"Hi! My name’s Carl Bradshaw and I work as a writer for Manhattan's
favourite glossy men’s magazine! Every Wednesday my friends and I meet
to do lunch at our favourite trendy high street café. We 'catch up' and
chat about all manner of subjects, be it literature (erotic), films
(pornographic) or politics (who’s fucking whom)- somehow the
conversation always seems to come round to sex, which we love to talk
about - in gynaecological detail!
I often wonder if our parents fed us nothing but liquidised jazz-mags
as babies, given the amount of base crudity that spews from our
unapologetic mouths. Anyway, there’s Martin. He’s the high flying
business type, reasonably restrained though he does like to talk about
sex quite a bit. Second, there’s Charlie. He owns an Art gallery and is
probably the most reserved and easily embarrassed of the group, though,
truth be told, he will often indulge us in conversations about sex.
Finally, there’s Sam, who seemingly has no dimension beyond sex; its
all he talks about and all he does.
He often regales us with humorous takes on all his escapades. When he
talks, we all listen! Whether its fucking three women in one day and
treating them like shit or dumping some poor girl because her tits were
just too damn small, it’s a non-stop roller-coaster ride of valueless
intercourse and emotional torture for the hip men of today like us.
Best still, we are applauded for doing so!”
To be serious for
a moment, the programme Sex and the City certainly raised a number of
interesting ideas. It is, even by title alone, a strong statement about
the sexual strength of the modern woman. It bellows at the top of its
lungs that women are no longer the meek and the mild, and that men
aren’t the only gender who can engage in promiscuity for the sake of it
and be actively encouraged by their peers. However, in this particular
playground of immature one-upmanship between the sexes, you feel the
women jumped just a little to hard on the end of the equality see-saw
and the men ended up with bloodied faces . For example, I would see a
programme that utilised the content as I hypothesised in the opening
paragraph as sexist.
The fact is, such a show would never be made because (and rightly so)
it would be seen as a chauvinist male fantasy where any women involved
are merely receptacles for sex, their characters or emotions neither
visible nor explored. Surely, then, shouldn’t this work the other way,
too? I’m neither threatened and far from a prude (which is why I shall
be discussing horse dildos if you read on…), but feel that we have
somehow tainted ourselves in trying to effectively outdo each other on
all matters gender-related. This isn’t an issue of men vs. women, its
one of
people.
However, this article is not to ponder
whether we still strive for equality in the real sense of the word, or
the troubling contradiction the aforementioned show portrays about the
modern woman (“We are strong, we are smart, we are powerful…but I have
two hundred pairs of shoes and that’s what matters!”). To concentrate
on such topics would probably have me labelled sexist, so lets make a
few issues clear: I am all for equality. I do not hate women (Though
certain ones who held screening parties and cried after S.a.t.C
finished and continued to bemoan the loss of it while such apparently
trivial things such as the Madrid rail bomb took place tread a fine
line…).
I certainly appreciate the incredible hardships women have had to
endure just to be recognised in a society that was (and perhaps still
is) overly controlled by men. In many cases this struggle continues.
However, I believe that revelling in attempts to match a stereotypical
ideal of “lad” culture is a damaging idea - for either gender. Are we
really so shallow? We lack the sufficient depth to drown a small wasp
if our consistent gender representations are anything to go by. Yet we
never challenge these stereotypes; in many cases, we are even happy to
conform to them! [BB]
On a slightly bizarre but relevant
tangent, I do want to bring up the currently puzzling topic of
masturbation. I find the subject in context fascinating, humorous and
arousing, occasionally all at the same time which can sometimes get
messy…For instance: just when did sex toys become something widely
acceptable and readily talked about? Whilst you may get gangs of women
giggling as they extol the virtues of the “rampant rabbit,” where are
the men proudly proclaiming “I screwed a latex replica vagina last
night!” There aren’t any (Of these men I mean, not latex replica
vaginas of which I am sure there are plenty). Again, why should this be
so?
As the sex-toy industry grows richer and no doubt so does the battery
one, women become increasingly unabashed as to their masturbatory
habits. I think this is fantastic, though I do wonder why owning a
dildo is to be liberated, whilst to masturbate as a man is to be
painted as 'lonely,' 'sad,' and something of a 'desperate' in many
circles. This is boundless, as I enjoyed many years in a fruitful
relationship with my right hand until it left me, bemoaning the fact
that our union was “based on nothing but sex.” It took half the
contents of my house with it and moved in with an elderly man from
Crewe. The gold-digging shit!
Back to the point: Unlike the
earlier part of this article where I expressed concerns about
objectifying people, I have no problem with people utilising objects
for their own gratification. Of course, this does mean our wide range
of fetishes come out in the open and onto the sex shop shelves. The
following is true: If it's there, it's there because there’s a market
for it. That's why I was rather confused when I came across the
following on an online sex toy website:
Dong For Horse Lovers Exact replica of a horse's tool for women who can take a little bit more. (47cm long, 5cm diameter) Why oh why?
How small is the market for this? Surely it cannot be sizeable enough
to make the sale of such items profitable? Only bestiality fantasists
and females of the species involved would buy this, and even then you
have to ask how a horse has the time or money to order it, given that
their wages are small and their dial-up access pitifully slow.
At this point I’d just like to pre-empt any possible criticism that
follows these lines: “He talks about not assuming gender roles, and how
we should have more depth than just sex - then he talks about
masturbation for the rest of the article! What a hypocrite!” When in
actual fact as I write this I’m wearing high-heels and reading Proust.
So in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, what have we learned? We are
possibly nowhere near as close to sexual equality as we like to think
we are. A delicate line exists between shedding inhibitions, and
reducing ourselves to nothing more than a mass of organs in a rather
attractive skin-bag. Deep down, some of us are horse-dildo-loving
deviants. Finally and most importantly: Sex and the City was a crass,
lazy, mind-numbingly shallow televisual abortion dressed up in
ill-fitting sentimentality and cod-philosophy. Perhaps it would have
been wise for Carrie to have opened her laptop one day and pondered:
“Could I drown a wasp?”
It’s certainly something to think about.
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