AVC: By the time you get to the third book of Lost Girls, it's almost cover-to-cover explicit sex, but the third book is also where you push furthest into moral grey areas, with the pairings of children and adults. Was that intentional, making the material that would be the most potentially arousing also the material that would be most likely to make readers flinch?
AM: The reason that stuff mostly occurs in the third book is because we wanted to build slowly throughout the course of the narrative, and avoid what happens with a lot of pornography, where they start off at full strength and continue at full strength until the full-strength ending. Which is a bit exhausting. We wanted to build to a climax, because if ever a genre should build to a climax, it should be pornography.
The thing about the underage characters… It all gets a bit silly when you're talking about characters that are made up. Alice In Wonderland is like 150, well past the age of consent. And we have a culture over here—and I'm sure in America as well—where we go in for an awful lot of pedophilic titillation, in magazines like Barely Legal, where we're told that these women are over 18, but just look young. But then we were told that about Traci Lords, weren't we? And anyway, it doesn't really matter that much, does it? The intent is still the same. Look at Britney Spears and her sexy schoolgirl imitation. What is that actually saying, and how many apparently normal men is it saying it to? We are sexualizing our children at an increasingly young age. Exposure to The Spice Girls seems to have doomed us to a Western world where every 10-year-old wants a belly-button ring and a "Porn Star" T-shirt. And we just think it's cute! "Ah, look at them! They're acting like little whores!"
It's an obvious, weird part of our sexual makeup, but one that we'd rather do anything than talk about. We have to put our hands up and admit to our complicity in the sexual problems we have. As for incest, yes, in real life, incest is very, very, very seldom an idyllic thing. It's much more often a monstrous thing that destroys people's lives. However, we're not talking about real life. We are talking about the human sexual imagination. Sigmund Freud, frankly, I've not got a great deal of time for, because I think he was a child-fixated cokehead, to be perfectly honest. But his is still the prevalent paradigm in our attitude to sexuality. And Freud said that all sexual desire was sublimated incest. I don't agree with that for a moment, but it does suggest that incest is one of the big players in the theater of our desires. So that has to be referred to.
We felt we had to explore even the problematic areas of pornography, because they're a big part of pornography. We didn't want to be accused of turning out something arty that claims to be pornography but isn't. We felt that if we were going to do this thing, we were going to have to do it properly. We wanted it to be as pornographic as possible, and as artistic as possible. We wanted it to be a pornography that would include even the more extreme pornographies. All right, we chickened out with the Marquis De Sade to a degree. I don't think you can do anything that examines the field of pornography without referencing De Sade, because De Sade was the first person to use pornography for anything other than simple arousal. He was the first person to use it almost as a kind of social weapon. And I believe he was, in many respects, a profoundly moral man. However, his books are incredibly boring. I don't think that he himself got past the 15th day of Sodom. He gave up out of sheer ennui.
There's not a lot of scatology in Lost Girls, because… well, to say that it wasn't anything that appealed to us is not to put it exactly correctly. Because there's lots of things in Lost Girls that don't appeal personally to me or Melinda. But there were things that we had to find some way of getting interested in, in order to make them arousing. We had to be, to some degree, aroused ourselves, or it wasn't going to be interesting to the readers. But things like scatology were a bit beyond the pale, and we just couldn't find a way that we could get even vaguely interested in it. Sorry, all you scat fans out there.
Inevitably, there will be people, I'm sure, who will be offended by one thing or another, but we really couldn't pay any attention to that. This has taken us 16 years. We didn't know it was going to come out in 2006, in the middle of George Bush's second administration, with the world plunged more thoroughly into war then it's been in a couple of decades. It could just have easily come out nine years ago, when Clinton was in office, and it might've seemed irrelevant, and not particularly shocking in a time of [Andres Serrano's photograph] "Piss Christ." And if we'd done this 40 years ago, there would've been people asking us if we hadn't gone a bit far by portraying homosexuality.
We're working for, hopefully, something human and timeless, like I think our sexual imagination has proved to be thus far. It's been with us since [the ancient erotic statue] The Venus Of Willendorf, and will certainly be with us until we've managed to eradicate ourselves from this planet. We wanted to speak to that quality, that timeless eternal human interest in sex. We wanted to apply art to that. We had to be as comprehensive as possible. We tried to be encyclopedic without making too big of a deal about it.
