'It starts as all these stories do. With blood'

Joanne Harris’s latest novel, Broken Light begins with the blood of menstruation, decades in the past, while the onset of the menopause is the trigger for the contemporary sections.

At the centre of the story is Bernie Ingram (née Bernie Moon), approaching 50, in a marriage that has long since gone stale, while she’s estranged from both her mother and her own son. Working in a bookshop, she has no friends and begins to realise that, in effect, she has little agency.

But as she travels through the menopause, the nearby murder of a woman triggers a return of powers that she had long forgotten about – and Bernie begins a journey to a totally new sense of living.

Broken Light is an extraordinary tale of female experience; angry, passionate and deeply humane.

It’s been labelled as magic realism and it has, as much of Harris’s work, a quality of fairytale/folklore about. In keeping with that, it is an incredibly easy read (420 pages in two days for me), which illustrates the grip in exerts, but it’s also full of complexity, power and moral nuance.

The central theme here is the violence and misogyny that women face as a matter of routine, and the way that women are ignored.

But it’s also an examination of friendship – and of the cycle of toxicity in relationships. And also, the toxicity that can be spread on social media and is stirred by a sizeable amount of the mainstream.

There is something exhilarating about seeing some of the worst offenders called out, by their real titles, in the pages. Harris isn’t afraid to cast her fiercely feminist stare straight at them and illustrate the damage they do and the damage they facilitate.

In terms of the traumas that childhood can produce, there are places I physically winced in personal recognition – not least a child’s birthday party and aspects of domineering motherhood.

But the ending is shocking, yet redemptive and hopeful – simply stunning. Bernie Moon will stay with me for a very long time.

Broken Light by Joanne Harris is out now, available in hardback, for Kindle and audio.

It's my body – not yours

London protest against harassment at clinics

It’s difficult – if not downright impossible – to imagine that anyone could consider abortion to be ‘nice’.

But while many countries now have legal abortion, there are still countries that do not – and plenty of campaigners that would like to stop for former having legal abortion too.

From 25 September, in response to the campaign 40 Days for Life, a counter campaign, in support of reproductive rights, was launched: 40 Days for Choice.

40 Days for Life is not a new group, and it uses US-style tactics, picketing clinics where abortions are carried out or at least discussed: in other words, harassing those entering or leaving.

The campaign states quite clearly that it wishes to see “an end to abortion”.

Not just a reduction in times within which an abortion can legally be carried out, but an end to all abortions.

Now just think what that actually means.

It means that, even if a woman is likely to die unless she has an abortion ... well, she’ll just have to get on with it and die, won’t she: preferably as quietly as possible. Because, the message goes, the ‘unborn child’ is more important than her.

In Nicaragua, where an incoming government sucked up to the Catholic Church by introducing precisely such a ban, women have died and are dying because of it.

If there is a hell, then Daniel Ortega deserves to go there for this one move – and all to get himself off the hook over accusations of abusing his own daughter.

Which also says something about the church’s attitude to the rights of children once they’ve actually popped out, although we probably already knew that.

Indeed, to stay with Nicragaua, there have been at least two cases of a young girls being made pregnant as a result of rape.

The Catholic Church has squealed at the prospect of them having an abortion, threatening excommunication – but not for the rapist.

But setting that aside, such an aim works, philosophically, on the premise that life begins at the moment of conception. And that, if you’re religiously minded, is when the soul is miraculously ‘born’ too.

However, just one of the problems with this approach is that of spontaneous or natural abortion.

If one describes any fertilised human egg as a ‘unborn child’ (ie a human person), then there’s a lot of ‘children’ who ‘die’ when the body naturally or spontaneously aborts.

Scientific research suggests that less than 50% of all fertilised eggs will even be successfully implanted into a woman’s womb causing pregnancy to continue.

There is then a 25-50% chance of aborting before the woman even realises that she is pregnant. If, however, she makes it to a month, then the odds go up to 75% chance of carrying to term.

So if we accept the belief that life begins at conception, then nature herself is a mass murderer. Or, more pertinently, God, the creator of everything, is a mass murderer.

Mind, fundamentalists and their supporters in the US are trying hard to tackle this natural deviation from the plan that God himself obviously got somewhat wrong by bringing in laws to prosecute women who miscarry, if it is decided that they did something that may have brought that miscarriage on.

