1993 DELTA OF VENUS/LITTLE BIRDS BY ANAIS NIN

 “At the time (1941) we were all writing erotica at a dollar a page, I realized that for centuries we had only one model for this literary genre — the writing of man. I was already conscious of the difference between the masculine and feminine treatment of sexual experience. I know that there was a great disparity between Henry Miller’s explicitness and my ambiguities — between his humorous, Rabelaisian view of sex and my poetic descriptions of sexual relationships in the unpublished portions of the Diary. As I wrote in Volume Three of the Diary,  I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of women’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate.   Women, I thought, were more apt to fuse sex with emotion, with love, and to single out one man rather than be promiscuous. This became apparent to me as I wrote the novels and the Diary, and I saw it even more clearly when I began to teach. But although women’s attitude towards sex was quite