Watching the English

RULES OF SEX

'How's the Englishness book going? What chapter are you working on?'

'The one about sex.'

'So, that'll be twenty blank pages, then?'

I've lost count of the number of times I heard this response - or others like it, such as: 'That'll be a short chapter!' 'Oh, that won't take long, then!' 'Oh, that's easy: "No Sex Please, We're British!"' 'But we don't have sex, we have hot water bottles!' 'Lie back and think of England, you mean?' 'Will you explain the mystery of how the English manage to reproduce?'. And these were all from English friends and informants. Foreigners occasionally made similar jokes, but the English almost invariably did so. Clearly, the notion that the English do not have much sex, or have a laughably low sex-drive, is widely accepted as fact - even, indeed especially, among the English themselves.

Or is it? Do we really believe in the popular international stereotype of the passionless, reserved, sexually naive, amorously challenged English? The bloke who would really rather be watching football, and his wife who would prefer a nice cup of tea? And, moving up the social scale, the awkward, tongue-tied, timid, public-schoolboy character, and his equally clueless horsey female counterpart who cannot stop giggling? Is this really how we see ourselves? Is this really how we are?

In purely factual, quantitative terms, our sexless image is inaccurate. The English are human, and sex is naturally as important to us as to any other members of the species. Our sexually incompetent reputation is not borne out by the facts and figures, which suggest that we manage to copulate and reproduce just like the rest of the world. If anything, we start younger: the English have the highest rates of teenage sexual activity in the industrialized world, with 86 per cent of unmarried girls sexually active by the age of nineteen (the US comes a poor second, with 75 per cent). There are also plenty of other nations that are far more prudish and repressive about sex than the English, and where the English are regarded as dangerously permissive. Our censorship laws may be stricter than many other European countries', and our politicians more likely to be forced to resign over what the French, say, would consider minor sexual peccadilloes, but in most respects, by international standards, we are fairly liberal.

Stereotypes do not come out of thin air, however, and one as widely recognized and acknowledged as the un-sexy English must surely have at least some basis in reality. Sex may be a natural, instinctive, universal human activity, which the English must perform like everyone else - but it is also a social activity, involving emotional engagement with other humans, contact, intimacy and so on, which we have already established are not exactly our strong points. Still, our apparent readiness to accept this decidedly unflattering stereotype (we are much more patriotically defensive about our weather than about our sexual prowess) could be seen as somewhat bizarre, and requires explanation.

Looking back at my research notes, I find that I was continually struck by the difficulty of having any sort of sensible conversation about sex with English informants. 'The English simply cannot talk about sex without making a joke of it,' I complained in my notebook, 'usually the same joke: If one more person offers to "help me with my research" for the sex chapter, I'm going to scream.' The mere mention of the word 'sex' seems automatically to trigger a quip or witticism or, among the less articulate, a crude nudge-nudge remark, a bit of Carry-On-style ooh-ing and face-pulling, or at the very least a snigger. This is more than a rule: it is an involuntary, unthinking reflex - a knee-jerk response. Mention sex, and the English humour reflex kicks in. And we all know that self-deprecating jokes are the most effective, the most widely appreciated form of humour. The 'blank pages' quips about my sex chapter were thus not necessarily a sign that we fully accept the sexually-challenged-English stereotype, but just a typically English reaction to the word 'sex'.

Why do we find sex so funny? We don't, not really: it's just that humour is our standard way of dealing with anything that makes us feel uncomfortable or embarrassed. This is surely one of the Ten Commandments of Englishness: when in doubt, joke. Yes, other nations joke about sex, but none, in my experience or to my knowledge, does so with the same tedious knee-jerk predictability as the English. In other parts of the world, sex may be regarded as a sin, an art form, a healthy leisure activity, a commodity, a political issue and/or a problem requiring years of therapy and umpteen self-help 'relationship' books. In England, it is a joke.