Sex: An open approach to our unspoken desires. (The School of Life Library)

We live under a cheerful delusion that sex might nowadays be easy – because we have been ‘liberated’ from the hang-ups and taboos of the olden days. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Despite a veneer of openness, sex remains an extraordinarily complicated business, hard to discuss and surrounded by shame and unspoken desires. This book provides a relief from the loneliness and confusion, explaining how sex truly operates and what it aims at. The book demonstrates that far from thinking about sex too much, we haven’t begun to think about it as deeply as we should.

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iii. Keeping Our Clothes On There is an assumption that sexiness is about nakedness and explicitness, and that logically, therefore, the sexiest scenarios must also be the ones involving the greatest amounts of nudity. But the truth about excitement is likely to be rather different. At the core of sexiness is the idea of being allowed into someone’s life, when the memory of having been excluded from it is at its most vivid. Sexiness stems from a contrast between prohibition and acceptance. It is a species of relief and thanks at being given permission to enter another person’s life. We tend to know the thrill of getting sexual while keeping our clothes on in the earliest days of a relationship. After a party, with neither of us entirely sure where things are headed, we lie on the bed together fully clothed and kiss and hug awkwardly. At these moments, any chance to touch feels deeply special. A shoulder slipping out from its cardigan covering, a finger probing the flesh under the waistband of a skirt, loosening a tie and undoing some buttons to reveal the neck and the top of the chest: these things make the permission of bodily discovery very vivid and powerful. At such moments our excitement is intimately tethered to gratitude – we realise how generous the other person has been in allowing us to roam over their body. This gratitude is usually most keenly felt not when one has been granted full licence by someone, but when one is on the borderline, when one has only just been lent a pass – and when the memory of the taboo of sex that surrounds most people is still intense. The reminder of the danger of rejection brings the wonder at being included into sharp, ecstatic relief. As we get used to having sex with someone, it generally happens that their mere nakedness (which was once mysterious and desperately longed for) diminishes quite substantially in its power to excite us. We lose sight of what previously we knew so well: the marvel of acceptance. This explains why the decision to keep clothes on a bit longer than strictly necessary, to deliberately retain clothes during sex even after the early period, can prove such a turn-on. To heighten excitement, we may design a scenario in which we are ‘allowed’ only to press against one another, never moving beyond guilty caresses and small thrusts – like we might have been forced to do in early adolescence or in a bedroom in Saudi Arabia. Such games mean we can keep revisiting the incredible idea of permission: the outer garments evoke the barriers one has finally been able to cross with impunity. Playfully limiting oneself to pressing through wool and cotton brings into enticing alignment both one’s previous exclusion and the new wondrous inclusion. The rule that we know full well is fake (‘don’t go too far’) makes our status as actual lovers all the more vivid and hence arousing. We are, via the game, trying to recover gratitude. Prudishness can be willingly invited into our sexual games as a way of reminding us of our enormous, but too often forgotten privileges.