CHAPTER TEN:
‘SOMETHING OF THE NIGHT…’
OR ‘SELF-ABUSED, BUT STILL STANDING’
Sexual intercourse began
in nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
between the end of the Chatterley ban
and the Beatles first LP.
Up to then there’d only been
a sort of bargaining,
a wrangle for the ring,
a shame that started at sixteen
and spread to everything.
(Philip Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’)
A comic quasi-fiction with a message for us all…
My teenage years were warped, I admit. My teenage years were twisted, I confess. I had acne. At one point I was convinced the whole street was on drugs, and I was the only one not in on the secret. But more than that, I was subject to sexual doubts, dark disturbing sexual doubts. The 1950s were bleeding into the sixties, the moral revolution was yet to come, and I was experiencing erections in the communal showers after games. What did THAT mean?
But there was worse dread to come. I was haunted by guilt over… masturbation. I was doing it too much and couldn’t fight the addiction. I was destroying my metabolism by abnormally intense bouts of self-abuse. And I couldn’t stop. Because, truth to tell, in an often frightening world of contradictory and confusing sexual morès there’s reassuring certainty in the blunt insistent singularity of taking matters into your own hand.
Britain’s sharpest Science Fantasist Brian Aldiss commiserates, ‘people pretend to be so enlightened about sex these days, they talk happily about copulation and such subjects, about adultery and homosexuality and lesbianism and abortions. Never about masturbation though. And yet masturbation is the commonest form of sex, and tossing off the cheapest and most harmless pleasure.’ Of course I wasn’t able to read those lines THEN, because he didn’t write his excellent ‘A Hand-Reared Boy’ until 1970. But, like the similarly pubertal Philip Roth, I lived in a ‘world of matted handkerchiefs and crumpled Kleenex and stained pyjamas,’ endlessly coaxing a ‘raw and swollen penis’ to renewed effort.
Emotional release, it seems, comes in spurts.
We used to call such hand-relief ‘fetching cum’, while Aldiss calls it ‘flapping yourself’. My first experience of the ‘solitary vice’ occurred when a boy a few school-years older than myself lured me into his front-room while I was on my paper-round and his parents were out. He paid me a shiny new two-shilling coin to do it to him. I was a little scared, a little intimidated… but not exactly reluctant, more fascinated, numb with a kind of sweaty weirdness I’d not experienced before. Like I was part of something seismically and mystically significant that I couldn’t quite understand. Inevitably I began my own furtive exploration of my own quivering genitalia. Later I practiced with a friend, dropping all pretence along with our trousers.
I sometimes wonder how my breathless and sticky-fingered co-wankees look back at those mutual incidents now from the benefit of maturity. Whether burgeoning heterosexual conformity has created deliberate censorial erasure of the memories, or if they still derive a secretive warm glow in the boxer-shorts, and a slight embarrassing stiffness at awkward moments of recall? In his quasi-autobiographical novel Brian Aldiss vividly details his formative forays into ‘bashing the bishop’, and the complex codes of chivalry extant at his boarding school that determines who should be jerked off by whom. A rota that leaves no groin unmolested. We did it to each other until our techniques were perfected, closely examining each other’s states of arousal before, after, and during those breath-catching trembles of climax – purely from the point of view of investigative enquiry. We went further. It seemed like a perfectly natural extension of the programme, until we experimentally sixty-nine as fully interlocking as Lego bricks.
But I was rehearsing in my own time too, ‘white-washing the sheets’ above and beyond the call of duty. Every night the gravitational pull of the crotch proved irresistible, my head stormed with uncontrollably incendiary images. Jack Rosenthal’s 1948 schoolboy (John Albasiny) goes to bed wearing boxing gloves to make ‘pulling the yo-yo’ impossible, but winds up doing it anyway (in his nostalgic 1982 TV-movie ‘P’Tang, Yang, Kipperbang’ directed by Michael Apted, with Alison Steadman and comic narration provided by legendary cricket commentator John Arlott). As a boy Alfred Kinsey had been instructed that masturbation ‘fits’ could be controlled by submerging his testicles in a bowl of cold water while reading the Sermon on the Mount. Dr Kellog argued that Corn Flakes would prevent children from masturbating. But you can’t argue with a red-hot hard-on.
Peter Cook – on the ‘Derek & Clive’ “Having A Wank” album track describes ‘fingering his private parts continuously’ to a photo of Prime Minister Clement Atlee, excited by the ‘moustache on his chin’. Well… perhaps. Hans Christian Anderson wrote ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Princess & The Pea’, but he also kept a diary in which crosses indicate the days he masturbated. Yes, but how the hell does ‘Edward Scissorhands’ do it?
