Body Week 2: The joy of sex
Dec. 11th, 2004 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIn a way, I'm 'post-sex'. Although sex is a massive and central presence in my life -- and the main way I experience 'embodiment' -- it's less important to me now than it has been in the past. 'An intellectual is someone who's found something to think about more interesting than sex', they say. I don't know if I've finally become an intellectual, or if I've simply switched a sex addiction for an information addiction. I know that these days I often creep away from the nuptial bed, feeling slightly furtive, to illuminate a computer in another room and sit transfixed, like a baby with a bauble. In the end, the internet is more compelling than sex. Knowing has triumphed over fucking. Is this healthy? If I've just switched one obsession for the other, an embodied obsession for a disembodied one, perhaps I'm not going in the right direction. Perhaps I should try to make my way back to full-on sex mania. If it's not too late...
Swinging Sixties. I've had around a hundred sexual partners. I always expected to have as many partners as that, because I was brought up in the Austin Powers-like swinging sixties. Not only did James Bond and Michael Caine seem to expect -- and get -- 'pussy galore', but our family house was full of books like Mary McCarthy's 'The Group', or Frank Harris' 'My Life and Loves', books which detailed moustache-twirling seductions or the antics of 'sexual athletes'. I've certainly been influenced a lot by my mother, who's bibliophile, francophile, erotomane (and she takes after her own father, a tennis champion and a terrible flirt). In the sixties our house was always full of au pair girls from Denmark, Holland or France, glamourous student lodgers who drove open-topped sports cars, or beautiful secretaries and students attached to the language college my father ran. All the elements of a Swinging 60s Sexual Farce like 'What's New, Pussycat' were present, and sexual farce certainly went on. My earliest sexual memory is of the buzz I got from walking naked into the au pair girl's room, aged about 5, to ask (not that I cared) when Mummy and Daddy were coming home. At the same time, there was some odd prudishness in me. I remember being appalled, on a visit to London, to find that the elderly children of our friends the Coulters walked around the house naked. I suppose that for me nakedness was already irrevocably sexual, and I wanted to keep it that way.
I began masturbating at the age of 9. My first orgasm occurred in a room in Athens, my own small room, with a calendar of Italian midi-skirted models on the wall and a sign saying 'Private' on the door, filled with the sound of cicadas and the scent of orange and lemon trees. I was at my first mixed school, the British Embassy School in Psychico. Girls wore tall, shiny boots and mini-skirts. One night I had a tender, romantic dream about two of the girls in my class, Kirsti and Marion. I couldn't decide which was going to be my special crush, Norwegian Kirsti or English Marion; they arrived together in the dream, on equal terms. But in the end it was Kirsti's name I began to doodle on my exercise books. My crush began when I heard her, in the back seat of an American car, describing the midnight sun. I never got round to telling her, or even speaking to her much (that had to wait 25 years, until I met her again in Oslo). I learned 'the facts of life' from Paul, the loud, clever American Kirsti liked. He and Kirsti were sitting together in front of me in a bus that was about to take us on a school trip to Delphi. Paul told Kirsti, in a matter-of-fact yet oracular tone, that the man puts his thing inside the woman's... I wrestled with this information, stunned and somewhat humiliated. Could something so arcane and intimate really be the Big Secret, the way of the world? Well, far-fetched and scandalous though it seemed, apparently it was.
I asked my mother what 'sexy' meant after seeing graffitti on an Edinburgh bus stop pole that said 'The Pope Is Sexy!' She just laughed. I asked her 'What does it mean when your peepee goes all stiff and hard?' She told me 'It means you're excited.' Such explanations were limited. At the age of ten I read an article in the TLS (yes, I must have been terribly precocious) about a Danish sex manual for children, The Little Red Schoolbook. I asked my parents to buy it for me. They bought two, one for my brother and one for me. I'd sit there in the family house in Athens listening to the rock opera 'Hair' and reading this beautifully designed little sex manual modelled on Chairman Mao's Little Red Book (also on our shelves). It began 'All adults are paper tigers...' and its basic message was 'if it feels good and doesn't hurt anyone, do it.' Of course, when I went to boarding school both my Hair songbook ('Sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty, father, why do these words sound so nasty?') and my 'Little Red Schoolbook' were confiscated by the housemaster, never to be seen again.
