Unexpectedly, I just found this link, which takes you to several pieces I’ve had in the Independent on Sunday. But please see below for more detail.
We Get Drunk, We Lose It. It Isn’t Pretty But It Is Real (Jan 2004) Plus ca change…
As well as the main paper, I wrote several pieces for the late-lamented and most excellent Talk of the Town magazine supplement, which ran for about a year. It was edited by Ian Irvine, who has just recently become literary editor of the New Statesman. He was a great editor to write for.
Rabbits Don’t Chase Other Women, and They Never Get Tired (Jan 2004)
Hating the Americans? So Much Easier Than Hating Oneself (Dec 2003)
Why Do So Many People Have Children Who Are Unable To Bring Them Up? (Nov 2003)
I also did a piece called ‘Cigs And The City-A Woman’s Right To Roll Her Own’. (Nov 2003). It seems a charming anachronism now, but it bears a quick read, for history’s sake.
Last year, for the first time ever, I started rolling my own. Some of my friends were scandalised; anyone with a deep-seated fear of seeming ‘lower class’ shuns loose tobacco in horror. For them, loose tobacco conjures up images of shivering on a demo, of damp beer mats and a dog on a string; most of all, of being skint. I’m not unfamiliar with any of those things but, until then, I never saw myself going the whole hog and rolling up in solidarity.
Note, also, that I’ve never been into cigars. For a woman, liking cigars ranks with liking motorbikes and football; these were once exclusively Man Things, so for a woman to be into them is cool. And the sight of a girl with a six inch cylindrical object in her mouth is enticing to some. Me, I like four wheels, not two. Footy is dull, but many women have taken to it like ducks to an oil spill – it looked OK, and everyone else was doing it, but now they’re stuck, and they haven’t even found a husband yet! And cigars smell, too often, of piss.
My conversion was rapid. One day, suddenly enraged at the ludicrous cost of cigarettes in this country, I bought my first 12.5g of Golden Virginia and got going. Never a fan of spliff, I had to learn from scratch. A lovely Italian friend of mine had always rolled her own, and she introduced me to dark, sweet Licorish Rizlas, and those little white filters that keep the paper from sticking in your lippy. Another glamorous friend, an agent, desperate to sidestep her twenty-a-day Marlborough Lights habit, also switched to rolling and never went back. So I was in safe company.
But not too safe. More and more women are taking up smoking. We do it because it gives us a feeling of personal space in an ever-encroaching world, despite the risk of incurable disease, not to mention brown teeth, dry leathery skin and bitter-tasting body fluids. Once we’ve started, we don’t stop because, whatever the latest research says, everyone puts on weight when they give up. If questioned at gunpoint, most women would say they’d rather risk cancer than get fat. Not very PC, nor clear sighted, but very true.
But we don’t stop also because we are addicted. The upside of rolling tobacco is way fewer of the four thousand nasties, such as accelerants, found in ready-made cigarettes, which can induce a foul hangover. Rollies, however, especially given the variables in anything hand-crafted, have more tar in them, and more nicotine. This may well affect future health statistics. The Royal College of Physicians notes that, due to higher taxation on cigarettes, more people are turning either to the black market, or rolling their own. In 2001, the somewhat ambiguously named SmokeFree London, an umbrella organisation of campaigning health groups, reported that 14 percent of women smoke roll-ups. Compare this figure with the four percent given by a BMJ report in 1994. We have a long way to go before we reach the near fifty percent of women in the Netherlands, but we’re catching up.
Once upon a time, long ago, I would have nodded sagely. Aged twelve, I was virulently, sanctimoniously, anti-smoking. At school, smoking was a hotline to popularity, but my stubborn, politically wrong-headed logic had it that if you had to smoke just to get in with the trendies, then smoking was crap. Of course, if you were pretty and good at sport, you got a special dispensation. The gym teacher, who I had nicknamed ‘The Whale’, told me how super a tall girl like me would be at high jump, and then berated me for not living up to her assumptions. Similarly, my early days doper pals told me what a great roller I’d be, with my delicate ‘artistic’ hands. I remained unpersuaded. But that was then.
