MARK SIMPSON.com

Well, not quite.

But almost. Someone arrested in the same sting, using the same entrapment who decided to fight the charge - as Craig now wishes he had done - has been acquitted. Somehow I doubt this news story will get much coverage, because as everyone knows that Craig is GUILTY! and GAY! and a HYPOCRITE!, right?

A jury Friday acquitted a Minneapolis man arrested in the same airport bathroom sex-sting operation that snared U.S. Sen. Larry Craig.

Vince Tuzon, 39, of Minneapolis, claimed he couldn’t be guilty of interfering with the undercover officer’s privacy because the officer is the one who invited the invasion with foot-tapping. That is an argument Craig has raised in trying to withdraw his guilty plea.

In Tuzon’s case, a Hennepin County jury agreed.

“My client really feels that he was set up,” defense lawyer Jeffrey Dean said after the verdict. “He stopped in to use the restroom. He was using the toilet when he was essentially bombarded with overtures.”

Dean said his client would not comment, but he said he hoped the verdict would deter similar sting operations.

“The police created a situation where there was none,” he said.

These kind of entrapments of mostly married men like Craig rely on them not daring to contest and go to trial - and who can blame them, given the treatment that has been meted out to Craig by the public and his colleagues once his misdemeanour was made public? Out of 41 men arrested during this sting operation at Minneapolis airport, only two fought the charge. One was convicted, one acquitted.

The haste and undisguised glee that liberals - and gays - displayed in rushing to condemn Craig and their willingness to believe everything the entrapping, toe-tapping pretty policemen had to say - compared to, say, a jury - was much more indecent than anything he was accused of.

But of course, Craig can’t be allowed the benefit of the doubt by liberals because he’s a Republican.

Nor by his own party because they don’t want to seem… liberal.

Larry Craig has decided not to resign from the Senate after all and vowed to fight on, despite a judge’s rejection of his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea to the ‘disorderly conduct’ charge levelled at him after his arrest in that airport men’s room.

‘[the judge rejected that as a good reason to withdraw the plea. Any pressure Craig was under “was entirely perceived by the defendant and was not a result of any action by the police, the prosecutor or the court,” he wrote.’

The police tape flatly contradicts this. The first question Craig asks is ‘Will I have to fight you in court?’ It’s clear his main concern, like most of the married men arrested in these situations, let alone conservative politicians, is avoiding publicity - at whatever cost. The entrapping/arresting officer repeatedly mentions the ‘jail time’ and courts that loom if Craig doesn’t ‘cooperate’ - and plead guilty. In which case: ‘There’ll be a fine. You won’t have to explain anything.’

In fact, the whole of America has demanded - and keeps demanding - Craig explain himself.  To come out - with his hands up.

In the tape, Craig never accepts that he was looking for sex.  The arresting officer becomes hotly indignant when Craig contradicts his version/interpretation of events in the men’s room (interpretation is what it comes down to since this is, in effect, a ‘crime’ of intentionality - or foot-tapping). In fact, he seems outraged that someone could dare to do this. No doubt most of the cop’s victims, horrified at the thought of ‘jail time’, or simply drawing attention to the case by fighting it, comply meekly.

And it was certainly true that Craig was under unusual pressure as his local newspaper was on an (anti) gay witchhunt against Craig.

Even if you consider entrapped, pressured Craig, now denied his day in court, guilty as sin, because you always believe policemen - he’s only guilty of a demeanour.  Something which should not end his career.  Unless of course you think that tapping your feet in a men’s rom is much worse than, say, using female prostitutes (after admitting he used female prostitutes, Senator David Vitter was greeted with a standing ovation in the Senate from his Republican peers).

I say: best of British to Craig in his fight to stay on. Unlike most of liberal America, which jeers at every attempt he makes to fight for his career and name, I don’t suddenly think that sex police are a great thing if they entrap a conservative and then pressure them into an ill-advised confession. Nor should the GOP be allowed to hurriedly flush him like a dirty tissue as they have repeatedly tried to do.

Everyone’s had their fun now and made all their sophomoric Larry Craig jokes - so perhaps American liberals can now wake up to the real issue here and stop scoring cheap shots and show some non-partisan principles.

What’s the real issue? Well, it’s a bigger issue than Craig, bigger than accusations of ‘hypocrisy’ (which often turn out to be. er, hypocritical), bigger than ‘coming out’, and bigger than Republicans v Democrats.

It’s about justice.

Retrosexuality Islamic stylee - which until recently was possibly the only un-ironic or non-fashion-accessorised kind of retrosexuality left - seems to be in a bad way in the Islamic heartland. Medievalism just isn’t what it used to be.

Yesterday’s London Times carries a news feature on what’s termed “Pakistan’s metrosexual revolution”. The local Mullahs’ fatwahs on beauty salons for women as ‘un-Islamic’ appear to have provoked Pakistani men into an inspiring act of solidarity with their countrywomen: they’ve been selflessly queuing up for waxings and facials themselves and splashing out on Western vanity products for their own bathroom cabinets. Male cosmetic surgery and hair transplants are sprouting up everywhere - including on the previously shiny bonces of former Prime Ministers such as Nawaz Sharif who recently tried to return to Pakistan (the bad quality of his implants and dye job led to his immediate deportation back to Saudi Arabia).

Most Pakistani women are not complaining about the locked bathroom door. A survey of 25,000 women found that over half preferred men with “a metrosexual appearance similar to David Beckham” to those with “a rugged appearance”. Though perhaps they just preferred a man who looked like they had David Beckham’s money.

But the most important angle to this news about Pakistan’s ‘metrosexual revolution’ has been missed: it confirms that the most wanted man on the planet after David Beckham - Osama Bin Laden - has indeed been taking refuge in the country as many suspected. In his recent cheery ‘anniversary’ video address, the one exhorting Americans to ‘embrace Islam’, Bin Laden appears to have ordered a 9-11 on that tired-looking grey beard of his seen in previous videos and given some major uplift to his Prophet of Doom look with a trim and a dye that has really helped massacre the years. Who wouldn’t embrace him now? Patently, Pakistan’s metrosexual makeover fever has reached Osama, even in his inaccessible mountain redoubt.

Now all the the CIA has to do is find a cave in on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border within easy donkey-ride of a drug store stocking bottles of Arabian 2000 hair restorer.

How the Larry Craig affair has outed liberal ‘hypocrisy’

by Mark Simpson

Whether or not Idaho’s Senator Larry Craig likes cock or not, following his arrest for ‘lewd conduct’ in a men’s room at Minneapolis airport this week one thing is for sure: a lot of cock has been written about him. Here’s Melissa McEwan offering a typical - if relatively kind - commentary in the Guardian:

‘Voting against the interests of the LGBT community displays either a callous lack of feeling towards people with whom he shares a vested interest, or it’s a hypocritical attempt to ensure his longevity as a politician.’

Call me pedantic, but tapping your foot or putting your hand under a toilet stall partition doesn’t make you particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered. Or part of any community with whom you share ‘vested interests’.

Judging by the rush to ‘out’ Craig as a ‘hypocritical closeted gay’ by hordes of callous bloggers and columnists, and the scorn poured on his claims that he’s not gay, it seems that liberals are equipped with even better and stricter sexpolicing instincts than Minnesota’s Finest. Liberals don’t just finger your collar, they finger your soul - divine your innermost desires, make identifications on your behalf and work out what your own vested interests are for you. Even though they’ve never met you or shared a bathroom with you.

After all, Minnesota’s sexpolice, as the (cute, young) arresting officer (pictured above) makes clear in the taped interview with Craig, are not concerned whether someone is gay or not - merely whether they might be soliciting sex in a bathroom. Or whether they respond to their own flirtatious footsie. And by the way, I know I’m being pedantic again, but we don’t even know that Craig was looking for sex in that bathroom. Yes, of course, it seems quite possible, very likely even, but we only have a policeman’s word for it. And liberals don’t usually fall over themselves to believe a policeman, especially when he’s paid to hang around toilets all day like ripe cottage cheese in a mousetrap. Let alone one that seems to have, on the tape, possibly a self-righteous political axe to grind (’no wonder this country is going down the tubes’).

Unless of course they’re entrapping a conservative politician.

Even if Craig was definitely, unquestionably a dick-craving, tap-dancing cottager, it wouldn’t mean that he was gay, or that he should feel any affinity to the gay community. As safer-sex educators can tell you, rather a lot of men have casual anonymous sex with other men without seeing themselves as gay, or even bisexual. Or Democrat.

