Author Archive

At fifteen, appearances were mending; she [Catherine Morland] began to curl her hair and long for balls. Jane Austen, Northhanger Abbey, Chapter 1 Favorite0

There was a “knowingness” about the way they walked that suggested the whole sex thing mightn’t be totally alien to them. Brendan O’Connor, Slices of Exotica, Irish Sunday Independent, June 22, 1997 Favorite0

These girls [local girls] were too sensible for sex. They wanted to play chasing and stuff. Courtship and sex were relegated to being a hidden agenda lurking beneath the endless games of chasing on summer nights. Brendan O’Connor, Slices of Exotica, Irish Sunday Independent, June 22, 1997 Favorite0

Sure, we all knew what them continentals were like about sex. They were all at it from an early age, encouraged, we didn’t doubt, by their equally sex-mad parents. If only we could crack their continental cool and get our clammy claws on their tanned pert perfection. Brendan O’Connor, Slices of Exotica,

I don’t think England should be represented abroad by an unmarried man… It might lead to complications. Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance Favorite0

It is also, you will notice, foreign. We find it helpful to associate sexual products and practices with foreigners because—naturally—we could not possibly have invented them. (…) Abroad is where sex happens and where the British are most at risk. Sarah Ferguson is trapped having her toes sucked in France, Hugh Grant

Remember that for most of the last century this country’s iconic woman—our Madonna, as it were (in both the Catholic and the American senses)—was Queen Victoria. She might have been sex-on-a-stick for poor Prince Albert, and maybe that funny Scottish chap, but not for anyone else. For the rest of us, sex—unless

The reasons for non-consummation are the same as ever, she reports, in spite of our apparent enlightenment on sexual matters. “Some fail to consummate because of parental prohibition: they think their parents would be against it. Some need to be told it’s all right to do this thing. Some married women have

Others say they’re both Christian and so didn’t do it before they got married—and then cannot bear to do it after marriage. For them, sex has been built up into such a magnificence, with the Earth moving and the communion of the spirit that it can seem such a disappointment the first

In some bedrooms, it seems, the Victorian age lives on. There are still men like John Ruskin, who failed to consummate his marriage due to the shock, on his wedding night, of finding out that women had pubic hair; hitherto he had only seen smoothly sculpted, “naked” classical statues. Ross Clark, Not