marksimpson.com

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.

Achilles, Alexander, Jason, Odysseus – the fabulous scrapping, rutting warriors of the Ancient World fulfil every boy’s own fantasy. Now, says Mark Simpson, Oliver Stone’s spayed movie ‘Alexander’ and the recent crop of ‘epics’ confirms that Hollywood has abolished heroes – past and present.

(Originally appeared Independent on Sunday, 19 December 2004)

For some, the entry “Double Classics” in their school timetable might have been an ominous omen. For me and my classmates however it meant 80 minutes of bliss listening to a wonderful old gent called Mr Field recount, and frequently re-enact with his walking-stick, fantastic stories of male derring-do from the Ancient World. Spellbound and wide-eyed we listened to the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts, Achilles and Odysseus. So great was the pull of the past in the mouth of Mr Field that hardly anyone fidgeted or played with their chunky 1970s LED digital watches.

Of all the epic tales recounted it was that of Alexander the Great that most gripped my pubescent imagination. The story of a scrappy, muscular little blond boy from the provincial Greek state of Macedonia who took on the world and won, carving out an unprecedented empire that stretched from the Adriatic to India. The story of a boy who never quite grew up; who quite probably assassinated his father; who certainly surpassed his extraordinary achievements, establishing himself as the greatest cavalry captain who ever lived, whose tactics are still studied today. A boy who never really cared for any woman except his terrifying mother Olympias (so terrifying that once he left home, Alexander never returned); whose great and constant loves were Bucephalus, his legendary war-horse, and Hephaestion, his legendary comrade in beefy arms. What boy wouldn’t love Alexander? What boy wouldn’t want to be Alexander?

The story of Alexander the Great (356BC -323BC) is the best boy’s own story ever told -the Trojan Wars may never have happened: hence the posters for Oliver Stone’s new movie Alexander announce: “The Greatest Legend Of All Was Real”. Alexander’s is a tale of passion, adventure, really big fisticuffs, masculine camaraderie, and running away from girls. And also, drunkenness, debauchery, mass murder and madness. His 12-year tour of the known (and unknown) world, and his long list of battle honours – Thebes, Heliocarnassus, Issus, Gaugamela, Tyre, Hydaspes, to name but a few – represent dates on the greatest rock ‘n’ roll tour in history.

Alexander is the timeless, ageless hero of boyish psychosis – a romantic disease which affects all men, though admittedly some more than others (well, I was at boarding school). Boys brim with enough energy to change the world, or destroy it – it makes no difference to them. This dangerous, sexy, passionate indifference is the basis of the mixture of fear and envy that causes adults generally to treat them so badly.

Alexander’s ambition was literally global, shaping the Ancient World; his Eastern crusades ended the ancient dynasties of Persia and Egypt. Alexander effectively invented the Western idea of Empire, globalisation and stamped his face on our idea of fame and success. He wanted nothing less than the whole world to be Alexander. For a while he came shockingly close to achieving just that, boldly going where no man had gone before (another boyhood hero of mine, William Shatner, played Alexander in a TV series before landing the role of Captain James Tiberius Kirk – which he played of course, in his wonderfully limited way as Alexander again). In part, his success was due to the way he succeeded in portraying his own ambition and self-interest as being for the benefit of Macedonia, pan-Hellenism or humanity itself.

In this Alexander could be seen as the ancient template for a neo-con America; he even invaded and conquered what is today Iraq and Afghanistan – as well as Iran. But like the neo-cons he could conquer but he couldn’t or wouldn’t administrate: rebellions broke out frequently and his Empire dissolved immediately after his death; Alexander, like contemporary audiences, had a short attention span. Certainly Stone’s epic new biopic could be subtitled: “Operation Persian Freedom”: his Alexander mouths platitudes about liberating Asia; the turbaned, bearded King Darius looks oddly like Bin Laden and, after his decisive defeat at Gaugamela, he is hunted down by Alexander in the mountains.

Obviously this, in addition to the rediscovered fashionability of sword-and-sandal epics (Gladiator, Troy, King Arthur, The Last Samurai), is why Hollywood has rediscovered this chippy little man and remembered his story as the ultimate road move, the classic story of boundless boyish all-American ambition, lighting out for the territory. In addition to Oliver Stone’s effort, Baz Luhrmann is rumoured to be developing his own version, with Leonardo Di Caprio in the title role. Even The World’s Only True Catholic, Mel Gibson, is planning to make a 10 episode HBO TV series about this pagan arse-bandit who whipped the world’s butt. Suddenly, Alexander really does appear to be conquering the world again.

There is another reason why the epics are back though: they offer reassuring, if utterly fraudulent, nostrums about masculinity in an uncertain, metrosexual world. The Ancient World was a time when men were men (and boys were nervous). In fact, warrior chic has been the fashion statement of 2004. This is the same year, after all, that a US presidential election was fought largely on the basis of who would make the best warrior president – and won largely on the grounds of who saluted best on camera and looked most fetching in 1960s uniform.

And likewise, what Hollywood is really offering us in these modern epics is not hairy retrosexuality but just more metrosexual pleasures, this time in a rather gorgeous, ancient setting; models playing at being rough boys – metrowarriors. In The Last Samurai, the Tom finally grows facial hair, and renounces the unmanly military machinery of modernity for the harsh-but-tender camaraderie of Samurai life – but only to make him more glamorous; Mr Cruise’s Western otherness actually makes him the female lead of the movie. In Troy pretty boys Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom are the real beauty pageant entrants and Diane Kruger (Helen) – and the audience – sit in judgement. The fields of Ilium become not a backdrop for the glorious feats of ancient warriors, but an expensive pretext for ogling Brad Pitt’s body, and also a half-hearted attempt to make it look practical, purposeful: when in fact his flawless, untested physique is the very definition of look-don’t-touch. In Alexander Irish boy-band actor Colin Farrell, with bottle-blond hair and eyeliner, stands in for charisma and passion.

The main reason for the return to the epics is this: Hollywood is emasculating the past. It isn’t raiding it, but paving it over. Telling us there never were any heroes. What other explanation could there be for foisting Pitt as Achilles and Farrell as Alexander on us in the space of a year? These stars who have risen without a trace are stars because of their bland insubstantiality not despite it. We live in a crowded world which is offended by talent, terrified by genius. The Irish pipsqueak Colin Farrell was destined to become King of the Knowing World, aka Hollywood, because he is so inoffensive. He’s the anti-Alexander. Like Robbie Williams doing an album of Frank Sinatra songs, Farrell as Alexander, or Pitt as Achilles, serves to reassure a generation that might have some dim, uneasy ancestral memory of a time before the mediatisation of everything – relax! – there were no great men and there was no era of greatness. There are just different styles, man. Masculinity is a game of dressy-uppy. Like the CGI armies of modern epics, and the digital wars of Pentagon planners, contemporary masculinity is simulation and number-crunching technology. Shock and Awe without the draft.

