Some things really make you feel old, and how you initially found out about the mechanics of sex is chief among them. If you’re under 20 and don’t live in a cave, we can safely assume that the internet was your first port of call as a teenager. If you’re under 30, television and the advent of relatively explicit weekly magazines probably helped you along.

But if you’re 40 or over, had a sheltered upbringing, and read magazines such as Bunty or Jackie — more ponies and macramé than “position of the week” — then the story is quite different. Chances are you educated yourself by leafing through books, any books, hunting desperately for the enlightening parts, and then sharing them with your girlfriends.

I spent the earlier part of this year compiling an anthology of the kind of stuff my friends and I passed round furtively at my all-girls’ school — the “dirty bits”, which became more dog-eared with each breathless reading. Some of the books had, in their time, been banned, or burnt, or both — Lady Chatterley’s Lover being a prime example. Twenty-five years ago we still thought those books were wildly exciting, and that we were wildly exciting too for familiarising ourselves with them.

Today, rather sadly to my mind, any young person wishing to educate themselves about sex has access to an unimaginably vast amount of freakishly hardcore stuff at the click of a mouse. It takes them seconds. It took us years. But what fun we had along the way! Our sentimental education was gentler, funnier, and also pleasingly collective, in that we read the books individually but discussed them together for hours afterwards — which seems a more agreeable and healthier way of informing oneself than sitting, all alone, by the flickering glare of a computer screen.

Possibly young women now pass websites on to each other, in the way that we passed around Anaïs Nin, but the whole process seems to lack innocence, or the sense of sisterhood we enjoyed. And it’s hard to see where the sisterhood is now, given that the majority of porn involves women being degraded in one way or another. I sometimes think back rather dreamily to all those softcore magazines of topless, cheerful-looking women reclining on haystacks. Softcore doesn’t exist any more: it would be laughed out of town.

Besides, the books we read told a whole other story than the freak-show websites frequented by the scarily young (the internet isn’t exactly overflowing with images of two attractive people doing it on a bed and looking pleased about it). There was a plot. There were developed characters. There was wit, and romance too — Mr Darcy or his equivalent doesn’t exist online.

There was mystery — we were told, not shown — and the whole process involved more imagination than today’s teenagers would probably know what to do with. There was even a bit of feminist rhetoric thrown in, if you read — and we did — Erica Jong, and a lesson or two about literary fiction.

Sometimes an amazing thing happened: you’d find the dirty bit, but it was so interestingly and compellingly written that you’d flick back to page one, and start reading the book properly. This is how I first came across Philip Roth: the dirty bits in Portnoy’s Complaint were rewardingly filthy, but also so engaging and funny that even my feeble teenage one-track mind was impressed, and went back to the beginning.

And of course one of the marvellous things about finding out about sex through books was that it instilled a love of reading — whether the books in question were potboilers, collections of Victorian erotica by “Anonymous”, or “proper books” we’d found lurking on our parents’ bookshelves, like those of John Updike.

I have a theory that women of my generation, and the generation before it, still read more broadly and less snobbishly than anyone else, and I think it’s because of what I’m describing: books were all we had. They were the source of all wisdom, whether they were Das Kapital or one of Jilly Cooper’s. Well, books and the lone, termly Scottish Dance at Eton, in my case. Real live boys were encountered only once every three months, which wasn’t much to shout about.

Hence, presumably, our obsessive interest.

Our first steps were tentative, which is how first steps should be. I don’t think that’s any longer true of the average 15-year-old, which seems an awful pity in a number of respects — not least that if sex is first encountered as something freakish, shocking, gruesomely graphic, with dead-eyed plastic women contorting themselves for the benefit of a webcam, you could hardly blame anyone for running screaming out of the room.

When I look back at the emotional impact of the books we read, and compare them with the emotional impact of one disturbing photograph or online movie, I can’t help but feel lucky that I was born when I was.

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