From Samuel Richardson's Clarissa to any number of current chick-lit titles, sex has always been an essential ingredient for a successful bestseller. Poet Philip Larkin famously wrote: 'Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP.' Larkin himself dabbled in mild erotica as an author and in hardcore porn as a reader. There has always been pornography for those who want to find it - either under the counter or on the top shelf - but it wasn't really until the Sixties that sex began to establish itself in mainstream popular culture. Ian Fleming's Bond novels - which had a first publication run from 1953 to 1966 - marked a transition phase. The books were known for their sex, snobbery and sadism: there were plenty of opportunities for Bond to engage in foreplay and indulge in a post-coital cigarette of Balkan and Turkish tobacco, but the sexual intercourse itself always took place between the chapters. Fleming's descriptions are never more than titillating, and there's even an element of the bodice-ripper in his style. Bond gets aroused but the reader is never asked to picture his erection.
By 1973 all false modesty had been discarded. That year saw the publication of Jacqueline Susan's Once Is Not Enough, a trashy potboiler that included the mass rape of a convent of nuns by Nazi soldiers and climaxed with heroine January Wayne participating in an explicitly described orgy. I found a paperback copy of the novel by my parents' bedside and read parts of it - the parts that Mary Whitehouse would have called 'mucky.' It was always easy to find these bits in any book that circulated around school: you could either let the book fall open at the page where the spine was most cracked or identify the sections from the darker edge of the well-thumbed pages. Strangely though, the one abiding image I retain from the book is of a Coca Cola bottle that the young January takes from the refridgerator in the kitchen of her uncle's Rome apartment. To be able to take a bottle of pop from the fridge without having to ask seemed to me to be the height of decadence.