Hence Farrell’s Alexander isn’t haunted, or driven, paranoid, or threatening, terrifying or charismatic: his eyes are just too close together. When wearing his giant war helmet in the battle scenes his beady little eyes look blinking out like Marvin the Martian. He is utterly lost in Stone’s movie. Farrell’s face is as blank and thoughtless as the world that has made him a “star”. It’s difficult to believe that anyone would follow him to the corner shop let alone the edge of the world.

Just as I and countless other generations of boys before me worshipped Alexander, Alexander hero-worshipped Achilles. It is said he kept two items under his pillow at all times: a dagger and a copy of the Iliad. He yearned to emulate flame-capped Achilles’ achievements; in fact he far surpassed them (Farrell, by contrast, turns in a performance below even that of Pitt’s Achilles). He was terrified that his father would leave nothing left for him to achieve, and is one of the reasons why he is suspected of a hand in his assassination. Alexander wanted fame – but he wanted it for his worldly achievements not his profile. There was another reason why Alexander was fascinated by Achilles: he was interested in the story of his warrior-lover Patroclus (Homer doesn’t actually say they were lovers, but by the time of Alexander they were widely regarded as such). Patroclus was a year older than Achilles, just as Hephaestion was a year older than Alexander; Alexander must have worried that the world might think him Hephaestion’s boy.

At Ilium, Alexander and Hephaestion laid wreaths on Achilles’ tomb, stripped naked, anointed themselves with oil and ran races around the grave. Strangely, this scene didn’t make Oliver Stone’s movie. We do however hear Aristotle lecture the young Alexander on how Achilles and Patroclus were lovers and how such a friendship between men “produces virtue” and is “the basis of the city state”. But this dry history lesson on Greek patriarchy isn’t quite what the teasing tagline “Alexander was conquered only once: by Hephaestion’s thighs” might lead you to expect. In fact, we never really see Hephaestion’s thighs let alone Alexander between them. Stone hints heavily they were lovers, and uses Alexander’s life-long devotion to Hephaestion – Alexander was besides himself with grief when Hephaestion died and lay on his corpse for a day and a night – to make him more sympathetic, but can’t quite bring himself to show sex, kissing or even very much affection. By contrast, the on-screen romance between Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Ringpiece is positively pornographic.

There is only one sex scene in the film – but it is a wedding-night tryst with Roxanna, a wife that Alexander took after invading Persia (but didn’t get around to impregnating until years later, and only after Hephaestion’s demise). Alexander, by the way, was not “bisexual” in the way that publicity for the movie has carefully suggested. Stone’s Alexander is bisexual in the way that Elton John was “bisexual” in the Seventies: Stone is worried about losing his mainstream, American audience and wants to give them at least half of Alexander to identify with/desire. Of course, terms such as “heterosexual”, “homosexual” and especially “bisexual”, with its sixties ‘free love’ associations, are anachronistic and misleading in an Ancient context where the gender of a male’s partner was of much less importance than the public observance of certain rules of engagement based on age and rank (adult male citizens, for instance, were officially forbidden sexual relations with one another but encouraged to have them with unbearded teenaged youths).

Nevertheless, according to many accounts Alexander’s preference was for the same sex; and there is evidence that in regard to Hephaestion at least he disregarded the ban on sexual relations between adult males.

His mother and father were so frantically worried about the teenage Alexander’s lack of interest in ladies and what this augured for the royal line that they hired a beautiful and famously talented courtesan. The fact that his mother is recorded as pleading with him repeatedly to sleep with the courtesan suggests that this approach wasn’t very successful (and a mother’s pleading, let alone Olympias’, was likely to have been slightly counterproductive). He was to marry, more than once, but mostly for political reasons, or to satisfy demands for an heir. For most of Alexander’s life, boys were for pleasure; Hephaestion was for love; women were for heirs and alliances – and effeminates like Paris. Though, perhaps to confound our modern interpretations, or at least mine, there is evidence he took a mistress towards the end of his life.

Alexander disdained a chance to inspect Paris’ famous lyre, dismissing it as having been used for “adulterous ditties such as captivate and bewitch the hearts of women.” But, he added, “I would gladly see that of Achilles, which he used to sing the glorious deeds of brave men.” This early example of the public school mentality seems to us now like a kind of queeny misogyny, and perhaps it was, but the fearsome queeniness of hyper-masculinity, a queeniness that literally subjected the world (arguably not once, but three times: under Alexander, under the Romans and under the Brits). Alexander’s father Philip may have invented the modern state with his innovation of a standing army, but it was his Empire homo son who proved to be his most potent martial innovation of all.

According to some, possibly mischievous accounts, Macedonia – even by Greek standards – sounds like a giant, jumping, open all hours Ancient leather bar. In fact, the Greeks were scandalised by the “barbaric” and “beastly” behaviour of the Macedonians. Sniffy Greek sources complain that the members of Philip’s court were selected for their prowess at drinking, gambling, or sexual debauchery. “Some of them used to shave their bodies and make them smooth although they were men, and others actually practised lewdness with each other although bearded… Nearly every man in the Greek or barbarian world of a lecherous, loathsome, or ruffianly character flocked to Macedonia.” Actually, Macedonia was the kind of place that most leather queens would be terrified by.

Needless to say, it scares the bejesus out of Hollywood. In Stone’s film (financed mostly by German money), we get occasional, almost subliminal flashes of the real, raucous nature of Macedonian masculinity, with warriors and their boys glimpsed in the background almost necking each other. But despite these hints, the pre-Christian, barracks erotics of Macedonia ultimately defeats Stone precisely because it is too masculine, too pagan. Stone is a liberal Judeo-Christian pussy. Stone the macho director of films about macho men in which women are very thin on the ground wimps out in Alexander. Macedonian masculinity is just too… masculine. But then, this is the contradiction of all these metrowarrior epics: the Ancient World is just too  rough and real and beastly and male – and, well, Ancient – for contemporary America.

