Is all this sexual openness actually taking us in positive directions? Photo / Getty Images
Nicole Kidman might disagree but, in an age of online porn and Bonnie Blue’s infamous stunts, we’d be better off with a little more mystique.
I was having a drink with a group of 50-something women the other day and one asked the group what they considered to be taboo nowadays. We swiftly compiled a shortlist that included: revealing your salary, fancying your son’s friends, becoming a Scientologist, telling a liberal you admire JD Vance, going to a party when you know you have Covid, disliking dogs and not having your children vaccinated.
Fascinatingly, not one of us mentioned sex.
And yet Nicole Kidman, who has gave her first interview since splitting from Keith Urban – to Vogue – said with the conviction only a Hollywood superstar can muster: “Sex is an important part of our lives and is still, a lot of times, taboo.”
But in the age of online porn is anything sex-related really and truly verboten? Okay, the illegal stuff is – thank God – still out-of-bounds for dinner party chat, though it feels like it’s just a matter of time before someone confesses to romancing their llama and being petsexual.
In the past year I have broken bread in friends’ houses and heard guests variously describe their experiences of Viagra, a Killing Kittens sex party (what we once called “swinging”) and visiting a dominatrix. The newly-divorced men on Hinge are the worst, like kidults who reached the top of The Magic Faraway Tree and found themselves in the Land of Playboy. I can now tell you that if there’s anything that feels longer than a tantric sex session it’s hearing a man the same age as Sting describe it over dessert.
In fact, I often feel Generation X – the demographic both Kidman and I belong to – do little but jabber on about our erotic thoughts and exploits. Long gone are the days of A-list blondes, like Grace Kelly, keeping their desires hidden behind dark glasses.
Gwyneth Paltrow is arguably better-known nowadays for marketing kooky sex accessories than acting. Her wellness website Goop is known for selling jade yoni eggs, a candle labelled, “This smells like my vagina”, and promoting a practice that involves steaming your lady garden.
Even super-cool Gillian Anderson, who once entranced The X Files’ vast fanbase with a geeky froideur that evoked suppressed passion, is now a 21st-century Nancy Friday, after soliciting women’s erotic fantasies and compiling them into a bestselling book, Want.
I’m not sure all this sexual openness is taking us in positive directions, however. For starters, it seems to be frightening our children into celibacy, with Gen Z the least libidinous set of young people since Natsal (the National Survey for Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles) began recording “sexual frequency” in 1990. It’s almost as if the torrent of porny gymnastics available to view online have proved daunting, rather than liberating.
When I was young it was okay to be a sexual amateur like everyone else, slowly improving your game through a lifetime’s practice. Now you’re supposed to have a degree in sexual theory before you even start kissing.
I spoke to my older son this week, who’s in his final year of university. He informed me that Bonnie Blue – infamous for allegedly sleeping with a thousand men in one session – was bringing her “Bang Bus” to his campus for a “meet and greet” on a tour of student cities (she’d already stopped off in Oxford and Cambridge).
He and his friends couldn’t think of a greater turn-off than this kind of sex stunt and yet all of them knew about it via social media. “Sex influencer” is now a profession, but the realm of true intimacy feels as mythical as Neverland.
In fact, whenever I talk to young people about their love lives (strictly out of professional interest, you understand) they express an intense aversion to porn and a longing for romance. Somehow they have been handed a vast sexual menu that doesn’t have the amuse-bouche of flirtation, let alone a starter course of courtship, but plunges them straight into fetish and multiple-orgasms. I barely raised an eyebrow at this week’s news that there’s now a “Kinkster Society” at Anglia Ruskin University.
The fact is when we fling away taboos, we also discard the exquisite frisson that comes from breaking rules and accessing forbidden pleasure. When I was editing the Erotic Review in the 1990s the magazine’s joie de vivre largely stemmed from the fact that everyone involved, including the readers, felt they were entering a realm of mild transgression.
One where risqué banter and delight in lovemaking over all other pastimes was permissible. For a while I modelled my editorial persona on the prim-looking bookseller in The Big Sleep, who looks uptight until she takes off her glasses and lets down her tresses, making Humphrey Bogart exhale “Hello!”
Thirty years on from that brief nirvana, we have all let down our hair and prised open our desires and nothing feels “naughty” any more. But what have we gained beside Bonnie’s Bang Bus, hook-up apps and the trend for “consensual non-monogamy”?
It’s notable that the world’s most iconic pin-up girl, Pamela Anderson, has moved in the opposite direction – she’s embraced her inner bookseller and been feted for it.
Perhaps it’s time we all buttoned up our blouses and regained a little mystique?