My sex life didn't really pick up again until I went to university. I wasn't very interested in the public school girls my sister brought home from St George's, and they were more interested in my hunkier, more rugger-ish brother than in me. Leentje was my first lover. She was smart, beautiful, bolshy, half-Belgian, a politics student. I met her in the creative writing group. I was 21 when she bedded me under an orange duvet at Hillhead Halls of Residence, a kind of polar research station atop a wooded hill in Aberdeen. I remember being clumsy, not even knowing how to roll back my own foreskin. I was late to sex; I'd wasted years being obsessed with Paula, a wild, tragic, dark-eyed, hispanic art school girl who didn't want a physical relationship with me. I totally idolised Paula, and being rejected by her plunged me into fashionable gloom. I consoled myself with Joy Division and the novels of Franz Kafka. And eventually with Leentje. Then I remember a couple of sex-free years, when I had vaguely homosexual feelings. This was when I got into music, making my first records with The Happy Family. I'm pretty sure I went a whole year (1982 or 1983) without having an orgasm. I must have been depressed. My parents were getting divorced, I lived in a weird mezzanine in Edinburgh below my father's flat, eating mostly beans and chick peas, writing songs, hanging out with my Kafkaesque musician friends.
'I know you see London as a kind of Sexopolis,' said Leentje when I moved there. I did, but things were very slow to pick up on the sex front, even in London. I met a few lonely nurses and teachers through a dating agency. I placed an ad in the City Limits personal columns that mentioned Kierkegaard and Nick Heyward and made one friend, a teacher called Celia who took me to 'right on' pubs in Brixton. Eventually I started sleeping with Zoe (not her real name), the French ex-girlfriend of my Greek Marxist friend from university. Zoe lived in Tufnell Park and was into dancing, aromatherapy, massage, and sex. She was extremely thin and had a wicked sensuality. When she was at home in Vence, in the south of France, Zoe would lie in the garden and cover her naked body with snails, just to feel them crawling across her skin. Me, Babis and Zoe went on Mediterranean holidays together, and they'd always walk naked in the hills or on the beach while I stubbornly clung to my clothes. But thanks to Zoe I slowly learned to relax and enjoy my body. She gave me sinus-popping massages and oral sex. She'd listen with perverse pleasure to my fantasies about seducing her girlfriends. She'd take me to make love in her sexy flatmate's bed when no-one else was home, or out to Hampstead Heath. I wonder where she is now and what she's doing?
After Zoe, I went a bit crazy. It all becomes a blur. I was a kid in a candystore. I discovered that girls like bastards, and began to resemble one. I came back from Paris to London with a French attitude to pursuit and seduction. I became a bit of a popstar, a bit of a Machiavel, a bit of a Rasputin. Girls looked me up in the phonebook, girls shouted my name outside my window, a crazy girl sat in the cafe across the road from my house and left notes about how nice white trousers look when they're clean. Around this time, the time of my greatest promiscuity, AIDS was the issue of the day. You'd hear reports that AIDS affected 'homosexuals, drug users, and fast track heterosexuals' and think 'Who are these fast-track heterosexuals?' Was I one? Was this the 80s term for what in the 60s they called 'swingers'? Had the enviable goodies become pitiable baddies? At this point, as if in direct defiance of the Thatcher government's Section 29 (strikingly similar to new Bush proposals to ban the promotion of homosexuality), I decided to make records celebrating sex, and promoting homosex. In my records and in my life I worked through sexual ideas one by one, using them as a big cultural stick with which to beat the prudish, priggish British. I embraced as my gurus and masters Serge Gainsbourg, the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille. The personal and the political merged. I almost titled my 1989 album 'Haggard Masturbator'.
In the 90s I finally became sexually happy. I seemed to become attractive to women in the way I'd always dreamed of being. I could have three girlfriends at a time if I wanted to. I became 'Alfie', I became a sort of intellectual Benny Hill. Then I fell in love and got married. Then I got divorced. Then I became a confirmed nipposexual; I lost interest in all women except Japanese women. I left Britain and lived in New York (the real Sexopolis), Paris, Tokyo, Berlin. Little by little I extinguished my 'sexual Britishness' -- that horrible, volatile cocktail of prudishness and prurience, post-protestant revulsion leavened by 'guilty pleasures'. Like a successful analysand, I worked through all my sexual neuroses one by one, sang and masturbated them out of my system, felt their power over me wane with habituation, saw them fall by the wayside. Which brings me to this sofa, and the girl lying in the other room waiting for me to come back to bed so that we can lie there with our arms around each other, confirming and comforting each other. Perhaps we'll even have a spot of post-sex sex.
