I grew up in a time and place where sex wasn’t pushed under the rug. We were lucky if it stayed behind closed doors. I was born in the late 1970s, in the midst of a social upheaval around sexual mores, and my parents and their friends had decided to do things differently to their forebears. Shame around sex was out, spontaneous public nudity was in. Amid all this freewheeling behaviour, nothing was ever explained. I was a watchful child and the basic tenets I gleaned about sex in my early years could be most simply summed up as: it’s not a big deal, there’s no need for discussion, and—the golden rule—don’t be uptight. Meanwhile, all around me families broke apart and reformed at whirlwind speed. Like many kids who grew up in this climate of sexual experimentation, I developed a cautiousness about sex, because one thing soon became clear—it was a very messy business.

I have no memory of not understanding the mechanics of sex—who put what where—but the confusion around sexual feeling started early. I distinctly remember my parents taking me to see some kind of foreign film. They had no baby sitters, so my brother and I always tagged along with whatever was happening. The film was dark and broody, subtitled, and I couldn’t yet read. There was a sex scene that began with some degree of antagonism. I remember asking my father, ‘Daddy, why is he hurting her?’ And him shushing me and saying, ‘He’s not. She likes it.’