To have sex with the ocelot, turn to page 45

At last! The literary world has found room for a contemporary twist on the Choose Your Own Adventure stories, of which I owned several as a young tyke. I can't remember which ones I read, though I vaguely remember Nazis featuring heavily, but I do remember finding them boring and frustrating:

I presume that the books were a response to the perceived threat of computer games, which were beginning to evolve from simplistically teleological (win/lose or live/die) narratives to more sophisticated texts in which simple actions were replaced by complex decision-making. I guess Skyrim is a decent modern version, as the quests can be ignored in favour of exploration to some extent. My favourite computer game, by the way, is this one. You can play it for free, for ever. I have memorised the books and still can't get far. I also used to play Civilization II but gave up once I realised that it was ideologically constrained: it was impossible to succeed by running a peaceful socialist state, and I hate being lectured to.

The other motivation is of course the perception that boring old novels with their starts, middles and ends were incapable of holding a cool 80s kid's attention, too bossy and prescriptive for Gen-X rebels. In this sense, I'd have to say that they were failures. The idea that the reader was 'free' to choose an adventure of his or her own was illusory, and the illusion was brought to the fore by the mechanism. The slim books only held room for a certain number of choices, and in particular of endings. The mechanism of narrative was laid bare in a really boring way for me, though that in itself was educational, I suppose.

Paradoxically, the classic novel affords the reader far more freedom than the CYA ones. The latter are solely about plot: there's almost no characterisation or narrative commentary. Entirely written in second-person ('You reach a fork: to turn left, turn to page 31…'), the destination becomes the only thing of interest and the outcomes were so stark that boredom is inevitable. Where the traditional Bildungsroman would end with the protagonist growing up, understanding society, himself and his place in (or out of) society, the CYA novels would end with 'You are dead' or 'you find the treasure'. Not much room for ambiguity or side plots, let alone allowing the reader to prefer death or not care about the treasure. While established genres have more or less authoritarian narratives, none of them are quite so reductive. Tristram Shandy's black page and the first-person narration of Tristram's own conception, various authors' use of pages to be read in random order, or the seemingly random flow of Ulysses leave the reader with far more freedom of interpretation, understanding and creation than the CYA sub-genre. Even the less experimental texts are implicitly more adventurous than CYA ones. Take Pride and Prejudice and its famous opening sentence:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

So many choices have to be made just by the time you reach the end of this sentence. Your choices dictate what kind of novel you read. Imagine assuming that this sentence is entirely seriously intended. The result is a novel in which the interest lies in getting the rich man a wife and we're just reading for a conservative happy ending in which the rich man acquires his female trophy. It's a romance, slightly undercut by the monetary foregrounding (which makes a 'straight' reading difficult). Let's choose another adventure: let's assume the narrator is being ironic. Just by changing the tone of voice, we have a completely different novel which uses satire to challenge established social conventions. There are other choices to make. Is this an external narrator, refereeing the action and characters, or are the attitudes of one particular character being relayed (we call this free indirect discourse) and perhaps even mocked? If so (and I'd suggest Mrs Bennet) then we have not just a social comedy or satire, but rather a cruel parody of a woman trying her best in difficult circumstances to provide for her daughters. Another possibility is that the text sympathetically explores the precarious situation of young women whose only salvation is in snaring the young man, whether they (or he) wish to or not.

That's not all: as long as Choosing Your Own register and genre, you have all the fun of reading with or against your narrator, picking your characters' clothes, appearance, back-story, preferred fates, accents and a host of other things. A decent book will leave you with lots of space to interpret events, statements, implications and endings for yourself, far more than a CYA novel will.

And what of the new Choose Your Own Adventure novels? Rather boringly, they're Choose Your Own Sexual Adventure texts. Not 'boringly' in the sense of 'middle-class academic takes fashionably dismissive view of sexual content', but boringly in the sense that this was inevitable and will inevitably be entirely reductive and predictable. In one way, sex is the ideal subject for a sub-genre (no pun intended) with the limitations described above. However you look at it, the basic permutations of sex are pretty limited and mechanical, and for men at least, lead quickly to a defined end-point, however one chooses to get there. As Pulp's jaded take on sex and by extension life, 'This Is Hardcore' puts it,

I've seen the storyline played out so many times before.
Oh that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there. & then it's over.

Oh, what a hell of a show but what I want to know:
what exactly do you do for an encore?

The inventive aspect of sex, and sex writing, is how one dresses up the the permutations and divert attention from their repetitiveness. The books will feature a few relatively mild sexual options (light S+M, different locations, no doubt some class and racial mixing) all of which will tell you quite a lot about the idealised readership's cultural state, but they'll be as boring as porn, which I'm told also lacks compelling plots, characterisation or discursive variation.

The limited nature of the children's versions of CYA books will only be accentuated by the sexual versions. All the readers will know (at least in theory) what the preferred ending will be, and certainly won't be pleased by a realist treatment. Just imagine it:

p. 1. A rich man invites you to stay with him on his yacht. If you choose to go with him, turn to page 3.
p. 3. Your sexual adventure is over in 32 seconds. Your partner claims that this has never happened before and falls asleep. He later wakes up, gets your name wrong and explains that his wife doesn't understand him while ostentatiously looking at his watch. Go back 7 pages and try again. 

or

Your new acquaintance asks you to use some toys and 'sexy' clothes. Do you a) laugh derisively or b) give it a go? If b) turn to page 69.
p. 69. Your partner is snoring loudly. You lie awake in the dark empty, disappointed, unfulfilled and used. Do you wish to try again or browse dejectedly for LOLCats on your phone until sweet oblivion takes pity on you?

