I still feel there’s a grain of truth in that vision of Thatcher as a nursery dominatrix, thrashing grown-up little boys who confuse punishment with love. But now I’m 57, I realize the reason Thatcher made our podium is more obvious. A powerful, intelligent woman who knows her mind and is unafraid to use her sexuality as part of her arsenal can act as catnip on certain men.

A new, pleasingly unconventional biography of Thatcher, The Incidental Feminist: Friend, foe, femme fatale? by Tina Gaudoin, places much of its focus on what sociologist Catherine Hakim terms “erotic capital” — the way personal assets, such as glamour and sex appeal, can be used to gain social and economic advantage. Instead of looking at the leader’s political legacy, Gaudoin tracks down Thatcher the woman: daughter, sister, wife, mother, fashion lover, flirt, manipulator of men. The book examines how the Finchley coquette’s utilization of feminine qualities propelled her to the top job, with chapters titled “Autistic Glamour Puss”, “Warrior Queen, Gender Blender?” and “All the Prime Minister’s Men”.

For all the “Attila the Hen” labels and Spitting Image’s puppet of a beaked PM standing at a urinal in a man’s suit, what stands out now is the constant sexual appraisal of a woman who was 53 when she entered Downing Street and 65 when she left. In 1989, Vanity Fair ran a major interview with Thatcher by Gail Sheehy, which contained the following frothy passage: “President Mitterrand says Britain’s prime minister ‘has eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. She also has the nerves of a five-star general and, increasingly, the sexual charisma of a woman in her prime. She manipulates her court of bedazzled male advisers with the skill of Elizabeth I.”

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If you think Sheehy’s wildly overstating the case, here’s a tableau I witnessed at the Spectator summer party in July 1992. I arrived just as a car drew up amid a cascade of paparazzi flashes; the former prime minister, dressed to the nines, stepped out and was greeted by a phalanx of adoring young fogeys with Simon Heffer at the fore. I recall thinking I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had laid down his immaculate linen jacket for her to tread on. For one surreal moment, in the crammed entrance corridor, I found myself bosom-to-bosom with Thatcher, looking into her blue eyes (which didn’t alight on me) and imbibing the heady cocktail of fame, glamour and mythology still in the making.

That, however, wasn’t the first time I registered Thatcher’s erotic allure. This happened earlier, in 1988, when a friend from university invited me to join her family for a country walk. Her charming father was Peter Snow, renowned for Newsnight’s election night “swingometer”. At some point in the conversation he made reference to the PM’s sex appeal, which his daughter and I — with all the callowness of youth — found impossible to countenance. How could the 60-something villainess of the Poll Tax, with her roller-set hair and pussy-bow blouses, possibly be seductive?

Nearly four decades later, I realize Snow was just one in a sizeable cohort of media men who — if not all ardent admirers — couldn’t help but relish the way Thatcher deployed her femininity (rather as many media men and politicos now battle inconvenient attraction to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni). Peter’s cousin, Jon Snow, said of encounters with the Tory PM, “she enjoyed being a woman and I enjoyed being a man”. John Sergeant, the BBC’s former chief political correspondent, admitted on Michael Parkinson’s chat show in 2005 that Thatcher “could be… sexy, almost”. He explained that it was “unusual” in the Eighties “for a prime minister, or powerful woman of any sort, to put her hand on your arm and she could do that to devastating effect. And I would tend to weaken, I must admit.”

Thatcher’s allure was carefully cultivated, as Gaudoin’s book reveals. Childhood letters to her older sister Muriel reveal a passion for cinema, but also for clothes and quality lingerie. I hadn’t anticipated quite so much bra shopping. There’s even a moment on a trip via London when teenage Margaret fibs to her parents about the day’s trajectory and absconds to Bond Street.

Over the years, Thatcher’s love of fashion and finery was honed for strategic effect. When she won the Tory nomination for Finchley in 1959, an Evening Standard headline blazed: “Tories Choose Beauty.” She would go on to appear in Vogue four times. One fascinating example of Thatcher maximizing personal effect is the private deportment classes she took from Laurence Olivier, arranged by her speech writer Ronald Millar. She was advised by the thespian to take long confident strides, and to use her eyes to seduce and flirt.

Thatcher’s use of fashion as a seductive power ploy became even more effective when she took on Margaret King as a personal stylist. The Aquascutum director sharpened Thatcher’s look for a state visit to Russia in 1987, as a guest of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaudoin describes King’s vision for Thatcher as “a kind of Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago meets Sigourney Weaver as the boss in Working Girl”. The PM even wore a Lara-style fur hat. So successful was the Moscow visit that the Mirror ran a photo hoax on the next April Fool’s Day, using Thatcher and Gorbachev lookalikes cuddling up to one another in Gorky Park. Many readers fell for it.

Prime-ministerial tendresses appear to have cropped up all over. The Australian CEO and diplomat Sandy Holloway recalled attending a private Downing Street dinner for Australian leader Bob Hawke, and sitting next to Neil Kinnock who said, “You just watch how Margaret flirts with Bob.” Although, of course, that was a mere flicker compared to the flame that developed between Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Charles Moore once said that, “She had a sort of, it sounds a bit explicit to say, a sexual attraction” to the US president. It’s just as well Nancy and Denis got on too, so no one was left feeling too much of a wallflower. But the Reagan pash lends weight to Kinnock’s observation: “All of Margaret Thatcher’s favorite men and those she promoted, sometimes way beyond their abilities, looked as though they’d walked out of a 1950s B-movie.”

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Gaudoin takes Kinnock to task in the book for oversimplifying Thatcher’s predilections. She agrees the PM appreciated good-looking men. But argues that “she also liked men who flattered, and those with brains, tenacity and, to put it bluntly, balls”. The chevaliers and stalwarts are there, like Airey Neave, Robin Butler and Willie Whitelaw, who inspired her immortal line “every prime minister needs a Willie”. But there’s a more fun list of bounders: Cecil Parkinson, Jeffrey Archer, Alan Clarke, Jonathan Aitken and PR advisor Tim Bell (who boasted about putting his hand on the PM’s knee). It’s worth noting that the supposedly devout Methodist PM readily overlooked her favorites’ peccadilloes; perhaps because, in some part of her brain formed by wartime movies, she was swooning in their arms too.

Conservative women MPs didn’t enjoy the same leeway as the chaps with Thatcher. Those who succeeded — Virginia Bottomley, Edwina Currie and Gillian Shephard — did so for many of the same reasons she had: talent, graft, good hair, and persuading constituencies that they were good political housekeepers. Thatcher was never a “sister” and wasn’t even all that sisterly to Muriel, who she once alluded to in the past tense while still alive. Gaudoin makes it clear that it was the leader’s forward-propulsion and sense she was any man’s equal that rendered her an “incidental” feminist. In his 1990 TV interview with Thatcher, Terry Wogan says of male media interrogators: “They don’t seem to make any concession to the fact you’re a woman.” Thatcher flashes back at Wogan — another favorite — “Why should they? I don’t make any concession to the fact that they’re men.”

