Four letter words Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of the great works of the 1920s was given a second coming almost 30 years after publication during the famed ‘Lady Chatterley Trial’. 50 years since the trial, obscenity and pornography are an easily acquired commodity, but why are we still so shocked by the four letter word? “... so that’s why you should always have a hacksaw around.” On a stage in a tiny theatre in East London, a liberated, middle aged woman has just told a dark room filled with women the perils of tying up your lover with handcuffs. The Story is there for research purposes of course. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a work of literary genius and filled with panting metaphors about sex in a forest, changed the face of literary and social freedom of speech when Penguin won the right to publish the unexpurgated version in 1960 (32 years after it’s completion and publication overseas). But when sex is not only a fact of life, but a pretty keen feature in literature since the ancients (Catullus’ (84-54BC) similes about birds in laps spring to mind) why would one book, detailing a woman’s adultery with her disabled husband’s gamekeeper, cause such a revolution? The fact is that books are considered high brow, academic and often perceived as stuffy. Blatant sex in literature– not for function but for pleasure – offends public sensibilities... but that doesn’t stop us smuggling the book home and reading it in comfort of our homes. To probe the ideas of discussing sex in literature, we went along to the Mucky Book Club. Its theatre debut, The Mucky Book Club (‘Literature with knobs on’) started out as – just that – a book club for ladies who love naughty literature. They aren’t interested in mucky-for-the-sake-of-mucky, these ladies have discerning tastes in literature and just happen to find pleasure in the kinky bits. But on this cold November evening they have broken out in to theatre, an evening of entertainment Mucky Books style. After the demonstration on handcuffs, we are all given a Barbie doll and some string. We are instructed to take off her clothes and then tie her up in the style of Japanese Bondage. After violating Barbie and a reading from Belle Du Jour’s Diary of a London Call Girl, we have a short break in which we are encouraged to go into a confessional booth and tell all to a woman who was going to promptly tweet our deepest secrets, the ‘Kinky Disco’ playing ‘Je t’aime’ in the background. Then Betty Herbert and Monique Roffey, who have both written sexual confessionals, were interviewed. Betty’s The 52 Seductions charts her and her husband’s sexual re-ignition, ten years in to marriage. Monique on the other hand, wrote With The Kisses of His Mouth – a sexual memoir describing in eye watering detail her mid-life sexual self discoveries where she travelled the world learning tantric tricks and Karma Sutra style flexibility. She read an extract from the book describing having her genitals typified by a South American Shamanic guru in Hereford – it turns out she is a fox ‘down there’. We leave the event wondering if we are a fox, or a wolf, or a buffalo, or even an antelope...
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