Dave Tomlinson

Sex was published by The Erotic Review, a regular British magazine devoted to discussions around sex and eroticism. Unlike top-shelf fodder, it considers itself more urbane and literary in its endeavour. Its stated purpose is ‘to appeal to the primary sexual organ - the brain’. It flourished under the editorship of a woman editor, Rowen Pelling, who transformed the magazine from an A4, 16-page quarterly newsletter into a widely-read, monthly 48-page glossy.

After The Erotic Review was bought out by Penthouse , Pelling quit and the magazine foundered. However its halcyon period is planned to be the subject of a forthcoming film starring Rachel Weisz as Rowen Pelling.

Whilst Rowan as still editing The Erotic Review, I was asked to interview her for Third Way magazine. The interview didn’t go down well with the magazine’s more conservative readers. But I found Rowan’s views fascinating, insightful and clearly connected to her underlying Christian faith. Make your own mind up…

For people who haven’t seen it - and I suspect that most readers of Third Way have not - how would you describe The Erotic Review?
In style, I think it’s a sort of hybrid between (if you can imagine such a thing) the Spectator, Private Eye, the New Yorker, I suppose with a splash of Forum or something thrown in. Obviously, people do sometimes say, ‘Isn’t it pornography?’, but to me it’s very clearly not on that….the other side of the line…

Where do you draw that line?
To my mind, pornography is really clear what it’s about: people pay a certain amount of money to get a certain amount of explicitness. It’s all about what is within the frame. Imagination is not important.

Erotica is very often about what you don’t get, about how the mind goes beyond. There’s always a human relationship implicit between photographer and subject, artist and subject, writer and material, and a tension between what is being illustrated or described and the person who’s doing it.

But, to put it crudely and from a man’s point of view, are they both supposed to give you a hard-on?
I think pornography should always give you a hard-on, otherwise it’s not your sort of pornography. Erotica can but that is not necessarily its purpose, and quite a lot of things that people consider erotic, or that I do, don’t have that directly kinetic attribute. So, you may find John] Donne’s poetry very erotic but you don’t think, ‘I’ll read it to cop off to.’

You’ve also described erotica as a journey …
I think it’s always about the journey and not about arriving. It should stimulate a sense of anticipation. The most erotic things tend to cheat you a bit: they don’t take you all the way there. Hopefully it’s part of developing a complex and interesting emotional side to your personality, that you don’t just want the quick fix, you want something - particularly when you are in a marriage or a stable relationship - that, to put it bluntly, keeps the romance alive.

That’s why I find the moral objections to erotica so strange, because without imagination every other kind of thing fails. You look at a bad housing project and you say, ‘Why didn’t the architect show more imagination?’ And yet people are very uncomfortable with the idea of imagination in sex.

So, really erotica is a marital aid?
Yes, I like to think it is. To me, one of the most important things is to keep that energy, that charge you feel when you first meet someone. And that’s just as much about intellectual stimulation as about sexual. It’s like Beatrice and Benedict, isn’t it, [in Much Ado About Nothing]? It’s about engaging and disagreeing and moving on.

Most of our readers, over 90 per cent, are married or in a stable relationship, and most of the men who read the magazine read it with their other half. I think it’s a way of flirting.

Do you think that attitudes towards pornography and erotica have changed in recent times?
I think they have changed, because we’re so aware now of really big threats in terms of sexual abuse, we’re aware of incredible, unimaginable images of paedophilia online. Everything is available via the Internet, and it has made people lose some of their innocence, I think, about what goes on in the world and I do think that makes us feel less threatened by people having a more what I call ‘baroque’ imagination. I think the British are much more prepared now to say, ‘Whatever the Joneses do behind their privet hedge is their business’ … Every survey shows that people are much more tolerant about sex (and much less tolerant about violence).

Certainly the internet has extended people’s ability to pursue their own fantasies - ‘You know the side to me that’s always been interested in dungeons or donkeys or whatever it is … ?’ People can explore things more now and if you discover something you didn’t know about yourself - and most of us do as we get older, and very often it’s something sexual as long as it’s something you don’t feel is associated with the disintegration of society, you’re more tolerant about other things.