It might be absolutely the safest form of safe sex, but masturbation has been subject to bad press since the earliest tremors of civilisation, and ultimately the onanist is always alone. At times I imagined there was only the three of us doing it in our separate time-frames and isolated island universes. Me, Brian Aldiss, and the man who wrote the original hand-job handbook, Philip Roth. In ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ (1969) Roth’s addiction doomed him to ‘half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out. Or else I was doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to taste that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my tongue and teeth.’ Philip Roth has succeeded in portraying sex as a strong defining impurity in our lives.
But on a nightly basis, uninvited, resisted, fought-against, but uncontrollable come the invasion of images fuelling the fires down below, the groin-strain that yearns to be quenched. Envisioning the nude boy who’d approached me up against the cold tiles in the showers after the cross-country, the ginger-headed boy with freckles and soft auburn pubic hair running glistening-wet, offering my awkward stiffness a ‘helping hand’. Then turning away, refusing, but now – what if? allowing ‘him’ to feel me up by proxy as my own digital stimulation begins its slow cool crawl. Feeling ‘his’ fingers on me as the tempo accelerates, coming together across my stomach, but stifling the sounds so no-one else will hear…
Then the recriminations. Wondering, like thirteen-year-old Philip Roth, ‘when will I begin to come blood?’
It exacerbates my acne like the mark of the beast, and everybody who sees that dread facial rash knows exactly what I’ve been doing, sniggering behind their hands. Contact with so much seminal ejaculate would cause hair to grow on the palms of my hands, werewolf style. My spine would dehydrate from loss of fluid. It would crumble to flakes of dust leaving me invertebrate like some grotesquely obscene amoebic blob. I found an old medical textbook in the Library with a line-drawing of hideously atrophied male genitalia, and it said ‘The Effects of Excessive Self-Abuse’. I was convinced that by age sixteen I’D LOOK LIKE THAT! But I was certain that I was doing it so frequently that long before then I’D RUN OUT OF SEMEN, drained infertile and sexually barren before I’d even hit the age of consent. Such was to be the bitterness of my terrible self-inflicted destiny.
Pope Paul VI’s 1975 declaration ‘Persona Humana’ argues that ‘masturbation constitutes a grave moral disorder… (and) is an intrinsically and seriously disordered act.’ It’s worth considering his reasoning. Wanking is out because ‘the deliberate use of the sexual faculty outside normal conjugal relations essentially contradicts the finality of the faculty.’ Which is procreation. Conception. Making babies. It is said that 140-million sperms are released at each ejaculation, and that each sperm is a potential human life. Enough potential lives to populate a planet. Which means that each jack-off massacres more potential lives than Hitler, Stalin, and Attila the Hun put together.
It scared me rigid. And the only way to handle rigidity is to ease it with the application of manual dexterity. A vicious circle. Lives of desperation, lived both quiet and loud, in rage and deceptive calm.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have worried quite so bad if I’d known that a million Philip Roth’s were out there, all thinking ‘if only I could cut down to one hand-job a day, or hold the line at two, or even three…’ Self-Abusers of the world should unite, we have nothing to lose but our vital fluids.
Sex can be pretty much like a card-game, when you’ve got a good hand, who needs a partner? Of course, sex with a partner always involves an element of sharing, that’s the nature of the experience. That’s what makes it beautiful. A man ejaculates at 28mph (45km/h). It takes his sperm five minutes to cross the six inches to the cervix (0.0011mph). That’s all it needs. But masturbation – onanism, self-abuse, jacking-off, is pure sensual self-indulgence with no-one’s orgasm to consider but your own. Instant gratification without all the messy double-guessings and awkward mood-matchings of seducing a partner. It’s comforting. Recreational. Therapeutic. In a 2005 issue of ‘GQ’ Tony Parsons claims ‘self-assisted orgasm is going through a boom,’ advising on the pleasures of dedicated me-time for ‘comfort wanking’. While in his short story “The Immortals” Martin Amis teases ‘out a lone hand-job for an entire summer’ (collected into ‘Einstein’s Monsters’, Penguin Books 1987).
And if it’s supposed to be a phase you grow out of, then I’m still eighteen. What was it Paul Simon said? – still wanking after all those years? I may have grown out of teenage trauma and adolescent angst – sure, but now I’m hung up in midlife crisis and male menopause. And, as ever, a slave to the five-finger shuffle.
Self-Abused, but still standing…
— 0 —
1958 is a strange dark country.
It’s difficult to believe that we ever actually lived there. But we did, or at least – some of us did. Levels of ignorance about matters anatomical were amazing, but not necessarily unusual. Francis Wyndham writes from an earlier generation, but plagued by the same gender mysteries, in his ‘The Other Garden And Collected Stories’ (Picador 2008). he is the watchful child adrift in a mystifying realm, who is half-willing to believe that women might have ‘cocks too, just like we have.’
