Howard Jacobson: Without a healthy dose of intelligence, sex is just a mechanical process

A bit of rough is a fantasy only in the minds of the well educated

So "new research shows" that intelligence, not beauty, is the key to a better sex life. It doesn't actually, but that's the trouble with new research – it never quite says what the popular press says it says. Shame. My own view is that you have to know what a shocking thing sex is before you can enjoy it fully, and that means you need to have been educated out of thinking it is natural. It is for this reason that I have always argued that sex with a partner who doesn't have a degree from a reputable university is bound to be a let-down. Not because you can't discuss Hobbes and Newton together, but because you can't measure in each other's eyes the inordinate impropriety of what you're doing.

As it turns out, this "new research" from King's College London isn't about inordinacy in my sense at all. By a better sex life it has in mind nothing more adventurous than frequency of orgasm. There's something dismally mechanical about this measure of a good time, not least as an orgasm is so often the end of one. There you were, enjoying being outraged by your soul's resorting to the body,and now you're not. Over. Finished. You can of course always repeat whatever it was that's just worked. But that it is to pile the mechanical upon the mechanical. Desperately sought for when inaccessible, an automatic recourse when not, the orgasm will become a tyrant if you let it.

It is for this reason that some voluptuaries practise a form of sex in which orgasms are strictly forbidden. Carezza, it is called, not to be confused with a well-known brand of espresso coffee maker. Otherwise, coitus prolongatus. The fact that they prolong their pleasures in a foreign language only proves my earlier point. In sex, schooling is everything.

It stands to reason that a bit of rough, for example, is a fantasy only in the minds of the well educated. A bit of rough cannot be a fantasy in the mind of a bit of rough. Lady Chatterley's lover aped the demotic of the gamekeeper but was in reality well read. And Connie Chatterley herself was a person of refined culture. A woman I once knew would ask her lovers to play the tiger in bed. Not just scratch and bite but make tiger noises. Aaagh! Grrrr! Not me: she knew a non-tiger when she saw one. But that this preference for the feral was associated with her having a PhD in William Blake only a fool would doubt.

Again, by "intelligence" the research does not mean what the popular press, in its excitement over the story, has been portraying – women in spectacles chewing a pencil and looking up knowingly from a Penguin classic. The pencil I understand, but why the spectacles? Is the supposition that intelligence makes you short-sighted? Or that too many orgasms make you blind? They have it wrong, anyway. It is EI, not IQ, that the King's College project is addressing: Emotional Intelligence. In my Cambridge days we called it "intelligence about life". D H Lawrence again, filtered through F R Leavis. There was an algebraic formula for it. DHL + FRL = EI.

You have to be careful, though. Too much EI of the intuitive, empathetic kind can be the end of sex. You need a peppering of confrontation. A little hellish hostility can work wonders. Maybe not the whole Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? package, but a sniff of it. And to manage that you must know who Virginia Woolf is. So yes, intelligence, but intelligence with spikes. Ironic, eyeball to eyeball intelligence without which sex as a pleasure, not a function, isn't worth a candle.

That I am gearing up to approach the issue of Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning West Indian poet who has just withdrawn his candidacy for the Oxford Poetry Professorship, should by now be plain. I have nothing to say about the politics of the appointment. May the best woman or man win. But I have thoughts about the smear campaign which has forced his withdrawal. That is to say I have thoughts about the smear itself, which depicts Walcott as a sexual pest who in the past forced himself on students. In one published account that has resurfaced during this election – The Lecherous Professor – the details of a sexual harassment charge made against him by a Harvard student in 1982 are laid out.

Do I know if the charge is true? No. Do I blame or exonerate him? Neither. But if the charge was proven, Harvard of all places would surely have disciplined him, and if not, not. And there the matter should have ended. Anything further feels like a vendetta. And a vendetta of a sort I have come across before in universities where women, shielded by anonymity, and frequently relying on no more than sexual hearsay, seek to ruin a man's reputation by passing bits of paper around.

I am not going to invite the wrath of women who have suffered at the hands of pestiferous professors by arguing that there can be a fine line between encouragement and harassment in the classroom. I have finally come to accept that whatever the temptations of confidently beautiful students with challenging intelligences it behoves a professor to resist them. Relations between academics and students in the 1960s and 1970s were expected to be close. Not to have an affair with your professor counted against a woman student almost as much as it counted against a professor not to sleep with his class. In the humanities in particular this was how knowledge was transmitted. Think Eloïse and Abélard, only without the castration. For many students it was how an academic career was made, whether you were given a plum overseas scholarship because your professor loved you, or because he wanted you out of the way. But for others it was how hearts were broken and prospects blighted.

Much good came from these affairs, educationally, and without doubt much pleasure – just think of all those spectacles coming off – but in the end there was too much damage. And by the sanctimonious 1980s, universities knew it. If Walcott was still living in the 1960s in 1982, then his chief sin was to be an anachronism.

Maybe poets shouldn't teach. Let a poet loose on the world rather than a university and everything is allowed him. Don't we positively require our poets to be unbridled? Marlowe? Donne? Byron? Oscar Wilde? Dylan Thomas? Take sex out of poetry and what's left? The same as when you take intelligence out of sex. Not a lot.