Some things really make you feel old, and how you initially found out about the mechanics of sex is chief among them. If you’re under 20 and don’t live in a cave, we can safely assume that the internet was your first port of call as a teenager. If you’re under 30, television and the advent of relatively explicit weekly magazines probably helped you along.
But if you’re 40 or over, had a sheltered upbringing, and read magazines such as Bunty or Jackie — more ponies and macramé than “position of the week†— then the story is quite different. Chances are you educated yourself by leafing through books, any books, hunting desperately for the enlightening parts, and then sharing them with your girlfriends.
I spent the earlier part of this year compiling an anthology of the kind of stuff my friends and I passed round furtively at my all-girls’ school — the “dirty bitsâ€, which became more dog-eared with each breathless reading. Some of the books had, in their time, been banned, or burnt, or both — Lady Chatterley’s Lover being a prime example. Twenty-five years ago we still thought those books were wildly exciting, and that we were wildly exciting too for familiarising ourselves with them.
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I found about sex from Loveline on MTV, sex blogs like Naked Loft Party, and that old standby, Judy Blume. Perhaps I’m from the multimedia generation?
Gallery Carre
