The Virtual Stoa

I was first told about dogging in 2002, when I was visiting Josephine in Rome, where she was living at the time. One of her archaeologist colleagues there — someone who has also, as it happens, told a lie to the Queen — explained the phenomenon to me. But I didn’t fully absorb what I was being told, so for quite a while afterwards I mistakenly thought that dogging was something that Italians did in autostrada lay-bys, even though dogging is, when you think about it, clearly a deeply, deeply English activity.

(So no good for Gordon Brown’s Britishness crusade. On the other hand, I see that googling “dogging Scotland” gets me 200,000 hits, and “dogging Wales” gets me 150,000, so perhaps a case could be made for “British values” teaching in schools to include a how-to module on dogging. I’d have thought it was far too cold and wet in Scotland and Wales. “Dogging Northern Ireland” nets you a mere 37,000 pages, so perhaps it never really took hold over there, or perhaps the internet hasn’t yet reached Ulster, or something.)

Anyway, for reasons I never began to understand, by about 2003 the Virtual Stoa had made it onto at least one list of “UK dogging websites”, and a surprising number of people would show up in the stats as coming to the Stoa in search of “dogging in Bedfordshire” and the like. (Also puzzling, since the VS isn’t known for its coverage of Life in Bedfordshire, but there we go.) And, over the years, I’ve kept half an eye on dogging in our national life, although I think the only sustained discussion we’ve had here at the Stoa was this one last year.

Fast forward now to 2008, and in February I was surprised to see in the site referral stats that someone had visited the Stoa looking for “daniel davies dogging”. (Back then it was the fourth hit; now it’s dropped to sixteenth.) I dropped blogland’s Daniel Davies (aka dsquared) a note to tell him that someone was onto him, and he said that he thought it might be something to do with this guy, “or at least I profoundly hope that’s what they were looking for”. And, yes, it turns out that another chap called Daniel Davies has written a state-of-the-nation novel about dogging, hence the title, The Isle of Dogs, which was published not so long ago. (And just as the person who came to the Stoa was presumably looking for the novelist but found the blogger, so over here there’s someone down in the comments who’s looking for the blogger on a page about the novelist.)

Anyway: I read The Isle of Dogs the other day, being generally in favour of the idea that people are writing novels about dogging, but unfortunately it was crap. (This bloke liked it, though. Where I thought it was a largely predictable string of clichés, he thought it was ” a near-flawless analysis of British society”. De gustibus, et cetera.)

Under the Tories’ new plans, can lesbians just write “David Cameron”, “George Osbourne” or perhaps even “Andrew Lansley” in the bit of the form where they have to mention a “male role model”, or is it a bit more complicated than that?

Coming out of the monkey-house at the ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes here in Paris yesterday, we read a notice about the orang-utans, which said, among other things, that

“Sa mère Wattana rejoindra prochainement un groupe de femelles élevant leurs petits à Appeldoorn, en Hollande, afin de compléter l’entraînement qu’elle a suivi à la Ménagerie pour recouvrer un comportement maternel.”

And what was the matter with her comportement maternel, we wondered?

The internet, as ever, comes to the rescue. This page starts with a disussion of La grande erreur de Rousseau, but eventually gets to the ape in question:

“Des observations récentes, en milieu artificiel, suggèrent même que les grands primates sont susceptibles d’apprendre la culture et les comportements d’une espèce voisine, y compris en ce qui concerne des éléments aussi sensibles à la sélection que les comportements sexuels. L’exemple de Watana, célèbre jeune femelle orang-outan de la ménagerie du Jardin des plantes à Paris, qui reçut des éléments de culture sexuelle bonobo au zoo de Stuttgart et se retrouva plus tard rejetée brutalement en milieu orang-outan, est à cet égard particulièrement édifiant!”

Regular readers of Popbitch can probably guess what’s going on here — the giveaway phrase, culture sexuelle bonobo, will be setting off the alarm bells. But there’s also this page which gives a few more details:

“Le second exemple concerne une amie orang- outan, Wattana. Elle appartenait, de naissance, à cette espèce solitaire dont les comportements sexuels, dans la nature, sont rares, pendant le court oestrus des femelles et plutôt calmes. Les hasards de la gestion des parcs zoologiques l’ont fait élever parmi des bonobos, chimpanzés bien connus pour leurs performances sexuelles permanentes et variées, nombreuses et brèves, entre partenaires de toutes combinaisons de sexes. Eduquée par ce groupe, Wattana fût ensuite “mariée” à un orang mâle qui, d’abord, prit si mal ses grimaces provocatrices et propositions sexuelles explicites qu’il fallut les séparer ! Dans un deuxième temps, introduite dans un groupe familial, Wattana fût acceptée par son fiancé, dont elle modifia culture et comportements, ainsi que ceux des autres membres du groupe!”

