More prude than rude? No, Britons love a... BONKBUSTER
As an American novelist says we’re turned off by sex scenes, a historian whose stories inspired two erotic dramas argues there’s nothing we enjoy reading MORE than rumpy pumpy
One of the nicest things about being an author is that I am often asked to give talks about my books — both my non-fiction books and my novels. Afterwards, when people ask me to sign a copy, they usually like to chat, often about sex.
elegant women of a certain age candidly reveal their sexual secrets, telling me of their wild, sexually liberated youth and penchant for naughty behaviour.
Though I am principally a historian, the way I write about sex — frankly but with, where appropriate, a sense of fun — seems to set them off down memory lane.
Other authors who write about sex tell me they, too, receive such candid confidences. We all agree that it is a peculiarly British aspect of our vocation.
Although my books are published in the U.S., where I grew up — my mother is American, my father is english, and I am married to a Brit — this never happens at talks there. Why? Because Americans are much less open about sex than the english.
Indeed, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival this week, the whole business of writing about sex has come under attack.
The great American novelist Jonathan Franzen said he felt english readers were ‘particularly harsh’ and prudish in their criticism of sex scenes, perhaps because his bestseller, Freedom, was nominated in 2010 for Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards.
At the same festival, the acclaimed British novelist Sebastian Faulks, author of Birdsong (which contained one of the most moving sex scenes in literature), announced that he will no longer describe the physical appearance of women in his novels, having been challenged by a female reader who asked him what made him think he had the right to do so.
In my view, both authors have got it wrong.
As someone who has written about prostitution in Georgian London in The Covent Garden Ladies — on which the TV series Harlots was based — and about voyeurism in The Scandalous Lady W, the story of an aristocratic lady whose husband watched her having sex with other men, I believe it would be a tragedy if fears about being criticised were to put authors off writing about sex.
WHy? Because sex scenes are not just fun — they are at the heart of some of the greatest books of all time. english literature has a noble tradition of ribaldry, dating back to Chaucer’s lewd Wife Of Bath’s Tale. The Civil War brought a brief period of prudishness but then it was back to bawdy business with the earl of Rochester, whose poems were as filthy as they were funny.
In the 20th century we had D.H. Lawrence writing about sex and female desire, with a frankness that was liberating. And this century we have Michel Faber, author of the sensual Crimson Petal And The White, and Ian Mcewan, whose erotic scene in a library was at the centre of Atonement.
Despite the reputation of the British for being buttoned up, in my experience, Americans are far more prudish.
Growing up, I seldom heard adults talking openly about sex. Among the suburban middle class, no one gossiped about it, no one laughed about it, and although people did read novels about sex, they attempted to keep them away from their teenage children.
It was a huge surprise when I came to university in Britain and found that people were far more liberated about sex. They gossiped about it in the pub, laughed about it, gave each other saucy birthday cards, and didn’t take it seriously. There was no sense of shame as there was — and often still is — in many parts of America.
British culture is older, and so perhaps it is more relaxed. Sex is treated with a lightness that harks back to the music hall’s gentle ribaldry. Treating it as fun — with such brilliantly British phrases as ‘rumpy pumpy’ and ‘slap and tickle’ — is surely better than seeing it as serious and shameful.
Sex, then, is central to British — and especially english — culture, so to avoid writing about it would be not just a shame but an omission of a vital component of the national character.
It is the key to so much of history. The Protestant Reformation and the Abdication were each fuelled by a king’s obsession with having sex with a woman who was off-limits.
By reading sexual writings from the 18th and 19th centuries, you learn about people’s inner lives, their personality and pre-occupations, attitudes to sex before marriage, homosexuality, the age of consent, and the role of women.
I love writing about historical sex partly because of the clothes: there’s an extra layer of sexiness when you add corsets, skirts and ruffled shirts to proceedings. Things that had to be unbuttoned and unwrapped.
Sex was more surprising in the 18th and 19th centuries — no one knew what they were getting underneath those clothes, unlike today.
Readers like to be titillated, disgusted and shocked. And why not? If you don’t like it, don’t read it. And even if it’s bad, that can be enjoyable, too. People love to cringe, and writers shouldn’t worry about making people giggle or roll their eyes.
AMeRICAnS don’t like to poke fun at sex and maybe this cultural difference is the reason Jonathan Franzen has misunderstood the Bad Sex Awards: they are not about mockery, or prudishness, in my view, but comedy.
Where else but Britain would you have all of literary society gathered together in a room to drink alcohol and read sex scenes out loud and laugh at them?
Who could fail to laugh at the late A.A. Gill’s descriptions of a male appendage as being ‘as thick as . . . a magnum? A Jeroboam? A Methuselah? A bitter pump?’
Well, A. A. Gill was not amused to win the Bad Sex prize. Or what about The Smiths former frontman, Morrissey, whose novel described his protagonists, eliza and ezra, rolling together in ‘one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting . . . in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation’? Or even the great John Updike, who wrote: ‘I slapped her glazed butternut ass’?
e. L. James’s Fifty Shades series will never win literature prizes, yet millions of readers buy her books, so she is having the last laugh.
It would be a terrible shame if other writers shied away from bedroom scenes for fear of being ridiculed. We should all be able to take a bit of criticism and ribbing.
It would be an even greater travesty if they follow Sebastian Faulks’s lead. While I hugely admire him and sympathise with his decision, I believe part of being a writer is exercising the freedom to tell stories in the way you want.
What is the point in being a novelist, or playwright, if you can’t use your imagination to describe fictional characters?
The point is that sex scenes, like sex, are a matter of personal preference. They can be central to the plot, or gratuitous, deeply moving or simply titillating — writers should be free to write about sex in whatever way they want, to tell the story they want to tell, and readers should be free to read it — or not. As long as it is not likely to cause harm.
So I, for one, will continue to cast off corsets when and where required, and will continue to enjoy writing — and reading — about sex in all its forms: the good, the bad and the glazed butternut.