Notably, the one man who didn’t seem to attract Thatcher much at first was Denis Thatcher. Both Charles Moore and Gaudoin deduced from the Muriel letters that 20-something Margaret’s preferred suitor was a medical superintendent twice her age, Robert Henderson, inventor of the iron lung. There’s a tantalizing mention of an overnight stay with Roberts at a hotel in Eastbourne, but no indication of similar intimacy with poor, patient Denis who she was running alongside the medic. Then Henderson suddenly disappears from the correspondence and Margaret Roberts marries the man whose loyal support — and money — would allow her to fulfill her political ambitions.

It strikes me now that this long, stable, unsexy but mutually supportive marriage may, in itself, have contributed to Thatcher’s erotic glamour. For certain individuals, there are few things quite as tantalizing as an attractive woman (or man) who is unavailable, but happy to deploy their sexual energy within safe boundaries. Denis gave her that freedom and perhaps took a little for himself. I was intrigued to learn via the book of his late-blossoming friendship with Marilyn Foreman, better known as Mandy Rice-Davies of the Profumo Affair.

In the end, Woodrow Wyatt speaks for all of Thatcher’s admirers, the overgrown schoolboys who doted on matron: “I was in love with her, yes, but I suppose in the best platonic manner because — well, she was a marvelous girl… her skin was glowing and she had very fine legs.” You can’t help suspecting that for all Thatcher’s political achievements, that gushing appreciation of her sexual charisma might be her preferred epitaph.

We Brits don’t usually lead the globe in terms of unrobing. For dedicated, meticulously organised nudity, the world traditionally looked to Germany’s Freikorperkultur, or “free body culture”, to show the way. This ethos grew out of the mid-19th century Lebensreform movement, which challenged the destruction wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Between 1871 and 1918, half of all Germans left their place of birth and moved to a city, creating a deep nostalgia for the simpler, purer existence left behind.

And yet all is not well in Germany’s Garden of Eden. The German Association for Free Body Culture (DFK) has just cancelled their August centenary celebrations, due to a pronounced falling off in support — membership numbers have slumped from 65,000 to 34,000 over the past 25 years. The President of the DFK, Alfred Sigloch, believes that younger members are put off by older naturists adhering to strict rules “such as specified afternoon nap or quiet times”, while others are anxious about being photographed naked via a smartphone — especially now peeping Toms can use drones to get sneaky shots. Sigloch also blames social media for “the rise of the cult of the perfect body”, engendering anxiety about cellulite, tummies and other imperfections.

I find it depressing that old-style, let-it-all-hang-out nudists have been sent fleeing back to their patios by a plague of influencers using personal trainers, butt implants, absurd poses and photo-shopped images to show how “brave” they are going naked. To this middle-aged voyeur’s eye, the honed results aren’t nearly as pleasing as the bumpy, droopy chestnut-hued nudists of old.

My appreciation of such aesthetics has been honed as a member of one of the UK’s oldest naturist clubs: the Newnham Riverbank Club, on the edge of Cambridge’s Grantchester Meadows. It’s unique among such establishments for allowing costumed members to swim alongside nudists. This happened organically after the traditional membership of male academics (the land is owned by Cambridge University) fell into decline in the Eighties. In that era, the intrepid wife of one of the club’s groundsmen asked if she could pop down for an occasional dip in her bikini. Where she led others followed until numbers of both sexes were boosted, costumed and naked. I cherish the fnarr-fnarr greeting older, British members habitually utter when they meet outside the basking-bodied lawns: “Excuse me! I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.”

I’ve long said the Riverbank Club is the most democratic place in our rarefied university city, which has one of the largest gaps between the wealthiest and poorest residents in the whole country. When you are stark-bollock naked there’s nothing much to separate a biotech entrepreneur from a postman. Everyone is in equal raptures when they spot the brilliant flash of blue on a diving kingfisher or greet a new batch of cygnets. Like the German clubs, we have our rules, but they are sensible ones such as a prohibition from getting in and out of the Cam naked while punts are going past — although the tourists are invariably disappointed by this. We are also bonded by the primal urge to immerse every inch of our skin in wild water and have our soul cleansed sub-aqueously. Like Tom, the sooty chimney sweep in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, we long to be clean (although this urge has been tempered of late by sewage pollution, as is the case in so many parts of the UK). And no wonder: we humans are 60% water and come into existence floating in amniotic fluid; so the urge to return can feel overwhelming and the requirement to wear a swimming costume nonsensical.

The now deeply unfashionable Kingsley, an Anglican priest and chaplain to Queen Victoria, had close links to Christian socialism, with its underlying tenet that the drivers of mass production and commerce were rooted in greed and immorality. Like Germany’s Lebensreform movement, Kingsley and his brethren channelled the anxiety of their grubby age, with factories belching out smoke and the Thames so filthy that it caused the Great Stink of 1852. The antidote to all this filth was a return to nature and the great outdoors, which — for many — also meant stripping-off unnatural layers of clothes. This idea of nakedness as a form of spiritual good had been pioneered in the previous century by William Blake alongside his wife Catharine. The duo startled the artist’s benefactor Thomas Butts, who once found the pair sitting naked in their garden on a visit to their Lambeth home. “Come in!”, said Blake, “It’s only Adam and Eve, you know.”

The story of Blake’s nudity has long been used to indicate his idiosyncrasy and that association gently persists in the UK, where the desire to be naked is often seen as a largely harmless form of eccentricity. We love streakers at sporting fixtures (remember Erica Roe?) and laugh whenever the “naked rambler” Stephen Gough is arrested, while the backbench Tory MP Bernard Jenkin, a member of the 1922 Committee, is rarely mentioned without someone bringing up his enthusiastic embracing of naturism. Even in 2024, we are still locked in a Carry On mentality that tells us few things are as funny as someone’s clothes falling off unexpectedly. I had to shrug off the urge to snigger when I first encountered a nudist beach (the long-established one at Brighton) because the sense that bare bodies were both absurd and embarrassing had been deeply imbued in me. This was not helped by the scene in a Pink Panther film where Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau pursues an investigation through a nudist colony with a guitar place strategically over his groin. Like most middle-class children of the Seventies, I’d been taught to shroud myself in a huge towel every time I wrestled in and out of a swimming costume as if the cosmos would end if anyone glimpsed a nipple.

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In Germany, however, they’ve always taken nudity far more seriously. The movement that started in the 1850s, gained momentum from members of the youth movement Wandervogel (wandering bird), formed to hike and commune with nature, like a more anarchic Scouts. By the first two decades of the 20th century there were more than 200 nudist associations and clubs, informed by the idea that nudity was a healthy practice, and it was only social conditioning that made people conflate nakedness with sexual expression. Although in other ideological areas the groups could be at odds: on Motzener Lake (just outside Berlin) in the Twenties, one bank was frequented by bourgeois nudists influenced by ideas of racial purity, while another area was used by a radical working-class club, founded by the reformer and educationalist Adolf Koch. The latter practiced mixed-gender naked gymnastics and hosted the first International Congress on Nudity in Berlin in 1929, with participants from 23 countries. But in 1933, Hermann Goring tried to stop what he saw as decadence by passing laws restricting the practice of naturism, saying nudity “deadens women’s natural feelings of shame and kills men’s respect for women”.

