Thrill Seekers
BETTY HERBERT
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One summer holiday, bored and 11 years old, I embarked on a trawl through the wardrobes in my Grandparents’ spare bedroom. Most of the discoveries were unpromising: an old coat, a great quantity of pillowslips, and my mother’s teenage collection of Elvis 45s, which at that time were below my condescension.
But then, in the middle drawer, I found a small stash of books buried beneath an ageing electric blanket – my Grandma’s Jackie Collins collection. Jackpot. I spent a happy afternoon riding the giddy waves of such an illicit oeuvre, without ever once wondering whether they took Gran on a similar journey.
In any case, within a few weeks I was at secondary school, and a well-thumbed copy of Judy Blume’s Forever was passing between us. To this day, I couldn’t tell you the plot; the previous owner had helpfully turned down the pages at the beginning of each sex scene. We whispered about it between us, barely daring to believe that such glorious and detailed smut could be written for teenagers.
You could argue, I suppose, that erotic fiction is to women what porn mags are to men: that is, a starter pack for youthful sexuality, passed from hand to hand in reverence. This is stereotypical, but probably contains a grain of truth, although it may say more about convention and the availability of material than authentic desire.
I certainly get more of a thrill when I read about sex than when I watch it. Perhaps this is because I’ve got a better chance of imagining my way into the protagonists’ shoes in books, whereas film makes it clear that the bodies having sex do not belong to me. Perhaps, also, I am falling into that old trap of valuing the written word above the moving image, seeing it as cleverer, safer, inherently more intelligent. Certainly, erotic books don’t drag in their wake the tangled politics of visual porn, the involvement of real bodies and real lives.
And yet my snobbery may be misplaced. Those literary authors who are famous of their (and here we inevitably enter into a world of double-entendre) erotic output generally sought to curtail their literary language and exposition, and to engage more with the basic sensations and instincts of sex. In Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, for example, the stories grow more compelling as the scenarios become simpler and less loaded with meaning.
It is that midcentury crop of erotic paperbacks that still seem to hold the most cachet for readers. Authors such as D H Lawrence, Henry Miller and Pauline Réage offer us a distinctly cerebral encounter with the erotic, even if the sexual politics are now a little dated. I have a grinding suspicion that the popularity of these authors endures because we can pretend (to ourselves and others) that we are not simply reading them for our own gratification. We remain slightly abashed about reading to arouse ourselves.
Surely we should be past this adolescent embarrassment about sex in fiction? The weaving of sex into movies and TV programmes is almost de rigeur – this week I belatedly watched the first episode of The Killing, in which most of the lead characters were happily bonking, or at least considering it. Yet we flinch at authors’ attempts to include sex as part of the normal spectrum of behaviour for their characters.
Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction awards give us all an annual giggle (this year’s winner, Rowan Somerville, must lament the day he wrote, ‘Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her’). But this disguises a wider problem: when it comes to literature, we are comfortable with neither good, sexy sex, nor awkward, nasty sex. Either variety makes us cringe. We would prefer the author to avert our gaze.
Apple famously took this one stage further. As part of Steve Jobs’s mission to purge the newly-released iPad of pornography, three erotic titles mysteriously disappeared from Apple’s book chart top ten last July. Big corporations, it seems, do not want to endorse titles such as Blonde and Wet, the Complete Story.
And yet erotica is the success story of the e-book. The anonymity of the electronic reader finally allows discretion on public transport or in a household with children – perhaps even from our own partners. Canny authors and publishers have slashed the prices of such books, knowing that they can now access the mass sales of their wildest dreams.
Meanwhile, the erotic memoir thrives in legitimate space, attracting newspaper discussions and TV adaptations. The aim of these books is to turn us on, but in a package that allows us to gracefully deny our own arousal. We claim we’re curious about these real lives, but really we’re seeking the same thrills that we found in that dog-eared copy of Forever.
Occasionally, while I was blogging my own sexual memoir, people would accuse me of writing porn. I think I was supposed to be offended by this; in fact, I was flattered. Given that I was writing about the reality of sex in marriage, there were few moments of high fever. But in the instances when I was describing good sex, I wanted to pass on that erotic charge to the reader, too. If it turns you on, I would reply, I have no objection to you putting it to your own, personal use. That usually scared them off.
Flip? Absolutely. But it leads to a more serious point: once we own up to the literature that arouses us, we’ll have half a chance of understanding our other desires, too.
Betty runs the monthly Mucky Book Club, a reading group for people who like good books with rude bits in them. Her memoir, The 52 Seductions, is out in July. You can find out about both at bettyherbert.com.
