Maybe a subset of the lust list should be banned books. Written in the early 1960s, The Country Girls Triology by Edna O'Brien was summarily banned in Ireland, how dare a woman write about premarital sex with a married man, adultery, abortion, and other sins against the ten commandment.
Even more Irish than Summer and Love, TCGT follows the lives and lusts of two girls from early teen years until middle age, through all their attempts at love where love is used garner wealth and free them from their bucolic roots. Caitleen repeatedly is attracted to older married men, never realizing her need to find a father figure to replace her drunken, brutal, provincial father.
Only after realizing that her marriage to Eugene is over, Cait reacts: "She'd missed her chance ... She knew danger as she had never known it -- the danger of being out in the world alone, having lost the girlish appeal that might entice some other man to father her. It wasn't just her age; she was branded in a way that other men would spot a mile away, and though still young, she had not the energy to coax, and woo, and feed, and love, and stroke, and cosset another man, beginning from the very beginning again."
Bridget, Baba, is another of Cait's bad influences, the one provoking her to get expelled from high school where she is on scholarship and egging her on to flee to London. Although Baba eventually marries a striving contractor, her inclinations towards extramarital affairs never wanes.
Sure and the book is about lust, never passion or lust. Cait and Baba's sex drives are insatiable but differently motivated: Cait's a way to use attraction to gain security and Baba's entirely animalistic. Neither would be excused by an Irish Catholic country; Edna is the Anais Nin of her homeland.
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