Now, you may think them wrongheaded. You may think them closeted and self-loathing and in denial. You may consider them creepy. But that’s just what you think - it’s not necessarily who they are. You may wish the world was a tidier place, where any departure from official heterosexuality was ‘Gay’ or ‘Lesbian’ or ‘Bisexual’ - and proudly identified itself as such - but sexual behaviour isn’t like that. Sexual behaviour into identity doesn’t go. Cripes, desire into identity doesn’t even fit very well. As police officials admit, most of the men they arrest in bathrooms are married (and probably the main reason, along with the repeated threats of jail-time from the arresting officer if they don’t ‘co-operate’ and ‘make it easy on yourself’, why most, like Craig, don’t fight the charge in court).

When married-with-kids Welsh secretary Ron Davies had his ‘moment of madness’, as he described it, on the South London gay cruising ground Clapham Common in 1998 which led to his resignation, there was no ‘hypocrisy’ angle, but he was nevertheless condemned universally in the British press, liberal and conservative alike - not for his cruising, we were told, but for his stubborn refusal to ‘come out as gay’ and ‘face facts’, for ‘his own good’. How considerate of the ladies and gentlemen of the press. But, I wonder, if he had been caught in a red light district would he have been expected to come out as a congenital visitor of prostitutes? Would he have been required to declare publicly that this was the innermost ‘truth’ of who he was? (In the US, Louisiana Senator David Vitter kept his job after recently admitting he used prostitutes.)

If sexuality is a murky business, even what we mean by ‘sex’ is not always as clear as we like to pretend. In the teeth of the state -sponsored witch-hunt by sexpoliceman (and judge and jury) Ken Starr, Bill Clinton’s denial that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky was not simply the lawyerly sophistry or bald-faced ‘lie’ that almost everyone, however they estimated the importance of it, denounced it as being at the time. A good Southern Baptist, Clinton wouldn’t have considered that oral sex constituted ‘sex’ - and in fact he was careful never to have intercourse with Lewinsky. Nor is this simply Baptist, or fuddy-duddy thinking. In the same decade, the American Medical Association found that 60% of American college students didn’t consider oral sex ‘sex’. In other words, probably most of the Americans condemning Clinton for his ‘lies’ were being… hypocritical.

Then again, America is a country that likes to call a toilet a ‘bathroom’ - when there is no bath in it. Or a ‘restroom’ - when there is precious little resting going on. Especially in Minneapolis International Airport.

Now that the shoe is on the other foot (straying under the stall partition) the same kind of sanctimonious solidarity appears to have been ranged against Craig - but with interest. His own party, appalled at the merest whiff of the men’s room, have glanced at the toilet paper stuck to his shoe and run off screaming. Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, just a few days ago, a friend and close political ally, wrinkled his Mormon nose, described the affair in his best Lady Bracknell as ‘disgusting’ and disowned Craig; faced with zero support from his GOP comrades Craig now seems likely to resign. Politically, he’s toast.

Yes, Craig is a Senator for a Party I have no love for, a party which panders to the gay-bashing of the religious right and which launched a criminal war. Craig has supported policies like ‘Don’t ask, dont’ tell’ which drum out men and women from the Armed Forces for less than he was accused of. And yes, he may well be - like much of the Republican Party - pretending to virtues he doesn’t possess. He is, after all, a politician. He may also have lied through his teeth. (Again, he’s a politician.) But I can’t help but have some sympathy for a hunted, rural thing (Idaho is the home of ‘famous potatoes’) and everyone of whatever political stripe in the US appears to want to throw Craig into the nearest deep-fat fryer.

When talking about people’s sex lives, liberals should probably think twice about hurling the world ‘hypocrite’ around with as much relish as conservatives like to use the word ‘immoral’ or ‘pervert’. It’s much the same kind of public shaming. It used to be called stoning. Let him who is without sin cast the first blog.

Moreover, I’d like to venture, somewhat controversially, that ‘hypocrisy’ is a word that has had a bit of a bad press, especially in the confessional culture of the US. What is a ‘hypocrite’ anyway? Someone whose private life fails to match up to his public image? That’s not even the definition of a politician - that’s the definition of a human being. Besides, sometimes hypocrisy might simply be the voice of experience.

Craig may cut a preposterous figure, but what’s even more preposterous is the sight of a long line of liberals forming to hammer on the stall this married-with-grandkids Republican’s been locked in by the media - and his own ‘moment of madness’ - yelling, ‘COME OUT!! YOU’RE GAY, YOU GODDAM HYPOCRITE!! YOU’RE SHOWING A CALLOUS LACK OF VESTED SELF-INTEREST TO YOUR LGBT COMMUNITY!!’.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Tomorrow sees the First International Masturbate-A-thon in London.  Their slogan is ’Come for a Cause’ - in addition to using a lot of tissues, they aim to raise money for the THT and Marie Stopes Society.  In a move that has provoked much media comment, and a few protests, the event will be filmed by Channel 4 for broadcast later this year during what it promises will be a themed ‘Wank Week’.

Seems like a good opportunity to whip out this perky piece from 1999 on how masturbation has gone from shameful private vice to boastful public… broadcasting.
 

Hand-job: Mark Simpson gets to grips with a man’s favourite bad habit
‘WANKER!’.

A bastard blue van has just cut me up, pulling out suddenly from a side-street right in front of me, forcing me to brake.  Hard.  So I responded in the customary way: winding down the window, leaning out and calling him, at the top of my voice, an Onanist.  Tasting his oil-seasoned exhaust while rolling the window up I feel a warm sense of satisfaction.

Calling someone a wanker is one of the great pleasures of being English.  ‘Wanker’ is after all, a full-bodied Anglo Saxon word which can be relished in its pronunciation.  Especially if you deliver it – as most people south of Watford seem do nowadays – with an Estuarian twang: as in, ‘WAN-KAH!’.  Even better, it’s possible to drive this insult home visually, by making that cute jacking gesture with your half-closed fist, (though when I do this to other men I sometimes get a bit confused whether I’m offering an insult or an invitation).

The best thing about calling someone a player of pocket pool though is that its a crime you’re just as guilty of.  As the jigging fist does rather hint, the man accusing another man of being a hand galloper is no stranger to Mrs Palm and her five daughters himself.  Unlike, say, ‘motherfucker’ (unless you live in Thebes), using ‘wanker’ as a term of abuse is a tad self-incriminating.  It’s a bit like calling someone a ‘nose-picker’.  Everyone does it.  You might as well be calling someone ‘human’.

For most of us males, ‘wanking’ is the normal form of sexual behaviour and intercourse is the deviation.  Most men, even those in relationships, have orgasmed alone rather more times than they have with others – after all we peak sexually long before anyone will go out with us.  And if God hadn’t wanted us to wank, would he have put our hands at crotch level?  Unless he just really wanted to make things difficult for us?  As any anthropologist will tell you, when Homo erectus stood up, the first thing he reached for was his tool.  (The original Obelisk scene in Kubrick’s 2001, in which an apelike man grabs his ‘bone’ for the first time was cut by the 1970s censors and had to be re-shot in its current, symbolic form).

Of course, once upon a time having a Jodrell Bank was somewhat shameful.  Not any more.  Nowadays, there’s a whole TV channel devoted to it: it’s called Channel Five.  Everyone talks incessantly about it on TV, in magazines, on the No.73 bus.  Wanking has finally come out of the cubicle, with some tissue stuck to its shoe.  George Michael might have been arrested for it, but then he did turn it into a hit pop single celebrating it.

In the good old days, masturbation was regarded as a sin and a sickness, an enervation of the nation’s manhood, and a waste of its precious jism.  Boys were solemnly told that it would make them go blind/deaf/grow hair on their palms – which of course was all true, they just forgot to mention that it would take about fifty years.  All these warnings and threats may have made lads a bit anxious, but you can bet it made the slightly sad business of auto-eroticism much more fun because it made it naughty and dangerous.

These days however, masturbation is as rebellious as a side parting.  On their seventh birthday boys are given videos by their mothers called ‘How To Pull Your Pud Properly’ featuring Toyah Wilcox.  Not masturbating is now considered pathological.  [Health organisations now recommended that men masturbate regularly to avoid prostate cancer.

Public schools in the Nineteenth Century were as obsessed with preventing their boys from jerking their gherkin as we are today with encouraging them.  They developed a whole way of life which we called ‘Britishness’, designed to stamp out ‘self-abuse’.  Cold showers, thin blankets, bad food, soccer and rugby football were all deployed to ward it off.  This approach may not have been terribly successful, but we did at least get an Empire out of it.