So, watch out with that glass of wine with your dinner – you might be pregnant and if you miscarry, you might then be responsible for murder.

In case you’re wondering whether this campaign really has a religious link, the campaign blog hopes “That all the campaigns across the UK will be blessed with God’s grace”, while the Twitter account says that the 40 days will be accompanied by “peaceful prayer”.

So what do they do? They harass people who are probably in a fairly conflicted and vulnerable state to start with.

In the meantime, we have a global population that is rising to levels that present problems when it comes to sustainability.

No – I’m not suggesting that abortion is the key, but pointing out that we’re hardly short of new human life as a result of abortion.

It’s a popular approach for anti-abortionists to claim that abortion is being used as a contraception, yet one that is not supported by research among those who seek a termination.

Of course part of the religious answer is that one should not have sex unless one is, at the least, prepared to get pregnant and, for many, unless one is intending to procreate.

Damn that God geezer again: makes sex so damnably pleasurable and then has his squaddies wandering around telling people not to do it because it’s sinful.

Worse still, if you’re a Catholic, then even a relieving wank is out of the question because that’s a mortal sin. Far better just to increase the global population. Or be celibate. Like priests.

Not only do anti-abortionists play to a sentimental view of when ‘life’ begins and what it means, they also like to pretend that they are ‘pro-life’. As opposed to anyone else.

It gets particularly amusing in the US, where many of the same ‘pro-lifers’ turn distinctly anti-life if there’s the chance of a nice execution going.

Simply, it is far better to describe them as being anti-abortion or even anti-choice.

Those who are pro-choice believe that a woman has the right to choose – whether that be to have an abortion or not.

There is something rather disturbing about a group of people wanting to control the sex life and body of complete strangers.

Not only wanting to, but believing that they have the right to.

In the US again, it’s doubly creepy – and hypocritical – since many of the same people who oppose abortion also like to rant and rave about keeping the state out of as much as possible.

Expect women’s reproductive systems. Obviously.

The idea that a foetus – a life that is not realised – should take precedence over a realised, developed life, even if that kills the latter, is one that can only come about, ultimately, through a hatred of women: in most cases, a hatred either borne of religious belief or lent some form of legitimacy by it.

A belief that women are to blame for sin, for The Fall.

It also comes with a view that sex, outside of heterosexual, monogamous marriage, is wrong, and that female sexuality in particular is dangerous and needs to be controlled.

A few other religions have similar ideas too.

It's quite remarkable just how dangerous to civilisation my cunt appears to be.

It is difficult to imagine any other circumstance in which people seem to imagine that they have a right to control another human being’s body – apart from the question of the right to die, where religion also gets involved, and where those who otherwise want the state out of private lives suddenly want it to defend what they believe to be God’s will.

People have every right to believe that abortion is wrong. They have every right to campaign openly and honestly.

They do not have the right to bully and harass in an underhand effort to get their way.

It would be nice if anti-abortion campaigners would start a political party and stand for election, just to see how popular their views are. But they won’t. For obvious reasons.

As a placard at one protest against 40 Days For Life put it: 'Keep your rosaries out of my ovaries'.

• You can keep up to date with the campaign at the following:

@40DaysofChoice

40daysforchoice.tumblr.com

Èdouard Pignon: capturing Catalan women

La Catalane, 1945

If there’s a particular value to seeing exhibitions of work by a single artist, and a further value to seeing exhibitions from a particular period of a single artist’s oeuvre, then imagine how fascinating it is to see successive such exhibitions of different artists, where the linking theme is that of a single place.

Collioure’s Musée d’Art Moderne may perhaps not have intended it to be quite so much the case, but this summer’s exhibition, Édouard Pignon, femmes en Méditerranée: Catalanes à Collioure, étés 1945-1946, is the perfect sequel to last year’s Les années Collioure: 1925-1932, which presented the Collioure paintings of Leopold Survage.

Pignon was a fascinating character. Born in Bully-les-Mines in 1905 (the year Matisse arrived in Collioure) he was the son of a militant miner.

Leaving for Paris in 1927, he worked in the Renault and Citroën car factories, studying art in the evenings.

Femme assise (Catalane), 1945

In 1931, with the Depression taking effect in France, he joined the Association des Ecrivains et des Artistes Revolutionnaires, while the decade also saw him meeting and moving much closer artistically toward Picasso.

