Watching the English

AND SO TO BED...

But what about actual sex? Some of you may be feeling a bit cheated - in that I called this chapter 'Rules of Sex', and have so far said a lot about humour, flirtation, class-endogamy and so on, but apart from de-bunking the working-class potency myth, not a great deal about what the English are actually like in bed. And certainly nothing much about how our sexual performance differs from that of other nations.

There are two main reasons for this. First, being English, I find the whole thing a bit personal and embarrassing, so I've been procrastinating. (If you were here in my flat, I'd be prattling nervously about the weather and saying 'I'll just go and put the kettle on...') Second, there is a bit of a, um, er, how shall I put this? A data problem. The participant-observation method is a wonderful thing, but the observation bit does not include direct observation of people's sex lives, and the participant element does not involve having sex with a full representative sample of natives, or with a cross-cultural sample of foreigners for comparison. Well, anthropologists have been known to become intimately involved with the people they study (my father tells me that such liaisons used to be jokingly called 'cultural penetration'), but this has always been rather frowned upon. I suppose it's allowed if you're studying your own native culture, as I am - and yes, I have of course had English boyfriends, and a few foreign ones, but nothing like enough to constitute a scientifically representative sample. And in terms of direct experience, I'm not qualified to comment on the female half of the population at all.

But these are fairly lame excuses. A lot of social scientists write in great detail about sexual matters of which they have no direct personal experience. And although I have not had sex with a wide enough range of English people, my research has certainly involved enough discussion of the subject, with a respectably large and varied sample of both natives and foreigners, to gain at least some understanding of our sexual behaviour and its unwritten rules.

Sex-talk Rules

Discussing sexual matters with the English is not easy: although we are not particularly prudish, we find the subject embarrassing, and our methods of coping with or covering our embarrassment, such as knee-jerk humour and polite procrastination, mean that a great deal of my valuable research time is wasted on jokes, quips, witticisms, displacement weather-speak and tea-making. On top of this, the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule means that getting the English to give straight, serious, non-ironic answers to one's questions about sex can be a struggle.

To make my task even more difficult, there is an unwritten rule whereby English males tend to assume that a female who talks about sex at all, however indirectly, must be at least signalling sexual availability, if not actively chatting them up. An American friend of mine got into some trouble with this rule: she couldn't understand why so many English men seemed to be 'making passes' at her, and taking offence when she rejected their precipitate advances, when she had 'given them no encouragement at all'. Anxious to help (and spotting an opportunity for an experiment), I hung around and eavesdropped on some of her conversations with men in our local pub, and found that she was saying things like 'but that was just after I discovered my first husband was gay, so I was feeling a bit confused about my sexuality...' within about ten minutes of being introduced to someone. I explained that this kind of intimate disclosure, although undoubtedly commonplace in the land of Oprah, would be interpreted by many English males as the next best thing to a written invitation. When she somewhat reluctantly curbed her natural frankness, she found that the unwanted attentions ceased.

Great, I thought. Another successful rule-testing experiment - and with someone else acting as unwitting guinea-pig and breaking the rules for me. My favourite kind of field research. But although this test confirmed that I had correctly identified an unwritten rule, I could see that the rule itself was going to prove something of a handicap in my attempts to find out about English bedroom habits. I got round this problem in the usual ways - by fudging and cheating. I talked mainly to women, and to men I knew well enough to be sure that they would not misinterpret my questions. Women - even English women - can be quite open and honest with each other, in private, about the quirks and characteristics and attitudes of their male lovers, and indeed about their own, so I learnt a lot about both sexes just from them. And to be fair, I also gleaned quite a lot of useful information from discussions with male friends and informants, including one who somehow managed to combine an encyclopaedic knowledge of English females' sexual behaviour (thanks to a personal 'sample' of MORI-poll proportions) with an endearingly self-deprecating frankness about his own thoughts and habits.

The Rule-free Zone

So, after ten years or so of laborious, tactful information-gathering, what have I discovered about the private sex-life of the English? Actually, it's good news. Bed is the one place where we seem to shed almost all of our many and debilitating inhibitions; where we are, albeit temporarily, magically cured of our social dis-ease. Shut the curtains, dim the lights, take our clothes off, and you'll find we suddenly become quite human. We can, after all, engage emotionally with other humans. We can be passionate, open, warm, affectionate, excitable, impulsive - in a way you normally only see when we talk to our pets.

