The most audacious act of public sex is sexual speech. It's not the beast with two backs kept in a closet; it's a provocative mouth, a picture that speaks to memory. Scheherazade kept herself alive telling sex stories every night, a true survivalist. She knew her erotic imagination was the key to her vitality.
When I was a child, I took my favourite babysitter's hand and begged her to tell me what the "dirty words" meant, the ones I heard on the playground. I knew they must be special because they were simultaneously forbidden and mandatory. It was too dangerous to ask my mother, who exploded such words only on dramatic occasions – assassinations and war-dead announcements, critiques of great stupidity, amazing surprises and delights. Fuck!
Where would we be without strong language and taboo images? Everyone is so smug about Johannes Gutenberg's first project – the Bible – but what was the very next item to roll off the press? A "dirty bible," of course – its gilded fore-edge inscribed with venal satire. Erotic parody and sexual unmasking have been employed to denounce every tyrant, every twit to hold a sceptre or higher office. We may not glean every detail of their hypocrisy, but the legend has to start somewhere. And that's where sexual expression really shines: legend. Lust makes a liar out of everyone. Without lies, there's no fiction. No story.
Literature wouldn't exist without erotic shadow and light, shame and desire, "my body says yes but my mind says no ...". Subterranean at times? Sure. But the sex motive is honest at its heart. We hear the maxim "follow the money" (sage advice, to be sure) but it's just as rewarding to follow the clit, the pounding little man, the hard-on that points the way.
Your true erotic life is not revealed all at once. We're bamboozled to think that it's who – or how many – rather than an inner drive, a weather system of hot floods, snow drifts, and tiny little drops that hold every memory close. With maturity, our erotic observation and reflection finally kick in. Some of the most moving sexual stories I've ever heard are from old people close to death.
My friend M is a fan of Dante's Divine Comedy. "Here we have a hero," he says, waving his hands above his head, "who goes from hell to purgatory to paradise. At the end of it all, after he has seen God, what does he have to say for himself? He wants to recount his memory of one woman, a woman he saw only for an instant.
"After all that, it's her fleeting image that is 'the love that moves the sun and all the stars'. Remember, this is after his special meeting with God!"
"Yes," I said, "and just think – his god was just as much a fiction as the feminine apparition. He created both visions, both interpretations, and then graced us with inspired writing." Thank goodness he didn't go into derivatives.
Sex is, simply put, good for thinking – and thinking is good for sex. I try to take inspiration from everything I see, yet take instruction from no one. My treat is to appreciate simple erotic gestures. I assume everyone is sexual, and there's no greater empathy.
If you take a honest look at your sexual history, you'll see it's a panorama of everything about you that's seed-and-egg creative. The risks you took blind, the way your imagination survives in spite of every banal and repressive catechism. The church has tried to shut sex up, the advertising world has tried to buy it out. We are fortunate to be engineered so well that the flame isn't easily extinguished.
Light up another one and tell me a good sex story. Something that makes my mouth drop open like my babysitter's once did. If it's got any erotic truth to it, your legend will hold my attention.
• Thanks to AllyF who suggested this topic in our fourth birthday open thread