Swinging Sixties. I've had around a hundred sexual partners. I always expected to have as many partners as that, because I was brought up in the Austin Powers-like swinging sixties. Not only did James Bond and Michael Caine seem to expect -- and get -- 'pussy galore', but our family house was full of books like Mary McCarthy's 'The Group', or Frank Harris' 'My Life and Loves', books which detailed moustache-twirling seductions or the antics of 'sexual athletes'. I've certainly been influenced a lot by my mother, who's bibliophile, francophile, erotomane (and she takes after her own father, a tennis champion and a terrible flirt). In the sixties our house was always full of au pair girls from Denmark, Holland or France, glamourous student lodgers who drove open-topped sports cars, or beautiful secretaries and students attached to the language college my father ran. All the elements of a Swinging 60s Sexual Farce like 'What's New, Pussycat' were present, and sexual farce certainly went on. My earliest sexual memory is of the buzz I got from walking naked into the au pair girl's room, aged about 5, to ask (not that I cared) when Mummy and Daddy were coming home. At the same time, there was some odd prudishness in me. I remember being appalled, on a visit to London, to find that the elderly children of our friends the Coulters walked around the house naked. I suppose that for me nakedness was already irrevocably sexual, and I wanted to keep it that way.
I began masturbating at the age of 9. My first orgasm occurred in a room in Athens, my own small room, with a calendar of Italian midi-skirted models on the wall and a sign saying 'Private' on the door, filled with the sound of cicadas and the scent of orange and lemon trees. I was at my first mixed school, the British Embassy School in Psychico. Girls wore tall, shiny boots and mini-skirts. One night I had a tender, romantic dream about two of the girls in my class, Kirsti and Marion. I couldn't decide which was going to be my special crush, Norwegian Kirsti or English Marion; they arrived together in the dream, on equal terms. But in the end it was Kirsti's name I began to doodle on my exercise books. My crush began when I heard her, in the back seat of an American car, describing the midnight sun. I never got round to telling her, or even speaking to her much (that had to wait 25 years, until I met her again in Oslo). I learned 'the facts of life' from Paul, the loud, clever American Kirsti liked. He and Kirsti were sitting together in front of me in a bus that was about to take us on a school trip to Delphi. Paul told Kirsti, in a matter-of-fact yet oracular tone, that the man puts his thing inside the woman's... I wrestled with this information, stunned and somewhat humiliated. Could something so arcane and intimate really be the Big Secret, the way of the world? Well, far-fetched and scandalous though it seemed, apparently it was.
I asked my mother what 'sexy' meant after seeing graffitti on an Edinburgh bus stop pole that said 'The Pope Is Sexy!' She just laughed. I asked her 'What does it mean when your peepee goes all stiff and hard?' She told me 'It means you're excited.' Such explanations were limited. At the age of ten I read an article in the TLS (yes, I must have been terribly precocious) about a Danish sex manual for children, The Little Red Schoolbook. I asked my parents to buy it for me. They bought two, one for my brother and one for me. I'd sit there in the family house in Athens listening to the rock opera 'Hair' and reading this beautifully designed little sex manual modelled on Chairman Mao's Little Red Book (also on our shelves). It began 'All adults are paper tigers...' and its basic message was 'if it feels good and doesn't hurt anyone, do it.' Of course, when I went to boarding school both my Hair songbook ('Sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty, father, why do these words sound so nasty?') and my 'Little Red Schoolbook' were confiscated by the housemaster, never to be seen again.