This is genuine disinhibition - not the rule-governed, so-called disinhibition of our Saturday-night or holiday-resort drunkenness, where we are merely acting out a prescribed social role, a sort of hammy caricature of what we think uninhibited behaviour ought to look like. Our sexual disinhibition is the real thing.

Of course, some of us are more free and abandoned between the sheets than others. In bed, we are ourselves, which means a wide range of different sexual styles - some a bit shy and tentative, others more confident; some talkative, others quiet; some clumsy, others expert; some creative or kinky, others more conventional; some perhaps a bit virtuoso-show-offy - depending on all sorts of factors such as age, experience, personality, how we feel about a particular sexual partner, our mood, and so on. But the point is that these factors influencing our varied sexual styles are personal - nothing to do with the 'rules of Englishness' that govern our social behaviour.

Every step leading up to the sexual act is shaped by these Englishness rules: where we meet our partner, how we flirt, what we eat at dinner and how we eat it, how we talk, the jokes we make, what we drink and the effects of alcohol on our behaviour, the car we drive home in and how we drive it (or our conduct on the bus or in the taxi), the house we take our partner home to and how we feel and talk about it, the dog who greets us, the music we play, the nightcap we offer, how the bedroom is decorated, the curtains we close, the clothes we take off... Everything, right up to that point, whether we like it or not, is at least partly determined by one or another of the hidden rules of Englishness. We do not stop being English while we are engaged in the sexual act but, for that relatively brief time, our actions are not governed by any particular, distinctively English set of rules. We have the same basic instincts as other humans, and exhibit much the same range and variation in our personal sexual styles as humans of any other culture. Bed, at least while we are actually having sex, is a rule-free zone.

The Textbook-sex Imbalance

Having said that, one can make a few generalizations about English sex. For example, English males are, as a rule, less likely than their American counterparts to read those earnest self-help books and manuals about sexual techniques. English females, even if they don't read the books, get a lot of this kind of information from women's magazines. Until fairly recently, this has meant a slight imbalance in the sort of 'textbook' sexual expertise that one can acquire from such reading.

But the most 'laddish' English men's mags now feature illustrated articles on 'how to drive women wild' and 'three easy steps to multiple orgasm' and so on - and even the illiterate can watch late-night educational sex programmes on Channel 4, or pseudo-documentary soft-porn on Channel 5 (programmes that are helpfully scheduled to start shortly after the pubs close) so our men are rapidly catching up. Many younger males - and even some trendy older ones - seem to have gathered, for instance, that performing a bit of token oral sex is de rigueur, just to prove you're not a total wham-bam Neanderthal. Some have even got past the stage of expecting to be awarded a medal for this.

Post-Coital Englishness

Apres sex or, if we have fallen asleep, the next morning, we revert to the usual state of awkward Englishness. We say:

'I'm terribly sorry, but I didn't quite catch your name...?'

'Would you mind very much if I borrowed a towel?'

'I'll just go and put the kettle on...'

'No! Monty! Put it down! We don't eat the nice lady's bra! What will she think of us? Drop it! Bad dog!'

'Sorry it's a bit burnt: the toaster's a bit temperamental, I'm afraid - doesn't like Mondays or something...'

'Oh, no, it's very nice. Ooh, yes - tea! Lovely, thank you!' (this delivered with at least as much enthusiasm as the cris de joie of the night before.)

All right, I'm exaggerating a little - but not much: all these are genuine, verbatim morning-after quotes.

Le Vice Anglais and the Funny-bottoms Rule

In The English, Jeremy Paxman devotes the first four pages of his chapter on sexual matters to what the French call 'le vice Anglais' - 'the English vice': flagellation (spanking, caning, and other assaults upon the bottom). At the end of his entertaining anecdotal survey of the topic, he admits, 'It would be silly to claim that 'the English vice' is widespread among the English. It is not. Nor, despite its name, is it unique to the English'. Quite. (And he might have added that even the name is hardly significant, as the French randomly designate as 'Anglais' things they disapprove of or wish to poke fun at - things we in turn call 'French': their term for 'French leave' is 'filer a L'Anglaise' - to run away like the English; a 'French letter' is a 'capote Anglaise'.)

