Why, one wonders, this sudden interest in sex?  As a woman of a certain age, I already feel I could write an instruction manual. But as I laughed over Cynthia Heimel’s Sex Tips for Girls (1983), I was astonished by her detailed instructions on how to give a blow job.

There’s no casual hopping into bed in a camisole and gym shorts, then shedding layers. Heimel is a diva obsessed with oral sex. It’s as if she suddenly decided to rewrite The Joy of Sex in the middle of her book.  But of course she’s very witty, albeit perhaps too detailed in her instructions.

And so I began thinking about the portrayal of women and sexuality in 20th-century literature, about what worked and what didn’t.

D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is his best-known novel, and that’s a shame: it was far from his best.  But of course it’s very popular, because it was banned in England for the sex scenes till 1960.

It is a novel of sexual unhappiness. Sex is always important to Lawrence, and this is one of the few books where he doesn’t philosophize about it. But the characters are very sad: Lady Constance Chatterley married her husband in 1917; he came back from the war a paraplegic.  There is no sex: Constance is unhappy; he is unhappy, everyone is unhappy.  But then Constance begins an affair with Mellors, the virile gardener, and she and he are ecstatic.  Lawrence is always brilliant, but I must admit the sex scenes are slightly comical, because Mellors refers to their genitals as Lady Jane and John Thomas.  If you’re a Lawrence fan, you should read it; and if you’re not a Lawrence fan, start with something else.

His better banned book, Women in Love, is much more complicated, and one of the main characters, Rupert, philosophizes about sex, but there is also much humor. His girlfriend Ursula tolerates his orations and grounds him. They are the perfect couple.

Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a novel about eight women who graduate from Vassar in 1933,  was a best-seller, and no wonder: it is the perfect beach book. Everyone apologizes for liking this book.  I’m not sure why.  Some of McCarthy’s intellectual friends (she was political, outspoken, and made a lot of enemies) deemed it too commercial.

But is it too commercial?  That’s not how I remember it.  Although I prefer Birds of America, her satiric novel about a young American abroad in the 1960s, The Group is a fascinating portrayal of an earlier generation with fewer choices. In one memorable scene, two women put on fake wedding rings before going to a doctor to be fitted for diaphragms. And, if I remember correctly, the diaphragms zoom around like frisbees as they practice inserting them. Perhaps they were easier to insert by the time I got mine! But the characters in The Group can’t take birth control for granted: if they’re not married, the doctor might refuse to prescribe it.

Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying was a sensation when it was published in 1973. The heroine, Isadora Wing, is afraid of flying , but accompanies her psychiatrist husband to a conference in Germany anyway. She is tired of her marriage, and on the lookout for the “zipless fuck,” as she calls it. (She finds it. )And she finds it again in a couple of sequels, which I actually preferred to Fear of Flying. 

All four of these writers were groundbreaking in their approach to women’s sexuality.