Chloe Thurlow's Blog, page 22
April 15, 2014
Spanish Fly
A pinch of Spanish Fly and you are flying. Take too much and it kills you. It is this balance between the ultimate orgasm and a gut-wrenching death that has made Spanish Fly the aphrodisiac of choice since the Romans first started sending out invitation cards to orgies.
Spanish Fly is in fact a misnomer, seeing that it is not a fly but an emerald-green beetle, and it is not Spanish, but an international traveller that scurries about in warm damp places all over the globe. Ground into powder and taken with liquids, water for the curious, champagne for the daring, the cantharidin extracted from the crushed beetles is an irritant that stimulates blood flow to the genitals. And we all know what happens when that happens.
Is Spanish fly a myth? No. Does it work? For men, yes. Women who try it just feel itchy, which is not necessarily very sexy, although it might be.
An early fan of Spanish Fly was Livia, the money-grubbing wife of Augustus Caesar. She would slip the green stuff into the wine cups of visiting guests to encourage an indiscretion that she could then exploit in blackmail. Apothecaries supplied Louis XIV with beetle to arouse a prolonged erection when he climbed into bed with Madame Montespan, who must have gasped ‘Long Live the King’ during their lovemaking. We have in court documents a record of the Marquis de Sade giving Spanish Fly laced with aniseed to ladies of the night at an orgy in 1772. Sentenced to death for drug abuse and sodomy, his noble status probably enabled his being pardoned on appeal. Locked up again for another aberration, he started writing erotic novels, smuggling his work out to an impatient public a page at a time.
The word aphrodisiac come from Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, and men, obviously men, have since classical times been seeking the sexual grail to provoke desire, pleasure and performance in places it is hard to imagine anyone looking – like in the digestive tracts of sperm whales, where they discovered a waxy stuff called ambergris. They found erotic qualities in the nuts from the ginkgo (or maidenhair) tree, which the Chinese have been serving at weddings for millennia. Phallus-shaped foods like asparagus is thought to have the necessary je ne sais quoi, and, of course, so does the banana, which is rich in B vitamins and potassium, both necessary for sex hormone production. Salvador Dali believed in lobsters, which he served with chocolate sauce, and wrote an aphrodisiac cookbook. Snails have a coquettish reputation, as do oysters. Groucho Marx famously remarked: Last night I had a dozen oysters. Only eleven of them worked.
The above foods do contain chemicals that can stir the blood, which may not improve performance, but will aid erections. Perversely, traditional Oriental recipes, such as soups cooked with the penises of tigers or turtles, have no effect whatsoever. Neither does ground up rhino horn, the most famous, or infamous, of all aphrodisiacs and sold on the black-market for up to $100,000 a kilo. The horn is like hair, hardened and dead, a weapon and sex adornment belonging to the rhinoceros, an endangered species, like the tigers and turtles. Men seeking lasting erections should leave the last few rhinos to graze the veldts of Africa in peace and stick to Viagra, the modern-day Spanish fly.
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April 8, 2014
Poetic License
What is a Poetic License? And how do you get one? Poets juggle words. Poets tell you the grey sky is blue and you believe them. They are sorcerers weaving rhyme. They hear the angels whisper and it doesn’t take much for them to rip open their shirts to bare their hearts. Shakespeare asks in As You Like It: Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
Take Rodolfo for example. In Pucccini’s opera La bohème we meet the poet in the opening scene as he sits with Marcello and Colline before an empty stove. It is 1830s Paris, a bleak mid-winter, the city of lovers deep in snow, the cold biting through the ragged coats of the artists who inhabit the Latin Quarter. They have no food or fuel for the fire, and we are moved when Rodolfo burns the manuscript for an unfinished play to heat the garret. Schaunard arrives with some cash earned from giving music lessons and they go out to eat at the Café Momus. Rodolfo impresses his friends when he stays behind ‘to finish the last few lines of a new poem.’
A girl pale as moonlight appears at Rodolfo’s door with a burnt out candle and a look of helplessness. She has also lost her key, which he finds and keeps from her. Why? It’s what poets do. Mimi’s hands are frozen and Rodolfo warms them in his own. He stares into her big brown eyes and is struck by a coup de foudre: love at first sight. He takes Mimi with him to the café. The wine flows and the party grows lively when Marcello’s former lover, Musetta, arrives with her new amour, a wealthy older man. Musetta, in a scarlet dress with a thousand petticoats, dances among the tables. She is vibrant, vulgar, the complete opposite of Mimi, a seamstress whose one pleasure is ‘her white room with the view over the Paris rooftops.’
