Nor does it seem to me plausible to think of D. H. Lawrence as a ringleader for phallic domination. He and his wife, Frieda, had a tempestuous relationship that contained a lot of physical fighting. But to see Lawrence as the alpha male and the bully wouldn’t be entirely accurate or just. He often sought to verbally humiliate his wife and he was unable to control his temper, but then Frieda was often unfaithful to him, whilst he remained completely loyal to her; he was the domestic one, while she preferred to be looked after, and Katherine Mansfield, an unwilling witness to one of their major disagreements recorded how, once the operatic argument had passed “he was running about taking up her breakfast to her bed and trimming her a hat.”

They were, in other words, a perfectly ordinary couple, having a relationship that, like most relationships, could not possibly be explained or justified to the outside observer. We could also plead for a little historical understanding here, and see Lawrence as the man of his times he could not help but be. He was no clairvoyant, able to write books with attitudes that would anticipate the political climate fifty years or a hundred years later. He could only be a flawed human being, wishing men and women could sort themselves out in the maelstrom that is sex and make each other a bit happier.

But this is the nature of literature; it says things it shouldn’t, in order to rattle the bars and alarm the sacred cows. We should be wary of the stories that only say what we want to hear.

When we look back at books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Madame Bovary, they seem completely tame compared to modern standards. The books I was reading for my research project blew them out of the water. Graphic sex was only the beginning of it; there were sadomasochistic scenes, novels about paedophiles and of course, men and dogs. But none of them were suggesting to me, personally, that I should rush out and commit such acts. And much as I had a few university degrees under my belt, I didn’t think they exempted me from reacting like an average human being. I was horrified by that scene in Bernard Noël’s book, because he intended me to be. He wanted me to finish reading it so nauseated and reeling and angry that I was ready to question all relations of dominance and submission. He succeeded. And dreadful as the book was, the great thing about a book is that no actual dogs were harmed in the making of it. It was asking me to examine my fantasies and my prejudices, and I felt compelled to do so.

The books I read spoke about the alienation between men and women that sex used to bridge, but now could not, given how shame and mistrust and confusion over political correctness had entered into sex itself. They spoke about the way that our consumer culture markets sex as one of its prize commodities, and sells an experience to people that dominates their sense of what ought to happen them, and they spoke about the way that children are sexualised too in order to power a youthful consumer culture. They spoke all kinds of things that I did not like hearing, about the way that uncomfortable fantasies still invade the space between lovers, because sex is the place where we are least in control of ourselves, and often unable to react or behave as we would wish. They said much that was ugly and disquieting and offensive.

But this is the nature of literature; it says things it shouldn’t, in order to rattle the bars and alarm the sacred cows. We should be wary of the stories that only say what we want to hear.