Caitlin Moran embarrasses her daughters

Funny:

“Why do you keep writing books with lots of sex in?” they ask me, as a new release pops up on the schedules. “Why do you keep writing books that start with a teenage girl masturbating, and then go on to describe having sex with a man whose penis is too big, and a subsequent urinary tract infection that feels like the battered genitals ‘are like a castle under siege – with panicking princesses with pointy hats getting jammed in your urethra’? Or a loving yet filthy sex scene that’s six pages long and so graphic that the actor reading it for your audiobook had to have three shots of whisky before they waded into it? Why? Also, Mum, where is my lunchbox, and have you seen my gym kit?”

My name is Caitlin Moran, and I write books with lots of sex in them. My teenage daughters hate it, because of course you don’t want your mum writing books with lots of sex in them. This is an interesting paradox, because I primarily write the sex in my books for teenage girls.

This is because, when I was a teenage girl, sexy books were my main source of sex information, and although there were some great ones – thank you, the blessed text that is Jilly Cooper’s Riders: courtesy of page 32, I’m always gonna find nettles sexy – most of the sex I read about was humourless, unrealistic and frankly alarming to a fat teenage virgin girl, trying to find out about this incredibly important thing that she intended to do as soon as she found a) a nice blouse and b) someone to do it with.

Henry Miller, Ian Fleming, John Updike, Martin Amis, Philip Roth – they all wrote about having sex with powerful, mysterious women with perfect breasts and “nipples like hazelnuts”, in scenes where these demanding, often slightly mad chicks would have to be shagged into submission.

The sex would happen in weird places like “on a boat”, or in Monaco; the women would always be wearing amazing white silk dresses that fell to the floor “like a puddle of cream”, and the narrator would often later discover that the woman had actually had sex because she was trying to get revenge on her husband or kill James Bond, or had rampant daddy issues. No amusing, nice, fat woman ever had sex, in leggings, in Cannock, because she was horny. That never happened. Presumably, that kind of sex didn’t exist.

The result of reading all this was to make me very sexually confused – for starters, I thought I would never be able to have sex until I got a passport, lost four stone and went mad.