1958 is monochrome. The blacks are blacker, and the whites whiter than they are now. And I’m already fucked-up. Ten years old. My Mother found my secret stash of little pornographies, and made me burn them in a ritual incineration. She was confused and disturbed by male sexuality. But the truth is, I didn’t understand it either. I watched the flames warp the underwear adverts cut and hoarded from woman’s magazines and mail-order catalogues, curling the hint of nipple and darkening the shadow of cleavage. And the stirring in my groin was something bizarrely wonderful in a dumbly stupid world.
Humberside is flat and featureless to the horizon. And beyond the horizon is more flatness and featurelessness.
Down our lane grotesque old people inhabit rail-free railway carriages and tyreless caravans hauled onto yellowing grass in rows of drab dominoes. Blitzed and still un-housed. Because they revere the war and Churchill, I am fiercely anti-war and despise Churchill. There’s nothing I can relate to except in negatives of blacker blackness. Of course, I couldn’t verbalise the detonations that had stranded me there. I counted time in issues of comics. And hit records – “A Big Hunk Of Love”, “I Need Your Love Tonight”, “A Mess Of Blues”, “His Latest Flame”. War comics bored me. It was the Space stories that picked at the scabs of my imagination, exposing the rawness beneath. English culture was dead. I didn’t know it. But I could feel it. Later I would read Stan Barstow and Alan Sillitoe, recognise their unease and claustrophobic Northern drabness. They help define my anger. My dissatisfaction. But they couldn’t show me escape.
Elvis was napalm. He alone understood my sexuality.
I first met my father when I was seventeen. He couldn’t measure up. By then it was too late. I already had the record albums. He took me on a trip to London. Bought me flat Southern beer. Took me round Soho. A tacky strip-club where persistent erection battled a growing disgust for bloodlines. He was as shallow and dull as England. He could teach me nothing. Although I never saw my father actually drunk, I’m pretty sure that I never saw him completely sober either.
Instead I decode sex by studying Elvis Presley. Specifically the texts of the first four movies. I was his bastard love-child. Elvis taught me all I know. Girls were scary, not because they’re different-but-equal, but because they’re different-and-superior. When you look them straight in the eye you can see the clear intelligence piercing back at you, stripping clean through your defences to your soul, baring it all. And they’re demanding your responses. Evaulating your performance, appraising you coolly with their different-but-superior intellect. They think differently, in ways we can never understand. With unpredictable mood-swings impossible to negotiate. With rationales that carry their own reasons to which we are not privy, but in which we are ensnared, and yet are incapable of making sense. Girls are scary. They set off reactions we can’t control. A biochemical reaction that overwhelms me. Robs me of control. Steals my voice. Leaves me stuttering and stammering inanities that they coolly and critically deconstruct. As they whisper secretively to their friends, leaving teasing trails of tinkling coded-giggles as you pass.
It’s not fair. It’s not kind. We’re thrown into this thing without a route-map. The distracting contours hinted at beneath the rise and fall of their clothes tease enticing suggestions of the inaccessible and the unknowable details your imagination can’t help but flesh out. Unfulfillable longings for softness and fragrances they deny at a whim. Different, but superior, while we snigger our dirty little innuendoes… John Updike says women are ‘so fascinating and exasperating, so other. There’s such a psychological gap between the sexes. The erotic impulse jumps across that distance, like the creative spark…’
In Stan Barstow’s wonderfully-observed 1960 novel ‘A Kind Of Loving’ young Vic Brown is also learning about sex. First through magazines. Upstairs on the bus into town ‘I get in the back seat and have another butcher’s at this book of pin-ups and nudes Willy Lomas lent me before the holidays. ‘Cherie’ it’s called and it’s French, with a bint on the cover in a suspender belt and black nylons and nothing much else but a you-know-what look. ‘Lush,’ Willy said, and he was dead right. These Frenchies certainly know how to put a book like this together. Your guts melt when you look at some of these bints in there. There’s some birds in their underwear or nylon nighties, just covered up enough to set your imagination working and some others where you don’t need any imagination at all.’
France, to Vic’s generation, is another world. Paris, a city of undreamed-of voluptuaries. Later, in the pub they get to discussing that issue of ‘Cherie’. Harry tells Willy ‘You don’t think they walk about streets wi’ nowt on, do you?’ ‘Course not,’ Willy says. He leans over the table and lowers his voice. ‘But I’ll tell you what, though: there’s wenches over there ‘at open their coats when they see you comin’ an’ they’ve got nowt on underneath.’ ‘It’s right,’ Willy says. ‘I know a bloke what goes over reg’lar: one of the travellers at our place. He’s had it with more different bints than a lodging-house cat. An’ besides they’ve got knocking-shops on every corner, run by the gover’ment. All above board. You walk in, pay your money, an’ take your pick.’ Only to be corrected, ‘they closed ‘em just after the war.’
A difference of one chromosome determines your sexual identity. The sex chromosomes normally present in female cells are designated ‘xx’, while those in male cells are ‘xy’. Yet such a slight difference produces such wonderfully problematic results. It results in a woman’s body being a thing of eternal beauty and wonder. Even – or perhaps particularly, the less conventionally beautiful body-types, for they conceal a secret and personal uniqueness known only to their lovers.
