Literary news this week suggests that when it comes to women writing about sex, reviewers are still reacting in the same way as Dr Johnson to his walking dog, surprised that it’s being done at all. So hats off to Charlotte Roche, who has managed to give both the Sunday Times and the Guardian the willies by cheerfully confessing to consuming pornography with her husband and starting her book Wetlands with a graphic discussion of hemorrhoids.
Male reviewers seem barely to have moved on from the mentality of the Chatterley trial: anything which disturbs or shocks them must be dismissed as pornography. Thus Rod Liddle (who presumably wouldn’t want his servants reading Wetlands) fulminates against dim feminist critics who interpret the ramblings of “cheapjack book sluts” as serious art. In the Standard, David Sexton slags off the offerings of Faye Weldon and Rachel Johnson in the short story volume In
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