by Do you have a sex or relationship question? Ask Rachel about it below
When I was about 10, I went into my bedroom (well, the room on Exmoor I shared with bats) and a book appeared on my bedside table.
Girls and Sex was the title of the slim paperback that my mother found for me during the summer holidays. My three brothers took turns with their own book, called, you guessed it, Boys and Sex.
Shortly afterwards, my father drove us back to preparatory school for the start of the autumn term. My older brother and I sat in our school uniform (gray flannel trousers for him, a navy pleated skirt for me) without a seat belt on the back bench seat as we drove through East Grinstead in the rain. “Now, kids,” he said, the windshield wipers swinging. “Has your mother talked to you about it yet…” and then he went into a spasm of embarrassed throat clearing. “Yes!” we screamed. “Don’t worry, Dad, it’s all right,” – although she didn’t talk to us about masturbation at all, we just knew that was the subject of raising orders.
“Oh fine,” he said, clearly relieved. “Nothing wrong with him, but don’t…” and trailed off. And that’s it, apart from my grandparents’ issues National Geographic in the bathroom, and my mother’s copy of it Our Own Bodieswhich I would furtively examine when she was out, especially the gloom and gynae chapter, which instructed women on the joy of examining their own cervix with a speculum, accompanied by black-and-white photographs of the results.
When I say “that”, I mean that was my sex education. The most daring thing I saw on the screen was Anna Friel’s lesbian kiss Brookside and trembling when I made my father take us to see Officer and Gentleman by Richard Gere. “White goat!” he kept muttering during the sex scenes (very tame). “White goat!”
That was then; this now.
The internet. Porn on smartphones. Sexting. PhSE classes in schools. Netflix. The younger generation has literally Sex Education on tap – and in widescreen.
So, in the entirety of my middle life, I feel the need (if not my entire cohort) to re-educate myself. Here’s why: I read widely; I have three grown children; I have been a journalist all my life; and every week I interview Difficult Women for my podcast. You’d think I’d managed to keep up at the back. But I have learned that it is not enough to be read Delta of Venus as a teenager, married in my 20s, and had three children in NHS teaching hospitals. We are in a whole new world in the 2020s.
I know this for many reasons, one of which is that I am broadcasting live on the radio. The other day I had to look at Ofcom’s list of abusive language. Dear reader, I didn’t know half of these words existed, let alone be tempted to say them on the air! Bumberclaat. Chow. Bawbag. Put it this way, I would definitely challenge if someone put these down on a Scrabble board. But, over Christmas, one of my millennial guests used all seven letters for “revelation”, to applause from the other players.
It’s not just me – even the undisputed experts in the field are struggling to keep up.
“Practices are being mainstreamed, normalized – and we could say ‘pegging’ here – that many people have never heard of, let alone practised,” says Sophie Laybourne, a couples counselor who specializes in sexual relationships.
But even the language is changing, too. We don’t or can’t say “erectile dysfunction” or “ED” anymore. We say “unreliable erections” as if the male member is prone to erratic mobile signal. We don’t say “sex addiction”, we now talk about “sexual compulsion”. Everything about sex is de-stigmatized. Nothing biased or biased more…
As one friend my age who came to a New Year’s turkey soup lunch said, “This is what I don’t understand. Why aren’t we talking about good old-fashioned sex maniacs anymore?”
The other sea change involved relationships. Customs is changing as well as practice.
A national newspaper editor in his 60s called me last week. “Forget adultery, the hat was so old, so 1990s. You should be writing a novel about polyamory.” He was on his phone, so I wasn’t sure if I heard him correctly. Polly Amory? I asked. “Is she the daughter of Ed and Alice Amory?”
He laughed and said no, polyamory – it seems to be all the rage in the US and coming over here too, as is CNM. (This isn’t a cable network, honey. It’s “consensual non-monogamy. I looked it up.)
Since I was single in my 20s, “troups” have also become a thing – and all of this brings me to this inevitable conclusion. The way we have sex may be polymorphously biased, but marriage has not moved with the times, and that is causing some problems.
Marriage binds most of us in monogamy, the system that psychotherapist Esther Perel describes like this: “today we must give to one person what a whole village used to provide – financial and emotional support, companionship, entertainment, friendship, familiarity, mystery, love, sex, the works.”
No wonder many “find the chains of marriage so heavy that it takes two to carry them,” said Alexandre Dumas poet once mused, “three times”.
And it’s no wonder that apps that offer alternatives are all over the place on smartphones. Consider Feeld, an app designed to serve those who are open to experiencing people and relationships in new ways. As the darkly seductive website puts it: “Polyamy, consensual non-monogamy, homosexuality and polygyny, pansexuality, asexuality, voyeurism, voyeurism and kink are some of the sexual identities and desires in the Feelings community.”
Feeld has at least 20 other classification options, including GrayA for asexual, and sexual objectivity, for those who have sexual or romantic feelings towards inanimate objects. Before you titter, didn’t Tracey Emin marry a rock?
The days of “incubate, match and launch” are behind us and we must move with the times. As Sophie Laybourne says, “It’s fine for a woman to have a penis surgically attached to her crotch, but the institution of marriage itself has not been reassessed – when will it wake up?”
Well, that is the question. One of many I hope we will respond.
Welcome, then, to the new column to go to for all your sex and relationship questions. We will go, you and I, into the thick of the unborn. I am totally here for this.
As a hardened hack and the author of four novels (one of which won the Bad Sex prize), I’ve been around the block and feel on relatively safe ground as a sounding board for most issues. These are my starting points: there is no such thing as a stupid or embarrassing question. If you want to ask for something, other people have a chance. There are only embarrassing answers.
But for more questions, granular and detailed on sex, I will deploy Sophie, whose expertise and wisdom have no limits. With her in our hands as resident sexist in this brave new world, this will always be a safe space. And, in my opinion, an important, necessary and timely one.
All questions answered. Don’t be shy. After all, you can always say you want a friend.
