Mark Simpson detects how public information films about policing and justice throw an arresting light on our recent past

The London Times

Last Sunday’s News of The World carried a ‘JORDAN’S LOVER BOMBSHELL’ expose on Jordan’s ‘hunky cage fighter boyfriend’ Alex Reid.  What was the bombshell?  He’s sexually open-minded.

‘”I’M TRY-SEXUAL: JORDAN’S MAN SAYS “I’LL TRY ANYTHING ONCE!’”’ was the shocking headline for the two page spread. The piece, cobbled together from interviews with ex-friends, and some snaps of him in drag with his mates – obviously for a lad’s night out – did its best to keep the (now old) tranny story going, further undermine his masculinity and suggest that he’s even worse than a tranny – he’s probably a poof! After all, any bloke who says he’s a ‘try-sexual’, even one who doesn’t wear women’s clothes, is obviously a bender….

So far, so NOTW. It is, after all, a famously narrow-minded newspaper catering to people who don’t get much.

But rather confusingly, the front of the NOTW glossy magazine inside the very same edition that mocked and ridiculed Reid for his cross-dressing and daring to step outside prescribed gender roles featured TV celeb Myleene Klaas shaving her face on the front page, the with the come-on coverline: ‘MYLEENE MANS UP! – Tough talking and too feisty even for Cowell. Yes, this girls got balls.’ Inside she poses for a glamorous photo shoot in a suit and a side-parting.

Klaas doesn’t describe herself as ‘try-sexual’ in the interview (though she does talk about comparing ‘boob sizes’ with female friends in toilet cubicles), but if she did it would probably have been presented in the same yay! good on ya! girl power!! fashion as her ballsiness. ‘Try-sexuality’ when undertaken by women now seems, even in the NOTW, to be both a measure of both female empowerment and also their new assertive sexuality.  It tends to enhance their femininity rather than bringing it into (fatal) question.

But when men try to join in the experimentation and step outside gendered sex roles themselves, by for instance cross-dressing or expressing an interest in same-sex fantasy, the opposite appears to be true, at least in the public sphere.  They are merely deviant, ‘gay’ or ‘sad’ – and instantly shorn of their masculinity. A joke.  Even cage fighters. Attitudes towards male bi-curiousness show that for men being ‘half gay’ is tantamount to being ‘half-pregnant’.

This new double standard for male and female sexual behaviour which in contrast to the old ’stud/slut’ one, penalises men rather than women was documented earlier this year by Canadian sociologists, who found that men were expected to be up for sex all the time – but only very straight sex. Women were allowed much more latitude in both whether they actually wanted to have sex – and what kind of sex they wanted to have.

This double standard is endemic in the UK, as is painfully evident in the recent case of the barmy woman boxer (also Canadian) found guilty of a violent and unprovoked attack on a couple of drunken squaddies at a disco for kissing and dancing with one another and ‘pretending to be gay’ screaming ‘THIS SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED IN THE BRITISH ARMY!’.

Despite being a violent foreign criminal on the run from the law for assaulting British soldiers (from behind) – and moreover a woman who stepped outside of gender stereotypes herself – she was feted by the British popular press as some kind of have-a-go a heroine.

Why? Well, partly because she was quite ‘tasty’ (in the sense of ‘not looking like a dyke’), but mostly because she was punishing men for daring to break the gender rules themselves.

21st century trysexuality is, you see, just for girls.

by Mark Simpson (A shorter version originally appeared on Guardian CIF November 2, 2008)

“It’s better to marry than burn with passion,” declared St Paul. But now marriage itself seems to have become a burning issue – or at least, gay marriage.

The re-banning of gay marriage in California earlier this month with the passage of Proposition 8 has been presented by gay marriage advocates as a vicious body-blow for gay rights. Angry gay people and their allies have protested across the US, some reportedly even rioting. The timely release of the Gus Van Sant movie Milk, about the murder in 1977 of Harvey Milk, the US’s first out elected official, has fuelled the sense of gay outrage and defiance. Surely only a hateful bigot like the one that gunned down Harvey would be opposed to gay marriage?

Gay marriage is the touchstone of gay equality, apparently. Settling for anything less is a form of Jim Crow style gay segregation and second-class citizenship.

But not all gays agree. This one for instance sees gay marriage not so much as a touchstone as a fetish. A largely symbolic and emotional issue that in the US threatens to undermine real, non-symbolic same-sex couple protection: civil unions bestow in effect the same legal status as marriage in several US states – including California. As a result of the religious right’s mobilisation against gay marriage, civil unions have been rolled back in several US states.

Perhaps the lesson of Proposition 8 is not that most straight people think gay people should sit at the back of the bus, but that if you take on religion and tradition on its hallowed turf – and that is what marriage effectively is – you’re highly likely to lose.  Even in liberal California.