But although a founding member of the influential Salon de mai and considered a leading figure in young French painting of the time, by 1945, Pignon was feeling the need for change.

He spent that summer in Collioure and then, inspired, the following months back in Paris painting a series of works based on his trip. The following summer, he returned, and the Collioure series continued.

The Catalanes paintings, almost exclusively of women, formed a solo exhibition in Paris in 1946. After that, they’ve never been seen together in this number until the Musée d’Art Moderne brought them back together for this exhibition.

Femme assise, 1946

They reveal not only a serialist approach – the artist working and reworking the same themes – but also a return to a much more figurative art.

Here we have something that happened with Survage's work too. When he arrived in Collioure, he found himself returning to a more classical way of capturing the world that he saw around him in the village.

And the links continue in other ways. Where Survage’s recurring theme was the Pêcheuses, or women with fish, Pignon took a number of themes for his Catalan women.

But one of them is Remailleuses – in effect, women making or mending fishing nets – in a variety of media (charcoal, oil, gouache, water …), which absolutely echoes and compliments Survage's women with fish.

The exhibition also brings together subsets of Pignon’s Collioure work: a series of both elderly women and a series of rather younger women.

The older women are pictured in traditional, dark dress, with lined faces and toothless mouths. Most are pictured seated, some with hints of stoves and pans to their right as we look at them.

They pose with decorum for the artist, but their faces are strong and the expressions direct.

Les Remailleuses de filets, 1946 (detail)

La Catalane, from 1945 (see top), is a particularly strong example: dignity, decorum – look how the hands, coarsened by working on the nets, are held – but the lips are still sensuous and the eyes challenging.

The surroundings and the colours bring to mind Matisse, while the style of the face displays the influence of Picasso, yet Pignon’s whole becomes something else.

In the second group – the younger women – many of the poses echo those of the older women, but there is also an element of flirtatiousness here, while the dress is not dark and their props are not so practical either: this is a not a generation, Pignon seems to be saying, that will spend their lives mending nets or cooking for their menfolk.

Catalane, 1946

Indeed, not one young women is pictured making or mending the nets.

Femme assise, from 1946, is the least conventional and the most sexual.

Yet even here, with one shoulder raised and, therefore, one breast higher than the other, she echoes the paintings of her foremothers.

The exhibition has a number of sketches and studies too, which allow the visitor to appreciate the artistic process that Pignon used in order to realise his finished works.

Like other artists who came to Collioure before and after him, he discovered his own palette to reflect the Mediterranean light and colours.

Seeing the dusky, burnt and burnished hues of Catalanes au filet, from 1946, brought Survage instantly to mind.

Personnages, Collioure, 1945

Personnages, Collioure, from 1945, with a greeting or bidding farewell to a fisherman, is also reminiscent, in its use of browns and yellows, of Survage.

If Survage saw something religious in his Collioure women – there are hints of pietàs in more than one – Pignon seems to have seen something different; a much more secular world, which seems in keeping both with his politics and also with what the world had just experienced.

Yet it is as though Pignon took up where Survage left off; as though Pignon painted the same women as Survage had, but as far older women, with their granddaughters now present in a changed and changing world.

There is sense of continuum here, but there is also a sense of finality.

Catalanes au filet, 1946

The way of life that Survage had painted was dying.

It could not stay the same in the post-war period, and Pignon’s pictures of younger women reflect that and illustrate the passage of time and the process of change.

It’s a subtle and fascinating exhibition, which also includes some of the artist’s pots and vases that pick up the same theme of the older women and the fishing boats, and which additionally marks the twentieth anniversary of the Pignon’s death.

It’s not a vast display, but at just €6 it’s a bargain and excellent cultural food for thought. If you’re in the area, it’s most certainly well worth a visit.

Abortion, FGM and porn: abuse and choices

Last night, in a quite extraordinary performance, Texas senator Wendy Davis stayed on her feet for 10-plus hours to effectively break a plan by that state to close most of its clinics that offered abortion (amongst other services) to women.

She couldn’t take a break to pee or to eat; she had to keep speaking – and staying on topic. This was no opportunity to quote Shakespeare at length or read her favourite poems.

It was an extraordinary feat, and one that should be applauded anywhere and by anyone who cares about women’s rights.