Crackdowns on monkey spankings were not however exclusive to Britain.  One reason why American men are circumcised is because it was thought that circumcision would discourage masturbation by removing that naughty, oh-so slidey bit of skin.  A notion that was for some inexplicable reason promoted most enthusiastically by the Crisco vegetable oil company.

But neither cold showers nor genital mutilation can stop boys playing with themselves.  Male adolescence is just too irresistible a force.  When you’re fourteen, everything gives you a hard on: sitting on a bus, fizzy drinks, strong breezes, the smell of pencil shavings (oh, was that just me?).  And almost anything can bring you off.  I shagged pillows, mounted my mattress, and even managed to turn the cold showers so beloved of my public school into a masturbatory device by allowing water from the shower head to drip onto the end of my dick, in a pervy variation on Chinese Water Torture.  Each large drop of water brought me tantalisingly closer to the edge.  The only problems was that by the time I came, I’d usually caught a cold.

It goes without saying that this method of self abuse wouldn’t work for me today.  Now I’m in my thirties and the hormonal frenzy has long-since receded, it would take a water cannon to bring me off.  If boyhood was a time when you masturbated four times a day, despite your best efforts to curb your habit; adulthood is when you masturbate only once a fortnight, despite your best efforts to do it more often.

Understandably, one of the reasons why masturbation used to be so heavily discouraged was because it was rather too close for comfort to homosexuality.  After all, at its minimum, ‘homosexuality’ is no more than a wank shared with a friend.  All men, however straight they might consider themselves, know what it is to feel a hard cock in their hands and how to please it.  Come to think of it, at its maximum, homosexuality is no more than a shared wank.

Not so long ago, adult men with girlfriends or wives would rarely admit to having a Barclays, unless they were separated from their missus by war or the Law.  The whole point of being an adult, being a man, was that you didn’t have to play with your pee-pee any more – you now had a woman to do that for you.  Or else you were too busy and too grown up for such things.  Hence the insult ‘wanker’.  It means: ‘useless’, ‘worthless’, ‘contemptible’.  But these days hen-pecked, feminist-badgered men want to advertise, or at least pretend to, their independence from women, and also their immaturity.  Wanking is now aspirational.

So all those seedy top-shelf wank-mags I remember from my youth which were full of fantasies about women giving them hand shandies on buses, have been replaced by big-circulation middle-shelf men’s glossies full of pieces by men bragging about giving themselves hand-shandies.  It’s not just cheating on the girlfriend, you see – it’s cheating on the whole female sex.

The much-touted next evolutionary leap for humanity, the Interweb, is of course all about wanking too.  Described by my friend the American decadent Bruce Benderson as a fulfilment of the Protestant vision of each man at home alone with his God, the Net is more a case of each man at home alone with his cock.

And yes, people in sex chat rooms do actually use the word ‘wanker’ as an insult – even when they have to type it with one hand.

A nd I sho uld knw .

[Originally appeared in Attitude magazine, 1999

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

Given the record-breaking heatwave and the continued talk of ‘global warming’ I thought it seasonable to give this feature piece on the hisory and cultural impact of air-conditioning another ‘airing’.  It was originally written for The Times Magazine three years ago - just before the last record-breaking heatwave.

GLOBAL COOLING

Mark Simpson on the rise and rise of ‘American air’
The Times Magazine 2003

‘This is my home, this is America!’ a canned, generic male power-ballad singer, possibly on loan from those naff Gillette commercials, warbles over the P.A. The giant on-stage video screen flashes stirring images of the American flag, soaring eagles, the Statue of Liberty and Abraham Lincoln. Song and images reach a lugubrious climax. Lights flash. Disco music pounds. A middle-aged man in an expensive suit and a side-parting that appears to start just above his ear, takes the stage to wild applause. He reads uplifting words from a teleprompter: ‘This is the American Dream come true…’. ‘During this time of conflict I have never been more proud to be an American…we have something truly worth fighting for…’.

No, this isn’t a Democrat or Republican Convention, or even a Coca Cola Convention, but the annual convention in Palm Springs, California of ACCA, the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, addressing a packed audience of several hundred rather animated but perfectly sweat less contractors in a hall magically cool, despite outside temperatures already well into the 90s this morning.

It may seem slightly laughable to British eyes and ears that so much patriotism and national significance should be attached to something as prosaic, as vulgar as air conditioning, but then perhaps that’s why our country is in such a state and why for a Brit, visiting the US is like visiting a strange parallel Universe where things actually work. A place where, moreover, things actually appear designed to work for you. America may be the land where the consumer is king, but it is also the land where the engineer is Prime Minister. The US is mixer taps, automatic transmissions, alarming-but-so-hygienic auto-flush toilets and urinals, power-assisted steering, dishwashers-as-standard, garbage-disposal machines, right-turn on red, top-loading washing-machines and driers that actually dry, drive-thru-banks, automatic garage doors, showers that actually shower instead of merely misting you and eight-lane freeways without a traffic cone in sight. American ingenuity and efficiency is as thoughtful and as indiscriminate as the mint left on your motel pillow and the sanitary seal on the toilet seat. ‘No sweat’ is the real translation of ‘E pluribus Unum’.

And of all America’s consumer engineering triumphs, Air Conditioning is the greatest. It symbolises more than anything else, America’s resourceful triumph over Nature — Nature in its most elemental form: Weather. While we Brits talk endlessly, helplessly about the subject; Yanks like to do something about it. And there is rather a lot of weather in the US: during the long continental summers it is not unusual for temperatures to hit the 100s and squat humidly there for days or weeks on end. Air conditioning – man made weather – standardises temperatures and seasons across America, allowing Americans to work, shop, drive and sleep with as much disregard for the outside climate as a Martian colonist. Today more than 50% of American homes have aircon. In 1996, 81% of all new US homes constructed were equipped with central aircon. More than 98% of new cars in the US come equipped with aircon as standard. In America, aircon has become a standard luxury, as ubiquitous and essential as, well, air.

Air conditioning – or AC to give it it’s car dashboard abbreviation – is the essence of the USA, its atmosphere, its very breath. It’s what embraces you refreshingly when you arrive sticky and rumpled at one of her airports. It’s what caresses your feet soothingly in the rental car. It’s what greets you briskly when you step into a shop, office or restaurant. It’s the distant whirring and humming in the night, the reassuring sound of 24hr American thoughtfulness, ingenuity, luxury, comfort – busy and dutiful on our behalf while we are sleeping.

Air conditioning is also the sound of America growing. Since the end of the Second World War, when AC became affordable for domestic use, eight out of ten of the fastest growing cities in US are located in the (hot humid) South Eastern and (hot arid) South Western parts of the country. Without AC Florida would still be a sparsely populated orange grove instead of a booming retirement and tourist state. Without AC even the black gold of Dallas and Houston could not have made the steaming Southern Texas swamps attractive enough. Without AC, the desert dynamos of Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada would still be dusty two-horse towns. And without AC, Palm Springs, ‘the city that air conditioning helped build’ as the literature for the ACCA Convention dubs it, would probably still be just a Winter retreat in the Colorado Desert for a few Hollywood stars, instead of the year-round home for 45,000 people it has become. In other words, AC opened up another Frontier.

Air conditioning is the wind of American ‘imperialism’. The US Army reportedly took large numbers of portable AC units with it into Iraq’s desert heat, to make sure its warriors could at least enjoy American air while conquering/liberating a foreign land. There’s a certain inexorable logic to this: America’s dependence on imported oil from places such as the Gulf (and President Bush’s recent abrogation of the Kyoto protocols) is a result of AC as much as America’s love of automobiles – even as early as the1960s, widespread use of AC meant that demand for electricity in places such as New York actually peaked in the Summer.

Mind, AC is the American lifestyle that most of the world apparently wants to be conquered by. Even in the temperate UK, sybaritic AC is becoming commonplace in new cars, luxury flats and commercial premises. In 1995 only 100,000 commercial systems were sold in the UK, a figure which had grown to 400,000 by 2001. Developing countries want a breath of American air too: India and China are plugging in their AC units (and causing regular blackouts) . In Hong Kong, AC is such a coveted item that relatives of the recently deceased now burn their AC units: according to local custom burning possessions of the deceased mean that they have use of them in the afterlife. Hence, in some parts of the world it’s now not only impossible to live without AC, it’s also impossible to die without it.

