What everyone needs to know about sex: I’ve been a sex expert for more than 30 years and these are the lessons I’ve learned for a lifetime of pleasure, writes ROWAN PELLING

‘Are you the erotic woman?’ asked a middle-aged woman at a drinks party in Fulham.

‘Yes,’ I said, looking around, ‘I suppose that would be me.’

She then proceeded to confess, in lavish detail, her penchant for being spanked, which, she informed me, sent ‘blood rushing’ to her erogenous zones.

Her husband liked corporal punishment too (she gesticulated at a tweedy man on the other side of the room) and also enjoyed watching her being spanked by other men. An eye-popping – and very much unsolicited – confession from a couple who wouldn’t look out of place at the local church bazaar.

This was a year into my new job editing The Erotic Review, a role which would prompt financiers, barristers, MPs, doctors, colonels and even clerics to share their sexual peccadilloes with me.

It was a role that would go on to inform the next 30 years of my career – and expose me to every conceivable sexual practice. From kink, threesomes and orgies, nothing is off limits when people learn you’re the ‘erotic woman’ who’s been writing about sex for decades.

Without meaning to, I had opened a window onto the shifting sexual mores of Middle England and become the go-to sexpert for the Waitrose classes.

My job made me the fount of all sexual knowledge in the Nineties and Noughties, a time which was arguably more liberated than today. But it wasn’t just a one-way street in terms of education; I learned the most, I’d say.

And my husband was a beneficiary too, since I became bolder in the bedroom (although we were both embarrassed when a sex toy I’d been given to review was once picked up by an airport security scanner).

Early on, I learned that the best sex involves imagination and a sense of playfulness. And I started to feel more liberated to fantasise in bed – the biggest sexual organ, after all, is the brain – and dare to ask my husband what really turned him on: mostly stockings, as it transpired.

I loved the maxim from US relationship guru Dan Savage, too: he advises couples to be ‘good, giving and game’ (GGG) in bed. Good involves listening to your partner and excellent communication.

Giving is focusing on your partner’s pleasure as much as your own desires, while game means being open to new ideas but maintaining healthy boundaries.

Over the years, though, I’ve come to believe that novelty isn’t as important as intimacy and intensity: the eroticism of looking the person you love directly in the eyes during sex cannot be bettered.

Eight years editing The Erotic Review provided a large postbag of readers’ confessions. I hadn’t realised before then how many British men liked wearing women’s knickers under their suits and corduroys, nor how many women liked role play as naughty nurses.

And I discovered the British really do enjoy spanking and BDSM. Around half the population have experimented with some element of fetish, according to various surveys, even if it’s only a set of handcuffs from Ann Summers. Which helps explain why Fifty Shades of Grey was such a runaway best-seller.

I came to believe we were a very tolerant country: the only requirement was that you didn’t flaunt your more outré behaviour. People don’t mind if you have a sex dungeon, so long as you call it a wine cellar.

US relationship guru Dan Savage advises couples to be ‘good, giving and game’ (GGG) in bed (picture posed by models)

Throughout my career, I have appeared on countless sex-themed documentaries and have even flown to the psychology faculty at Rutgers University, New Jersey, to have my brain scanned at the point of orgasm in an MRI scanner.

The funny thing is when I first got the Erotic Review job, I was 28 and still a relative novice in terms of sexual wisdom. I may have spent much of my teens immersed in bonkbusters by Shirley Conran and Jilly Cooper, but I went to a school in Sevenoaks, Kent, established for daughters of missionaries, and lagged behind most of my friends in terms of lived experience.

It wasn’t until university, aged 20, that I lost my virginity to a kind artist ten years older than me, who sketched me naked and brought breakfast to bed.

I remember thinking, ‘That was glorious!’ and my view on sex hasn’t altered over the decades. Erotic love is, for me, the pinnacle of adult experience.

That short-lived relationship was followed by a series of brief but educational flings: a cool ‘Sarf London’ boy who cared nothing for my pleasure (I never made that mistake again), a troubled Etonian, a friend in need and a Hungarian maths professor, who omitted to tell me about his wife back home in Budapest.

Within a month of working at GQ as the editor’s PA, I had met the tall, handsome chap in a Shetland jumper, who smoked Gauloises like a French intellectual, and felt, almost instantly, like coming home.

We had our first kiss just before Christmas 1993 and married two years later in a Kent country church.

Within three years, I had moved to Erotic Towers (as we called the office) and I loved the ribald atmosphere the second I walked in.

My bosses were two middle-aged, happily married, erudite-but-fruity public schoolboys, who lived to eulogise the female form. Flirting in the office was always humorous, rather than creepy.