Actually, you’d expect it to be applauded by those who care about a small state too – but that’s one of the oddities of the times we live in: many of those who say that they believe in the smallest state possible make an exception when it comes to women’s reproductive systems. And, of course, anything to do with LGBT people.

The ideology of such people is remarkably selective.

Mind, as of 2012 – perhaps lawmakers have subsequently seen sense – oral sex was illegal in Indiana.

In Washington DC, anything other than the missionary position is strictly verboten.

Sex toys are illegal in Alabama.

In San Antonio, Texas, it’s illegal to flirt.

It is illegal in Bakersfield, California, to have sex with Satan without a condom. If only I’d known.

And so on. There are plenty more where those came from.

So when you look at those examples of controlling, interfering laws, perhaps it’s hardly a shock that some states are targeting a women’s right to control her own body. And indeed, there are a few that are now prosecuting women for having a miscarriage.

But there really are times when the state should butt in (so to speak).

A report from the NSPCC a couple of days ago revealed the scale of the problem of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a practise that’s exclusive to any one religion, but crosses the divide. In Somalia, for instance, it’s to be found in Christian, Islamic and animist communities. In other words, it’s cultural in the widest sense of the word, not simply in terms of a single religion.

But although the NSPCC stressed that the youngest victim who has been treated by the NHS in the last two years was seven, and although various agencies warn of the scale of girls who are at risk, little seems to be being done in terms of using the weight of the law to prosecute families where it is uncovered.

Personally, I don’t buy into the argument that such things can simply be out down to ‘the patriarchy’. If a woman, who has suffered FGM herself, and knows therefore what it does, still decides to inflict it on her own daughter, then the prime responsibility is hers.

If it hasn’t happened to the mother, there’s even less of a mitigating argument.

And that is particularly true for women living in the West. If it isn’t, that means we have ghettos where nothing breaks in. But that’s a different problem.

Personally, I don’t think that any parent should be able to simply lop of a child’s foreskin either. If your god wants it as a mark of faithfulness, then wait until the child is a man and can make his own decision.

Anything else is simply about parental faith and is a symbolic version of child sacrifice.

These things are irreversible. There is rarely ever a sound medical reason for male genital mutilation and while it doesn’t have the same medical ramifications as FGM, there is evidence that it reduces male pleasure.

And here we hit the nub.

It’s that thorny old issue of sex – and pleasure.

In particular, in most of this, it’s about controlling female sexual pleasure – and ‘urges’. In the 21st century, it seems that some people don’t even comprehend that hormones create desire – not genitalia.

Indeed, here, an Egyptian Islamic cleric argues that’s it’s for controlling women’s “sex common sense”.

Mind, it’s worth remembering that FGM continued in the US well into the 20th century in order to control the dread evil of masturbation. So we should abe wary of thinking ourselves so far advanced of some other societies.

But it’s not far removed form the obsessive desire to ban pornography either. And all the ranting and raving, and all the claims of ‘cultural violence’, do not change one simple fact: not a single, solitary piece of serious research has ever been found a link between porn and violence –  predominantly by men toward women and children.

And people have been looking for that link for years – just as they have been looking to prove a link between violent entertainment and violence in real life.

Yet now, in the UK, we have legislators who are seriously coming up with propositions that would make it illegal to mention legal activities in print. Or even a private email. No matter how consensual. Fisting is just one. Bondage is another. I could potentially be breaking the law by evening mentioning those unmentionables.

To read more on this, follow lawyer Myles Jackman on Twitter and his blog. His most recent posts should be mandatory reading for any would-be censor.

Yet research done with serial sex offenders does tend to suggest a link between a sexually repressive background, with no outlets, and offending.

Statistics from the UN tend to suggest that the more liberal a country is in its attitudes to sex, sexuality and the sex industry, the lower the rates of rape and sexual abuse.

These are notoriously difficult stats, since cultures in countries such as Saudi Arabia make it very difficult, if not pretty much impossible, for a woman to report rape – not least since she stands the risk of being punished herself.

And also because, in places such as Scandinavia, not only is the opposite true, but the bar for what constitutes rape is set much lower.

Much of the point here is that the West should not be complacent – but nor should it fall into a trap of intellectual sloppiness, and start adopting what are, in essence, the attitudes of reaction.