Actually, I'm tempted to give writing one of these a go. Although Joe Dunthorne, whom I admire very much, has already written one.

If you think I'm being overly mean, let's have a look at what these books actually do:

"you" are a woman who has been stood up in a swish hotel bar. When a stranger mistakes you for a high-class escort, slips you an envelope full of cash and invites you to his room, the first of many choices begins. 

Erotic adventures could include "enticing two young men into a memorable threesome", "dinner with a stressed-out executive involv[ing] more than food on the table", or a visit to a porn set. "Remember, even if you choose submission, the control is still all yours," says the publisher.

Interestingly, the author decides that some Adventures won't feature:

Dominatrix for instance, just didn't come out erotically.

So: choosing your own adventure starts by asserting a fixed sexual identity: female and heterosexual, with the cash-sex nexus and male dominance firmly established, despite the claims that the female reader at whom the novels are aimed remains 'in charge'. The only choice is between thinly-disguised variations of tired, conventional social positions (no pun intended, once again) with no opportunity for genuine transgression ('You arrive at the zoo. If you wish to sleep with an ocelot, turn to page 45…').

Choose Your Own Adventure indeed! The only real choice is whether to further enrich an opportunist publisher by buying another coil of old literary rope, or retire to bed with nothing other than your own imagination. Or a copy of Ulysses. And my answer to that would be:

yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Of pedagogy and penis

So, here's a post which requires a little tact and sensitivity. If you're my mother, one of my aunts (my core demographic, actually) or a low-rent tabloid newspaper, you should look away now. Read this instead. It's very good.

Gone? Excellent, we can begin. You might remember that a few weeks ago I briefly ran through the low-lights of Jilly Cooper's 1985 bonkbuster novel Riders, in which Germans 'goose-step', murderous dictator Francisco Franco is a beaming gentleman, and in which betrayed wives apologise to their husbands for making them commit adultery, then promise to try harder.

Here - from 8.05 - is Rupert's accusation, though Helen's acceptance of the charge has been cut from the televised version, presumably for being too reactionary even for commercial TV:



All glaringly free of any authorial irony at all. The book has gained even more significance recently, as the core of the novel is the messy transition from what Cooper calls 'socialism' to shiny 1980s winner-takes-all Thatcherism. But more of that anon.

No, I don't know what a 'classic bestseller' is either.

The first question is of course why I put this novel on a university course. Two of my friends were monstered by a local tabloid and a rent-a-quote MP for featuring sexual material on one of their modules. Admirably, the university stood up to the bullying and gave the answer I'd give too: a lot of humans spend a lot of time having sex. Even more humans spend even more time thinking about sex. Things humans spend a lot of time doing or thinking about doing are important and need to be examined. (This applies to attacks on Media Studies too). Sex isn't a 'thing' that's been the same forever: it's a cultural text which impacts on every aspect of society. For instance, in Riders, sex with underage girls is a bit of a naughty laugh – not exactly an attitude readers would publicly adopt now.

The other charge against material like this is that it's somehow 'dumbing-down'. That universities should act like big Booker Prize panels, picking out (in Matthew Arnold's terms) 'the best that is thought and known' for preservation and dissemination. There's certainly a role for this kind of thing, but one of the positive lessons of postmodernism is that taste is subjective and contingent, not something which would bother Arnold. Instead, we're all Raymond Williamsites now: everything people do is intrinsically interesting and deserves analysis. When it comes to pulp fiction, we need to read it to understand the impulses which fuel its writing, publication, purchases and uses of pulp. I can pick any number of profound modern poems which examine the human condition (and I do, in lots of classes), but the fact is that most people are reading Jilly Cooper and her descendants. Geniuses are often a little odd: if you want to know what everyone else is interested in, you look at the mass market.

Which brings me to Riders itself, and my slight worry about the state of my career. It is, as I've said, an interesting novel. Underneath the appalling prose and structure, it has a political and cultural purpose. It promotes a weird melange of tradition conservative and Conservative aristocratic values, and expresses a considerable degree of horror at the rise of frightful nouveaux riches types like Kevin Coley the cat food king, who sponsors horses as long as they're named after his products. It spends a lot of time ridiculing and marginalising non-Alpha males, academics (I took this a little personally), intellectuals, homosexual men, lesbians (repeatedly), liberals, bogey-man 'Socialists', foreigners and the middle-classes whom I assume are actually the readership.