Happily, following the Second World War the practice of naturism was swiftly resurrected in Germany on both sides of the wall (it remained one freedom not lost to East Germans). Anyone who’s been a frequent visitor will know it’s still utterly normal to encounter utterly unselfconscious naked men and women on beaches, in parks, swimming pools and in saunas. In these scenarios, it’s the Brits who look weird if they refuse to drop their towels.

It feels like the UK is seeing a revival of the kind of ideology that first powered Germany’s naturism — a quest for spiritualism and truth in nature that is a reaction to Artificial Intelligence and the Technological Revolution. Once again, many people mistrust the speed of change and feel displaced by it. The feeling of being outside a powerful elite that controls the levers of society has been accentuated by social media platforms such as Twitter, driving many to a Manichaeistic view of the world where wild swimming and forest bathing signify a cleansing of the soul.

The ideas of the painter Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, a key prophet of the Lebensreform, feel extraordinarily familiar.  A devotee of naturopathy, vegetarianism and naturism, Diefenbach rejected monogamy and organised religion, but embraced spirituality under the guise of the new Free Religious Movement after a personal “revelation”. He took to wearing just a white wool robe and sandals — or nothing, if circumstances allowed — and gathered huge followings to his lectures, until the authorities suppressed them. At this point he set up a commune in a remote rural quarry. One of his rather ropey paintings, “You Shall Not Kill” (1903), depicting an agonised naked man, a leaping stag and a bearded deity with hand raised, reminded me of Russell Brand’s baptism in the river Thames, supported by Bear Grylls. Brand shares with Diefenbach a pick-and-mix tub of Christo-Judaic mythology and alternative philosophy, as well as a womanising past and ostracism from polite society.

The fact is, as in Germany in the Twenties, we are seeing a widespread urge for people to cleanse their bodies and souls via acts of nakedness. Four different women writers I know have joined a movement that combines eco-activism with elements of Wicca, Gaia worship, Tantra, naturism, wild swimming and experimenting with drugs including psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA. In fact, it’s now so normal for me to be told that a friend — usually female — is going on a retreat that combines two or more of these elements, often in Portugal, that I’m beginning to feel grumpy about not being included. In a similar vein, an increasing number of young women activists are carrying out their protests in a state of undress a la Lady Godiva, including the conservationist Hannah Bourne-Taylor and the “naked economist”, Dr Victoria Bateman. If only the Green Party’s Carla Denyer would liven up the deathly general election by campaigning under the banner “the future is female, naked, purposeful and dangerous”.

Summer was when Mum and Dad worked at full tilt, flogging drinks and Ploughman’s lunches to day-trippers come to gawp at the view over the Kentish Weald. My four siblings and I provided a ready-made taskforce: washing up, mowing lawns, clearing fag ends off the lawn and, once we could pass for 18, serving drinks.

Money, or lack of it, was the main roadblock to my wanderlust. I spent most of my gap year working in Hamleys and then Covent Garden bars, amassing funds for a high summer spree. The most affordable and flexible option was purchasing an Interrail ticket: a Seventies innovation that came of age in the Eighties when some ferry services were added. It was romantic, too: you could book a sleeper train and journey while you slept. Travellers could venture as far as Turkey, or mooch around nearby France, or ride the iron horse through Scandinavia.

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So, I set about enlisting travel companions. My big sister Holly, a fashion student at Trent Poly, was a shoo-in. We then enlisted my old schoolfriend Bee, a well-travelled trainee medic who we put in charge of planning and itinerary. She suggested we all carry Dioralyte sachets, Alka-Seltzer and, she pondered thoughtfully (and, as it turned out, optimistically), “condoms”. The fourth member of our quartet was dance student Sas, who possessed the mild ennui of someone used to holidaying and necking cocktails with two older, glamorous sisters.

Halfway through the July of 1987, we four mustered at Sevenoaks station, freighted with backpacks. We divvied up the task of carrying the two-man tents and all wore sensible money belts for our passports and traveller’s cheques. Over 30 years ago you had to find a bank or bureau de change, or even an obliging hotel manager, that would issue local currency in exchange for a traveller’s cheque — the practice that dominated foreign travel from the mid-19th century until the Nineties.

We managed the Dover train and ferry crossing without mishap and headed to Paris and a sleeper train bound for Italy. Just after we crossed the border a couple of wolfish young men in leather jackets entered our couchette wielding a bottle of vodka. They swiftly identified Bee and Sas as the sirens of our quartet and rightfully focused their laser-like attention. My beloved sister and I were late developers. I was plump and plagued by zits, while Holly retained something of the ingénue.

Our lower rankings on the sex-bomb hierarchy would transpire to be a blessing. We were nearing Venice when Sas and Bee realised their money belts had been nicked by the wolves. We spent two nights camping at the Lido, but our days vanished into queuing at the British embassy, obtaining replacement passports and new cheques for our stricken travelling companions.

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Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, the mercury was rocketing as one of the worst heatwaves for decades began to hit. We headed to sweltering Rome, clambering out at Termini station where hordes of pensione touts accosted anyone with a backpack. We divvied up tasks: Holly and I went to cash a cheque, while Bee and Sas went off to find rooms. En route to the exchange, Holl and I noted a sharkish man with pock-marked skin, a grubby string vest and crafty eyes. “He looks like a pimp,” I remarked. Fifteen minutes later, we found Bee and Sas sealing a deal with Mr Brothel to stay in his “very good flat — very big, very central”, which would make us “very happy”. All we needed to do was jump in his “very big” Mercedes and we’d be there in minutes.

Needless to say, the apartment was in a grotty tower block abutting one of Rome’s busiest red-light districts. We had supper in a cafe lit by one flickering lightbulb, where the only other customers were two transexual prostitutes. When we returned to the flat, we found the pimp had bought a pile of beers and invited two male friends round. We barricaded ourselves in the bedroom. By the next morning there were six guys at the kitchen table inviting us to accompany them on a drive to a lake, where we could swim “nudo”. We elected to cut short our stay, do a lightning tour of the Sistine Chapel, then decamp to Florence.

In Firenze, a woman tout secured us two bunkbeds in one shabby room near the centre, where we photographed the spongy, yellow fungus blooming on the wall of the communal shower. Tour maven Bee ensured we ticked the key cultural boxes, but we were wilting from the relentless urban heat, so detoured to rural Tuscany where our guidebook listed a “little-visited” ruined monastery with stunning views. A bus dropped us by some stumpy olive trees, and we four mad-dog English women trudged up a steep incline for four hours in a deadly heatwave carrying huge rucksacks.

