Vanessa wonders if women are kinkier than men
Beginning a new column for any magazine is like being the new kid at school. I’m going to be spending the next year+ with you, and I have a poor track record with first impressions; I was ugly, awkward and dorky at school, which put me at a considerable disadvantage. I made a study of the popular girls and, if I’d known then what I know now, and if my (very chic) mum had allowed me to wear shell suits (it was the 80s; flammable was hot in more ways than one) like all the other kids, I would have used sex as my weapon of choice to woo you. Which is exactly what I’m going to do now. Unwise? Maybe. Cheap? Probably. Popular? Always.
What’s interesting about sex in these cyber-days that have spoilt our palettes and seen us so over-exposed? Well, this is a family place, so I’m going to keep it fairly clean, but unless you’ve spent all summer in a very snooty bookshop you’ll know it’s S&M. M&S-style. Bondage is the new black. Everyone’s spanking everyone else. You’ve all been reading that book. I’m a literary snob of the very worst kind so I haven’t read it, and am quite prepared to trash it without ever putting myself through the (wrong kind of) torture of doing so. I’ve taken the measure of it from friends and reviews, and if kinky were a drink then this is Robinsons Fruit & Barley. (Can I get a Scotch with that?) How do I know? Well, I happen to work with one of the top ten erotic boutiques in the entire world, right here in Brighton – She Said. I know something about sex.
Whilst I may not look kindly on the literary quality of 50 Shades of Wouldn’t Know Kinky If It Sat On Your Face To The Point Of Asphyxiation, much preferring a 20th century classic like The Story of O or The Delta of Venus for my bedtime reading, this multi-toned pulp-back has shone a blinding beam of light onto female sexuality, and I feel vindicated. I’ve been saying for years that women are kinkier than men. Everyone disagrees with me, yet every woman on the beach this summer proved it. You’re all thinking I’m wrong. I know, men are filthy. But it’s an obvious kind of filth. It’s a caricature of every porn film they’ve ever seen, drawn into a cartoon of Jessica Rabbit (who, incidentally, I’ve just discovered is not in fact a rabbit, but a human. Ok, bestiality’s pretty taboo, I’ll give the boys that one).
Thousands of years of slavery have left female sexuality brutalised, and when repression and trauma meet sudden and extreme emancipation, kink is born. I’m certain Freud would agree. *Holds up Exhibit A – Catholics and Jews.* (I can say that, because I’m half of each, and generations-worth of the socio-economic imprint is firmly flagellated onto my derrière in all its neurotic, narcissistic, nihilistic splendour. Just ask my Priest/Rabbi/therapist/acupuncturist/healer/psychic/mother.)
“If kinky were a drink then this is Robinsons Fruit & Barley”
So, essentially we’re talking Stockholm syndrome. That makes psychological sense to me. Women’s sexuality can be pretty twisted, but they might not often own it, for legitimate fear of having it abused, misunderstood, ridiculed or rejected. You’d be surprised how many men don’t actually know what to do with their kinky fantasies when they’re bound and gagged before them.
Erotic literature has a strong link with women. For the longest time everyone thought it was just men that were into it, until they discovered that actually it really does it for the less visually stimulated sex. Well, Sappho could have told us that several thousand years ago. Today, while men surf the internet looking for GiganticJugs.com, women are reading erotica. This is why, while I can’t read The Book for fear of doing someone the wrong kind of injury, I do have a warped yet profound respect for its author. Although the author and anti-heroin have wildly misrepresented true submission and could never be called feminists (which many submissives are), they have unwittingly made a contribution to phase two of the feminist revolution, which I like to call ‘Femininism’.
Women are beginning to own, heal and understand the feminine, in all its darker and lighter shades, away from the brash male projection of it they are beginning to question their more unusual impulses and ask, “What turns me on?” and more importantly, “Why does it turn me on?”. In her famous essay on women’s writing, The Laugh of the Medusa, French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous says: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies … Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.”
I risk making myself unpopular by saying that as a woman writer, I want to write like a man. I have a severe case of paper-penis envy. I think, with a few notable exceptions such as Jeanette Winterson, Joan Didion and occasionally Virginia Woolf, men have, on the whole, been better at it so far. And that’s to be expected; they’ve been allowed to practise. But just look at what women have achieved in the comparatively short 70-odd years since our emancipation in the west. Yes, we’re playing catch-up, but by God we’re fast. E.L. James is at least trying to write as a woman, not, like I do, as a man, and for that she has my respect. She is making formative contributions to phase two of the feminist revolution, and I take my lesson
from her.
A little homework for you to think about: Is kinky still kinky if everyone’s doing it? Or is it in fact the clandestine, dimly-lit shame that we find
so seductive?
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