If there are cases of FGM, we should deal with them with the full force of the law. We should not run around, flapping our hands in the air and worrying about upsetting someone’s cultural sensitivities. It’s abuse, pure and simple.

But neither we should not fall for the argument of social conservatives worldwide that sexual pleasure is bad and should be stamped out, whether in terms of a woman’s right for her clitoris to remain intact or for men and/or women to make and view pornography that is consensually produced.

In the case of the former, as stated, it’s a straightforward issue of abuse. In the latter, we’re back to some people trying to control the behaviour of others on the basis of, at best, an absence of substance.

If we don’t think it acceptable for the judicial system to bang someone up because they ‘think’ they might have done something, we shouldn’t fall into a trap of calling for a ban on something just because we ‘think’ it’s bad.

If I don’t buy into the easy idea of blaming ‘the patriarchy’ for everything, I equally do not buy into promoting a culture of victimhood among women. And to constantly assert that women do things only because men tell them is actually the most patronising (matronising?) thing imaginable.

It also pongs of an elitism: that ‘I know better than you and I know the best for you’.

And ultimately, people who might see themselves as progressive actually add to the argument of social conservatives who would really like to turn back the tide and keep women ‘in their place’, as homemakers and breeding machines.

Be very aware of whose side you’re on. It can – or it should – be rather telling.

But let’s wind up by returning to abortion.

If a woman can be coerced into making porn, and if that’s the prime reason for banning it (since there is no evidence of it causing harm) then a woman can be coerced into having an abortion, so perhaps that should be banned too?

The truth is, we should stop treating women as malleable beings who cannot be trusted to make the ‘correct’ decision for themselves and are always and utterly the victims of men – unless they’re in that self-selecting band of the truly ‘liberated’.

If a woman is capable of making such as major a choice as abortion – and research shows that women do not take such a choice lightly – than women are capable of deciding whether to watch or appear in or produce or write pornographic material. And women are capable of making a choice not to have their daughters (or their sons) mutilated.

Either women as a whole are capable of taking responsibility for their reproductive and sexual lives – or they are not.

Anything else is disingenuous nonsense.

Note:

A day or so ago, the BBC published a quite interesting article on porn.

Farewell Ratzi and thanks for all the bigotry

Thomas Mann – damned by the Pope.

Isn’t identity a funny thing? Okay, let me try to be clearer: isn’t how we choose to identify ourselves a funny thing – what labels we decide fit us; what tribes we decide we belong to?

To be honest, I’m not personally a big fan of identity politics – or, indeed, of labels in general. So often it seems simply to point up what divides us rather than what unites us.

So it was not uppermost in my mind to consider penning something around February being LGBT History Month.

But then something happened that made me change my mind.

The Pope decided to retire.

That’s right: because Joseph Ratzinger has called it a day, I decided to pick up the LGBT baton for a post.

Many of us might prefer that no religious leader have any meaningful power in the 21^st century world, but whether we like it or not, that is not the case, and the office of pope still commands a great deal of clout and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Before his own elevation, Ratzinger had previously been grand inquisitor for John Paul II: when Karol Wojtyła was getting a tad past it, it was undoubtedly Ratzi who was really pulling the strings, so he’s had power for rather longer than simply his ascension to the top job in 2005.

Now, number one point to make: beating Ratzinger up because he was a member of the Hitler Youth is just plain daft. You don’t have a to be a fascist sympathiser to comprehend that children, at that time, would have had little safe choice in the matter.

So that isn’t going to be this blog’s complaint.

The problem with Ratzinger is that he has used his office to push lines that are sexist and homophobic.

Clare Balding – damned by the Pope.

His rhetoric about how those dodgy gays will essentially kill off civilisation cannot simply be taken as the rantings of an elderly person – not least because he/the office has the authority mentioned earlier.

And whether the Pope realised or intended it or not, his pronouncements have lent a veneer of legitimacy to those who would discriminate against LGBT people – and even do violence toward them.

His stand against contraception in general – and, in particular, the use of condoms as a method of safe sex – has been detrimental to the fights against poverty and against HIV/Aids.

He would rather a married couple produce far more brats than they can care for than that they use contraception. He wants every act of sexual intimacy to be heterosexual, monogamous, married and with getting the bird up the duff in mind.