A map of empire displayed by York, one of the major American AC manufacturers, on their stand at the ACCA Convention, tells the story: in addition to landmarks such as NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, the US sub fleet, the Capitol Building and the (former) World Trade Center, there are more surprising trophies, such as Britain’s Trafalgar Class Nuclear Submarines, Windsor Castle, the Chunnel (the high-speed trains generate much heat), the Kremlin, the Grand Mosque and the Taj Mahal. America is exporting even its air and the world is buying. Atmospheric imperialism anyone?

***

Today, in mid-March, the temperature is already well into the 90s. Palm Springs, California, ‘the city that AC helped build’, lies on the western edge of the Coachella Valley, within the Colorado Desert, a two-hour drive South East of Los Angeles. Winter temperatures average in the pleasant 70s with nights in the refreshing mid-40s. However, in the summer the temperatures regularly reach 120 degrees in the shade; surface temperatures reach an flesh-frying 195 degrees. The desert tortoise common to these parts burrows thirty-two feet underground to escape the heat (early settlers in the area also lived in tunnels). Palm Springs in the summer is a reminder that Southern California’s climate can be almost as hostile as Mars.

It’s easy to understand why Truman Capote who lived here in the 1960s, fell in love with the air conditioning man who came to fix his equipment one day and didn’t let him leave. Palm Springs today is utterly dependent on aircon. Not only are almost all homes, hotels and shops fitted with AC, Palm Springs even has outdoors comfort cooling – some hotel pool areas and many Downtown open-air restaurants and sidewalks deploy sprinkler systems which shower diners and pedestrians with cooling atomised water.

Americans were not the first people to find ways to build crafty comfort cooling devices to mitigate the summer heat. Recently a 6000 year-old settlement in Syria was excavated with double-walled living quarters, apparently to encourage air-flow, in an attempt to deal with summer temps of more than 40 degrees C. An Eighth Century Baghdad caliph had snow packed between the walls of his villa for Summer cooling (Saddam Hussein though probably just relied on gold-plated AC units).

In 1902 the engineer Alfred Wolff fitted the New York Stock Exchange with a refrigerated ventilation system, inaugurating the first modern air conditioning system, an ammonia-refrigerated brine coil system equivalent to 300 tons of melting ice. Filtered cooled air was gently diffused through an ornamental ceiling over the heads of the stock traders. Wolff also fitted three residential systems, though as the names of his latter-day caliph clients suggest – Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and J.J. Astor – domestic comfort cooling was a long way off being an affordable commodity and remained a symbol of prestige and wealth until the 1930s.

As Gail Cooper shows in her fascinating book ‘Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment 1900-1960’ (John Hopkins University Press), it was in the new mass-market industry of cinema that AC began to become a universal aspiration – part of the American Dream. If the motion picture houses were pleasure factories where the raw material were large numbers of people, the effect of all these huddled masses crammed together, especially in the Summer, was not always so pleasing. Health inspectors in NYC in 1911 reported that in one theatre on Third Avenue the smell was so rank that attendants walked up and down the aisles with an atomizers of perfume trying to blot out the pong of the punters. In fact, before AC movies were seasonal entertainment: many theatres closed for the Summer – as early as May in some parts of the country – and those that remained open experienced a dramatic drop in custom.

Difficult to imagine now, but in the Summer, Americans lived – and often slept – outdoors, seeking relief from the heat in breezes and cool water, heading to beaches, parks, swimming holes. The new large scale theatres with their 2000-4000 seats required large investment in capital and could not afford the seasonal drop-off. Despite the cost of installation, it was estimated that a mere 2% increase in attendance would pay for the AC. In other words, air conditioning allowed Hollywood to abolish Summer, and affordably. Nowadays the biggest movies are released in the Summer and target precisely those people who in the pre-AC past would have been most likely to spend the longest days outdoors – young people.

One of the first cinemas to install refrigeration was the Riviera Theatre in Chicago, whose 1919 ad in the Chicago Tribune bragged: ‘Our Freezing Plant (Just installed) Removes the Temper from Temperature’ and went on to claim, ‘It provides fresh and exhilarating air, chilled to any degree of coolness necessary to our patron’s comfort.’ While many enjoyed the new, ‘exhilarating’ experience, some complained that forcibly proving the existence of an AC system rather than the patron’s comfort was the priority.

In the 1930s the launch of the self-contained plug-in AC appliance, the so-called ‘room’ or ‘window’ air conditioner by the De La Vergne Machine Co. transformed AC into a consumer appliance, and seemed to promise affordable domestic comfort cooling, opening up new markets during the Depression and causing great excitement, being dubbed the ‘new radio’. In 1935 GE proclaimed that the new market was worth an astounding $5BN, generating a scramble of new producers and investors, though his turned out to be little more than hot air.

In the war years, comfort cooling was stigmatised as a luxury at odds with wartime stoicism. In May 1942 the War Production Board prohibited the installation of new systems or the manufacture of new equipment solely for personal comfort. Plans were announced to remove existing AC in civilian and government buildings and install them in factories engaged in military production. New York’s Tiffany department store dutifully sent its AC to a factory in Texas, cooling machinists instead of Manhattan’s chic set. Oddly, the bureaucracy itself was very reluctant to give up its cool air in the way it encouraged others to do so. Much of Washington, built on a swamp, had already become ‘climate controlled’ (the Capitol and the White House had been fitted with AC in 1929). Bills that authorised the transfer of government owned equipment to war plants inexplicably usually died in committee.

After the war, perhaps because comfort was now back in vogue, there was an explosion in the AC industry. In 1945 just over 1000 room AC units were built. By the following year this had risen to 30,000. By 1956 it had reached 1.3M. GE’s overheated pre-war prediction began, belatedly, to look like cool calculation.

Central or built-in AC also boomed. It was seen as a way of saving money on home construction costs, eliminating the need for high ceilings, movable sashes and screens and wings that promoted ventilation. 1950s tract housing, with its sealed picture windows and low roof, was a ‘TV–equipped hotbox’ that was uninhabitable without AC. Central AC turned housing itself into a kind of appliance, a factory-made, plug-in white good. Builders also noted that built-in AC was a big selling point, second only to built-in kitchens. By the late 1950s AC was a vital part of new home construction.

As with cinemas, the use of AC in offices was initially sold on the basis of increased efficiency. Tests in 1946 suggested that typists were 24% more productive in an AC office. Before AC it was not unusual for firms to have to close their offices early in the summer. In 1957 a survey of 376 companies revealed that 88% rated AC the most important item for office efficiency (even today, where most offices are air conditioned, it is estimated that $20BN is lost through poor AC).

AC also allowed the construction of the modern office ‘block’. As urban land became more scarce, H, T and L-shaped buildings, designed to maximise natural ventilation and light became too expensive. The interior, dark and airless ‘deep space’ of block construction could be lit with the new, low-heat, low-cost fluorescent strip-lighting and ventilated with AC. Thus office AC turned many city workers into troglodytes labouring inside huge mountains; or astronauts floating in ‘deep space’. The outside appearance of the modern skyscraper, with its profligate use of (greenhouse) glass, was also a product of the voodoo of AC – the use of ceiling to floor glass at the UN Headquarters in NY in 1953 required an increase in AC requirements of 50%.

The addition of AC to cars (Packard was first in 1938) meant that more and more Americans were ‘bubbling’ from AC offices, to their AC automobiles, to their AC homes. By 1960 there were c.6.5M AC units of all kinds in use. By 1970 more than 24M. The pre-AC methods of staying cool, the outdoor life, eating and sitting on the porch, sipping iced lemonade, began to be forgotten as the seasons were homogenised as man made weather decreed a coast to coast, north to south, perpetual, productive, Puritan Autumn.

This astonishing triumph of America over, well, America, did not come without a price attached – one that was not apparent, however, until the oil crisis of the 1970s. In an effort to wean the US off its dependency on imported oil, President Jimmy Carter banned business and Government offices from setting thermostats lower than 78 degrees on pain of a $10,000 fine. Although this was in fact the optimum setting for AC, most Americans were now so used to comfort cooling that they bridled at the thought that they might not have control over their own personal weather, and ignored the ban. President Nixon a former occupant of the White House had apparently enjoyed turning the thermostat all the way down and then warming himself in front of a roaring log fire – Nixon was probably more in touch with American values than Carter, who was not re-elected and no President ever tried to come between an American and her thermostat again.

