“IT’S A DIRTY STORY OF A DIRTY MAN… (& HIS CLINGING WIFE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND)”
‘So I look back upon my life, forever with a sense of shame,
I’ve always been the one to blame, for everything I long to do,
No matter when or where or who, has one thing in common, too
It’s a, it’s a, it’s a… it’s a sin’
(“It’s A Sin” by the Pet Shop Boys)
While I’m out, my long-time partner discovers two porn DVD’s in my collection. She furtively wraps them in garbage-bags, and – assuming I’ll not realise until it’s too late, dumps them deep in the wheelie-bin.
It’s not as though I made great attempts at concealing them, I’ve been discrete, assuming she knows they’re there without making a big deal about them. And it’s not as though they’re anything too weird. Regular straight one-on-one’s… OK, some two-on-one’s too, but nothing really that out-there objectionable. And – after all, earlier in our relationship we’d watched this stuff together. At the time, I recall, she’d been amused, entertained, mildly curious. So why this now…?
While she’s out, I’m delving around in the bin, fishing under the pizza packs, muesli cartons, and last month’s issue of ‘Mojo’. There they are. Two ‘adult sexually explicit’ DVD’s. So what now? Dust them off. Take them inside. And hide them more efficiently, I guess. Except I’d intended ours to be an honest no-secrets relationship. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. This deviousness goes against everything I’d set out to become.
Yet sadly it seems this domestic scenario is far from unusual. Read the woman’s weeklies. You know the one’s I mean. Between the recipes, arrow-words and candid cellulite celeb photo-shots, they all have problem pages. And every so often, with predictable regularity, there’s the one where she’s shocked to discover his hidden cache of girlie mags, or she’s come home unexpectedly to find him jerking-off to a porn video, or found out he’s been accessing ‘adult’ websites.
It’s not that much different to her objecting to him ogling the girl on the supermarket checkout, or the girls on the beach. She regards this as betrayal. A kind of virtual infidelity. She’s hurt and confused. ‘We’ve always enjoyed a good sex life, so why does he need to do this?’ ‘Does his interest in these other women mean I’m incapable of satisfying his desires?’ ‘Is it me?’ ‘Am I inadequate?’ It’s closely related to the jealousy she feels when she can’t help but notice he wakes each morning with an erection. Who’s he been dreaming about? What’s been going on inside his brain as he’s been sleeping? Who’s he been dream-screwing? Well, you can’t police his head. But you can censor his video library.
Men have their hidden stashes. Their grubby little secrets. Perhaps they shouldn’t. But they do. Maybe it’s women that drive them to it?, perhaps they make the deception necessary? Ideally that shouldn’t be the case. It’s not even necessarily true of all relationships. In fact I’m sure it isn’t. But in many cases, it is. It’s not even a generational thing where changing moral climates alter attitudes into new more enlightened tolerances. It’s a gender constant. Even streetwise 2006 popstrel Lily Allen expresses her mild disapproval about finding her boyfriends ‘dirty grotty magazines,’ which he’d presumably hidden from her (in her hit “Littlest Things”). Sometimes – in the problem pages, it’s the mother who discovers her teenage son’s hidden jazz-mags. That’s where it starts. ‘Is he going to grow up into a pervert, a sexual deviant, a sex-addict…?’ Remember the Beastie Boys whinge-rap about ‘your Mom just threw away your best Porno mag’ (on “Fight For The Right To Party”).
Own up time, that’s how it began for me. That’s how the two sides of the equation were first defined. That’s why I determined I was never going to grow up to become my own parents. My way would be different. Perhaps I should explain. I grew up through the 1960s in Hull as part of what would now be called a one-parent family. I was what was then called a bastard. With an absentee father. He happened to be married. But not to my mother. A mere ghost-presence in my life rumoured to live down south, Herne Bay, in a house overlooking the Thames. My mother did her best, but it can’t have been easy. And as grubby puberty hit, things get stranger. You wake up, and smell the pheromones.
