MARK SIMPSON.com

Recent research, widely publicised in the press with the usual barely-disguised glee that usually accompanies news that the efforts of other people has been in vain, suggested that therapy was no more effective than prescription drugs or ‘talking regularly to a friendly academic’.

I doubt this is the case, though I can’t speak from experience as I’ve never been in therapy. Like an Anglican agnostic, or perhaps just a pathologically lazy person, I don’t take part myself but like to think that lots of other people are.

I like to think I can read myself better, or at least smarter. Certainly there’s no shortage of literature these days pandering to those who can’t quite make it out of their armchair and onto the couch, encouraging however tacitly the idea that a talking cure can be a reading cure. With practising analysts like Adam Phillips, Darian Leader and Raphael Samuels so keen to write for a general audience it’s impossible not to suppress the uncharitable thought that perhaps shrinks are fed up with having to shut up for most of that analytical hour. One of the disadvantages of the talking cure is that someone has to do an awful lot of listening.

Probably very few people ‘talk regularly to a friendly academic’ - most academics I know would become very unfriendly very quickly if the traffic were one-way: in the opposite direction to the one they are accustomed to.

But then, as Leader himself puts it in Freud’s Footnotes (Faber & Faber) ‘anyone who chooses to devote their life to psychoanalysis be it as profession or object of academic research, has something seriously wrong with them.’ Of course, it would be cheap to deploy such an ironic confession against its author, but I won’t let that stop me. I’ve never used prescription anti-depressants, but Leader’s prose strongly inclines me to try. Clearly some of his reviewers have been trying non-prescription ones. His extraordinarily bloodless writing has been pantingly described as ‘coltish’ by one paper and ‘athletic’ by another. The Guardian described him in awe as ‘Oliver Sachs as agony aunt’. Which does rather beg the question, who would want Oliver Sachs as an agony aunt? Mind you, Leader’s last book, ‘Why do women write more letters than they post?’, also begged a few questions: the first - from every woman I mentioned the title to - being: ‘Do they?’

However, it’s all somewhat academic whether Leader begs questions or asks them because he rarely stoops so low as to actually answer them. Or present a coherent argument. Or write in an accessible way (except in his introductions - which are probably based on outlines written for publishers). No, Leader doesn’t need to do any of these things because Leader, as his name would suggest, is a very special kind of man, with a very special access to knowledge and a very special way of showing it off. Leader you see is a Lacanian.

Lacan is the French post-structuralist smoke-and-mirror-phase phallus-as-signifier chappy who ‘updated’ Freud and rescued him from his gravest error: his accessibility. Lacanians are a perverse bunch. It is as if after Martin Luther, Protestants had decided to translate the Bible back not into Latin even but into Greek, so as to keep the hoi polloi and their crude misapprehensions at bay. Difficulty is not of itself objectionable, especially in an age of pop-everything let alone psychology, but something that manages to be at once inscrutable and trying too hard is just hideously uncool. Someone once said of reading Nietzsche that it was like seeing the world lit by flashes of lightning; with Lacan and most Lacanians it’s like seeing a library lit by a faulty fluorescent tube.

As Leader points out, Freud was the father and mother of psychoanalysis. With the possible exception of Nietzsche himself (who Freud deliberately avoided reading until late in his career) there really isn’t much of a tradition that goes before him. Hence psychoanalysis really is footnotes to Freud, in a way which philosophy isn’t footnotes to Plato, despite the famous aphorism. Perhaps this is why Leader wishes to present himself as the master of the addendum, the king of the cross-reference. His book is largely a squabble about sources, overly arcane even for someone who ‘has something seriously wrong with them’. ‘Freud’s Footnotes’ is in fact a book-length footnote to a footnote. Moreover, almost every page has its own footnotes, including the very first line on the very first page of the introduction. This, no doubt, is a Lacanian’s idea of a clever joke. It is however, everyone else’s idea of agony.

Sometimes Leader’s observations are mildly interesting, such as when he points out that Freud’s footnotes on the importance of the repressed olfactory senses hugs the bottom of the page, ‘just like the quadruped man they are supposed to describe.’ It is also piquant to learn that when Newton magnanimously described himself as ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ he was actually being very bitchy - Hooke, his chief rival, was a hunchback. (It also suggests that Oasis’ singular new album title ‘Standing on the Shoulder [sic of Giants’ might be worryingly clever instead of dippily daft).

Occasionally, like a lighthouse looming up out of the nightime fog of his obscurantist prose, Leader produces an important contention, albeit one which goes against the grain of his own style: ‘Freud’s idea that desire generates states of wishing and of expectation as well as all forms of thinking only emerges in the most garbled form, in most of the translations…’

And there is a curiously fascinating case history Leader touches on to illustrate how Freud may have put too much emphasis on guilt/self-punishment as a function of the desires of the child, instead of a response to the parent’s own desires. Leader tells the story of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy fussed over by his mother who continually banged his head against inanimate objects because his father had greeted his first bruise with the exclamation: ‘That’ll make a man of him!’ (‘Or,’ I found myself adding out loud as I read this passage, ‘a Lacanian’).

Certainly Leader is always well-informed and bafflingly well read, but unlike the Viennese master (as opposed to the French Pretender), he has a tendency to come across as a pedantic show off. Worst of all, Freud himself seems to be largely missing from ‘his’ footnotes. Unless you are mightily interested in what the Kleinian and Lacanian schools might have in common despite their recent falling out, ‘Freud’s Footnotes’ isn’t worth looking up.

Originally appeared Independent on Sunday, February 2000

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

In the Twenty First Century, probably around the time that men are restricted by law to the occupations of handyman and strippergrams, it will be agreed that the image which summed up the end of the Twentieth was not the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor the death of Diana, but a close up of a man’s naked bottom.

And who today can deny that the Twentieth Century is ending on a bum note? Turn on the TV any time after 9pm and you will almost certainly be faced with several pairs of naked male buttocks, shiny and slick with baby oil, being jiggled to the strains of Donna Summer in yet another documentary about working class Northern men with fake tans forming a male strip troupe to help pay for their gym membership.

The uncovered male derriere is the most eloquent symbol of our times, representing the rise of the rabblesian over the suburban, the expressive over the repressive, the feminine over the masculine - and the rosy financial future of Immac For Men.