(By the way, I’ve never seen bestiality as the biggest worry, I have to say. I think the animal would probably rather that than be slaughtered for Sunday lunch.)

Not that I am totally libertarian, though I’m not crazy about censorship. I really do think that sometimes you feel, ‘I actually don’t want to see or know or have that.’ I think there are limits …

What do you think about what one might call the ‘old feminist’ concern that pornography and erotica are shaping the attitudes of men towards women?
I think we’re much less worried about it. I’d never say that we’re not worried at all because, for example, we carry classifieds in this magazine which I’m not always quite comfortable with (though they’re not the sort of thing you get in porn mags).

But, yes, I think there are two things to consider. How are we bringing up boys? Are we saying, ‘All girls are up for it, every second of the day’? In a funny sort of way, I find more worrying than pornography the way that air-brushed girls-next-door-made-to-get-down-on-all-fours are presented [by lad magazines] as normal womanhood to younger men. I think that’s a more pervasive and influential sort of image at that age. In a sense, pornography is always pornography, it’s always seen as a bit other.

But I think you have to balance that with the fact that there is no doubt that in many ways women are calling the shots. I’ve got four women working for me, and all of them are completely au fait and OK with quite explicit material, though none of us had worked with it before.

You can’t have feminism telling women how to be women. I think that was always a problem with the Seventies stuff - it was almost hostile towards you because you weren’t being that sort of woman, and suddenly women were sort of turning on you. In fact, the network between women is much more complicated than ‘We all think it’s degrading if you wear a low-cut top.’

Do you think we take sex too seriously?
Yes, I do. When you think about it, sex is essentially ridiculous: this peculiar, sweaty ritual we have to go through which is not dignified. Which is why it is hard to make anything that is too explicit erotic, it seems to me, because when you’re outside two people’s intimacy, or even 10 people’s intimacy, you’re looking at something that’s rather ludicrous, aren’t you? I mean, it’s not choreographed neatly like some Russian ballet.

I am very proud that in The Erotic Review we never tell anyone how to do anything - we presume that they have their own unique and interesting and fulfilling way of doing it - but I do think that humour is a huge and important part of sex. For me, the great meeting-point of men and women is not only romantic and erotic but also, ideally, humorous.

When I worked at Private Eye they told me that the best response they’d ever had to a personal ad was to one that just said: ‘Woman who likes laughing in bed’. The Italians and French would find that really insulting, but it’s one of the great traits of the British that we are able to laugh at ourselves, and to laugh at ourselves about sex. And that seems to me to be a virtue.

We live in a very sexualised culture which confronts us with images of an erotic nature on every side. Do you think sex is too much in our faces?
I think I’m much like anyone else. I think that sex has become quite boring in the hands of the media and advertising. You think: ‘I want a rest from this. I don’t necessarily want it on the money pages of the Telegraph. I don’t need semi-naked pictures of Liz Hurley to illustrate this.’

I hate things getting dull, and for me the mystery of sex is very, very important and the thought of that mystery being taken away I find pernicious.

‘Mystery’ is an interesting word, which I would associate with spirituality. Do you think that spirituality and erotica are good bedfellows, so to speak?

Yes. I think there has long been a link between spirituality and the erotic, and I feel it very strongly. It seems to me that erotic love does not exist without mystery. If you turn sex into some animalistic function and it doesn’t have that emotional complexity, then it loses the mystery and somehow you miss out on what it really means to be totally in love with someone - which in my experience is the most profound thing. I haven’t experienced motherhood yet, so … But the most profound experience of my life has been falling in love in that way, and I suppose you feel it’s a terrible thing if it doesn’t happen and there are so many forces that seem to be working against that.

You’re not talking about tantric sex here but you’re saying that ordinary, everyday sex in the context of a relationship has a spiritual dimension to it?
Yes. I’ve never really believed that you can be ‘good at sex’ or ‘bad’ at it - because people have lost their way about falling in love and finding satisfaction in that way, just as much as they’ve lost their way spiritually, and everyone’s seeking an answer, and so we are always being told how to do things. Whereas, in fact, the great mystery about sex seems to me that, for example, you’ll never, ever fall in love with someone if they don’t smell right to you. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you, to do this amount of foreplay or to tweak that, if the smell of that person - this strange chemical component - isn’t fundamentally right, you will never fall in love; and that’s much more important than 500 tips from Cosmo.

