If I could go back in time and track Cleland down for a nice chat, I'd smack him in the face with a clipboard and watch him like a hawk till he'd read through the list clipped there in its entirety. Better yet, I'd take a woman and a man back with me, both of them less concerned with feminism issues to an unholy extent than I, and let the conversings about the genders commence. Maybe then, perhaps, I'd figure this author out.

The list? An abridged version of the following.

If you've seen my review of [b:Delta of Venus|11041|Delta of Venus|Anaïs Nin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388793271s/11041.jpg|1369571], you know I take erotica seriously. That whole spiel about increasing respect and social justice and all that jazz? Still relevant, sadly so when considering this piece appeared in 1749. That's 265 years ago, 18th century stuff alongside the likes of Voltaire and Swift and we're still mucking around in slut shaming. Seriously! This is a classic written by a dead white male two and a half centuries ago, and it's chock full of feminism! Second wave feminism at that! Where are the feminist scholars and, more importantly, where are the rest of those classics/elitist/whatever your name for those in the literature "know" who are reading this without taking a single smidgen away from it besides the fact that it's bad erotica?

Yes, bad erotica. While it may have done the job more than 250 years ago, these days people like their porn with a little more...well. Now that I think about it, a great deal of today's Fifty Shades of Grey readers don't actually mind if the biology's a little off so long as there's plenty of writhing and fingering and whipping, which this work has in full. The only difference really is Cleland's constant hitting home the fact that, while women have different equipment, they have the same need for pleasure and more importantly respectful pleasure, whomever the companion they happen to be with. Now that's something that could put modern readers off.

Men know not in general how much they destroy of their own pleasure when they break through the respect and tenderness due to our sex, and even to those of it who live only by pleasing them.

Of course, there are problematic aspects, namely the homophobia, the pretense of sex only being successful when dick thrusting is involved and resulting invalidation of female pleasure, the multiple instances of sexual assault rapid fire forgiven because the assaulter was attractive/pitiful/remorseful/what have you. Less problematic and more absurd were the multiple male orgasms business: so sorry, men, but your refractory period averages a half hour and can even go on for days, whereas women, you're good to go.

Also, the synonyms for penis. I'm not even going to go into that. If you want a list, the book's been around for a while. Spoilers abound and may even be carefully categorized.

Besides all that, not only does Fanny Hill like sex so long as her partner's not an asshole, she likes educating herself! Behold.

...he it was who first taught me to be sensible that the pleasures of the mind were superior to those of the body; at the same time, that they were so far from obnoxious to or incompatible with each other that, besides the sweetness in the variety and transition, the one serv'd to exalt and perfect the taste of the other to a degree that the senses alone can never arrive at.

No wonder the unabridged version's been taken to trial as recently as 1963, as god forbid a woman reconcile body and mind so ardently. Yeesh.

While I'm at it, have some more breakdowns of female stereotypes:

Silks, laces, earrings, pearl necklace, gold watch, in short, all the trinkets and articles of dress were lavishly heap'd upon me; the sense of which, if it did not create turns of love, forc'd a kind of grateful fondness, something like love; a distinction it would be spoiling the pleasure of nine tenths of the keepers in the town to make, and is, I suppose, the very good reason why so few of them ever do make it.

...all my looks and gestures ever breathing nothing but that innocence which the men so ardently require in us, for no other end than to feast themselves with the pleasures of destroying it, and which they are so greviously, with all their skill, subject to mistakes to.

You're welcome.