… so I wasn’t reading erotica. And I wasn’t hunting down once-banned books. But I was still pretty surprised at how hard actual orgasms are to come by in your average novel. Most authors seem to draw a tactful curtain over that particular aspect of existence. It reminds me of a letter I read in a newspaper once, from an old lady complaining about the explicitness of sex scenes in the movies nowadays. And she wasn’t being prudish. Things were way more saucy, she said, when the hero and the heroine shut the door on you and left it up to your imagination.
She had a point. I’m endlessly intrigued by the seen/unseen divide. The ways the hinted-at can be so much more erotic than the explicit. Maybe the Victorians were onto something with their floor-length skirts and oft-elevated necklines. In the absence of cleavage and acres of skin, apparently, the humble shoe achieved unprecedented erotic significance: the merest curve of an instep or glimpse of a shapely ankle was enough to make a Victorian gent cream his woollen drawers.
So in the spirit of the gently seductive, I’m widening my search. Expect metaphor, innuendo and plenty of drawn curtains. But in the meantime, here’s a little gem I stumbled across in the course of my summer reading -
“then he pulled his fingers very slowly down my face, lightly tracing from my jaw to my throat and then all the way down to my waist. My eyes rolled back into my head a little.” – Stephanie Meyer, New Moon
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