In the following scene, a month later, Marcello and Musetta are back together and living at a tavern where Marcello is painting a mural. Rodolfo has split up with Mimi and tells Marcello it’s because she is ‘fickle’ and has taken a ‘Viscount’ as a lover. This is poetic fantasy. Or, put another way, a whopping great fib. Mimi’s lungs are succumbing to tuberculosis and Rodolfo can’t face this banal reality.
Once Rodolfo learns from his friends that Mimi isn’t merely sick, but dying, he blows the dust from his poetic license and kneels at her bedside with his heart bursting like a flower. There are tears on his cheeks, but it is Musetta who sells her earrings to acquire medicine and a fur muff for Mimi’s cold hands, while Colline pawns his winter coat for food.
Puccini’s duet sung by Rodolfo and Mimi fools us into thinking this is a love story. It is not. It is warning to young girls who fall in love with poets. Poets are in love with love and seek from their lover a mirror that reflects themselves. Rodolfo has woven himself into the costume of the poet, but beneath his fancy vest beats the heart of a hedge fund manager. His poetic license is a sham and we find in the subtext of Puccini’s tragedy a savage indictment of those men who call themselves poets. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Fall for a poet and he will rip open your chest and eat your heart.
What does Poetic License mean to you? Do leave a comment, no number puzzles, no fuss. And if you’d like to indulge in a clip from La bohème at The Royal Opera, London, try this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NFbc9d5Enc
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April 3, 2014
Sex and the Screenplay
Sex sells. Sex scenes in movies can be moving and passionate, but must remain subtle, understated. Sex scenes are a glimpse of what sex is in life, but that glimpse must be more than just a visual feast, it must be integral to and enhance the story.
In a screenplay, the writer must direct the director to understand whether the scene is loving and impassioned, or spicy and erotic. It is hard to understand this maxim, but nudity is less sensual than the suggestion of nudity – a bare leg, shoulder-blades, a scooped back, invite the eye to imagine what is not seen. A girl in a mask, even fully dressed, is automatically alluring – why is she in a mask? What is she hiding? Who is she? A camera that pans across a nightclub and pauses at a shapely leg in elegant heels make us want to know who is wearing those heels.
It is the potential of sex more than sex that’s exciting to an audience. A couple climbing the stairs dropping their clothes as they go holds our attention far more than that same couple stripped naked banging away on the bed sheets. The sex act is pretty much the same, him on top, her on top, the variations are limited. It is the flirtation, the verbal and visual foreplay, that grips the audience.
Describing a sex scene requires the same restraint and nuance – he lifts her shirt over her head and reaches for the clasp at the back of her bra. She smiles because he can’t find it. Their eyes meet and he looks down as she unhooks the clasp between the cups and her breasts are briefly revealed before he looks up again. Now they kiss and we see her busy fingers pulling the shirt from his pants. This is sexy. The audience wants more – the secret is to make them wait.
Words in a sex scene detract. Silence is sacred, except for a music track which, again, must be subtle, no marching bands and sliding chords; strings are best, a quartet by Schubert, Death and the Maiden, perhaps, something moving and mysterious, the violin (the maiden) in counterpart to the deep resonance of the cello (her lover).
If there is a need for dialogue, almost anything a writer can think of will have been thought of before and will thus be cliché: I’ve wanted you so long; I never knew it would be like this; Wow, you’re amazing. Avoid all this stuff and strike out for something original. Let the sex play out and maybe she says, You know, I wish I’d never given up smoking. Maybe he says: You must have done this before…sex is cool. What people say has to be cool. Encounters that don’t end in sex can be just as passionate. It is done with the eyes, with light and shadow, and any director worth the name will have watched thousands of films to see how it’s done – and then set out to do it the same, but different.
In the book I am writing now, a couple meet at the New Years Eve Tartan Ball. They are Tom and Kate. Kate is dancing alone on the edge of the floor. Tom speaks to her and there is a frisson.
TOM: Do you want to dance?
KATE: I am dancing.
TOM: That’s not dancing, it’s just moving about.
KATE: I happen to have a broken finger.
