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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 10:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 10:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 11:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 11:29 am (UTC)Are you confusing the attitude of the 'News of the Screws' and, admittedly, large sections of the British media with a more generalised national characteristic here? Outside of the hermetic media circles that dominate our cultural life I think that things are very different. I don't think that the, generally middle-class perveyors of tabloid smut have the faintest inkling of what is going on in the bedrooms of the council estates of Britain. A lot of pretty free-ranging sexual activity I think.
The current blizzard of media activity around a minister's sexual peccadilloes may be full of finger-wagging moral chastisement but, from my experience of discussing this with 'the man/woman on the Clapham omnibus', people just enjoy seeing an unpopular authoritarian squirm. His indiscretions are just a stick to beat him with.
As for the rest of the world and its attitudes I've met, in particular, lots American people who exemplify the characteristics you describe above far more than - many - Brits. After all, Benny Hill and Carry On don't define a national attitude any more than Porky's or American Pie do.
Now admittedly my background is half-Italian and in no way Protestant (post- or otherwise) so maybe I'm missing something here that, if I were more 'British' I'd understand. Either that or you've probably been away too long!
Fascinating post though. Thank you for your candour.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 12:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 12:25 pm (UTC)By the way, it's always worth reading the Christian-oriented music reviews at Plugged In Online (http://www.pluggedinonline.com/music/index.cfm) to see what happens when puritanism and art collide. Their review (http://www.pluggedinonline.com/music/music/A0001940.cfm) of Green Day's 'American Idiot', for instance, says the record 'reeks of hopelessness, often raging against the status quo. Targets include government leaders on “American Idiot” and “Holiday” (a depiction of our President as a bomb-happy dictator). Christianity gets maligned by “Jesus of Suburbia,” which complains of lost faith, brands religious leaders hypocrites, and scoffs at sin and salvation. It also wallows in nihilistic lostness... Without meaning to, its belligerent opposition to Christian faith helps to explain the band’s futility and emptiness. But that’s nowhere near reason enough for teens to tune in.'
Needless to say, they hate (http://www.pluggedinonline.com/movies/movies/a0001888.cfm) the movie about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey:
'The problems with this movie, including its pornographic content, are too vast to itemize. To say that it is rank propaganda for the sexual revolution and the homosexual agenda would be beyond stating the obvious... Kinsey’s legacy is that he played a role in unleashing epidemic levels of sexually transmitted diseases, rampant divorce, massive numbers of out-of-wedlock births, the breakdown of the family, abortion and the destruction of marriage... That anyone would want to make a film lionizing the man simply boggles my brain.'
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 12:31 pm (UTC)Download my song 'The Homosexual' for the answer to the question about whether I was using queer cultural indicators to pick up girls. And yes, I was an 80s metrosexual of sorts, though with a bit of Gainsbourgian faux mechant machismo thrown in.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 12:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 12:50 pm (UTC)lsb (http://losceiccobianco.splinder.com)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 01:24 pm (UTC)Interesting that you mention Genesis, his hounding from Britain was shameful, however his persecution seemed a very personal thing, engineered by Christian fundamentalists & egged on by tabloids (see comments above) but the police, and/or state seemed, while not necessarily unwilling, to be relatively unenthusiastic participants in the process. This, of course, in no way mitigates or condones the unfairness of it all.
Ironic that his home had been in Brighton. It is a very different place now - it reeks of sexual licence to the extent that I'm frequently reminded of that old Woody Allen routine about Sweden. Sometimes it seems that the whole place is either shagging everything that moves or indulging in a permanent state of bacchanalian intoxication. But then of course we're in a different world now where sexuality and perpetual indulgence are just more marketing opportunities. The old-fashioned British moralists (disgusted from Tunbridge Wells) can't compete with entrepreneurial enthusiasm for the chance to sell sex toys to the boundary pushing 'liberated', run lap dancing venues for the same sad old bastards in suits that always went, but who now kid themselves that they're on to something a bit 'hip', or sell ever more treacly alcoholic confections in order to capture the pre-teen market. Gen's cock rings and tattoos and experiments in derangement of the senses seem a reminder of a rather more innocent and uncommercial time.
As for our American cousins again, I suspect that, no matter how strong the religious right gets in America it will never compete with the opportunity to 'make a buck'.
A fFig for Momus
Date: 2004-12-11 01:26 pm (UTC)Don' you mean "Haggis Masturbator"?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 01:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 01:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 01:40 pm (UTC)I think I've been extraordinarily lucky. My grandfather was a Baptist preacher, but although I was dragged to church every week as a small child, my parents never had much enthusiasm for it. They did have a terror of talking about sex, but despite that, I somehow never inherited the Puritan disapproval of it. I can see now that they were trying to escape their parents' body-fear, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 02:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 02:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 02:37 pm (UTC)Hair
Date: 2004-12-11 02:37 pm (UTC)I never knew you liked Hair! Can we rap about it over at my blog? (Embarassing, but I am dead serious... Dr. Lincoln, my head needs shrinkin'.)
Marxy
Re: Hair
Date: 2004-12-11 02:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 02:59 pm (UTC)Really? Must be something in the air there! Those sexy cicadas...
You know, it often strikes me that I love Japan so much because it reminds me, not just of Athens, but of Athens in the late 60s, early 70s. Semis instead of cicadas, but the same summer heat, the same 'permissiveness', the same miniskirts and shiny boots. Japan -- and this was particularly the case in the 90s -- has a feel of 'permanent 1960s' about it. The high tide of sexual freedom was reached in the West in about 1972, and it's been receding ever since thanks to AIDS and neo-conservative, neo-Christian political developments. But in Japan there's a permanent guarantor of sexual liberalism in the form of shinto traditions and a general sense of embodiment. I'll write more about this on Monday, which is set aside for a discussion of body technology and body facilities (things like sentos, vibro-massage chairs, water-jet toilets, and love hotels).
Re: Hair
Date: 2004-12-11 03:01 pm (UTC)Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 03:01 pm (UTC)But some of those are bitter records, records which accuse women, girls like you, of using your attractiveness wantonly and wilfully to trap and to paralyse men who want them and can never have them
However, "Paper wraps rock" (http://www.phespirit.info/momus/19860108.htm) is stunningly beautiful and desire, even of the destructive kind, can be very sexy. Don't have to agree with the condemning message to appreciate it?
Oh, boring me. Let's move along (http://www.imomus.com/irefusetodie.mp3)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 03:10 pm (UTC)Interested to know how you define sexual freedom?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-11 03:41 pm (UTC)