A blast from the past, and how jaded I've become.

Right now, I'm re-reading The Judas Kiss by Victoria Holt. The book was written when I was fourteen, and I think I read it at age fifteen. I found it in the basement of our house. It became one of my favorite books. I don't know what happened to it, but I found a copy on Amazon. The copy I got looked a lot like the one I had at fifteen. Worn pages, a torn and worn out book cover. I loved holding it in my hands. I immediately started reading. I remembered the plot but I didn't remember the sex scenes and was eager to get to them. I wanted to recall how the authors did it back then. Here's where it gets weird. There weren't any sex scenes! The author simply wrote, loosely quoted, we made love. That's as steamy as it got. Where was the explicit detail of the heroine's deflowering? I carefully looked through the pages to make sure I hadn't skipped a page. Checked to make sure a page hadn't been ripped out. There was no steamy sex in the book. I had to wonder, how jaded am I? In a world where sex is described in detail, where tab A, fits into slot B, I found that I didn't mind that the explicit sex was missing. I'd just come to expect it in the books I read. It seems I even imagined it where there was none. Maybe my fifteen year old brain thought that saying the hero and heroine did the deed seemed explicit. For some reason, when I read this book decades ago, I remembered sex being somewhere in there. But it wasn't. I still love this book! I couldn't put it down. I'm no longer jaded. Sure there's a lot of sex out there in books. But I'm wondering, how necessary is it? Do books with no sex sell as well? Or are we just jaded and think explicit sex makes for a good story?