Stories about heterosexual relationships interest me when they stage a violation, large or small, which doesn’t conform to canonical representations. Stories with no beautiful women, for example, but ordinary ones. Or beautiful women who later reveal a physical defect. Or a handsome man hopelessly in love with a very ugly woman. When I find stories of this type in books or at the cinema or on television, I think they should be treasured, because they are small doorways through which we can glimpse different ways of narrating sex.

I’ll try to explain. Tradition as a rule reinforces men’s desire for the body of the woman. We’re flattered, as women readers (but I would say as consumers of all the arts, including movie and television stories), with the male adoration of every part of our body. From love poems to porn, we have been represented as the most longed-for object of their passions. And convention wants our body to adhere to the model that, at a specific historical moment, is considered attractive. However one puts it, the adequacy of our body is central for the love scene to function – that is, for it to inspire the wish to receive love, to give love.

For some time now, things have seemed different, precisely as a result of the sudden increase in the number of women who write, who direct films – who try to give a form to our relations with men. It seems, however, that we still haven’t been able to avoid the canon fixed by men but, despite our best intentions, have simply inserted ourselves, reinforcing it.

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Female characters, especially in television, are more active, more eager, more demanding, more imaginative. Female desire explodes immediately: sometimes it’s the woman who makes the first move. Yet there’s little to be done: I have the impression that even today, even without wanting to, we fold and adapt to the male story of sex. If our grandmothers recognised themselves in the passive giving in to a man’s desire (on the understanding that orgasms were rare, if not nonexistent), our daughters recognise themselves in the most unrestrained erotic activism – on the understanding that all that frenzy is the forced, at times painful, adaptation to behaviour that creates pleasure for men.

In this sense, stories, whether male or female, that trip up the traditional erotic narrative seem more innovative today – as opposed to those which expand the female role, making it more active than in the past. Maybe the first step in a real break with the past should be – in the era of the web and YouPorn – a female story that, while its subject is sex, isn’t aphrodisiac. It’s possible that our true erotic self, to begin to express itself, has need of this beginning.

• Translated by Ann Goldstein