Only good article written about this stupid Stephen Fry business
Just thought it could use a pat on the back as such.
Pineapple sex is not for us all | Victoria Coren | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
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The fall-out from Stephen Fry's Attitude interview has been fascinating. Everyone queued up to say why Fry was wrong about sex. And then they explained about sex. And they were all wrong.
Now I'm going to tell you what I think about sex. And I'm going to be wrong.
The amazing thing, in a world where a single mis-tap on Google shows us how vast, complex and miscellaneous is the human sexual instinct, is that people, especially columnists, keep thinking there's a "right".
Have you ever tried to write a porn film? I have. I don't recommend it. It's like trying to cook a meal for a million people. Except, instead of some of them being vegetarians and some meat-lovers, some kosher and some halal, some allergic to salt and some addicted to it, there is no "some". Every single one wants something different. And you've only got one saucepan.
In California, they think they've cracked it. My friend Charlie and I, in training to make our porn spectacular, went to meetings in the San Fernando Valley where "adult industry experts" told us… I don't want to shock you over breakfast, so let's just say that we were advised we need seven minutes of this, six minutes of that, one scene in which [x], two scenes in which [y], DEFINITELY NO SCENES in which [z]…
Those businesspeople have identified the most marketable formula. But every viewer would be disappointed by something, and a billion non-viewers would be turned off by all of it, because the sexual psyche is as individual as a fingerprint and no two are the same.
You could make the perfect blue movie for one person, somewhere in the world, by introducing, right in the middle of coitus, a pineapple with a smiley face drawn on it. Of course, you'd ruin it for everyone else. And that one person… nope, it isn't perfect after all. Because the pineapple doesn't have eyebrows. Not like the one in his head.
Personally, I agreed with Stephen Fry. He said that heterosexual men struggle to believe women really like sex. I think the controversial stuff which triggered the rage – about why women don't go cottaging, how they trade sex for a relationship – was not meant to be Fry's own opinion but an extension of that theory, a fleshing-out of the fears in this theoretical straight guy's head.
And I think that's true. I think some men fear that women don't really like it, or only in a decorous kind of way. I think women can mistake this fear for an idealisation (and sometimes it is one) and we all want to be what our lovers want us to be – so we hold back from expressing the true depths of our desire in case we look like sluts. Or we try, our sweetheart looks slightly shocked or surprised, and we never try again.
Maybe we decide we really are a bit "wrong" and it's better never mentioned. Thus men think their fears are confirmed and everyone continues in one massive, cyclical, co-dependent failure to, as Stephen Fry terms it, "get our rocks off". Or they have affairs.
It works both ways, of course. Some women, and I would imagine gay men too, fear that their male partners don't like sex that much, or just not with them. Sometimes, they are right. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean everyone isn't talking about you. And how they don't fancy you.
An army of female journalists attacked Fry for saying (which he didn't) that women aren't sexual. But none of them dared to disagree with the idea that women don't want to screw strangers on Hampstead Heath. Goodness, no! The ladies are agreed that ladies don't want that!
Well, I think we all want to screw strangers on Hampstead Heath. I think we also want to wee and scratch ourselves on Hampstead Heath, and eat whenever we see food. The reasons not to… they are many and complicated, but it's not the absence of human desire.
Some of the reasons mean that we don't even know we want it. What I think I want is to do filthy and disrespectful things with someone I love and trust. That's not a moral code; I just think it's sexier, to unlock the hidden and forbidden with someone you also talk to politely at breakfast and watch being a civilised grown-up on social occasions. Conveniently, love also gets stronger if you share every dark secret. That's real intimacy.
But I'm wrong, because some people define intimacy differently. I'm wrong because some of you now think I'm a slut. I'm wrong because I'll never know how much more filthy, or how much less, I'd be without the billions of influences on our suggestible little brains, including those from centuries before we were born, that built the culture in which we live. Without those, maybe I'd be pushing a husband away, saying: "Ugh, I don't want that, it's disgusting!" Or maybe I'd be out cruising the heath in the nude.
Well… it's November. I'd take a scarf.
All I know is that there are too many billions of influences for any two of us to be the same. In the idea of how men might see women, I had a moment of sexual congruence with the brilliant Stephen Fry: 20 years older than me, male and gay. I doubt we'll have another.
But for anyone to say that Fry is "right" or "wrong" in any general sense is madness. As his clarification spelt out, he was just throwing around ideas about the incomprehensible. There's no point trying to find the truth of desire with anyone but your partner. There is no "women" or "men" or "sex". Sentences beginning with any of those words are usually meaningless. There is nothing but an infinite number of vibrating particles, and love.
And in saying that, of course, I'm probably wrong.
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