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| Put down the porn and explore real sex with erotica | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| In many ways, sex is the most important thing human beings do in our lives: the complex emotions and desires that accompany it separate us from primates. But there’s a prurient, sniggering prudishness to the British attitude towards sex that we can no longer afford. Sex is used to sell us almost every product, bar Lego, and it’s essential we refocus on it as a manifestation of all kinds of complicated human emotions and needs. Sex as the desire for friendship, love, excitement; sex just to be transgressive – rather than the explicit, pumping sex you see everywhere you look, used to sell us makeup, underwear and cars, and always just a few clicks away on your mouse. | In many ways, sex is the most important thing human beings do in our lives: the complex emotions and desires that accompany it separate us from primates. But there’s a prurient, sniggering prudishness to the British attitude towards sex that we can no longer afford. Sex is used to sell us almost every product, bar Lego, and it’s essential we refocus on it as a manifestation of all kinds of complicated human emotions and needs. Sex as the desire for friendship, love, excitement; sex just to be transgressive – rather than the explicit, pumping sex you see everywhere you look, used to sell us makeup, underwear and cars, and always just a few clicks away on your mouse. |
| My generation had the pleasure of enjoying erotica when we first explored the subject of sex but, for many children, their introduction to it is now very different, and certainly doesn’t tend to happen in the context of a relationship. That’s incredibly worrying. Not all children have sex education in schools, but they can all access some of the worst crimes you can imagine against women and men, without any real parental control. We are allowing our children to go out into a world where pornography is freely available, while they are completely ignorant of sex. We separate sex from our daily lives – we put it in boxes – separating out pornography and “boring sex” in long-term relationships. Society is incredibly conflicted. | My generation had the pleasure of enjoying erotica when we first explored the subject of sex but, for many children, their introduction to it is now very different, and certainly doesn’t tend to happen in the context of a relationship. That’s incredibly worrying. Not all children have sex education in schools, but they can all access some of the worst crimes you can imagine against women and men, without any real parental control. We are allowing our children to go out into a world where pornography is freely available, while they are completely ignorant of sex. We separate sex from our daily lives – we put it in boxes – separating out pornography and “boring sex” in long-term relationships. Society is incredibly conflicted. |
| Bad writing about sex is excruciating – but great writing about sex is wonderful | Bad writing about sex is excruciating – but great writing about sex is wonderful |
| Part of the reason I’ve put together Desire – a compendium of 100 of literature’s sexiest stories – is to try to recapture some of the complexity around sex. There is a bad sex award in the UK – and there’s nothing wrong with that, bad writing about sex is excruciating – but great writing about sex is wonderful. Why isn’t that celebrated? Why not draw attention to the captivating stories that put you in a sensory dream world, that ignite sensations and emotions? | Part of the reason I’ve put together Desire – a compendium of 100 of literature’s sexiest stories – is to try to recapture some of the complexity around sex. There is a bad sex award in the UK – and there’s nothing wrong with that, bad writing about sex is excruciating – but great writing about sex is wonderful. Why isn’t that celebrated? Why not draw attention to the captivating stories that put you in a sensory dream world, that ignite sensations and emotions? |
| Erotica is so different from pornography, which is almost exclusively designed to cater to men. Any relationship that existed between men and erotica dates back to the Victorian era when it was one of the few ways to access the sexy stuff. Now the tsunami of pornography has all but obliterated any particular interest the majority of men might have had in reading erotica. For women, sex is part of a whole sensory experience and I think that is less true of men. If you look at the pornography that has been designed to appeal to male viewers, particularly in the 21st century, it is very much about the physical act and very little else. That is why it is less satisfying for a lot of women. | Erotica is so different from pornography, which is almost exclusively designed to cater to men. Any relationship that existed between men and erotica dates back to the Victorian era when it was one of the few ways to access the sexy stuff. Now the tsunami of pornography has all but obliterated any particular interest the majority of men might have had in reading erotica. For women, sex is part of a whole sensory experience and I think that is less true of men. If you look at the pornography that has been designed to appeal to male viewers, particularly in the 21st century, it is very much about the physical act and very little else. That is why it is less satisfying for a lot of women. |