It does seem to me a profound mystery why you fall suddenly head-over-heels in love with someone. You can analyse bits of it, but not the whole thing.

Do you think that sex rightly belongs within a relationship?
I think that would probably be most people’s most satisfactory experience of it.

Are there good arguments against promiscuity?
I think there are, just because I don’t believe that free love makes people happy in the end. It might make one person happy - very often it is one person suggesting and another going along with it. I mean, I’m not someone who would say I think that’s the only way for people to live, in a regimented marriage certainly not. That, I think, is a different matter.

But everyone finds their own way through these things. I’m really against any moralising about people’s sexual behaviour - unless it reaches a point where everyone agrees that it’s reprehensible, like if it involves 10-year-old girls. It seems to me there are very sensible limits of what we find just absolutely wrong, but other than that sex is not a matter to exactly moralise about.

But when you look at it experientially, at how people find happiness… It’s not my experience that people find immense happiness through prolonged bouts of hedonistic, promiscuous, any-which-way sex. I don’t think it gives you what you find when you have this tremendous bond with another person. I suppose what I wish is that people would talk more about love. They seem to know everything about sex but very little about love.

But people do make mistakes, they have affairs, they commit youthful indiscretions; but I don’t think that’s anything irredeemably wrong, it’s part of the learning curve. Just like everything else -like going into the red with your overdraft - you have to kind of get things wrong to find out what you think is a better balance.

Also, just because you falter, because you err, it doesn’t mean you don’t believe that something else is a happier path.

So, you can still hold on to the ideal, perhaps, of a monogamous relationship -
Even if it’s not what you’ve always practised.

- and you can still hold on to it while showing tolerance to other people and to yourself?
I think it’s very, very difficult, because now we live longer and to a certain extent we are biologically programmed to find more than one person attractive within our lifetimes and it is not only possible but quite probable that people will, for all their best intentions, go astray. Struggling to chisel out what you think is a better way to live is part of life’s great dilemma, but I don’t think people should be condemned out of hand in any way for falling in love more than once in their lifetime.

Do you think that the concept of sexual morality has a future in the 21st century?
I think it’s a tough one. I think sexual morality will always be so subjective and I do genuinely believe that people can live in very different ways. Our sexual mores are so different, and so spring from our background and our experience, that to try and impose what you think is increasingly hard.

If you were devising a basic moral code for the new century, what sort of things would be important?
The thing I think is tremendously important is respect - for everyone, but especially you’re not going to respect other people if you don’t respect yourself. And the problem with having no sexual morality is:

Does it show respect for those you love most in the world? To have no respect for them does to me feel immoral.

What do you think are the best and worst things the church has done for human sexual relationships?
I think the worst thing is guilt about sex, and often unsuitable censorship of what is for me one of the most precious emotions and experiences that most people (if they are lucky) have in a lifetime. The way the church’s teachings historically have made people repress their sexual energies has been very destructive. And it’s resulted in that energy kind of exploding very often in a wrong way, as we saw in (an ostensibly very moral) Victorian society, which produced the worst and most perverted pornography known to man - there were things that would make people blench now.

Also, speaking as someone who has within my close family two gay relations, obviously I find the exclusion of people who are living within gay relationships very difficult to accept. In my experience, people are born with a particular sexual proclivity which is as much a part of them as having brown hair; and that anyone could teach that this essential element of them is morally wrong I find very hard to cope with - a kind of unkindness, sometimes, in some elements of the church. (I know that historically there has also been a lot of glossing-over and accepting of people … )

And on the positive side?
It’s very clear that the church has enshrined in the sacrament of marriage a celebration of the union of two people not just spiritually but sexually as well. This is seen as a blest and important activity, and there’s a tradition of joy going back to the Song of Solomon.

You are really quite pro marriage, aren’t you?
I’m very pro marriage. I’m very pro marriage. I’m the last of the totally unreconstructed romantics. I don’t see the point of not feeling that things will last forever.

