Naughty but ever so nice

Once it seemed so simple. Representations of sex in literature and art were, we learnt, regrettable but just-about-allowable constituents in a larger enterprise. They were tolerated as flavours in a dish, provided they didn't threaten to overwhelm the other flavours. A sex scene in a movie was incidental to the plot; a nude in a Rubens landscape was part of a beautiful composition – even if she was, as EM Forster's tourist ladies in Italian art galleries would say, "a pity" for having been painted with nothing on.

Thirty or 40 years ago, one understood these rules. And so books and visual displays that concentrated too hard on sex, on naked flesh, desire, breasts, bottoms, genitalia and rumpy-pumpy were completely beyond the pale of decency. To go to see a movie explicitly about sex, or devoted to its depiction, was evidence of a beastly mind and a sordid disposition; it meant you were probably not a chap to trust to be alone with one's younger sister (or brother.) To read a book considered to be "gratuitously" (a word that reverberated through my childhood) concerned with sex, such as Lady Chatterley's Lover or Portnoy's Complaint – and especially to do so on public transport – was to lay oneself open to disapproval.

Related articles

• More Love & Sex articles

It was rude to look. It was rude to be overly interested in other people's sex lives. It was indecent to watch actors doing things to each other on screen. This is what we learnt from our parents, who were on constant watch, in the late 1960s, for evidence of filth. My mother would extract a copy of Photoplay from my school satchel and brandish it before me as evidence that I was lost to sinful thoughts of sex, and was destined for hell. I'd argue in vain that it was a movie-fan magazine, and that the girls in bikinis on pages 62-67 were shortly to appear in Thunderball. On trips to Soho, we furtively eyeballed the smut cinemas – Jacey's in the Strand, the Excelsior – which ran an exclusive diet of soft-porn movies, with titles like Come Play With Me. We hurried past the unimaginable fleshy delights offered by Raymond's Revuebar, the most famous strip club in England. The idea of actually going in, paying the girl and taking a seat, as if visiting the Albert Hall, was simply off the scale of possible experiences.

Screen sex was on display for the first time, a harbinger of a whole cultural revolution that the Sixties would foment. But we couldn't shake off the feeling that it was bad for us – just plain bad and wrong – to look at the unbuttonings and fondlings and penetrations. Nice people didn't indulge at all. Married people confined sex to their divan bed from Slumberland. One didn't externalise sex, leaf through pages of it, gaze at pictures of it, feast on screen images of it. One was not a chronic, shaky-handed onanist. Not publicly anyway...

Today, things are vastly different. We are far more likely than ever before to talk about sex in public, to discuss Max Mosley's taste for being thrashed by five women in an underground cellar, and to attend "Seduction", an exhibition of strongly erotic images at the Barbican. On Channel Four's The Sex Education Show, the studio audience noisily discusses the correct use of condoms and the ins and outs, as it were, of shaving your pubes. A Sunday newspaper's Style section features Peaches Geldof and her young associates taking part in a sadomasochistic fantasy.

The argument about whether sex should be represented on screen has long been lost, with the release of Intimacy, Baise-Moi, 9 Songs and other movies showing real, live-action verité shagging by the actors. We would queue for hours to ogle Nicole Kidman, were she ever to return to pose in her knickers in The Blue Room at the Donmar Warehouse, the role dubbed "pure theatrical Viagra" by Charles Spencer.

The Ann Summers chain of erotic clothing has gone mainstream, to be joined in a saucy-undergarment war by the more up-market Agent Provocateur (where, should you be in the mood, you can buy waitress aprons and sex toys), the luxurious Myla store (black silk blindfold with long luxuriant straps, £39) and the immensely stylish Coco de Mer (diamante whip, £165). Why, you can't even visit the Chelsea Flower Show without tripping over a few dozen naked girls, expertly sculpted in bronze resin, displaying their pink rumps in the shrubbery.

We have embraced the whole business of sexual display, sexual behaviour and sexual depiction as if our lives depended on it. Erotica, a word once used to mean simply erotic literature or art, has come to mean anything pertaining to the arousal of sexual desire – and gosh, how obsessed we are. The annual Erotica exhibition at Olympia pulls in nearly 70,000 guests every year, some of them from the sex industry, but the vast majority from what's called "passing trade," all of them inspecting with the liveliest interest a range of S&M whips, rubber leotards, dominatrix boots, nipple rings, butt plugs, fisting slings, urethra dilators and chain-mail codpieces as unembarrassedly as if walking through a B&Q warehouse in search of a better toolkit.

