MARIELLA: Why I talk frankly about porn with my ten year old ( )
And I’m so terrified my daughter will start sexting
LISTENING to Mariella Frostrup talking about sex is a delightfully suggestive experience. Quite aside from those husky tones and the gutsy, full-throated laugh, the conversation is liberally peppered with eyebrow-raising innuendo.
The very mention of the word ‘banging’, for example – in a conversation about ongoing building work – provokes an instant, hearty chuckle.
For Mariella, 53, such euphemisms are harder to avoid than ever, as the broadcaster and BBC Radio 4 presenter has spent the past year editing an anthology of erotic fiction, including tales of dishevelment and passion by authors ranging from the Marquis de Sade and DH Lawrence to Patricia Highsmith and Henry Miller.
Some might think it odd then that, as a mother, Mariella is profoundly worried at the sexualisation of our society. She is, she admits, fearful for her young daughter in a world where girls are increasingly objectified, where advertising increasingly takes its cues from online porn and where the internet brings ‘torture and sadomasochism at the touch of a button’.
The only solution, she believes, is a radical rethink of sex education in schools, as it is failing to prepare a generation of children for today’s sexualised society.
‘I live in a world where I’m inundated with sexual innuendo and imagery and objectification of young girls, and increasingly young men,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing wrong with having fantasies. But pornography takes those fantasies and puts them into a reallife scenario with real human beings, who are poverty-stricken, disadvantaged, dispossessed.
‘We’re watching the abuse of other people for our own delectation and in ways that actually make the world a more dangerous place for our daughters and sons.’
Her strong views are formed in part because Mariella’s two children – Molly, 12, and ten-year-old Danny – are on the cusp of becoming teenagers, and she is keen to foster a culture of openness about sex with them.
‘I believe whatever they ask me about they’re ready for,’ she explains. ‘I’ll try to push it a little bit further and the minute I do, they go, “Uurgh, that’s gross, I don’t want to talk about that.” But at least you’ve opened the gate a little bit wider.’
Mariella finds it particularly daunting bringing up a daughter in an entirely different world to the Ireland of the 1970s where she was raised.
‘I’m very frightened for her. I try to say that there’s terrible stuff out there on the internet, although I know she’d be horrified rather than intrigued. I’m even more concerned she’ll start sexting.
‘Boys are more lured by what’s online, and are expected to be part of the crowd and say, “Cor, look at this!”
‘What I talk to both of them about is that porn is nothing to do with sex – it’s about people having terrible things done to them for the appreciation of weirdo perverts.’
Talking about sex has become something of a specialism for Mariella.
She may be best known for being the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book programme since 2000. But more recently she presented Channel 4’s risque series Sex Box, a show which aimed to ‘reclaim sex from porn’, but arguably was an exercise in voyeurism as real couples engaged in amorous relations on set.
HER ‘mission’ – as she describes it – is continuing with her anthology of erotic fiction. Is it, in the light of this, hypocritical to condemn the pornography industry?
Not in Mariella’s view. Because literature relies on the imagination, she says, it can be confined to the world of fantasy in a way that online pornography cannot.
‘The immense difference between erotica and pornography is that pornography is not about sex – it’s about sexual violence against women.
‘Reading erotica gives you a chance to dissect those sorts of scenarios in your own mind – they’re fantasies. I’d love to see more porn made by women about sexuality and sensuality.’
We are, she says, ‘living in two separate universes’ – one which is ‘still very repressed and Victorian’ and the other which is, because of internet pornography, ‘a sexual free-for-all’.
‘Sex is still a great taboo for some. But it’s as important as brushing your teeth, going to the loo and eating. It’s what makes the world go around. So to be embarrassed about it is bizarre.’
Mariella stops short of asking the Government to intervene in the censorship of the internet, but agrees there needs to be a ‘big discussion’ about how society’s freedoms co-exist with the web’s ‘horrible black hole’.
And she believes that discussion must start at a young age.
‘The saddest, most frustrating, and most ludicrous thing is the lack of sex education in schools. Sex is used to sell every product under the sun, and gross acts of torture and sadomasochism can be found at the push of a button. We must prepare our children, but the expectation is that it’ll be covered at home. That’s completely irresponsible and I just do not understand it.’
