Whenever we’re in France, once a week or so we drive past two villages called Orgy and Anus. Spelled this way, the first name doesn’t mean what it does in English, but Anus is just that in French.
We have friends living there, and I envy them their self-confidence: I’m not sure I’d be happy telling people that up in Anus is where I spend half my time. But our friends don’t seem to have that problem.
Anyway, every time we pass by those villages I crack what my wife alternately calls infantile or puerile jokes. Usually I suggest that the places should be twinned either with Sodom or else with Dorking (if you ever lived in the States, you’ll understand this last one; otherwise, you’re better off not understanding it).
But this morning, for the first time in 12 years, I kept silent all the way past Orgy, and Penelope was worried that this lapse of bad taste may have been caused by some terminal medical problem. In fact, I was having dirty thoughts about, or rather caused by, Jilly Cooper.
Please don’t misunderstand: now that Mrs Cooper is past the age of consent, I wasn’t lusting after her. It’s just that some of her comments inspired thoughts on sex, for in passing literary judgement on a new porn sensation Jilly has scaled the heights of tastelessness she never quite managed to reach even in her fiction – and not for any lack of trying.
Mrs Cooper praised the valuable service the book Fifty Shades of Grey has done our society: ‘Porn was terribly out of fashion before that book came out… I am delighted that it’s giving a new lease of life to the genre.’
‘Women,’ according to her, ‘don’t want to have sex any more’ as they are ‘suffering from low libidos’. Could’ve fooled me.
Walking past an overcrowded London pub or night club in the evening, I’m often regaled with the sight of young couples (sometimes triples or quadruples) indulging in what they call ‘snogging’ and what in the past was called ‘heavy petting’. Usually they stop just short of what in Mrs Cooper’s favourite genre is called ‘full pen’, but if there’s a park nearby, its benches do see the sort of action she thinks ought to be described in excruciating detail for our delectation.
‘Ours is now a terribly undersexed society,’ complains Jilly, a problem that she believes could be remedied by a wider spread of pornography. Well, all knowledge is comparative, if you believe Aristotle. Our society at large may indeed be undersexed as compared to Sodom, though perhaps not to Dorking. Yet any Victorian or Edwardian, resurrected to find himself in today’s Britain, would probably feel Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing on today’s London or Cardiff.
Our cities are full of drunk, practically unclad girls trying to pick up men in ways that make normal people blush. A man screaming ‘Fancy a shag?’ at a female passer-by could be arrested for sexual harassment. Reaching for a strange woman’s genitals or even buttocks in a public place could in some quarters be classified as assault. Yet this kind of behaviour, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, is increasingly becoming the norm for our ‘undersexed’ women ‘suffering from low libidos’. You may think I’m exaggerating, but that only proves you don’t live in Britain. Those who do wouldn’t contest my observation.
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Mrs Cooper is correct in her diagnosis, and British women don’t do sex any longer. A Freudian could perhaps suggest that their public spectacles are merely overcompensation for a serious amorous deficit in their lives. If that’s indeed the disease, is pornography really the treatment?
By Jilly’s own admission, Fifty Shades of Grey is ‘quite poorly written’. It’s almost embarrassing to have to make this point to a professional writer, but all porn is poorly written by definition. If it’s well-written, it isn’t porn. Great poets, from Aretino to Pushkin, have written erotic verse. Great writers, from Rabelais to Joyce, have written erotic novels. Great film-makers, from Fellini to Bergman, have shot sex scenes. All of them pursued artistic ends, and no one other than a tasteless prude would describe their work as pornographic.
What Jilly’s geriatric heart yearns for is something else. She wants our women to be sexually aroused by words like ‘glistening’, ‘throbbing’ and ‘thrusting’ jammed densely into every other sentence. I’ve got news for Mrs Cooper: they won’t be. And if, as a result of some congenital psychiatric defect, they are the kind of women who would find such trash stimulating, then they’re better off deprived of it. Who knows, they might get frisky and procreate as a result, producing others in their own image.
It would be tedious to go into the multiple ways in which society suffers from a surfeit of porn assaulting our senses at very corner. My problem with it is mainly aesthetic – nothing so crude ought to be in the public domain. That someone would think there isn’t enough porn should make one question his mental health. Or her mental health, in this case.