Recent blackouts in California have been blamed partly on increased AC use, but the concern today, with much of the rest of the world apparently wanting some of America’s comfort cooling, is that man made weather is affecting the natural variety. The vast amounts of energy used to run AC units produces CO2 emissions, contributing to the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’. Older models of AC units also use CFC refrigerants which are thought to attack the ozone layer. Of course, AC doesn’t actually get rid of heat, it merely pumps it (and the extra heat actually generated by the process) outside. The ambient temperature of Manhattan is estimated to be raised several degrees by AC in the summer, more if you’re waiting for a train on the subway (the trains are icily cooled but the platforms are not, causing your sweaty shirt to give you a chilly shudder when you board your train). Paradoxically, AC makes things warmer.

Arguably, the whole idea of ‘global warming’, which is still a controversial theory, is itself a product of air conditioning – the notion of man being able to control or affect the climate, for good or ill, at all is something that proceeds from the same place as the idea of man-made weather/climate control: human vanity and ingenuity. Undeniably however, AC can make you ill. At its most lethal, poorly maintained AC can give you Legionnaire’s Disease, so-named after an outbreak at a convention for ex-service personnel in Philadelphia USA, in 1976 which killed 34 veterans. Some blame AC for the rise of so-called ‘Sick Building Syndrome’, where unfortunate workers are subject to regular headaches and dry throats and tiredness, though this is more likely to be the case if the system is not working properly.

On the other hand it’s equally undeniable that AC saves and prolongs millions of lives: older people used to die in their thousands during heatwaves in the US; now their main worry when the mercury rises is a power cut or a malfunction, or, as happened to one unfortunate, befuddled and now very much expired American pensioner recently, turning on the heat instead of the AC.

In the UK, if aircon is installed at all, broken and inadequate systems are the norm. Some estimates put the figures at a luddite 90%. Vent ducts are not cleaned, dead pigeons frequently scent the air intakes, refrigerant is not recharged. The British are clearly conflicted about AC – they want it, but sabotage it; perhaps because the consistency of man-made weather would rob them of their principal topic of conversation and complaint. A friend of mine who works in a luxury supermarket in Central London tells me the AC has never worked properly there since the shop opened fifteen years ago. Despite yearly visits from engineers and expensive changes of equipment, staff and customers still sweat through the summer and the expensive imported chocolate on the checkout shelves sighs and wilts. But at least they’re not American.

Practically speaking, there simply isn’t the infrastructure and the culture here necessary to sustain AC (though this may change if we experience more heatwaves like the recent record busting one). Principally, there simply aren’t enough trained technicians; perhaps because of our attitude towards consumer engineering and perhaps because there isn’t the incentive. At the ACCA Convention in Palm Springs I met several keen young air conditioning students from the Pennsylvania School of Technology. Maurice, a 7 ft tall black guy on a two-year AC course, was going to be a professional footballer, but opted instead for the AC business. ‘I helped out an uncle of mine one summer and got real excited by it.’ By the technology? ‘No, more the money side, actually! There’s a LOT of money to be made in aircon!’

Professor Lowell Catlett, a ‘futurologist’ from New Mexico State University who delivered the opening address at the Convention agrees. ‘The average American living below the official poverty line has more washing machines, dishwashers, TVs than middle class people did a generation ago.’ He sees AC as a part of the rising expectations of an ageing society. ‘In 1900 life expectancy was just 42 years, now it’s 76. Engineering rather than medicine is responsible for that, in the form of sewerage, water and food preparation. And the older our population gets, the more it is going to expect – and require – air conditioning.’ AC is, in other words, going to be part of the life-support system necessary to sustain our unnaturally prolonged lives. He also points to the growth in single-parent – i.e. single woman – households and suggests that this is something the AC industry, which is very male (there are few women at the Convention) should respond to.

Some already are. I ask Rick Roetken, Brand Manager for Carrier, the oldest and most prestigious AC manufacturer in the US, standing beneath a large, flowery poster advertising Puron, a new environmentally friendly Carrier-made, if AC is no longer about ‘man-made weather’? No longer about conquering Nature but living with Her? ‘Yes, I think that’s right,’ he says. ‘In the future AC has to be seen to be working more with the environment and more sensitive to people’s needs and concerns’.

Ironically, Rick himself is slightly nostalgic about a time before AC ruled the world. ‘When I was a kid growing up in Indiana in the 1970s, we’d only have the AC on 2-3 days a year. My dad would announce that we had to close up the house and then he’d switch it on. It was a big deal, and kinda cool. Now it’s on 24hrs a day and we never open the windows.’

Rick’s wistfulness for a time of open windows is shared by at least one other attendee at the ACCA Convention, Ted an AC contractor from the border Southern State of Maryland. ‘Aircon is much more common now in Maryland than when I was a boy,’ he says. ‘Back then we used to sit out on the porch when we came home from school or work, chatting to the neighbours and watching the world go by. That doesn’t happen any more. No one knows their neighbours any more,’ he says regretfully. Then he adds, as if it had only just dawned on him, ‘I don’t know my neighbours.’

Air conditioning is undoubtedly an American triumph, a terrestrial form of space travel – ‘Apollo 13’ after all, is a film about a bunch of guys struggling to fix their AC unit. It has however, forever changed what it means to be an American; America’s gregarious ingenuity can be oddly alienating. More to the point, ‘American air’ may also be helping to change forever the setting of the giant thermostat on Spaceship Earth, nudging it up several degrees in the next hundred years. And making aircon even more desirable.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

When, I wonder, am I going to receive my fee for my makeover of the Tory Party?  Metrodaddy, alias yours truly, appears to have been cast as the (reluctant) queer eye of the British Tory guy. 

As yet another sign of the total mainstreaming of male aesthetics, that once reliably retrosexual party that seems to have gone raving metrosexual – or, rather, ‘mincing metrosexual’ in the inadvertently revealing words of its chairman this week. 

First they elect a new, young, (relatively) stylish, rather moisturised, leader in the form of David Cameron.  Practically the first thing he does, before his trip to Norway to watch glaciers melt, before holding a shadow cabinet meeting/photo opp. in his lovely designer kitchen, is to announce that the The Queen is Dead by The Smiths is his favourite album of all time.  (I can’t help wondering if I’d chosen, for some inexplicable reason, to write a biography of Holly Johnson rather than that alternative 80s ‘Iron Lady’ Morrissey, whether Cameron would have named Welcome to the Pleasuredome as his favourite album instead.)

Then an ‘A list’ of parliamentary candidates is announced – featuring women, gays, non-whites, and celebs – as a kind of new, designer political wardrobe for Cameron, fast-tracking the Conservatives’ change of image from something retro into something more modern, more fashionable, more desirable, more… metro.

Pre-eminent among these ‘A-listers’ is metrotory poster boy Adam Rickitt, who despite his name, is an anything but mal-nourished chap whose major claim to fame until now is that he used to take his shirt off a lot on the soap Coronation Street to show us his boyish six-pack and pecs.  Kind of a Woolworths pick ‘n’ mix Marky Mark, or, perhaps more to the point, a BHS soft-furnishings department Joe Dallesandro (Warhol hustler and hunky, hairless shirtless cover star for The Smiths’ debut, eponymous album).  Not surprisingly, a gay character in that soap fell for him and tried to kiss him  - a pass which was, after a bit of hesitation, rejected by Adam’s hetro metro character.

Given the awful looks, shape, clothes and halitosis of most British politicians I reckon Rickitt’s guaranteed a buff majority at the next election as thousands of young women and gays hitherto unfamiliar with the arcane and occult practise of voting rush to the polls to put a big kiss next to his name – and a prominent front bench position.  After all, you wouldn’t be able to appreciate his pretty blond features properly in the backbenches, would you? 

What on earth would this lad with no previous political experience be minister for, I hear you demand?  Well, there’s a host of possibilities that his talents bring to mind.  Such as… Minister for Looking At.  Or Minister for Working Out.  Or Minister for Men’s Underwear.  Or Minister for Decorating the House.  Failing that, he can just bring along his own portfolio – of photographs. 

Politics has already been successfully aestheticized by New Labour – once the proletarian party of production and supply-side, now the party of consumption and seduction – and rendered skin deep.  Why not politicians?  At least then we’d have something nice to look at while we’re being lied to.

Little wonder though that die-hard, unmoisturised retrosexuals within the Tory Party are rather unhappy with what’s happening to the party that used to bathe once a week and used a whiffy flannel the rest of the time; the party that used to regard that gay-baiting crank with the pudding-bowl haircut Normo Tebbit as the summit of everything desirable in a man; the party that introduced legislation in the form of Section 28 to ban schools from promoting the use of male hair care products and gymnasiums.  Little wonder they have been making loud noises – mostly of buttock clenching.