It wasn’t always this way. Before housewives were encouraged to bellow ‘gerremorff!’ (and that’s just during the ad breaks) such images were strictly for a specialised niche market that had little to do with women and even less to do with consumerism. They were at best bohemian; at worst degenerate.

The cover image for David Leddick’s Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes 1935-1955, of a naked, muscular young male photographed from behind with his open hands resting saucily on his buttocks, might be almost a cliché today - though perhaps he should be bending over and shimmying down a pair of spangly knickers - but when it was taken in the fifties it was intended for private collectors, not the latest advertising campaign for Levi’s or Haagen Daaz.

Now that oggling men is in the mainstream several pioneers of male nudity have been ‘outed’ by publishers. Last year Bob Mizer’s famous Athletic Model Guild work from the forties, fifties and sixties, was published in one painfully loud and proud pink boxed set decorated with Tom of Finland drawings. The same year saw the publication of Physique a life of the eccentric British male nude photographer John S. Barrington by Rupert Smith. Meanwhile, David Leddick confesses that the inspiration for his book was Collaboration, a recently published book about the male nude drawings and photos of Paul Cadmus, Jared and Margaret French.

Leddick’s innovation in the crowded pioneering male nudes market is to make his book a biography of the pioneering male nudes themselves, answering that vague question that poses itself in the back of the mind when looking at old pictures of beautiful young men: ‘I wonder what they look like now?’, by tracking down Platt Lynes’ surviving models and photographing what’s left of them.

Like most vague questions it’s one that’s probably best left unanswered, as is demonstrated by The Gap’s recent advertising campaign featuring a contemporary Joe Dallesandro, the famously angelic devil who posed for Bob Mizer and Andy Warhol in the Sixties and whose torso adorns the first Smiths album, but who now looks like a truck-driver with ulcers. True, the pictures of the young men have a certain poignancy when placed alongside an inset headshot of the young man grown old; and, reciprocally, there’s a certain dignity revealed in old age too. However, while the ephemeral nature of male beauty is undoubtedly part of it’s appeal, you need to be able to suspend disbelief in the immortality of such beauty to fully appreciate it; a disavowal not exactly helped by seeing precisely what time had in store for them.

On the other hand, if the contemporary pictures were nudes instead of discreet headshots the effect would have been more provocative and less precious. Two of Platt Lynes’ best, most disturbing pictures actually play on this theme. In ‘Alexander and Diogenes’ he recreates Alexander’s encounter with the philosopher in a barrel. Alexander, smooth and strong, stands wearing nothing but his laurels and his youth looking down at Diogenes, wizened and wrinkled, wearing nothing but his years and his wisdom. In his famous portrait of Somerset Maugham, a fat middle-aged man fully-clothed in a dark suit looks down contemptuously/enviously at a slim, naked young man kneeling before him.

As this last picture hints, there’s something slightly distasteful, slightly corrupt in the fey, 1940s New York world of writers, artists, ballet dancers, fashion photographers and Fire Island parties that this kind of photography emerged from and which employed Greek imagery, partly in an understandable attempt to avert the intervention of the law, and partly in a faintly contemptible attempt to bestow something pure, virile and artistic on something that - frankly - wasn’t. It’s a world too fey and pretentious to be erotic and too timid and neutered to be artistically impressive. As Leddick writes of one of Lynes’ models: ‘Bill Harris was an arbiter of style. During the 1940s and 1980s, when one wanted to do things the right way - clothes, travel, lovers - one called Harris for advice.’

Curiously, in all the tributes to the ‘brave’ pioneers of male nudes there is no mention of the L.A. photographer Bob Mizer, who also used Greek and Roman imagery, but in a way that somehow managed to be erotic and pure, virile and artistic, as well as light-hearted. Of course, Mizer was too crude, he used Californian sunlight instead of overwrought New York studio lighting, he wasn’t a friend of Cadmus, he didn’t move in Cafe Society, and the Manhattan Mommies Boys no doubt disapproved of the rough sailor and Marine models he used, and which most of them didn’t have the nerve to pick up themselves.

Moving in Café Society does, however, have it’s perks - you occasionally persuade a celeb, or celeb-to-be to strip for you. A picture of Christopher Isherwood from the 1940s shows him dressing to the left; and one of Yul Brynner from the same era shows both his heads covered - he sports a full mane of hair and a fully un-American foreskin. But best of all by far is a picture of Tennessee Williams lying face down on a bed. We are told that Mr Williams’ possessed a ‘taut swimmers body’.

This may or may not be the case, but judging by the picture, I have to say that that I doubt if Mr Williams’ bum will feature in Twenty First Century history books about the Twentieth Century. And it certainly wouldn’t sell any ice-cream.

Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday, April 1998

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

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 cathwalks 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

By Mark Simpson

(Independent on Sunday, 22 April 2007)

Of all the terrifying new weapons developed in the Second World War and unleashed upon an unsuspecting planet, the teenager was by far the most powerful. The supersonic shockwave of Fat Man and Little Boy was as nothing compared to that caused by dropping the teenager on Japan, Italy and Germany after their surrender - or Britain after her victory. American post-war global hegemony was guaranteed not by the Bomb but by the Teen.

Forget the Nuclear Age; the second half of the 20th century was the Teen Age.

Like the bomb, the teenager was an American invention. The Cold War might have turned out very differently if, instead of Los Alamos, Soviet spies had been installed at the offices of Seventeen magazine. Launched in a booming USA on the brink of global victory in 1944, the same year as the word “teenager” was coined, Seventeen was aimed at the consumer queens of tomorrow with disposable income to spend today. “Seventeen is your magazine, High School Girls of America - all yours!” proclaimed the first issue. “It is interested only in you - and everything that concerns, excites, annoys, pleases or perplexes you…” Features on Harry James, Frank Sinatra, a Hollywood gossip column, record reviews, a “First Date Quiz” and a regular slot called “Why Don’t Parents Grow Up?” did their best to prove it.

We’re all self-centred, celeb-struck American high school girls now (I certainly am). No one, least of all parents, is in danger of growing up. The dominant “adult” culture is teenage, and Seventeen’s 1940s editorial policy has been adopted by national newspapers. We all expect - nay, demand! - to be addressed intimately by a mass consumerism that is only interested in that wonderful unique thing that is YOU - and everything that concerns, excites, pleases or perplexes YOU. Teenitis, or deliberately, profitably arrested development, is the modern sensibility. In the doom-laden words of the curmudgeonly German Marxist Theodor Adorno, who fled Nazi Germany and found himself in 1940s Los Angeles, the satanic laboratory of consumerism: “All will be provided for, so that none may escape.”