TOM: And the kilt’s not that good.
KATE: I like it.
TOM: Can I buy you a drink.
KATE: Seeing how the bar’s free…
He smiles. She smiles. That night they will see in the New Year in her big bed with a view of the City banks across the Thames – and we don’t even need to show the sex scene, we can cut straight to New Year’s Day with Tom and Kate sitting up in bed eating marmalade on toast.
The blog first appeared at http://speedscreenwriting.com
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April 2, 2014
Mata Hari
Mata Hari is famous for three things: nude dancing, spying and being shot by firing squad. Born in 1876 in Holland, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle came from a wealthy family and was removed from her élite school when the headmaster was caught flirting with her – her fault, naturally.
At 18, she married Rudolf MacLeod, a Colonial Army Captain twenty years older than her. She was whisked off to Indonesia, and was shocked to learn that her new husband kept a concubine. They lived in Java, where Margaretha learned sacred dancing and adopted the name Mata Hari, Indonesian for The Eye of the Day. Her husband died of syphilis, and Margaretha, now Mata Hari, moved to Paris in 1903 where she began her show business career as a bareback rider in the circus.
The American Isadora Duncan had just moved to Europe and was attracting big audiences with her scantily-clad dance routines. With her lithe body and willingness to show it, it was just what Mata Hari had been waiting for. On 13 March 1905 she made her nude dancing début at the Musée Guimet and was an overnight success.
Mata Hari was a free spirit, a risk taker and promiscuous, things men admire, except in their wives and daughters. While across the Channel in London, suffragettes were throwing themselves under horses, Mata Hari was flying the flag for women’s rights in her own way. She made erotic dance respectable and created a form of entertainment for which Paris was to become famous across the world. Like the Dance of the Seven Veils, her act consisted of stripping down to nothing but a jewel-encrusted bra which kept her small breasts under wraps. She did make exceptions, and posed naked for those new fangled one-eyed little black boxes called cameras.
War was brewing, it always is, and this was the big one, The Great War, 1914-18. Mata Hari’s career was waning and she performed her last show in March 1915 while French and German troops faced each other across the muddy battlefields of Neuve Chapelle. Being Dutch, Mata Hari was able to move across borders and travelled to Holland, Spain and Britain. In 1916, the Brits arrested her and she was interrogated at Scotland Yard. Accused of spying for the Germans, she claimed that she was indeed a secret agent – but working for the French.
She returned to France and was arrested again on 13 February 1917 at her suite in the Hotel Elysée Palace on the Champs Elysée. She was put on trial and accused of causing the deaths of 50,000 soldiers by passing secrets to Germany. When her defence lawyer, Edouard Clunet, was denied permission to cross-examine witnesses, it was clear that Mata Hari’s fate had already been decided. On a chill autumn day in October 1917, Mata Hari was executed by firing squad.
It was assumed after the war that Mata Hari was an innocent shot because she slept with Germans, because France had been ill-prepared for war, because nude dancing was out of fashion and women who take off their clothes in public have to be punished. From Eve onwards, whatever it is, it has always been the fault of women. In Holland they raised a statue to The Eye of the Day and Mata Hari has been celebrated as a prototype feminist ever since.
Fifty years later, the story took its last ironic twist when papers showed up in Germany showing conclusive proof that Mata Hari had been a spy – and a good one at that. So why did a Dutch woman living in France spy for the Germans? Spies ply their craft for the money, extreme patriotism or the joy of taking risks. Mata Hari was born into a well-off family, married an aristocrat, and became famous. Had she needed money or security, any number of wealthy men would haver walked her down the aisle. Why did she do it?
Because she could. Because she wanted to. Because she was outrageous. Because after all the romantic liaisons and the existential thrill of nude dancing, becoming a secret agent was fun. She was 41. She had seen and done it all. Spying was something new and being shot by twelve young soldiers was a poetic end to a life lived in extremis. According to reports at the time, Mata Hari wore an ‘Amazonian-tailored suit, white gloves, a low-cut blouse and a tricorn hat.’ Was she smiling? I bet she was. And, 97 years after her death, in the Age of Celebrity, we are still talking about her.
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March 27, 2014
Purity Balls
Two items crossed my radar this week. First, a survey on rape conducted at UCLA. The second an item on Purity Balls, a movement spreading across the United States in which girls at about the age of 12 dedicate their virginity to their daddy.