Maybe I shouldn’t carp, living as I do in the UK, where civil partnerships with equal legal status to marriage have been nationally recognised since 2004. But part of the reason that civil partnerships were successfully introduced here was because they are civil partnerships not “marriages” (the UK is a much more secular country than the US, and somewhat more gay-friendly too – but even here gay marriage would almost certainly not have passed).

At this point I’d like to hide behind the, erm, formidable figure of Sir Elton John, who also expressed doubts recently about the fixation of US gay campaigners on the word ‘marriage’, and declared he was happy to be in a civil partnership with the Canadian David Furnish and did not want to get married. Needless to say, Mr John wasn’t exactly thanked for speaking his mind by gay marriage advocates.

But amidst all the gay gnashing of teeth about the inequality of Proposition 8 it’s worth asking: when did marriage have anything to do with equality? Respectability, certainly. Normality, possibly. Stability, hopefully. Very hopefully. But equality?

First of all, there’s something gay people and their friends need to admit to the world: gay and straight long-term relationships are generally not the same. How many heterosexual marriages are open, for example? In my experience, many if not most long term male-male relationships are very open indeed. Similarly, sex is not quite so likely to be turned into reproduction when your genitals are the same shape. Yes, some gay couples may want to have children, by adoption or other means, and that’s fine and dandy of course, but children are not a consequence of gay conjugation. Which has always been part of the appeal for some.

More fundamentally who is the “man” and who is the “wife” in a gay marriage? Unlike cross-sex couples, same-sex partnerships are partnerships between nominal equals without any biologically, divinely or even culturally determined reproductive/domestic roles. Who is to be “given away”? Or as Elton John, put it: “I don’t wanna be anyone’s wife”.

It’s increasingly unclear even to heterosexuals who is the “man” and who is the “wife”, who should cleave to the other’s will and who should bring home the bacon. That’s why so many today introduce their husband or wife as “my partner”. The famous exception to this of course was Guy Ritchie and his missus, Madonna – and look what happened to them. Pre-nuptial agreements, very popular with celebs (though not, apparently, with Guy and Madonna), represent the very realistic step of divorcing before you get married – like plastic surgery, this is a hard-faced celeb habit that’s going mainstream.

If Christians and traditionalists want to preserve the “sanctity” of marriage as something between a man and a woman, with all the mumbo jumbo that entails, let them. They only hasten the collapse of marriage. Instead of demanding gay marriage, in effect trying to modernise an increasingly moribund institution, maybe lesbian and gay people should push for civil partnerships to be opened to everyone, as they are in France – where they have proved very popular.

I suspect civil partnerships, new, secular, literally down-to-earth contracts between two equals, relatively free of the baggage of tradition, ritual and unrealistic expectations, would also prove very popular with cross-sex couples in the Anglo world at a time when the institution of marriage is the most unpopular it’s ever been among people who aren’t actually gay. Yes, cross-sex couples can have civil marriage ceremonies, but they’re still marriages, not partnerships. If made open to everyone, civil partnerships might eventually not just be an alternative to marriage. Marriage might end up being something left to Mormons.

Perhaps my scepticism about gay marriage and marriage in general is down to the fact that I’m terminally single. Perhaps it’s all just sour grapes. Or maybe I prefer to burn with passion than marry. After all, St Paul’s violently ascetic world-view which regarded marriage as a poor runner-up to chastity, also ensured that the Christian Church would burn sodomites like kindling for centuries.

Either way, I think it needs to be mentioned amidst all this shouting about gay domesticity that, important as it is to see lesbian and gay couples recognised and given legal protection, probably most gay men (though probably not most lesbians) are single and probably will be single for most of their lives. With or without civil partnerships/unions.

Or even the magical, symbolic power of gay marriage.

Postscript: The Voice of Gay America responds – loudly.

I’m still in shock after watching the handover to the London Olympics in Beijing. Please tell me it was a bad dream and that on your goggle-box you saw something much less horrifying.

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson looked like he’d put on his worst suit – sorry, someone else’s worst suit – and slept in it all the way to China.  Adding to his impact, he generally behaved like someone from a Home for the Terminally Bewildered on a rare day out.

As for the show the Brits put on, featuring a morphing red London bus, hordes of annoying dancers – it looked like a Cliff Richard film directed by Brent Council, but less fun.

And then the climax: David Beckham popping out of the top of the bus like Samantha Fox out of a birthday cake, to the tunes of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ warbled by crummy TV talent show winner Leona Lewis in crinolene, stuck on the end of a pole like a dodgy Christmas decoration.

How the world went wild as he showed us his latest cosmetic surgery! (My tranny friend Michelle tells me he’s had his eyes done, the upper bags – and I never doubt her judgement about these things).  Before expertly kicking a ball into the wrong part of the stadium.

It was a complete and utter disaster and embarrassment.  A comedy of errors with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Welcome to London.

No, really, you’re welcome to it.

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.

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.

After all, 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 admittedly, 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 it’s 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 in surgical gloves.  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 like FHM and Maxim 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 2008

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 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 in Palm Springs, California, which is 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