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One summer holiday, bored and 11 years old, I embarked on a trawl through the wardrobes in my Grandparents’ spare bedroom. Most of the discoveries were unpromising: an old coat, a great quantity of pillowslips, and my mother’s teenage collection of Elvis 45s, which at that time were below my condescension.
But then, in the middle drawer, I found a small stash of books buried beneath an ageing electric blanket – my Grandma’s Jackie Collins collection. Jackpot. I spent a happy afternoon riding the giddy waves of such an illicit oeuvre, without ever once wondering whether they took Gran on a similar journey.
In any case, within a few weeks I was at secondary school, and a well-thumbed copy of Judy Blume’s Forever was passing between us. To this day, I couldn’t tell you the plot; the previous owner had helpfully turned down the pages at the beginning of each sex scene. We whispered about it between us, barely daring to believe that such glorious and detailed smut could be written for teenagers.
You could argue, I suppose, that erotic fiction is to women what porn mags are to men: that is, a starter pack for youthful sexuality, passed from hand to hand in reverence. This is stereotypical, but probably contains a grain of truth, although it may say more about convention and the availability of material than authentic desire.
I certainly get more of a thrill when I read about sex than when I watch it. Perhaps this is because I’ve got a better chance of imagining my way into the protagonists’ shoes in books, whereas film makes it clear that the bodies having sex do not belong to me. Perhaps, also, I am falling into that old trap of valuing the written word above the moving image, seeing it as cleverer, safer, inherently more intelligent. Certainly, erotic books don’t drag in their wake the tangled politics of visual porn, the involvement of real bodies and real lives.
And yet my snobbery may be misplaced. Those literary authors who are famous of their (and here we inevitably enter into a world of double-entendre) erotic output generally sought to curtail their literary language and exposition, and to engage more with the basic sensations and instincts of sex. In Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, for example, the stories grow more compelling as the scenarios become simpler and less loaded with meaning.
It is that midcentury crop of erotic paperbacks that still seem to hold the most cachet for readers. Authors such as D H Lawrence, Henry Miller and Pauline Réage offer us a distinctly cerebral encounter with the erotic, even if the sexual politics are now a little dated. I have a grinding suspicion that the popularity of these authors endures because we can pretend (to ourselves and others) that we are not simply reading them for our own gratification. We remain slightly abashed about reading to arouse ourselves.
Surely we should be past this adolescent embarrassment about sex in fiction? The weaving of sex into movies and TV programmes is almost de rigeur – this week I belatedly watched the first episode of The Killing, in which most of the lead characters were happily bonking, or at least considering it. Yet we flinch at authors’ attempts to include sex as part of the normal spectrum of behaviour for their characters.
Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction awards give us all an annual giggle (this year’s winner, Rowan Somerville, must lament the day he wrote, ‘Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her’). But this disguises a wider problem: when it comes to literature, we are comfortable with neither good, sexy sex, nor awkward, nasty sex. Either variety makes us cringe. We would prefer the author to avert our gaze.
Apple famously took this one stage further. As part of Steve Jobs’s mission to purge the newly-released iPad of pornography, three erotic titles mysteriously disappeared from Apple’s book chart top ten last July. Big corporations, it seems, do not want to endorse titles such as Blonde and Wet, the Complete Story.
And yet erotica is the success story of the e-book. The anonymity of the electronic reader finally allows discretion on public transport or in a household with children – perhaps even from our own partners. Canny authors and publishers have slashed the prices of such books, knowing that they can now access the mass sales of their wildest dreams.
Meanwhile, the erotic memoir thrives in legitimate space, attracting newspaper discussions and TV adaptations. The aim of these books is to turn us on, but in a package that allows us to gracefully deny our own arousal. We claim we’re curious about these real lives, but really we’re seeking the same thrills that we found in that dog-eared copy of Forever.
Occasionally, while I was blogging my own sexual memoir, people would accuse me of writing porn. I think I was supposed to be offended by this; in fact, I was flattered. Given that I was writing about the reality of sex in marriage, there were few moments of high fever. But in the instances when I was describing good sex, I wanted to pass on that erotic charge to the reader, too. If it turns you on, I would reply, I have no objection to you putting it to your own, personal use. That usually scared them off.
Flip? Absolutely. But it leads to a more serious point: once we own up to the literature that arouses us, we’ll have half a chance of understanding our other desires, too.
Betty runs the monthly Mucky Book Club, a reading group for people who like good books with rude bits in them. Her memoir, The 52 Seductions, is out in July. You can find out about both at bettyherbert.com.
(source:spectator.co.uk)
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