So the warrior sodomy of Alexander is turned into something modern and harmless, something simulated: Queer Eye for the Macedonian Guy, as one critic dubbed it. In addition to the creepily spayed relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion, which is presented as a kind of contemporary gay marriage (sexless, boring, respectable), there’s a strong smell of Sixties unisex androgyny, like rancid jossticks: Stone has Hephaestion portrayed by the spoilt-girlish Jared Leto, complete with hippy-chick wig, plastered in eyeliner applied by Dusty Springfield. The masculine side of male love is as taboo today as the effeminate side is popular.

There is a strange kind of poetic irony here: after all, in JFK Stone told us that his virile Irish Catholic hero Kennedy was punked by the hissing conspiracies of New Orleans fags. Here Alexander and its director are punked by Stone’s own fear of masculine homosexuality.

But there is, admittedly, a lot to be afraid of. An entire season of Jerry Springer couldn’t come close to one evening’s male jealousies, passions and intrigues in Macedonia. Although Stone makes much of Philip’s assassination he draws a veil over the details. The assassin, one of his bodyguards, was a spurned lover called Pausanias. Noted for his youthful beauty, he had been usurped in the royal bedchamber by another attractive young soldier. Pausanias denounced Philip’s new lover as a male tart and “whore”. The boy then proved his virility and virtue by saving Philip’s life in battle, at the cost of his own. His brother and friends then, as you do, drugged Pausanias and gang raped him before handing him on to their grooms and muleteers who also raped him and then gave him a good beating as thanks. For political reasons Philip refused to punish the wrongdoers and restore Pausanias’s honour. Olympias and Alexander probably then used Pausanias’ fury as an instrument for removing daddy and gaining power. Alexander became king and Emperor of the World because his father was murdered by a neglected male lover. Warrior sodomy is a terrifying, fearsome-fearless thing – don’t mess!

It’s tempting to see this current obsession with the Ancient World as a function of our search for new pagan lights in a chaotic, darkened, post-Christian, post-ideological world in which Posh and Becks have replaced the Holy Family. Tempting, but probably mistaken. None of these films have any gods – except the pathetically democratic, earthbound ones: the celebs that star in them. Real worship, whether of heroes or gods is definitely not on offer. It’s just too messy and dangerous for our safe, sterile, simulated modern lives. Boys today don’t worship or want to be Alexander or Achilles, who both regarded themselves as sons of gods. They want to be Colin or Brad. Or their stylist. Although it is difficult for someone like me to accept, maybe this isn’t all bad. After all, as we’ve seen in present-day Mesopotamia, there really isn’t much room in the world for Empire building these days.

Besides, we’re all too busy playing with our digital watches to care about warrior virtues.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

A remarkably, refreshingly reasonable treatment of the Spitzer scandal and the indispensable social role of prostitutes by a woman, Minette Marin, in The London Times (if a straight man had written this he would probably have faced a lengthy free sex ban):

Right up and down the scale, a man can rent a girl a great deal better and more cooperative than the woman he lives with. She will be probably be much more sexually experienced and more accomplished than most wives too. In plain English, or so I am told by perfectly nice men, prostitutes tend to be better at it. They tend to be younger and more energetic. They are also prepared to do things which her indoors might draw the line at. Some prostitutes provide tender loving care, too; the famous madam Cynthia Payne provided her suburban clients with comfort food after the act in the form of poached eggs on toast.

The other awkward fact, which most people must know, but somehow prefer to ignore, is that men often prefer sex without a relationship. Perhaps that is wrong of them, but one must concede that relationships can be wearing, particularly marriage, and sometimes a man just wants time out, and sex without strings is clearly a source of great pleasure, at least for men. If you were an evolutionary biologist you might argue that unfettered sex is entirely natural to men. One might at least agree that hogamous higamous, man seems to be a bit polygamous.

Prostitution, like cruising, is something that makes the institution of marriage tolerable for many men who otherwise wouldn’t be able to meet its rather exacting standards. No strings, slutty sex outside marriage might, for many men, be the only kind of sex there is. For them, sex inside marriage is perhaps the abnormality. ‘Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love’, as Dr Freud put it. Such is the nature of much male sexuality – for which, of course, quite a few women wish to condemn men as a species.

Gay marriage may have had a lot of press lately, along with the consoling idea that homos are becoming homebodies, but what is rather less publicised is that gay male marriage is, by definition, a much more ‘realistic’ arrangement than the traditional variety. Because it involves two men, they usually don’t hold each other up to such exacting sexual standards. They can’t kid themselves – or each other. Truth be told, the easygoing attitude of many gay partners towards sex outside the relationship – and the use of online cruising sites like Gaydar – would be intolerable for most heterosexual women, and many heterosexual men for that matter.

Male cruising produces even more hysteria and hypocrisy than prostitution – when it involves a man married to a woman. In the midst of all the loudly proclaimed sanctimony over Spitzer’s use of call girls, no one is suggesting that the former NY Governor is obviously a congenital visitor of prostitutes and this this is the truth of who he is and hence his marriage must have been a complete sham from day one and in fact his whole life has been a lie.

No, that’s something reserved for Senators busted in dubious airport rest-room entrapments.

Yesterday’s London Times ran a three page piece called ‘Oral History’ interviewing some of the ‘players’ (or perhaps ‘chancers’ would be more accurate) in the Monica Lewinsky ’scandal’ that was to engulf the Clinton Presidency for more than a year, lead to his impeachment and, very nearly, to his departure from the White House.

The piece was pegged to the tenth anniversary of the surreal crisis and also, of course, to the Presidential Primaries in which Hillary Clinton, energetically supported by her husband Bill is trying to secure the Democratic nomination.

After all that has happened in the intervening decade, Bush’s disputed election, 9-11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, Paris Hilton, it’s difficult to believe that the US worked itself up into such a frenzy over whether or not Clinton had a blow job. But, boy, did they.

If Hillary wins the Democratic nomination, then we can bank on some of that frenzy being revisited. In fact, it’s already happening, as both this article and it’s introduction with its regurgitation of that myth about Hillary’s Senatorship and thus her Presidential bid being based on the ’sympathy vote’ for the ‘wronged woman’ shows. A myth that is, strangely enough, most popular with those who used the ‘wronged woman’ angle ten years ago to try and destroy her husband – when they hated her even more than him.

Here’s a piece I wrote in early 1999 at the height of the scandal about what I believed was really at the heart of the brouhaha: sexual hypocrisy. Not Clinton’s – ours.

