"Jondalar's mood suddenly changed. He sat up, pulled her up on her knees to face him, and sat her on his lap with her legs on either side of him. He took her in his arms and kissed her with an intensity that surprised her. She didn't know what had changed his mood, but her love for him was strong, and she responded in kind.

Then he was kissing her shoulders and neck, and caressing her breasts. She felt his need upon him so hard, it almost raised her up. She lifted up a bit, arched her back, and felt the sensations race through her as he suckled and nibbled. She felt his hard, fiery rod under and raised up a little higher, and without thinking, she found herself guiding him into her. It was almost more than he could bear as she lowered herself onto him, taking him into her warm, wet, eager embrace. She lifted again, leaned back, while he held her close with one arm to keep one nipple in his mouth while he massaged her other one, as if he couldn't quite get enough of her full womanness.

She was guiding herself on him, feeling the Pleasure fell her with every stroke, breathing hard and crying out. Suddenly the need was stronger upon him, building with each lift and plunge. He let go of her breasts, leaned back on his hands, and raised up, lowered, and raised again. Both cried out as waves of intense Pleasure grew with each thrust, until with a glorious flood of shuddering release, they peaked in a culmination of delight."

—from The Shelters of Stone by Jean M. Auel (Crown Publishers, 2002)

If you're a female born between 1965 and 1975, you've probably heard of Jean M. Auel, the author of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the first volume in what would evolve over the next two decades into a meticulously researched, if ham-handedly written, pre-historical epic known as the Earth's Children

Series. The fifth volume, The Shelters of Stone, has just hit the shelves.

Clan was published in 1980, when I was a clueless and agonizingly self-conscious (which is to say entirely average) eleven year old, and the hefty hardcover edition of the novel made its way around my sixth-grade set, traveling more rapidly than rumors from lunch-room table to Tiger Beat-decorated locker. The book's popularity among my peers was attributable not to our burning desire for greater knowledge of Cro-Magnon culture, though the volume's pretense to historical accuracy allowed our parents to believe we were doing serious adult reading. In part we fell for the adventure tale of a heroine about our age, a female Mowgli raised not by apes but proto-human creatures just a rung or two below her on the evolutionary chain, a superior girl, maligned and misunderstood, who beats the boys at their own games and is ultimately accepted on her own terms. (Pop culture would offer nothing comparable to pre-teen girls until our dearly beloved Buffy hit prime time, a warrior princess in Frankie B. jeans ass-kicking her archetypal way through a demon-infested adolescence, in a way that would make Joseph Campbell proud.) I believe, though, that our girlish enthusiasm for Clan was primarily due

to the novel's steamy atmosphere—sultry primeval forests, skimpy loincloths, unabashed carnivorism—and, in particular, to one bona fide sex scene, which managed to combine both rape and quasi-bestiality in a context that qualified nominally as educational.

At age eleven, I understand now, boys had already begun to pillage their fathers' clandestine Playboy collections, while girls, up to that point, had made do with a pre-sexual education comprising The Love Boat and Sweet Valley High paperbacks in which the climax was a kiss at the homecoming dance (setting up yet another generation for a lifetime of disparate expectations and colossal misunderstandings). But all that was about to change. "Tweens" didn't exist in 1980 — they

was a marketing segment yet to be exploited — so we soon-to-be Generation-Xers had to make do with what we could wring from the current fare. We had Clan; we had Erik Estrada and The Fonz; we had the fiction of Judy Blume, patron saint of American pubescents. That same year Hollywood provided us with Foxes and Fame, Little Darlings and Blue Lagoon and Summer Lovers. Further stealthy sex ed was provided by that hell mouth of teen ruination, the radio — which, at the time, was spouting a lot of power ballads. The wailings of Foreigner and Journey, Air Supply and REO Speedwagon penetrated the privacy of my bedroom, bearing a subtext of longing that filled me, as all these things did, with a deep, abiding, and inexplicable squirminess.

I had a vague comprehension that these books and movies and songs involved something "dirty," and I understood, in part, the mechanics of sex, but the stuff that surrounded it — grown-ups thinking and laughing about it, writing songs and making movies about it — that I didn't get. What was the Blue Lagoon boy up to behind that rock? Why would Kristy McNichol lie about winning the bet? What the heck are "aching loins" and what is a "throbbing manhood?" What does Brooke mean, nothing comes between her and her Calvins? Thus, comes the end of innocence: not a single moment but a

long, slow series of revelations that led me from sandbox and jungle gym to super-mall food court, video game parlor, and the sidelines at the Sadie Hawkins dance, ogling Todd Oace, a twelve-year-old computer geek with a penchant for V-neck velour shirts who bore a pale but distinct resemblance to Scott Baio.

By eighth grade, my girlfriends and I begged, borrowed, and stole Judy Blume's racier novels, Forever and Wifey, and devoured the lurid V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic series. We snuck out to midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In 1982, we blushed and

wriggled over Auel's second effort, Valley of the Horses, approximately half of which is spent on the heroine's dawning sexual consciousness and her first consensual (and intra-species) sexual experience. In high school we traded dog-eared copies of fat, fulsome pulp like Scruples and Mistral's Daughter; the more forward-thinking among us, or those with consciousness-raised mothers, discovered Anais Nin and Erica Jong — and after that, well, we were off to the races. (Though I would decide, after a brief experiential survey of high school boys' foreplay skills, to stick with the books for a few more years.) Who knows how things might have gone had I started out with Auel's latest effort. She apparently caught on to the hot-caveman-action appeal of her books, because each one seemed to get more sexed up than the last. Naughty Bits-seeking fans will not be disappointed by Shelters of Stone, which seems to average a sex scene every twenty pages or so. Our prehistoric heroes go at it in fire-lit caves, on river banks and open plains, and soft core references are plentiful: "his tumescent manhood," "her hard, pulsing nodule," quickening desires and racing sensations, arched backs and tossed heads and eager moaning. Nuanced it's not, but it does the trick.

As it was, I got just those few lurid paragraphs in The Clan of the Cave Bear, and they were, I'm fairly certain, the first explicit sex my young friends and I encountered. We didn't know it then, but Jean Auel was our introduction to erotica — and erotica our introduction, for better or worse, to our own sexuality. And for that, may Doni, the Great Mother Who Gave Earth's Children The Gift of Pleasures, bless Ms. Auel forever.

 n°

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Darcy Cosper is a writer and book reviewer. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Village Voice, Nerve, and GQ, and in the anthologies Full Frontal Fiction and the forthcoming Sex & Sensibility. Her first novel, Wedding Season, was published by Crown in March 2004. She lives in Los Angeles and New York.
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