Sexuality: Beauty & Fragility – Baronová & Jakubowicz Insights

Baronova: The book was originally supposed to be called Pleasure they weren’t Sweetness. But we were overtaken by Linda Bartošová with the podcast of the same name, so we kept looking for something short and striking. In the end we chose Soft. We treat the topics in our book delicately, softly. Moreover, it is an international term whose meaning is understood by everyone. Only later did we realize that it is in opposition to the word hard.

Jakubowicz: Actually, I’m the name Soft he did not associate it at all with the contrast to pornography. I perceive that word as tenderness. From the beginning of the project, we aimed to bring something positive with the book.

Baronova: With the book, we want to express that sexuality should not be viewed only from a performance point of view, statistically, according to the number of penetrations, orgasms, minutes. We turned our gaze to slowness, caring for others and ourselves.

In our book, we try to look at quality through fragile approaches. In the mainstream, sexuality is portrayed through the greatest extremes. On the contrary, we were interested in who the individual persons representing the diverse currents of sexuality are inside and how they experience their world.

Baronova: Porn is discussed, along with cases of sexual abuse and violence, which is of course important. But sexuality is missing from it, which can also be something beautiful and fragile.

However, we wrote the book knowing that we are all wounded in some way, so experiencing sexuality joyfully is not self-evident. It is affected by age, illness, handicap, pregnancy, menopause, but also, for example, experienced bullying, infidelity of a partner or humiliation of a person based on his appearance. We tried to discuss all these diverse phenomena in the book.

Jakubowicz: There aren’t that many films that have fundamentally influenced me, even though cinematography is my field of action. In my native France, erotic literature is a phenomenon. I like to read it very much, in this genre I liked the prose of Apollinaire or the Marquis de Sade. And also a collection of short stories Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin, which describes in some cases unthinkable sexual fantasies. Unfortunately, the book was not translated into Czech.

These works did not directly influence the creation of the book Softbut it had an impact on my life. I see sexuality as a landscape that you can endlessly explore without having to like everything. Maybe you prefer the sea to the mountains, but you accept that mountain ranges exist and someone likes them.

Baronova: For me, the trio of Toyen – Štyrský – Nezval, who published erotic works, is important. I was also very influenced by the movie Valerie and the Week of Wonders. In our book we have a photo by Nina Mann of Hervé and I in bed in a green garden that looks like a scene from this picture.

Baronova: Yes. With each new partner comes a different type of sexuality, although I probably remain the same myself. It’s about new desires, ideas.

I broke up with my previous boyfriend after fifteen years of relationship, which was quite unexpected. I was forty at the time and it hit me hard because I was at an age where I could still have children.

I felt like my life was over with our breakup. He had the experience that men are afraid of childless women in their forties, because they might push them to start a family quickly. I found myself in a similar situation to Bridget Jones. I didn’t know what to do next. As a joke, I said that I would find a significantly younger man from Prague so that I wouldn’t have to change my life, which I love.

Coincidentally, right before we met, Hervé’s relationship broke up after twenty-six years. He planned to find a woman in her fifties, a doctor. But eventually he bumped into me and we soon found out that we were a good match.

Just before we met, I went to the Pohoda festival in Slovakia, where I participated in an art project about dreams. I thought of focusing on erotic fantasies. I listened there with fascination to the ideas of strangers and returned home with the feeling that the whole world was in front of me again.

The subsequent work on the book was quite intensive and exhausting. Hervé and I met a lot of people all over the world, and new ones keep appearing, so there will probably be a second part. We have a lot of topics.

Baronova: In November, the Intimity Festival took place in Prague. I was fascinated there, for example, by the connection of sexuality with hot wax or electricity. I wouldn’t have thought to try these things on my own.

Jakubowicz: At the beginning of work on the book Soft we wrote down a list of maybe fifty topics that could be in the book. In the end, only a fraction of them got into it. For example, we are interested in remote-controlled sex robots, but it is still too early for those at the moment. Maybe we’ll talk about them in the third book.

Baronova: It turns out that a certain type of scientific research has not yet been done on women, or very little. The main reason is that there is a lack of money for it, and scientists also see no reason why they should focus on squirting. It is not relevant for reproduction, it is not a disease, and there are no business opportunities yet.

Until recently, squirting was treated as incontinence. In addition, it is mistakenly confused with female ejaculation.

Besides the Czech associate professor of sexology, Zlatko Pastor, who is one of the heroes of our book, only two other research teams in the world are devoted to him. In addition to finances, it is difficult to find women who would participate in the study. We still know very little about women in general from a sexual point of view.

Baronova: I grew up in a strange time. In the eighties, sexuality was discussed behind closed doors. In the 1990s, we experienced the shock of explicit sexuality, which arrived from the West on an unplowed field. But everything was so tight-lipped, intimacy was not discussed in a nice way in public space.

A friend of mine, who is ten years older than me, read our book before it was published. She called me that she cried during the reading because no one had ever told her about some things. Now she’s fifty-five and discovering what’s possible.

Jakubowicz: I was born in the late sixties, which was a very progressive period not only in France. There was sexual freedom. Now I feel like we are losing it even though we pretend how advanced we are today.

I will give an example. At the end of the seventies, the Italian Joe D’Amato filmed film Beyond the darkwhich probably no one knows today. It is a necrophiliac horror that could not be created now, because it is really beyond the edge. At that time, its creation was possible.

In that image, I see a contrast with today’s artificial pornography, which does not represent reality at all. Although it is absolutely accessible, it does not convey anything about contemporary society. While the little horror film at least in its own way criticized the era of that time. Today’s videos are about nothing, they just serve as clickbait.

Jakubowicz: Hard to say. I feel like people are heading somewhere and they don’t even know where. Certainly today, the so-called progressive groups preach a much stricter morality than they did in the 1970s. It becomes such a religion.

We see that political control is increasing. The internet and social media have enormous power that I fear. Our rebellious life annoys their rulers. They want us to work, not to enjoy sex the way we want.

Baronova: Political representation also pushes its power interests in the sexual area, thereby manipulating society. People should be able to experience what they want, of course, without harming anyone. Every person should have the right to speak out loud about their needs, fantasies, as well as boundaries.