The nurnurnurnurnur! response in both the media and in the blogosphere, liberal and conservative, to Senator Larry Craig’s recent entrapment in a men’s rest-room by a pretty, tap-dancing policeman, and the religious certainty that everyone, gay and straight, has expressed about a) what happened and b) exactly what this reveals about the Senator from Idaho’s ‘real’ sexuality and c) his political fate (he should resign), has shown that we haven’t come very far.

The Sex Terror

(Originally published in The Seattle Stranger, January 1999)

by Mark Simpson

In the midst of all the over-discussion – and all the over-exposure – of the Republican show-trial of William Jefferson Clinton, the real charge against him remains curiously under-reported. In fact, it’s not reported at all. Oddly, the media is thunderously silent to the point of discretion about it.

What is this crime of crimes that can lay someone so high so low and which can’t even be mentioned? It isn’t perjury, the obstruction of justice, or the betrayal of his Oath of Office. It isn’t even being a successful Democrat President.

No, it’s having the effrontery to resist the most magisterial, sovereign and powerful force in the land – the ‘sex’ terror. Clinton is being made an example of – one that everyone, even editors of academic journals, should fear.

Last week [15 Jan 1999 the American Medical Association impeached George Lundberg, editor for seventeen years of the AMA journal. Lundberg’s High Crime and Misdemeanour? He included in this month’s issue of the AMA journal research from 1991 which showed that 60% of college students did not define oral intercourse as sexual relations. A spokeswoman for the AMA explained his sacking: ‘Through his recent actions he has threatened the integrity of the journal by inappropriately and inexcusably interjecting the journal into a major political debate that has nothing to do with science or medicine’.

Who can blame the AMA for purging Mr Lundberg’s heresy? Everyone, of whatever political hue, whether they think Clinton should be censured, impeached or impaled, seems to be agreed on one thing-that Bill Clinton is a liar, that he did have sexual relations with ‘that woman’, and that his distinction between sexual intercourse and ‘inappropriate intimate contact’ (in this case fellatio) is pure sophistry and legalese.

In fact, this point has become the crux of the whole scandal (which, as I’m sure the AMA know, has everything to do with science and medicine). Clinton’s ‘crime’, the justification for all those ‘LIAR!’ banner headlines, the approval of the articles of impeachment and now his constitutionally unprecedented Senate trial has boiled down to his refusal to agree that fellatio constitutes ‘sex’.

After the broadcast of his four hour inquisition in the Starr Chamber, in which he admitted ‘inappropriate intimate contact’ with Lewinsky, many liberal papers cautiously applauded his forbearance but still called on him, for the sake of Mother’s Milk and Western democracy, to either throw himself on the Republican’s sword and resign, or admit to Congress ‘what we all know’-that he lied, and that oro-genital contact constitutes a ‘sexual relationship’ (in other words, fall on his own sword).

But is Clinton really a ‘liar’? Is it really absolutely clear what ‘sex’ is? Isn’t ‘common sense’ a fickle, not to say tyrannical mistress? Aren’t we just joining in the shouting because we want to distract from the necessary hypocrisies and disavowals that make our own lives bearable – and because we don’t want the Sex Terror to come for us? Isn’t Clinton’s trial more than just a farcical accident of history? Isn’t it perhaps the clearest sign anyone could ask for that no-one is safe from the Sex Terror?

It is a measure of how bad things have got that this has to be said at all: Everyone makes distinctions about what ‘sex’ is. Prostitutes, for example, know very well that most married men distinguish between ‘full sex’ and fellatio and ‘hand relief’, often opting for the latter two because it doesn’t feel like they’re really cheating on their wives; while the prostitutes themselves don’t even acknowledge vaginal intercourse as ‘a sexual relationship’: they regard it as ‘business’. Good Catholic girls in Latin countries often masturbate or fellate their boyfriends or even allow them bugger them, so they will remain virtuous virgins on their wedding night.

Of course, nowadays we smirk at their ‘naiveté’ and ‘denial’, and congratulate ourselves on our sophistication and honesty, but who are we to say they’re wrong to make that distinction? Isn’t it a form of erotic totalitarianism to insist that all sensual contact is ‘sex’? To refuse to acknowlede that the ‘meaning of sex’ isn’t actually incoherent – that it might even be occult?

Perhaps the only indisputable ‘fact’ about sex is that the meaning of it changes with the context. What happens in private, in the dark between two people takes on a different meaning – or just a meaning - when put under the spotlight. The ‘Oh boy was I drunk last night! I don’t remember a thing!’ line is not the recourse of someone who did something they regret the night before, but someone who doesn’t wish to regret, or even think about, what they did the night before. Yes, this can be the refuge of a scoundrel or worse, but the difficulties prosecuting so-called ‘date-rape’ cases merely demonstrates the difficulties in trying to draw one unambiguous meaning out of an intimate exchange between two people in the dark (or windowless, locked corridors off the Oval office).

Clinton occupies the most sober, most brightly lit office in the world. In a sense, he’s not so much the victim of his own stupidity, mendacity, promiscuity or even Republican hostility, but of the late Twentieth Century mania for dragging everything private out into the open. The more the meaning of that private activity changes once it is put in the public sphere, the more imperative it is to expose it. And what could be more private and therefore more worthy of being made public than the sex life of the President of the United States? The Starr Report was la $40 M, half-ton tabloid scandal sheet, though, alas, not so well-written.

But this is not to down-grade its importance. As tabloid editors and Kenneth Starr know very well, despite the protestations of the public to the contrary, everyone wants to know the ‘truth’ about sex and in particular the ‘truth’ about celebrity sex lives. More than this, everyone thinks that the ‘truth’ about sex is the most important truth about us.

This is why pretty much everyone, except the Pentagon and Pat Buchanan, seems to want private homosexuals to come out as public gays these days-after all, gays are the living proof that the truth about our sex lives is the most important truth about us. They are literally defined by it; Telling the Truth About Sex is what they’re for. Even the uptight, soul-of-discretion Brits, for goodness sakes, want them to ‘come out’. Disgraced British Minister Ron Davies’ crime wasn’t cruising for sex on Clapham Common but refusing to ‘come out’ as ‘gay’ after this emerged, and give the public what they wanted. He was berated by a sneering press for being ‘hypocritical’ and ‘dishonest’ (the tabs) and ‘in denial’ or ‘mentally ill’ (the broadsheets). However, if he had been caught in a red light district visiting prostitutes would he have been called upon to announce to the world that he was a congenital visitor of prostitutes and confess that this ‘truth’ about his sexuality was more important than, say, his relationship with his wife and children? (Prostitution and male cruising grounds are both age-old, ‘secretive’, ‘hypocritical’ institutions which have made the public virtue of marriage tolerable to millions of men who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to meet its demands).