| There’s a huge difference between the perfunctory plots sometimes used in pornography and the experience of immersing yourself in a story, characters and a considered environment – all those elements of the intellectual exchange involved in reading. In pornography, the literal act is simply placed right before your eyes. It is skin deep and, increasingly in the modern world, what you’re watching is the poor, dispossessed and desperate trying to earn a crust in whatever way they can. How many people who participate in porn do so because that’s what they grew up wanting to do? The sex industry as a whole is a bit like the drug industry: it’s an end product that involves an awful lot of misery for an awful lot of people along the way. | There’s a huge difference between the perfunctory plots sometimes used in pornography and the experience of immersing yourself in a story, characters and a considered environment – all those elements of the intellectual exchange involved in reading. In pornography, the literal act is simply placed right before your eyes. It is skin deep and, increasingly in the modern world, what you’re watching is the poor, dispossessed and desperate trying to earn a crust in whatever way they can. How many people who participate in porn do so because that’s what they grew up wanting to do? The sex industry as a whole is a bit like the drug industry: it’s an end product that involves an awful lot of misery for an awful lot of people along the way. |
| Erotica offers a different route to explore our sexuality. I hadn’t read much of it in the past 35 years, so it was fascinating to see the changing social mores in how we write about sex and who is doing the writing. Anaïs Nin was a rare exception when I was a teenager in terms of a woman’s view of the sexual and erotic world. She is still a favourite – you stay in thrall to what you read in your teens. That heady, opium-den world of 1920s Paris is just such a natural environment for deviant behaviour. It’s wonderful, narratively. But it’s definitely of its time. Nin’s portrayal of sex is very much influenced by the nature of the patriarchal society at the time. While her writing was more feminine than any of the other erotica available back then, I still don’t feel it reflected female sexuality in the way current writers do. | Erotica offers a different route to explore our sexuality. I hadn’t read much of it in the past 35 years, so it was fascinating to see the changing social mores in how we write about sex and who is doing the writing. Anaïs Nin was a rare exception when I was a teenager in terms of a woman’s view of the sexual and erotic world. She is still a favourite – you stay in thrall to what you read in your teens. That heady, opium-den world of 1920s Paris is just such a natural environment for deviant behaviour. It’s wonderful, narratively. But it’s definitely of its time. Nin’s portrayal of sex is very much influenced by the nature of the patriarchal society at the time. While her writing was more feminine than any of the other erotica available back then, I still don’t feel it reflected female sexuality in the way current writers do. |
| Recently, erotica has had a resurgence, led by the success of Fifty Shades of Grey. Apparently Desire is doing incredibly well on Kindle, and that’s no surprise – it’s a lot easier to read something transgressive, or something you wouldn’t want to broadcast, in that subtle and slimline way. And that’s the great thing about erotica: you can indulge in fantasies that you would never want to see on screen, or to happen to you in real life. You are entering an imaginary world. It’s like watching Deep Impact. Nobody wants a huge tsunami and a meteorite to hit the world, but you live through all those feelings of anxiety in a movie and feel better at the end. | Recently, erotica has had a resurgence, led by the success of Fifty Shades of Grey. Apparently Desire is doing incredibly well on Kindle, and that’s no surprise – it’s a lot easier to read something transgressive, or something you wouldn’t want to broadcast, in that subtle and slimline way. And that’s the great thing about erotica: you can indulge in fantasies that you would never want to see on screen, or to happen to you in real life. You are entering an imaginary world. It’s like watching Deep Impact. Nobody wants a huge tsunami and a meteorite to hit the world, but you live through all those feelings of anxiety in a movie and feel better at the end. |
| We’re nowhere near the point where we could introduce erotica in schools – and my book is certainly not for children – but perhaps as part of a more wide-reaching programme certain forms of writing about sex could have a place in educating young people about relationships. Young adult writers do touch on the erotic – Twilight has lashings of it, and vampires are inherently a sexy concept. What we need to leave behind is the notion that sex is something either to snigger about, or to be ignored. It’s simply naive to believe that, if we just close our eyes and don’t mention sex, our kids will be able to effortlessly navigate the sexual world as they grow up. | We’re nowhere near the point where we could introduce erotica in schools – and my book is certainly not for children – but perhaps as part of a more wide-reaching programme certain forms of writing about sex could have a place in educating young people about relationships. Young adult writers do touch on the erotic – Twilight has lashings of it, and vampires are inherently a sexy concept. What we need to leave behind is the notion that sex is something either to snigger about, or to be ignored. It’s simply naive to believe that, if we just close our eyes and don’t mention sex, our kids will be able to effortlessly navigate the sexual world as they grow up. |
| • Desire: 100 of Literatures Sexiest Stories selected by Mariella Frostrup and the Erotic Review, published by Head of Zeus, £25 | • Desire: 100 of Literatures Sexiest Stories selected by Mariella Frostrup and the Erotic Review, published by Head of Zeus, £25 |