“Are you the erotic woman?” a middle-aged guest asked me at a drinks party in Fulham.
“Yes,” I replied, glancing around the room. “I suppose that would be me.”
She immediately launched into a remarkably detailed account of her enthusiasm for spanking, explaining that it sent “blood rushing” to her erogenous zones.
Her husband, she added, shared her interest in corporal punishment. She pointed towards a tweedy man across the room, saying he also enjoyed watching other men spank her. It was an extraordinary, entirely unsolicited revelation from a couple who looked as though they might have been on their way to a church bazaar.
I was a year into my new role as editor of The Erotic Review, a position that would lead financiers, barristers, MPs, doctors, colonels and even clerics to confide their sexual peccadilloes in me.
That job would shape the next 30 years of my career and introduce me to almost every sexual practice imaginable. Kink, threesomes and orgies were all fair game: once people discovered you were the “erotic woman” who had been writing about sex for decades, few subjects appeared to be off limits.
Without intending to, I had opened a window on the changing sexual habits of Middle England. I became the unofficial sexpert of the Waitrose set.
In the Nineties and Noughties, my work made me a supposed authority on every aspect of sex, during a period that may have been more sexually liberated than the present day. But the education was never one-sided. If anything, I was the person who learned the most.
As editor of The Erotic Review in the Nineties and Noughties, Rowan Pelling became “the go-to sexpert for the Waitrose classes”
My husband benefited, too, because I became more adventurous in the bedroom. We were both less enthusiastic, however, when an airport security scanner once detected a sex toy I had been given to review.
I soon discovered that the best sex depends on imagination and playfulness. I became more comfortable allowing myself to fantasise, remembering that the brain is the body’s most powerful sexual organ, and began asking my husband what truly excited him. The answer, as it turned out, was mostly stockings.
I was also drawn to the advice of American relationship expert Dan Savage, who encourages couples to be “good, giving and game” — or GGG — in bed. Being good means listening to your partner and communicating clearly.
Being giving means caring as much about your partner’s pleasure as your own, while being game means staying open to fresh ideas without abandoning sensible boundaries.
With time, however, I began to think intimacy and intensity mattered more than novelty. Nothing, in my experience, surpasses the erotic charge of looking directly into the eyes of someone you love during sex.
Eight years at The Erotic Review also brought a steady stream of readers’ confessions. I had not previously understood how many British men wore women’s knickers beneath suits and corduroys, or how many women enjoyed role-playing as naughty nurses.
The letters also confirmed that spanking and BDSM have a strong following in Britain. Various surveys suggest that around half the population has experimented with some form of fetish, even if that means no more than trying handcuffs bought from Ann Summers. It may also explain the extraordinary success of Fifty Shades of Grey.
I came to see Britain as a remarkably tolerant country, provided people did not make a public spectacle of their more unusual preferences. Few seem to object to a sex dungeon, as long as it is described as a wine cellar.
US relationship guru Dan Savage advises couples to be “good, giving and game” (GGG) in bed (picture posed by models)
Over the course of my career, I have appeared in countless sex-themed documentaries. I even travelled to the psychology faculty at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where researchers scanned my brain in an MRI machine as I reached orgasm.
The irony is that I was only 28 when I landed the job at The Erotic Review and was still relatively inexperienced when it came to sexual knowledge. I had spent much of my teenage years reading the bonkbusters of Shirley Conran and Jilly Cooper, but I attended a Sevenoaks, Kent, school founded for the daughters of missionaries. In terms of real-life experience, I was behind most of my friends.
It wasn’t until university, aged 20, that I lost my virginity to a kind artist ten years older than me, who sketched me naked and brought breakfast to bed.
I remember thinking, ‘That was glorious!’ and my view on sex hasn’t altered over the decades. Erotic love is, for me, the pinnacle of adult experience.
That short-lived relationship was followed by a series of brief but educational flings: a cool ‘Sarf London’ boy who cared nothing for my pleasure (I never made that mistake again), a troubled Etonian, a friend in need and a Hungarian maths professor, who omitted to tell me about his wife back home in Budapest.
Within a month of working at GQ as the editor’s PA, I had met the tall, handsome chap in a Shetland jumper, who smoked Gauloises like a French intellectual, and felt, almost instantly, like coming home.
We had our first kiss just before Christmas 1993 and married two years later in a Kent country church.
Within three years, I had moved to Erotic Towers (as we called the office) and I loved the ribald atmosphere the second I walked in.
My bosses were two middle-aged, happily married, erudite-but-fruity public schoolboys, who lived to eulogise the female form. Flirting in the office was always humorous, rather than creepy.