By way of contrast, George Michael, ever the showman, knew exactly what the public wanted after his entrapment by the Beverly Hills PD’s finest and gave them full confessions which earned him the approval of the press for co-operating with their enquiries. The outing of Michael happened despite the fact that for several years George Michael had been fairly open in his work and interviews about not being straight. What the world wanted was for him to come out as ‘gay’; to stop being equivocal about sex and recognise instead its irresistible sovereignty in all our lives.

Interesting that many gay activists in the US have been largely silent about the Lewinsky affair, despite the fact that they know all too well the vicious, violent hatred of pinched pious people like Kenneth Starr, a hatred barely hidden behind a smiling respectability and constant invocation of The Law. As the shock troops of Telling the Truth About Sex, who originally elected Clinton so they could go on telling the Truth even more, they are ideologically hamstrung.

Barney Frank the outspoken and openly gay Senator, who is a close political ally of Clinton’s, exemplifies this dilemma. Although, unlike many others in the Democratic Party, he has consistently fought his President’s corner, he has nevertheless called on him to be ‘truthful’ about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and abandon his pedantic ‘sex’ distinction. In other words, to ‘come out’.

Frank has however pointed out one of the curious paradoxes of this whole affair-that those leading the inquiry into Clinton’s sex life and publishing their findings on the Internet are the very people who told Frank to shut up about his sex life and keep it private.

Putting Clinton’s behaviour into the context of America’s history and his own Baptist background the charge against him that he is a ‘liar’ because he didn’t consider having non penile-vaginal relations with Lewinsky ‘sex’ becomes even more confused. The Starr Report effectively brands Clinton a ‘sodomite’. Under the anti-sodomy laws still on the statute books of many US states [at time of writing, ‘sodomy’ is defined as oro-genital or anal-genital contact between members of either sex. That is, pretty much anything that isn’t penile-vaginal intercourse. Everything that isn’t potentially baby-making is a perversion, or ‘inappropriate intimate contact’ to use Clinton’s telling phrase. This is why gay marriage is so fiercely resisted in the US – including by Clinton who signed into law a bill banning gay marriage – because it bestows recognition and respectability on an act which is, by definition, un-respectable.

Sodomy was, until quite recently, not only unlawful but a crime against the American State. J. Edgar Hoover, who along with Senator Joe McCarthy, begat (spiritually) Kenneth Starr, kept secret files on public figures that were reported to engage in ‘oro-genital contact’, as he considered this meant they were subversive and ‘un-American’. McCarthy’s hysterical – and probably jealous – view of oral sex as a form of treason is echoed today in the repeated shrieks of a Republican spokeswoman on a recent TV debate: ‘HE WAS HAVING A BLOW JOB WHEN HE SENT TROOPS INTO BOSNIA!!!’

Since Hoover, we have had Kinsey, the Sixties, gay liberation and feminism and the meanings of what is ‘sex’ have been widened enormously. Hoover himself has been ‘outed’ posthumously as a ‘closet gay’. But the effect of this ‘sexual liberation’ is not unambiguously ‘progressive’ or ‘liberating’ as most liberals seem to think. You don’t have to be Michel Foucault to see that the old imperative to control people’s erotic lives by prohibition has not been abolished. Instead it has been supplanted by a compulsory, puritannical transparency in people’s erotic behaviour – and indeed their whole sense of themselves is controlled, defined and produced through the ritual of public confession (i.e. Protestant rather than Catholic confession). Everyone must submit to ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’, even and especially Presidents.

The modern, ‘scientific’ discourse of ‘sex’, a la Kinsey and Masters & Johnson, which demands that sex be confessed, exposed and measured allied in the Sixties with the explosion of personal politics. That alliance was in turn given an irresistible momentum by the exponential increase in media, and exponential decrease in respect for privacy since then. The rise of political correctness and battles over sexual harassment has only intensified the need in the Nineties to confess ‘sex’ in the courts, the workplace, the television studio.

Now, at the end of the Twentieth Century, this Sex Terror has made it’s way into the highest office in the land. It has become a Scylla to America’s Puritan, scolding, sodomy-hating Charybdis. With ‘Elvis’, the Sixties baby-boomer liberal Baptist telegenic talk-show President, in the middle. The supreme irony is that the Republicans, who believe that the distinction between sex and sodomy should be maintained in life and law, are trying to impeach a President on the grounds that he made that very same distinction in life and law. The Grand Old Party which once was the Party of discretion in matters of Eros is now a party of sexual Jacobins in the service of the Sex Terror, branding popular Presidents Enemies of the People for not confessing every detail of their private life – even outing themselves as adulterers on the steps of Capitol Hill – and turning American public life into one gigantic, insane Denunciation Box.

Prophetically, ironically, Clinton whose Presidency began with an attempted coup over his intention to lift the ban on sodomites serving in the military, now seems to be ending with another attempted coup over his own (heterosexual) sodomy. The compromise solution he came up with for that first crisis has turned out to be the most apt – if most hopeless – solution for what may turn out to be his last, as well as a romantic resistance slogan in an era where ‘sex’ is a sign we must all submit to: ‘Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Don’t pursue’.

© Mark Simpson 2008

A 51-year-old man caught by cleaners ’simulating sex’ with a bicycle in his locked room in a hostel in Ayr, Scotland has been sentenced to three years probation and has been added to the Sex Offenders Register.

“In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind,” opined the presiding judge (talking I presume about the cases he had heard rather than other judges). “But this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a ‘cycle-sexualist’.”

Reportedly the cleaners used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the offender “wearing only a white t-shirt, naked from the waist down… holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex.”

Both cleaners, who were “extremely shocked”, told the hostel manager who called police.

Some bleeding-heart louche metropolitan types have whinged that this case a ridiculous over-reaction and waste of judicial resources – or even, honestly!, a worrying invasion of privacy and attack on personal liberty.

What a load of inner tubes. Thank goodness someone has had the courage to take a stand against this evil vice threatening the very lycra of our society. Not to mention undermining attempts to combat Global Warming, obesity and urban congestion. Personally I think the fiend should have been given a lengthy custodial sentence and banned for life from being within 100 yards of a bike-stand.