Grimaces provocatrices! Anyway, this seems to be the deep background to help explain why she’s now off in Holland to recover her comportement maternel. The scientists seem to be interested in the case, as it’s a good example of the extent to which sexual behaviour is learned, rather than innate. (There’s also an academic article out there about Wattana’s talents with knots.)

And for more on the culture sexuelle bonobo, you might start here.

Edward Carpenter, English socialist and champion of gay sex. A clerical fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Carpenter resigned his holy orders and left for the North, teaching astronomy at Leeds and living from 1880 near Sheffield with his lover, Albert Fearnehough. He published Toward Democracy anonymously in 1883; from 1882 he was a market gardener and helped to popularise sandal-making as a suitable activity for socialists. He wrote a programme for the Sheffield Socialist Society in 1886, as well as “England Arise: a Socialist Marching Song”, and his 1889 Fabian Lecture was published as Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. He began his major works on sex in the 1890s, with Homogenic Love, and its Place in a Free Society later republished as Love’s Coming of Age. His most widely-read work was The Intermediate Sex, published in 1908. A pacifist, he opposed both the Boer War and the First World War. Born in Brighton, 29 August 1844, died in Guildford, 28 June 1929. His grave is here.

The curious thing about this piece in yesterday’s tehgraun is how few of the pleasures these intellectuals list — country music, Elvis Presley, Trinny and pro-wrestling, baseball, and so on — ought to induce guilt in any way, shape or form. (The odd inclusion is James Wood’s nomination of car magazines, but that stands out because it’s hard to see how they could be pleasurable.) Still, I don’t suppose that this crowd was going confess an interest in horse-porn or dogging to a random journalist.

Thinking of dogging, as I suppose we all do from time to time, is this still something that the Great British Public pursues at night in motorway laybys, or was it very much an early-millennium fad? And if it has faded from the scene, did fashions just change, or did the police develop some effective anti-dogging strategies when they weren’t investigating cash-for-peerages? Or something else?

(The rest of you won’t be interested.)

(more…)

Jasper Milvain buys the Saturday edition of the Guardian, and has very kindly forwarded to me a discussion of hair that appeared there yesterday, and which was curiously suppressed from the online edition. John Mullan was reviewing Alastair Fowler’s new edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Here’s Mullan:

“So if the longer notes at first appear digressive, they return you to the poem convinced that the editorial digression showed you the very by-ways of Milton’s imagination. Take the long paragraph of Fowler’s small print excited by Milton’s first description of Adam and Eve’s hairstyles — of Adam’s “hyacinthine locks” and Eve’s “wanton ringlets”. We start with Saint Paul’s strictures on when women should cover their hair, then wander through a mini-essay on the significance of hair in epic poetry, a parenthesis on Milton’s own hairstyle and hair-colouring, suggestive examples of the depiction of women’s hair in 17th-century painting and some speculation about Milton’s “special sexual interest in hair”. You might think this is like listening to an engagingly eccentric professor, free-associating, in the library of his mind, yet soon the clinching references to the ways the poem fixes on Eve’s “golden tresses” convince you otherwise. Her “dishevelled” hair signifies what is both lovely and vulnerable about here, and the poet is as fascinated as the devil who gazes at her from his hiding place.”

Here’s what Fowler wrote in the 1971 edition of his book (I think I’ve got a later edition at home, so I’ll post any of Fowler’s subsequent thoughts on hair before too long):

“iv.301-8. The hair-length proper for each sex follows directly from the statement of their hierarchic relation; for, according to St Paul, ‘a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man: for her hair is given her for a covering’ (1 Cor. xi 7, 15; cp. the A. V. marginal glass on 10, which explains the covering is a ’sign that she is under the power of her husband’). hyacinthine locks] When Athene ’shed grace about his head and shoulders’, Odysseus’ hair flower ‘like the hyacinth flower’ (Homer, Od. vi 231). If a colour were implied, it might be either blue, the colour of the hyacinth flower or gem (i.e., the sapphire; cp. l. 237n), or just possibly tawny (the hyacinth of heraldry, near to the colour of M.’s own hair), or black (Eustathius’ gloss on the Homeric passage) or very dark brown (Suidas’ gloss); in fact, almost any colour at all. But it is just as likely that a shape is meant (the idealized treatment accorded to hair in antique sculpture?), or an allusion to the beautiful youth Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo but doomed to die. The elaborateness of the present passage lends some support to the theory that M. had a special sexual interest in hair. (In this connection cp. 496f, Lycidas 69, 175.)”

And here’s John Milton, Paradise Lost, iv.300-311:

“His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
She as a veil down to her slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.”

There’s a story in today’s Observer about the children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, based on the true story of the love of Roy and Silo, two male penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo. We bought a copy in San Francisco’s A Different Light last year for one of our nephews, and it’s a pretty good book, with lots of pictures of penguins in it.