The teenager was perhaps the first subject to be created almost entirely by marketing. Little wonder that in a post-war world built on the ruins of fascism and out of the American Dream of marketing and consumption (the Marshall Plan didn’t just fight the spread of Communism, it provided the US with vital markets for its consumer goods), the teenager became the master race. But if we’re all teenage now, is anyone a teenager any more? Particularly young people? Perhaps the teenager, at 63 years, is pushing retirement? Is there in fact anything “hot” or “cool” or even interesting, let alone rebellious, about teenagers any more?

Professor of Punk Jon Savage, perhaps wisely, doesn’t directly ask or address these questions in his scholarly new book on youthful excess, Teenage: the creation of youth 1875-1945 (Chatto), but proffers an answer of sorts by offering a history of the Teen Age not from 1945 to the present day, but from the late 19th century to 1945. Maybe it’s merely a way of allowing for another two or three volumes, but it seems to suggest that you now have to dig deep into the past to unearth something… alive. Savage claims convincingly enough in his introduction that while the teenage may have been a product invented in 1944, he/she was in development for at least half a century before that and that this is what his book aims to profile.

Savage begins with the 1870s teen Adam and Eve, Marie Bashkirtseff and Jesse Pomeroy. Marie Bashkirtseff was a dreamy 16-year-old girl in Nice whose blog-like diaries detailing her daily hopes and fears (before her youthful death) gained her world fame. Jesse Pomeroy of Massachusetts (whose plate looks alarmingly like Robbie Williams) gained fame aged 15 by killing and mutilating several young boys (a proto-Cho, though without semi-automatics and Quicktime). Savage, as befits his own punk moniker, argues that youth is about the eruption of the hormonal Id into the repressed adult world: “Bashkirtseff and Pomeroy symbolised the twin poles of youth: genius or monster, creator or destroyer of worlds… At stake was the future; would it be dream or nightmare, heaven or hell?”

This is also the question you find yourself asking of the huge 576 page volume in your hands. Along with, how much older will I be when I’ve finished it? Perhaps it’s another sign of my own incurable teenitis, but Savage’s book drags for much of the first half like a triple history class on a hot summer’s day, and doesn’t pick up speed, or open the classroom windows, until between the wars when the first “modern” kind of youth culture begins to emerge, with drink, drugs, sex, flappers and frantic dancing. Savage consummately conjures up a pre-1945 world of youth culture and mass hysteria that is both fresh and familiar, exciting and vaguely annoying, robbing us as it does of our own sense of specialness.

It’s a world where swing “raves” attract ecstatic crowds of thousands, where 80,000 inconsolate men dressed as dandy sheiks and starlet-styled women mob Valentino’s pretty young corpse in New York. A world of pitched battles between American servicemen and the Mexican-American Zoot-Suiters in the 1940s, and, most terrifying of all, gangs of “Khaki-Whacky” 14-year-old hussies trawling down the street arm in arm, breaking for civilians, but ensnaring any male in uniform.

The Second World War provides the global climax for this book, portrayed by Savage as a clash between fascism and consumerism, totalitarianism and teenagerdom, Hitler Youth and American youth. We know of course who won, but the Pétain-defying early New Romantic Zazous in France, and the Hitler Youth-baiting activities of the punkish young Edelweiss Pirates in Nazi Germany, who later linked up with escaped concentration camp inmates and deserters to form an anti-Nazi partisan movement, make for gripping reading, not least because the stakes of this cultural war were so high (13 of the Edelweiss Pirates were hanged in the centre of Cologne).

This book makes it clear that the two world wars of the 20th century exhausted European ideas/ideals of youth. The hedonistic, frivolous, slightly solipsistic New World teenager untroubled by ideology was the perfect antidote to the failure of Old World notions, whether romantic or patriotic, socialistic or fascistic.

However terrifying the destruction wrought by the tantruming tornado of the teenager on Western Civilisation, it was the vital vulgarity of America that saved Europe from its own murderous seriousness.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

By Mark Simpson

Independent on Sunday, 11 March 2007

(Another Bloody Love Letter, Anthony Loyd; Headline Review)

‘People have on occasion asked me to reveal the most shocking sight I have ever seen,” writes Anthony Loyd, Times war correspondent, ex-Army officer and ex-heroin addict. “They want a little vicarious hit off a war correspondent’s memories.” Another Bloody Love Letter is full of this vicarious, possibly vicious, pleasure - and not just a little hit either.

This memoir is a great big bloody bong of horror, chaos, gallows humour, loss, boredom and self-loathing, followed by slack-jawed self-medication. For much of the period covered by the book, Loyd is struggling with his heroin addiction: when he isn’t covering the shooting abroad, he’s shooting up at home.

Senseless destruction? Check. Dying men pleading for their lives? Check. Wild-eyed women and children who have seen what they should never see? Check. Mutilated, decomposing dead bodies? Check. Mass graves? Double check. All the horror and madness and desperate, thoughtless, random injustice and, even worse, random justice, of war is present and incorrect. From the killing fields of Bosnia, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan and Iraq, to scoring smack in London, Loyd gives it to us straight, both nostrils.

Inhale deeply at your own risk, however. Loyd makes us pay for the hit by cutting it with pathos, personal suffering and a certain amount of maudlin introspection about what kind of peculiar person becomes a war correspondent. For once, the promise of the publisher’s blurb - “Anthony Loyd spares us nothing in this moving and painfully honest memoir” - is more than fulfilled.

My own favourite horror story is of Loyd’s own capture by psycho rebels in Sierra Leone, armed to their gold-capped teeth and off their heads on pills and palm whisky. While waiting for them to decide whether to kill him or torture him first, he notices two men cracking open AK47 rounds and snorting the gunpowder. Perhaps the most shocking thing about this image is that it represents Loyd’s, and our, relationship to war - though slightly less mediated.

Sometimes, though, the most shocking material here is his overambitious sentences. A particularly harrowing example: “We had crawled through the dark underworld of Europe’s belly, enmeshed in the cataclysmic breakdown of a terrible, pointless and preventable war, and emerged at its last conclusion to return to our respective homes, smashed-teeth romantics in a street-party where no one cared.”