We persuaded a raft of well-known people such as Auberon Waugh, Barry Humphries and Josceline Dimbleby to write for the magazine.
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Then I had the brainwave that maybe Waterstones might stock us, since bookish types are notoriously open minded. Six London stores said ‘yes’.
A journalist called to interview me and we made the newspapers, too. Soon I was on Radio Four’s World at One making my first ever public broadcast and explaining that we weren’t ‘the kind of mag that tells its readers how to have ten orgasms a day’, but were far more concerned with celebrating eroticism.
From that first burst of publicity, our phone lines were besieged and within a couple of years we had moved to bigger, central London premises, selling 30,000 copies a month.
‘Strangers revealed details of their intimate lives within minutes of meeting me, while couples asked me to adjudicate on their bedroom disputes,’ writes Rowan Pelling
Erotic Review lunch invitations were highly coveted, as they could run into the night and even, on occasion, through the night. Boris Johnson was the star guest at one, having contributed a ‘naïve sketch’ of Lady Godiva riding naked on a horse.
We had a Christmas party in our office with an absinthe bar and people who popped by included members of the band Blur, the distinguished historian Sir Antony Beevor and a famous jockey, who nipped off to the upstairs lavatory for a tryst with a female guest.
It’s fair to say I lived in a parallel reality. Strangers revealed details of their intimate lives within minutes of meeting me, while couples asked me to adjudicate on their bedroom disputes.
Two married subscribers invited me to join them in Cap Ferrat for a threesome and I was invited to a sex party somewhere near Hemel Hempstead, but sent two of my intrepid writers instead.
The propositions came thick and fast throughout my time as ‘editrix’. An intellectual Tory politico asked to try on my knee-high, stiletto-heeled Manolo Blahnik boots.
A 50-something master of foxhounds invited me to be his mistress if I wasn’t deterred by his inflatable prosthetic penis. ‘It works well and no one has complained,’ he declared.
Even more optimistic was the 84-year-old journalist who asked if I would thrash him once a week with a riding crop, in return for ‘a steak dinner’.
I was lucky that I was married to a man 15 years older than me, who found jealousy ‘baffling’, was secure in his own skin and laughed at all my anecdotes.
He hated parties and public events, which meant I could assume a persona for writing in the magazine and public engagements.
I always knew that once I’d had children it would be hard to maintain the illusion that I was up for any kind of mischief.
So it’s no coincidence that my first son was born just after I stopped editing The Erotic Review.
Looking back, the 1990s and early Noughties were the ‘good-old, bad-old naughty days’ in London that birthed outrageously sexy supermodels, lads’ mags, Britpop and art, with celebrities tumbling drunk out of private members’ clubs such as the Groucho.
It was before the fall of Harvey Weinstein in 2017 and the necessary broom of #MeToo, which swept away unrepentant predators and highlighted the horrors of online porn. The trouble was it took some carefree joy and innocence with it.
Young men of my sons’ generation would never dream of chatting up an attractive stranger in a pub, for fear of being thought ‘creepy’.
Dating has been increasingly pushed to online apps, where ghosting and lies are legion and no one feels the electric charge of instant chemistry.
Instead of drunken teen party fumbles, the young learn about sex from online porn, which explains the rise of vile scourges such as ‘sexual choking’.
Consent became – understandably – the biggest dating issue of our time. But this also meant spontaneity was ditched for almost legally-negotiated forms of ‘affirmative consent’.
My generation had the luxury to look at sex as a source of joy and even humour, but now everything has become deadly serious.
This, in turn, has affected my work, writing and advice. Now I say to men that no one will give them the benefit of the doubt in a bedroom scenario gone wrong and to never go near a tipsy woman.
I have also had to tell some older chaps that banter that was acceptable in 1996 could now lose them their jobs.
Young women are more fluid in their sexuality than my generation and many date female friends in preference to men. Sex toys and porn abound, yet every reliable survey records a gradual decrease in sexual activity amongst the young.
This has all happened against a backdrop of smartphones, tablets and social media intruding into the bedroom. It’s hard not to conclude that we’ve sacrificed human touch and intimacy for the phoney closeness of instant messaging.
Over the course of 30 years, some of my early convictions have been quietly let go, such as the best sex of your life is in your 30s. After all, society encourages us to believe sex will plunge downhill from 40, while older generations know better. A Cambridge gynaecologist told me his friskiest patient was in her early 90s and had a toy boy in his 80s.
With every fresh decade, I’m astonished by my previous ignorance. My conclusion is that the best sex of your life is the sex you’re having right now.
