Last year I was invited to speak at the Oxford Union in my capacity as editor of the Erotic Review. I was also asked if I would like to stage an exhibition of erotic prints to give an extra frisson to the evening’s debate.
I filled the august interior of the Gladstone room with explicit images by Aubrey Beardsley and the like. As the room filled up, the female students drifted towards the pictures. The young men, on the other hand, averted their gaze, with crimson cheeks. If it hadn’t been for the late arrival of some whiskery dons, no men would have looked at the pictures at all.
This event confirmed several things I have long suspected. The first is that there is a growing market for erotica aimed specifically at young women. The second is that there is a real correlation between young women’s enthusiasm for erotica and middle-aged men’s appreciation of the same material.
I first noticed this trend among readers of the Erotic Review. Our male readership has always consisted largely of men in their 40s and 50s. But in the past year, the real growth in female readers has been among women in their 20s and 30s.
Over the same period, I have also had more young women writers approaching me with ideas. The current crop has grown up free of the idea that possession of a libido is a male preserve. However, they are probably also wise to the fact that their idea of what sex and romance entails is widely different from that of their male counterpart, the Neanderthal new lad.
Hormones dictate that the young man’s primary sexual organ is his penis. A short circuit appears which ensures all sexual stimuli go straight to the groin, not via the brain.
As men get older, testosterone levels fall, the circuitry gets more complicated and the brain kicks into play. This is commonly described as mid-life crisis, but what is happening is that men are getting romantic just as many women are getting world-weary and pragmatic.
Their fantasies have now become situational and detailed. They concern a time and place, a particular scent, a play of light on the curve of a certain woman’s neck.
Sexual desire is being triggered by a story, a romance, Hollywood love stories and, increasingly, on phenomenally successful erotic imprints such as Virgin’s Black Lace.
For young women and older men, the lure is not so much sexual fulfilment as sexual tension. The uncertainty that this tension will be relieved produces a sensation of exquisite torture.
This is probably the most distinctive feature of erotica. It establishes a narrative but the consumer remains uncertain where that narrative will take them. The details we are given are rarely as important as what is left unseen and unsaid.
With pornography, the explicitness of the pose or the text is everything. It hinges on principles of cause and effect: a certain amount of money is paid for a precisely predetermined amount of thrill. And the thrill is exhaustive. Porn mags are produced to be thrown away. They are as ephemeral as the ejaculations of the men who read them. Erotica is made to be kept, treasured and referred to, time and again.
The willing suspension of disbelief is what links young women to older men in the erotic scenario. For the women, belief in a forbidden realm of the senses is part of the fantastical package that includes weekends in Paris, diamonds, roses round the door and love that lasts until the end of time. Men, on the other hand, are less likely to want any sort of resolution. In any case, they are probably already happily married.
The erotic allure of an idealised younger woman to the ageing Casanova is not so much prolonged bouts of gymnastic sex as the idea of someone who will admire and cosset him. A woman who will appreciate his sexual technique rather than despise his depreciated libido.
The common view may be that money is the key to relationships between ageing beasts and young beauties, but sex is often at the heart of it. As testament to this, one ageing publishing lothario was asked how he managed to seduce so many beautiful young things and he said: “Simple. I am the Nijinsky of cunnilingus.”
A young woman may well exchange youth, good looks and muscle for erotic expertise and excessive flattery.
It is interesting how Jane Eyre points to the same archetype. A young woman’s willing surrender to an older man who epitomises a dark and forbidden sexuality – and quite possibly a talent for oral sex.
But what of the older woman? Famous gardener (and feminist) Germaine Greer suggests in her new book, The Whole Woman, that sex is not a fruitful pursuit for the older woman. However, the latest sex surveys suggest women enjoy sex in their 50s more than at any other time in their life.
Perhaps the pragmatic older woman should join forces with the priapic, but now rejected, younger lad and engage in mutual, mindless, multiple orgasms. In this scenario, everyone’s sexual energies would be gainfully deployed.
Greer’s response would no doubt be the same as Candide’s: “Cela est bien, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin (True enough, but we’ve still got to tend to our garden).”