Mercifully, this kind of purple ambush becomes less common as the book progresses, and Loyd is almost as gifted a writer as he is loquacious. However, Loyd, as is the modern habit, occasionally tries a little too hard to be as interesting as the wars he has seen. Unfortunately, there’s nothing very interesting about heroin addiction, even for the addict. It’s synthetic narcissism.

Politically, the book is something of a mess too - a liberal imperialist mess. The author is an enthusiastic interventionist who wants NATO to bomb the Serbs and put troops in Kosovo to protect the Albanians, but when they do is appalled by their failure to protect the Serbs from mass killings by Albanians - despite himself repeatedly caricaturing Serbs en masse as evil, stupid, thuggish, racist killers. One of the bloody sequels he favoured, the invasion of Iraq, has also turned into a sectarian bloodbath, though on an even more terrifying scale. Loyd admits many of his errors with refreshing candour but you are left wondering whether his gung-ho spirit was sometimes less down to his idealism or naivety than his serious gunpowder habit.

What works best is the central narrative and relationship, possibly only relationship, of the book - his hero-worship of an older, more experienced, self-assured American correspondent called Kurt whom he shared many assignments with, and his attempt to make sense of his death in Sierra Leone. It is Kurt’s mutilated, partially decomposed body and face that is the sorry answer to the voyeuristic enquiry about the most shocking thing he’d ever seen.

So strong was Loyd’s affection for, and admiration of, Kurt’s toughness and invulnerability, as someone who “could smile under bombardment and hitch his thumbs under his belt”, that his death seems inconceivable. He was almost as shocked by Kurt’s confession to crying while watching the elaborate ceremony marking the handover of Hong Kong by the British to the Chinese in 1997.

“Because it was a goodbye,” Kurt had said, explaining his tears to a puzzled Loyd, “and in this game you don’t often see any goodbyes… War isn’t about goodbyes. It’s about unnatural and sudden severance… All those hundreds of times I saw for myself people who had no time to say any goodbye, who were just signed away in a splatter, they came back to me when I saw it being done in a ceremony with such perfection.”

This book, in its best parts, is Loyd’s goodbye to Kurt. His posthumous, bloody love letter. It isn’t perfect. Often, like war, it’s messy. But it is occassionally moving.

And if this is just another vicarious hit of a war correspondent’s memories, well, in that respect it’s seriously good shit, man.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

by Mark Simpson

(Independent on Sunday, 18 February 2007)

During a long car journey with a slightly older gay friend, I suggested he put on one of his CDs. I said this knowing full well that he liked showtunes. Sorry, LOVED! show tunes. It was a warm sunny day, the top was down, and I was feeling reckless. “I can deal with this,” I told myself. “After all, how bad can this be? It’s only music.” But I was wrong. So wrong. Musicals are not in fact musical. They’re much more than that. They’re vocalised, choreographed insanity. Hoofing hysteria.

As we sped through the English countryside to a soundtrack of Liza Minnelli impersonating a dying llama, I began to lose the ability to change gear or focus on the road ahead. I had to ask my blissfully happy passenger pointedly if he had any other CDs. He reluctantly obliged and I found myself missing Liza already. Now my stereo was pumping out a gee-whiz-fellas Broadway male chorus that sounded like a battalion of Ned Flanders on happy pills. Every time we drove through a village, small children and stray dogs followed us. I sank below the wheel and steered by the position of the sun.

I don’t like musicals. That way unreason lies, hands on hips, drumming its fingers on its pink silk sash and tapping its emerald slippers. For a while I kidded myself that I was man enough to endure them because I liked the title song sequence of Singin’ in the Rain and quite enjoyed Calamity Jane when I was 12. But neither of these count, since Gene Kelly’s virile, carefree embrace of the elements transcends the musical genre and is in fact one of the pillars of Western culture, while Calamity Jane isn’t a musical at all but lesbianism in reverse.

Liking films like Grease, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Can’t Stop the Music, which single-handedly ended disco, the 1970s and the Village People, doesn’t count either. Campiness is cheating. Musicals are sincere. Terrifyingly, ruthlessly sincere. They block all your exits and breathe down your neck demanding you marry them forever and ever. Or else.

Phantom of the Opera is the only bona fide musical I’ve been to see (for a dare), instead of watching from behind the sofa. I cheated again: I slept through the whole smothering thing, waking once for the big chandelier crashing to the floor at the end of the first half and a second time for the final curtain. For me, all musicals are a scary night-mask.

Emma Brockes, author of What Would Barbra Do? (Bantam), subtitled “How musicals can change your life” is made of much sterner stuff however, and she likes - no, LOVES! - real, unadulterated, hairy-chested, five-alarm musicals like Phantom, Mary Poppins (which she has watched hundreds of times), Oklahoma, The Sound of Music and Guys and Dolls. And even - sharp intake of breath - Yentl. So she has my deepest respect.

She is also often rather more entertaining and witty, not to mention cogent and ironic, than most musicals. Brockes’s autobiographical advocacy makes a song and dance about musicals without actually making a song and dance. Perhaps this is because she has a keen awareness of how mad musicals appear to most men, and probably most women. She also knows that musicals are a disease usually passed down the maternal line, but for her it is a blessed, blissful one, and the book is peppered with affectionate, funny memories of her mother and the quirky passion for showtunes she passed on.

Despite the title, the book doesn’t really have much to do with Barbra; it’s mostly an attempt to persuade men to like musicals. Brockes hopes that musicals can melt the ice around the heart of men, just as hearing his children singing “The hills are alive…” in the parlour melted Captain von Trapp’s: “…tears spring to his eyes and he walks into the room crooning that he, the captain, also goes to the hills when his heart is lonely. The children stare at him as if a small mammal has just appeared through the curtain of his fringe, but, recovering themselves, come in with backing vocals to accompany their father… Maria has brought music back into the house! And that, my friends, is the magic of the musical.”

Yes, that’s what I was worried about. Brockes argues at one point that musicals disturb men because they’re not about them. But, as much of this book shows, and almost all musicals demonstrate, the audience for musicals may be women but the target for them is men, on and off stage. This is the main reason why men feel uncomfortable around them. Musicals are femininity mobilised and orchestrated against them.

To prove this, I only have to point out that the recent BBC series, How do you Solve a Problem like Maria, was presented by Graham Norton and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Brockes knows that “in these metrosexual times”, as she puts it, “straight men are getting gayer by the day,” but she also knows that for even for heteroflexible men, musicals represent a high-kick too far. Apparently, most homosexual men love musicals - a few don’t but this is only because they are in denial or afraid of cliché. Real gays know that they were born to be hag fags to girls like Brockes, sighing over Mary Poppins together.

