Between The Sheets

I have always been a dangerously curious reader. As a child, I was thirsty for knowledge and had an insatiable appetite for books. If there was a book in the house, sooner or later I was going to find it and read it, which is how, far too young, I discovered Mum’s extremely 1970s copy of The Joy of Sex. Let’s just say I was a fast reader, and my Barbie games were never quite so innocent again.

Looking back as an adult, though, I have complicated feelings about children encountering sexual material before they are ready for it. A few years later, some neighbourhood kids and I built a fort in the bushes behind our suburban houses, backing onto the highway. It was our little world. One day we arrived to discover somebody had strewn torn pages from a pornographic magazine around our camp. At the time it was mysterious, forbidden and confusing. Now? I hate that somebody brought adult sexuality into that innocent little place. It is strange how those early encounters can lodge themselves in the memory, provoking curiosity long before we possess the emotional vocabulary to understand what we have seen.

And curiosity, for me, became a lifelong fascination with pleasure.

By my early teens I was in an enormous hurry to grow up. I wasn't desperate to lose my virginity because I thought sex would make somebody love me, or because I felt worthless without someone else's attention. My motivation was simultaneously much simpler and much more complicated: I liked pleasure. As I grew older and began talking honestly with other women, I realised something that genuinely surprised me: many women had reached adulthood without ever developing that same sense of ownership over their own pleasure. Mine had always felt like it belonged to me. I could share it with somebody, certainly, but it wasn't something another person bestowed upon me. That distinction still feels important.

I identified as bisexual almost as soon as I discovered there was a word for it, and later pansexual felt closer to describing my experience. I've found beauty and sensuality in an extraordinary variety of people and bodies. Despite the romantic cliché, I don't think attraction necessarily means not seeing the body and only seeing the soul. Quite the opposite. Bodies are fascinating. It's the tiny details: a freckle, a crease, the soft fuzz along somebody's neck, the peculiar geography of a body that belongs to nobody else. Bodies have folds and scars and mounds and lines like maps. Go and find one of those places on yourself. I guarantee you've got one. Love that bit too. IYKYK.

There have also been periods of my life when sensuality felt enormously powerful. Pregnancy, unexpectedly, was one of them. I had never felt so physically embodied. I even experienced orgasm during labour — something I certainly hadn't anticipated — and discovered firsthand just how extraordinary the relationship between pleasure, pain, hormones and the human body can be.

Then, in my early thirties, another kind of curiosity arrived. I wanted to experiment. I missed the company of women. I wanted to explore my own gender fluidity. I became interested in BDSM and polyamory, and after an adult lifetime of reading erotic literature — some of the books in our new Between the Sheets collection *may or may not once have belonged to me* — I suppose I wanted to find out what happened when fantasy stepped off the page.

So I sampled quite a few things from the buffet, and here's the bit that doesn't always fit neatly into our modern conversations about sexual liberation: I didn't particularly like all of it. Not because I've become prudish, not because I think everybody else should make the same choices I have, and certainly not because I think pleasure has an expiry date. I simply discovered that some things which were exciting intellectually or erotically weren't particularly good for me psychologically.

Polyamory taught me an enormous amount about communication, jealousy, attachment, boundaries and ethics. It also taught me that navigating multiple intimate relationships when everybody's values don't quite align can feel like negotiating an international peace treaty while everybody involved is naked. Most of us barely have time for one partner's bullshit, let's be honest.

Some of my experiences also made me examine assumptions about myself that I had previously regarded as evidence of how open-minded I was. In exploring my attraction to people across the gender spectrum, for example, I eventually had to ask myself an uncomfortable question: was I always celebrating another person's identity, or had my curiosity occasionally slipped into treating somebody else's identity as something exciting for MY exploration? It was an important distinction to recognise. People aren't experiences for us to collect.

Likewise, I had always fancied myself something of a dominant — until an entirely non-erotic encounter involving being crash-tackled and handcuffed by an actual police officer changed my relationship with restraint rather dramatically. That's a story for another day. Suffice to say, some fantasies survive contact with reality. Others absolutely do not.

I've sampled a respectable portion of the lovemaking buffet, and these days I'm remarkably happy with a home-cooked meal with the same person every night. I don't see that as a failure of experimentation. Perhaps that's partly what experimentation is for: discovering what you actually want.

Which brings me back to books. Recently, a customer came to the counter and announced, “I couldn't find the book on Taoism I wanted, so I'm getting this instead,” and triumphantly held up the Marquis de Sade. Quite the pivot.

Having read de Sade myself — and having recently donated my own collected works to the shop — I felt almost compelled to issue a warning. And understand something: I am not easily scandalised. There is erotic literature that is playful, ridiculous, transgressive, kinky, romantic, queer, fantastical, outrageous and gloriously filthy. Then there is literature that deliberately takes you somewhere much darker.

My experience of de Sade was not "ooh, how naughty". It was closer to staring into an abyss. His work relentlessly pushes beyond ordinary sexual transgression into cruelty, degradation and the destruction of human dignity. I found it only mildly fascinating historically and philosophically, but distinctly and profoundly disturbing as a reader. Ironically, writing that attempts to obliterate every moral boundary can make you think very seriously about why boundaries matter. Sometimes you go so far into the darkness that you find yourself looking rather fondly back towards the light.

Personally, I'll take Penny Birch and her wonderfully naughty Puppy, Pony and Piggy girls. And, entirely coincidentally of course, there happens to be a fabulous Penny Birch selection in the Between the Sheets collection. Fancy that.

Perhaps this is why I don't think erotic literature should be dismissed as pornography, or celebrated automatically as liberation. Erotica can be funny. It can be beautiful. It can give language to desires people thought belonged only to them. It can allow us to explore fantasies safely in our imagination. It can help people discover their sexuality, question assumptions, laugh at themselves, feel less alone, or simply enjoy being deliciously entertained. But sexual curiosity isn't automatically wisdom, nor is transgression automatically enlightenment.

I've come to believe that genuine sexual freedom includes the freedom to experiment - and the freedom to decide you've had enough. To alter your boundaries as you learn about yourself. To rediscover an old fantasy that hits or discovering that something you once wanted no longer serves you. There is no medal for being the most sexually adventurous person in the room, and there ain't be one for being the least adventurous either.

Pleasure belongs to you. So do your boundaries.

Read widely. Fantasise extravagantly. Laugh. Explore. Be curious. Know yourself. Change your mind. And whenever another human being enters the equation, remember that they are never merely a character in your fantasy. They arrive with their own desires, boundaries, dignity and sovereignty.

Play safely. Respect consent. Treat each other kindly. And whatever you choose to do between the sheets, may it be something that leaves everybody involved feeling more deliciously human — not less.

Explore our new Between the Sheets collection at Pulp Fiction — erotic fiction, sexual history, queer writing, literary transgression and plenty of gloriously naughty books for the curious reader.

DISCLAIMER: Some titles are decidedly more adventurous than others. Consider yourself warned. We are not here to condone or condemn.