The rape survey was carried out by Jacqueline Goodchilds, a psychology professor associated with the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. She asked a broad mix of high school students this question: Is it all right if a male holds a female down and forces her to have sex if…the list below is the percentage of guys who answered YES to the question, followed by the girls who answered YES:
He spent a lot of money on her 39% ~ 12%
He is so turned on he thinks he can’t stop 36% ~ 21%
She has had sex with other guys 39% ~ 18%
She’s stoned or drunk 39% ~ 18%
She lets him touch her above the waist 39% ~ 28%
She is going to and then changes her mind 54% ~ 31%
She has led him on 54% ~ 26%
She gets him excited sexually 51% ~ 42%
They have dated for a long time 43% ~ 32%
So there we have it: 42% of high school girls from this particular survey think it’s okay if a guy holds her down and rapes her if she gets him excited sexually? Girls who believe this clearly see themselves as sexual objects and are complicit in male-dominated ideas and values. Girls in the 21st century who think of themselves in this way, not as individuals with the right to say NO, must have been so controlled by macho thinking that their own minds have turned to mush.
The marketing men selling stuff in our male-led consumer society influence girls to believe they must be pretty, curvy, obedient, that the greatest achievement is to be draped half-naked over a car in a magazine ad. The underlying message is always sexual.
If we move on to purity balls, the inherent message is exactly the same. Girls of 12, and sometimes as young as seven, pledge at these ceremonies to remain pure until her wedding day and gifts her virginity to her father until marriage. The balls resemble weddings and the girls dress as brides. Daddy, on bended knee, gives his little girl a purity ring to signify her commitment to virginity, and she signs a contract to seal the deal. Purity in this case is a promise to have no sexual contact whatsoever, no dating and no kissing until her wedding night when daddy’s little girl gives her virginity, the property of daddy, to the man who will now be her guardian and protector.
Purity balls have a religious connotation. The documentary The Virgin Daughters – you can see it for free at - http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/virgin-daughters – shows a pastor explaining to one little girl that the purity ring is ‘a reminder that keeping yourself pure is important. So you keep this ring on your finger and from this point you are married to the Lord and your father is your boyfriend.’
The purity ball ends with daddies dancing with their little girls. The gowns the girls wear are often cut with bare shoulders, slender waists, lots of chiffon, the look simulating bride’s dresses with their combination of innocence and desirability, a sexual ambiguity which is adult, fun and part of the wedding day ritual. For adult brides. Not for little girls. Little girls dressed with the same ambiguity is not fun. It is a misjudgment.
The men who organize purity balls love their little girls. There is not doubt about that. But I have to ask: can a man can love his daughter too much, so much that he is submerging her personality, her individuality, her ability to take risks, make choices, take chances, be whole? Protecting young girls by marrying them to the Lord, by placing rings on their fingers and making daddy their boyfriend is only one step away from keeping daughters locked up and in veils, something that would be understood and applauded in Afghanistan, where religion decrees that a woman should only leave her house twice in her lifetime: once to marry and the second time to be buried.
According to the documentary, one in every six girls in the United States now pledges to remain a virgin and save her first kiss for her wedding night. The practice started in the US, exists in 48 states and has spread to 17 other countries. Girls from the age of five attend purity balls to get them used to thinking about chastity, celibacy, virtue and morality, adult concepts, not of purity, but sexuality.
There has been an elected Parliament in the United Kingdom for 400 years. It was only 100 years ago that women got the vote. After thousands of years of patriarchal society, women in the last century have made long strides towards equality. Girls must make their own choices, not have them made for her by daddy and the pastor. Those girls brought up with these suspect and confusing ideas about sex and boys are going to be less able to cope with contemporary society and more likely to end up getting raped. And 42% of them, if they are raped, will believe it is her fault for getting the guy excited. What is the difference between rape and purity balls? One is the suppression of women by control. The other is the opposite.
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March 22, 2014
Sexting
I opened a text without noticing who it was from and found an erect penis pointing at me from the screen on my iPhone. Now, I am as fond and familiar with the male equipment as the next girl, but I was shocked that someone I probably knew from social media had gone to the bother of finding my number and sexting me a selfie of their genitals.
A few girlfriends have sent me topless selfies and I thought nothing of it. Pictures of bare-breasted girls, and the impulse for girls to send them, seems perfectly natural and harmless. But a pleased-with-itself penis winking at me over the air waves felt like an assault – on good taste, if nothing else.
