This book's Wikipedia page will gladly inform you that it is the first, proper, big boy, capitalised and italicised, Novel of prose English smut, which I am by no means educated enough to dispute; what is far more interesting to me is the degree of influence it continues to have stylistically. The language of modern, um, "spicy" writing (this is what the customers at the bookshop I moonlight at call it) is fundamentally Cleland's. We trade still in metaphors, oftentimes direct extensions of the imagery Cleland sought to evoke. It remains, today, a 'weapon' at times. While it may no longer be called a 'machine' with any regularity, there is a direct industrial throughline to more commonplace terms like 'package' or 'equipment,' even something like 'rod.' It is not hard to imagine that somewhere in Sarah J. Maas' extended works, a wolf-man wields an 'essential object of enjoyment.' It's easy to mistake these metaphors for some kind of default social understanding of anatomy, but the association had to be made somewhere, and this is that somewhere. The staging of the scenes of pleasure, the dry, almost ambivalent voice of our female protagonist (all the better to imagine oneself as her), these techniques of titillation remain essentially unchanged.

There are, of course, elements that works of this ilk have shed. The attitude towards rape is more than a little flippant. For one, it is portrayed in a romantic light a couple of times, though not always. Sometimes it is equivocated to an insult or rudeness. I found these sections a little hard to stomach, as you might expect. There is also the matter of Cleland's surprisingly even-handed interest in the sexuality of the human body. The majesty of a towering mast is given equal lyrical weight to a 'luscious mouth of nature' topped with 'downy springmoss.' Throughout the length of the novel, I came to question the academic consensus view that Cleland was a closeted homosexual. That view, to my understanding, comes from a couple of places. The reverential descriptions of penises, the female POV, the scene of sex between two men, one of the first of its kind in English; the argument isn't vapour, but I dispute the conclusion. If I were to assert this text as evidence of his sexual proclivities, I see no reason not to assume this author is bisexual, given that it contains passionately drawn scenes between all possible pairings of men and women. Bisexual men don't enjoy penises any less than gay men. I find it odd that this is essentially one of the arguments made in favour of that reading. W/r/t our protagonist's POV, that has, in my opinion, far less to do with Cleland and far more to do with the social roles of men and women in 1700s England, which Cleland projects into the bedroom. The masculine-dominant perspective of >99% of pornography rears its head in Cleland's imagistic depictions of the roles of men and women in intercourse; it's quite striking that this pornographic dogma remains, today, essentially unchanged since Cleland coined it 300 odd years ago. Fanny describes a young man's testicles as a "storebag of nature's prime sweets, which is so pleasingly attached to its conduit pipe from which we receive them." It is this understanding of men as mechanistic 'deliverers' and women as unthinking 'recievers' that snakes its way through the entire history of western pornography to the modern day. I've seen some readings posit this as a vital pre-feminist text wherein Fanny asserts her autonomy and personhood through her sexuality. I can see it. Still, it's hard to square that reading with the fact that, as written, she is entirely defined by her sexual identity, and that sexual identity is defined entirely in terms of subservience to another, whether that be her partner or her employer.