My sex life didn't really pick up again until I went to university. I wasn't very interested in the public school girls my sister brought home from St George's, and they were more interested in my hunkier, more rugger-ish brother than in me. Leentje was my first lover. She was smart, beautiful, bolshy, half-Belgian, a politics student. I met her in the creative writing group. I was 21 when she bedded me under an orange duvet at Hillhead Halls of Residence, a kind of polar research station atop a wooded hill in Aberdeen. I remember being clumsy, not even knowing how to roll back my own foreskin. I was late to sex; I'd wasted years being obsessed with Paula, a wild, tragic, dark-eyed, hispanic art school girl who didn't want a physical relationship with me. I totally idolised Paula, and being rejected by her plunged me into fashionable gloom. I consoled myself with Joy Division and the novels of Franz Kafka. And eventually with Leentje. Then I remember a couple of sex-free years, when I had vaguely homosexual feelings. This was when I got into music, making my first records with The Happy Family. I'm pretty sure I went a whole year (1982 or 1983) without having an orgasm. I must have been depressed. My parents were getting divorced, I lived in a weird mezzanine in Edinburgh below my father's flat, eating mostly beans and chick peas, writing songs, hanging out with my Kafkaesque musician friends.
'I know you see London as a kind of Sexopolis,' said Leentje when I moved there. I did, but things were very slow to pick up on the sex front, even in London. I met a few lonely nurses and teachers through a dating agency. I placed an ad in the City Limits personal columns that mentioned Kierkegaard and Nick Heyward and made one friend, a teacher called Celia who took me to 'right on' pubs in Brixton. Eventually I started sleeping with Zoe (not her real name), the French ex-girlfriend of my Greek Marxist friend from university. Zoe lived in Tufnell Park and was into dancing, aromatherapy, massage, and sex. She was extremely thin and had a wicked sensuality. When she was at home in Vence, in the south of France, Zoe would lie in the garden and cover her naked body with snails, just to feel them crawling across her skin. Me, Babis and Zoe went on Mediterranean holidays together, and they'd always walk naked in the hills or on the beach while I stubbornly clung to my clothes. But thanks to Zoe I slowly learned to relax and enjoy my body. She gave me sinus-popping massages and oral sex. She'd listen with perverse pleasure to my fantasies about seducing her girlfriends. She'd take me to make love in her sexy flatmate's bed when no-one else was home, or out to Hampstead Heath. I wonder where she is now and what she's doing?
After Zoe, I went a bit crazy. It all becomes a blur. I was a kid in a candystore. I discovered that girls like bastards, and began to resemble one. I came back from Paris to London with a French attitude to pursuit and seduction. I became a bit of a popstar, a bit of a Machiavel, a bit of a Rasputin. Girls looked me up in the phonebook, girls shouted my name outside my window, a crazy girl sat in the cafe across the road from my house and left notes about how nice white trousers look when they're clean. Around this time, the time of my greatest promiscuity, AIDS was the issue of the day. You'd hear reports that AIDS affected 'homosexuals, drug users, and fast track heterosexuals' and think 'Who are these fast-track heterosexuals?' Was I one? Was this the 80s term for what in the 60s they called 'swingers'? Had the enviable goodies become pitiable baddies? At this point, as if in direct defiance of the Thatcher government's Section 29 (strikingly similar to new Bush proposals to ban the promotion of homosexuality), I decided to make records celebrating sex, and promoting homosex. In my records and in my life I worked through sexual ideas one by one, using them as a big cultural stick with which to beat the prudish, priggish British. I embraced as my gurus and masters Serge Gainsbourg, the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille. The personal and the political merged. I almost titled my 1989 album 'Haggard Masturbator'.
In the 90s I finally became sexually happy. I seemed to become attractive to women in the way I'd always dreamed of being. I could have three girlfriends at a time if I wanted to. I became 'Alfie', I became a sort of intellectual Benny Hill. Then I fell in love and got married. Then I got divorced. Then I became a confirmed nipposexual; I lost interest in all women except Japanese women. I left Britain and lived in New York (the real Sexopolis), Paris, Tokyo, Berlin. Little by little I extinguished my 'sexual Britishness' -- that horrible, volatile cocktail of prudishness and prurience, post-protestant revulsion leavened by 'guilty pleasures'. Like a successful analysand, I worked through all my sexual neuroses one by one, sang and masturbated them out of my system, felt their power over me wane with habituation, saw them fall by the wayside. Which brings me to this sofa, and the girl lying in the other room waiting for me to come back to bed so that we can lie there with our arms around each other, confirming and comforting each other. Perhaps we'll even have a spot of post-sex sex.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 07:16 pm (UTC)