But should you point all this out, there is one last, offhand class-war dick move that people pull.
“Oh, yes,” they will reply, facetiously. “The working classes are wily—you can’t deny that. They have cunning.”
As if there must be different words for the intelligence of the poor. As if simply “being clever” only happens in certain wage brackets.
Ironic Bigotry—Because Only a Cunt Would Pretend to Be a Cunt
One of the biggest scourges of our time is “ironic bigotry”—the modish new invention that allows one to say absolutely unconscionable things, but then end it with “Joking!!!!,” thus serving . . . well, thus serving the purposes of Satan, as I explain here.
The problem with progress is you never know who is going to benefit from it. The groundbreaking cancer medicine that saves a dictator; the human rights legislation that frees a rapist. When people are driven to improve the world, they always imagine saving the good people—innocent children, kindly mothers—and not the bad. Marie Curie did not toil to save Scrooge McDuck.
But, of course, when the world gets better for kind people, it gets better for unkind people, also. The shiny, dazzling future does not, sadly, leave the ass-hats behind.
And, so, to comedy. Over the last few years, there has been a rise in a new kind of comedy—one which got its most public outing yet during Seth MacFarlane’s hosting of the Oscars, three weeks ago. I’m sure you know what happened by now—the jokes about domestic assault, “powerful” Jews, the word “nigger,” the nine-year-old African-American actress Quvenzhané Wallis still being too young to have sex with George Clooney; all topped with a song called “We Saw Your Boobs,” in which MacFarlane named every actress in the room who’d done a nude scene in a film—four of which centered around rape, or assault.
In the controversy that followed, the defense of MacFarlane was that he was satirizing a more bigoted era. MacFarlane himself did not look at, say, multi-Oscar-winning writer, actor, and director Jodie Foster, and immediately think of her breasts in the rape scene in The Accused. Of course not! But people used to. And he was just—as every good comedian should—acknowledging the historical elephant in the room.
I have noticed that comedians—white, male, straight comedians—have been acknowledging this elephant for a while, now. They have been acknowledging the hell out of it. Until MacFarlane on the Oscars, it had previously been in more select, partly concealed environments—characters in the postmodern sitcoms of Ricky Gervais, say, or edgy entertainers on the boys’ clubs of Top Gear or Mock the Week. Ironic bigotry, faux misogyny. Pretend racism, satirical homophobia—all the comedy tropes we might, lightheartedly, group together under “being Satan’s craven ventriloquist dummy, for cash.”
So. Here’s the problem: in all these instances, the comedians were not acknowledging an elephant that wandered into the room—they brought the elephant into the room. All artists start with an empty page, or a silence—and this is what they wanted to talk about. Over and over. In a world of medicine and fast beats and revolution and prosthetic lungs growing in petri dishes, and universes dying at the end of telescopes, this is what they want to talk about, time and time again. Women and niggers and puffs, and funny dwarves, and mongs.
And how this feels to anyone who has struggled with who they were born as. It is as if you had, some years ago, been in a traumatic car crash. And you had a work colleague who, every morning, greeted you with, “Hey! How you doing? God—do you remember when you nearly died in that terrible car crash?”
The first few times, you would think, “This person is acknowledging the bad things that happened to me—and I thank him.”
But by the end of the week—when he said it, every morning—you would be going, “This is a raging pervert who wants to remind me about bad things that have happened and see me get upset about it. This guy is nursing some kind of raging Taboo Boner. This dude has watched Crash too often.”
Because the thing about bigotry is that it’s like the flu. Every couple of decades it mutates into a new strain that catches you by surprise. Feelings buried that deep in the bone have a terrible, prehistoric smartness—they can rewire whole blocks of their DNA in order to survive. They find new hosts to quietly mutate in: Sitcom writers. TV presenters. Sports commentators. Oscar hosts. It lives in “banter” and “lads being lads.” Its first symptom is saying something that makes other people awkward—then greeting the resultant wince with a peevish, hurt “Hey—I was just joking.”
Which, if I might translate this down into its absolute, finite instruction, means, “Laugh, bitch.”
So, on the flanks of progress, ride ticks. Ironic bigotry is a parasite—it snacks on things people have wept over, and died for. When I see a straight white able-bodied millionaire making an “ironic” joke about when a nine-year-old African-American girl will be old enough for George Clooney to have sex with her, it’s a little bit like watching someone using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to mop up their spilled beer, or write a note to their cleaner.
As it turns out, ironic hatefulness works in pretty much the same way as real hatefulness. In 2013, we have no need for nostalgia for jokes about uptight women, powerful Jews, horny gays, repulsive transsexuals, and the weirdness of other ethnicities. Because you know what—I can remember these kind of jokes from yesterday. From ten minutes ago. From now, right now.
How I Learned About Sex
Right, let’s get fruity. It’s time to talk about pumping. When How to Build a Girl came out—a book that centers on a teenage girl who wishes to be, in her words, “a Swashfuckler”—I was asked to write a piece detailing my own “sexual awakening.”