The Observer article, however, does rather overdraw the contrast between “liberal Manhattanites” and “small towns in the American heartland”. Tango is basically a conservative text, which strongly implies that the gay penguins’ relationship is legitimated through the baby-penguin-rearing activity that transforms them into a family unit deserving of respect. So it’s basically an Andrew-Sullivan-inflected gay penguin children’s book.

What America needs is a book to celebrate the lives of queer and sluttish non-baby-penguin-rearing male penguins. This is a group that is strikingly underrepresented in America’s lucrative and high-profile children’s book market.

In addition to its pair-bonded lesbian geese (Alice and Gertrude, I think), San Francisco Zoo used to have a nymphomaniac lady penguin. I wonder what happened to her.

The Mail on Sunday devoted a lot of space to Mr Prescott’s difficulties, and printed excerpts from the diaries of Ms Tracey Temple, and one entry refers to “phone sex” with Mr Prescott. But in the “news” article that accompanied these extracts, “phone sex” had become “coldly sordid phone sex”. So is it that in the world of the Mail on Sunday all phone sex is coldly sordid, by definition, so that “coldly sordid phone sex” is tautologous (and therefore redundant), or was the paper suggesting that there are (at least) two kinds of phone sex, the coldly sordid kind and (let’s say) the warmly uplifting kind, but that they had reason to think that this was the former variety (even though the diary remained strictly neutral on this point)?

… Paul Marsden, who probably strutted and fretted his final hour upon the public stage yesterday, and, with luck, will be heard no more.

To mark his passing from public consciousness, if not from bloggers’ memory, I’ll reprint both his finest piece of sex-verse, “She Came In The Night”, together with my own response, hastily written when a commenter at the Stoa suggested that we should be more impressed by the rhyme scheme than in fact we are.

(It is a great shame that Mr Marsden’s collected poems are no longer available on the web. If anyone ever archived a copy of “Grand Old Man” in particular, please get in touch.)

Call

Dark hair, alive billowing as a trapped kite
Marching forward, confident and right,
Her hips swaying and her red lips tight
Then that smile so devastating in its might,
Tongue rippling across teeth so white.
Breasts rising as I feel the urge to bite.
Eyes stalking its prey, she’s relishing the fight.

Who would mess with this amazing sight?
In awe of womanhood so sexual and bright,
A wondrous sweet smell exacerbates my plight,
Arching her back, stretched to its full height,
I am captured forever, dazzled by feminine light.
As she came in the night.

Response

“She came in the night” –
This erotic poem by Paul Marsden might
Be one to set my dullard’s soul alight,
Thrill my mind and make my world more bright,
Fill my heart with parliamentary verse delight
And end MPs’ collective literary blight
With sexy words that intrigue and excite –
So shall I give this sonnet a big green light?

It’s strongly tempting to remain polite
To change the subject, not be quite forthright,
Refrain from judging it as black or white.

But no, this time I’m going to pick a fight:
The MP should be quite contrite:
The trouble is, his rhymes are shite.

Not a pretty combination, I know, but Peter the Great links to this fun story about how some Welsh Tories from a place I’ve never heard of called Delyn are trying to wrest their website domain name back from the clutches of evil pornographers.

(Why is it that Welsh Tories are vulnerable to this kind of thing, anyway? Lots of the spam messages that appeared at the VS over Christmas allegedly contained links to some Vale of Glamorgan Conservatives site, which was presumably going to sell me viagra or phentermine or low cost meds or something equally useful.)

Anyway, the detail I like is the “Email Alerts” box in the middle of the CNN page, which allows you to request notification about stories that appear about the “British Conservative party”, on the one hand or “Porn”, on the other. It’s a nice binary, though perhaps not quite the exclusive-and-exhaustive kind of non-deconstructable binary we like over here at the Virtual Stoa.

Sarah’s worrying away about pronouns and discussing valuable ways of playing havoc with conventional (i.e. patriarchal) written English — all of which reminds me that there’s a handy gender-neutral pronoun for all the family, which starts out from the clunky “he or she or it” and elegantly contracts it to “h’orsh’it”.

My brother Michael’s blog is now in both the gold and silver medal positions on google for “Worthing sex entertainment“.

As he writes, “This suggests that either I inadvertently provide a great deal of it (I do hope not), or that there’s not a lot to be had.”

Because liberals are hotter, apparentlly.

Over here (but possibly not if you’re at work).

If you haven’t read it already, do go and have a look at “Sex Tips For Red State Girls” over at the New York Times, before they stick it in their archive and make you pay for it in a few days time. It’s all about tryin’ to make a livin’ sellin’ vibratin’ sex toys and other useful things in the Bible Belt.

“I realised I was an alcoholic the day I mounted Brian Sewell.”