In the recent study ‘Love, Relationships and Technology’ by the security software guys at McAfee, a whopping 49% of adults in the United States use their devices to send sexual content via video, photo, e-mail or messaging. Half of the sexters save the sexts, and 16% send them on to strangers. With most sexters coming from the 18-24 year old group, psychologists are busy speculating on how technology is going to effect society long term. I imagine Neanderthal parents had the same worries when their teenaged son picked up a chunk of flint and started carving a nude portrait of the girl next door on the wall of their cave.
Near naked models never go out of fashion and are used to sell everything: cars, refrigerators, cleaning products, dog food – my blog! Nudity in magazines and movies isn’t merely accepted, it’s the norm. Being exposed for girls is not the same as it is for men. Women are pressured into feeling that they have to compete with the air-brushed beauties in the ads. We are always to some extent on display – bare legs, bare shoulders, bare tums. Exactly how much skin we should reveal in our showy and shopping obsessed times is puzzling and deeply hypocritical. Dress like a nun and you are condemned for being dull and unattractive. Uncover too much flesh and you’re a slut. Girls who are raped are often blamed for bringing the crime on themselves by the way in which they were dressed.
We have come to believe in modern times that the female form is more aesthetic, most likely because of the locker-room mentality of the marketing men and our corporate masters of the universe. Historically, that is not the case. The Greek and Roman sculptors preferred the male form and that was still in vogue during the Renaissance when Michelangelo gave the world his David, the towering five metre masterpiece complete with a cute sleepy marble penis.
According to McAfee, girls as young as thirteen and fourteen are sexting their skinny nude bodies to classmates who, of course, instantly message them all over the school. The girls are being encouraged by boys, but just as much by other girls. It is hard to say no when everyone is doing it. Is this cause for concern, or just a modern form of kiss chase, an update of carving nudes on the cave wall?
McAfee doesn’t have the answers. Nor do the psychologists, and girls will probably work it out for themselves. Young women don’t want to be objectified, but it is totally devastating being ignored. There are contradictory ideas on what is artistic and what is pornographic, what can be shown and what can’t. Simply put, breasts and bums are acceptable, while female genitals are best kept hidden. As for sexting erect penises to my iPhone, that’s a no, no, no, no, no.
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March 18, 2014
Lick This
How are things down their in the cunnilingus department? Is your lover’s tonguing technique up to scratch? Does he (or she) know how to chime the magic bell? Can he bob the buried treasure of the g-spot like it’s an invisible beach ball? Can he keep up the rhythmic motion of a drill tunnelling for precious oils? And then grind in circles until you smell the fresh coffee? No worries if he can’t, the new app LICK THIS is here with the promise of orgasms to die for.
LICK THIS follows the trend for wireless intimacy predicted in my blog Cybersex, but with a difference. It provides a tutorial for improving cunnilingus – not pleasure now, but pleasure delayed, the best sort, according to the Marquis de Sade!
Developed by Club Sexy Time of San Francisco, LICK THIS is being marketed for women to put on their lover’s device (pun intended), and was designed by Pablo Rochat and the erotically-named Chris Allick (surely a sign that there is a master plan for the universe). The app requires no download, just tap www.lickthisapp.com into your browser and put your tongue through its paces – which I did until everything was moist except me. My jaw ached, my throat was dry and my smartphone was sopping. Then I read the small print: cover your device with plastic wrap before you start. Silly me, always diving in without looking first.
The three exercises are: 1) Up n’ Down – where you have to get the point of your tongue in a position where it can flick a light switch up and down as quickly as possible; 2) Circles – where you wiggle your tongue about as if turning a mechanical handle; 3) Freestyle - where you jab at a beach ball that appears randomly on the screen. This is all about eye-ball coordination, which men claim to have, especially in a car, and if LICK THIS makes the fairytale a reality that has to be a move in the right direction.
Club Sexy Time says they want people to have fun and talk more about technology and their bodies, which must have made for a totally weird business plan. But if LICK THIS helps persuade men that the clitoris is like a Bonsai-tree requiring constant tending and the g-spot is an unexplored island waiting to have a flag pinned at its peak, then Monsieur Allick will be living up to his name.