And – lest we now think of sexual morality as little more than extra-marital dilemmas on TV-soap plotlines, it wasn’t always like that. It could be so serious it destroyed lives. Not only could the ‘deviance’ of homosexuality be punished by imprisonment, or horrendously abusive ‘cures’ involving the kind of chemical aversion-therapy last seen on-screen inflicted upon Alex in Anthony Burgess’ ‘Clockwork Orange’ (1962 novel, or Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie), but the ‘social crime’ of bearing a child out of wedlock could result in asylum incarceration for ‘moral insanity’, a charge still active enough to be seriously levelled at Elvis Presley. While the deviant practise of female masturbation, as late as the 1930s, could incur the ‘cure’ of ‘circumcision’ or ‘cauterisation’ of that troublesome clitoris. This happened in England in the time of our parents or grandparents.
Tony Leigh’s ‘Vera Drake’ (2004) movie offers a glimpse into this strangely alien time, set in 1950s Islington in a world of unremitting drabness, trapped in that strange limbo between the final days of the war and the kick-starting of pop culture. The ‘Grease’-style Fifties – as we have fondly reimagined it, hasn’t really started yet. Vera is a back-street abortionist, an illegal but necessary function. Not even her close family are allowed into her secret, the service for which she is finally imprisoned. The characters, young and old, share a sense of what might be termed optimistic stoicism, their conversations clipped and halting, their belief in a better future tempered by their wartime experiences, which are seldom referred to except in the most oblique and glancing ways. It is a world of post-war togetherness, of putting together, of solidarity, making do and mend. But stultifying to anyone deemed an outsider. At the very least, wilful moral non-conformity or just an unfortunate choice of an unreliable partner, could bring hideous social exclusion, humiliation and condemnation.
And while we correctly condemn foreign fundamentalist regimes for stoning adulterers, it’s worth recalling how recently we were enthusiastically endorsing similar levels of moral totalitarianism here. And that it took unbelievable courage to stand out against such stifling doctrines, a genuine level of resolve sufficient to further the process of erosion towards liberation, and just how easily that liberal tolerance we now ‘wear like so much cheap perfume’ could be taken away, snatched back by new-Right ‘Family Values’ conformities.
In the autumn of 1953 Jack Wolfenden – a pillar of the British establishment, took the first steps to making homosexuality legal. The then university vice-chancellor was made chair of a Home Office committee tasked with examining the law regarding homosexuality and prostitution. Although he regarded gay relationships as ‘abominations’, the discovery that his own son was ‘queer’ forced him into an uncomfortable moral dichotomy. Perhaps it was compassion for his son, or the impartial expert witness testimonies – including submissions from behavioural scientist Dr Kinsey, which finally swayed him to recommend decriminalisation. Although the subjects of his deliberation would have to wait many more years before his recommendations reached the statute books.
Religion polices and represses fantasies. Causing what psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall describes as the psychic conflict arising from the tensions between the inner world of primitive drives and the constraining and denying forces of the external world. Jesuits instil the dread of flesh, warning against the rebellious quirks of the pink alien snake between the legs that raises its head like some fakir’s cobra in an Indian market.
In 1949 the BBC came under a colour-coded censorship system based on the hue of the manual in which the rules were laid out. The ‘Green Book’ listed forbidden suggestive joke-topics such as ‘lavatories’ and ‘honeymoon couples’…’ But arousal can come from the least expected places. At Harland Rise Secondary Modern our English Literature master, Mr Wakefield, took us through the pages of ‘A Pattern Of Islands’ (1952, John Murray), the memoirs of Arthur Grimble, Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert & Ellice Islands. Yet Grimble’s wealth of experiences as colonial administration officer with a deep interest in the Kiribati people’s myths and oral traditions was largely overshadowed for me by a single image. Arriving by boat at the jetty of one small island he is greeted by a naked adolescent girl. There’s little more to it than that single line, but that’s more than enough to sear a beautiful vision indelibly into my overheated imagination.
Meanwhile, as kids we discuss sex as though we’ve actually done it. ‘Haven’t got a girl, but I can dream.’ My mother vaguely disapproves of the King Brothers slick-harmony minor hit, “Standing On The Corner Watching All The Girls Go By”. ‘Brother, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking…’ And man, were we thinking…! Every mammal on the planet is having sex (except, possibly, Catholic Priests, and that’s open to question). Some creatures do it multiply, others are hermaphrodite and have it both ways. Even single-celled organisms get to divide once in a while.
‘Most guys at Pencey just talked about having sexual intercourse with girls all the time – like Ackley, for instance – but old Stradlater really did it. I was personally acquainted with at least two girls he gave the time to. That’s the truth,’ says J.D. Salinger’s angsty but curiously reticent Holden Caulfield (in 1951s ‘The Catcher In The Rye’, which had debuted as a 1945-1946 magazine serial).