By the time we reached the ruins, half-crazed by sun, dehydration and recriminations, we promptly stripped off and posed naked in a line of stone arches as “living statues”. Inevitably, just as we’d taken up our classical poses a middle-aged couple in beige shorts strolled round the corner, before retreating in disbelief while we collapsed laughing. Later we discovered their campervan parked a short distance away. “Look, they’ve got Belgian numberplates,” said Sas. “They’re almost certainly a couple of perverts.”

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Either way, it seemed tactful to pitch our tents away from the Belgians, at the edge of a corn field. Holly and I shared one, while Bee and Sas were in the other. We’d been asleep an hour when we were woken by men’s voices just outside the tents. I sat bolt upright and watched aghast as the zip on our tent’s gauze door started to be tugged open. I could hear Bee also crying out in alarm. Holly detached a tent-pole and jabbed at the shape outside the tent, while yelling “Piss off!” The men outside laughed mockingly. We didn’t speak any Italian, but Sas used her schoolgirl French to shout that her friend was “très malade!” I discovered moments later that Bee had emptied two packs of Dioralyte into her mouth and was frothing like someone with advanced rabies.

We decided to run for it, in T-shirts, knickers and sandals, with tentpoles brandished like spears, while four burly local males tried to grab our breasts and buttocks. Feeling there would be safety in numbers, we fled downhill to the campervan, hammering on its doors with cries of “Help!” The Belgians kept their doors resolutely closed and didn’t utter a peep in response. Presumably, because they thought the nudo Anglais were the true deviants. I’ve nurtured a slight grudge against Belgians ever since. Plan B wasn’t great, but it seemed to be our only option: we edged our way very quietly into the corn field and curled up like dormice until morning.

On reflection, town life seemed safer than any rural idyll, so we set off for Siena and another giant dose of art — which was an excellent idea, until we couldn’t find any affordable lodgings. Uncertain what to do, we sat outside a café in the Piazza del Campo, trying to eke out bowls of pasta and carefully-nursed beers. It took us a while to realise that our caf, which had been almost empty when we sat down, was beginning to teem with young men who seemed to be encircling us. It also began to dawn on us that there were no other unaccompanied female tourists in the square and not a single young woman who looked local. As ever more youths arrived, it felt like we were about to incite a riot.

The waiters, noticing our predicament, started yelling at our suitors and beckoned us inside the café, then into the kitchen and out the back — where a young man was waiting with a Fiat Uno. This seemed marginally better than a public mauling, so we hopped in and were driven to a house on the fringes of Siena, where three waiters eventually joined us. We spent a wearisome night resisting blandishments and creeping hands and the ubiquitous compliment, “You have beautiful eyes.” I couldn’t help feeling Italian men would say this to any English women. An American tourist, whose parents hailed from Milan, told us later that Italian men rated British girls as “easy”, second only to Swedes.

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Nowhere else we travelled quite equalled the art, drama — or gropey menace — of Eighties Italy. Our original plan had been to head for Istanbul, but “God Help Us” headlines warned of furnace-like heat. The prospect of a two-day journey in a cramped, ill-ventilated train carriage, with reports of buckling rails, suddenly didn’t seem so enticing. Especially once we’d spent the most stifling night of our lives without aircon in Athens, as temperatures soared above 40°C. So, we jumped on an overnight ferry, slept on the deck and set off for Paxos, working our way around five islands in the end. As the month drew to a close, we made our reluctant way home via Genoa and Burgundy. We never told our parents that our 12 days in Italy had been a near-constant struggle to avoid sexual assault.

Still, we were English, and we soldiered on. The unworldly Holly and I were so entranced by the wonder of cobalt blue Greek water and cheap tavernas that nothing could ruin our memories of the trip. In recent years, with undimmed enthusiasm, we’ve taken our children to Greece so they can experience the rapture a little earlier in life than their bumpkin mothers managed.

These days, we wonder what dark misadventures our own offspring are keeping from us as the planet bakes. Then feel relieved we have no idea.

But we small islanders are never more at home with our own hypocrisy than when it concerns our sex lives. I’ve known married relationship counsellors warn clients against the perils of conducting love affairs, while having a string of lovers themselves. One tale that best demonstrates our wayward attitude to sexual mores involves my publican mother. When I was editing the Erotic Review magazine in the late 1990s (a job that raised eyebrows) my mum bumped into a church-going neighbour while walking in the local woods. In the course of conversation the woman said to mum, “I’m so sorry about Rowan, that all sounds dreadful”.

My mother replied she wasn’t the least bit embarrassed and was happy I was doing what I loved. At which point the neighbour, without missing a beat, said, “Actually, I was thinking of taking out a subscription for my husband.” Most middle-class Brits main concern when discussing sex is to give the appearance of conforming to societal norms. If the rules are suddenly relaxed within a friendly and discreet setting your average upright person may confide eye-popping misdemeanours.

The contradictory messages about sex are also apparent in people’s reactions to the BBC drama Normal People. It was announced this week that there had been 16 million downloads of the series in its first week on iPlayer. The pre-publicity and reviews all focused on the intense portrayal of sexual intimacy, which presumably helped boost the ratings.

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Yet a number of comment pieces — and myriad threads on social media – expressed discomfort or shock at the unbridled coupling.  One newspaper headline announced, “The sex scenes in Normal people give me the ick.” Which, in the stubbornly enduring spirit of Mary Whitehouse, is a bit like settling down to watch a dramatisation of The Kama Sutra and declaring yourself astonished there’s so much rumpy-pumpy.

If I hear there’s graphic violence in a film or TV series, I tend to opt not to watch it. Yes these sexually-tormented viewers of Normal People nobly struggle on, through every erotic last erotic frame. (Btw the director Lenny Abrahamson has pointed out the two stars were semi-clad in almost every sex scene, so clever cutting and camerawork gives you the sense it’s more explicit than it actually is.)

What Normal People and the Neil Ferguson debacle show is that we Brits are pretty useless at acknowledging our sexual needs. If this is clear under usual circumstances, it’s even truer under lockdown. When New York first locked down the city, NY Health issued a two-page memo detailing how turned-on citizens could stay safe during the epidemic. With endearing understatement the experts said, “This is not a good time to be having orgies.” Instead their top tip was “You are your safest sex partner,” suggesting you wash hands for 20 seconds before and after use. Try as I might, I could find no similar instructions for Londoners, or anyone in the UK. No official recognition that single people, or couples torn apart, would find sexual frustration boiling up like steam in a pressure cooker as lockdown progressed.

As ever, the inconvenient force of desire isn’t something we really want to talk about in this country. The closest the Government came to issuing advice was telling couples who didn’t live together they’d better “choose now” where they were going to stay throughout the period of self-isolation, then stick to that arrangement. Which didn’t begin to cover the full gamut of sexual ‘arrangements’. There were those in tentative new romances who didn’t want to put them under the strain and accelerated familiarity of living together. There were divorced or separated adults in new relationships, who often had children in different abodes to consider. Then there were those, like Ferguson and his married lover, with more unconventional arrangements – licit or illicit lovers outside their own home. On top of that were millions of lonesome souls continuing the search for love on dating apps. As week after week passed some people were bound to find lust overwhelming caution.