Old-timer Tory chairman Francis Maude has tried to reassure them, to soothe their fevered brows and cramping sphincters, and counteract some unfortunate ‘misapprehensions’.  Alas, his Freudian unconscious sabotaged him and revealed his own anxieties about the policy he himself is having to implement in an hilarious slip of the tongue, or some such fleshly organ.  Appearing on Toryradio this week, railing against the wilder rumours, he found himself saying:

“The idea that what we’re actually trying to do is insert mincing metrosexuals into gritty northern marginal seats is complete rubbish.”’

Err, thanks for that, Frankie.  A choice of words and images that will definitely put all unsavoury and uncomfortable thoughts of bumming out of the minds of Tory stick-in-the-(non-beautyfying)-muds who can’t stop worrying about it - at the same time as reassure the public that the Tory Party has really changed (its underwear).

I suspect however that most self-respecting metrosexuals would probably rather not insert themselves into ‘gritty seats’ anyway.  Certainly not without a shower and a sack and crack wax first. 

More to the point, that colourful outburst would seem to confirm that Cameron is inserting ‘mincing metrosexuals’ into safe seats instead.  I told you we’d be seeing Adam on the front benches soon, sunbathing in a thong.  [Update: In fact, Rickitt has applied to replace former Tory Leader Michael Howard as MP for Folkestone and Hythe at the next election.  On one Tory web forum he’s described by an apopleptic Tory activist as a ‘ghastly hermaphrodite’.

Actually, despite the depressing, patronising view of the North held by Southerners such as Maude and the BBC (e.g. ‘The Street’) as some kind of Gulag for people who use short vowel sounds, I can assure you, as someone who has recently moved back to the North from the South, that working class northern men in this largely - thanks to Mrs T - post-industrial region are even more keen than Southerners on fake tan, hair gel, designer clothes and gym-bodies and least likely to apologize for it.  The centre of the nearest big city to me, ‘gritty northern’ Newcastle, is full of them milling if not mincing around wearing expensively little on a Friday night – Newcastle even officially calls its giant shopping mall the ‘Metro Centre’, in case local lads didn’t know where to go when they get their pay-packets. 

If the Tories want to insert themselves into more seats in the North, and God knows they can hardly occupy fewer than they do at the moment, they could do worse than recruit a few more Adam Rickitts.  If they want to seduce younger voters, the Tories need to convince them that they’ve abandoned the ‘Victorian Values’ – and aesthetics – of the Iron Lady and embraced the ’softer’, ‘selfish’, ‘superficial’  and ‘vain’ aspect of the consumer revolution she ushered in but tried, like most Tories, to disavow. 

That, in other words, the Tories are something that young people might actually want to wear.  Or even look at.

Damn – I’ve done it again.  I’ve given the Tories more consultancy advice.  For nothing.

How about a signed poster of Adam Rickitt canvassing himself in the altogether and we’ll call it quits?

© Mark Simpson 2006

Review of ‘Britain’s New Power Elites’, Hywel Williams (Constable, £12.99)

by Mark Simpson

Appeared in Independent on Sunday, 14 May 2006

‘Among the most significant achievements of the modern British elite,” argues Hywel Williams, limbering up in the early pages of his polemic against Britain’s rulers in the form of an incompetent executive class, a meaningless political class and a degraded professional class, “is the promulgation of the essentially ideological idea that Britain is an anti-ideological place. Criticism of its fundamental features can therefore be dismissed as the ravings of the marginalised - those whose temperaments fail to show the kind of finesse required in order to understand Britain and the British - and who need not therefore be admitted into the contest and the debate.”

Mr Williams, I hope, will take it as a compliment that I found his temperament singularly failing in finesse. I don’t know whether the author of the classic text of the 1990s implosion of Toryism, Guilty Men: Conservative Decline and Fall, 1992-1997, world historian, and contributor to the Guardian’s Op-Ed pages is a marginal figure or not, but I certainly enjoyed his ravings.

Less of a book than a steel-toe-capped kicking of the great and the good, Britain’s Power Elites is an invigorating volume of spleen and informed invective of the kind that is in short supply in this enervated, “ironic” age. A donnish punk, Williams argues that the problem with our contemporary political culture, the biggest symptom of its deathly monopolisation by careerists, capitalists and creeps, is precisely its deadening politeness. The fact that Williams is so learned only makes his aphoristic assault all the more enjoyable.

On politics: “… a good profession for people who are mentally agile, intellectually incurious and physically robust. The political elites’ conformist agreement that it is the drama of personal jealousy which explains the very foundation of politics is a conventional judgment which suits all those personal traits.”

On lobby correspondents: “Worker bees, if fed on royal jelly, may become queen bees, and so the point of this journalistic class is not so much to expose as to honour the greater power it observes and tries to decipher.”

On bankers: “The perverse, but almost universally accepted, practice within elite banking circles sanctifies the position of those who are in power while also protecting them from those market shocks that they are otherwise so eager to elevate as the justification for capitalism.”

Even when his malicious metaphors over-reach themselves it’s still enjoyable, in a scatological fashion: “If Churchill finally made it to No 10 at 65, then there’s always hope for the rest who, all greased-up, can slide their way up and down the back-passages of elite ambition while waiting for recognition to wind its way towards them.”

Maybe it’s his refusal to hide his braininess and reading, maybe it’s his chippiness, but I suspect that Williams is one of that dying breed, a grammar-school boy: “The dominant tone of the new legal elite is that of a clever philistinism,” he complains, “which is not that different from the dominant tone of British broadcasting.”
He contrasts previous generations of grammar-school elites such as Roy Jenkins, Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, and Edward Heath who openly displayed their intellectual prowess, their meritocratic certainty, with modern power elites “who have to play the game of ostentatious anti-elitism in order to maintain, covertly, their elite power”. Discretion, like talking about democracy all the time (”press your red buttons now!”) but making sure that it never happens, is a very British way of doing business.

Williams is particularly scathing about the egghead collaborators: “What typifies the British intellectual class… is its successful absorption within the power elites to a point at which its thoughts and stances are reified and appear to be simply the neutral observation of questions of fact.”

Conservative intellectuals come in for a special drubbing: “All have failed to observe, or chosen not to see, how powerful is the thrust of monopoly in capital’s command of the world, and how the urge to create larger and larger units is the true lifeblood of its existence and its motive for being.” Well, of course. That would be the ultimately ideological and therefore ultimately un-British impoliteness. Dear boy, it would be practically Marxist!

Although he hardly mentions the German curmudgeon, Williams’ central thesis is rather Marxoid. He identifies the problem with our eviscerated political and professional culture as being caused by the total dominance of international finance capital in the form of The City. Capital has swallowed everything, but, he argues, this is hardly acknowledged. In the 1980s, the money men conducted a quiet and stunningly successful coup d’etat, moving smartly into the power vacuum created by the collapse of ideological politics and faith in the State. This revolution was so successful that most aren’t aware of it; those that are, the political, professional and legal elites, are largely at their beck and call - and in their pay. The financial elites are out of control and in control. There are no other elites to stand in their way because all other institutions are now effectively their servants. The old political elites are “front of house” flunkeys, while the money men themselves, with their “offshore” interests and allegiances, get on with the global business of making billions.

It’s why an actor and failed rock star is our Prime Minister. It’s why the first thing the first Labour Chancellor in 18 years did was abandon his main economic lever, the setting of interest rates, to the Bank of England, when he started work in 1997. It’s also why Labour ministers marry dodgy international financiers; after all, this is no more nor less than what New Labour has done.

This, above all, is the reason for the stultification of British politics which so enrages Williams. It is polite, mediocre and tedious because it doesn’t matter. “Britain has allowed its power elites to effect a transformation which amounts to the degradation of an entire country,” he explains; a statement that should shock people into recognition, but which will probably be interpreted merely as proof of his shocking faux pas.
Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

The recent spate of media reports of the commonness of female bisexuality and the non-existence of the male variety inclines Mark Simpson, the father of the ‘metrosexual’ to the world’s attention, to wonder why we seem to be kidding ourselves about the real, red-blooded nature of the ‘bi-curious’ times we’re living in

(Originally appeared on marksimpson.com Feb 15, 2006)

Male bisexuality doesn’t exist. Or it’s very, very rare. Or it’s really just gay men in denial. Yeah, it’s official: bi guys are freaks and liars as well as non-existent.

