I'm the first female owner of the Erotic Review – all thanks to The Scotsman

1997 was quite a year. We ceded Hong Kong and won Eurovision. We lost Diana but gained Harry Potter. Dolly was cloned and Tony was crowned.

At the risk of self-aggrandisement, 1997 was also the year I first wrote for The Scotsman. An untried newbie, I was dispatched to interview Rowan Pelling, a prettily petite woman with "far back" vowels and blue-stockinged body language. She was the eye in the hurricane of Fourth Estate excitement, having been gifted the editorship of the Erotic Review – a hitherto little-known publication which could equally be described as a literary mag for those with a profound interest in sex, or a sex mag for those with a profound interest in good writing – by its creator and founding editor, James Maclean.

There was fascination with a female becoming editor of a magazine that would have been top shelf had WH Smith stocked it (which it didn't). And so 1997 was the year I first wrote about the Erotic Review. And for the Erotic Review.

The magazine has had its ups and its downs since then. It withered and all but perished, but is once again tumescent with fine writing, beautiful illustration and wit sharp enough to cut a diamond.

There is no longer a female editor at the Erotic Review. But there is, as the magazine announces its 100th edition, a female owner. Me. I know. Me? A writer and critic for The Scotsman? Own an erotic magazine? After going to the same school as Andrew Neil and Fred Goodwin, I could have done worse.

The Erotic Review was born in 1995, brainchild and lovechild of James Maclean, a fine art dealer and inaugural head of Victorian painting for Sotheby's. Maclean had shown his artistic colours in 1985, when he boldly went where no Brit had gone before and exposed the ankle of Fine Art in the UK's first ever dedicated exhibition of erotic art.

There was shock, outrage and huge success. Which begat the Erotic Print Society, purveyor of fine, artistic ruderie to the discerning. Which begat the Erotic Review, first the newsletter of the society, then a magazine in its own right. Jamie Maclean's expertise and fancy, you see, was not restricted to the painted image. Words as much as pictures dilate his pupils. He is the son of the quasi-legendary Sir Fitzroy and Lady Veronica Maclean. Sir Fitzroy was famed as the role model for James Bond and the couple were as gilded a pair as Scotland has produced – each a much lauded writer in his'n'her own right. His brother Charles's thrillers have garnered plaudits from The Scotsman's own critics, and he is as much a master of that genre as Jamie is of the erotic.

Seldom have the DNA of a magazine and its publisher/editor been so closely entwined. Jamie Maclean and the Erotic Review are a sort of sexy, literary double helix all of their own.

And it was because of this that I bought the magazine on the proviso that Maclean stay on as editor. There had, you see, been talk of getting a female editor – and that I could not let happen again. There are still a few jobs in which I believe only a nano-number of women could be successful. Editor of the Erotic Review is one.

The editor of the Erotic Review has to have a purist attitude to the appreciation and enjoyment of words and images sexual. Women seem to like to do everything in packs. And where one woman would be, in my opinion, detrimental in the ER editor's chair, a pack of them would be catastrophic.

The ER is, increasingly, featuring work by women. We have a semi-incumbent dominatrix, a sexpert and Tilly the Secretary (I put that one in just to irritate feminists). Belle de Jour wrote for us, as have Kathy Lette, Sam Roddick and Dame Edna (well, Barry Humphries). We have probed sex symbols from Jean Christophe Novelli to Gyles Brandreth, made space for the bad boys like John Walsh and Rod Liddle, enjoyed the wits of Jonathan Green, Giles Coren and Auberon Waugh and excited the aesthetic talents of Brian Sewell and Stephen Bayley. We have even published Boris Johnson.

I am still here, a contributing editor, and loving every second. Especially as being the owner makes getting your features in uncut so much easier.

I debuted in 1997 with rather a feisty piece in defence of bisexuality, and it has remained a thrill to write for such a literate, intelligent, erotophilic readership. I still have a collection of the letters of outrage which followed my piece on Banning the Foreskin.

I am off now to interview composer Michael Nyman about sex for our summer issue. This, too, only came about because of The Scotsman. I was sent to review his brilliant photographs and video installations for our own arts pages. We came back to London on the bus together and talked about sex. And now we are going to talk some more.

The influence of The Scotsman should never be underrated. And when you consider its origins – launched in 1817 in response to the "unblushing subservience" of competing newspapers to the Edinburgh establishment – the fact that it is now largely responsible for the continuing success of the Erotic Review is not entirely surprising.