Contrary to the ridiculous arguments of liberals, the wicked exploitation by sick perverts like this of innocent, helpless bicycles to gratify their twisted lust is not a victimless crime. How can a bicycle give consent? By pinging its own bell? Changing gear? Increasing tyre pressure? Obviously not. Any sex act with a bicycle is by definition unconsensual. Not to mention rather uncomfortable.

And what about the corrupting effect of this pedalistic depravity on those unfortunate enough to view it, even if they have to barge into someone’s locked bedroom to do so? Or the wider effect on society? The vile degradation and contamination of the entirely clean and pure pleasure of riding a bike to work, firm leather saddle chafing between thighs, pressing insistently, teasingly, against one’s freshly-talced but now nicely moistening Perineum?

If these cyclesexual monsters aren’t stopped, we’ll have to pixelate the TV coverage of the Tour de France and even episodes of Miss Marple.

Come to think of it, for the sake of even-handedness, the authorities should also arrest self-confessed petrosexual Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson. After all, he doesn’t even have the decency to conduct his perversion in private: those close-ups of Jezza all glassy-eyed and foam-flecked in the latest Ferrari, playing with its chunky gear-lever moaning and sighing how much he really, really LOVES, no, LURRRRRRVES, this SEXY, FRISKY, FOXY, BEAUTY… go out in prime-time.

OK, I’ll admit there are some very minor details of this case that could perhaps be slightly clarified. What, for instance, does the court mean by ‘simulating sex’? Does it mean that the man was pretending to have sex with the bicycle, or that he wasn’t enjoying sex with the bicycle? If the former then perhaps he and the bike were just having a laugh after the pub like lads do, if the latter then he isn’t much of a pervert.

Or does ’simulating’ mean that, yes, he was having some kind conjugation with the bicycle, but the court calls it ‘simulated’ because, of course, you can’t actually have proper, natural, godly, man-woman baby-making sex with a bicycle – unless it’s had some major modifications. Like a vagina fitted under the saddle.

And why on earth did the hostel allow its residents to take bikes up to their bedrooms after dark?

I also wonder somewhat about the hostel cleaners. They claim they ‘knocked several times’ before using their master-key to open the door, but I find that difficult to believe.

I mean, how many of the cleaners in five star hotels give you enough time between knocking and opening the door to allow you a chance to disentangle yourself from the Corby Trouser Press?

————

NB to protect the innocent, the bicycle pictured is not the unfortunate victim, which is currently undergoing therapy. And talks with Max Clifford.

Tip: David H

What a carry on in the dark.

The very widely-reported story of the Avon firemen disciplined for bringing the Fire Brigade into disrepute and unauthorised use of their fire engine (and torches) is both fnarrr funny and funny peculiar. But the most peculiar aspect of it, and certainly the most serious, is the light it casts on the minds of newspaper editors.

The ‘bare’ facts that can be ascertained from the various reports are these: on their return to their fire station, four on-duty firemen from Avonmouth Fire Station’s ‘Blue Watch’ (no kidding) drove out of their way at night in in a fire engine to a remote cruising/dogging area and shone their very powerful Fire Brigade torches into some bushes, supposedly revealing a group of four men involved in ‘a gay sex act’. According to the newspaper reports, one of the participants in this night-time tryst in the bushes illuminated by the firemen’s torches complained to the THT who then contacted Avon Fire Brigade. Avon Fire Brigade suspended the men on full pay for three months before finding them guilty of bringing the service into disrepute, demoting, fining and moving them to different stations and compelling them to undergo ‘gay awareness’ training.

The Sun, for whom the story was almost tailor-made, devoted most of a page to it: ‘Firemen expose gay doggers’, with the strapline ‘Four firemen have been carpeted after disturbing an outdoor gay sex romp.’ The Sun suggests of course that the case was an example of ‘political correctness gone mad’ (and some of the details, such as the ‘re-education’ of the firemen appear to lend themselves to this), and also makes a meal of the ‘criminal’ nature of the acts these public-spirited firemen witnessed.

However, perhaps surprisingly, the Sun, unlike most other newspapers, made some effort to avoid whipping up indignation at the very idea of men having sex with other men outdoors – e.g. the use of ‘gay romp’ (‘romps’ used to be strictly hetero in the Sun; gay sex was ’sordid’ or ’sleazy’ or ‘perverted’) and the interesting phrase ‘gay dogging’ (when dogging, a very recent phenomenon, might actually be described as straight cruising).

Funnily enough, The Sun’s sister-with-a-degree-paper The Times, the UK’s paper of record, ran a report that was much more misleading, right down to the headline: ‘Firemen are disciplined for disturbing orgy in bushes’, which in its very ambiguity is rather ‘revealing’. The piece failed to make it clear that the firemen had quite literally gone out of their way in council taxpayer’s time in a fire engine bought and fuelled with taxpayers money to shine their taxpayer-purchased powerful torches on this ‘criminal activity’ – when they should have been back at the fire station awaiting a call from a member of the public whose chip-fan was on fire.

More importantly, like most reports, it also conveyed the impression that the (disturbing) act the firemen witnessed was illegal and seemed founded on the absurdity that they should be punished rather than the uppity criminal ‘gay’. (If you think I misread the piece, see the indignant comments about ‘criminal gays’ posted at the end – e.g. ‘I am astounded. Fine upstanding citizens, hardworking firemen who risk there lives to help people, disturb people in an ILLEGAL act and it is they who get into trouble, not the individuals who are behaving in an ILLEGAL and immoral way. This country is going to the tubes’.)

The Daily Telegraph, which doesn’t pretend to be as metropolitan as The Times does these days, managed a better fist of it, despite their equally confusing/revealing headline: ‘Firemen reprimanded for disturbing gay sex act’. The article seemed like the others to presume the ‘illegality’ of the disturbing gay sex act, and the outrageousness of the uppity gay who complained, but, crucially, included (in the print version) a small box at the end by their legal correspondent which contained the rather important point – neglected from all the other reports I saw – that reforms to the law in recent years, doing away with discriminatory laws that criminalized only sex between men, and introducing the concept of ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’, mean that consensual sex between men – or anyone of any gender – in a remote place (in the middle of the night, in the bushes) such as was happening here, isn’t illegal.

So the angle presented in the Sun, The Times, the Telegraph (main story) and the Mail, and in countless Richard Littlejohn style ranting blogs – criminal gays get off (arf) while upstanding straight firemen are punished; strewth, what’s this country coming to? – wasn’t an angle at all.