But it's the sex which is really striking. There isn't as much of it as you'd expect from Cooper's reputation but it's very interesting. The book devotes a lot of time to criticising bourgeois middle-class sexual morality, hence the author's contempt for poor American suburban import Helen, who is so hurt by her husband's compulsive adultery. Aristocratic men and women are rampant, it says: if you don't like it, stay away. But there's also a covert but insistent attempt to introduce the readership to a new politics of sexuality, a very 1980s version. For instance, hairy-legged, fun-free feminist shrew Hilary is converted to patriarchy through being slapped in the face then sexually assaulted by Rupert, one of our heroes. Lazy journalist Janey (shades of Cooper?) thinks she's free because she sleeps around before and after her marriage and because she works for a living, but she's not actually organised enough to live independently, and we're explicitly told that she needs a husband and a baby to fulfil her. Silly girl! Oh, and the women are constantly being assessed in exactly the same way and using the same words as  the men examine and talk about their horses.

Yet the actual mechanics of the sex in Riders is very interesting, and demonstrates the fuzzy boundaries of 80s individualism and sexual liberation. And here's where teaching gets interesting: I never thought I'd find myself discussing the political significance of female-on-male oral sex in a classroom one Monday afternoon with a socially diverse crowd of young and mature women. And least of all on a module called… wait for it… Positions! And yet here we are. We'd read Trollope's 19th-century attack on aristocratic amorality The Way We Live Now, Waugh's disapproving exposé of 1920s toffs Vile Bodies and Gwyn Thomas's Welsh mining novel Sorrow for thy Sons, which in many ways is the most sordid novel of the lot. But last on the list, carefully juxtaposed with these others, is Riders in all its gold-embossed glory.

On the sexual menu in Riders is: various more or less orthodox sexual encounters; droit de seigneur exploitation of more-or-less willing proletarians such as stable girls who are presumed to have no interior life at all; meaningless encounters with assorted foreigners – and repeated discussions of specific acts such as pubic shaving, oral sex, fantasies, and a very unhappy foursome in a Kenyan holiday home.

I think these are interesting firstly because it's through pulp fiction that practices previously restricted to pornography or marginalised groups become normalised. I suspect that the discussions of pubic hair removal in Riders, and perhaps the blow-job scenes, are amongst the first ones in popular mainstream fiction: and yet the book is enthusiastically endorsed by the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph amongst others. In case you think I'm joking, here's a screen shot of a recent Daily Mail page (h/t: @takitaki).

 Why do these right-wing outlets approve of all these hi-jinks? Partly, I suspect, because Jilly Cooper has been very clever. In the novel, the pubic hair issue is proposed by the women's partners as being for their own benefit, and the women come to like it. The same goes for the oral sex: there is some reciprocation, but as the classroom discussion discovered, the fellatio is essentially an act of patriarchal domination: the characters talk about it as something rather unpleasant which can eventually be enjoyed, while the unspoken truth is that by its very nature, it's a one-way process. Male pleasure, followed by sleep and/or a prolonged recovery period (as you can probably tell, I'm struggling for words here: this is not in my comfort zone). The orgy scene is also highly significant. The Kenyan setting evokes – for some readers – the notorious history of aristocratic expat hi-jinks in Happy Valley, and carefully distances the scene from 'real life'. In it, poor Helen is essentially sexually assaulted by her husband, his best friend and his wife, Janey: and they explain it as being good for her. When she finally gets away, they cheer the disappearance of the disapproving 'grown-up'. It's one of the very few moments of genuine sympathy for Helen, who is largely mocked for being pseudo-intellectual, sexually inadequate, politically liberal and American. Try this clip, especially from around 3.30:



But here we see the unacceptable edge of sexual liberation. Alpha-male patriarchy reveals its own contradictions in this scene. While the men's sexual impulses are 'natural', Rupert's cruelty becomes intolerable. Additionally, the orgy raises the suggestion of male-male sexual contact (never represented here) which is clearly beyond the boundaries of what's acceptable. Finally, I think there's an unspoken and old-fashioned fear: that group sex endangers patriarchal capitalism. None of them use contraceptives: if either of the women became pregnant, the orderly transmission of identity and property rights would be in serious doubt. It's these concerns, I think, which ensure that this is the scene which teaches readers where the boundaries are.

What we've got here is an uncomfortable mix of right-wing women's liberation, old-fashioned patriarchy, and anti-feminism. The novel proclaims the rights of at least upper-class women to sexual pleasure within and without marriage, as long as they accept that fulfilment ultimately lies in heterosexual submission to élite men. Sexually however, Cooper makes it clear that female sexual fulfilment is available only to patriarchally-approved acts: satisfaction lies in pleasing your man. Lesbians are unhappy predators or (even worse) droopy unhappy academics: the notion of women being sexually fulfilled without men is obviously a threat to Cooper's worldview. An awful lot of effort is expended in separating women's sexual liberation from their political liberation: awful Hilary may name her children after Kate Millett and Germaine Greer, but she smartens up once Rupert sees the inner beauty hidden by her frumpy right-on clothes and attitudes and forcibly enfolds her within the patriarchy. Feminists are self-destructive monsters in this novel: women can and should enjoy sex, but that's as far as their ambitions should go.

And of course, the female sexual emancipation story is overshadowed by the novel's driving plot: rivalry between men in which women and horses are interchangeable objects to be traded between them in a homosocial – if not homerotic – competition.