As teens the arguments gain in eloquence, but remain largely theoretical. At some point I could quote Tom Stoppard at you – ‘intelligence in women takes the bloom off carnality’ (from his 1978 movie adaptation of Nabakov’s ‘Despair’). Sex – he’s saying, is at its best when it is at its most primal, it should be intuitive. Jean-Jacques Rousseau seems to concur, albeit with an edge of gender-insecurity when he claims that ‘a brilliant wife is a plague to her husband, her children, her friends, her valet, everyone.’ Although there’s an equally strong tendency to disagree. In fact you can counter-argue, suggesting that ‘intellectual women are best sexually, because they can conceptualise their eroticism. Haven’t you read Pauline Réage’s ‘L’Histoire d’O’ (1954)?’ ‘Wrong analogy’ comes the reply back with an over-nervous laugh. ‘You’ve seen Jean-Jaques Beineix’s ‘Betty Blue’ (1986)? The way Beatrice Dalle’s dark dangerous pout slips into frighteningly child-like innocence? Sex should be more like that. A balance between the two.’ And so on, and so forth. Investigations. Intrigue. Who’s done what to whom? Who has a chance of doing what with whom? While secretly researching wherever hints and clues seem to be available. Theoretical manoeuvres…
Then, in 1960 – on the slip from one decade into the next, the Food & Drug Administration approves the pill. That pill. The contraceptive pill. Originally developed by American biologist Dr Gregory Pincus, it had been initially tested on Puerto Rican and Haitian women during the 1950s. It finally arrived in the UK in 1961, when it was at first available to married women only, yet it already represented to Fay Weldon ‘the beginning of the separating out of babies from sex.’ The subversive idea that sex could be more than just a means of reproduction. It could be a pleasurable end in itself. As novelist Elizabeth Bowen acutely observes in 1959, ‘nothing changes more than the notion of what is shocking.’ And yes, ‘Readers Digest’ was already fearfully prophesying an ‘all-pervading sexological spree.’ Even as Wynonie Harris was celebrating it by singing, “Keep On Churning ‘Til The Butter Comes”. A fully paid-up member of the Permissive Society? Yes please…
It was an inexorable slide, a decline, or – from another viewpoint, a liberating process of opening up. There had – there has always been promiscuity, always ‘good-time girls’ and roués eager to fraternise with the opportunities they offer, as well as bohemians and decadents living on the fringes of polite mainstream society, just that it was then done more furtively, less openly honest. And always with a delicious hint of sin. But at least since the Second World War, when men and women had fought and suffered equally to defeat repressive foreign tyrannies, there was a new sense that things would never again be allowed to be quite the same at home.
The war years must have provided a strangely unsettling intermission, with moral constants suddenly in temporary suspension. Outcomes uncertain. The world ripped apart, the future, both personal and national, open to question. Mass mobilisation meant that a generation experienced years in uniform, separated across continents from partners, and the normal restrictions of social coercion. Soldiers were exposed to different European attitudes, to the ‘Madamoiselles from Armentieres’ (parlez-vous) with their looser loucheness and moral climates that sharply confront and contrast their own up-tight Protestant upbringing. While – let’s not forget, their partners on the home-front were similarly deprived, often thrust into new circumstances through war-work, open to the distractions of other military presences. Women at home, subject to the blitz and the austerity, denied the company of husbands and fiancés who were posted abroad, dislocated from their expected life-expectations by war-work and land-girl postings, took advantage of what freedoms they could. Sometimes in the form of handsome gum-chewing GI’s stationed here, with the added lure of gift nylons. Sometimes under the friendly safely-veiling concealment of the black-outs.
A digital broadcast on BB4 (5 October 2005) shed strange light on the sexual habits of the British in the years immediately following hostilities. In 1949 the nation’s first ever Kinsey-style sex survey had taken place, with results deemed so shocking they were suppressed, filed and safely forgotten. Among the statistics were that one-in-four men admitted availing themselves of the services of a prostitute, while one-in-five women owned up to having been involved in extramarital affairs. Why lie? That’s how it must have been. Neither were prepared to return to life as it had been. The war movies portray a stiff upper-lip officer class of the David Niven type, with chirpy comic Cockney privates to provide light relief. If that cheery Cockney survived into the fifties and beyond in the irreverent form of Tommy Steele, Joe Brown – and Merseysider Gerry Marsden’s mischievous grin, the tables had been decisively turned, it was the officer class that was now seen as comedic, a ridiculous anachronism.
And it was happening everywhere. The Right To Press Freedom might have been guaranteed by the French constitution of 3 September 1791, but the ‘Commission Du Livre’ was set up by legal decree in 1939 enabling referral to the police to enforce censorship if and when it was brought to their attention. In a situation of contradictory multiple-standards publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert’s four limited-editions of De Sade’s books were prosecuted for obscenity in 1956, even though Olympia paperback editions of the same titles from Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press were already circulating, if you knew where to look. Although Pauvert was defended by star literary celebrities such as Jean Cocteau, André Breton and Georges Bataille, he was found guilty, and the books were banned. Until the decision was overturned as censorship was swept away by 1960s reforms.
