Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review, has a bone(r) to pick with today's women's erotica — she says it glorifies casual sex.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Pelling includes the obligatory dig at "ladette" culture ("anybody who sees drunken young women on the pull in city centres knows that, for that generation, feminine mystique is already well nigh extinct") and the obligatory why-should-ladies-want-to-act-like-men rhetoric ("While I would fight tooth and claw for women's right to sexual freedom, I'm not sure the sisterhood has gained much if it sees that freedom as a chance to brag about sex and conquests in the same kind of tedious and lewd manner that made the new lad so obnoxious back in the Nineties.") But she's especially pissed off about contemporary erotic writing, like The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and Charlotte Roche's Wetlands, because it creates a "crushing new sexual orthodoxy [that] inevitably puts pressure on young women to behave as if they're hot, horny and 'up for it', twenty-four seven." She writes,
I didn't even lose my virginity until I was 20, but today's young women are being pressured to think that anything less than hooker-style knowledge of multiple partners and outré sexual positions is abnormal. In the end I question whether extreme promiscuity suits more than a very small handful of women. The boring truth is that most women prefer sex when their emotions are deeply engaged as part of a proper, involved relationship. I am certainly not saying that women shouldn't write about sex, merely that they must do so for a reason.
Thanks for including your age of deflowering, Ms. Pelling, thereby proving that you're not slutty like today's youth. And thanks for telling us "the truth" about what kind of sex women like. You don't include any data to back this up, but that's okay, we know this is candid woman-to-woman sharing, and not another kind of "crushing sexual orthodoxy" that has been making women ashamed of their bodies and their desires since long before your no-doubt "proper" first time. And your requirement that women write about sex "for a reason" is such a great way of reinforcing the old idea that women only fuck to keep a man around, or to feel good about themselves, or to express their love, and never for the sheer pleasure of fucking. "Surely it's time," you say, "to recognise that the way anyone has sex is a matter of personal preference, not dubious gender politics. " Surely it is, Ms. Pelling, and yr doing it rong.
Un-Erotica? As Another Female Writer Publishes An Explicit Novel Is This New Feminism Or A Tawdry Betrayal Of Women? [Daily Mail]


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