Last week, Mariella’s Radio 4 colleague, Woman’s Hour presenter Dame Jenni Murray, told an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival that teenagers should be shown and asked to analyse pornography rather than have sex education classes. Mariella would not go that far. ‘The only safety is making sure your children will talk to you about any of it and, I hope, have an understanding of what it [pornography] really is rather than what it’s presented as,’ she says.
‘Every man has to be some kind of hairless, Hollywood movie star; every woman is a prepubescent Barbie with ridiculous breasts and unnatural waist. It makes me feel nostalgic for the less oppressive days of the 1970s when porn was more about atmosphere.’
She adds: ‘Pornography is analogous to the drugs industry because so many of the actors are dependent. The only people making anything out of it are those at the top.’
In the Frostrup household – Mariella’s husband is human rights lawyer Jason McCue – the parental internet controls are turned up to the max to prevent idle curiosity, but she is resigned to the inevitability that her children will access porn anyway.
Mariella herself had been fully prepared for the starry world of showbiz and pop hedonism that she was thrust into while she was still a teenager.
Her strident views on pornography come not from a position of prudishness but are inherited partly from her artist mother, a staunch feminist who somewhat neglected her children to go to meetings with fellow radicals.
Her childhood was poor and, at times, difficult. Born in Oslo to a Norwegian father and Scottish mother, the family moved to Ireland when Mariella was six. Her parents separated and her alcoholic father, who was foreign editor of The Irish Times, died at 44 when she was 15.
Much of her early life was so traumatic she has blocked it out, and only has a clutch of random memories before she packed her belongings into plastic bags and embarked on a new life in London.
She recalls: ‘I was lucky to have a clear idea of what I felt was right and wrong. My parents encouraged me to think that sexuality was
something
Sex is still a taboo for some but it’s as important as brushing our teeth… to be embarrassed is bizarre
you explored as far as you wanted. They used to tell me the best sex I’d ever have wasn’t with the person you marry but with someone you love and feel safe with. ‘That was the best advice I ever got, and it made me feel safer, entering the world at a particularly precocious age.’ Mariella hit London with her new punk wardrobe and worked her way into the glamorous world of music PR, hanging out with Bob Geldof, Paula Yates and Iggy Pop. There was a lot of drugs, alcohol, clubbing and excess – and plenty of wandering hands. It was the prime era for stars such as Jimmy Savile to be operating. Mariella shrugged them off. The women who became victims were, she says, too naive.
‘Yes, there were blokes who didn’t think anything of chatting up a 15-year-old but you could complain because there were rabid feminists banging on about it.
‘Part of the reason some women were vulnerable is because, for them, sex was taboo growing up. They didn’t know how to deal with it.’
Mariella was in charge of publicity for Live Aid in 1985 and moved into television, presenting a music show for Channel 4. By 2000 she had been asked to become a judge on the Booker Prize panel and shortly afterwards began presenting Open Book on Radio 4.
She has always been a bookworm, delving covertly into her parents’ bookcase as a child to read DH Lawrence and Anais Nin, a pioneer of female erotica. It is in books that her passions now lie.
Many of the stories she waded through were written by male Victorians, and contained scenes involving servant wenches which could perhaps have been considered a little too forced for modern tastes.
But it is the ones written by women that give Mariella hope. ‘It felt with these stories there was a glimmer of light, that the world was turning towards a place where sexuality and desire was no longer defined via male desire. It’s great we’re all different, that men and women are different, and that should be celebrated.’
Mariella has, of course, been celebrated as something of a sex symbol herself, not least because of her famously husky voice. The mere mention of it makes her bristle.
‘I used to re-record my voicemail messages all the time because I hated the way my voice sounded on them,’ she confides. ‘But it’s certainly earned me some money over the years, so I am grateful.’
As for her sex life now, she says that it has fallen rather by the wayside – she’s been too busy reading and talking about it.
‘I’ve been talking about sex enough to put me right off it and I haven’t had time. But I think of it as an altruistic mission – everyone else can have more sex and I’ll just keep on talking about it.’
What, then, has she told the children about her compendium of erotica? ‘Neither of the kids know about the book yet – they think I’ve been running off to parent-teacher meetings. Hopefully they won’t find out until they’re older. You don’t want to think about your parents having sex, let alone talking about it publicly.’
Desire: 100 Of Literature’s Sexiest Stories, edited by Mariella Frostrup and the Erotic Review, is out now.