Ian McEwan’s new novel On Chesil Beach, which has reached No 2 in the
bestseller list this week, is about two sex-mad dwarfs — Floppy and Eno —
going on their honeymoon in cyberspace.
Of course it’s not: McEwan’s novel is actually the story of two adults —
Florence and Edward — who go to a genteel hotel overlooking Dorset’s Chesil
Beach on their honeymoon. But you can’t help feeling that a truly modern
novelist with his finger on the zeitgeist should be writing about Floppy and
Eno. For in an age where more than 4m Britons surf porn sites for an average
of 45 minutes a day you couldn’t get a less fashionable topic than the loss
of virginity. It’s so anachronistic as to be positively avant-garde.
But what makes Florence and Edward seem so odd, at least to the modern reader,
is that they are adult virgins. It’s Florence and Edward, not Floppy and
Eno, who are the odd couple now.
McEwan’s novel is set in 1962, right on the cusp between the old Britain of
stiff-upper-zips and the new swinging, let-it-all-hang-out Britain of the
Beatles and dolly birds. According to Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse is
about to be invented. But that’s of little use to Florence and Edward as
they face their first night of intimacy. He is eager, she is fearful, they
are lost.
Sex back then — or so it always seems when people who came of age in the 1940s
and 1950s talk about it — was the big bang that always ended in the small
whimper of discontent. Reading past accounts of the sex life of the British
nation one is bound to ask: did anyone in the UK between the years 1935 and
1962 ever wake up with a smile on their face?
I wonder what a couple like Florence and Edward would make of sex in
contemporary Britain. McEwan tells us that they “lived in a time when a
conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible”.
We live in a time when we never stop talking about our difficulties and our
desires. I suspect they would have welcomed the so-called liberation that
followed the “Beatles’ first LP”. But what about the liberation that
followed the liberation?
The conventional history of sex in the 20th century goes like this. Until the
1960s we all lived in the dark ages. Then along came the Beatles, the pill,
permissiveness and we entered a dawn of erotic enlightenment where fear —
thanks to the new openness and widespread dissemination of information — was
banished and people were free to enjoy sex. They called it the sexual
revolution.
As the 1960s slipped into the 1970s the sexual revolution took a strange and
unexpected turn: it lost interest in one of its founding precepts and that
was the idea that good, guilt-free sex would enable us to really love one
another. But instead of getting closer to each other the new freedom was
actually driving people further apart. In pursuit of pleasure and “exploring
new possibilities” — ie shagging everything in sight — sexual gratification
became an end in itself. Never had there been so much intercourse and so
little intimacy.
Then, around the mid1990s, we got what I believe social historians will come
to see as the sexual revolution part two. This one happened not between the
sheets but in cyberspace. Its development is tied up to the history of the
internet. As late as 1985 there were only 1,000 locations across the world
with internet capabilities. By 1989 you had only 100,000 people online.
Nobody knows for certain when porn sites first appeared on the internet but in
1994 a British parliamentary select committee reported on the “new horror”
of computer porn. Now we have about 4.2m pornographic websites, providing
420m pages of pornography and nobody bats an eye any more. I know numerous
educated, married middle-class men in their late thirties who regularly
consume internet porn at home without embarrassment and with their wives’
consent (yes, really).
This second sexual revolution made it possible for everyone to have immediate
access to a brave new and weird world of sexual life wherein could be found
erotic mutations that would have staggered the mind of the Marquis de Sade:
lactating women, bestiality, group sex, granny sex, sex-change sex — the
menu for your viewing pleasure was infinite.
With the exception of child sex, all was permissible. Mark Dery, author of
Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, described this new
world well: “There is no one so grotesquely Falstaffian, so hideously obese,
so weirdly disfigured or mal-formed that they can’t be the subject of
exploitation on the internet. It is a democracy of exploitation.”