I've covered two or three Erotica events, purely in a spirit of journalistic enquiry, and have always been pleased by the way they bring out the ridiculous side of human sex transactions. It's not just the dressing-up, although there's something a little farcical about the elderly Scottish lady in her Doris Day wig and her black-lace maid's outfit, or the bearded and bleary-eyed transsexual, Ricky Tomlinson to the life, in his headmistress wig and pinstriped skirt. It's the terribly human humdrum-ness and eccentricity which people bring even to their perversity. Like the client of a bondage equipment firm, who wrote to ask whether they could make his bondage stool more comfortable (eh?). Or the boss of The Wildcat Collection, which makes silver and chrome objects for poking inside yourself, who told me: "The people who buy the really big insertables tend to call into our Brighton shop first thing on Monday morning after spending the weekend getting their courage up."

He explained that, no matter how unfeasibly large they make dildoes, all of them – even the ridiculous ones, made purely for show – get snapped up for private use. "People sometimes ask, 'Haven't you got a bigger one?' and I say, 'There's a pillar box outside if you wanna give that a go'."

We aren't all, of course, indulging in these curious games, but you can't say it's just a pervy fraction of the population who are. The erotica extremists seem to come from all socio-economic classes, age groups and points of the compass. They're very ordinary people for whom the monitoring of their sexual feelings is a major pre-occupation, and who can derive a real charge of excitement from a Whipping Bolster or an "adult babywear" romper suit.

You could approve of all this polymorphous perversity, as a sign of unfettered liberation from guilt and shame. Or you could disapprove, on the grounds that such hardcore fascination with physical contact has little to do with human feelings or tender relationships, apart from making some people enjoy sex more. It certainly seems a far cry from the days when eroticism was a harmless vice indulged in by rural deans and retired judges: it involved merely a collection of saucy, gauze-covered prints of maidservants with crimson nipples being tumbled in a hay wain by lusty youths with bulging cocks. It wasn't pornography, of course, because it was art: those little daguerreotypes of girl-on-girl embraces in the 1880s, or those French drawings of preening grandees toying with wardrobe-malfunctioning Fifis.

Yet traces of the spirit of the rural dean survive in The Erotic Review, a monthly magazine published from a basement in west London, just round the corner from the Olympia Erotica exhibition centre. Its owner, Jamie Maclean, used to run a London gallery behind Sotheby's until one day he put on an exhibition of themed erotic art called Forbidden Images. Its wild success persuaded him to start the Erotic Print Society, publishing books of photos and illustrations. When the journalist Rowan Pelling joined, and edited the EPS newsletter with her characteristic sass and cheek, Maclean turned it into the Erotic Review. Both the magazine and Ms Pelling became hot properties among the capital's trendy scribes, subscriptions shot up, and a stream of big-name contributors visited the office, where the staff often disported themselves in basques and suspenders. It was all very exhilarating and fun, this combination of middle-class filth and Sloaney girls talking dirty. But they ran out of money, the magazine was sold and the fun abruptly stopped.

Maclean launched a second journal, Sex, in February 2006. It carried lots of titillatory prose and sober pieces about cars or food fetishism, along with charming drawings and a very rude strip-cartoon – and now it's mutated into the Erotic Review again.

"We bring out roughly 10 erotic books a year," said Maclean. "I'm constantly surprised by what people like and don't like." His best sellers tend to be full-colour-photograph sex-instruction books. The alarmingly-titled Master Class: Anal Sex is a big hit – but then, as he says, "books on bottoms are always very popular with the British". He regrets that the market is very different from when he started "What's changed in the last 10 years is that the internet has mostly provided people's visual erotica. Their erotic charge has come from sitting in front of a computer screen. Or a mobile." His voice was heavy with disgust. "It has a lot to answer for in shrinking our business. We don't try to compete with them." He has watched all kinds of trends and fashions come and go in the sexy-art universe. "I think people are weary now of the fetish scene, and it's blighted the careers of some potentially great photographers. Then after the fetish bandwagon came the burlesque boom. God knows what's going to be next."

Maclean refuses, however, to bow completely to market pressures that venerate the glossily explicit over the pictorial. He's an old-fashioned guy when it comes to depicting sex. His company is about to publish Master Class: Understanding Shunga – a Guide to Japanese Erotic Art, a work which, by comparison with the rest of his output, is a masterpiece of restraint. It explores Japanese boudoir and geisha culture from Hokusai to Manga comics, and its beautiful illustrations feature a thousand variations on a basic image: of two figures snuggled together in bed under voluminous bedclothes, with only a drawn-aside sheet allowing the prurient viewer to see what they're up to.

There's a sweet, don't-peek quality about the collection that harks right back to the days of cigar-room erotica, when you had to squint hard to see who was rogering whom – before erotica became, not an "adult lifestyle choice", but a light-hearted appreciation of sex as both sublime and ludicrous, animal and spiritual, brilliantly rude and amazingly tender – a crazy amalgam of opposites, of which its enthusiastic exponents never tire.