Roland Barthes called language our second skin: ‘I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.’ Which should make the latest Meanjin, ‘On love, sex and desire’, a veritable Kama Sutra of literary massage. Yet it opens, perversely enough, with a denunciation of the erotic. John Armstrong’s honest, elegant and sharply self-critical essay recounts an early sexual experience during a brief trip to Paris. Giving his father the slip one morning, the teenager snuck off and spent his money on a prostitute. Afterwards he wandered the streets, full of loathing: ‘I was wicked, stupid, naïve, vile, corrupt, irresponsible, thick, wasteful, out of control, nasty, brutish.’