This is exactly what the champions of this new pornocopia argue — that the
sexual material, imagery and opportunity that were once the preserve of a
rich, well connected elite are now open to all. The trouble is that anyone
who questions the benefits of this democratisation of decadence is
immediately branded as “another Mary Whitehouse” or a “fascist censor”, as I
know all too well. There is nobody as self-righteous and intolerant as a
sexual libertarian.
To such people I have said: look, the sexual revolution wasn’t about the
freedom to sit in your room in front of a screen, a passive, atomised
consumer enjoying an infinite variety of means to self-gratification. Don’t
you remember, back in the early 1970s we wanted something much more than
that. We wanted a better world through liberated people — “human
emancipation” is what people on the left called it — and look what we’ve
ended up with: the global wank.
Of course it’s absurd to suggest that the internet has become just a great
shopping mall of sexual depravity where the sick and sadistic roam free
hunting for bargains and preying on our children. It serves our need for
information, contact and often companionship. But it’s just that like
television we have hundreds of channels showing pretty much the same thing.
What is never explored on the net is that sex is about feelings as much as
mechanics and that it is part of the fabric of the rest of our lives.
So it was with great excitement that I found a sex site on the net that is a
sea of thoughtful, realistic, emotional reflection in the ocean of
cyber-rut-ting. It is called the Virginity Project and was set up by Kate
Monro who has spent the past year getting British people — of all ages,
races and sexual orientation — to talk about losing their virginity and then
putting their stories on her site. She also invites visitors to e-mail her
their stories and comment on what they have read.
It all began last year when Monro was sitting on a beach (unfortunately not
Chesil Beach) with a friend and they started talking about how they lost
their virginity: “It was then that I had a lightbulb moment. I realised that
everyone has a story to tell. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are
from, we all possess our virginity and at some point we all step over this
threshold into adult-hood.
“I wanted to know what it really feels like to be that close to another human
being for the very first time. What thoughts are pulsing through our minds
as we literally merge with another person? And what do we think when we look
back? How far have we travelled?”
Monro believes that she is providing a kind of therapeutic service. She tells
me: “We are very insecure when it comes to sex. I can’t tell you the number
of times I’ve interviewed people and they tell me things and then they look
at me and say, ‘Has anyone told you that before?’ People want to be
reassured that their experience is normal.” The first thing you notice about
these stories is that here are people talking about one of the most
important sexual moments in their lives, and there’s nothing sexual or
erotic about what they’re saying. Most of the contributors tend to discuss
the actual sex act in a few brief words — “It was pretty disappointing” or
“I didn’t see what all the fuss was about”.
What is different about these stories is that here sex is linked to feelings
and the rest of the fabric of people’s lives. They tell us about how sex
feels and what it means.
The Virginity Project is also a kind of Mass-Observation for the internet age
as it provides an interesting snap-shot of the changing sexual mores of
Britain over the past 50 years. Reading the stories of older contributors I
was struck by how so many of them could have stepped from the pages of
McEwan’s novel. Take the case of Sandra Jones (all names have been changed
by Monro), who was born in 1943 and lost her virginity in that fabled year
of 1963. She grew up in a Methodist community in rural Wales in the 1950s:
“It was a strange time to grow up because then nice girls simply did not do
it. If you did do it you were nasty.”
Sandra finally met a boy called Ian and even before they got married they
started having sex together. Her verdict? “It was a pretty disappointing
experience. Ian and I were so immature and unknowing about sex.”
For birth control the couple would use a solution of vinegar and water after
intercourse, which is hardly the most romantic way to finish an evening.
Soon Sandra contracted what was called honeymoon cystitis but was too afraid
to explain her condition to her doctor “because Ian and I weren’t married”.
She soon got pregnant, too.
Or take the case of Mary Stuart who was born in 1915 and lost her virginity in
1936: “I was frightened on my wedding night. I’d never seen anything so
funny. In spite of having two brothers I didn’t know what a man looked like.
My mother had never told me anything. On the first night, I might tell you,
I thought this is much ado about nothing, but then I got to like it.”