He would rather that people died of Aids-related conditions than that they use condoms.

This is also an individual who has played a role in the protection of child abusers by his organisation.

Jodie Foster – damned by the Pope.

But then again, this he has also headed an organisation that believes that the victim of rape, even if a nine-year-old child, should not be allowed an abortion if made pregnant by her abuser.

It is an organisation that does not value women, but would rather a woman die than have the abortion that could save her life. The realised human being is worth less, in Catholic orthodoxy, than the potential of her producing a (male) child.

These are the attitudes that Herr Ratzinger has chosen to uphold in the name of a belief in something for which there is not a solitary shred of evidence.

Thus his faith cannot be viewed as somehow ‘cute’ or ‘quirky’, but for what it is: a stick with which to beat many, many other human beings whose lives and whose intrinsic being is different to what he wants it to be.

Let's also be quite clear: there really is not much difference between the likes of Ratzinger and the likes of the Taliban: and yet we (rightly) condemn one, but allow the other great respect and clout.

There’s something very wrong with that; very wrong indeed.

Oscar Wilde – damned by the Pope.

And it is worth noting that it is far from certain that the cardinals will elect a new pontiff with more 'liberal' credentials. Ratzinger is not the first 'traditionalist' to occupy the role of pope, and he is highly unlikely to be the last. In other words, his reactionary attitudes are far from unique.

I hope that Ratzinger has a peaceful retirement. There would be something rather pointless and sad about wishing him, as an individual, ill. But he is most certainly NOT some sort of saint. And the organisation that he has spent a lifetime promoting and defending is, frankly, immoral and corrupt and well past its sell-by date.

Now, since I have mentioned LGBT History Month, let's be a little more positive. Here are a few of my own household gods – who just happen to be or have been part of the community of which I myself am also a member. They're not my only "household gods", and they are not "household gods" because of their sexuality, although it is not hindered by the sense of connection that flows from that.

And perhaps, in that, I have just countered my own arguments against identity politics.

Remember: every one of these extraordinary people would be damned by the man who is just about to retire, and by his organisation. And yet he and it would almost certainly applaud Tony Blair.

Alan Turning – damned by the Pope.

Alan Turing – massively instrumental in the defeat of fascism and in the development of modern computer science, but effectively driven to his death afterwards simply because he was gay.

Thomas Mann – one of the greatest authors ever; a principled and humane giant.

Virginia Woolf – wonderful, wonderful writer, and hugely innovative. If you haven't done so already, do read Mrs Dalloway.

Quentin Crisp – England’s real queen.

Oscar Wilde – greatest wit ever? And yet one of my favourite quotes of all time is more poignant than Wilde’s reputation would lead one to expect: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

Stephen Sondheim – what a god of the musical theatre. Forget Andrew Lloyd Whatever He's Called.

The Pope.

Clare Balding – breaks down barriers all over the place, not least by being a ‘posh bird’ introducing Rugby League for the BBC. In line for national treasure status – and it will be utterly deserved.

Alan Bennett – just a wonderful writer; such a great ability to understand human beings and the smallnesses of their lives.

Nigel Slater – quite simply the best food writer that this country has produced since Elizabeth David. Nobody else, currently writing, has anything close to his sense of food and time and place and memory.

Jodie Foster – a wonderful screen actor, and has managed an amazing career without getting caught into all the crass celeb gossip etc.

Gore Vidal – oh how we miss him; an intellectual giant and iconoclast.

50 shades – of female sexuality

One of the more amusing topics to have arisen in the UK in recent weeks is the extraordinary success of EL James's 50 Shades trilogy.

It tells the story of the developing relationship between Anastasia, a young graduate, and Christian, a rather rich businessman with a predilection for a spot of S&M.

Well, actually quite a lot of S&M.

It has become, as everyone knows, the fastest-selling paperback to date, with record numbers sold for ereaders.

But while books have sold vast amounts before - and even to unexpected audiences (think Harry Potter and adult sales), James's success seems to have sparked another entire sub-industry – that of asking: 'why?' and 'what does it mean?'

One commentator (tearing their hair out for the Independent, if memory serves me correctly) suggested that it means the end of civilisation as we know it.

Okay - they didn't. I exaggerate. But only a bit. They actually suggested that it was the end of Real Literature.

