Let's Talk About Sex, Baby ... And Seventeenth Century Theatre

Yes! My totally grabby scandalous title brought you in! Read on, friends as I share my tipsily written, soberly edited thoughts on a seventeenth century spy, tinder and feminism. 

I recently watched the dress run of The Rover, probably the sexiest show currently on at the RSC. (If you don’t think that’s much of a statement, go check out Lucifer in a white catsuit, red lipstick and stilettos in Doctor Faustus at the Barbican, then come back to me. Elizabethan theatre is RAUNCHY.) 

It was very enjoyable. Aphra Behn, who wrote it, was one of the UK’s first professional female playwrights, when she wasn’t being a spy. She’s kind of like a seventeenth century John le Carre, except she wrote about far more universal and exciting things than international espionage: sex and travel, mostly. The play’s about three wealthy sisters who escape their brother’s restrictive watch to experience some fun and romance before facing the highly unromantic futures that have been laid out for them, which involve being shipped off to convents or into unwanted marriages. They disguise themselves as gypsies and join carnival season for one night of freedom, where they become entangled with three English travellers, who find the carnival equally new, exciting and foreign. 

The Rover © RSC

The whole play stinks of patriarchy, like most things from 1677 do. Amid the party atmosphere of the carnival, there are seriously solemn moments: one of the sisters has to not just forgive but pretty much laugh off two men who attempted to rape her (on separate occasions! in one day! And one of them goes on to marry her sister!), and the sisters all have to do exactly what their brother and father tell them. 

While that’s all important though, what I really want to convey here is how SEXY the show is. There’s sexy men, and sexy women, and sexy men having sex with sexy women, and sexy women having sex with sexy men, and sexy women having sex with unsexy men and skirts fly off and hands wander and everyone is just so excited to SEE EACHOTHER. It’s lovely! 

The Rover © RSC

As I sat and watched the scandal unfold, it felt terribly unfair to me that nearly 350 years later, such electric, excitable sexual adventure still feels like such a distant and fantastical notion. There’s something desperately numbing about watching people dance and kiss and argue and get so intensely entangled in each other, in a story that only takes place over 24 hours or so, and then go home and turn to the 21st century’s equivalent matchmaking tool - not carnival, but tinder. Masks and music and dance have given way to swiping through photos and forcing conversation with boring strangers on an app. 

HOW CAN THIS HAVE HAPPENED? We’ve had lots of progress since 1677. Microwaves and shorts for women, to name but two examples. It is very much a good thing that I am not forced to marry anyone I don’t want to. This play makes it abundantly obvious that women in the seventeenth century found it just as unsavoury a prospect as we do today. It is good that women can now report rape as a crime, and men are punished - occasionally. AREN’T WE LUCKY. But all these marks of progress come with serious caveats. I may not have to marry anyone I don’t want to, but that’s not the case for many women and girls in the world. We might be able to report rape as a crime, but women still have to laugh off rape ‘jokes’ in many situations.  

Rather than joining a carnival and dancing round in masks, meeting people, taking in smells and sights and sounds and feeling physical attraction, we join Tinder or Grindr or Happn, and virtually bat off weirdos and consign ourselves to random onslaughts of dickpics. Technology has somehow allowed us to do away with physical connection, but keep the abuse and objectification. How can we have let this happen as a society? We’ve kept the sexual oppression, and LOST THE ACTUAL SEX?!?! 

© Vice

I don’t think I’m being over dramatic here. A study released last month showed that millenials (specifically young people aged 20-24), have less actual, in person, kissy touchy sex than previous generations. And I can believe it. I mean, how do you even connect with people these days? We don’t go outside! Even if we did, what would we do? Technology has splintered the media so much that there’s very little that EVERYONE connects over any more.There’s nowhere that EVERYONE IS. They’re not at carnivals, or speakeasies, or punk gigs or raves. They’re on the internet. (And while you CAN have sex over the internet, I’m going to stick my neck out here and say it’s not as fun.) And yet these extra miles and messages and apps between us all haven’t kept us any safer. Young women have a 30% chance of being sexually assaulted on university campuses. We’ve kept the dark, oppressive demons of centuries past and cast off the fun side. 

Watching this 1677 play in 2016, the poignant, relatable aspects are the violence, sinister control and revenge many of the men seek to affect on the women, while the lively sexual banter feels ludicrous and dated. IT SHOULD BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND. The crazily overt sexism should feel distant and antiquated, and the SEX, the CONNECTION and the CARNIVAL, should feel universal.

The Rover © RSC

The Literary Review Just Got Exciting!

Well, it actually has been for the past 20 years, I just didn’t know. 



As a student of English literature, I’m no stranger to the Literary Review. It’s a place I regularly find myself trawling through, looking to impress my tutors with up to date criticism. I hope they might be duped into thinking that my fantastically relevant reference articles are pieces I merely happened across while eagerly flicking through my monthly subscription, rather than the product of a few haphazard taps of my keyboard (I don’t even have to type it all out any more - my igoogle page remembers my frequent and frantic search on the eve of every deadline).

