Apologies if this is too personal, but is there anything in your home that turns you on? A sleek standard lamp, say, or a sexy piece of kitchen kit? I’m casting an eye around here and wondering.
I used to have the hots for my furry heated throw when it was sleek and glossy, but it’s so matted and grubby now, it gives me the ick. I still fancy the big kitchen cupboard, though. It is steely blue and so capacious, and its generous spice rack gives me a frisson every time I look inside.
I’m prompted to ask by the release of Wicker, the loopy erotic fable in which Olivia Colman’s fisherwoman enjoys a mutually supportive, sexually satisfying partnership with Alexander Skarsgård, whom the basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) has woven from wicker. I haven’t seen it yet, but the trailer is joyful and the premise is sending people – mostly women – wild. The internet is full of horny comments about Skarsgård who, the fisherwoman’s neighbours gossip, is “strong as a tree and just as hard” (he’s certainly very pleasingly woven; a real statement piece).
I also enjoyed an article in New York magazine, entitled What Would Happen If You Had Sex With a Wicker Dick?, in which an exceptionally game gynaecologist addresses this question with utmost seriousness, tackling splinters, lubrication and condom advisability, while also declaring, disarmingly: “But what do I know about wicker? Nothing.” Unfortunately, I feel obliged to spoil everyone’s fun by wondering: what does it mean? Why has a film whose romantic (erotic) hero is plaited twigs sparked such enthusiasm?
Have we all become basket cases? Because this wicker husband is no outlier: non-human romantic heroes have been wildly popular for a while. At the more human-shaped end of things, romantasy has exploded (there’s wild excitement for romantasy queen Sarah J Maas’s latest), revealing a seemingly infinite appetite for stories about humans getting it on with goblins, elves, minotaurs and mothmen.
Sentient object smut gets even wilder: I took an online quiz, guessing which objects of desire came from a real cultural product and which were made up, and completely flunked. There’s real erotica, I learned, about a front door, coronavirus, a garden rake, a coffee mug and Clippy the Microsoft Word paperclip (which does have very come-hither eyes). So are humans sick of each other – and are women in particular sick of men?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