Which is extraordinary, because if Dan Brown hasn’t managed that ...

What it means, in essence, is very simple:

• People - and this includes women - like rude stories. They like sex, and not just actually the business of having it.

• Electronic devices such as Kindles make it easier to buy books, so probably making it easier to buy (and read) titles that you might not otherwise buy out of embarrassment.

• There has been so much talk about the trilogy that many people will have bought the first book (or more) because of word of mouth.

That's what we can say with a fairly high level of certainty.

Personally, I’m so culturally backward that it was only a few weeks ago that I first really became aware of it.

So far, I haven’t been tempted to buy. Indeed, from what I’ve seen and heard, it’s badly written and the S&M aspect seems to be have been penned by somebody with little actual real-time knowledge.

Plastic ties are NOT a good idea for bondage. Seriously. Without wishing to sound as though I’m importing ’lf ‘n’ safety into the world of kink (truth is, perves are very safety conscious), they could cut off the blood supply badly.

Which does rather make you wonder why the book isn’t being prosecuted by the CPS under the Possession of extreme pornography law, really, since that is dependent, in part at least, on the issue of more than transitory physical harm.

Indeed, it’s one of the quirks of timing that this publishing phenomenon comes as the same time as #PornTrial, and it reinforces the idea, gained from the speed and clarity of the jury's decision in that case, that the CPS is out of kilter with attitudes at large.

But that aside – stick to ropes and silk scarves, or fluffy handcuffs.

Anyway, the success of the books does, as I mentioned earlier, suggest that lots of women like some pretty hardcore fantasies, including ones of submission.

It’s no wonder there’s handwringing going on – although this is hardly new.

When it emerged that the real writer of Story of O really was Dominique Aury (née Anne Desclos; pen name Pauline Réage), there was a similar sort of handwringing.

Although it came with bells on, since copies of the book were apparently burned on US campuses in the 1980s by some feminists.

Burning books has never struck me as a particularly progressive approach.

So perhaps we should not be surprised that 50 Shades has caused a furoré.

What James has done, yet again, is to raise the spectre of female sexuality neither being Madonna-like or quite as dominant as some feminists appear to demand and expect.

In other words, female sexuality does not fit into any of the narrow templates that some people would like. Who’d a thunk that, eh?

There are other, related, deeply irritating – and revealing – issues that 50 Shades has brought to the surface.

For instance, the 'mummy porn' tag is a snide and essentially ageist comment on female sexuality.

But then again, only a coupleweeks ago, writing in the Daily Telegraph after the death of Irish author Maeve Binchy, author Amanda Craig asked whether Binchy would have been 'deeper' as a writer if she'd actually managed to pop some brats out of her vagina. (Story)

I can’t answer for anyone else, but I knew who Binchy was. I had to Google Craig.

And it should tell people something that the old Pope would love such sentiments: the deification of motherhood and, with it, the implication that a woman who is not a mother is not a real or really fulfilled woman.

Indeed, when Joseph Ratzinger was, in effect, still Inquisitor to his predecessor, one of John Paul II’s last encyclicals was to say that, even women who wouldn’t or couldn’t have children had value. Which was nice of him.

Even today, the London Evening Standard has published a ‘report’ about the murder of businesswoman Carole Waugh, in which it uses speculation that she might have had a double life as an ‘escort’, to describe her as “a fantasist”, in a way that hints that she only had herself to blame.

But that’s the way with women and sex, isn’t it?

It is extraordinary that, in the 21^st century, so many people – male and female – still seem so bothered by any indication of female sexuality that is seen to step outside certain boundaries.

If EL James has upset a few of these limiting voices, then good for her.

Finally, a little ‘admission’. Some years ago, for various reasons that I’m not going to bore you with, I penned some decidedly pornographic short stories.

One was published in Forum (not for free – don’t worry), while 10 more were picked up by a publisher in Germany, translated, and are still available in a second edition.

My parents were so shocked that the matter was brushed under the carpet with a haste that was at least as indecent as the stories themselves. Okay – maybe not quite that indecent.

I’ve always refused to refer to them as ‘erotica’, quite simply because that seems a tad disingenuous. They were written to arouse. Apparently they do.

As a friend said at the time: it’s not everybody who gets paid for their wet dreams.

And it was a liberating experience too.

• Article about Dominique Aury