Behind the learned baffle of expert witnesses pontificating on literary merit, both sides in the 1960 ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ trial knew exactly what was at stake. And both, from their side, were absolutely right – with their opinions clearly vindicated by what followed. What was at stake – let’s get this straight, was the right to read dirty books. After this… the deluge, for better or worse. Prior to the failed prosecution of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’ the ‘F’-word had never appeared in a legitimate novel. Prior to the ‘Guardian’, also in 1960, it had never appeared in a British newspaper. Prior to Kenneth Tynan in 1965 it had never been uttered on TV. It first entered the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ in its 1972 edition. On each occasion, as each limit was transgressed, there was public outrage. Until, by 1994 the romantic-comedy ‘Four Weddings & A Funeral’ offers ten ‘fucks’ and one ‘fuckity-fuck’ in its opening three minutes. And mainstream publications routinely use it several hundred times a year.
Can profanity be poetic? Can excessive use of the ‘F’-word push back the literary frontiers? After all, could there really be anyone alive in the country unfamiliar with the earthy language D.H. Lawrence uses in the novel? Surely not. Could there be anyone unaware that such sexual activity goes on around them? Nope. So what was at stake was the right to freely discuss and honestly portray what everyone was already – if not speaking, then at least, on occasions, thinking. If, by reading the book, it opens up the horizons of possibility to new experiences, new heights of awareness, openness and fulfilment, then how can that be a bad thing? If it leaves the reader unsatisfied with their own lives, frustrated by its limitations, and full of unrealisable expectations, how can that be a good thing? But the expression of those ideas can only clarify and focus desires. For good or ill, they’re already there no matter how unfocussed or vague, no matter how society pretends they are not. The only response in a mature society must be to democratise experience. Penguin – with their distinctive colour-coded paperbacks, democratised the ownership of books. Whether it is the mass-production of texts since the Gutenberg explosion, or the mass interactivity of the internet, information, dialogue, ideas must be allowed to stand or fall.
If the defence was right, the prosecution was also correct. They were both right. The ‘Chatterley’ verdict did unleash a tide of filth – or free-expression, it did open the floodgates. They were right. Post-1961 editions of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ are dedicated to ‘the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of Not Guilty.’ And yes, it was a watershed event. Cultural historians on both the political left and right are still undecided if it’s a debasement of culture, or a portal into a new more democratic, more honest society. John ‘Rumpole’ Mortimer was not involved in the ‘Chatterley’ trial, but he defended the British publication of Hubert Selby’s ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’ (1964), and successfully fought for an embattled ‘Oz’. In his apt definition, permissiveness meant ‘allowing people to do things you disapprove of.’ He went on the defend ‘Gay News’ against blasphemy charges, and the Sex Pistols for the right to use the slogan ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’…
Meanwhile, the 1963 Profumo scandal is usually interpreted as a further post-‘Chatterley’ watershed in the gradual inexorable thaw-down process to a less deferentially class-stratified time. It wasn’t, of course. The process was continuous, and was going on everywhere. It was just that such events punctuate and provide signposts to navigate by. Perhaps things before had never been quite as rigid as we think? And perhaps the freedoms that came in its wake would prove to be more complex that we anticipated. As news of the Profumo affair broke Noël Coward wrote a supportive letter to Jack Profumo’s wife, actress Valerie Hobson, admitting that ‘although I didn’t know the ins and outs of the situation,’ before adding in brackets, ‘perhaps this could have been more happily put!’
Nevertheless, as a paper-boy I drool over the hinted details of the Profumo affair reported in the newspapers I deliver. ‘In the late spring of 1963’ wrote Bernard Levin ‘men and women all over Britain were telling, and others believing and embellishing and repeating, such stories as that nine High Court judges had been engaging in sexual orgies, that a member of the Cabinet had served dinner at a private party while naked except for a mask, a small lace apron and a card round his neck reading ‘If My Services Don’t Please You, Whip Me’, that another member of the Cabinet had been discovered by police beneath a bush in Richmond Park where he and a prostitute had been engaged in oral-genital sex…’ (in ‘The Pendulum Years’, 1970).
Stories about Mandy Rice-Davies who’s ‘the kind of a girl who makes the ‘News Of The World’,’ as John Lennon might have phrased it – ‘yes, you could say she was attractively built.’ About how Christine Keeler frolicked nude in the pool, and my imagination went into overdrive… Her notoriety even climbed the Pop charts. Joyce Blair (sister of dancer Lionel), assumed the court-related pseudonym ‘Miss X’ – Keeler’s defendant name, to hit no.37 in August 1963, and stayed on the chart for no less than six weeks, with “Christine”, a single on Ember S175. Anticipating Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin’s later assault on the record chart it’s essentially an instrumental with provocative mildly suggestive female voice-overs, ‘what… now? But I’m a good girl’ she protests coyly, then, after a suitable pause, ‘see, I told you I was good!’