From Tanya Gold, in today’s Guardian. The rest of the article doesn’t live up to the genius of the opening line. But then, how could it?

Not that the Virtual Stoa’s got a one-track mind, or anything, but Martin raised a good point in the comments to the post below: why hadn’t I linked to the now-legendary page on Antebellum Parasexuality? Well, there it is, and VS-readers who are keen to learn about farmyard sex in the pre-Civil War South can now follow the link to the 1998 discussion and enlighten themselves in the company of some of the leading students of American Studies.

The last six years have been kind to the perpetrators of Antebellum Parasexuality and both continue to go from strength to strength: Martin has recently been elected a Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St John’s College, Cambridge and knows a great deal about the deep metaphysical structure of contemporary theories of egalitarian justice; Dominic has recently had his first book, Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism, published by Random House, and has some alarmingly good literary representation.

But they’re still both Very Naughty Boys.

The Virtual Stoa is unusual among websites in not being chiefly a repository for images of animal porn. But things are now going to change, bringing this page into line with the rest of the worldwide internetweb.

This discussion below got onto the subject of Gerald of Wales’s History and Topography of Ireland (composed around 1185), and this provides me with ample excuse to reproduce two of the classic mediaeval illustrations that accompany �56, on “A goat that had intercourse with a woman”, and �57, on “A lion that loved a woman”.

Here’s Gerald on the Irish goat:

“How unworthy and unspeakable! How reason succumbs so outrageously to sensuality! That the lord of the brutes, losing the privileges of his high estate should descend to the level of the brutes, when the rational submits itself to such shameful commerce with a brute animal!”

Gerald then sagely observes that

“Although the matter was detestable on both sides and abominable, yet it was less so by far on the side of the brute who is subject to rational beings in all things, and because he was a brute and prepared to obey by very nature. He was, nevertheless, created not for abuse but for proper use…”

And here’s Gerald on the French lion:

“Sometimes when he escaped from his cage and was in such fierce anger that no one would dare to go near him, they would send for Johanna who would calm his anger and great rage immediately. Soothing him with a woman’s tricks, she led him wherever she wanted and changed all his fury immediately into love.”O Beasts! Both! Worthy of a shameful death! But such crimes have been attempted not only in modern times but also in antiquity, which is praised for its greater innocence and simplicity. The ancients also were stained with such unspeakable deeds. And so it is written in Leviticus: “If a woman approaches any beast to have intercourse with him, ye shall kill the woman, and let the beast die the death”. The beast is ordered to be killed, not for the guilt, from which he is excused as being a beast, but to make the remembrance of the act a deterrent, calling to mind the terrible deed.”

Is this sound reasoning from our Gerald? Six hundred years later, this argument was apparently still being made, calling forth Jeremy Bentham’s dissent in his classic essay (and longstanding Virtual Stoa favourite) “Of Offences Against One’s Self“. There he considered the problem of human-animal sex (”Accidents of this sort will sometimes happen; for distress will force a man upon strange expedients”), but expressed the thought that laws against this kind of things were probably a bad idea. He then wrote this:

“Some persons have been for burning the poor animal with great ceremony under the notion of burning the remembrance of the affair. (See Puffendorf, Bks. 2, Ch. 3, 5. 3. Bacon’s Abridg. Title Sodomy. J.B.) A more simple and as it should seem a more effectual course to take would be not to meddle or make smoke about the matter.”

Bentham then turned his attention to the “most incontestably pernicious” of “all irregularities of the venereal appetite”, which was masturbation, though while he judged that this was Very Bad Indeed, he didn’t really think it should be banned, either, for “no punishment could ever have any effect” as “it can always be committed without any danger or at least without any apparent danger of a discovery”. So there we are. (Which reminds me that I haven’t yet read Thomas Lacqueur’s Solitary Sex, though I’m looking forward to very much indeed. No time, no time.)[Gerald of Wales snippets from the Penguin ed., translated by John O’Meara, pp.75-6.]

Not so long ago they were issuing gay and lesbian marriage licenses just up the road from where I used to live in San Francisco, California (and in the exact spot where Jo and I were married all those years ago); and at midnight last night they started issuing marriages just round the corner from where I used to live — for a much longer period of time — in Cambridge, Mass.

With luck, the other towns in the US that I’ve never set foot in might begin to follow suit…

I’m surprised to report that someone has recently (in the last hour) visited the Virtual Stoa while searching with this search string. Since the only Dolly with whom the VS has ever been concerned is this one, I’m a little concerned, and hope whoever it was didn’t find what he (probably a he, don’t you think?) was looking for over here.

Earnest teenager Jade Farrington (OK, that’s a horrible thing to call anyone — I take it back) realises that she hasn’t been paying attention to the Adultery Drama That Is Gripping The Nation but goes on to ask, “Does anyone apart from the media and Beckham’s obsessives actually care?”