Pulp fiction either specialises in Bakhtinian carnivalesque transgression: we read it to indulge dreams we wouldn't attempt to reproduce in 'real life', or its a conduit for imagining new ways of organising society. Riders is like Fifty Shades: either a safety-valve for frustration or a channel for  previously-marginalised subcultures to enter the mainstream. The success of Riders, I think, is that it beautifully identifies a bourgeois, largely-female readership which has no interest in new forms of politics or social structures, but does want to read about and even try out new sexual identities. It's therefore a Tory Liberation: the trappings of liberation are there, but reduced to individual experience. There's precious little empathy or gender consciousness in this novel.

This is why it's a Tory sex manual: all relationships and sexual practices are stripped to the status of a menu, denuded of political or cultural significance. The idea that there's a cultural history or context here, or that readers are complicated creators of meaning, is implicitly discounted. Riders definitely isn't just a bit of fun: it's a fascinating insight into the psyche of a time, a class, a place and a philosophy. You won't be surprised to learn the the sequel, Rivals combines sex with the machinations of… privatised TV stations.

Should you read Riders? Not for fun, certainly. It's just too badly written, as though Cooper has a grudge against the English language (though she's curiously obsessed with naming 'classics' of English literature as though to prove that she's self-consciously slumming it). If English is a horse, it throws Jilly off its back with astounding frequency. But as a key text for understanding the 80s… and the current government: hell yes.

How did the students respond? Well, they'd never read Cooper before but they had mostly read similar more recent texts. What they found interesting was the way in which they now read differently. Instead of consuming novels simply for pleasure (nothing wrong with that, of course), they said that they were now much more demanding readers, less easily pleased. Because of this they found it easy to talk about Cooper's techniques, the sexual politics and the reader's role pretty dispassionately. If there was any embarrassment in the room, it was mine. Of course, the module evaluation records might tell a very different story. But I'm glad I put this on the course. Nothing should be unspeakable or unteachable, and I refuse to accept that there isn't something to be learned from any available text.

Now I'll just sit back and wait for the local rag to run outraged headlines about moral and educational decay…

Mr or Ms Vole?

One of the interesting exchanges at the Science into Fiction conference I attended yesterday came during the lunch break. Craig, a cheery man who writes what the Guardian calls 'harrowing' fiction, asked another chap if he knew who Plashing Vole was. I gingerly raised me hand, to which he replied that he'd always assumed PV was female.

I'm intrigued by this, and asked Twitter followers what their assumptions were. Most said male, a few said female. I realise I've never stated my sex online, but I assumed that if anyone gave it a moment's thought, they'd think I'm male. One respondent said my style is 'very male', which raises a number of fascinating questions about discourse and gender.

In terms of content, I think I fit largely into the male category, though it's a dubious claim to make. Sex and gender, we know from modern theory, is an unstable concept reinforced by performance. But I talk about football, the minutiae of indie music and politics a lot - not exclusively male, but certainly publicly more male than they should be. On the other hand, teaching is a subject and profession with many women in it (though less rarely in senior positions) and I talk about them a lot. I would reckon that I fit some stereotypical categories: the mildly autistic collector, for one.

Stylistically, I think my writing is masculine: I'm obsessive, forceful and often rude. Obviously there are plenty of women who fit these categories (hello mum) but you're more likely to find these qualities in writing by men. Certainly from my days as a literary theorist, feminist critics asserted that men write authoritarian, 'closed' 'phallic' texts, while women write 'open' or flowing, ambiguous work - informed by their respective genital and sexual characteristics. Lakoff claimed forty years ago that women's speech is marked by qualifiers, ambiguity, hesitations, redundancy and tentativeness - marking a desire for communal validation, whereas men supposedly assert things without concern for the speech community's opinions. Very baldly: some claim that men use speech as a carrier of meaning while women use it as a social glue. Interesting claim, but dependent on a lot of philosophical/ideological assumptions.

It's easy in some languages: Japanese has separate vocabularies for male and female language for some things. There's also some physiological evidence for differential communication skills between women (better) and men, from brain scans, and that women are more fluent on paper. Women apparently use language more formally or correctly, while men adopt slang more quickly - though I suspect new media and educational/social changes might erode this difference. It's also believed by some that men and women exist in differential cultures and linguistic groups, which makes sense to some extent: we often read different things, talk about different subjects and mix with different groups - though it leads too easily to the Men are from Mars bullshit. This isn't exclusive of course: most of us work and play in the same spaces, with each other. There's also an argument that linguistic difference represents the unequal distribution of power between men and women, which seems fairly convincing to me.

I quite like the idea that my sex isn't immediately obvious online. It lends a kind of freedom and lets me escape from gendered assumptions. To all the arguments noted above, I'd insist that linguistic and sexual identity is a continuum rather than a pair of opposed poles. We're all located somewhere on the scale. I hope that my interests are open and interesting to people all along the scale, but I'd have thought that my mode of expression was further to the male side. So: apart from those of you who know me, what sex did you think I am?

Update: some comments from Twitter:

@PlashingVole until I discovered your identity, I thought you were female, too! Pink background (gender construction) of the avatar [ a statue of a man reading]

I thought you were "he" because I read the profile bit where it says "he". 

 I know you and thought you were female. 

never for a second thought you were a woman - something very male about your writing style 

I did. I think it might have been discussions of child care. I know, says more about me...

I confess that I too thought you were female! Something in the (very eloquent, BTW) way you write, perhaps? 