To be an adolescent male is to be disabled. Is to be a dysfunctional human being. Tongue-tied. Clumsy, lumbering, ungainly, lurching, gangly. Emotionally-constipated. Obsessively self-centred. Over self-analytical. Unable to connect with any pain other than your own. Self-righteously intolerant of other’s hypocrisy and weakness, while secretly wired with unvoiced uncertainties and riddled with embarrassments. Maimed, pummelled and mutilated by every slight and sarcasm. Viciously defensive. Wrecked. Lazy. Hyperactive. Numb. Hyper-sensitive. Dumb. Damaged. Intense. Shallow. Terrified of rejection, but rejecting ninety-nine percent of everyone else… These impulses alone are enough to make entire libraries of parenting guides spontaneously self-combust.
Me, I built walls, a fortress deep and mighty, that none could penetrate. I was a Rock. I was an island (me… and Paul Simon). The only things capable of battering their way through this self-imposed force-field exclusion-zone was cheap Science Fiction, loud Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the immense gravitational singularity emanating from the groin. For when the hormonal stew accelerates to critical mass, hair starts sprouting where it’s never sprouted before. Acne explodes as an instant repellent to those already inaccessible objects of your confused desire who are also going through their own beautiful changes.
There’s that moment of realisation that fifty-percent of the human population on the planet is differently sexed, and female. And that even after eliminating those too young to qualify, and the ones so old that you wouldn’t really want to see them naked anyway, that still leaves… what? – thirty-percent, – twenty-percent of billions of potentially desirable bodies out there. Every city street, every shopping mall across nations and continents, is crowded with clothed bodies suggesting luscious bulges, beguiling curves and fascinating undulations that you will never ever get to see in the state of nature. For even the most dedicated Lothario could never hope to view more than the most insignificant decimal point of that total. Yet your most basic human urges make you want to.
The desire to see more is what forms your very rationale. The thing is, women, girls – the female of the species, cannot help being beautiful. It’s not their fault. The girl can’t help it if she was born to please. It’s a fact of existence. They are desired because of their wonderful and indefinable otherness. Clothed, or unclothed. But preferably, the latter. John Updike said that ‘the most beautiful thing most men will ever see is a naked woman’s body.’ Of course, he’s correct. So what to do? And of course, things were different then. Now, bare breasts… and more, are everywhere. Back then, eroticism wasn’t easy to come by. Underwear ads in woman’s magazines and mail-order catalogues. Well-thumbed copies of ‘Parade’ passed around school with furtive sniggers. ‘Health & Efficiency’ with its jolly naturist idyll smudged by absurd men with ridiculously flaccid micro-dicks beneath bulging guts (a March 1951 issue of the U.S. ‘Naturism’ magazine is subtitled ‘Physical Culture & Health’). While the step from ‘National Geographic’ to ‘pornographic’ was not so great when the magazine in the school library ran photo-spreads of remote rainforest tribes-persons with pendulous breasts.
Even high-gloss issues of ‘Playboy’. But also anatomically imprecise sketches and stories we perpetrate for each other. An accumulation of sad smut which – inevitably, my mother finds. Not that she’s looking. Oh no. She wouldn’t pry. Just that she’s interested to know what I’m interested in. And she’s accidentally encountered these items in among the Sci-Fi Space-Adventure comics in my cupboard. Needless to say she’s shocked, saddened, and disappointed. Now we sit face-to-face in a gut-churning arse-clenching skin-crawling excruciating embarrassment as I’m forced to burn them, feeding them one by one into the open fire, all that precious sweet lust curling and blackening into crisp ash. While she demands – in expressions of genuine concern, what I find so interesting about such vile things? What is going through my head as I look at them? Is that really the way I think about women?
Me – I’m surly, upset, incoherent. She’s asking questions I haven’t the vaguest ideas of the answers. These things don’t come in neat phrases. How do you explain to yourself, never mind your mother? Then the killer. ‘If you’re going to squander away your talent and intelligence on such filth you might as well go sweep the streets for all your gifts are worth.’ Shocked, saddened, disappointed…? Yes, me too.
