But wider society often seems far keener to embrace the spirit of porn culture — namely that sex is primarily a frenetic but largely meaningless shag-fest — than to imbue it with some form of greater resonance. Screen depictions of intercourse are almost invariably of the thrusting, pumping, sucking variety. Which is tedious if there’s no counterbalance — no sense that time can seem to slow down when you’re totally absorbed with another person’s heartbeat.
No one seemed perturbed that the first episode of Sex Education — to return there for a moment — opened with a sex scene depicting a young woman having an orgasm from doggy-style sex while receiving no clitoral stimulation whatsoever. I felt compelled to lecture my poor 15-year-old son (“Mum! Shut up!”) on the fact that it’s quite rare for women to experience an orgasm through penetration alone and research suggests that almost 80% of women rarely or never have a climax that way. According to TV drama, around 95% of women achieve vaginal orgasms with no problem whatsoever.
Perhaps I protest too much. Is sex really that sublime? Olivia Fane doesn’t think so: she’s written a book called Why Sex Doesn’t Matter— reviewed for UnHerd by Zoe Strimpel — despite or, perhaps, because of having an open marriage in her twenties. Sarah Vine has written that she values sleep over erotic intimacy, and Suzanne Moore has been bored for some time now.
I understand their arguments and that it’s the columnist’s art to be provocative. Our culture is over-saturated by tedious images of mindless rutting and ersatz passion. When you’re married for many years — as Fane and Vine have been — erotic hunger fades and companionability is often more highly rated.
Still, it feels like a terrible swizz to complain from your 50s and 60s, when libido has often dampened, that sex is overrated. Imagine spinning that yarn to a younger self back in the days when you yearned for nothing more than to become one with the beloved. No citizen of a Latin American country would every say such a thing — to them it would be like saying you can dispense with food or water (but then they’ve never had to suffer Luther and a cold climate).
To disparage erotic intensity is to disown the most powerful feelings most of us (alright, not nuns and asexuals) will ever experience on this planet. Our love for our children tends to be more steady and steadfast. We would willingly die for our offspring, but we wouldn’t be so cavalier as to risk our livelihood for them. It’s erotic yearning that precipitates moments of madness that bring presidents to the brink — as so strikingly illustrated by Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
Sexual passion is unpredictable, unfettered and often takes on the quality of obsession, which leads to fear and censure. But living without boundaries in a stupor of the senses can give us some sense of the infinite and the unobtainable. The language of rapture belongs equally to lovers and God and it’s a dim-witted vicar who doesn’t acknowledge this. You can be sure they haven’t read the line, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God…”
How can I back up any of these assertions? Not with statistics, as they’re notoriously unreliable on the subject of sex. That’s why the topic is such an alluring land-grab for anyone with a theory to pedal. But there’s plenty of persuasive evidence in myth, legend and literature — which is why novels, classic films and art should be employed in contemporary love lessons.
Since the dawn of narrative storytellers have known one thing for certain: sex matters. It really, truly matters. It’s the reason Paris of Troy started a war with the Spartans, having abducted and seduced the Spartan queen Helen. It’s why the Greek and Roman Gods were always quarrelling, finding themselves unable to resist illicit love affairs with stray nymphs, or mortals. Apollo had an impressive array of male lovers for starters. It’s why King Arthur was betrayed by his wife and the knight he most trusted. It’s why Scheherazade told so many erotic stories in the Arabian Nights, knowing few other themes would prove quite as compelling.
It’s why Romeo and Juliet defied their feuding families and why Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina enthral us a century and a half after publication. It’s why we return to Wuthering Heights despite Heathcliff’s barbaric behaviour that we’d now term domestic violence. There’s something numinous that speaks to a profound, hungry part of the reader when Cathy declares of Heathcliff, “he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”.
It’s why Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People met with such widespread critical and popular acclaim and is about to hit our TVs as a drama series. Few writers since Emily Brontë have captured so acutely the sense of jeopardy, ecstasy and narcotic intensity that results from two young people baring bodies, minds and souls.
And it’s why readers of all stripes delight in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty: the recognition that desire transcends gender and heterosexual clichés.
There’s something all those bards, storytellers and novelists know as they turn their own experience into fictional narrative — that there are heightened times in most people’s lives when nothing matters more than the desire to drown in the physical perfection of the longed-for lover.
Commentators are always telling us we ask too much from sex, but I think it’s possible we ask too little. Why crush physical connection into a small space and say daft, but socially acceptable guff like, “I’d prefer a cup of tea,” or “Chocolate’s better than sex”? It’s impossibly hard to assert that there’s nothing wrong with seeking profound physical connection that leaves us quivering with rapture.
A good friend calls this uncanny bond quantum entanglement: the sense that if you and best beloved mate are on opposite sides of the planet your atoms will be moving in tandem, twinned across time and space. This may be more poetic than strictly scientific, but at least it transports sex to the realm of the imagination where all the finest human endeavours are nurtured. I can’t help feeling a great metaphysician like John Donne would embrace the concept. This Valentine’s Day, it seems only appropriate to quote the most sublime lines from the most sublime poem in the English language, “To His Mistress Going to Bed.”
Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joys.
This is the erotic education I return to more than any other, because Donne’s sentiments are always freshly minted: reborn in the rapture I glimpse around me and anticipate for my sons when they come of age; relived in the beauty I have sometimes been fortunate enough to experience myself.
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