I took them upstairs, frantically made a pot of tea (we had four cups) and discovered some sad biscuits from the previous week. They sipped, shuffled-and politely suggested we repair to their hotel, just across from Kensington Palace and Gardens.
Off we went. Once installed there, with curry couriered from the best Indian restaurant in London and vast glasses of scotch in hand, we settled in for a comfortable evening. More guests came, from distinguished Punjabi families resident in England. Then my host came over to me suavely and asked: ‘Robyn, do you know where we can get some pornographic films?’
I was so taken aback I could not answer. It was as if the Pope had asked for a willing harlot. ‘Sorry, not my line, I’m afraid,’ came out eventually. ‘That’s OK, Poppy,’ intervened one of the smooth fellows based in England, who had all the graces and fine garb of the top diplomat. ‘I know a chap. He can get here in no time.’ Calls were made.
Mystified, I sat next to the lady in the shawl and began to hear how Indian women are chaperoned everywhere, with mother or elder brothers before marriage and in the company of senior relatives or other wives afterwards. ‘We are not permitted to go out alone, ever, or just walk solo down the street as we fancy. Certainly not our girls. Absolutely strict!’ And she smiled with approval, nodding.
At which point a bloke in a raincoat and cap-a sleaze from Central Casting-came into the luxurious hotel room, set up an old-fashioned two-reel projector, plugged it in and spooled film through the settings. With a mere nod to the assembled, who were chatting over drinks as if at a reception hosted by Indira Gandhi, he pressed a switch and the film started. There, on the pristine white wall of the Kensington Gardens Hotel, hostelry to the world’s great dignitaries, we saw rough sailor shagging willing tart in Roedean School uniform, from every angle known to man plus a few more. No one missed a beat. Apart from me.
My distinguished shawled companion, employing the Oxford tones of an Indira Gandhi, continued blithely to describe the protocols of female incarceration as her relatives did quiet business in different parts of the room, while sailor and ‘schoolgirl’ reenacted the Kama Sutra in front of them. I am still at a loss to understand the gap between public propriety and private prurience in this traditional upper-class Indian social group. It is
The Future of Sex typical of contradictions about sex throughout every society on Earth.
I am not sure whether the future of sex really will involve practical classes at school and afterwards, but I remain available to help any education minister, state or federal, who is willing to take things further.
More worrying than missing skills is the possibly imminent end of sex itself. Many scientists, of whom Bryan Sykes is the most famous, have warned of the demise of the male. Our Y chromosome is puny, responsible for too many of the ills of civilisation and on the way out. His book Adam’s Curse shocked the world when it came out in 2003, not least because he described the end of men as an advantage. Men are troublesome, noisy, rapacious and, now that science has offered alternatives, unnecessary. Eggs can be fertilised by means of the nuclei of body cells from other women. You don’t need sperm any more. Men have done their historic bit, says Sykes, so it is time to exit stage right.
Barbara Ellen, of the London Observer, wrote a piece on this a while ago. She looked forward to a future existence free of masculinity.
I can easily imagine a world without men. It is the year 2061 and men have been barred from the reproductive process for 60 years. For 40 years, they’ve been banned completely, even as pets. We keep them in cages at Man Zoos, feeding them scraps, beating them when they complain. Occasionally, we take our artificially conceived girl children to Man Zoos to see what females used to have to put up with. There are only girls, because it has long been possible to choose the sex of the baby, and no one wants boys. What men still exist are in these zoos, and dying off, but it is considered unethical to breed them.
Many years later, in what is called the post-Bridget Jones age, Ellen’s Time Lady reflects:
I am still alive, an old woman now, a relic from the past, with my naturally conceived daughter, and memories of ‘heterosexuality’, which I am frequently asked to give lectures about in halls full of shuddering, disbelieving students. I have to do it. I’ve been virtually unemployed for the past half century because, with no men around, there’s no longer any market for my journalistic speciality: ‘Carping About Men.’ I tried to scratch a living, writing about music, but with testosterone outlawed, many types of music went with it. Oasis were captured in the spring of 2010, hiding out on the moors. They were placed in Man Zoos, but had to be taken out, because they were upsetting visitors with their bravado displays of ‘Mooning’. Eminem is still at large, as are Nick Hornby, Martin Amis, Russell Crowe, Tony Blair and other male luminaries. Salman Rushdie was spotted hiding out in a Welsh cave in 2017, moaning to his companion: ‘Not again!’
I can face up to my future, but I am not entirely convinced. In Dr Sykes’s undoubtedly scientific prognosis I find the small flaw that the old Y chromosome, however diminutive, has been shown to have greater significance- and endurance-than he once thought. It could go (maybe should go), but not yet. And Barbara Ellen’s vision, though enchanting, misrepresents testosterone. Girls need it too; otherwise they suffer in both mood and sexual élan. Heterosexuality is with us for just a little longer. Bryan Sykes’s dreaded wars will endure for even more years.
So much for a scientist and a journalist looking to the future of sex. The novelist Michel Houellebecq has done so too in his book The Possibility of an Island. In it, as is his wont, he writes vividly of free and spectacular sex, of girls with no knickers and micro-skirts who do sex like moneymen in the 1980s did lunch. Automatically, unhesitatingly and without love-just like sneezing. Human beings develop generations later as isolated clones, cocooned in their solitary chambers, safe because unsullied by hormone-driven rushes that formerly made them such victims to irrational needs. Life, in this Island future, resembles that in a secluded monastery (except that you don’t see the other monks), where every day is spent looking at your screen, writing your thoughts, liberated at last from base impulses. You are free because you are no longer human.
Houellebecq’s starting point is the flaw in his vision, in my view. His dystopia follows not from sexual indulgence but from the sheer absence of anything to go with it. It is as if his humanity is made up entirely of Paris Hiltons, devoid of finer feelings and incapable of physical affection. This may be unfair to Ms Hilton (she could be acting and may grow out of it) but there are lots of us who are having a jolly nice time and will not surrender in any way to this de-sexed, disengaged, disembodied Possibility of an Island. Retreat? I thought the French knew better!
What worries me more is the fading of that essential to human society: the gay element. In my last book I argued that the only credible manifestation of intelligent design is the presence of homosexuals in society. God was very keen on this experiment, having created no fewer than 450 different animal species showing same-sex inclinations. They could not be a Darwinian example of natural selection, because their genes obviously could not have been passed on. Therefore, they must be a special part of God’s creation, giving us such supremely talented icons as Stephen Fry, k.d. lang, Leonardo da Vinci, Julian Clary, Alan Turing, Dusty Springfield, Virginia Woolf, Elton John, T.E. Lawrence, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Dr Bob Brown, Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Franz Schubert, Patrick White, Gertrude Stein and a million others.