Well, as a paid-up shirt-lifter who also happens to have been credited with/blamed for siring the term “metrosexual”, I can tell you frankly and openly that I’m not afraid of cliché, but I’m terrified of musicals. While the question “Are you musical?” may once have been a discreet way of asking if someone was a player of the hairy oboe, today it won’t get you many drinks bought in Old Compton Street. (Though it might get you a herbal tea from my car passenger.)

I identify with the experience of Brian, Brockes’ straight friend, who as a seven-year-old boy was taken by his mother to see South Pacific at the cinema. It’s recounted as an example of why straight men hate musicals. He was understandably troubled by the poster, which had too many girls and flowers in it for his liking. “Really, dear,” Brian’s mother said, “it’s about war.” Little Brian was quickly reassured, as I was, by the appearance of Rossano Brazzi, “built like a war hero, dressed like a war hero, and surrounded by all the exhilarating paraphernalia of the Second World War”, and “bare chested sailors”.

But then things started to go wrong. A strange expression crept across Brazzi’s face. “Sort of strained… then he opened his mouth and out came a sound that, at first, Brian couldn’t quite place. Hey; wasn’t that… singing?” Now he was singing into the face of a woman who’d materialised behind him who looked like “she, too, might be about to… yup, there she went. What was this?”

Heterosexuality, Brian. The real, unvarnished kind.

In other words: from the point of view of the dame.

Oscar Wilde has been added to the UK’s National Curriculum. Teenagers in English secondary schools will now study the aesthete author alongside Dickens and Shakespeare.

Whilst I think this is welcome news - Wilde is a writer as vital and as brilliant today a century after his death as he was when he was when he was quipping in the salons of London, or lying in the gutter looking at the stars and the thighs of messenger boys - I wonder whether Fisher’s biography, reviewed below, shouldn’t be required reading also.

Revenge of the Psychocrumpet

by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, March 2002)

There is a terrible, disgusting, filthy vice which should strike horror and shame into the hearts of any red-blooded Englishman and which is closely and intimately associated with an effete 19th-century Anglo- Irish dramatist. In fact, his name has become a by-word for it. It is the love that once dared not speak its name but now won’t pull its pants up. It deports itself in shameless ways everywhere these days: in films, newspaper articles, television, and countless books.

I’m talking of course about Wildolatry.

It isn’t merely that Mr Wilde has become overrated and over-espoused his every utterance treated as a gem of eternal wisdom and precious paradox. Or that public nuisances such as Stephen Fry seem to have based their entire claim to relevance on a life-long low- rent impersonation of The Witty One.

No, the most revolting aspect of this tendency is its sentimentality. The central article of faith in Wildolatry is that Oscar (oh, how the Wildolators like to utter that name, their lips forming an “O” like drooling communicants on their knees) was and is the most exquisite victim. A victim of “bigotry”, a victim of English philistinism, a victim of political intrigue, a victim of his psychocrumpet boyfriend (well, who could resist Jude Law?), and a victim of the lad’s jaw-clenching, whip-brandishing, eye-popping, violent dad, the Marquis of the Daily Mail, who famously left a card for Mr Wilde at the Groucho Club addressed to that “posing Somdomite”, setting in motion a sequence of events that would lead to Wilde being sentenced to two years’ hard panto in Reading.

Precisely because we’ve heard the story too many times, fact, fiction and fellatio have blurred into one soggy mess in the Wilde myth. However, as Wilde himself hinted, he was the author of his own downfall - and with it his posterity. As he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1885: “I would go to the stake for a sensation… To be a master of moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and I am not sorry that it is so.” In Trevor Fisher’s ‘Oscar and Bosie: a Fatal Passion’ (Sutton), it becomes clear that the great dramatist was also a common-or-garden drama queen.

One, moreover, who had ideas above his station. He thought he could take on drama queens who had been in the business of mastering and being mastered by “moods” for centuries. What’s more, this lot played for keeps. The blue-blooded battiness of the Douglases, described by Bosie himself with dramatic understatement as a family with “theatrical tendencies”, was entirely out of his league. Wilde may have been Irish, with an eccentric father and a formidable mother, he may have been a homosexual, he may have been the greatest playwright of the late 19th century, he may have penned one of the most extraordinary novels in the English language which is even more relevant today than it was then, he may even, you might be forgiven for thinking, invented postmodernism and irony, but the Douglases were drama queens who made him look like a lisping bar-stool amateur and who outgunned him in a feud with life and sanity that for them had been going on for generations.

They also knew more about real suicide, which is frequently the last and definitely unlovely gesture of the drama queen. Queensbury’s father shot himself, as did Lord Alfred Douglas’s elder brother Drumlanrig. Queensbury’s letters to Bosie threatening to shoot him are signed in a manner which typified the “cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-my-face” technique of the serious drama queen: “Your disgusted so-called father, Queensbury”. (To which Bosie replied, with filial obedience: “What a funny little man you are.”) The Douglas instability was not without its darkly comic moments, however. Bosie’s uncle, Lord Jim, caused a scandal when he filled in the 1891 census describing his wife as a “cross sweep” and a “lunatic”, and his stepson as a “shoeblack born in darkest Africa”. (He committed suicide shortly afterwards by slitting his throat from ear to ear.)

When Queensbury was stalking his son and his playwright boyfriend, Bosie took to carrying a loaded revolver in his jacket, which he somehow managed to discharge accidentally one evening in an expensive restaurant, like an early, high-class gangsta rapper (no one was hurt, though Wilde probably needed several glasses of absinthe to calm his nerves). Of course, you or I or Jennifer Lopez would decide that things were getting a tad out of hand, that we were getting a teensy bit out of our depth and quietly move on. Not Wilde. The self-styled “Lord of Language” thought he could master both Bosie and his father when in fact, as events showed, he wasn’t equal to either of them.

But then again, perhaps I underestimate Mr Wilde, or at least his unconscious. After all, Queensbury succeeded in destroying Wilde’s reputation - in a manner which guaranteed Wilde’s present-day fame. Bosie destroyed his private life - in a manner which guaranteed that their love affair would be one of the most famous ever. Though, it’s worth asking, as Fisher does, what kind of “love affair” it was.