Female bisexuality, on the other hand, is almost universal. It’s as natural and as true as it is wonderful and real and… hot!

Or so you would be forgiven for thinking if you had read the effusive reports in the papers about California State University’s recently published sex-research which claims that women are 27 times more likely to become attracted to their own sex than men.

I haven’t yet been able to study the research quoted, but any sex survey that claims to have interviewed 3,500 people and show that 0.3% of men are attracted to the same sex compared to 8% of women (as quoted in the Independent on Sunday 12/2/06) is difficult to take seriously – except as a measure of social attitudes rather than sexuality.

Maybe it’s because some of my best shags are bisexual men, but I’m beginning to get a bit teed off with this drive to make male bisexuality disappear, either into statistics smaller than a micro-penis or obscured behind a flurry of girl-on-girl action. A few months ago the New York Times published an article ‘Straight, gay or lying?’ which seemed to be a press release for the hilariously cranky research of Dr J. Michael Bailey at Northwestern University, which apparently involves wiring up people’s genitals and showing them dirty pictures and then claiming to have ‘proved’ that male bisexuality ‘doesn’t exist’ and that most women are bisexual. Which seems a much more tenuous conclusion to reach, rather than, for instance: most psychologists at Northwestern University are very strange indeed. (Amongst other extraordinary omissions, the article neglected to mention that Dr Bailey has more than one ‘previous’ in his area: he thinks transsexuals are also ‘really’ gay men and, in a coup-de-grace of his tidy-minded thinking, advocates eugenics to solve the problem of homosexuality).

I hate to break it to you guys, but most of the evidence, historical, anthropological and sexological, suggests that if anything, male ‘bisexuality’ – it’s a terrible word, almost as bad as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’, but it will have to do for now – is much more common than the female variety. After all, entire civilizations such as Ancient (and according to many accounts, Modern) Greece have been based on it. Not to mention public schools, the Royal Navy and Hollywood….

It’s unquestionable that female bisexuality is today much more socially acceptable than male bisexuality, and in fact frequently positively encouraged, both by many voyeuristic men and an equally voyeuristic pop culture and also, perhaps slightly paradoxically, women’s new-found desire to assert themselves sexually. What’s more, female homosex has never been legally or socially stigmatized to anything like the same degree as male homosex. It’s a fond myth that the Victorians exempted female homosex from legal censure because Queen Victoria couldn’t conceive of it (apart from anything else, the young Victoria was a fan of Sappho). Woman-on-woman love action wasn’t legislated against because, unlike male homosex, it simply wasn’t considered of much consequence. It may be difficult for feminists to grasp, but ‘patriarchy’ was always much more concerned about where men’s penises went than women’s tongues.

Straight women now have something to gain and little to lose by admitting an interest in other women. Rather than exile them to the acrylic mines of Planet Lesbo, it makes them more interesting, more adventurous, more modern… just more. For the most part, however, straight men still have nothing to gain and everything to lose by making a similar admission. It renders them considerably… less. Unlike women, men’s gender is immediately suspect if they express an interest in the same sex. What’s more, any male homosexuality still tends to be seen as an expression of impotence with women. In other words: men’s attraction to men is equivalent to and probably a product of emasculation.

A straight man admitting that he finds masculinity desirable – as so many clearly, thrillingly do – threatens to cost him the very thing he values most: not only his own manhood and his potency, his reputation with the ladies, but his lads-together homosocial intimacy with other men. It’s a nasty, vicious, bitchy trick to play on millions of red-blooded men, but this is what passes for common sense in the modern, anglo-saxon world.

When a male in public life is outed as bisexual – and, with the exception of controversy-courting David Bowie in the 1970s, who now denies he ever was, they almost never come out willingly – he is immediately represented as ‘gay’. For a man, unlike a woman, there is no such thing as ‘half gay’, it’s tantamount to being half pregnant.

Exhibits A and B: the recent outings of British Lib-Dems Members of Parliament Michael Oaten and bachelor Simon Hughes by the press as ‘gay’ – or rather ‘GAY!’ This despite the fact that Oaten is a married man with children and Hughes’ own careful presentation of himself in his (clearly arm-twisted) admission as bisexual. All those witty ‘LIMP-DEMS’ headlines illustrating once again that any male homosexuality is seen as emasculation. If a male celeb’s sexuality is ‘questioned’ (a tellingly popular phrase, suggesting his genitals have been taken down the police station) by the tabs, they frequently run front page headlines by some tart claiming ‘HE’S NO GAY! HE’S ALL MAN! WE ROMPED SEVEN TIMES A NIGHT!’

Naturally, a man’s prowess with the ladies is proof positive that he couldn’t possibly be ever interested in men. Hence the popularity of the expression ‘red-blooded heterosexual male’. It goes without saying, doesn’t it, that non-heterosexual men have pink blood. Real men don’t do dick; and if they do, well, they’re not real men. Can I have my professorship at Northwestern University now, please?

Speaking of unreal men, Robbie Williams’, the drag king of Britpop, was recently awarded large damages over newspaper reports that he had GAY HOMOSEXUAL SEX with ANOTHER MAN!. Many pointed out this libel action of his over accusations of GAY HOMOSEXUAL SEX was rather odd, hypocritical even, given this former member of gay disco dancing baby Chippendale troupe Take That’s careful cultivation of his ‘ambiguous’ sexuality over the years and its crucial role in making him seem much more interesting that he actually is. However, Williams’ flirtation with ‘gay rumours’ was probably more a I’m-so-secure-in-my-sexuality postmodern strategy for dispelling the possibility that he was homo at all. Williams spent a great deal of time and money publicising his affairs with the ladies. This careful investment threatened to be rendered worthless by this story. In keeping with their reflexive denial of male bisexuality, the newspaper allegations of his ‘homosexual affair’ also suggested that his very high profile relationships with women were a sham and that he was a GAY HOMOSEXUAL really. Hence Robbie ‘red-blooded’ Williams had to sue.

When men have sex with one another it is never sex – it is, you guessed it, GAY HOMOSEXUAL SEX! Last week British scandal sheet the News of the World ran a story about a ‘secret’ (i.e. unlawfully obtained) film of two bisexual English Premier League footballers having sex. The headline for the story used the word GAY in font so large it covered more than half the page. (The words ‘sordid’ and ‘perverted’ and ‘obscene’ were also much in evidence; in a story about bisexual women the words would be: ‘saucy’ ‘steamy’ and ‘sexy’.)

Likewise, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ was popularly dubbed the ‘gay cowboy’ movie, but in fact both the protagonists are bisexually active, and there’s rather more straight sex than gay sex in the film. Actor Jake Gyllenhaal has felt obliged to tell interviewers how ‘uncomfortable’ it was for him to perform the ‘gay sex’ scenes – despite there being almost none and that this is a film that likes to lecture us, rather tediously, on how awful homophobia is. I suppose some would say we should commend his honesty; but then, this is a guy, remember, who lives in LA and works in a profession where everyone smooches whenever they meet, when they leave, and when they’re feeling especially emotional – like when they win an Oscar. And I’m not even mentioning that one of the problems with ‘Brokeback’ was that Jakey boy was just too gay looking.

If you’re a man who loves women, admitting a sexual interest in other men – or even failing to mention how uncomfortable/ill the very idea of it makes you feel – can apparently cost you your virility, and expose you to public ridicule of a kind that people might think twice about if you were actually gay. Partly because a degree of political correctness now protects gays, and partly because gays, unlike bis, ‘can’t help themselves’; and at least you know where you are with them – especially now that they get registered (in the UK.) You won’t even be praised for your ‘honesty’ as everyone will think you’re ‘really’ gay anyway. Why do bisexual men not come out? Because there is no good reason to and plenty of good reasons not to.

Fear and loathing of male bisexuality is something tends to bring heterosexuals and homosexuals together. Instead of pondering the possibility that public attitudes towards male bisexuality are a truer, less censored indication of what many people actually feel about male homosexuality in general and its enforced incompatibility with masculinity, gay men too often rush to condemn bisexual men and reassure heterosexuals: don’t worry, you’re not being homophobic when mouthing off about bisexual men coz we hate them too!

