My Sex education
As she publishes her (highly erotic) debut novel Insatiable, Daisy Buchanan reflects on what she’s learned from filthy fiction that puts female desire front and centre
Holding my breath, I listened for parental footsteps. Still, I could only hear the sound of the rain hammering against the window and my heart beating at double speed. Taking a page between finger and thumb, I prayed that I would not be betrayed by the crackle of paper. Damian had removed his belt, and Ellspeth was gasping, writhing, sighing and moaning…
When I was 12, I was obsessed with sex, but it was hard to find any source material. It was the late 1990s, pre-broadband, and I shared the one computer in the house with my five little sisters and my strict Catholic parents. Every single thing we viewed was monitored. All we could hope for in the way of sex education was a bull getting up to something in a field in the middle of The Archers. So, I started searching the bookcases.
My first encounter with erotic literature was in VC Andrews’s infamous pulp classic My Sweet Audrina. It was a little alarming, but utterly addictive. I followed it with
The Valley Of The Dolls, and then Andrea Newman’s Two Into Three Won’t Go. These books were thrillingly explicit, and they all featured women who were as horny as I was, but none of them were ashamed of their desire.
When a school friend leant me my first Jilly Cooper novel, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, I was enthralled. It was the story I’d been waiting for. Not only was its star, Lysander, a hero I was happy to think about before I drifted off to sleep at night, but I also found it comforting to know that millions of readers had the same lust for sexy stories as me. If I thought of something shocking or embarrassing, Jilly had usually got there first.
Reading, rather than seeing sex on screen, let me configure the scene in order to allow myself to fantasise safely. If I’d been born 10 years later, I think I would have immediately gone online to learn more, and I suspect I might have been scared off. There’s a huge variety of porn, but the most prevalent material is made by and for men. However, that feels as though it’s changing on the page. The success of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is down to its authenticity – it put women and their true stories and desires front and centre. Meanwhile, one of the hottest books of this year is Raven Leilani’s Luster, which features a heroine who embraces her sex drive. I think we’re finally making more space for women’s bodies and stories.
I started writing Insatiable because I wanted to write a book that explored desire explicitly. Violet, my heroine, is more curious than confident. She doesn’t see herself as a sex goddess, but her appetite for sex is so great that as soon as an exciting opportunity presents itself, she feels powerless to resist its pull.
Sex is everywhere, yet we still struggle to talk openly about fantasy and yearning. I hope Insatiable inspires its readers to embrace their desires and erotic imaginations, and I hope it encourages them to rediscover the fun of fantasising. Violet goes to the orgies so we don’t have to; we can simply dream about how it might feel.
‘READING LET ME FANTASISE SAFELY’