At this point readers are almost certainly dividing into two groups. The ones thinking, “Death-wish morons, I have no sympathy”, have a valid point of view, and the Government and tide of public opinion is with them. I’d hazard a guess a significant number are in stable relationships where parking sex for a bit doesn’t seem like a big sweat if other priorities – work, small kids, Covid-19 and the imminent threat of death – assert themselves and if your best beloved shares your house.

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The only problem with that point of view is that it ignores historical precedent and the line of persuasion best used by the metaphysical poets. Writers like Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell knew the most effective tool of seduction was reminding the beloved of their own fragile mortality. When Marvell wrote his famous couplet, “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace,” the bubonic plague was still a very real hazard, with the Great Plague of London (1665-6) sweeping off  nearly a quarter of the city’s residents. If you prized sensible chastity over the chance to seize some rapture, there was a good chance you’d die in any case, but without gathering any rosebuds. Similar reasoning was evident in the Blitz when falling bombs led to increased risk-taking and thousands of brief encounters.

Twenty years into the new millennium, nothing much has changed. Persistent thoughts of death lead to insistent thought of sex and, for that second group of people, a heightened risk of infection is a calculation worth living with. Furthermore, learning to calculate risk is something we glean from the earliest days of maths and use in many everyday scenarios, from giving birth, to driving a car and playing contact sports — as Timandra Harkness detailed so compellingly on UnHerd yesterday. Neil Ferguson had already had Coronavirus and been through quarantine, so I have some sympathy for him reasoning the chance of re-infection wasn’t huge. I suppose all this depends on whether or not you acknowledge how overwhelming sexual connection can be and see it as a driver of the human life-force, akin to hunger and thirst. From my reading and viewing of Normal People I’d guess Sally Rooney believes in that kind of erotic imperative.

What’s notable in my own circle of acquaintance, is how many otherwise sensible, intelligent people have followed all the rules – except the implied one about not seeing a sexual partner outside the home. I’m not talking about cavalier sex-jaunts days into lockdown, but the kind of cumulative longing for human touch, sensuality and reassurance that can make you flout rules and risk social censure. One 50-something friend broke at the six-week point and took an empty train to London (“far safer than my local Co-op”) wearing a mask, where her boyfriend picked her up. Another allowed her partner of a year’s standing to stay twice at her house, but said her teenage children gave her, “such a bollocking it almost wasn’t worth it”. A third moved in with a new man half-way through lockdown, after a flirtation fuelled by long Facetime calls and emails became a fully-fledged romance. You may believe your own circle has behaved more impeccably, but as my anecdote about my mother and the Erotic Review shows, when it comes to sex, people tend to tell you what they think you want to hear.

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By Rowan Pelling

I’d like to think we could grow up a bit about sex in this country. That we could applaud a drama like Normal People for showing the most realistically tender love scenes in British TV history without anyone calling it icky. That we could draw up some guidelines for any future pandemic that give more leeway to the realities of adult sexual behaviour. If two adults are reasonably sure they’re not infectious, don’t use public transport and wear masks when out, should they be pilloried for having sex – especially if the married one’s spouse had approved the arrangement? Although of course it wasn’t the shagging that did for Neil Ferguson – it was the double standards. And quite right too. But if our experts were prepared to be more honest about the fact there’s little that’s normal when it comes to sex, there’d be no need for such hypocrisy. As Sigmund Freud once observed, “The only unnatural sex behaviour is none at all.”

The truth is, it’s hard to hold a wake for something most people felt died years ago. For me, the magazine was put on the funeral pyre with Hugh Hefner in 2017, sati style. The man and his mag were irrevocably entwined in a way that’s rare in journal-land, where even Anna Wintour is just one in a long line of well-known Vogue editors.

Hefner pretty much invented the concept of a playboy: he lived the lifestyle and then pumped air into its saggy carcass when it was sinking like a punctured Lilo on the Playboy Mansion pool. The death knell was sounded by middle-shelf men’s mags like Maxim and FHM in the late 90s, which saw the beer-loving lad boot the martini-loving playboy off the shelves.

Forty years of doughty campaigning by feminists had finally paid off; the presence of girlie mags on top selfs seemed like an anachronism. The lads’ mags, with their ribald humour and cool female contributors and interviewees, were placed on family-friendly shelves and given a veneer of respectability. But over the next decade, a flesh race started over which publication could showcase the most naked totty. In 2013 the Co-op asked the low-rent Nuts to put its issues in cover-concealing “modesty bags” and a year later it was dead, alongside most of its brethren. I’d like to say this was down to consumer pressure, but it’s equally true the internet with its unimaginable reserves of filth killed the soft-porn mag.

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Yet as epitomised by Playboy, the girlie mag was the embodiment of intelligent sharp-edged masculine glamour — the sort of thing you expected to find on James Hunt’s or Jack Nicholson’s coffee table, beside a white tux. People (mostly men) read it for the car write-ups, interviews and travel as much as the pin-ups, and in 1975 its circulation per monthly copy peaked at 5.6 million.

In the mid-Seventies, the world was still giddy from the sexual revolution and the backlash was yet to properly kick off. Women wrote and featured in Playboy, the quality of writing was good and the nude pictures were often seen as liberating to the post-war generation. The magazine’s presence in a liberal household wasn’t unusual.

My dad bought into the Playboy myth. When my parents took over the tenancy of a country pub in Kent in 1968, my father decided to keep copies of Playboy on the bar counter, alongside Country Life. If you’re blinking in disbelief, cast your mind back to the way packets of peanuts were sold in pubs. They hung in rows on a cardboard backing and as the packs were peeled away a picture of a busty topless model emerged.  My scrupulously upright mother didn’t complain about any of it until she attended a parents’ evening at our local CoE primary school. She lifted the lid of my big brother’s desk and found a naked centrefold inside it  It transpired he’d been charging other boys 5p to take a look. Playboy was quietly banished and replaced by Punch.

Now it’s time to do the same with the print magazine. Although the brand itself is far from dead. Playboy Enterprises still turns over hundreds of millions of dollars — but it makes money from soft porn TV channels and online content and licensing the famous bunny logo to all manner of companies.

When I saw my wider family over Christmas, I was rather startled to see one of my three 17-year-old nieces wearing a hoodie that had a print on the back of a pouting, scarlet-lipped female mouth chewing on a just-extinguished matchstick, with PLAYBOY writ large above the image. There is, it transpires a wide range of Playboy logo-ed garments designed and stocked by fashion company Missguided, which targets young women. When I asked her if she knew what Playboy was actually about, she said, “It’s cool, right?” and her cousins nodded.  She’d never heard of Hefner, nor the magazine and I might as well have been speaking Swahili when I said, “Aren’t you lot supposed to be Fourth Wave Feminists?”