Bosie and Wilde shared appetites more than they did each other’s beds, or hearts: chiefly an appetite for teenage working lads. “On Saturday,” Fisher recounts, “the [16-year-old boy slept with Douglas, on Sunday he slept with Oscar. On Monday he returned to London and slept with a woman at Douglas’s expense.” Suddenly, Jonathan King’s extravagant comparisons of himself with Oscar Wilde make a certain kind of sense. After all, Wilde was prosecuted and sentenced not for gross indecency with Bosie but for gross indecency with teenagers from the lower orders. Indeed, Wilde could have been tried and convicted of the same offence for another hundred years - and decades after the ‘decriminalisation’ of homosexuality in the 1960s, until the Age of Consent for male-male sex was equalised with male-female sex at 16 in the 1990s.

Bosie’s designation by Wilde as his “Judas” in history’s longest and bitterest Dear John letter, De Profundis, is arrant, self-dramatising nonsense, as Fisher makes clear. In fact, Bosie stood by Wilde during his trial and while he served his sentence. Though it’s difficult not to suspect that this was down to the dramatic potential of the situation - shortly after Wilde was released they met in Naples and promptly lost interest in one another.

Fisher’s charmingly old-fashioned book (he can’t quite bring himself, for example, to write “anal sex”) is a necessary corrective to Wildolatry, and if it is sometimes rather repetitive, then so were Wilde and Bosie, who were on and off more times than a tart’s knickers when the fleet is in.

“Do you want to know the great drama of my life?” asked Wilde of Andre Gide after his downfall. “It’s that I have put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent.”

Perhaps. Trouble is, the “great drama” in its full, unabridged detail is ultimately rather tedious.

Something, of course, utterly unforgiveable in Wilde’s books.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

By Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 28 January, 07)

['Pies and Prejudice: In search of the North', by Stuart Maconie (Ebury)

Stuart Maconie is looking for the North. It’s not really so difficult to find, but we’re only a few pages in to the book and he’s already hopelessly lost. Perhaps he’s spent too long in the south (the blurb describes him as “a northerner in exile, stateless and confused”), or perhaps he’s visited the buffet car once too often. Whatever the reason, he’s more off-course than the MSC Napoli as he claims categorically, ludicrously, that “the north” (and it should be The North, by the way) “undeniably begins in… Crewe”.

Crewe. Possibly, just possibly, to indulge a perfectly likeable Radio 2 DJ with good taste in music and the star pundit of “I Love Any Decade You’re Making a Series About”, you might say that the North West begins at Crewe. But then, no one is interested in when the North West begins. That’s why Maconie’s travelogue is called “In Search of the North” not “In Search of the Granada TV Region”.

As everyone should know, The North begins (or rather ends, if you’re looking at England from the right way up) further south than Crewe on the other, more important, more attractive, more modest side of England in Grantham, Lincolnshire, on the usefully named Great North Road and Great North Eastern Railway. A helpful hint: if you departed for The North from Euston station or turned left at Watford Gap you’re going the wrong way. Sorry to be pedantic, but The North is, well, north.

Grantham is the real gateway to The North partly because the name forces you to speak Northern (it’s definitely not pronounced “Hugh Grantham”), partly because you can taste the self-reliance and bluff no-nonsense in the air, like chip fat at teatime, even in an air-conditioned coach at the station, but mostly because it’s on the Eastern/Yorkshire side of the country - ie the correct side.  And the next stop is Doncaster.

The North isn’t a mythical, imaginary or obscure place. It was clearly mapped out, more or less, in the Dark Ages AA Atlas. But back then it was called the Danelaw: the Danish Viking kingdom which ran the better half of England from the late 9th century until the early 11th century with its capital at Jorvik/York. Roughly speaking, everything above a diagonal line from Chester to London was Norse and horny-helmeted. Everything below it was Radio Four.

Despite what the history books may say, the Danelaw never really ended and god’s own county of Yorkshire remains at the proud, stoic heart of The North. However, as London has grown exponentially over the centuries, the South Eastern boundaries of the Danelaw have retreated further northwards - to Grantham (well, would you want Peterborough?).

It’s not really Maconie’s fault that he’s so confused. He’s from Wigan, you see. By a terrible accident of birth of the kind that can seriously shake your belief in a benign creator, he’s a Lancastrian. So of course the poor lad has no idea what he’s talking about - all that matters to a Lancastrian is that he’s talking. Perhaps this is why some of this book seems less written than transcribed from an especially long and breathless on-air motormouth monologue, full of random facts, random connections and random geography - diverting enough, but not really going anywhere. Save Crewe.

OK, OK, he does cover the North West rather well: visiting pie-loving Wigan, leafy Cheshire (the designer-sunglasses shop capital of England), up-and-coming Liverpool (soon to be cultural capital of Europe), booming Warrington (home to the UK’s very first IKEA), strumpet Blackpool gearing up for Super Casinos, and makeover Manchester (”a jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place”, quoting from both Morrissey and Peter Shaffer at the same time).

But, as I said, who’s interested in the North West? Yes, our kid Maconie makes a reluctant day-trip across the Pennines to the actual North, visiting Leeds, Durham and Newcastle (where the locals understandably denounce him as being “from the midlands”) but this is really a book about the damp, camp North West that pretends to be about the glamorous, shining North.

Perhaps you think me unkind. Perhaps you think me a tad biased, as a son of York (did you guess?). Well, you’d be right. But you should read some of the things Maconie has to say about Yorkshiremen. Apparently, we’re dour, cold, humourless and mean (clearly he knew this review was coming). But the truly unforgivable slur is that he thinks that Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys are closet Yorkshiremen. If Maconie can capriciously decide to exempt Lancastrian Liverpool from The North because he feels like it (apparently they’re more New York than Northern), why can’t I exempt the whole of the North West?

But even Yorkshiremen and Lancastrians have something that can bring them together: the South. As someone who has lived in York, Sheffield, Manchester and London, but who now lives just off Scotch Corner because I reckon that here I might just possibly be out of range of Ken Livingstone’s next extension of the Congestion Charge Zone, I cheer on Maconie when he moans about the way that the decadent South loves to patronise the glorious North, the way that the BBC has a “North of England Correspondent” but no “South of England Correspondent” - whom is he corresponding with? Half of the population of England live in the North.