Does porn shift the way we respond to our partners in the real world? Perhaps, but no more so than the equally all-pervasive interpretations of gender relationships in TV-soaps, or mainstream literature, or comicbooks, or even through casual conversation with our contemporaries at work, or in the pub after work. Humans are sponges, and absorb multiple influences from everywhere.
Some will accuse I’m deliberately weighting the argument. That there are vile levels of pornography I’ve barely touched on, slanting a purposefully lightweight argument for the inoffensive truth of porn. There’s torture-porn, child-porn, sex-with-animals, levels of bondage and humiliation to make the most liberal-minded anti-censorship lobby wince. There’s no point in denying it’s there. Merely that these are not areas towards which I’ve ever been naturally inclined. Some argue porn is an addiction that inevitably escalates from the one to the other, from soft-core to hard-core, from mild titillation to gross-out. It’s the same argument that insists all junkies start out with a puff of cannabis. Richard Neville skewers the fallacy by pointing out – no, they all started out with milk. None of us are trapped by inevitability. Which is not to deny that the libido is a deep and dark place. Spacial singularities are grade one stuff by comparison. Hot and cold-wired to places we’d rather not go.
Stan Barstow’s Vic Brown knows all about its irresistible gravitational attraction. When he’s first taken to meet his (pregnant) girlfriend’s mother ‘Mrs Rothwell’s frock’s a bit on the short side and she shows a lot of leg while she’s settling herself. I’m looking at it an’ all. I couldn’t care tuppence about Mrs Rothwell’s legs actually but you know how it is when a woman’s showing a lot. You can’t keep your eyes off it. Nearly any woman – she doesn’t have to be attractive. Anyway, just for a minute I’m looking at her legs, which aren’t anything to write home about at all, and she’s looking at me looking and I feel myself coming up in a huge blush. I can imagine her talking to Mr Rothwell when I’ve gone and saying something like ‘Did you see the way he couldn’t keep his eyes off my legs? He’s nothing but a young sex-maniac. He’ll be trying to get into bed with me if we have him about the house!’’
It seems that evolution has equipped the human male with a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to operate one of those two organs at a time. Ask this – one step away from ‘Why do men look’ to ‘Why do men rape’? Because they can…?
1970s Feminist theory determines rape is more about power than it is about sex. And that’s certainly an aspect. An extreme perversion of bullying with the purpose of demonstrating domination over the victim’s will, achieving the feel-good ego-frisson of subjugating and humiliating another. Exerting the buzz of superiority, even if for the moment, even if only on the most basic of physical planes. That’s certainly part of it, for inadequates, the damaged and low-esteem losers. But not all of it. Surely sexual gratification must figure in the equation…? That gives the act of rape another, separate and unique dimension. That is – no pun intended, a motivating end in itself.
Ask this. Why do men not rape? Because social restraints forbid them from doing so. For when those restraints are removed, they rape. Rape is part of every war, where authority and order have collapsed. In the confused devastation of Nazi defeat, in the never-ending Vietnam conflict, whenever authority lapses, whenever the threat of consequences evaporates, and men are armed, innocent women are violated. Even in the devastated aftermath of the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina there was rape. Not by psychopaths or social deviants. But by clean-cut college-kids. By your uncles, brothers and fathers. I’ve listened to their shop-floor talk in factories, amusing anecdotes from men older than me who were part of the liberating army advancing northwards through Italy, about how you could buy a woman with a tin of bully-beef. Taking advantage of their poverty and refugee starvation. Or read how patrols in Vietnam took local girls for their collective use. Once they’re removed from their familiar contexts, it seems, placed in an alien culture where different rules and imperatives apply, then morality takes on altered imperatives.