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I would, of course, have been a grade-A hypocrite if I’d told my niece she shouldn’t be wearing a top like that. I’ve edited two erotic literary magazines, been a sex columnist for GQ and had a naked shot of me published in a national newspaper. I always swore I wouldn’t be one of those women who went from thoroughly enjoying her sexuality to ticking off other women for doing the same (Germaine Greer flashing her orifices for Suck magazine, then snarking about Suzanne Moore’s “fuck-me shoes” springs to mind).

Above all, I’ve learned you’ve got to view most things pertaining to sex in the context of their times. The later years of Hefner’s saw his epically naff lifestyle veer towards the nasty and cast a shadow on the magazine. He looked more like a tortoise in a smoking jacket than the Casanova of legend, as he filled the Playboy Mansion with disturbingly young lovers, like pneumatic, playmate twins Karissa and Kristina Shannon. Hef offered girls Quaaludes as “thigh openers” and popped Viagra “like Skittles”, a habit that left him almost completely deaf.

According to one former girlfriend, Holly Madison, who wrote a book about her time in the Playboy Mansion, all girls had a 9pm curfew, had to ask permission to go out unaccompanied and had to agree to unprotected group sex with Hefner twice a week. One of Bill Cosby’s victims, the model Chloe Goins, claimed that she was raped at the Playboy Mansion in 2008 when she was 17, after Hefner encouraged her to have drinks with the comedian.

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Needless to say, the Mansion’s scene was favoured by Donald Trump. The President’s long association with Hefner included him featuring on a Playboy cover in 1990, while in 2006 he rewarded a winning team on the Apprentice with a trip to the Mansion, where according to a female contestant he lent over and said to Hef, “It’s hard for me to tell which of these girls are yours, and which are mine.” According to Hefner’s son Cooper his dad didn’t support Trump as a political figure: “We don’t respect the guy.” It makes for an interesting hierarchy of sleaze when the pornographer denounces the politician.

When you think back to Fifties Hefner, there’s total logic to this pecking order. Anyone who espouses the concept of sexual emancipation should find something to admire in Hefner as a frontline warrior of the Sexual Revolution. He said of sex, “We should embrace it, not see it as the enemy. If you don’t encourage healthy sexual expression in public you get unhealthy sexual expression in private.” It’s clear he knew whereof he spoke, describing his conservative, religious parents (originally from Nebraska) as “Puritan Prohibitionists”.

It became Hef’s life’s mission to overturn their values. He studied psychology at the University of Illinois, while also taking courses in creative writing and art and magazine became his calling. In 1953, after a brief stint on Esquire he raised $8,000 thousand dollars and launched Playboy with headline-grabbing photos featuring Marilyn Monroe in her 1949 calendar shoot (years later he would buy the crypt next to hers in LA). That first edition sold 50,000 copies and is now a collector’s item worth thousands.

That same year, 1953, saw the publication of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, alongside the second of Alfred Kinsey’s great tomes on human sexuality Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female — which informed an astonished world that women could be just as libidinous as men and enjoyed orgasms. The forces that shaped the sexual revolution were mounting.

Hefner quickly established a style that was admired across the magazine industry: racy photo-shoots teamed with top-class writing and an influential central interview. For decades literary men would talk glowingly about the Playboy Interview, as if it had never occurred to them the mag was also full of tits‘n’arse.

I worked on GQ in the early 1990s and it struck me the formula was just the same as Playboy’s (which was when Hef’s mag started losing its USP), but with fewer world-famous writers. The roll call of people who wrote for Playboy is astonishing, including Margaret Atwood, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, Roald Dahl and Ursula le Guin, while Normal Mailer was dispatched to write about Muhammad Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle. Interviewees included Mae West, Ayn Rand, Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Satre, Better Friedan, Al Pacino and, well, absolutely everyone quite frankly. Hefner established a Playboy Philosophy, was a rigorous campaigner for free speech, and espoused liberal causes including the Civil Rights movement, sending black writer Alex Haley to interview Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Haley also interviewed George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, a choice that gave Rockwell a fit of nerves, meaning he kept a handgun on the table throughout the conversation. More than that, Hefner was a leading advocate of women’s reproductive rights and a vocal supporter of legalising gay marriage, saying the struggle was “a fight for all our rights. Without it, we will turn back the sexual revolution and return to an earlier, puritanical time.”

Of course none of this white-washes the dark excesses of the Playboy Mansion. I’ve ploughed through a tonne of literature on Hefner and while I’ve never found anything that proves he himself was guilty of what a court would view as sexual assault, it’s clear the money, drugs and lure of fame were a form of coercion to the young and vulnerable. And he presided over a flesh-show that made others feel amoral behaviour was permissible.

Even so, it would be careless to dismiss the contribution Playboy and Hefner made to sexual liberation, the civil rights movement and to the cause of good writing in the mag’s first two decades. One of the curses of getting older is realising how many celebrated historical figures have feet of clay: should I cease to admire all Marie Stope’s efforts to ensure women had contraception and access to abortions because she was, at the same time, a committed eugenicist? So I won’t tell my niece to take off her sweatshirt, but I might buy her Holly Madison’s memoir and a Seventies copy of Playboy, so she knows the dual nature of what she’s buying into. As Hef would agree, informed is empowered.

I’d be inclined to rate my mother’s birds and bees talk as a five out of ten, if it weren’t for one key aspect. When she described the intimate business of making love, we three made the usual protests of, “Yuck!”, “No!” and “I’m NEVER doing that!”, at which point Mum said, “You’re wrong. It’s the most beautiful feeling in all the world.” I was watching her face and, 43 years later, still recall a fleeting moment of ecstatic reverie. It was clear to me she was telling the truth (her truth, in any case) and from then onwards I nurtured the idea that the end game of sex should be rapture.

Which takes us — as all discussions about sex do at the moment — to the Netflix series Sex Education. The local academy my sons attend thought it necessary to send a memo home a couple of weeks ago from their “PSHE Coordinator” (Personal, Social and Health Education) warning parents to be aware that their children were likely to be watching the new season, despite its 18 certificate, “due to its representation of a variety of different teenage issues and curiosities”.

Damn right. My 15-year-old had pretty much inhaled both seasons and was delighted to note that the main character’s mother, a sex therapist and writer played by Gillian Anderson, “is almost as embarrassing as you”. The chat also meant I learnt exactly when his classmates had discovered, courtesy of Google, that I’d edited two erotic magazines and appeared on programmes with titles like, “100 Greatest Sexy Moments”.

The geography teacher who wrote the school’s letter went on to say, “Personally, I will be making sure I watch the series to ensure I know what is being shown and therefore to support questions should I be approached at school by pupils.” Judging by Series 1, I hoped she was braced to discuss rimming, scissoring, alien-themed erotica and how to suppress the gag reflex while performing fellatio. Of course, many of the show’s themes are more universal: performance anxiety, consent, the perils of sexting, body dysmorphia and the pervasive influence of porn culture.

