MORE SEX PLEASE we're British

Our playful attitude towards lovemaking has gone off the boil in recent years, says Sophia Money-Coutts

- 

Britain has long been a saucy nation. We're the proud inventors of Carry On films and bawdy catchphrases (nudge nudge, wink wink). We've laughed along with Victoria Wood asking to be beaten on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly, giggled at euphemisms and generally found smut wherever we could find it (you only have to look at Shakespeare to trace our fondness for the saucy innuendo in all its glory). We talked of bonking and hanky-panky, of slap and tickle and funny business, of doing the horizontal tango and rumpy pumpy. In other words, we've never really taken sex very seriously.

But in the past few years, attitudes towards our carnal desires seem to have changed dramatically. We've stopped tittering and started coming over all earnest about matters in the bedroom. Sex (and certainly sex when related to gender) seems to be a much more fraught, politicised topic. These days, joking about nookie or a bit of how's your father may well earn you a withering look of disdain.

As an author, I've spotted this increased squeamishness surrounding sex in novels. Look back to the 1980s and 1990s and the golden age of the bonkbuster. It was the era of Shirley Conran, Jackie Collins - and Jilly Cooper, who, in The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, wrote of a character plunging into a woman 'as joyously as an otter diving into a summer stream.' As a sheltered teenager, I was quite comforted by this because it made sex sound as jolly and unthreatening as a game of tennis. I was more disturbed by a love scene in The Horse Whisperer, where the horse-whispering hero licks the woman's underarm hair. Would I have to do that one day, I worried.