But if this particular sexual kink is neither widespread among the English, nor unique to us, why give it such a lot of space and prominence? Paxman says that the 'central ambiguity' of this practice, 'that punishment is reward, and pain, pleasure - rings with English hypocrisy'. Well, maybe. But I think there is a simpler explanation for why he starts his sex chapter with this not-particularly-English vice, and that is the knee-jerk humour rule. When faced with any sort of discussion of sex, our humour reflex kicks in, and we make a joke of it. We also regard bottoms as intrinsically funny. So, if you've got to talk about sex, start with some funny stuff about bottoms62.

Page Three and the Un-erotic Bosoms Rule

Then, if possible, move on to bosoms, which we also find highly amusing. Paxman claims that 'English men are obsessed by breasts', citing the daily parade of page-three bosoms in the tabloid newspapers as proof of this fixation. I am not so sure. Breasts are a secondary sexual characteristic, and men in many parts of the world like to look at them - in magazines and so on, as well as in the flesh. I am not convinced that English men are any more obsessed with breasts than, say, American, Australian, Scandinavian, Japanese or German men. The daily breast-display on page three of the Sun, and in other tabloid papers, is, however, an interesting English phenomenon, and worth looking at a bit more closely.

In a national MORI survey, only 21 per cent of us expressed moral disapproval of the page-three breast parade. Of all the representations of sex in the media, topless page-three girls attracted the least condemnation, by a long way. Even among women, only 24 per cent had moral objections to page three, whereas nearly twice that number, 46 per cent, objected to soft-porn magazines in newsagents' (such as Playboy, with similar images), and 54 per cent thought cinema pornography was immoral. Now, this does not of course mean that the other 76 per cent of women actively enjoy looking at page three, but it does suggest that many do not regard it as 'pornography' - perhaps seeing it as something more innocuous, even though the pictures are much the same as those in soft-porn magazines.

When I read these statistics, I was intrigued, and started asking my own questions, trying to find out why both men and women seemed to regard page three as somehow different from other soft-porn images. In terms of numbers, although my 'sample' was much smaller, I got much the same results as the MORI poll - only about a fifth of my informants objected to page three. I was surprised to find that even some of my more feminist-minded informants could not work up much indignation about page three. Why was this? 'Because, well page-three girls - I mean, they're just a bit of a joke,' said one woman. 'You can't really take it seriously.' 'Oh - I suppose we're just used to it,' explained another. 'Page three is more like those saucy seaside postcards,' said a particularly astute informant. 'It's just daft, with the silly captions full of awful puns. You can't really feel offended by it.' A teenage girl was equally dismissive: 'Compared to what people download off the Internet, or even what you see on the telly - well, page three is so innocent, it's sort of quaint and old-fashioned'.

I noticed that almost all of the people I asked about page three, even a few of those who expressed disapproval, tended to laugh or at least smile as they responded. They would roll their eyes or shake their heads, but in a resigned, tolerant way, much as people do when they are talking about the minor misdemeanours of a naughty child or pet. Page three is a tradition, an institution, somehow reassuringly familiar, like The Archers or rainy Bank Holidays. George Orwell described the English working class as 'devoted to bawdy jokes' and talked about the 'overpowering vulgarity' of rude comic postcards. The ludicrous puns, wordplay and double-entendres in the page-three captions are as much a part of this tradition as the naked breasts, reminding us that sex is a bit of a joke, not to be taken too seriously. It is hard to see the 'tits and puns' on page three as pornography, any more than the bosoms and puns in a jokey seaside postcard or a Carry On film are pornography. They are not even really sexy. Page three is somehow just too daft, too cartoonishly ridiculous, too English to be sexy.

'England may be a copulating country, but it is not an erotic country' said George Mikes in 1977. This was an improvement on his original claim, in 1946, that 'Continental people have a sex-life; the English have hot-water bottles', but still not exactly flattering. He does have a point, though, which is borne out by my page-three findings: only the English could manage to make pictures of luscious, half-naked women into something quite as un-erotic as page three.