The New Zealand Young Writers Festival celebrates the role literature has in shaping us into adults. Ōtautahi writer Claudia Jardine is looking forward to exploring the prompt, "Should I Have Read That?", alongside a panel of other writers next Saturday.
The event immediately caught my eye because of its reference to Jean M. Auel’s raunchy epic book series Earth’s Children. Like me, Claudia spent much of her tweenhood immersed in the life of Ayla, an orphan raised by Neanderthals who eventually gets expelled from the clan, spends a bit of time living with her pet lion and inventing sports bras, before a tall, brooding fellow Homo sapiens, "enters her cave", wink wink. Yep, the rest of the series is essentially Palaeolithic soft porn. At age 12, I couldn’t get enough of it.
I was starting to think that those niche books from the ’80s were just a figment of my prepubescent imagination. When I called her, Claudia laughed and assured me that "no, those books are very much real". The series had an enduring influence on her expectations of sex in her adult life. Nestled among layers of smut, Clan of the Cave Bear is inherently feminist, Claudia says.
The sex, referred to elusively as "pleasures", was described in flowery and old-fashioned detail and was concerned with Ayla’s experience as much as her partner’s. The couple enjoyed pages and pages of pleasures, and I was finally let into the thing most people didn’t want to tell me about.
"It gave me the impression that sex was something to be enjoyed," Claudia says.
Literature has a role in preparing children for what’s to come when they enter adulthood. As uncomfortable as it is, sex is part of that future.
Claudia sometimes hears people say "but you don’t want to traumatise kids by teaching them about sex!" That sentiment assumes that sex is traumatic, she responds.
As the age-old hysteria over sex education ebbs and flows — including the flurry of discourse last month around National Party deputy leader Nicola Willis’ statements on sex education: "a job for me and my husband to do" — Claudia and I agree that it’s not something to be afraid of. From cooking to driving to gardening, we read about the facts of life from an early age. Why do we feel so weird about throwing sex in the mix?
"It conditions us to feel shame about it," Claudia says. And shame, we both agree, is isolating and dangerous.
The question the event poses seems to have been answered by the end of our conversation, reminiscing about prodigious manhoods and pulsing loins. Should I have read that? Absolutely.
The session
- Should I Have Read That? Saturday, September 23, 8pm-9pm @ Te Whare o Rukutia.
- Inspired by Jean M. Auel’s epic Cro-Magnon softcore erotica series Earth’s Children, six writers share the moment they realised they were "reading beyond their age". Featuring innuendos, throbbing manhoods and ... Digimon? Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku), Sam Brooks (he/him), Eamonn Tee (Vaka Puaikura, Pākehā), festival curator Jennifer Cheuk and Ōtepoti theatremaker Bronwyn Wallace will be your confessors for the evening, alongside event curator and Clan of the Cave Bear acolyte Claudia Jardine (she/her) as MC.
- The NZ Young Writers Festival runs from September 21-24. Events are free.
- Programme at youngwritersfest.nz/
