‘I’m shocked by what arouses me’
Compiling a collection of erotic writing, Mariella Frostrup tells Rowan Pelling how her desires have changed over the decades
The mere mention of Mariella Frostrup reduces the most phlegmatic of men to dewy-eyed romantics. One gruff friend, a former Greenpeace activist, tells how he once supplied the Norwegian-born broadcaster with research material on overfishing and received a voicemail from her saying she was “prostrate with gratitude”. He kept the message on his office answerphone for years – adding, wistfully, “Her email address was ‘brazenhusky’ back then.” As seems only right and proper, for when anyone thinks of Frostrup it’s that low, lilting, wood-smoked voice that comes to mind, with its hints of honey, musk and bourbon, familiar to fans of Radio 4’s Open Book and innumerable arts shows.
So when I say I’m going to spend an hour discussing erotic literature with her, every male I know has palpitations.
The svelte, blonde broadcaster has just edited a hefty great volume entitled Desire: 100 of Literature’s Sexiest Stories, in collaboration with the Erotic Review, the magazine I edited many moons ago. In so doing, she’s brought a fresh eye to amorous fiction. As we sit at Frostrup’s wooden kitchen table in her comfy, stylish, book-lined Bayswater flat, sharing a beer (she has that gift for making a total stranger feel like an old friend), she confesses: “I am not really an erotica aficionado.”
Until this project, she hadn’t browsed much sexually themed fiction since her teens, when she found D H Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy and Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus on her parents’ bookshelves. She writes in her introduction: “These two writers formed my early sexual education, revealing the power of the mind to transport you to places, situations and stimulations that you might avoid in real life, but can safely embrace cerebrally.”
In person, she has a snappier summary of erotica’s role, dubbing it “literature with a purpose”. I wonder if the volume’s demure, floral cover means that – like most contemporary erotic fiction – it is tilted more towards women readers than men, and she invites me to take a closer look. Petals and leaves reveal themselves as intimate anatomical parts in a design by artist Jonathan Yeo (son of former Tory MP Tim Yeo). Still, I’d wager most men would only tackle a volume this big if it were about the Second World War.
Frostrup clearly had a blast paging through all manner of saucy stories while commuting to and from her main domestic base in Somerset on Great Western trains. She smiles at fellow commuters’ innocence of her reading matter, saying it’s rare as an adult to do something in public that feels slightly transgressive, “to be lost in this miasma of sexuality and passion and desire”, while engaged in the quotidien. She adds that on glum days she’d find herself thinking: “Why isn’t my life like this? Why don’t strange men sit on the train and slide their hand onto my knee under the table? Obviously, strange, but incredibly attractive and desirable men,” she clarifies. “But again, that’s what’s fantasy is about, isn’t it?”
I ask Frostrup, now 53, whether she thinks many people don’t really know, until they’re older, what they truly desire and she admits she was, at times, “quite profoundly shocked at the things I found sexually arousing”, citing a story by Ortensia Visconti, in which an octopus ravishes a young woman who’s dreaming of a fish market in Japan. I later read the tale, which is in the section titled “Darkest Desire” – for fans of Fifty Shades, but largely better written – and see what Frostrup means: “… a tentacle explores her mouth. The viscous arms draw her thighs open...”
She’s keen to point out that true sexiness has little to do with perfect, post-pubescent, depilated female bodies, and that our view of what’s attractive has become “almost unbearably claustrophobic”. She
‘Why don’t strange men sit on the train and slide their hand onto my knee?’
points to actors in French films and the large, fleshy women in Jenny Saville paintings as better role models, and says it was liberating to read stories that described luxuriant “bushes”.
When she declares, “Hollywood is the death of sex to me,” I can’t quite stop myself asking whether George Clooney (with whom she has a longstanding friendship) has genuine sex appeal. Frostrup replies equably that his allure to the masses is not about his looks, so much as the fact he was a mature man when he came to fame, “who liked women, twinkled, and seemed to be energised by their presence.”
I say I’ve always thought Daniel Craig embodied pure sex appeal. Frostrup readily agrees (I’m afraid we both erupt into dirty laughter), adding that Craig is the sort of notso-nice actor you could imagine “in a really great porn film”, and that both he and Michael Fassbinder belong in the “Darkest Desires” section of her compilation.
She would love to edit a second volume, concentrating on sexy stories written by women, citing the growing number openly writing about sex from a female perspective – “not under a pseudonym” – as a reflection of huge societal and cultural changes. She praises Sarah Hall, Nikki Gemmell and Emma Donoghue as authors who are staking out new erotic turf. We are both fans of the American author Arlene Heyman, who fearlessly tackles sex between couples in their sixties and seventies, bringing Viagra and acid reflux into the boudoir (sexier than it sounds). Although she’s clear that “censoring fantasies is not my business”, Frostrup was determined to set some kind of ethical framework round the scenarios included. Any sex act that could be construed as constituting a crime was verboten, while she sought scenes of unambiguously consensual passion. “Quite a lot of the Victorian stuff was really, really offensive,” she says, wearily. But she is clearly no prude, even if she rolls her eyes at the “schoolboy smuttiness” that dominates so much of modern Britain’s discourse on sex. A quick perusal of Desire’s contents reveals an admirably broad range of sexual expression, from a subtle Rudyard Kipling tale of strong feelings unleashed in a sandstorm, to fetish author Fulani’s mainstream pornography. Frostrup is furious that a “tsunami” of explicit online imagery has distorted the dating landscape, teaching the younger generation “about sex completely devoid of desire, relationships and all the mitigating stuff ”.
In her role as a newspaper agony aunt she gets more letters from distraught women whose partners are addicted to porn than on almost any other topic. Her eyes flash with anger as she cites the kind of porn scenes that evoke a “butcher pounding flesh with a meat tenderiser”. By contrast, she says passionately, the greatest fiction brings in its wake “empathy and strong feelings”.
I wonder if Frostrup feels her own desires have changed with the decades.
“The sex I had when I was young would have been all about being in the moment, driven by forces that felt outside of my control,” she says. “Now, they’re not forces out of my control: I’m much more a party of whatever I choose to do.”
She points out that for women to vocalise what they want in a sexual situation is a relatively new phenomenon. “I was brought up in Roman Catholic Ireland [her father was a writer for the Irish Times] and even to admit you had ever had sex before felt like a really transgressive thing in a public space.”
On the other hand, she’s wistful for a world in which there were clearer boundaries between the private sexual space and the everyday one, when her parents’ generation kept publications such as Amateur
Photographer on the top shelf. Frostrup’s own copies of Desire will be kept firmly out of her children’s reach: her censorious 12-year-old daughter (she also has an 11-year-old son) would be “appalled” by the book. I can’t help wondering if her husband – human rights lawyer Jason McCue – welcomed this erotic project. She replies in perfect good humour: “He took no interest at all – absolutely none.” She laughs, “That would be depressing, if it wasn’t really so normal in the day-to-day machinations of a relationship.”
She can console herself with the thought that pretty much every other British male I know would cede his right arm to have erotic bedtime stories read out to him by the sexiest voice in British broadcasting.