The way that faux-northern films like Brassed Off, The Full Monty, and Billy Elliot portray The North as a poverty-stricken wasteland gasping for the generous charity of southern audiences; the way that Englishness is always cast by the London media in terms of the South, despite the obvious truth that Englishness, like pop music, is clearly Northern: the English language was invented in the North (by a Geordie monk), along with The Beatles, The Smiths, ABC, the Human League, the Artic Monkeys and Alan Bennett.

“If Durham were in Kent or Sussex we’d never hear the last of it…” writes an amazed Maconie, having happened across the magical beauty of the place. “It would have its own boat race and its own folk festival and its own TV show where an irascible, beer-swilling, opera-loving detective finds corpses in every cloister and bookshop.”

And if it were in the North West instead of The North it would probably have had its own chapter in this book, instead of a mere few pages.
Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

‘Achtung Schweinehund! A Boy’s Own Story of Imaginary Combat’, Harry Pearson (Little, Brown)

By Mark Simpson

Independent on Sunday, 21/01/07

When I was a boy in the languorous 1970s I looked forward to Christmas not just for the prezzies but the boredom that only cold turkey and just three TV channels could produce. I calculated that the more bored everyone was the more chance there was that they might succumb to my outlandish, vaguely indecent suggestion: ‘Let’s play Escape from Colditz!’

‘Oh, no! Not Escape From Colditz!!’ everyone would cry, shrinking away in horror as I brandished the unfeasibly large box for the game ‘based on the hit BBC TV series’, with it’s crazily complicated board, myriad fussy pieces and cards and incomprehensible gameplay. ‘It’s so silly!’ my sister would huff. ‘The rule-book is the size of dictionary!’ Dad would snort. ‘It takes forever!’ Mum would moan.

These all sounded like recommendations to me. But no dice. Escape from Colditz would go back in the cupboard for another year. For you, Tommy, ze Christmas is over. Everyone hated that game. Except me. I thought it was almost as exciting as ‘The Battle of Britain’ (my favourite film). But now, after all these years, I think I’ve finally found someone to play Escape From Colditz with.

Not only did Harry Pearson, author of ‘Achtung Schweinehund! A Boy’s Own Story of Imaginary Combat’ also love this tragic game as a boy, he like me spent his childhood re-enacting the Second World War, devouring Commando comic books, wearing Clarks Commando shoes, playing with plaggy Airfix soldiers, assembling Airfix scale-models of Spitfires and re-watching ‘Sink the Bismarck!’. We were a generation raised to win the Second World War over and over again. Something most of us were only too happy to do.

It’s a shame that Pearson didn’t live next door to me. Pearson and I would have been best of chums. We even share the same boyish dislike of unisex hairdressers that colonized the 1970s, secretly suspecting that ‘they didn’t actually cut your hair at all. They just folded the untidy bits away and fixed them there with the heat gun.’ The only cloud on the horizon would have been who was going to play the Germans.

And then again…. Maybe it’s best he didn’t. You can have too much in common with someone for both your own good – which seems to me to be the essential the problem of male friendship. If Pearson had lived next door I would probably have ended up that peculiarly disdained species of failed man known a wargamer. Instead of just a fondly indulged homosexual. You see, Pearson never stopped battling on the fields and on the beaches, ‘in his head on the sitting-room floor and across his bedroom ceiling’ as his book blurb puts it. Thirty years on he’s still at it, collecting vast, anally-accurate historical tin armies, hand-painting them all and lugging them up and down the country in search of other people who share his proclivities.

For years he has kept this ‘niche’ side of his life secret from most of his friends, for fear they wouldn’t understand. This book is his grand coming out: ‘It’s time to stop living this double life. It is time to unleash the geek,’ he declares. He’s not under any illusion how sharing his ‘specialist interests’ is likely to be received and how, once he starts talking about this side of his life, he is frequently compelled ‘by a force stronger than me’ to blurt out information that he probably shouldn’t, such as the exact number of buttons on an early 19th Century Hungarian Hussar’s Sunday pantaloons. ‘I know that even while you are nodding and saying, “Really? Is that so? How fascinating,” many of you will be gradually edging towards the exit.’

But not me. While much of the general population may regard a wargamer as only a few rungs up from a nonce, I refuse to cast aspersions. Because I know they’ll boomerang. Like most men, not so deep down, I’m really a wargamer inside myself. When we are boys, wargames simulate manhood. When we are men manhood simulates wargames.

So I understand wargamers. I sympathise. I just don’t want to go there – in case I don’t come back. Fortunately, there’s no need to live next door to Pearson and take the risk because instead we have his funny, scourgingly honest and sometimes affecting autobiographical book about his childish-mannish obsession and the childish-mannish nature of men. All in all, it’s even more fun than ‘Escape From Colditz’.

Pearson is perhaps at his most hilarious when he’s being bitchy about other wargamers. Lampooning the acronym-happy wargamer who likes to show off their superior knowledge a little too much he writes: ‘�See amongst those AFVs, there’s a Panzer IV Auf HSd.kfz 161/2 Pz. Div 12 in pattern T4G75Y. But – heh-heh-heh – this is supposed to be Eastern Front, 1942 and [pause like Perry Mason about to catch a witness in a lie - T4G75y was Normandy, 1944!�.’ Of course, this is how all wargamers sound to non wargamers, but Pearson is painfully aware of this.

Anorak or no, Pearson is also capable of poignancy and perhaps even philosophy, admitting his own disillusion with his compulsion, perhaps with masculinity itself: ‘In my view, the aspect of wargaming that was most like real war was that it was never quite as thrilling as you hoped and imagined it would be’. Everything looked lovely, but once the fighting started it ‘all dissolved into a chaotic slogging match.’

If you think that Pearson’s sagacious observations the way of the sword are somewhat devalued by the fact he has spent his life playing at war but never actually taking part, then you should probably consider that quite a few wargamers are former or serving military chaps, including a squaddie chum of his called Tony who wrote from Iraq, ‘Keep sending news of your wargaming activities they are a welcome dose of sanity in all this craziness.’ He was killed by a bomb at a checkpoint shortly afterwards.

As the famous Colditz escapee Major Pat Reid notes in the pamphlet that came with the Colditz board-game, ‘There is no greater sport than the sport of escape.’

So, Harry, fancy a game? I’ll even play the Germans.