Cybersex blog @ http://chloethurlow.com/2014/03/cybersex/
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March 13, 2014
Velvet Handcuffs
One night, your lover produces an elegant box tied in ribbon. Inside, you find a pair of velvet handcuffs. He kisses you. You slip out of your clothes – your old skin – and into the velvet handcuffs. He snaps the lock shut and whispers: ‘Now, my dear, you must wear them forever.’
That’s what happened to Kate Middleton the day she married Prince William. She entered Westminster Abbey in April 2011, a commoner, and left riding in a velvet-barred carriage through which the eyes of the world would be watching her forever.
The velvet handcuffs are fiction, but an accessory of a very real kind found its way like a bondage collar around Kate’s throat at a recent gala at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Queen loaned Kate a tiered diamond necklace by Cartier that she had first worn at her own wedding to Prince Philip in 1947. The chain of Indian diamonds is one of the 300 pieces in the Queen’s personal treasure chest worth £50 million, the collection not to be confused with the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, which belongs, we’re told, to us all.
It’s hard to imagine what it is like being Kate; in fact, it must be hard for Kate to imagine what it is like being herself. Her journey into the velvet handcuffs was promoted by her ambitious mother, the former flight attendant who married the dashing pilot and launched a party hire company that made them millionaires. Kate met William when they were students at Edinburgh University, and through near-anorexia, pregnancy and a kaleidoscope of new frocks, Kate has been fresh meat on the tabloid table ever since.
Queen Elizabeth famously says little and is big on symbols. She rarely lends out her jewels and did so that gala evening to encourage Kate to see herself, not as she is, but as she will be, a future Queen. Not that you can ever shrug off the invisible tattoo of your class in the UK. George Orwell described Britain as having nine classes, upper, middle and lower, each divided by three to provide distinctions so nuanced we Brits find it hard to talk to each other because we are never sure who should be looking up to who or whom should be looking down upon whom. Kate, as if destined by the name Middleton, can be placed precisely in the centre as middle-middle-class, unlike Princess Diana, for example, who was from an aristocratic upper-upper-class family, a little in front of the Royal Windsors with their cloudy Saxe-Coburg-Gotha roots and penchant for marrying commoners.
Whether she likes it or not, Kate is the poster girl for that minuscule group at the peak of privilege at a time when the pyramid has stretched out, thinner at the top, fatter at the bottom, and the gap between those who have it all and those eating from food banks is incompatible and more unjust in the 21st century than at any other time in Britain’s long monarchical history. The price Kate pays is the velvet handcuffs, a wardrobe with too many frocks to close the door and the paparazzi an intrusive and unrelenting shadow.
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March 6, 2014
Cybersex
In Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, Jane Fonda presses palms with David Hemmings until their psychocardiograms are in harmony and her orgasm blows a black hole in the universe. Released in 1968, the cybersex scene was sheer fantasy. But what was science fiction then has become science fact with new cybersex accessories starting to reach the market. With the appropriate apps and smartphones, couples can now enjoy erotic moments while separated by space and time.
For Her: OhMiBod – www.ohmibod.com – has created a wireless vibrator. Naked on Skype (at least, that’s the way I see it), you close your eyes, insert the device and your partner controls the motion and mood music until you roar with a digital igasm – that’s not a misspelling, by the way. Your beloved far away across town, or across the world, can relay messages synchronised by the tone and cadence of his (or her) voice. Whether you like taking control, or giving it up, Bluetooth magic lets you feel the vibe your partner transmits.
For Him: Oculus Rift – www.oculusvr.com – have come up with a next-generation virtual reality headset designed for immersive gaming. Having then cast an eye over the cybersex market, the California-based company have begun to develop a ‘sensitive connection’ for male masturbation operated by a virtual partner to deliver visual as well as genital stimulation. The user slips into the Japanese-made Tenga apparatus, lays back, as they do, and allows their lover to do the work.
According to a study by Paul Oyer at Stanford University, in less that two decades, half the population will meet their partner through dating sites. With the new devices, and there are lots more in the pipeline, couples will be able to make out on line to make sure they get on sexually as well as texturally. Cyber relations are changing the way we think about sex, love, friendship, and you have to ask yourself how long it’s going to be before OhMiBod and Oculus Rift join forces and we will be able to conceive across the web’s hidden amniotic fluid.
