London's Calling

The headline: (Obviously full of transphobic crap, as is the article).

Men can wear skirts at Oxford University as academic dress code is changed to ‘meet needs of cross-dressing students’

Shut up you fucking fascist scum. I hope I don’t have to explain to anyone why this is such a stupid and ridiculous reaction from the Mail. Uch. 

Blood pressure going through the roof right now. And as a Scotsman, men do wear skirts, we’re cool with that.

When it comes to erotic writing, the more explicit it gets – the more heaving, the more panting – the more I want to laugh. Erotic writing is said to have a noble pedigree: the goings-on in Ovid, the whipping in Sade, the bare-arsed wrestling in Lawrence, the garter-snapping in Anaïs Nin, the wife-swapping in Updike, the arcs of semen hither and yon. But it’s so much sexier when people don’t have sex on the page.

Yet if you were a working-class boy in the 1970s, badly written books about fucking – quickly followed in the 1980s by badly written books about shopping-and-fucking – were the kinds of book your mother read, and so, to be fair, did your father, and to be even fairer, 400 million other people. When I was about ten I went to a jumble sale to buy books only to discover that everything that wasn’t a copy of Jaws was by Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, or Danielle Steel. I noted this cultural deficit in my compendium of things to complain about to God but I read The Bitch myself on the way home and remember a very fruity passage in which the heroine, a woman who owned a disco and was called Fontaine, has sex in a hot tub with a very unsuitable man who might or might not have been in the Mafia. I also read Jaws but scarcely got beyond the sex scene on the beach before I came across the gouging Great White and the word ‘sinew’, which I’d never encountered before. I had more trouble with The Carpetbaggers. I’m not saying I knew much about the world of discos or killer sharks, but Robbins’s world of Hollywood high living and eternal shagging was a challenge to my imagination. The term ‘blow-job’ was a legendary beast that stalked the imagination of Ayrshire boys for many years. But the style of the book remained with me, too: suddenly there was ‘thrusting’ and ‘quivering’ and ‘juddering’ and ‘pulsating’. My father gave me a funny look when Robbins’s name came up during an episode of Fawlty Towers. ‘Pornographic muzak,’ Basil says to his wife as he addresses her liking for the great man’s oeuvre.

Robbins and Collins liked a plush car with a smooth chassis. They liked champagne and caviar and jets you could shag in. They liked big desks. They liked jacuzzis. But what these gazillion-selling authors liked most was a human being perpetually on the brink of a soaring orgasm. Women just had to be approached, sometimes just looked at, and a ‘shuddering’ event would occur in their ‘sex’. Sometimes it wasn’t called ‘my sex’, and the word ‘clitoris’ made its debut in our lives. Men sometimes had cocks but more usually they had a ‘member’ or a ‘shaft’ or just an ‘erection’. More likely, they had a ‘towering erection’ or a ‘colossal shaft’, and that was worrying. Things didn’t improve a great deal in the 1980s, when women came on TV wearing lakes of lipgloss. Jackie Collins’s sister Joan was chief among them in Dynasty, pouting for England and surrounded by gay men with big hair who were keen to get on with the shafting. By this point in the evolution of the genre, ‘shafting’ could also mean something else, and the enduring aspect of 1980s sex novels was their obsession with new money. Time was when a romantic hero could be a soldier or a doctor or, heaven help us, a priest. But in the age of Jilly Cooper and Judith Krantz he had better be a polo player. Work is for pigs, and anyone without enough money to coat themselves in leisure had no place in a Krantz novel. There was something nouveau about the new bonkbusters that perfectly suited the times. A point made by Clive James in these pages in a review of Princess Daisy: ‘Mrs Krantz would probably hate to hear it said,’ he wrote, ‘but she gives the impression of having been included late amongst the exclusiveness she so admires. There is nothing wrong with gusto, but when easy familiarity is what you are trying to convey, gush is to be avoided.’[*] Each era gets the erotic writing it craves, or deserves, if that doesn’t sound too much like I’m asking you to spank me into an ecstasy of submission.

The first thing to say about this decade’s multi-million-selling contributor to the art of terrible writing about sex is that she will not easily be mistaken for Andrea Dworkin. It’s not that Fifty Shades of Grey and E.L. James’s other tie-me-up-tie-me-down spankbusters read as if feminism never happened: they read as if women never even got the vote.^[†] Before we get to the designer labels – and in this, like so much else, James has learned a lot from the Jackies and the Judiths, to say nothing of the Harolds – we have a female protagonist who thinks like the scullery maid in a Victorian wank mag. To say the woman in this book is submissive won’t cover it. She likes to compare herself to the heroine of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is nice. But Tess has the whole of Victorian hypocrisy to contend with while Anastasia just has to worry – between delicious ‘humiliations’ – whether she’s got the right music on her iPod.