Make it best of three?
Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

If Viagra has turned the penis into a `punctureproof balloon’, does that mean it’s not funny any more, wonders Mark Simpson

[This review of 'A Mind of its Own: A cultural history of the penis' by David M. Friedman (Robert Hale), first appeared in the Independent on Sunday, 2002

INVESTIGATING THE PENIS can be an eyewatering business.

Examining the urethra of an impotent young man, using a long nickel-plated probe called a ‘No 25 Explorer’, a 19th-century American urologist appropriately named Dr Gross wrote: “As soon as the instrument entered the passage it occasioned tremor and retraction of the testes… the muscles of the lids, nose and mouth twitched convulsively”; finally the patient “lost consciousness, his face livid”.

Well, yes - I think, under the circumstances, most of us chaps would be a bit narked. Mind you this patient doesn’t appear to have been dettered from returning to the good Doctor Gross to have blasts of hot and cold air sent down his urethra, a hot rubber plug jammed into his rectum and - hurrah! - a trusty friend No 25 Explorer reinserted, this time after being dipped in some cheeky corrosive chemicals.

Nowadays there are places where you can go and get this kind of thing for free, though usually you have to dress as one of the more intense members of the Village People to get in. Fortunately for those of us who are a little less venturesome, David M. Friedman’s examination of the penis and the, ahem, pointed role it has played in Western culture (’A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis’; Free Press), is a rather more agreeable - and useful - journey than Doctor Gross’s.

And of course, we all have an interest in the penis, don’t we? Er, or at least, we all have a position on it… Um, what I mean to say is… Oh, bollocks.

Well, you can see the problem with writing a book about the membrum virile: uninvited knob gags have a way of puncturing your carefully maintained hymen of seriousness.

Herein lies the strange and powerfully “fascinating” (derived from the Latin for a phallic charm) dichotomy of the penis: you can’t get any more serious and you can’t get any funnier. It’s ticklish and terrifying, titillating and tremendous all in one lunch-box. Commendably, Mr Friedman maintains an erudite and respectable tone in his book, and while he is occasionally at pains to let us know he has a sense of humour, he avoids cheap laughs. Unlike this reviewer.

The phallictastic journey begins with the Greeks, who as we know went “commando” in their gymnasia. However, the Greeks, hot as they were for the masculine body, considered exposing the glans the pinnacle of bad taste and would “infibulate” their John Thomases, drawing the foreskin forwards over the glans, and then tying it closed with string or clasping it shut with a circular safety-pin-like instrument. (It is not known if this was also indicative of a shortage of toilet facilities in Greek gymnasia.)

The Greeks disliked large members, considering only dainty ones desirable: “hung like a hummingbird” was a compliment. Aristotle gave this Tinymeat tendency a scientific basis, explaining that a small penis is better for conception because semen cools down in a large one, becoming “not generative”. And perhaps less appetising. Semen was considered by the Greeks as a vehicle for the transfer of arete: manly virtues such as courage, strength, fairness and honesty which a boy needed to grow into a man. As you’ve probably worked out, this cunning theory meant that young Greek men had to spend a lot of time receiving ‘arete’ from older men.

Romans, on the other hand, were less versatile; they thought penetration always emasculating, and saw the penis as a sacrosanct weapon of the Roman State - glans is apparently also Latin for bullet. When launched by slings, Roman bullets often had lurid inscriptions written on them comparing their use to acts of rape (reminiscent of the slogan “Take this, faggots!”, daubed on American bombs due to be dropped on the Taliban).

Populating the legions was also a duty of a Roman: Augustus Caesar penalised bachelors and rewarded fatherhood. Romans celebrated a son’s first ejaculation as part of a state holiday, the Liberalia. You can imagine the proud father: “Nice one, our kid! No, don’t put them in the washer - yer mam’s gonna show them to the neighbours and then frame them!”

The Christian “peter” was different. In fact, next to the rampant Roman pagan prick it was difficult to see it at all. The Kingdom was God’s, not Caesar’s; true freedom was freedom from lust. God’s only son was born of a virgin and remained one, and admired those men who would become “eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven”. Some, such as Origen, took him literally and castrated themselves. In the fourth century, Augustine’s rather exciting idea of the “demon rod” as the organ of corruption became the dominant influence on Western Christianity and Western culture, and perhaps the reason why there are so many homo priests today. After all, if one penis is sinful, two penises and twice as much semen must mean double the sin/fun.

Or perhaps it was because Jesus was the only person allowed a penis. Jesus’s organ - because it was never used and was the product of a penisless birth - was as holy as all others were damned. His foreskin or prepuce became a holy relic, so holy that there were thousands of them. Hence the taste test, a medieval version of the Pepsi Challenge: chewing the shrivelled leather to determine whether it was wholly or partly human. Saint Agnes imagined she was swallowing the Holy Prepuce at Communion (with no gag reflex).

In a classic case of projection, Christians accused Jews of ritual cannibalism - in part because of the ancient practice where a child’s freshly circumcised, bleeding penis was placed briefly in the Rabbi’s mouth. Of course, the use of the somewhat phallic word “projection” is another example of the humungous impact of the Jewish dentist Sigmund Freud and his very phallic theories of the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety and penis envy.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t believe that a cigar is ever just a cigar that I feel Friedman’s book really only reaches full tumescence in his chapter on Freud, who as far as Western culture is concerned, discovered the penis as surely as Cook discovered Australia. Actually, the penis, or at least the phallus, is Freud’s. Any book about the cultural history of the penis is de facto a history of Freud. He’s the daddy. In an interesting passage, Friedman points out that Freud and Augustine, so far apart in other ways, meet on a crucial point: each recognised the psychic and historic potency of the penis. “For the Bishop of Hippo original sin is passed from one generation to the next by semen, and the punishment for Adam’s insult against God is erections we cannot control. For Freud the killing of the primal father and the sexual appropriation of the mother is passed on as the Oedipus complex, and the punishment is a civilisation which controls our erections.”

Oddly, one of the ways that modern civilisation has controlled our erections is to prescribe them to us. In his, he believes, literally final chapter on the history of the cultural signification of the penis, Friedman examines how Viagra has changed our relationship to it and the anxieties it produces, by turning it into a reliable thing: a “punctureproof balloon”. This is because, while Viagra is rather less fun than our old friend Explorer No 25, it does - unlike No.25 and almost all the other attempts to make the penis obedient - actually work.

The really bad news, I suspect, is that if the penis no longer has “a mind of its own” it might not be funny any more.

© Mark Simpson 2006