Beneath the thin layer of ice that is civilisation, there’s miles and miles of deep ocean, of darkness and barbarism. And the ice can break so easily…
This is a fact so terrifying it’s almost impossible to rationally contemplate. But there’s worse. Admit it. A photo in a newspaper. A tragic autowreck, an innocent girl of nineteen, the victim of a speeding drunk. A photo of her in happier times, long hair blowing, shy smile. What a terrible waste of human potential, a life snuffed out in random mad carnage. But what is it that snags your attention? Isn’t that the clearly discernible outline of her nipple visible beneath the material of her blouse? Nice! In Ian Rankin’s 1997 crime-detection novel ‘Black & White’ his cop – Rebus, finds himself uncomfortably affected by a corpse, ‘he’d seen the post-mortem photos of Angie Riddell, and the first thought that had come to him, the thought he’d had to push past, was: good body. It had bothered him, because in that instant she’d been just another object. Then the pathologist had got to work, and she had stopped being even that…’
Watching a rape sequence in a mainstream movie – say Jodie Foster as ‘Sarah Tobias’ in ‘The Accused’ (1988), or Uma Thurman in ‘Thelma & Louise’ (1991), or the gang-rape in ‘Clockwork Orange’, viewing it safe in the knowledge that this is a theatrical simulation of rape, it is not real, she is in control, she is not being attacked, each movement in her struggle is choreographed, and every expletive scripted, yet there’s an extreme contradiction in the duality of your response. Two contrasting voices compete to be heard in your head. The dominant one is repelled and horrified by the brutality, by the helplessness and sheer terror experienced by the victim, the claustrophobic closeness of invasive inescapable vile bodies, the disgust and shocked revulsion. This empathy is genuine and instinctive, it requires no explanation or justification. So what about that other more debased voice which urges from some dark recess within the psyche, ‘watch closely’ it whispers, ‘pay attention, scrutinise with care, you might get a flash of her tits, you might see her nipples, even a momentary glimpse of a single nipple.’
Sometimes it worries me that I am a man. Keep things in perspective, be responsible about this. If the situation wasn’t a filmic fiction, that selfish lustful reaction would be drowned out by other more immediate, more responsible urgencies. Wouldn’t it? Of course it would. But doesn’t the fact of that reaction being there at all imply a level of complicity with the rapist, even if – in this instance, he’s an actor playing a part? Can’t rape in the real world be triggered by much the same complicity?
Consider this, that what we assume to be normal behaviour is merely a condition of imposed restraint. That morality is situational, and subject to change when circumstances alter. Women, of course – are kinder, gentler creatures, communal beings, the sponsors and nurturers of society. While men remain imprisoned in the testosterone-fuelled inferno of the ego. All you want to do is pump them full of sperm. There’s an unbridgeable gulf between the female universe, a place of healing and sympathy, and the hell of phallic violence inhabited by men. Before his execution, Ted Bundy – one of America’s most notorious serial killers, contacted an anti-porn campaigner to confess that his urge to kill and mutilate had been provoked by prolonged exposure to hard-core pornography. To what extent is brutality something we’re all capable of? If conditions allow?
Don’t think about it. It defies analysis. It’s an experience. It just is.
I think back to an American Science Fiction comic-strip I read sometime in the early-1960s – in ‘Uncanny Tales’ or ‘Weird Science’, Steve Ditko perhaps? Two behavioural scientists, a white-coated man with horn-rim glasses and a white-coated woman with a clipboard are experimenting on rats. In extremis, enclosed and starved, the rats resort to cannibalism. They devour each other, even their own mates. As the strip develops the button is pressed and there’s a nuclear war. Civilisation collapses in an endless radioactive wasteland of devastation. Eventually through bizarre coincidence, ragged and driven feral by starvation, the two scientists meet again by accident. They face each other. In the final frame their eyes meet in open-mouthed shock. The question is left to hang. Draw your own conclusions. This is their behavioural experiment in extremis. Will their common humanity prevail? Or will they act like their imprisoned Lab-rats did…?
Perhaps we all carry enough internal darkness to devour one another, when need and opportunity coincide?
And where does porn fit in? Is porn a form of subliminal rape? Snatched stolen carnal knowledge through the distorting deferment and distancing device of print or film? Does it provide socially acceptable outlets for those same rapine lusts, channelling them into harmless substitution? Acceptable in the sense that there’s no immediate victim, except through the extenuating argument of coercion and exploitation? Fantasy, after all, is supposed to divert deviant energies, expending them in harmless spasms of self-dramatisation. The sagas of sexual excess we concoct in our heads play out with impunity so long as they stay in that private darkness. In some cases, they can be relieved through a shedding in the form of the sickness we call creativity – Freud describes artists as harmless maniacs, who imagine triumphs – sex and wealth for the fantasist, horrific death for his enemies, dreams which they can never bring to fruition in life.
I don’t know. I’m only asking.
‘You think too much’ she says. ‘You question it too deeply. Sex is only sex. It’s just something you do. Of course men exploit women. Women exploit men too. But men exploit men. Women exploit women. Gay men and lesbian women exploit their partners. Lovers exploit each other, beautifully, yet deviously and in a squillion ways. Kids exploit their parents. Parents exploit their kids. The old exploit the young and the young exploit the elderly. Management exploits the proletariat. Capitalism exploits everyone and everything. Life itself consists of diverse systems of mutual exploitation. A continual feedback loop of complementary energies, a universal life-guzzling sixty-nine. Life is a process of using, and being used. The worst thing of all – says Kurt Vonnegut, is not to be used by anyone, for anything. To determine a spectrum of moral synergies in amongst all that is to count angels on a pin-head… so don’t even try.’
And yet, Socrates said that living with the male libido is like being chained to a madman. He’s right.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON