You may or may not be surprised to learn that in a recent article in the Guardian, the sexiest scene in literature was identified as coming not from E L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, but from Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

 
It takes a fair bit of imagination to appreciate the erotic content in the Austen scene in question, but perhaps that’s the whole point. It goes like this:“Captain Wentworth, without saying a word, turned to her, and quietly obliged her to be assisted into the carriage. Yes, he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it…”

Obviously the scene was written in a particular era, the early nineteenth century, a time when authors were tightly constrained in terms of what could and could not be written. But readers were adept at reading between the lines in those days – they had to be. They had far nimbler imaginations than ours, here given plenty of room to play with this oblique feather of a hint of sexual intimacy to come.

In our era a solitary feather like this would never suffice. Nothing less than the whole chicken will do, and it had better come with all the trimmings. We are so overfed, in fact, that our imaginations have become bloated to the point of immobility. They lie about on couches, unable to move, demanding to be spoonfed with ever more vulgar explicitness.

I suspect that many contemporary romance writers feel almost compelled to cater to this growing appetite. If their protagonists haven’t had graphically-described sex by page 30, their books are in danger of being left on the shelf.

I believe there is an appetite in human nature that grows and expands in direct proportion to the quantity it is fed. The more the imagination consumes, the harder it is to satisfy. And the only cure for this is to move back in the direction of restraint. In the process readers accustomed to great explicitness might even discover, or rediscover, that there is as much pleasure to be had from a feather as from the whole chicken.