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Books: Whatever happened to ordinary sex?
The sex maniacs interviewed for this study are hardly typical of the general population, reckons Minette Marrin.
IT: Sex Since the Sixties by Jonathon Green Secker & Warburg, pounds 17.99
BIRDS do IT, bees do IT, even educated fleas do IT. But what exactly is IT that they do? This question is a hardy perennial, to pursue the nature metaphor, and It is also the title of Jonathon Green's collection of interviews on Sex Since the Sixties. The people interviewed are, as the blurb claims, sometimes 'astonishingly frank', but most of them are certainly not 'ordinary people', as is also claimed by the blurb.
Of 61 people quoted by name or by pseudonym, only 14, according to my reckoning, based on the potted biographies at the back, are what you might call ordinary. The others either make their livings in the sex industry - pornographers, therapists, prostitutes, agony aunts, sexologists, or political activists in sexual causes (about 29) - or media folk (about 14): the contributors are sometimes difficult to classify because in this busy, busy world, a person might double or treble up not only in bed, but as sex activist, sex therapist and porn model, for instance. The energy. That's what IT is, clearly.
Almost all those interviewed show a far more compulsive interest in sex of all kinds than I believe most people do. Perhaps this is because Jonathon Green, as a media person, necessarily inhabits a rather oversexed world, and has, according to gossip, gleaned quite a few of his interviewees from his own wide circle.
Even one of his few 'ordinary' people, a doctor, seemed to have suffered from drug addiction and advanced priapism; describing huge amounts of sex in the 1970s in St Stephens' hospital in London, he commented: 'The standard things went on . . . of doing it with someone you've been longing to do it with, and suddenly as you're about to come, the cardiac arrest beep goes off and there's that terrible decision; a man's life or your orgasm. I regret to say that I felt, well, a few seconds aren't going to make too much difference.'
What we have here is a collection of erotomaniacs and exhibitionists, mostly very intelligent and eloquent, talking about what they make of all different kinds of sex. For those who have read any serious erotic literature, looked at any agony columns in top-of-the-shelf magazines, know any sexual psychology or have seen any pornographic films or shows, there will be no real surprises. But the book is often interesting, or thought provoking, or simply inadvertently funny.
Barry and Rona, for instance, are an East Anglian couple who are into mild sadomasochism (S/M) and piercing; he has a ring and stud in his penis, she has pierced nipples and five rings 'down there'. They also like group sex and water sports (urinating on people). 'We have a friend who's really bizarre,' says Rona, by contrast. 'He has his head used as a toilet seat.
And he has this pipe up his rectum. . . (here comes something too ludicrously disgusting to quote) He's a very, very intelligent person. A very feeling person and a wonderful cook. But he's basically fed up with straight sex.'
Another friend of theirs got so fed up with straight sex that he 'really did do something bizarre'; he chopped his penis off. 'He did it on video apparently,' continued Barry. 'But that level of pursuit is not our scene.'
Clearly one has to draw the line somewhere.
What this book does not illuminate very much is what makes people draw the line in such strange places. We are not made to understand why straight sex is so truly desperately boring for some people.
It never becomes clear why the vampirish young Irish woman becomes so aroused by drinking blood, or precisely why hot wax on the genitals or whips or fist-fucking can be so exciting: people seemed to fight shy of the details, very often. But if you're talking about these things you might as well go the whole hog.
There are a lot of startling confessions, but for all their frankness, they are often curiously lifeless, with certain exceptions, such as Elinor Starr, the fascinating black prostitute. Many of the subjects' general thoughts are more interesting than their personal confessions. One of my favourite aperus was from a gay man lamenting the passing - with the advent of the superloo - of cottaging (anonymous sex in lavatories): 'The male toilet was the last bastion of male privilege.'
It is difficult not to wonder, at times, what the purpose is of slinging together a collection of sexy vox pops, other than making money for the author and publisher. What lifts this book above that level is that the subject - It - has genuinely undergone all kinds of radical political and social changes in the life-time of the speakers, and some of them are very good at conveying the feeling of these changes.
The editorial passages do not always inspire quite as much confidence. 'Sex in the Sixties was almost wholly a male phenomenon', writes Jonathon Green in the introduction; of course the reader knows he's referring to the male chauvinism of the Sixties, but the problem with not writing carefully enough to say what you mean is that you end up saying something you did not mean.
Still, he seems to be able to get people to say almost anything.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, May 09, 1993
