Pornography ain't what it used to be

Byron Rogers

THE EROTIC REVIEW BEDSIDE COMPANION edited by Rowan Pelling Headline, £10, pp. 222 READERS' WIVES SPECIAL NO 28 edited by Ross Gilfillan Fiesta, £2.95 Pornography, or erotica as it is known to the naughtily genteel, should be as honest as that other handbook, a car manual. Professor Lionel Trilling made out an elaborate case for it, arguing that if the expansion of the reader's consciousness was one of the aims of literature, stimulating his finer feelings, his curiosity, his taste, then pornography must surely qualify. If so, this would represent a considerable advance in literary criticism, giving it for the first time an objective scientific base. For, whatever its side effects, pornography has one function, and one function only, which is measurable.

The only way to review these two publications would be to read them under laboratory conditions, wired up to one of those ingenious electrical machines commissioned by Dr William Masters and Mrs Virginia Johnson, authors of Human Sexual Response, at the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St Louis. Anything else is humbug. What follows, written far from St Louis, is humbug.

You knew where you were with pornography once. It was forbidden, and sat in locked cabinets in the British Library, in one of which, next to a three-volume, much illustrated treatise on penile fashions in New Guinea, I came on the A,4 Book of the Road. This. I was told, was because such books stood the greatest chance of being stolen. But pornography is everywhere now. Magazines line the top shelves of newsagents' shops, which is surely an infringement on the civil rights of anyone under six feet in height. In the cabinets of motorway service stations its paperbacks are a genre of their own, And on the coast of Europe, massed like the Wehrmacht and the Grande Armee, is the hard-core stuff, an odd little footnote to the frustrated freetrade aspirations of the European Union.

As Adolf Hitler reminded German midwives at the Sportpalast in 1940, In England they are filled with curiosity and keep asking, "Why doesn't he come?" Be calm. Be calm. He is coming. He is coming.' And hard-core pornography will.

Pubic hair arrived in the early 1970s, according to a former editor of Fiesta, writing wistfully about air-brushes in Readers' Wives Special No 28. Erections came in 1999. Two years ago they would have landed a magazine editor in the magistrates' court, but now seem to have been around forever with monthly magazine series entitled That's My Boner, with readers like Danny of Luton and Richard of Harlow submitting their competing polaroids. Was this the result of some law passed in secret by New Labour, or did Lord Chancellor Irving circulate a quiet directive? We may know one day.

With such huge forces gathering, there is something wistful and brave about the Erotic Review, launched in 1997, as though someone had opened an amphitheatre in London in 410, say, just before the roof fell in on Roman Britain. It is an old-style erotic magazine like the Pearl and the Yellow Book, its learned contributors using words like membtum virile and peego and fesses, just like Aubrey Beardsley and the boys, words unknown to my computer which has drawn red interrogatory lines under them. 0 my peegos and my fesses long ago.

Stephen Bayley introduces a friend, in advertising of course, whose 'idea of absolute transcendent bliss is to watch the rugby on the telly, while enjoying his wife a posteriori and eating egg and chips off her back'. He confides that he himself would prefer 'a little char-grilled quail breast and celeriac remoulade'. There's words, as a barmaid told the young Dylan Thomas.

The trouble is, they do nothing for eroticism. It is when someone tells you, as a girl once did, 'I can't stand blokes holding a conversation with my bum,' that you recognise the accents of experience, just as an aside about the practical difficulties of digging egg and chips out of the fitted seagrass would have been.

But then so much of the Erotic Review seems to be by well brought up boys and girls writing under exam conditions, all of them desperately trying to be erotic and at the same time to distance themselves. For such stuff to work, they have to believe in what they are about.

Occasionally they do, and you wish they hadn't, as when the old master Simon Raven describes a teenage boy being treat

ed on his birthday to ascending degrees of sexual intimacy by his mother.

But for the most part the minds of the contributors appear to be on other things, which may be the editor's fault. In her foreword Rowan Pelting writes, 'I hope it makes you laugh until you come,' which is surely physiologically unsound, these being two separate reactions, each of which would tend to preclude the other, as Stephen Bayley might say.

No chance of that with Reader's Wives Special No 28, a much more serious work, and of great interest to decorators and designers for the insights into contemporary taste offered by the soft furnishings and the colour combinations against which the naked Wives pose. Some day a seminal work on British interiors of the late 20th

century may be based on these snaps. In the letters pages, there are many confessions, one reader, Chris of South Wales (like mediaeval men, they are without surnames), admitting to having seen his wife with strangers 'going flat out through the most intimate procedures', to quote Stephen Bayley again. Mr Bayley is against such activity, finding it 'murderously repellent', Chris is all for it, and has papered a wall with photographs. He writes wistfully, 'I wonder whether any of the television programmes on home improvement will ever feature our ideas.' He fears not.

His letter ends on a note of cosmic anguish, as he broods in South Wales, 'I wonder whether we are unique.That is the difference between these two books. Chris means it.