If a friendship fails to deepen it fades instead. I had lunch recently with an old friend named Sophie. At school the one thing we had in common was hockey. What we didn’t have in common was everything else. Over avocado wraps and sparkling water, she talked about her husband, a financial adviser, and her daughter, Annabel, three, a genius. And it occurred to me that I had less in common with Sophie than my virtual friends on FaceBook, Twitter, Pintorest.
Old friends make demands on us. They force us to look back at our joint history with reminiscences that may have vanished from our minds. Virtual friends are more accommodating. More understanding. They accept us for what we are, not for what we were running across the field a decade ago wielding a hockey stick.
The internet is being mined to resolve social, transport, housing and work problems in overcrowded cities. Every day, innovative new dating sites appear like mushrooms after the rain. From cyber friendship to cybersex is a step into the unknown, but as sex across the ether becomes ever more real and ever less virtual, we are entering the world of Barbarella where orgasms will become cosmic, orgasmic, infinite.
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March 1, 2014
The Oldest Profession
What struck me when I first saw Ana was her beautiful smile that didn’t just light up her face, it lit up the entire café where she worked as a waitress. I was on holiday in Spain and she was glad to practise the English she had learned during a six months stay in London. I asked her if she had been a student, and she leaned over and whispered: ‘No. I work in the oldest profession.’
She moved off between the tables and I wondered if I had misheard. Slim and self-confident, she looked less like a prostitute than any girl I knew. Then, of course, what does a prostitute look like? The first thing that came into my mind was the movies – Charlize Theron in Monster? Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour? Then it hit me: Ana bore an uncanny resemblance to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
Next day, I went back to the café. It wasn’t busy and over cups of coffee in small hot glasses, Ana said she wasn’t sure why she had shared her secret but, yes, it was true. She had read in a magazine article that girls were earning £2,000 a month in London as ‘escorts’ and she needed £10,000 ‘to buy a new smile.’ She had always had terrible teeth, black, stunted, broken. She felt so miserable boys avoided her and that made her even more depressed. I like sex, she said, and I needed new teeth. She shrugged and her full lips peeled back to reveal the full splendour of the dentist’s artistry
There were so many things I wanted to ask, like isn’t it just too horrible going to bed with an endless string of strangers? How do you decide how much to charge? And what if a man is violent? Or too ugly? Or wants to do things you wouldn’t normally want to do? She must have read my mind, or my embarrassment, because she had also considered those same things before she left for London. But new teeth was her obsession and getting them was more important than the morals of what she was planning to do. ‘I think lots of girls are curious about what it must be like to be a prostitute, and I don’t feel ashamed that I did it.’
Ana had used the words morals and ashamed. It got me thinking again about Pretty Woman. In the movie, Richard Gere is an unprincipled businessman, while Julia Roberts plays the hooker with a heart of gold, decent, honest and driven to prostitution – like Ana – by circumstances; in fact, they may even have been the same circumstances, before Julia climbs into bed that first night, we see her flossing her teeth.
People generally confuse morals with ethics. Morals are rules imposed on us from outside, from society and religion. Ethics are internal values, our own conclusions about what is right and wrong, and inspire virtue, kindness, common human decency. The prostitute working to care for her child, or pay for her mother’s operation, is more moral than the banker, to use the present bogey man, who manipulates share prices, sells faulty products and takes mouth-watering bonuses in failing banks.
Prostitution is nearly always the result of poverty. But in Belle de Jour, Luis Buñuel turns the rule upside down. Catherine Deneuve, as Séverine, is married to a doctor with whom she is unable to be intimate. She is that obscure object of desire, a beautiful woman who secretly enjoys the attention of men and has erotic dreams laced with scenes of bondage and sadomasochism. Séverine is drawn to work afternoons between two and five in a high-class Paris brothel, not by poverty, but the enigmatic pleasure of doing wrong.
Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution, according to Georges Bataille, is the logical consequence of the female attitude – the way Séverine takes care of her appearance, her cologne, the way she dresses, normally in white with white underwear, make her prey to men’s desire. The question is, having sprayed out her scent, under what circumstances, or at what price, does a woman yield? Is prostitution just another tool, deeply hidden, in every woman’s vanity case? Is the oldest profession the oldest profession because it has a logic women have always understood? And if prostitution is the oldest profession, then morality is the stick men reach for to beat women when they fail to meet male expectations.
The Oldest Profession? What do you think?
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