We persuaded a raft of well-known people such as Auberon Waugh, Barry Humphries and Josceline Dimbleby to write for the magazine.

Then I had the brainwave that maybe Waterstones might stock us, since bookish types are notoriously open minded. Six London stores said ‘yes’.

A journalist called to interview me and we made the newspapers, too. Soon I was on Radio Four’s World at One making my first ever public broadcast and explaining that we weren’t ‘the kind of mag that tells its readers how to have ten orgasms a day’, but were far more concerned with celebrating eroticism.

From that first burst of publicity, our phone lines were besieged and within a couple of years we had moved to bigger, central London premises, selling 30,000 copies a month.

‘Strangers revealed details of their intimate lives within minutes of meeting me, while couples asked me to adjudicate on their bedroom disputes,’ writes Rowan Pelling

Erotic Review lunch invitations were highly coveted, as they could run into the night and even, on occasion, through the night. Boris Johnson was the star guest at one, having contributed a ‘naïve sketch’ of Lady Godiva riding naked on a horse.

We had a Christmas party in our office with an absinthe bar and people who popped by included members of the band Blur, the distinguished historian Sir Antony Beevor and a famous jockey, who nipped off to the upstairs lavatory for a tryst with a female guest.

It’s fair to say I lived in a parallel reality. Strangers revealed details of their intimate lives within minutes of meeting me, while couples asked me to adjudicate on their bedroom disputes.

Two married subscribers invited me to join them in Cap Ferrat for a threesome and I was invited to a sex party somewhere near Hemel Hempstead, but sent two of my intrepid writers instead.

The propositions came thick and fast throughout my time as ‘editrix’. An intellectual Tory politico asked to try on my knee-high, stiletto-heeled Manolo Blahnik boots.

A 50-something master of foxhounds invited me to be his mistress if I wasn’t deterred by his inflatable prosthetic penis. ‘It works well and no one has complained,’ he declared.

Even more optimistic was the 84-year-old journalist who asked if I would thrash him once a week with a riding crop, in return for ‘a steak dinner’.

I was lucky that I was married to a man 15 years older than me, who found jealousy ‘baffling’, was secure in his own skin and laughed at all my anecdotes.

He hated parties and public events, which meant I could assume a persona for writing in the magazine and public engagements.

I always knew that once I’d had children it would be hard to maintain the illusion that I was up for any kind of mischief.

So it’s no coincidence that my first son was born just after I stopped editing The Erotic Review.

Looking back, the 1990s and early Noughties were the ‘good-old, bad-old naughty days’ in London that birthed outrageously sexy supermodels, lads’ mags, Britpop and art, with celebrities tumbling drunk out of private members’ clubs such as the Groucho.

It was before the fall of Harvey Weinstein in 2017 and the necessary broom of #MeToo, which swept away unrepentant predators and highlighted the horrors of online porn. The trouble was it took some carefree joy and innocence with it.

Young men of my sons’ generation would never dream of chatting up an attractive stranger in a pub, for fear of being thought ‘creepy’.

Dating has been increasingly pushed to online apps, where ghosting and lies are legion and no one feels the electric charge of instant chemistry.

Instead of drunken teen party fumbles, the young learn about sex from online porn, which explains the rise of vile scourges such as ‘sexual choking’.

Consent became – understandably – the biggest dating issue of our time. But this also meant spontaneity was ditched for almost legally-negotiated forms of ‘affirmative consent’.

My generation had the luxury to look at sex as a source of joy and even humour, but now everything has become deadly serious.

This, in turn, has affected my work, writing and advice. Now I say to men that no one will give them the benefit of the doubt in a bedroom scenario gone wrong and to never go near a tipsy woman.

I have also had to tell some older chaps that banter that was acceptable in 1996 could now lose them their jobs.

Young women are more fluid in their sexuality than my generation and many date female friends in preference to men. Sex toys and porn abound, yet every reliable survey records a gradual decrease in sexual activity amongst the young.

This has all happened against a backdrop of smartphones, tablets and social media intruding into the bedroom. It’s hard not to conclude that we’ve sacrificed human touch and intimacy for the phoney closeness of instant messaging.

Over the course of 30 years, some of my early convictions have been quietly let go, such as the best sex of your life is in your 30s. After all, society encourages us to believe sex will plunge downhill from 40, while older generations know better. A Cambridge gynaecologist told me his friskiest patient was in her early 90s and had a toy boy in his 80s.

With every fresh decade, I’m astonished by my previous ignorance. My conclusion is that the best sex of your life is the sex you’re having right now.