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There’s no doubt Sex Education has usefully broadened the debate about the kind of sex scenarios we might reasonably expect our teens to encounter. There’s wide acceptance outside religious lobby groups that current sex education provision at UK schools is woefully inadequate. Worse than that, it’s not even compulsory by law. That will change this coming September, and even then “parents and carers may withdraw their children from sex education until three terms before they are 16 in secondary school”.

But even when children do exit school knowing a modicum about consent, the clitoris, gender fluidity, masturbation and full-on intercourse, there are significant gaps. It’s one thing for a teacher to say oral sex is perfectly normal, and quite another to explain how it’s best performed. And they’re certainly not braced to argue whether sex could or should have meaning beyond being a pleasurable horizontal workout.

To return to my late lamented mother’s thoughts on sex, what none of the current educational provision deals with is the beauty. Or to misquote Woody Allen: is sex beautiful? Only when it’s being done right. This erasure of erotic value in our sex ed affects many people, whatever their age or level of sexual experience. If you don’t expect an ecstatic sexual experience, you’re more likely to accept the mundane or disappointing.

Take a friend of mine in her 50s, who’s just exited a long marriage to a stolid businessman who cheated on her with his tennis coach. She has just taken up with a sexy chef and their lovemaking is the stuff of revelation. She told me: “It’s a cliché to say it, but I didn’t know sex could be like this — an out-of-body, electrifying, almost religious experience.” Then her voice became wistful and slightly accusatory: “You knew this, didn’t you?” I had to admit, yes, I did. Not on a constant, smug or failsafe basis, but definitely as something to aim for.

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Of course, it’s hard to the point of impossibility to talk about the sublime in sex. It either sounds absurd or boastful — just dwell for a nanosecond on Sting talking about Tantra. The forces that have shaped our culture, from Protestantism to the Enlightenment and capitalism, aren’t too wedded to transcendentalism. And then we’re British, so inclined to snigger.

Our natural instinct is not to take sex too seriously. Some years ago the classified ads manager at Private Eye told me the most popular lonely heart in the entire history of the magazine was a woman who described herself as, “Lady doctor, who likes laughing in bed.” It’s a brave person in western society who tries to put sincerity and meaning back into sex. Naomi Wolf had a go in her book Vagina, which took as its starting point the author’s sudden diminishment of sensation at the point of climax. When the full force of her orgasm is finally restored to her she writes:

“Sexual recovery for me was like that transition in The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy goes from black-and-white Kansas to colorful, magical Oz. Slowly after orgasm I once again saw light flowing into the world around me. … I looked out of the window at the trees tossing their new leaves and the wind lifting their branches in great waves, and it all looked like an intensely choreographed dance, in which all of nature was expressing something.”

Cue a chorus of critics cackling like hyenas. To my mind, that passage was the best bit of the book: an unabashed acknowledgement that there’s something about great sex that resets all your dials, knocks twenty years off your face, and — yeah, let’s go full woo-woo — makes you feel at one with the planet.

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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.

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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…”

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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.

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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.

Levy, an entrepreneur and international master of chess, was the keynote speaker and has long predicted that by 2050 humans will be entering into legally binding marriages with robots. He’s said more recently that within the next century humans will be able to have babies with their electrically engineered spouses, given the “recent progress in stem cell research and artificial chromosomes”.

A surprising number of people aren’t troubled by bionic babies. They’re already signing up for android action, or its nearest equivalent. The New York Times recently reported the advent of Digisexuals, or those amongst us who reject human contact in favour of close emotional, or sexual, relationships with electronic devices and mechanisms enhanced by artificial intelligence. Exemplars of the trend include the Chinese AI engineer Zheng Jiajia who designed and married his own robot wife Yingying and the Japanese school administrator Akihiko Kondo who wed the pop sensation and hologram Hatsune Miku last November (neither wedding was legally binding).

Developments in virtual reality and digitally-enabled sex – using apps to control artificial phalluses and vulvas – are making it less and less necessary for reclusive tech lovers to seek human intimacy at all. And films such as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, in which Alicia Vikander plays a robot who can pass the Turing Test, seem ever more prophetic. Most of us have little idea when we message a large corporate website’s “help” facility whether the person answering us is real or a bot.

Before I attended the Goldsmith’s conference my own views on AI eroticism hadn’t progressed far beyond Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron. I was unaware that several sex-doll companies, such as US-based Abyss Creations, were already producing products widely billed as sex robots – in reality dolls with soft silicone “skin” and animatronic AI-enabled robotic heads– and that some were already in use in brothels. I hadn’t realised the sex tech market was estimated at $30 billion a year, meaning a lucrative race was on to produce devices to replicate the soft squishy sensuality of human intimacy (thus reducing the need for actual human intimacy). One young female computer scientist I met at the conference had created the “Kissinger”, a device to simulate lip-on-lip pressure via a mobile phone app.

Most of my fellow Goldsmiths’ delegates didn’t just see these advances as inevitable; they felt they were desirable. The most vociferous proponents of humanoid robots tended to be men and it became clear a little geek stereotyping wasn’t entirely unwarranted. The male coders, academics and futurists I talked to were linear thinkers, at ease with coding and algorithms but less in tune, I felt, with the emotional vagaries of your average human female.

Two of the event’s leading lights regaled me separately with tales of their god-awful divorces and ex-wives, before telling me with painful sincerity they’d plump for an android spouse any day. A German academic, Jessica Szczuka said her academic research (involving 263 straight males) found that two thirds of respondents could imagine using a sex robot. It was hard not to think back to Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, in which a bunch of irksome, feminist wives are replaced with fawning, docile lookalikes who don’t seem quite human.

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In fairness, it’s not just men who are drawn to sex tech. The Love and Sex with Robots conference was hosted by the archaeologist-turned-computer scientist Kate Devlin, who’s subsequently published Turned On, a history of the sex robot, which also keeps an eye on the science horizon. Devlin takes pains to point out that women in the field of AI aren’t swept up by the fem-bot type androids of popular science fiction. She questions why erotic tech has to come in human form at all and suggests we think more laterally.

In her book, she proposes a sensual duvet with receptors and transmitters that would be like wrapping yourself up in a pleasure-inducing cocoon. Devlin’s also a fierce advocate of the potential benefits of AI-enhanced erotic mechanisms in terms of catering for the elderly, the physically impaired and the chronically lonely. Like many women in the field she strives to promote the therapeutic side of sex tech. Szcruka similarly pointed out that the likely users of sex robots will be people who suffer from acute social anxiety, saying: “Someone with a fear of rejection could control the robot because the robot would never reject them.”

In wider, global terms you can see there’s an argument that this technology could help societies where there’s a perilous imbalance in the sexes, whether that’s remote mining communities or whole countries. China’s one-child policy and the Indian sub-continent’s extreme poverty, aggravated by both nation’s traditional favouring of male children, has led to mass abortion and murder of female infants. This necessarily means some young men will find it hard to secure a sexual partner, leading to either unwanted celibacy, or a culture that fosters rape and assault. Perhaps even the furious Incels (involuntary celibates – of whom the California school shooter 22-year-old Elliot Roger is the most infamous) would find their pent-up, misogynistic rage was soothed by a robot lover programmed for sexual healing.