Update: @infinitewarrior tells me about a site that claims to analyse your prose and give you a 'gender' reading. I'm a bit dubious: my writing is hugely derivative of the people I read, my academic context and the newspapers I follow, and when you look at the analysis, the decisions as to what constitutes a 'masculine' or 'feminine' word is heavily culturally dependent. But it's interesting.

My result:

Female Score: 1160Male Score: 1288The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
 

'…the relics of a world that progress threw away' (on Libraries and Sex)

OK, I'm not very good at erotica, but if libraries and porn go together in your filthy minds, this article in the Paris Review should be checked out (arf). I've no need to associate libraries with sex - they're sites of extreme pleasure without it. Though there's something masochistic about entering somewhere in which the books can only be handled, borrowed, but never owned. The teases!

I like the way he's holding on to the book. It's probably on short-loan.

Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal 

Sadly, the author's conclusion is that modern library porn removes the action from the library itself: the stereotypical female librarian is the object of the fantasy (never the subject), rather than the location. She is assumed, with her spectacle and bun, to be repressed and needing sexual liberation: recognition is rarely given (I should confess I haven't read many of these) to the liberatory possibilities of the knowledge contained in the library, unlike the 18th-19th century library porn: for the Enlightenment, sexual and intellectual liberation were of a piece and so libraries were natural sites for discovery in both senses.

On the other hand, our author suggests that modern library porn enunciates the alienation found in sexual cyberspace: devotees and characters search for a more personal and more intellectual climax than the atomised and individual life of the sex-surfer:

Lucy’s very real encounter in the stacks is the modern library’s attempted rejoinder to the loneliness of life online. The physicality of the library space is presented here as a concrete alternative to the interminable virtualness of contemporary erotic imagination. It’s the last argument for the library’s continued relevance as a space and of the subversive potential of books—both of which are, ironically, called into question by the very existence of Lucy. This book, like all recent library-porn books, cannot not be found on any actual shelf in the real world. It lives exclusively in virtual space.  

The threat of extinction has become a mainstay of recent library porn: again and again, the neglected love life of the librarian is a stand-in for the doomed state of the library generally.

The library sex fantasy has, in other words, entered an apocalyptic period. “Throw me on my back in the dark room with the microfiche,” says the narrator of “Checking Out,” the final story of 2011’s Nympho Librarian. “Fuck me amidst the relics of a world that progress threw away.”  

This is certainly something that speaks to me. In this country, libraries are being closed every day, thanks to the philistine government's preference for bombs over books. Here's a taster from the age of Austerity Erotica.

Soaked to the skin through her clinging, low-cut silk blouse and short skirt, lissom Lisa scurried up the steps of the library, knowing that within its close and labyrinthine walls, fulfilment - in so many ways - awaited her. Grasping the smooth, hard knob, she paused a moment before taking the plunge into a world of self-discovery. But as she slowly turned the handle, she spotted a sign pasted on the window.
'This library is now closed to improve customer experience. Clients may now take advantage of the Mobile Learning Centre (Fridays 6 a.m.-6.33 a.m every other month) or follow us on Twitter'.
Her hand fell from the door and, shivering now in the freezing rain, she trudged home to a low-fat Horlicks and a copy of More. The dream was over. 

Of course, libraries are no longer up to it architecturally. Too much plate glass, too many 'talk zones' and 'group…study areas'. Coffee bars and computers have taken over from dark corners and wide sturdy tables. They're explicitly social sites now, rather than places in which individuals skulk, seeking enlightenment or furtive romance.

Time for a Quickie?

If you're looking for a sharply-written book of erotic and very short stories for the underside of your mattress, then you need Quickies: Stories for Adults, a slim and smutty anthology compiled by the bright young hairy-palmed ladies and gentlemen of Manchester's literary scene. No doubt the gentlemen authors will claim that the tales last for much longer than the ladies.

Smut. Pulp. Dirt. Filth. The twitch of curtains. The starched flick of petticoats. The slow dance of couples undressing. Scandal. Intrigue. Forbidden passions. Love. Lust. Fidelity. Infidelity. Lies. Truth. Unrequited longings. Happy marriages. Broken promises. Strange fantasies. Quickies: Stories for Adults is a collection of stories, each no longer than 400 words, that catch humanity in the act and report back what they see. 

If you need further recommendation, I'm told that several copies were sold at the Conservative Party Conference this week. Say what you like about Tories, they're seriously discerning perverts (as George Osborne's lawyer will tell you).

You can order it at your local bookstore if you are a moral vacuum, or have it delivered in authentic shaming brown paper from this site (yes, it is SFW). You can even get it sent to your wipe-clean Kindle.

Take the sex test

VS Naipaul (not a writer I particularly rate) has made some headlines claiming to be able to spot a writer's sex immediately. He also claimed that there are no female writers at all up to his standard.

So try this Guardian quiz. I got 7 out of 10 right. How will you do?

What gives it away? I'm not sure. Many women writers don't dwell on female bodies in the drooling way a certain group of male ones do. I can tell the difference between Austen and Amis, for example, but a lot of it is period, class and subject matter. On similar grounds and generations, it's more difficult. There is linguistic research into gendered language use, but it's not my field at all.

Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Last week I was talking about sex. This week I was on about Milton and National Lampoon's Animal House. The two seem to have merged in this discussion. The Red Witch points out the bit where the Angels explain that they have sex too (this is a big theological deal: St. Paul and his grumpy friends see sex as a shameful post-Fall duty), in Book VIII, 617-629. 


It's pretty good for Adam and Eve before the Fall too: Book VIII 510-519 are the Renaissance equivalent of trains going into tunnels, rockets firing and all the other humorous representations we're used to from ironic films - only not ironic, and there's an undertone of fearful wonder as Adam realises that he's weakened by desire. 

To the nuptial bower

I led her blushing like the morn: All Heaven,

And happy constellations, on that hour

Shed their selectest influence; the Earth

Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill;

Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs 

Whispered it to the woods, and from their wings

Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub,

Disporting, till the amorous bird of night

Sung spousal, and bid haste the evening-star

On his hill top, to light the bridal lamp.

Thus have I told thee all my state, and brought

My story to the sum of earthly bliss,

Which I enjoy; and must confess to find

In all things else delight indeed, but such

As, used or not, works in the mind no change,

Nor vehement desire; these delicacies

I mean of taste, sight, smell, herbs, fruits, and flowers,

Walks, and the melody of birds: but here

Far otherwise, transported I behold,

Transported touch; here passion first I felt,

Commotion strange! in all enjoyments else

Superiour and unmoved; here only weak

Against the charm of Beauty's powerful glance.

Conversely, having posted some of those films last week, I should give you a bit of this: Pulp's 'This is Hardcore'. For me, it's their greatest song - a bitter, plangent lament for two things: the end of Britpop's innocence and their role in it, and for the pornification of culture. It's also about artifice in quite a profound way.


It is, in many ways, the post-Fall version. If you've seen children in 'Porn Star' t-shirts, heard tales of the way sexuality has been poisoned by the replacement of joy with mechanics, read of the way people's understanding of relationships have been degraded by the way pornography has reached into every aspect of popular culture, then this is the song for you. 





Baudrillard would understand. He'd say that love and desire have been entirely displaced by the hyperreality of porn. What we do and how we look has replaced the emotional connection, hence the requirement to shave and bejewel, perform certain acts and loudly proclaim them as liberation: these simulate the real thing but simultaneously hollow it out. We might not like it, but for him, there's no going back.

The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal. . . which is entirely in simulation.

This is what he says about universities:

The exchange of signs (of knowledge, of culture) in the university, between "teachers" and "taught" has for some time been nothing but a doubled collusion of bitterness and indifference (the indifference of signs that brings with it the disaffectation of social and human relations), a doubled simulacrum of a psychodrama (that of a demand hot with shame, presence, oedipal exchange, with pedagogical incest that strives to substitute itself for the lost exchange of work and knowledge).  In this sense the university remains the site of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value, and those who have lived there for the past few years are familiar with this strange work, the true desperation of nonwork, of nonknowledge.  Because current generations still dream of reading, of learning, of competing, but their heart isn't in it--as a whole the ascetic cultural mentality has run body and possessions together.

Hands-on sex education

Northwestern University biology classes get straight to the point: a class featured a naked woman demonstrating female sexual arousal to the class, with the aid of a sex toy.

Luckily, I have footage of the event:

Socialism and Sex

I thought that would get your attention.

It's a chapter-heading in a book given to my by a colleague: Revolutionary Socialism by Arnold Lunn, published by the Right Book Club. The RBC was a counter-operation to the Left Book Club. It was far less successful, partly because being on the right is just plain evil, and because the texts chosen weren't much good - mostly memoirs by ex-socialists explaining how they were converted. I collect them when I see them, but I'm far more interested in LBC books - if you see them (orange paperbacks, pink hardbacks) get them for me and I'll pay you back.

Lunn himself was quite interesting - obviously very bright, but he devoted his life to mountaineering, skiing and being rightwing: such sports were commonly associated with fascism in the interwar period. His father founded the famous but now disappeared Lunn-Poly holiday company. Like many English rich conservatives, he converted to Catholicism, despite his father being a Methodist preacher.

Part of his objection to socialism is its materialism: he couldn't stand the idea that we are determined by physical processes (chemistry etc.)

So anyway, what did he think about socialism and sex? It's only a short (11 pages) unillustrated chapter. Apparently, the socialist's "creed leads inevitably to promiscuity". I must confess that this has not hitherto been my experience. Rather the opposite. For real promiscuity, I suggest that Lunn should consider the case of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, who had more sexual partners than voters.

Lunn does admit that the Communist Manifesto looks to the liberation of women and that Lenin was 'ascetic' and opposed to promiscuity. He does, however, claim that 'revolutionary movements have a disastrous effect' on moral standards. Really? Ask the Iranians. More to the point, the 'free love' lot were a tiny minority. The British Communist Party was famously conservative and moralistic - their efforts kept 'licentious' American comics out of Britain in the 1950s, and they lost out to the hippy-influenced New Left because they didn't like rock, long hair, marijuana and sex.

To Lunn, though, revolution and 'immorality' go together because weak-minded people would rather blame repressive society for their sexual incontinence than accept responsibility, while revolutionaries will encourage anybody who rebels.