Last year, when I finally went public with my new habit, I soon discovered that there’s an etiquette involved. I am a woman in my thirties making my way in a world that is increasingly conservative; where New York-style grooming culture is urging people to a mindset that goes far deeper than nails and hair. Rollies , of course, have no place in this. You roll, tobacco falls; ash and burnt paper fly and drop beyond your control. I learned my lesson when having dinner with a publicist, who brushed off her black trouser suit a little too pointedly. So, a friendly warning: if you’re having a Career Moment, maybe take a store-bought packet of fags with you, even if you don’t inhale.
Welcome to my world; there are a lot of us rollers around, and we’re not all drinking Thunderbird under the bridge. I might be rigorously debating the merits of Co-Enzyme Q10 over Active Copper, while stroking my new handbag or lovingly polishing my rings, but the tobacco bits will go on falling. The Grooming Police will have to threaten me with a year in Style Solitary before I’ll go back to poisonous, cloudy, overpriced ready-mades.
And finally, my own contribution to ‘Building a Library’, which was, of course, sex books.
In fiction, writers are getting a little more savvy with their sex scenes – the runners up in the Literary Review Bad Sex Award are, with notable exceptions, not nearly as terrible as they used to be. In reality, however, we seem to have slipped into an unthinkingly hypersexual age, where sensuality has been pushed aside in favour of endless webcams, and soulless parody made flesh. Not that the past was golden, but you need to know your history.
I first discovered Sex In History by Reay Tannahill (1980) lying around at home during a key period in my development. It was my first sex history book, detailing ideas, customs and habits from prehistoric times to the end of the eighties, in detailed but accessible form. As a companion piece, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (1991) is an essential summary of all that was left unsaid down the ages about the pagan sexuality that drives Western literature, and therefore culture. Naturally, De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom appears in it. This late eighteenth century catalogue of repellence and torture-by-aristocrats, has inspired both schoolboy fantasy and professorial obsession. The relentless degradation can be hard going, but its popularity reveals the thin line between ‘civilisation’ and what anyone might do given the freedom to do it.
Taschen’s big, chunky Erotica Universalis (1994) is Sex in History in pictorial form. Marvel at the ‘normal’ bodies displayed in sexual art, until our starved, fearful, surgically enhanced age came along and changed everything.
Politically, you can call Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden an early seventies period piece if you like, but its revelations about women’s fantasy lives were explosive. The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976) was another landmark in the understanding of female sexuality. Shere Hite interviewed 3,500 women about their real needs and desires, and the role of the clitoris in female pleasure was finally dragged into public view, after millennia of resistance. Rachel P Maines’ The Technology of Orgasm (1999), part of the Johns Hopkins Studies In The History Of Technology series, is a history of the vibrator, from nineteenth century medical cures for hysteria, early porn movies, being forced underground, and the ‘non-doctor’ era, to its present day status as publicly adored accessory.
Both in fiction and non-fiction, Anais Nin provided many with their first literary porn (see Little Birds and Delta of Venus from the 1940s). As a sexual artist and fantasist, Anais Nin has no equal, whether in her diaries and Incest, or her novels (A Spy in the House of Love). There is a disturbing sense of schizophrenia (the mental condition, not ‘split personality’) about the way she sees the world and other people, which can make the head spin. Don’t be put off by the words ‘Erotic Classic’ on the cover of The Story of O, by Pauline Réage (1954). It’s a sadomasochistic relationship in all its glory, labial rings and all, with an old-school aristocratic atmosphere far from the sweaty clubs of today. If you prefer the latter, try the more full-on Macho Sluts by Pat Califia (1988); leather dykes, chains, the lot.
As for current how-to’s, Hot Sex by Tracey Cox, (1998), is a good place to start the basics, and The Ultimate Guide to Strap-On Sex by Karlyn Lotney, AKA Fairy Butch, (2000) has everything you need to know about the application of dildos to another person, whether woman or man.
Finally, the excellent Whores in History by Nickie Roberts (1989) deserves a special mention. It’s a history of prostitution in the west from ancient Greece to the twentieth century. This scholarly but highly readable book, written by an ex-sex worker, is full of sardonic sideswipes at the prurient hysteria of past historians. It deserves reprinting, and soon. Find a second hand copy on Amazon and then bug the publishers for all it’s worth. It’s shameful that they let this one slide.