As a consequence, in this piece, I explain to a world that has, in all truth, probably heard too much about my vagina, about how I learned all the “birds and bees” stuff. As you may imagine, it was a shambles throughout, but it’s still one of my favorite activities—just under “baked potatoes,” but above “second pint of gin.”
So at some point, inevitably, your parents give you the Talk. The Big Talk. The one awkward—sometimes upsetting—talk that initiates you into adulthood.
Unfortunately for me, as the child of hippies, the Big Talk wasn’t about the birds and the bees—but what we would do in the case of total nuclear annihilation, instead.
“As soon as they give the Four-Minute Warning, we’re pegging it to Wales,” my dad explained.
It was a sunny day in 1988, and we were in the back garden, mending a puncture on my bike.
“Obviously all the other cunts will have the same idea, and the motorways will be rammed,” Dad continued, fag wedged in mouth, “so we’ll be taking the back roads. I’m thinking B4176, through Claverley. But once we get past Telford, we’ll be fine.”
“Oh, good,” I said, carefully gluing the rubbery patch onto the wheel. I was glad we would be fine, once we got past Telford.
“Because most people will be dead by then,” he explained, cheerfully. “Twenty percent of the population gone with the first three bombs. POW! POW POW! There won’t even be any screaming. Not that you’d hear, anyway—because anyone within the twenty-five-mile blast radius will instantly go deaf. Just keep watching the news, love. If the Soviets start getting arsey, pack a suitcase. Keep it under your bed. Best to be ready. We’re only ever three bad days away from the start of Armageddon. Right, that’s done,” he said, standing up and looking at the bike. “You off to the library?”
“I suppose. While it’s still there,” I said, morosely.
I’d got the new Terry Pratchett reserved—but it seemed rather futile to go and collect it now, given that I might die before I finished it. Perhaps I’d just go and reread Jane Eyre, instead.
For another two years after this Big Talk, I fully expected the other Big Talk—the Sex Talk—to follow it: either my mother or my father finally taking me to one side, and telling me about sex. What it was, how to do it, and how I mustn’t do it until I was thirty-three and happil
y married. But the talk never came. There was total radio silence.
I even tried to start it once—“So! Sex!” I said brightly. “What’s that all about?”
“You’ve seen Bergerac,” my mother replied, gnomically, closing the conversation back down again, to my infinite confusion.
And that was the end of that.
Now, twenty years later, I can only presume that this was because they presumed that either (a) I already knew what it was—perhaps, indeed, because of Bergerac—and they didn’t want to patronize me or (b) they’d looked at me—fat, in NHS glasses, wearing an old tartan dressing gown instead of a coat, and apt to say “Forsooth!” when panicked—and calculated that, the Cold War being what it was, I was just very unlikely to lose my virginity before the entire Western world got wiped out, and it was a waste of their time—indeed, possibly taunting and cruel—to tell me about something I’d never get around to doing before I was vaporized. Either way, I never got the Big Talk.
But, thankfully, whatever your parents find too difficult to talk about, popular culture will invariably find fascinating. Mum and Dad might not have wanted to talk about sex—but telly, film, literature, newspapers, and pop music did. As my hormones staged a total coup over my life, I abandoned all other activities to become a full time Seeker of All the Filth Information out there. Thank you, world! Thank you for being full of rudeness!
I’d already grasped the basics thanks to the joyous, posh fucking in Jilly Cooper’s Riders and Rivals—generally very useful, albeit that they made me believe that champagne was an absolutely necessary part of copulation: either drunk, deployed in blow jobs, or just sprayed all over some hot nymphet splayed on a bed who clearly didn’t share a bunk bed with her sister, or have to worry about her only pajamas (polyester, BHS, with a fetching teddy bear print) having to be put in the wash afterwards.
However, all the information in Jilly Cooper novels was something that I was just going to have to wait to deploy, when I got near some men. As a very self-motivated girl—I had, only the other week, made myself a poncho out of a tablecloth—I wanted to find some information about sex that I could get moving with. I wanted Sex Homework, essentially. Something I could practice, in my spare, manless time—so that, when one finally got near me, I could spring knowledgeably into action.
And this came when Twin Peaks was shown on British television, in 1990. Although David Lynch’s cinematography and metanarrative, yadda yadda, what I found truly interesting in Twin Peaks was the scene where the sexy teenage Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) applies for a job as a prostitute at Twin Peaks’s spooky, high-class brothel, One-Eyed Jack’s.
In this legendary piece of television, the owners of One-Eyed Jack’s ask Horne if she can prove she would be a good employee at the brothel. Other sexy teenage prostitutes might have replied by bringing out their CV, or perhaps talking about their Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme. Or, frankly, just saying, “I have a vag”—but Audrey Horne was far too sassy for that.
Horne took a cherry from her cocktail, popped it into her perfect red mouth—and, ten seconds later, carefully removed from the tip of her pink tongue the stem now tied into a perfect knot.