Then he takes a rather illogical turn. After claiming that communists are promiscuous, and accepting that their leaders reject promiscuity, he claims that people become socialists because they're 'sex-frustrated' or feminists, ready to throw away their honour, give their own surnames to their children before being exploited by the revolutionaries. Added to this, he claims that France's socialist leader, M. Blum, is a promoter of incest. Rather confusingly, he then condemns the Spanish socialists for declaring that 'arousing the sexual feelings of another… amounted to a gross and palpable interference'.

In the end, Lunn's objection to socialist sex is that it implies atheism. Easy marriage and easy divorce stem from a rejection of the eternal rules imposed on us by God, whereas a Christian believes that 'eternal happiness' in heaven 'must not be jeopardized to escape from the discomfort of an unhappy marriage'. So suck up the misery and think of the angels!

Women, of course, are both more important and less noteworthy than men. Or more clearly: women don't matter, but female virginity does: 'when women enjoy the same sex liberties as men, the ancient doctrine of virginity topples down like a heap of snow struck by  rock. There is nothing to hold it together. Chastity… is no longer a badge of honour or glory'.

Men, of course, are exempt. Carry on shagging, chaps!

Thankfully, concludes Mr. Lunn - quoting Joad - these rampant atheists will get what's coming to them: 'they are very unhappy, and the suicide rate is abnormally high'.

So that's all right then.

S/he/it

This is a fascinating one:

A Swedish couple have decided to avoid gender stereotyping by hiding their baby's sex from everybody: an asexual name, male and female clothing, no sexually-identifying pronouns. It's not clear how much the child will be told about its sex and gender.

Here in the world of gender studies, we've long ago accepted that sex and gender aren't the same thing: sex is biology and gender is culture, so it doesn't seem that big an issue in philosophical terms.

However, a lot of people are quite upset because sex is one of the major ways in which we divide the world, for good or ill. We treat people differently according to how we perceive their genders, from clothing to conversational gambits to sexual advances.

Would you do this to/for your child? I'm quite impressed. The gender lines we draw are so arbitrary. Perhaps effacing the cultural signs of gender will make for a balanced, open child and adult. On the other hand, if the rest of the world continues to divide along gender lines, it's going to suffer: choosing which toilet to use, for example. Things will get really interesting (or awful) when the child develops sexually, and has to confront the difference between sex and gender.

Is this experiment child abuse? I'm really torn. On the one hand, I am postmodern enough to admire the attempt, but I can only see unhappiness for this individual because of the fact that the rest of humanity, even in enlightened Sweden, won't be in the same position.

Dr. de Jour, I presume?

Anonymity is tricky to maintain, even on The Plashing Vole. It's harder still for successful bloggers, such as Belle de Jour, who even managed to produce books and a not-very-good ITV series based on her prostitution blog without being exposed (fnarr fnarr).

Turns out now that she's a serious research scientist, one who works at the appropriately-named (and important) BIRCH, and outed herself apparently from boredom, though I can't help thinking that the tabloids will have been on her tail (oo-er) for years now. She was a call girl to fund the closing stages of her PhD. Wish I'd thought of that. I was a (terrible) supply teacher and visiting lecturer at The Hegemon, which is prostitution of an entirely different kind.

Update: of course revelation was driven by the tabloids, in this case our friends at the Daily Goosestep:

"We went to the Times willingly, after the Mail had their reporters warned off my work premises by the police"

If only life were that simple…

From the Irish Times, in Ferdinand von Prondzynski's column (he's President of Dublin City University), which is actually more serious than this makes it sound:

In his book, The Uses of the University, Clark Kerr, the late chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, suggested that a university president has three key tasks that the institution’s main stakeholders will expect to see achieved: “sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty”. Only the last of these, Kerr suggested, presented a problem.

Vacuous, intellectually bankrupt government: a case study

A silly rumour has swept the world of conservative tabloids and local newspapers that the coloured bracelets currently being worn by children signify the achievement of particular sexual activities, according to the colour. Or, as The Sun puts it, 'BRACELET which means YOUR KIDS are HAVING SEX!', which in this jurisdiction, is admissible evidence in a court of law.

Now a moment's thought should demonstrate the stupidity of such a claim. Is there a company marketing Blowjob Bands? A club? A Fellatio Federation solemnly awarding these things? Ridiculous. Even if there was once a link, it's surely broken once the bracelets are being worn on a mass scale: all cultural items are appropriated and hollowed out. The bracelets are signifiers without a signified.

Now, normally, I'd just sigh at the desperation and stupidity of the press, but now a minor government whip has got involved, calling on the government to ban the bracelets. What an utter, utter moron Mary Creagh is. Seriously, the only way to associate these bracelets with forbidden activity is to demand they be banned. They're just bits of plastic - and meaning can be transferred to any other item. Should the kids start wearing odd shoelaces to denote what they've been up to, will she demand they be banned?

This country has the highest teen pregnancy and teen STD rate in the world. Not coincidentally, we have the worst sex education (it wasn't mentioned at my schools) and most prurient media. Perhaps Creagh, a minister in the department of health, should ask herself why these facts are so, and why her government, despite trying hard, hasn't done much to improve these things.

