I wanted to see how producers manage to get any variety beyond the yelping and the humping. Twenty positions or combinations, yes, but thousands’? What do they all do?
My enquiry (research, officer!) is strictly ethnological, of course. There may be, you see, an educational function to watching others having sex. I once had a long and thoughtful discussion with John Williams, the brilliant Australian guitarist, about his father Leonard’s studies of woolly monkeys. These charming creatures need to see adults copulating to know how it’s done. If kept innocent they are incapable, wrote Leonard Williams, of reproducing. Other monkey species may be similar in this.
This may be the clue. Porn is educational! These days we in the West no longer occupy forest dwellings, where once bucolic bonkers could be observed and notes taken; nor are we still bundled together in houses where, even as late as the eighteenth century, so many were crammed together that you’d be inches away from a loud coupling whether you liked it or not. Now we are all in sepulchral isolation and only the thin wall of the kit home can bring us close to the secrets of real sex. Even then it sounds more like suppressed asthma than conjugal delight.
(Porn may indeed have a role in education, but the real question is why it is such big business. Every posh hotel with exquisitely courteous, swooning staff has rooms replete with Hot Adult Filth on the TV. Does the manager, Sir Humphrey Appleby personified, actually vet this stuff?)
What do you know about sex if no one tells you? I worked out some of it by the age of eight. I knew that somehow willies were involved and was impressed at the size of babies. I thought hard on this and came up with the answer: testicles are the new life forms, and to get things going you had to place one or two testicles inside the mother’s belly. I’d seen enough inflated women to know that part, though how you got such an egg-sized bollock in there through her navel was the real mystery. And why would you want to? Must hurt men horribly, and she wouldn’t fancy it much either!
Yet there were children, so someone must have been facing up to the task. One of life’s endurance tests, I thought to my young self-like the prospect of death. My musings were not much improved by talking with kids at school (this was my volkschule in Vienna), all of whom provided their own appalling variations on a sex theme of Hogarthian squalor that would have sent most sensible girls screaming to nunneries and boys to the eternal distractions of mountain climbing, slalom practice and invading Poland.
Did our ancestors know what made babies? You have to wonder. The sex writer Shere Hite convened a meeting of anthropologists at the American Association of Science conference a few years ago and the consensus was that the hominids and their modern human successors did not know much. But life was so relatively restricted (governed, as David Attenborough once observed, by the three Fs: feeding, fighting… and the other one) that sex had to have been something a little more than just an evening’s entertainment. But whether they did or not, all those thousands of years ago, there must have been plenty to observe-and to learn from.
Porn, in this analysis, must therefore be seen as a modern cry for help. It is not necessarily something dirty or vile but an avenue for learning. Young people need to know what their parts are for and what the fuss is about. Grown-ups need to build ways out of routine and repetition. (Most pornography is crude, even brutal, just as teenage sex is appallingly unsophisicated and positively unhealthy. Porn is to good sex as Blazing Saddles is to animal husbandry.) Sex skills and pornography therefore need to be-isn’t this obvious?-on the high school curriculum and part of tertiary courses.
And not only studies but practical classes. This raises the tricky question of where to get the attractive expert sex surrogates, but I am sure we can leave this to the federal education minister and his or her bureaucrat grandees. These hands-on sex educators must not look like teachers-otherwise we’d be warped for life-but be attractive members of a slightly older age group. High schoolers would be taught by twentysomethings, seniors by those in their thirties. I am not sure how these sex instructors would be tested and themselves given certificates, but Canberra would find a way. It would be a kind of national service. Many would be pleased to do their duty. Fucking for Australia.
Adults as practical sex educators have appeared, perhaps apocryphally, in many anthropological accounts of other societies. This may turn out to be part of the explanation of the brutal rites of Pitcairn Islanders-more capitulation to uncle than anything edifying-but there are precedents, I’m assured. The boy’s dream (usually damp) is of a winsome young lady who takes him through Rumpy Pumpy 101, all gentle show-and-tell with no fear of failure. Onwards and upwards (downwards?) to advanced or even scholarship level. Now, before you become incandescent, do remember that most of our renowned Lotharios-from Dylan Thomas to Errol Flynn-have turned out to be sexual squibs, so remedial courses for men are well overdue.
Reversing the genders in this example is trickier. Nowadays no sensible older person would dare go within shouting distance of a teenage girl-let alone tickling distance, even when she is well beyond the age of consent. What needs to be understood is how far these ideas can be taken, and how quickly. Would it not be worth trying sex lessons, then-like drug use, guided by someone medically responsible-to see whether this can be of benefit?
If only robots were clever enough, and halfway sexy. Maybe the Stepford Wives experiments were on to something. How far could we go? How flexible and pliable are human cultures? This is complex and difficult to predict. (The possibility of using robots for sexual tuition in the future is not as straightforward as it seems. Though wet-dream cyber-surrogates might be designed to suit your wishes, perhaps even by 2012, there are potentially adverse side effects. The Ig-Nobel Prize for Medicine three years ago was awarded to the author of a paper on how a Norwegian seaman caught gonorrhea from an inflatable rubber woman borrowed without permission from an unsuspecting fellow sailor’s bunk. This award, given in a ceremony at Harvard, stands as a warning about the limits of robotic surrogacy.)
On the one hand most of us accept that societies cannot be engineered from the top down. Stalin failed in Russia, George W. Bush in Iraq. We are usually solidly wedded to our traditional ways. Yet, in the West today, sexual mores are spectacularly different from the grope-and-grieve ways of our grandparents. With the exception of the British aristocracy, professional porn stars, and a number of American evangelical Christians (until they were caught), most of our elders have always been strictly buttoned up. Poor dears. How boggled they are by the present apparent free-for-all.
Other cultures, too, seem strict. Yet appearances can be deceptive. I remember an incident in 1967, when I was studying biology at the University of London. My then wife and I had just finished hitchhiking across the world. An extensive part of our trip was in India, where we stayed with an immensely rich family in Amritsar, in the Punjab. Their overwhelming hospitality, with its morning jugs of scotch (Amritsar is dry!) and daily curried banquets, left us eternally grateful and we said so: ‘Any time you’re in London, do call and we’ll do you proud!’ And off we went.
Some nine months later I was doing an essay on fossil botany in our five-pounds-a-week flat in Wandsworth when the bell rang. I swore and leapt downstairs, pulling the front door open like a man in a hurry about to give two Mormons marching orders. But, no. There stood eight of my Punjabi friends, smiling and nodding-one a sublimely elegant matron dressed in a priceless shawl made from the throat feathers of small birds-waiting to accept my largesse.