This scene made an enormous impression on me: I absolutely presumed that tying a cherry stem into a knot was something all teenage girls had to master—up there with algebra, and how to fill in the paying-in slip on a Nationwide Building Society savings account—and decided to dedicate myself to learning this vital craft. I feared being at a party, some years hence, where all the other women were assiduously crocheting fruit stems with their tongues, while I stood in the corner going, “So! Anyone know any great recipes using leftover mince? I do! BIG TIME!”
As cherries were far too luxurious an item to be on our family’s shopping list—the only cherries I’d ever come across before were the ones in tins of Del Monte fruit salad—I improvised with a piece of string, and spent long hours in my room, alone, quietly gurning as I tried to tie it into a knot with my tongue.
Within a week I’d mastered the art, and was utterly triumphal—only to find that, within my house, there was a very limited audience for viewing my sex skills.
“Do you need a poo?” my sister Caz asked as I sat with her, one night, quietly contorting my face as I worked on a particularly small piece of string. “You look like you’re in pain.”
When I exultantly spat the knotted string out into my hand, she looked at it and said, horrified, “Is that your phlegm? There’s what looks like a bit of lung in it. I think you have tuberculosis,” and left the room with nose and mouth covered with her jumper sleeve.
“I’m practicing being sexual!” I shouted after her. A younger sibling stared at me—then started to cry.
I would like to report that knowing how to tie a cherry stem in a knot with my mouth did, one day, pay off—bagging me a handsome lover who subsequently blew my mind. As it turned out, the only time I ever performed the trick with a man around was twenty years later, at the after-show of an Eddie Izzard gig, in Manchester, where I was with my sister Caz, standing by the buffet.
“Remember all those years ago, when I used to tie a piece of string in a knot with my mouth?” I asked her.
“Unfortunately, yes,” she replied. “I’m still waiting for you to cough yourself to death, to be honest.”
“I reckon I could take a piece of frisée lettuce from that salad,” I said, pointing, “and tie that in a knot with my mouth.”
One minute later, I proved my point admirably as I ejected into my palm a piece of knotted lettuce. At that point, Eddie Izzard came up to us.
“I’ve tied a piece of lettuce in a knot with my tongue!” I told him, proudly proffering my bolus of veg and gob.
“And is that . . . useful?” he asked.
And I had to admit that today, and for over twenty years, the answer had been, very much, “No. Not really. I mean, like, never at all.”
So, by the age of seventeen, my interest in sex was still unabated. You know in memoirs by boys about being, say, football fans, where they talk about being captivated by the game at the age of eleven—and by the time they’re seventeen they’re traveling across the country to dedicatedly see York City at every away fixture? I was like that—but with shagging.
By the time I was seventeen, I’d decided I wanted to be a great lay. A really amazing lay. “See her? She’s a legendary piece of ass,” I wanted people to say, at literary parties, pointing at me.
This is the point where you might expect me to say, “But it proved very difficult—if not impossible.” Traditional narrative insists that this would be the part where I would begin to struggle, against the odds, for decades, in order to fulfill my dearly held dream.
But that’s because traditional narratives are written by boys—who do find it difficult to get laid. If you’re a girl, on the other hand, you can get laid any time you like. Seriously. Fat, badly dressed, shy, awkward—not even actually in a room with a man at all—there is nothing that can be so “wrong” with a woman that she can’t go and have sex any time she wants, merely by uttering this infallible magic spell to a man: “Would you like to have some sex with me?”
And this is one of the things I like about men: they’re uncomplicated. Sex is fun, they think—so I would like to do it whenever I can. Why not? It was certainly how I felt about it. Yes, sex can be a potentially risky activity for a woman—but I was in a fairly closed social circle, shagging colleagues and friends of friends, and for me at least, it was less dangerous than riding a bicycle around town: I was still very shaky on the difference between “left” and “right,” didn’t understand the Highway Code, and often got distracted if a pigeon flew past. I was much safer on top of a man than on a bicycle.
And the thing was, I just quite liked the idea of gaining a lot of experience, and I was piqued by the idea that sex is the only skill where experience can be seen as a bad thing—for women, anyway. You would never denigrate a lady plumber for having fitted over a thou
sand toilets, or a lady pilot for having landed a thousand planes. Why, then—in a world of contraceptives, cheerfulness, and feminism—was landing a thousand penises apt to have you titled a slag?
So I decided not to care about being called a slag—as a writer, I simply pressed “delete” on it, in my head, knowing how easy-to-remove words ultimately are—and embarked on a two-year pumpy quest around London. And I have to say, it was all very interesting. It wasn’t romantic, and the sex was often quite bad, but it definitely was—as all ardently pursued hobbies are—fascinating. Also, confusing. During my Sex Quest years—I used to refer to myself as a Lady Sex Pirate, or Swashfuckler, in my head—I was given a series of bewildering pieces of advice by men.
One man told me that the secret of being a good lay was: “Never let a hand lie idle. Always keep them both busy.”
Eager to show I was a good student, the next time we had sex I noticed that one of my hands was, indeed, lying idle—and started to pat him on the back, absently, as if trying to wind a baby.
Another man at a party noticed I was fat, and proceeded to explain to me what fat girls are “like.”