PERSONAL COLUMN

The pornographer's dilemma

JOHN ROWAN WILSON

'She took me by surprise. While I was trying to unhook her bra she pressed herself against me and thrust her tongue between my teeth. I felt her hand on my zipper. She grabbed me ...'

I closed the book. I was supposed to be having lunch with the author and I was doing him the usual courtesy of skimming quickly through his last work before meeting him. Later, as we were drinking in the bar, I asked him how things were going. Not so good, he said gloomily. A film deal had fallen through and one of the kids was hav- ing trouble with her '0' levels. To crown it all, his back was acting up again. It was always the same in wet weather.

I sympathised with him. I knew there was a deeper cause for his anxiety. The fact is that, contrary to popular belief, life is not all roses these days for the writer of sexy novels. Relaxation of standards has created as many problems as it has solved. We are in a period of galloping inflation, indecency-wise. The market is high, but it is flooded with com- petition. At such times of cultural confusion, it is the conscientious professional who suffers.

The principal difficulty is to strike a balance between rapid changes in fashion and the hard facts of book production. A book takes about a year to write and another nine months to publish in hardback. Then there is another two years before it hits the bookstalls in paperback form, with the inevitable naked girl on the cover. In a statelier age, this kind of delay didn't matter too much. Nowadays, you can be as daring as you like, but by the time it gets to the boys with the belted raincoats it reads like Little Women.

This adds an additional complication to what is already a highly skilled job. Writing salacious literature is not something that anyone can do; it is a craft calling for some degree in specialisation. It can be handled in four main ways, which may be roughly categorised as lyrical, physiological, obscurantist, and dynamic. The lyrical ap- proach, often referred to in the business as 'Milky White Thighs', is, of course, age-old, but received its greatest impetus in this cen- tury from the works of D. H. Lawrence. It demands a mood of breathless romanticism.

It has lost some of its popularity in these down-to-earth times, but a practised performer can still get a good deal of mileage out of hot loins, rosy nipples, and dark triangles of mystery. In its general approach It is not too unlike the romantic fiction which %till commands such a solid market in the women's magazines. The diflerence is that it is the pubic hair that the daisies are lightly *oven into.

The physiological and obscurantist groups can be dismissed fairly briefly, since they are for a restricted, though faithful, audience. 'he first of these two categories is written by women with an unhealthy interest in reproductive physiology; here pregnancy and menstruation loom large, There is much description of the details of childbirth; a little moaning and sweating and clutching at bedposts never comes amiss. Recent ad- vances in anaesthetic technique have cut down the field a little here, but it has been extended in other. directions. The moaning and sweating has now been transferred from the moment of delivery to the moment of conception. - As for the other or 'Guess What?' ap- proach, it is so infuriating that I hesitate to mention it at all. 'We did it in every imaginable position, even including two not mentioned in Minimus Borgstern's ex- haustive treatise on the subject.' This, quite apart from creating unnecessary work for the librarian of the Special Books Section at the British Museum, comes perilously close to being a fraud on the reader. Most serious pornographers regard it as disreputable, if not actually unethical.

But by far the most popular method at the present time is the dynamic, or grabbing and zipping, approach. It is not only lively and realistic, but also contains an element of violence which is not unwelcome to readers. My own luncheon companion was a grabber and zipper in good standing, having started as a member of the Torn Nightie School in the early nineteen-fifties. As some older readers will remember, the tearing off of underclothes, used as an index of passionate urgency, was very popular in those days. It was the general use of nylon that knocked the bottom out of it. An attempt to tear a modern nightdress is apt to result in a nasty laceration. As for getting past a pair of nylon tights, it is like trying to push one's way through one of those giant cobwebs that en- tangle the unwary traveller in the Congo basin. Never has the seducer been so depen- dent on his victim's cooperation as today.

This is perhaps a contributory factor in the shift which has taken place in fictional love scenes in the unclean 'sixties. While the desire to get to grips has if anything in- creased, the logistics of the situation have changed out of recognition. Advances are halted not so much by enemy resistance as by difficulties of terrain. Under the apparent invitation of the mini-skirt, the girl is pro- tected by impregnable defences which can be breached by nothing short of a blowtorch on his part or the skill of a contortionist on hers. The man, by contrast, is absolutely wide open to assault. Now it is the girls who have to do the grabbing and zipping.

All these complex technical details need to be taken into consideration by a con- scientious author bent on realistic exposition of the sexual act. But, as everyone knows, creative writing requires a basis of first hand experience—it cannot rest entirely on hearsay. And this confronts the author with a problem which is becoming increasingly difficult of solution.

How much time and emotional energy should he be asked to spend on what might be called direct field research? Does he, in other words, have to keep on taking the oc- casional dip into the sexual whirlpool every five years or so, just to keep himself up to date? Time was when an author could build up a stock of experience in his youth and

then slack off a bit, taking it easy and li‘" off his capital, as it were. But now his sex capital, like so much other capital, is be. rapidly devalued. Can he be sure it is s relevant? Have there been advances technique, or changes in fashion, of he is unaware? Who is doing what, and whom, and how are they doing it, ti permissive days?

One may say that it would be no gr. hardship to find out. If sex were a thing isolation, this would be true for most m But adultery is a time-consuming and t quently frustrating business. It demands gift for deception and considerable organi tional skill. It involves hotel registers, co' stories, and false pregnancy alarms. which most of us like to think of as a fat spontaneous activity, has to be plan ahead. And, let's face it, one isn't akays the mood. A man may find himself co mitted to turning out on a wet night when feels he has a cold coming on or is in middle of an interesting rubber of brid What is worse, the woman's aims in e barking on the affair are necessarily variance with his own. There are wo around who engage in sex on an e perimental basis, but most of them a psychologically unstable and are avoided. It is certainly true that girls are n prepared to do their -share of the grabbi and zipping; when it comes to behavn women are docile, conventional creatu and will follow the accepted mores of t time. If this involves stripping off in pub or making something approaching a phys assault on the man of their fancy, they happy to oblige. So long as the others a doing it, it is all right with them.

But this does not in any sense imply they have taken up a masculine attitude the sexual act. They still expect a number concessions which men are apt to regard an irrelevant waste of time. They like at le a facade of emotional involvement; s affectionate small talk, a dinner candlelight beforehand and a somol solemn discussion afterwards on the na of love. Do not be deluded by the fact the beautiful girl you met at a party is m readier to go to bed with you than she was few years ago. You will find that the dee springs of her woman's nature rem unchanged. She still wants to talk your off about her wonderful holiday in Zer But an even more harassing quest! arises. Is normal • straightforward enough? An increasingly sophistica public is no longer impressed by a jou up the same well-worn paths; it dem variations. Here the quest for personal perience may put strains upon the :tu that he is ill-equipped to bear. If he is not nature either bisexual or exhibitionist. and reluctant to get involved with the poi there are a limited number of options to him. What shall he do? Shall he try to lect a party for an orgy, or organise a tic for a Black Mass?

We have, in fact, reached the point w it is becoming - difficult to pursue honourable profession without risk serious damage to health or self-re Inflation has brought to the pornograp only the illusion of prosperity; behind rows of titillating paperbacks sits a group chain-smoking neurotics, gloomily has their Remingtons and trying to guess will sound really dirty in 1973. In the terests of this small but deserving bodY men, I call upon the Government to legi immediately for the strengthening of lite censorship.