Even the Guardian, in a lengthy report, failed to mention this rather salient fact and conveyed the same erroneous impression, despite quoting prominently, as most if not all of the reports did, an ‘unnamed firefighter’ (who wasn’t present on the Downs that evening) complaining: “This is a complete farce. All four officers have been let down by their senior officers when they needed their support the most. They have been treated as the criminals in this case and it has been completely forgotten that they witnessed criminal activity occurring in a public place.” Umm, nice try, but they didn’t. And they didn’t report what they now appear to claim they saw, either.

The Telegraph’s useful little box also mentioned that unwanted voyeurism was potentially illegal. In other words, if you want to get all hoity toity and talk about ‘criminal acts’ the firemen should perhaps consider themselves lucky that they weren’t disciplined and prosecuted.

It’s difficult not to conclude that the firemen, homophobic or not, were in that place at that time of the night shining their torches around in the bushes because they wanted a cheap thrill. They were dogging themselves – but on our time. (Though of course we now get to dog as well by reading the newspaper reports.) If they had observed the usual etiquette of such places and not shone their bloody torches in everyone’s eyes to get a better look no one would have complained and they wouldn’t have got into trouble. As someone who has been cruising in such places myself in the past and know how long it takes to get your night vision back after being blinded by some idiots undipped headlights, I think they deserve everything they got.

But the newspapers deserve much, much worse for their dereliction of duty.

As part of the same misrepresentation of the story, most of the reports refer to the (anonymous) four men supposedly involved in the public sex scene unequivocally as ‘gay’ or (in The Times) ‘homosexual’.

How do the newspapers know this as a fact? Were they there in the bushes themselves? Would this have even helped? This was, after all, a pick-up area, we’ve been told, popular with ‘gays’ and ’straight doggers’. Even exclusively ‘gay’ cruising areas, if there are any left now that straight dogging has become so popular, are not that gay, which is, after all, the point of them: they appeal to married and bisexual men and men who regard themselves as straight but like a bit of cock every now and again.

And from what I’ve seen of dogging, quite a few ’straight doggers’ will get involved to some degree with the all-male action if it’s a slow night – or at least have a good look if someone’s putting on a show. Dogging by its very nature tends to wander outside the the usual boundaries of ’straight’ and ‘gay’.

Besides, the claim that the firemen witnessed any sex at all, let alone a ‘gay orgy’, is just that, a claim, not a fact as presented by the newspaper reports. A claim which seems to have been made only after the firemen were disciplined, and by a disgruntled firemen chum who wasn’t even present that evening. In other words, it’s about as dubious a claim as you could imagine.

So the ‘fact’ that it was one of the ‘gays’ taking part in the ‘illegal’ ’public’ ’gay orgy’ who contacted the THT - and the basis of all the torrents of indignation - is actually pure fantasy. Nothing is known about this man other than what the THT has put in the public domain as they were the ones who presented his concerns to the Avon Fire Brigade. They have made no statement about his sexuality (and the THT doesn’t ask anyway), or what he was doing on the Downs and he didn’t report any sexual activity to them.

So, a) his sexuality is as unknown as his identity and, b) the only source for the ‘fact’ that he was part of a ‘gay orgy’ is the disgruntled chum of the disciplined firemen who wasn’t there that evening.  And even if he had been, how would he know who had contacted the THT? Or perhaps the ’source’ for this ‘fact’ was the reporters’ own fevered imaginations?

It seems to me that on this one, everyone’s in the dark, thrashing around the bushes with their pants down.

—–

Update: An excellent piece by Rachel Johnson dissecting the farrago, setting the legal record ’straight’ and and going some way to restoring The Times’ honour appeared the day after I posted this blog.

An eloquent, but quite unhinged example from SFGate.com columnist Mark Morford of American liberal hysteria over the Craig affair:

‘In fact, Craig’s classic case of GOP hypocrisy, of the chasm between his homophobic public persona and his homosexual personal lusts is simply so blatant, so undeniably grotesque, he becomes a bizarre case study, a cultural curio, a deeply fascinating — albeit largely nauseating — archetype, full of obvious but still mandatory lessons for us all. ‘

What a veritable flurry of irresistible adjectives: ‘Undeniable’, ‘blatant’, ‘nauseating’, ‘grotesque’, ‘obvious’, ‘mandatory’. Very persuasive. Very reasoned.

Now go and have a lie down, dear.

Fortunately SFGate.com have provided the anti-dote to this shrill self-righteousness in the form of a less exciting but much more pertinent piece by Jonathan Zimmerman.

A good sadist is hard to find.

But, I can reveal, a good masochist is even harder to find. Whenever I hear the words, ‘Use me, abuse me, do anything you want with me!’ my heart and my manhood always sinks. This is not because I have any problem with the idea of using someone. Rather it’s that I know that not far behind this invitation to selfishness are always the words, ‘Not that! This! Not there! Here!’

And Anita Phillips, author of In Defence of Masochism, wonders why masochists have such a bad name. It’s a word that promises so much but then woefully fails to deliver. Far from being a slave to your desires, it turns out to be their pleasure that they’re interested in, just like everyone else. Worse, not only is their pleasure even more tediously exacting than most people’s, you also have to pretend that it is your pleasure. While the idea of having someone around the home to clean the toilet and bathroom floor with their tongue might appeal in abstract kind of way, it always, always turns out to be much more work and much, much more tedious than doing it yourself and conducting a common-all-garden, non-masochistic, missionary-position, under-the-floral-duvet-every-Sunday-morning relationship. As Phillips admits, the best partner for a masochist is not a sadist, but another masochist.

Sado-masochism, when all’s said and done, is a bit of a con and should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act.

Nonetheless, there’s plenty of it about these days – and it’s selling like hot candle-wax. Madonna’s early Nineties flirtation with s/m chic seems to have sent it squeaking and creaking up and down the catwalks and into advertising ever since – to the point where a stilettoed heel threatening a man’s bum-hole on a billboard hardly provokes any comment, let alone the rear-end pile-up it might have done just ten years ago. And while David Cronenberg’s Crash, a film about people who take pleasure being on the receiving end of mutilating car accidents, did provoke outrage and censorship from some quarters, many found it rather banal. Meanwhile the recent film Sick: the Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist seems to have elevated masochism to a kind of super-heroism; how long before we hear little boys whining: ‘Mum, can I have a leather harness and cling-film cape for Xmas, please?’.

