What’s Wrong with Twinkling Buttocks

If there was a single event in our recent cultural history that established literal-minded crudity as the ideal of artistic endeavor, however, it was the celebrated 1960 trial of Penguin Books for the publication of an obscene book, the unexpurgated version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
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Only when coffee was served, and the waiter had gone, Sir Malcolm lit a cigar and said, heartily: “Well, young man, and what about my daughter?” The grin flickered on Mellors’ face. “Well, Sir, and what about her?” “You’ve got a baby in her all right.” “I have that honour!” grinned Mellors. “Honour, by God!”, Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd. “Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what!” “Good!” “I’ll bet it was! Hah-ha! My daughter, chip off the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh Holy Saints!” He rolled his eyes up to heaven. “But warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Hah-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack all right.”

It would be difficult to find a worse, cruder, or more insensitive passage in the whole of English literature. It is startlingly unrealistic, of course (and Lawrence claims to be a realist): no father would speak of his own daughter in this men’s-locker-room manner, nor any widower of his deceased wife. It reduces human relationships to the lowest possible denominator: humans become no more than farmyard animals. And Lawrence approves of Sir Malcolm, wanting us to accept his view that he is superior, because more earthy and biological, to others of his social class