The Books: Delta of Venus

Firstly I must thank you Ms Nin. You gave my my first hands-free orgasm. It was on a bus to school. The book was borrowed, a secret and guilty pleasure. I know the section that sent me over. It involved Leila and Bijoux and a huge rubber dildo. Then the Basque entered the scene and the image of his erect cock battling agains the rubber one was the moment of my undoing. I speak to other people about it and I find that I am not alone. A friend snuck a copy of this book into his grandfather's study. Even now, years later he remembers the man who played with the little girls, putting his finger up under the sheet and watching them giggle and grab for it. He replaced his finger with his penis with inevitable results.

Yes. You Ms Nin, are sometimes the touchstone for our reading about sex. You were also one of the first women to write it so explicity in the English language. Whatever I read of yours is coloured by this fact. You were the first in so many ways and I have a certain nostalgia for you. I cannot pick up The Delta of Venus without bringing my own relationship to you into the book. In the cold light of a new reading you are perhaps a little repetitive, perhaps too romantic in your approach to sex. Your views on lesbian sex are odd. You do not seem to think that this is the real thing, actual sex, but just a game that mimics sex, and yet your lesbians in bed together are extremely sexy.

Your gender roles are too clearly defined for my more mature tastes, and yet I still long for your pure kind of femininity. I still like to dress up, to paint my face, to feel like I am being adored and cared for. Perhaps I got this trait from you in the beginning, on the bus. That first completely spontaneous erruption. Your words touched me like hands and, mixed with the rumble of the bus, the scent of teenagers sweaty and ripe, the whole illicit juiciness of the moment sent me over. I have tried to repeat that ever since and have managed it only a few times.

I finish your book again and I must admit I did not touch myself once for the duration. I also did not come whilst reading your book this time. Perhaps you are no longer to my taste, but I still admire you. I play a video of you speaking about your diaries. You are old but gorgeous and so careful with your words. I would like to have had sex with you, yes, even as an old lady I would have touched your face and kissed you gently between your parted thighs letting my spit wet you as the juices wet the open cunts of your protagonists. Yes, Ms Nin. I still like you very much.