The counter-argument is that such theories are delusional: that if a man becomes used to unquestioned compliance from a “female” robot then he will expect the same level of submission from a human woman. Or that angry, frustrated males will abuse non-sentient sex robots, making them more likely to behave violently to real flesh and blood women. In 2017, it was widely reported that an “intelligent” sex doll named Samantha, who responded to seductive chatter, was “molested” at Arts Electronica Festival in Austria. Her Spanish engineer, Sergi Santos, said festival attendees had treated Samantha “like barbarians”.

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Kate Devlin closely examines the ethical arguments against sex robots in Turned On – even looking head-on at the disturbing question of what happens if androids are constructed to resemble children. Once again, the central issue raised is whether such innovation is likely to help prevent actual abuse of minors, or actively encourage it. There’s almost no reliable evidence on the matter and the same is true of the debate around whether sex tech makes women more or less vulnerable to sexual assault. Devlin outlines the central problem:

“The ‘gateway’ versus ‘reduction’ theories remain ambiguous and they bear investigation, though such investigation is by necessity constrained by ethical boundaries… What ethics committee would sign off a study like that? What funding body would pay for it?”

And even if you settle these kinds of ethical issues, there are the everyday ones that complicate all technological innovation. Who is ultimately in charge of the software? Can it be hacked? Will large corporations hijack the programming to spy on our sexual habits? Will Big Government monitor it to see if we’re deviants?

If you feel this talk of androids is just an absurd sci-fi scenario, it’s worth noting the idea of creating a replica human for sexual pleasure has a history as long as storytelling. Devlin’s book highlights the Greek myth about a young woman called Laodamia, whose husband Protesilaus was the first to die at the siege of Troy. Distraught with grief, Laodamia commissioned a bronze statue of her dead spouse and took it to her bed.

Then there’s the 19^th-century ballet Coppélia, where a young man falls for a doll made by a malign inventor.  But truth is always weirder than fiction and few stories are more haunting than the tale of the artist Oskar Kokoschka’s affair with Alma Mahler (widow of the great composer). Mahler ended the intense romance after a couple of years, but  Kokoschka couldn’t come to terms with the parting. In 1918, he visited the Munich doll-maker Hermine Moos and commissioned a life-size soft effigy of Mahler, stipulating every last detail of design: “And take to heart the contours of the body, e.g. the line of the neck to the back, the curve of the belly. Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin… The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace.” Kokoschka posed the mannequin around his home and on one infamous occasion took her to the opera. But the doll proved deeply unsatisfactory and eventually, following a party, he destroyed her.

It’s easy to feel complacent; to believe this kind of obsessive behaviour that could never overtake you or me. Until you consider the average person’s emotional attachment to their smart phones, tablets and laptops. It may be too strong to say we’re in love with our electronic devices, but we display troubling signs of addiction and dependency that aren’t far removed from it. It’s fair to say I freak out more when I mislay my mobile than when I lose one of my sons. I think of my computer’s hard drive as an extension of my own memory. I see friends talk to Siri as if she’s alive and I found the film Her, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a sultry-voiced operating system, only too plausible.

On dating sites and chat rooms identity is blurred to the point you can feel passionate desire for someone who doesn’t exist except as a projection of a stranger’s fantasies. Teledildonics (app-controlled sex-toys that can be operated remotely) mean you can have a love affair where your lover never touches you because his skill won’t match up to your smart toy. Recent sex surveys have yielded the surprising result that millennials are losing their virginity later than comparable young from the 1960s to 1980s and were generally having less sex. One hypothesis was the pressure that comes from widely available porn and the pressure to perform.

I want to be relaxed about all this. I know our forebears were deeply disturbed by the spinning Jenny, the iron horse and the contraceptive pillandthat somehow humans adapt apace and survive the relentless tide of innovation. I find Kate Devlin’s enthusiasm admirable and I’d certainly test-drive her orgasmic duvet if it came to production – although nightly use might prove a bit over-stimulating. Nevertheless, something troubles me in the whole debate. We may not yet have reliable evidence to quote about the effects of intimate human interaction with machines, but most parents I know feel they observe significant changes in their children when they spend too much time on their devices.

Gaming and social media have inbuilt features devised to create an addictive response (such as Facebook’s infamous “like” button) and bond users ever closer to their favourite ways of wasting time. With advances in virtual reality you can only envisage the dependency becoming more pronounced – and the grumpiness, anxiety and anger when asked to return to real life becoming more accentuated. And if this is true of non-sex-tech how will it not be truer of the tech designed to push our sexual buttons? Especially for those who are most vulnerable: socially inept and reclusive young men. It’s not hard to envisage a scenario in which thousands of people retreat to an online erotic life with less chance of encountering a messy, complex, self-contradictory, enticing, evolving human being.

Suggested reading

All hail the AI dictatorship

By James Bloodworth

I’ve spent 23 years researching and writing about sex and relationships and have become increasingly astonished by human capacity for erotic intimacy – and also by how frightened we can be by the levels of trust and vulnerability involved in such closeness. Some of the hardest sexual practices are paradoxically the simplest, because they involve sustained eye contact, tender exploration and gentle, slow touch. They necessitate trust of an order that doesn’t entail you thinking: “Hmm, has someone hacked into your central controls.”

I’ll probably sound wildly kooky if I talk about “energetic connection” but when you’re profoundly, erotically in tune with another personthere is a flow between bodies that seems to transcend the purely physical. The irony is that we call it “electrifying” in homage to the spark that gives life to machines. Science can surely explain that amoroussensation via dopamine, oxytocin and a crucible of other feel-good chemicals, but it’s still a peculiarly human, interactive sensation.

More than that, let us consider the slippery, contradictory nature of desire. Do we ever want what we think we want? Aren’t our deepest yearnings to some extent occluded? Societal norms, parental guidance and peer pressure steer us for so long that it can take decades to know your own sexual taste. And then there’s the fact that when you get what you want it often leaves you unsatisfied. A friend filled in an online dating form saying she wanted a tall, dark, handsome London-based professional and promptly fell in love with a short, sandy, eccentric farmer from Wales.

Can we write algorithms for androids that delight and frustrate us in equal measure, that keep pace with our unconscious desires, that change our perceptions of our needs and deepest longings? Can a robot ever resonate with that iridescent glow of heart and soul that comes from melding with your best beloved to the point you don’t know where your own body starts and his ends? Could you feel the fine hairs on your neck rise as your android lover turned to look at you across a crowded room, although your back was turned to theirs? I know many thousands would sign up for a Rampant Rabbit that had a robotic Idris Elba attached to it. And far more for a compliant sex-bot that looked and talked like Scarlett Johansson. But I’ll always yearn for that small epiphany Nora Ephron outlined in Sleepless in Seattle:

“Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up… I knew it the very first time I touched her. … I was just taking her hand to help her  out of a car, and I knew. It was like… magic.”