Do you regret the fact that fewer people are getting married?
Oh God, yes! If I didn’t feel I’d get boring about it, I’d be a great campaigner for marriage. Most people secretly feel that it is the best system - particularly women, I think. I read a wonderful piece once that said that the argument for monogamy was a bit like Churchill’s argument for democracy: it’s the worst possible system until you look at the alternatives. And I think that’s true. It is by far the best way if you can find some way of making it work.

Of course, we all are imperfect and people falter and things go wrong, but to me the important thing is what you strive for. I think that everything that is really important and worthwhile in life is very, very difficult - it’s not easy to achieve things in love any more than it is academically. But the sense of satisfaction you get from making something precious is tremendous.

But we live in a society now where people fall at the first hurdle - it’s like, ‘Well, that tiny crack has ruined everything!’ In other areas of life we accept that it will take us a while to get there, but here we have become romantics in the wrong way, it seems to me: ‘Someone’s sold me a fairy tale and if I see a tiny bit of that pink-princess tinsel damaged I can’t live with it!’

What were the lasting values that were instilled into you as a child?
I was brought up in a fairly traditional small village where you went to the local C-of-E primary school and the local church. I feel very lucky to have been brought up in a way that I think would be considered in many ways conventional morally, but I never felt that anything was imposed.

My mother was a great believer in all sorts of things - such as, you know, it was a really bad idea to have sex before marriage - but I can’t say that in the end it affected the way her five children behaved. Although it did mean that all of us were very late entering into sexual relationships, much later than our peers. So, when you’re given freedom and are allowed to…

I’m not advocating a kind of hippy laissez-faire, but I feel very lucky to have been allowed to develop my own judgement.

Recently I’ve found myself thinking about the kids in my church and asking myself: ‘What are we giving them?’ I know what we’re not giving them, all those hard-and-fast rules and regulations; but are we giving them enough to base their judgements on? Absolutely. That is the key. You want to give people the tools to make those judgements and also to deal with the mistakes that will happen (and they happen to all of us). I think that if you’re not trusted you become untrustworthy. My parents did trust us, and I stayed out late and away from home and I wasn’t going round sleeping with everyone - but a lot of my friends were and of course they were the ones with the very strict parents.

How did your mum react when you became editor of The Erotic Review?
She dealt with it with absolutely the kind of brilliant wit and common sense that I always came to expect from her. When the local newspaper rang her up, she said, ‘Well, Betty Boothroyd started as a Tiller Girl and look at her now!’

She didn’t really want to look at the magazine very closely - her personal morality was what you would call quite old-fashioned: middle-England and C-of-E - but she believed that whatever her children did she would be proud of them. I don’t suppose she would have been proud if one of us had turned out to be a mass murderer, but apart from that…

But the great tragedy of my life is that she died last October. My father died when I was 20, but my mother was the great cornerstone of all her children’s lives. I feel terrible being an orphan. I don’t know how people cope with such grief if you don’t have any tools to deal with it. If you haven’t been brought up with any kind of faith, if you don’t have anything to reach for, if you don’t have that structure (even if you don’t have belief), you are absolutely just left on the floor.

Is religion still a part of your life?
Yes, it is, yes. I wouldn’t describe - I usually say I’m more ‘I don’t not believe.’ Does that make sense?

My mother had us all christened but none of us was confirmed - I think she felt that that should be our choice - but when I was going to get married I felt that I wasn’t getting married in the local church just because it was pretty but because it was really important to me, and if it was that important it was hypocritical not to make some sort of commitment to where I actually stand, on what side of the line. And so I was confirmed when I was 27.

People find this odder than if I said, ‘I belong to the Moonies’ or, you know, ‘I’m going on a Buddhist retreat’ or almost anything else - ‘I’m very interested in doing some Islamic studies.’ People are mildly embarrassed - especially with someone who does my job. Even.at the time I felt it was something I had to be quite low-key about - almost as though I’d had the Toronto Blessing and been talking in tongues. But for me it’s much more about how you work out the important things in your life. I think I have got that far.

Thank you for talking so frankly.
These are big, complex questions, but I think about these things a lot.