Surely a father would see things differently. He’d understand. He must have been through something similar when he was a kid. Most people, those with two parents, have a north, south, east and west to their lives. It helps them navigate their way though such situations. It was times like this I realise how much I’m lacking that crucial reference point. Without that missing compass-point I’d managed to assemble a cack-handed credo of insular self-sufficiency that usually got me through. It’s only now it breaks down. Surely a father would smile indulgently, wink in a male-bonding conspiratorial kind of way, and suggest ‘you’d better hide them more efficiently next time.’
Oddly, a couple of years later, by now I’m sixteen, it happens. A stranger with my face turns up on the doorstep. This – my mother explains, is your prodigal father, eager to make up for all those missing years. This is the absent compass-point from my life. Sadly, it proves to be a temporary spasm, an enthusiasm that – like most of his enthusiasms, soon passes. But for now, I’m to go down to Herne Bay for… a week? To build tentative bridges. An eerily disturbing experience. We travel down from Hull Paragon Station to London King’s Cross by train…
Stay with me, I’ll get to the point shortly.
He buys me a Welsh Rarebit and a pint of bitter in a pub just off the Thames embankment, enquiring about Yorkshire slang for taking a piss, ‘a slash?’ He’s appropriately amused. By now we’ve moved up into Soho, towards a seedy strip-show. Well, why not? Inside it’s like an old-style cinema or small theatre, where a series of girls reveal all to sparsely-populated rows of a vaguely disreputable audience. Naturally for me it proves to be acutely arousing, there’s no way it could be anything else, even though his presence and running commentary is more than a little unsettling. Men pretend to read newspapers (to furtively conceal what activities?), or even fall asleep, as on-stage the girls undress each other with mildly bored S&M overtones, and lazy flicks of a whip. Another cavorts in nothing but a Fred Astaire-style top hat, neatly trapping it over each breast in turn where it stays without any other visible means of support.
‘They work out their own routines’ he informs me as we trudge, mismatched, towards the station. ‘And often they work at a number of different clubs in the same afternoon.’ How he came into possession of these gems of information I’m much too scared to ask. And once on the train for Herne Bay he takes me deeper into his confidence. ‘This is between me and you. No-one else need know where we’ve been this afternoon. Men must have their secrets from women, this shall be ours.’ So what does that say? In a city full of galleries, museums, shows, exhibitions, tourist hot-spots on the cusp on the Swinging Sixties, why choose a sleazy strip-show for our first father-son assignation? If intended as a rite-of-passage masculinist initiation, I suppose I should be grateful he didn’t gift the full ‘Facts of Life’ prostitute bit. But I think not. More likely he just needs an excuse for his own small indulgence. And I provide the convenient opportunity.
Yet the continuity is there. The pattern confirming. Men have their concealed sex-lives that their women must be excluded from. In the DVD drawer. Or that most inaccessible of places, in the head. So, am I cursed by my prurient genetic legacy…? Or blessed with a healthy libido?
‘LOVE WARS…’
Gender is the only war in which you get to sleep with the enemy. If you’re lucky. Intercourse can be both conversation, and penetration. In the worlds of Literature and the Arts, every man who publishes his Life & Works has a Partner who Lurks. A partner who bowdlerises his memoirs, excises the riskier lines from his poems, burns the more sexually explicit sketches and art-works before they can reach the public domain, so we are left with a sanitised, incomplete and censored version of their lives to puzzle over. Women who are at first attracted to the wildness in their partners, then declare a war of extinction against that beast within him.
For – like Marianne Moore’s definition of her poems, erotic fantasies are also imaginary gardens with real toads in them. Sometimes there are other family complications. Anne Frank’s father censored the first editions of ‘Diary Of A Young Girl’ (published in Dutch in 1947 as ‘The Secret Annex’), excising passages he thought would show her in a bad light. In much the same way that, decades later, Jordan Zevon’s duty as a son was to dispose of his singer-songwriter father – Warren Zevon’s, porn-stash after he died, little realising that some of the offending tapes allegedly contain footage of his Dad involved in the action.