It’s an interesting flashback to a Britain of separate hotel rooms for
unmarried couples, “heavy petting” at dances, men who “tried it on”,
disapproving doctors and silent mums and dads. There is a kind of melancholy
to sex in those days and terrible sadness. “I was in love several times,
deeply in love. I was going to commit suicide when it ended,” says one
contributor.
Reading the younger contributors you realise that much has changed but some
things still remain the same — like the fear of the first time. Jim Mason,
born in 1988, lost his virginity at 15: “My first girlfriend was called
Sonia and I really liked her. We were together only a few months but she was
the first person that I really cared about. There was a circumstance with me
and Sonia when we were at her house and I could have lost my virginity. She
really wanted to. But I think I might have been a bit scared.”
There are moments when true love turns up in the most unlikely circumstances.
One contributor, who was a sex-mad teenage thalidomide victim, got punched
out by a communist lesbian with pink hair who was wearing Dr Martens boots
and a boiler suit: “It was literally, like, ‘wow!’ at first sight!”
Some stories are just funny. Gordon Chambers was born in 1968: “It was the
summer of ’86. I was 18 and wondering how and when I would ever lose my
virginity. I’d only had a couple of girlfriends but we didn’t know how or
what we were doing. We knew if we rubbed up against each other really fast
we quite liked it. No doubt we would have liked it a whole lot more if we’d
taken our clothes off!”
Monro’s contributors aren’t the usual collection of attention seekers and
exhibitionists that you find at many internet sites. It is not a place for
fantasists wanting a super race of super studs and sleek silicone blondes.
Here there are real people: vulnerable, confused, hurt, happy and a bit
mystified by the whole business of sex.
The way sex is packaged and sold on the internet has some people worried about
its effect on the young: that many growing up looking at internet porn and
going into chat rooms have these fantastical notions about the kind of sex
they should be having.
Dr Petra Boynton is a sex researcher at University College London and also an
online agony aunt. She believes that young people are acquiring a whole
“fantasy view of sex” that is created not only by sex on the internet but
also by fashion and the media in general. Consequently, “young people are
anxious about their bodies, their sexual performances, their inability to
talk to a partner. They think everyone else is having a fantastic time but
them”.
Dr Arthur Cassidy, a social psychologist at the Belfast Institute, offers a
bleaker view: “Young men who grow up using the internet in this way tend to
be lacking in self-confidence, sexual self-confidence and communication
skills. They become overreliant on electronic means and images of sexual
gratification. Consequently their social and emotional skills become
underdeveloped.”
Even more worrying is Cassidy’s discovery that “when I interview many of these
young men, they denigrate women. They do not see women as thinking persons
capable of communication, love and affection, they see them more as a means
of sexual gratification”.
This is why Monro’s collection of stories are an important corrective.
“There’s a huge discrepancy between the sex we see on television, in
pornography, and the sex we are actually having. It’s hardly what you would
call real sex. I think these stories fill the vacuum. They bring back the
reality of sex,” Monro tells me.
What do people who have talked to Monro about their first time get from the
experience? She says: “We don’t talk about virginity loss a lot. My
generation might entertain each other around a pub table with the odd
disaster/comedy story but on the whole we tuck this experience away
somewhere safe. But speaking this experience out loud, to a relative
stranger, can actually be incredibly therapeutic because it allows us to
review how far we have travelled.”
I asked one of Monro’s contributors why he wanted to talk to a complete
stranger about losing his virginity. “I thought it would be quite fun and
fascinating,” he admitted. “It was the first time I ever really talked about
it all in any depth.”
How was it? “I found it very rewarding. It was a chance to go back and get in
touch with the young me and I discovered a lot of things about myself. I
felt a quite profound sense of loss at the time and it was interesting to
see how I’ve changed since then.”
Monro’s site may seem like an aberration compared with the internet’s carnival
of explicit eroticism. But it is actually a return to the early vision of
the internet by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web. For him,
“the dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we can
communicate by sharing information”.
Maybe our sex-soaked world is ready for a little more communication and a lot
less consumption.
To read more accounts go to www.virginityproject.typepad.com