Which almost begs the point of a book with the name In Defence of Masochism. However, a recent European Court ruling asserted that assault cannot be consented to (which means, of course, an end to boxing, surgery and supporting Arsenal) suggests that there is still an argument to be made. And, even if most people who don’t wear wigs and suspenders for a living are more laid back about the issue, there are still a number of common misconceptions and prejudices about masochism – most of which Anita Phillips dispatches here with aplomb. Most notably, the idea that masochism is always someone else’s perversion. Phillips investigates, via Freud and American academic Leo Bersani the universality of masochistic impulses, the thin line between pleasure and pain, and shows how the curdling of these impulses into a condition and a type changed what it means to be human.

‘Masochism’ is one of the inventions of late nineteenth century sexology in the Gothic shape of Baron Dr Richard Von Kraft-Ebing. It was only ever intended to apply to men; women were ‘naturally’ masochistic, so pleasure in pain on their part was not ‘perverse’ and therefore not a problem to be explained or pathologised. This was part of a shift in gender roles in the West in the Nineteenth Century which was concerned with, we are told, institutionalising women’s subjugation. As Phillips points out, ‘Dante’s ordeal in the Inferno to be reunited with Beatrice, to John Donne’s love poetry, sacrificial masculine love has been a crucial theme, only in this century has what for many centuries seemed the natural, desirable form of male love been redefined as effeminate perversity, masochism.’

Phillips believes that this reformulation of male identity that excluded masochism made masculinity ‘blatantly misogynisitc, emotionally inept and homophobic’. She also believes that it was this new masculinity which led in part to the ‘corrective’ of feminism. Ironically, the exclusion of masochism from the male psyche has produced a public scenario of their punishment and chastisement by women which continues today. The feminist is Ms Whiplash.

To be sure, we can see that male masochism is now making something of a comeback – what else could explain The Verve and the tortured, feel-my-stigmata ‘soft lad’ [and now ‘Emo’ tendency? And while this rise of male self-dramatisation/self-obsession may or may not be good news for women in general, it is definitely good news for women like Phillips who enjoy masochistic sex. Paradoxically, now that men are relinquishing their grip on the whip handle, women need no longer feel like they are betraying their sex by expressing fantasies of domination.

But as with most cases of special pleading, Phillips’ argument often slips into evangelism. We are told that masochists are ‘imaginative risk-takers’ and that ‘real eroticism’ requires a certain ‘shattering of the self’. In other words, masochists are on a higher sexual plane to those poor souls who don’t want to get whipped, trussed up and locked in a cupboard for three days. Apparently, ‘the shattering quality of sex needs to be diluted for those who cannot fully handle it…. {and they} make a kind of civic virtue from their own necessity to retreat from the challenge of a full-blooded encounter.’

But those of us who prefer our sex weak and thin, with the gore and entrails strained out are not necessarily lily-livered. Perhaps most people refuse to indulge their masochist leanings any further than a spot of slightly embarrassed spanking or coy nipple tweaking because they have better things to do with their time than trying to ‘discover their limits’ remaking Hellraiser.

Originally appeared in Independent on Sunday, 1997

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Lady America seems to be pinned between the thrusting theocracy of St Paul and the passive-aggressive pseudo science of Karl Ulrichs. Not a good look.

I understand that many American gays, most of them middle-aged and no longer with hair whorls of their own, are keen to prove they’re an immutable/congenital minority who can’t help themselves, that Mom isn’t to blame and they need their own reservation – where the Christians can’t be beastly to them. After all, who wants to take personal responsibility for liking Cher?

But if you’re going to look to science to further your pet political project (i.e. yourself) then it does, I’m afraid, make it somewhat tricky criticising those on the right who do the same thing. Surgeon general nominee James Holsinger’s Godly science of the Holy Rectum is as convincing and as objective as the weird science of the Third Sexers.

And that’s without even considering how, whatever the professed aims of the gay scientists involved, talk of congenital conditions always raises the spectre of eugenics. To be honest, if I was to have kids I’m not sure I’d want a gay one. I mean, he might grew up to be a scientist with a chip on his shoulder harassing people on Pride parades wanting to look at their hair whorls.

I think the only way to describe this science is ‘gay’ – in the sense of ‘lame’.

That said, after looking at my my hair whorl, my index finger, my penis length, my head bumps, my underwear and my record collection, I had a revelation on the road to the gymnasium about Who I Really Am.

The results are conclusive, categorical and as clear as the hand in front of my face: I’m definitely a lesbian trapped in a straight man’s gay body.

Tip: Uroskin

The world of straight trade may have long since disappeared from the streets of London but if you still hanker after that lost economy of boisterousness, straight nightclub toilets might be a frutiful place to loiter. Preferably with a line or two of coke (Colombia’s own Gay Bomb).

Though you might have to be, like Stefan Postma’s ex girlfriend, Arthur rather than Martha. At least judging by this story related by Mike. [Thanks to mutual friend Dermod who passed this anecdote on to me on the grounds that this is ’such a Mark Simpson story’.

Mike was recently having dinner with a special chum at cheap Thai restaurant in London. They were trying manfully to mind their own homo business. This was a little difficult to do since at the – indecently close – table next to them a beefy blond Cockney wide-boy and a huge Nigerian began having an argument about some business deal that had gone tits up.

Things become somewhat heated and they start slagging off, as you do, each other’s birds, for several minutes.

Provoked beyond endurance, Beefy Cockney finally blurts out, ‘Well, at least I don’t get BUMMED UP THE FUCKIN’ ARSE IN CLUB TOILETS!!’

Outraged, Huge Nigerian hotly denies this terrible slur for ten whole minutes. Before finally conceding, under his breath, ‘Ok, Ok, it was just the once though, and you know I was off my head.’

‘Besides,’ he adds, ‘it’s not like you never done it yourself!’

‘THAT’S A FUCKIN’ LIE AN’ YOU KNOW IT!’ retorts Beefy Cockney, really angry now.

Five minutes later they had both conceded that they’d been done up the arse regularly.

Finally Beefy Cockney turns to Mike (who has been pretending for the past twenty minutes not to be hanging on every word of this exchange) and asks, straight-faced: ‘Mate, can you settle somefink for us? If you saw both of us walking down the street, which one would you say looked a bit bent?’

‘Hmm, I think it would be hard to tell,’ Mike replies, in all honesty. Then he turns the question around: ‘Do you think I look a bit bent?’

‘Nah,’ replies Beefy Cockney. ‘But your mate does.’