Gays, when they’re not eagerly cruising bisexual men in laybys, saunas and chat-rooms, are too often keen to denounce the ‘dishonesty’ and ‘double lives’ and ‘repression’ of bisexual men – because they have the temerity to not be just like them, and instead lead ‘normal’ lives that happen to include a discreet, ‘deviant’ sideline, rather than order their lives and their wardrobe around their deviation. In fact, the fetish might be on the other foot. The very existence of male bisexuality threatens to put exclusive homosexuality into a negative rather than a positive light: perhaps you’re not gay because you love men but because you don’t love women.

Or perhaps gay antipathy is down to simple jealousy. ‘Men-who-have-sex-with-women-and-men’ are getting organised and beginning to cut gay men out of the equation. In the US a phenomenon has emerged called the ‘down low’, young black, otherwise hetero men, having sex with one another, very secretly, and exclusively: gay men are not invited. Apparently, a similar distinction operates in British prisons: when inside for a long ‘stretch’, many if not most young straight men engage in sex with other men (obviously they haven’t read the sex-researchers reports) – but very often the gay prisoners are left out of the fun: the straight prisoners tend to turn to, or bend over for, other straight prisoners, the bastards. Whichever way you look at it, through the peephole or psychoanalysis, male bisexuality threatens gay men’s monopoly on male-on-male lurving.

Another, perhaps more elitist gay response to male bisexuality is to insist that men are not ‘really’ bisexual unless they take it up the arse; this seems to me to be a peculiar requirement. Would they also insist that a woman not be considered ‘really’ bisexual until she had fucked a woman with a strap-on? Why privilege some practices above others? Many homosexual men are exclusively active; are they not ‘really’ homo? Besides, it’s not for heteros or homos to define what is ‘really’ bisexual. If it were left to them, there would be no such thing as bisexuality at all. After all, bisexuality is ‘really’ the parts of human behaviour that undermine the very idea idea of ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ – of ‘sexuality’ itself.

Male bisexuality may be still officially invisible, but the internet, chat lines and mobile phones and the general fragmentation of modern identities has made it much easier for otherwise heterosexual men to discreetly explore their ‘bi-curiousness’ (a recent, erotic paddling-pool coinage which attempts to avoid the plunge-pool identity of ‘bisexual’). There are vast and growing numbers of these ‘bi-curious’ men, especially those under 35 (some of them are probably cruising the chat rooms and rest rooms of California State University). These are, after all, a generation of men who have grown up with frank discussions of homosexuality in the media and, more crucially, glossy, glamorous images of male desirability rammed down their throats, on billboards, magazines, films, pop music, TV and even and especially on the playing field.

Metrosexuality was in large part a response to this – and a socially acceptable, commodity-focussed male complement to the media-generated trend towards female bisexuality which many men, while appreciating enormously, felt somewhat short-changed by. If the sex roles have broken down – nay, battered down – why should women be allowed to maintain the monopoly on sensuality and men be forced to continue to merely perform? Why the anachronistic division of labour in the High Street and the bedroom? Why shouldn’t men experiment as well, and discover, for example, their own profile – or their own G-spot? Why should Adam not be as curious and as vain as… Eve?

Especially since the arrival of that boon to boundless curiosity as the Internet. This is a generation of men who have grown up with easy access to hardcore porn; which, by the way, means: masturbating over images of dicks and pussies. In fact, dicks are frequently the only constant. Anyone claiming that men simply don’t have a bisexual responsiveness should be made to watch the porn consumed by straight men today. Not only do all the most popular scenes (anal and vaginal penetration, blow jobs and ‘money shots’) star - very large - penises, but more and more frequently, they are attached to young, attractive, smooth, worked out, metrosexual men that the camera lingers over much more than in the past. Forget the sex-researchers with their clunky electrodes; the porn industry knows what today’s males like.

You might counter that the metrosexual male porn model phenomenon is simply a result of the industry’s mostly fruitless attempts to encourage women to consume more porn; if you did you’d be even wider of the mark than those who have tried to explain away metrosexual advertising entirely in terms of marketing to women and metrosexual men entirely in terms of pleasing women.

Most ‘bi-curious’ men I’ve met – usually very anonymously and very discreetly – express a very strong desire to try oral sex with a man, often as a result of watching so many women enjoy it. Or maybe just because most men would suck their own penis if they could, but most can’t, so have to ‘phone a friend’. Or rather a stranger.

More often than not they have had these fantasies for an aching long time before acting on them; and they definitely haven’t spoken to anyone, especially sex researchers, about them; in fact, they are usually terrified that anyone might find out and this has been the main reason why they haven’t yet acted on these fantasies. And these, remember, are the most adventurous bi-curious men; the unadventurous bi-curious men simply stay curious. This is probably the opposite for bi-curious women, who, it seems, tend to talk about it a lot before trying it.

The most ludicrous aspect of today’s ‘sexist’ taboo on male bisexuality is that, after all, is it really so strange that males who are very interested in masculinity quite often end up interested in men. This is part of the reason why it used be thought of as a ‘phase’ that all male youths went through. There seems to me to be something rather prissy and effeminate about a masculinity that refuses any physical intimacy with men, ever. (Well, that’s what I say to straight men I fancy.) At its most basic, most ‘rudimentary’, male ‘homosexuality’ is nothing more than a shared wank. All men, however straight, know how to please a prick and have been doing so regularly, for most of their lives – many times more often than they’ve been pleasing pussy. As for buggery – well, if God hadn’t intended men to get fucked he wouldn’t have given them a prostate gland.

I don’t have any doubt that most of these bi-curious men really love women and always will, and in most cases rather more than they will ever love men. They are not making their first steps ‘out of the closet’ into a gay identity. Many will lose their interest in having sex with another male. And there are, it is abundantly clear to me from my own exhaustive sex-research, several ‘bi-curious’ straight men for every gay man. Exclusive, life-long male homosexuality is the exceptional, not the normal form of male-on-male desire.

Male bisexuality as a phenomenon is here already and is something that society is going to have to get used to, or at least stop pretending doesn’t exist – except when it wants to make money out of it in the form of advertising, fashion, pop-promos, movies and porn. A generation of young men have been programmed by our hypocritical culture to be bisexually-responsive – so long as it makes corporations rich, but they are told it’s wrong and ill and makes their pricks drop off if they take that as a cue to be anything other than passive, veal-pen consumers. If I was Herbert Marcuse I might argue that reaching for your buddy’s shorts instead of your wallet – choosing the Real Thing over Diesel and Nike - is still verboten because corporations are making so much money selling straight men ersatz homosexuality.

That women are being encouraged to talk about their bisexuality as an enhancement of their femininity and sexuality is rather marvellous – but it also heightens the double standard about male bisexuality, one as pronounced than the double standard about promiscuity used to be (men were ‘studs’ and women were ‘slags’), and makes it more inevitable that male bisexuality – by which I simply mean ‘straight’ male sexuality that doesn’t fit into heterosexuality, and boy, there’s a lot of that – will have to be addressed candidly sooner or later. The tidy-minded inhibitions which keep male bi-curiousness under wraps are still powerful, but have largely lost their social value, their attachment to anything real; they are mostly remnants from a Judeo-Christian (re)productive, world that doesn’t exist any more, except perhaps in Utah, every other Sunday. Dr Bailey with his terrifying sex lie-detectors is the (slightly camp) voice of the Superannuated Super-Ego. When enough young men realise this – or maybe just the desperate preposterousness of the arguments and ‘science’ deployed against male bi-curiousness – the change in attitudes will occur very quickly and dramatically indeed.

Not least because the ‘bi-curiousness’ of some women seems almost bi-curious enough for both sexes. Women are beginning to talk about their interest in boy-on-boy romance – something I’ve only slightly-tongue-in-cheek(s) dubbed ‘femantasy’ – as loudly as men have for years bragged about their interest in girl-on-girl action. Some are even trying to persuade their boyfriends to return the ‘lesbian’ favour so often requested of them in the past.

A separated ‘bi-curious’ fireman in rural England I met a few times before he went back to his wife recently contacted me to tell me something rather alarming. ‘She found out about you,’ he said. ‘She hacked into my Hotmail account.’ ‘Oh, shit,’ I said. ‘What did she do? Did she throw you out?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘She got turned on! She wants to watch.’ The poor guy had to tell her that that this really was a kinky bridge too far for him. That he was too much a traditionalist to go down that path….

However the media tries to deny it, or obliterate it with another feverish discussion of female bi-curiousness, it’s just a matter of time before male bi-curiousness goes mainstream. These are interesting times. What we mean by ‘straight’ is changing so rapidly that the straightest of straight men might soon find themselves having to at least flirt with bi-curiousness – just to lay women.

© Mark Simpson 2006