She's out of a job in a year or so, and in any case, New Labour is obsessed with a) bashing the poor, b) grovelling to the rich, even now and c) pleasing the Daily Mail, so I'm afraid we're not likely to have a serious, considered, enlightened policy any time soon. Instead, we'll have silly, petty, headlines like this, dreamed up by a policy adviser to please an MP hooked on hits of publicity without regard for logic, rationality or simple humanity.

We expect this rubbish from the rightwing and local newspapers: they abandoned news in favour or scaremongering and conspiracy theories long ago (cheaper, more profitable): regrettably, we expect it from MPs. But ministers, even at the fag end of a failing government (and I'm a member of the Labour Party, by the way), have a higher duty, which this idiot has utterly failed to uphold. She's actually proud of her idiocy - her website features links to radio shows on which she's demonstrated her vacuity.

Her record is appalling: only moderately for open parliament, strongly in favour of new, improved, more-millions-of-child-deaths-per-warhead-nuclear-onslaught-from-above, very strongly in favour of government legislation to imprison anyone not smiling while wearing shalwar kameez (i.e.the terrorist until proven innocent bill), very strongly against an inquiry into how our Messianic leader managed to get the UK into an illegal war on faked evidence, and swings back and forth on climate change - great Zarquon, I'm stunned this puppet has the synapse coordination to blink regularly, let alone consider the great issues of the day. Poor, poor Wakefield. Still, at least she's on the case with Shag Bands. We can all rest easy.

Taxi for Mary Creagh.

A tale of two Erics

Over lunch, until joined by my esteemed colleague Debbie, I carried on reading MacCarthy's biography of Eric Gill.

It's funny how books can lead you through all sorts of terrain: typography to sculpture to Modernism to early-twentieth century sexology, the Arts and Crafts movement and many other things. What caught my attention today was Gill's status as the perfect subject for a moral conundrum. According to this book's take on his sex life, he slept with his wife (fine), other women (naughty Eric), his sisters (ooh, racy), his daughters (not very nice) and sometimes had a go with farmyard animals (clearly unEnglish, in fact positively wrong). Meanwhile, he converted to Catholicism and created the great Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral (as well as an exact copy of Little Eric in marble). When this story broke, there was pressure to have the Stations removed: how could people pray in front of these religious icons knowing that their creator was a sexual transgressor? Or doesn't it matter? It certainly fascinating to read of a man who joined the strictest of religious organisations while not altering his behaviour one iota.

By of comparison, here's one each from his sacred and profane sides (though Gill would hate the distinction (buy prints here or see them and sculptures at the Tate:

We are a charitable lot

In the middle of another story, here's an astonishing statistic, if true:

The number of students prevented by their parents from attending sex education classes increased during the Iraq war, when many Muslim families immigrated to Sweden. The Scandinavian country, with 10 million inhabitants, granted full refugee status to 24,799 Iraqis between 2003 and 2007, compared with 260 by Britain.

How astonishingly mean-spirited. The UK invades a country on a false pretext, having previously armed and encouraged its dictator, wreaking havoc and a concomitant civil war, then found room to accept only 260 individuals, despite the immense hardship. Meanwhile a much smaller country with no global pretensions and no responsibility for the war opens its doors to a much greater proportion of refugees.

Förlåt, Sweden!

Down at the trashier end of the book market

2 more books acquired today. The first is Tolkien's verse translation of the Volsungsaga, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, the ancient Icelandic/Norse tales. I haven't enjoyed Tolkien's fiction since I was 15, and have reservations about the deliberate archaicism of his Gawain translation. However, he was a professional philologist and linguist, so I thought I'd give this one a go.

Also got a Juliana Hatfield CD. Mmmmm.

The second book is a donation from Sarah, my office-mate, who knows I have a short fuse for quackery. It is Francis Marshall's Living With Spirits, which purports to contain 'authenticated, detailed case studies of actual sightings' and 'disturbing examples of the rich and famous who have been spooked, from Princess Diana to Mick Jagger'. I'm really looking forward to it. There's a 'science' chapter, and one on sexual encounters with ghosts, including that of a man in a Herne Bay pub who had sex with a ghost transvestite!

Here's Cilla Black's intro paragraph, as a taster:

Blind Date TV star Cilla Black was surprise-surprised out of her skin when the spirit of a melancholic teenager first appeared by the side of her bed one night. But there were a lorra lorra visits yet to come.

'I was shaking like a leaf - or a Blind Date virgin'.

Uh huh her

It's time for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award (for bad sex in fiction, so you can't nominate your exes). I always enjoy the sight of aged soi-disant heavyweight authors and powerful men getting their mojos working in public. They're too powerful to be edited boldly, so they spill their literary seed onto the page and expose only their own tedious, and usually tediously mechanical, imaginations to the mockery of the crowd. There's a simple rule - get your friends to read it. If they laugh, cut it out (or off). 

Thomas Pynchon's entry (sorry) is particularly egregious (last one on the page), though Updike has won it before. This year, I'm rooting (sorry again - it's catching after a quick browse) for Alastair Campbell's All In The Mind. But perhaps he can't help it, as the former 'Riviera Gigolo' of Forum magazine fame, to which I'm not linking.