Britain: A Nation of Sex Cases

Hero of the Day: Franz Kafka

Listen to this...

I'll be honest, brutally honest, so honest it'll make you wince and your toes curl.

Kirsten Dunst tickles me in dark places.

And I would like to give Salma Hayek a right sorting.

There is a simple reason for this.

I am a heterosexual man.

Were I gay I would probably cite Johnny Depp as a target for my urges (he is, after all, the Lord High Master of Cool and the Grand Mufti of Style). If animals were my thing I might well wax lyrical about the feminine charms of Lassie and I once heard of a fella who got caught making love to a Black Forest Gateau so it's safe to say that there are some seriously far out proclivities out there.
Now I'm cool with that.
Let me say that sex is great and that we should all be doing it all of the time and all over the place... especially in places of worship. We should be like the French and promote it to the level of a national sport and introduce each other to mutual friends in terms of our sexual prowess. ("Alice, may I introduce you to Stan? He has the staying power of a 38 ton lorry apparently"). Yes, we should be sexually free, revelling in our ability to make the ladies tingle and the men go "oof!".

But we're not, you know.

No sir.

When it comes to sex, despite all our smug posturing, despite our Channel 4's and our Page Threes and our Sexy Soho Smut Shacks we are just as awkward and as clueless as we have always been.

"What bollocks!" I hear you cry "The bloke's off his head. We talk about sex morning, noon and night!"

And that, ladies and gents, is exactly my point.

We talk about it.

All the fucking time.

And it's driving me fucking nuts.

The British obsession with the smutty and the rude has wormed its way into every facet of our everyday lives. A mere glimpse at the television will confirm this.

When I was a nipper, Bob Hoskins urged us (for a healthy fee) that it was "good to talk". Remember that? British Telecom beamed that reassuring, smiling fatman to millions and we duly picked up the phone and spent hours talking shit to Auntie Wotsit in Adelaide.

Nowadays we have that floppy haired, flacid winkle man from 'Love Actually' who features in a string of adverts for BT so numerous they should give him his own fucking channel. The premise of this advert is that BT has helped him get laid with some sultry MILF in Coulsdon (or some such English Home Counties mortgage-til-Jesus-visits shithole). With all the deals and the gadgets and the billion ways to tell someone you'll be late for the macaroni cheese, Mr Flop Hair has embedded himself within both her family and her loins. The implication is that if you use BT and all the (generally useless) shit they have on offer, you too will be doing it six times a night with someone else's ex-wife.

What the fuck happened to Bob Hoskins?

I'll tell you what happened to Bob Hoskins. They fucked him off and replaced him with "Coulsdon Over 30s Gagging For It With Nerds".

Why?

I'll tell you why.

Because unless it's got shagging in it, no one will buy it. It doesn't matter if it's a chocolate bar, a washing up liquid or a toilet brush, unless the sales pitch features tits or arses or pelvic thrusts, nobody will touch it with a ten foot barge pole.

And that is what we have become. A nation of sex cases. So busy talking, giggling and obsessing about it, we never get round to actually doing it. When we eventually do get round to it, however, the problems really start.

Flop hair must allude to rhythmic grunting on the Ikea King Size in order to sell us his shoddy telephone services, that is one thing. Beneath this, however, lies something very different altogether.

Our childish fascination with all things porno has swiftly turned sex into a shallow commodity. The consequences of this are grave.

At this point I must head off the inevitable braying from the religious quarter.

The God-fearing loonies would say that the unhealthy obsession I have described is proof that their way of life is the right way.

I would tell them to fuck themselves as Christian fundamentalists have their own sicknesses to cure, such as the worrying propensity to rape children and then cover it up, or the insane insistence that condoms be banned from the developing world thus sentencing untold thousands of the faithful to a miserable death by AIDS. (That Ratzinger bastard is going to get some serious Fynder treatment soon, I can feel it in the water).

So bollocks to that lot.

Returning to the world of the reasoned and the sane, I will continue.

We all know that a lack of talent has long since ceased to be a barrier to success in the music business. The Spice Girls (who, to my absolute horror, are organising a "comeback tour", I mean Jesus wept...) knew this and proved it beyond doubt seeing as only one of them could hold anything resembling tune (the one who looked like a bloke... Butch Spice was it? I'm not sure...). They also proved that there is one commodity that, in this day and age, a woman can not do without if she intends to succeed.

And that commodity is: "Me love you long time!"

I don't want to call it "whoreing" or "prostituting" because frankly it isn't anything like it. It is merely the gyrating of an arse, or the waving of a boob or a wink or a nudge or a giggle. Blonde Spice spent three and a half years promising every man with a television that one day she was going to shag them, simply by smiling and winking into a soft focus lense. But despite all the lollipop licking and the thigh slapping... she didn't.
I'll tell you what she did do, though. She managed to get several million eight-year-olds to dress up in mini skirts and bikini tops and to tell us "what I really really want". Am I the only person who thought that all that was a little bit sick? And what the fuck did "Girl Power" actually mean? Germaine Greer clapped her hands like a seal and said it was the new dawn of a reenergised feminism or some shit. Yeah right, Germaine. You sure it wasn't just good old fashioned, "what d'ya think of my baps, fellas?!" because that's what I think it was. I'll tell you what it reenergised; the propensity for women with smallish brains to show off the parts that were not designed to see daylight much. And that has opened a whole new can of worms of is own.

Listen, women can wear what they like. I don't give a fuck what a woman wears unless it's a sodding burkha, and then I get the hump. But I'm not going to say it's wonderful that girls, barely old enough to buy cigarettes, walk semi-naked through our streets in the name of liberation. Because I don't think it's liberated at all. I think women are under intense pressure to look like they'll put out if you buy them an Irn-Bru and that sucks.

What also sucks is that a large proportion of men believe that if a woman is dressed in such a way and is raped, she is partly responsible.

Let me say this.

If you really believe that you are a sick motherfucker and you should go and see a doctor.

The truth of the matter is that women, just like men, want to be noticed and because of this some feel the need to show off their round bits.

Is that really necessary?

I don't think so.

But maybe I'm wrong, because all you've got to do is ask Mr Floppy and he'll tell you that he and the sultry MILF have made BT millions this year.

And the Spice Girls ARE making a comeback.

So maybe I've got it all wrong.

Maybe I'm the one with the problem.

Maybe I'm the one who needs to change.

Or maybe we're all just a nation of sex cases.