But oh, how I have missed out in only giving this magazine the minutest fraction of my attention! I have been so dismissive and unappreciative. Blinkered by my narrow search criteria, driven solely by my quest for a precise result. And consequentially I have denied myself the world of pleasures available to those aware of all that this esteemed and valuable publication has to offer.

Did you know they do a BAD SEX AWARDS!?!


That’s the problem with us students. We’re only after one thing. Once we have our references we just toss the magazine aside, not taking the time to discover all its other beautiful aspects. Philistines.

It saddens me when I think about all the years of my life I’ve spent, unaware of the amazing invention that is The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award. I feel similar to how I imagine the second dude to leave Plato’s cave felt. After continuing to resolutely face the cave wall, calling the first guy who climbed out a wally, telling him to stop talking nonsense, only using him to bring back that outside-chicken he got that somehow tasted so much better than shadow-chicken, I’ve finally seen the light. And I now know that I was the real wally. I’m newly enlightened, and embarrassed that I wasted so much time in the dark eating ghost meat.

Every year the Review holds a lush ceremony in London, where one deserving author (if they are brave enough to attend) is presented with a statuette of a naked woman splayed out across the pages of a book, and the title of ‘author of the worst description of a sex scene in a novel’. The award excludes erotic and pornographic fiction (so not a whiff of Christian Grey anywhere near this year’s shortlist). What they are looking for is ‘bad sex in good books’ (so again, Christian Grey nowhere in sight). The magazine’s website explains that the award is designed to draw attention to ‘crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description’, a common crime in contemporary novels, according this entertaining and informative video.

The Review are seeking in their own way to improve the standard of modern fictional sexy encounters by highlighting authors’ awkward metaphors and evasive similes; hopefully discouraging such badly written inclusions in future. The founder of the award, former editor of the Literary Review Auberon Waugh, started it due to his belief that publishers encouraged the inclusion of sexual content to boost novels’ sales.

On a serious note, this is an awesome cause: eliminating poor obligatory sexual content, and working towards making sure modern novels retain a beautiful literary standard. I don’t want sex scenes to become shoddy laboured requisites in every novel, be they crime, historical, or that Alan Bennett one about books and the Queen. I don’t want to become desensitised to the danger and excitement of a good sex scene by recurring dodgy content. I really like that there’s a (sort of) quality control working to stop rubbish sex scenes being brushed over by editors and publishers, due, I can only assume, to some sort of universal sub-conscious recognition that sex is always crude, and therefore can be crudely described, even in a really good book. Sex can’t just be prudishly accepted by authors and critics as resident in the land of awkward, embarrassed euphemism and unhelpful metaphor, not requiring the same powerful, expressive language one would use for describing deep seated emotion or a picturesque landscape.

On a less serious note, it’s also REALLY REALLY FUNNY. My favourite example is from 2010 winner, Rowan Somerville’s The Shape of Her:

'Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her' 

Is it just me who found that more reminiscent of Silence of the Lambs than of anything remotely sexual?

This award is without a doubt my best discovery of 2012. It’s light-hearted, entertaining, and is simultaneously allowing us to laugh out loud at awkward and far-fetched descriptions of sex, while keeping sacred our ability to have a little naughty giggle at the good stuff too.

Here’s some extracts from this year’s shortlist (hee hee hee!) I don’t know about you girls, but no part of my body is a bakewell pudding, or a light-sensitive manual camera. And jockeys don’t (to my knowledge) go inside saddles (pelvic or otherwise). And my Lady Jane is definitely nothing like a chrysanthemum (though I will admit my plant knowledge is pretty shaky, and I had to do a quick google image search just to check). Enjoy! 

The Quiddity of Will Self, Sam Mills

'Down, down, on to the eschatological bed. Pages chafed me; my blood wept onto them. My cheek nestled against the scratch of paper. My cock was barely a ghost, but I did not suffer panic' 

Noughties, Ben Masters

'We got up from the chair and she led me to her elfin grot, getting amongst the pillows and cool sheets. We trawled each other's bodies for every inch of history'

Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe

'Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle's own lips and maw — all this without a word' 

Rare Earth, Paul Mason

'He began thrusting wildly in the general direction of her chrysanthemum, but missing — his paunchy frame shuddering with the effort of remaining rigid and upside down'

The Yips, Nicola Barker

'She smells of almonds, like a plump Bakewell pudding; and he is the spoon, the whipped cream, the helpless dollop of warm custard'

Infrared, Nancy Huston

'This is when I take my picture, from deep inside the loving. The Canon is part of my body. I myself am the ultrasensitive film — capturing invisible reality, capturing heat' 

The Divine Comedy, Craig Raine

'And he came. Like a wubbering springboard. His ejaculate jumped the length of her arm. Eight diminishing gouts. The first too high for her to lick. Right on the shoulder'

The Adventuress: The Irresistible Rise of Miss Cath Fox, Nicholas Coleridge

'In seconds the duke had lowered his trousers and boxers and positioned himself across a leather steamer trunk, emblazoned with the royal arms of Hohenzollern Castle. 'Give me no quarter,' he commanded. 'Lay it on with all your might.' 

So there you go. You may have learnt nothing new about sex, but I personally was not previously familiar with the word ‘wubbering'. The winner will be announced on the 4th of December!