This furtive libido, this divided self is something like, but nothing as dramatic as, the werewolf effect. Nothing as extreme as the Jekyll & Hyde scenario. Perhaps it’s more what German-Swiss writer Herman Hesse defines as the ‘Steppenwolf’ (1927) – where the wolf-nature and man-nature co-exist in the same human body. Sometimes the wolf rises to the surface, sometimes the man. But when the wolf-nature is dominant it leaves its spoor. Its hidden caches. The marks of its lair. Of course, men need commitment in a secure relationship too, an equal mutually-supportive love based in trust and emotional fulfilment. But you’re not thinking of commitment in a secure mutually emotionally-fulfilling relationship when you wank.
Nevertheless, I say no. My life will be different. My mother and my father’s mutual dishonesty and incomprehension was wrong. I’d not be forced into the position of justifying my deviousness in dread inquisitions, no duplicity of furtive secretive lies and evasions. No more. Not again. My sexuality will be open. There will be discussion. We will talk-through and mutually resolve the deepest elements of our being through an interactive trading of our dreams, our darkest kinks and quirks. There must be total adult honesty in this most intimate of relationships… except, of course, it doesn’t quite work out that way. Gender has its own hidden agenda.
I move in with… let’s call her Margaret, and in midnight post-coital confessions I try for that total laid-bare honesty. This is me. This is what I am. At one point in my life, I confess, I even masturbated every night, without fail. Unfortunately, something gets lost in the telling. She’s less impressed by the honesty of my own-up admission, than she is by how she interprets this intimate information. Suspecting an implication that I’ll now require sex with her ‘every night without fail.’ Which – while that might be nice, is not my real intention. Sometimes, in a relationship, after that first voracious hunger of wanting to learn everything you can about your significant other, things get snarled-up in complications, you now know things you wish you didn’t know, things you don’t fully understand. You must get beyond that – into caring in spite of what you know, not the other way around… or you end it there. We endure only a few more moody weeks before her own confession. She isn’t capable of meeting my needs. Better we part. Sometimes too much truth is bad for a relationship. Sometimes too much honesty can terminate a relationship.
Another lover. And she’s saying – it’s your birthday, there must be something you’ve always wanted to do with a woman, but were afraid to suggest, so tell me, go on, tell me. No, it’s alright, I’d rather not. She insists, tell me, I want tonight to be special. Well, there is something, but no, I’d rather not say. Intrigued now, she persists ‘what is it you want me to do? your slightest naughty wish is my command, master,’ until eventually, I tell her. ‘I want you to let me cum in your mouth.’
And it’s like I’ve hit her. ‘No,’ she turns away with an expression of disgust. ‘You asked me.’ ‘Yes, but I expected – I don’t know, you’d want me to wear a basque, or you’d want hanky-panky tie-me-up and spank-me, or you’d want me to dress like a St Trinian’s Schoolgirl, something like that.’ ‘So it’s alright to want sex with fantasy schoolgirls, but not consensual adult oral sex?’ ‘Oh very clever aren’t we, Mr Sarcastic, very smart.’ ‘You started it. You asked me.’ ‘And you finished it. Happy Birthday, perv…’
And now this. While I’m out, my long-time partner dumps my two porn DVD’s deep in the wheelie-bin. Where do I go from here? Confrontation? Anger? Recrimination…? No. I sit down and write this.
Men’s hidden stash is a political statement in the gender love wars. They lurk in the factory work’s locker, in the allotment potting shed because ‘her indoors’ won’t understand. It’s the furtive website he watches with the ‘private browsing’ setting on when his wife has gone to bed. It’s always there, as a secret space in the male cerebral wiring, and it always will be. What women can never know, is what we do to them in our minds. Don’t kid yourself. It’s there behind every protestation of New Mannish sensitivity. Women believe in friendship between the sexes. Men don’t. As in Paul Simon’s “You Don’t Know Where Your Interest Lies”, ‘we’re friends alright… but I won’t let friendship stand in my way.’ To assume that just because you are friends doesn’t mean that if the situation arises, if the circumstances are right, he won’t jump your bones. Because he will. If you think that because you are friends he won’t be looking down your cleavage when you lean forward, then you don’t understand the rules. Because he will. If you don’t appreciate this you don’t appreciate anything. The secret stash is always there. In the interests of honesty, that’s why I’m writing this.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON