Always on Sunday
THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY
It is well known that the British only copulate on Sunday afternoons, when the children are safely packed off to Sunday school. After this weekend I no longer wonder why—at least if one subscribes to the view that pornography's main function is not to remove the urge for active sex, but instead to promote it. For it was difficult to get away from it in last week- end's papers. It must have been a real eye- opener to those of advanced years who normally lie in bed on Sundays reading the juicier bits of the News of the World aloud to the wife in the hope it might get Something going.
Actually it's not just this weekend. It's been getting better—or worse—for a month or two now. We've had the. Sunday Mirror going on about the Sexual Wilderness and offering no ' guide to the way out, nor even to the way in. This followed those other works of ctirious in- terest, The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris and The Body by Anthony Smith; - both of which the Sunday Mirror extracted, particu- larly the bits about comparative penis sizes, copulation frequencies, and the rate of breath- ing immediately before and after orgasm. I would have thought the brain might have merited as many column inches, if you see what I mean. I was wrong.
And now, while the Sexual Wilderness is running around in its last dizzy circles, the Mirror gave us the opening chapters of some- thing called 'The Gap,' which tells us, at least in the north, just what the young think about sex in the old (defined in the swinging young Mirror as those over forty). It was as masterly as the Mirror's earlier epics.
But this Sunday was special. On top of the stuff in the Sunday Mirror, we had John Len- non and Yoko Ono revealing all. Not quite, now I come to think, for the People, with a coyness that very nearly made me sick, showed the front view of this odious two, but put 'Cen- sored' across their sexual equipment. The News of the World shied away from such cheating. It merely cut them off at the waist.
Now, one way and another, the People and the News of the World are where you'd have looked for a spot of titillation in the old days.
Not now. Go for the posh ones. The Sunday Times and the Observer, if you're not sure which the posh ones are these days. This week- end particularly they've shown us so much naked flesh you could pasture on it with your lips for months.
The Sunday Times Colour Supplement runs a piece called 'The Evolution of the Female Form.' The cover, which I presume was de- signed to sell as many as Playboy or Pent- house, while remaining pure as the driven snow, shows a picture of unparalleled hideousness. It is of what I think (no one could be sure) is a young woman's torso wrapped up in a body stocking. Where her navel should be the title is superimposed. Where her nipples should be there is nothing. Nothing at all. It is as though a particularly nauseating mutilation has been carried out. I begin, to think that the cover was designed especially so that W. H. Smug and Son Ltd could not object.
But inside all is different. The account runs to twenty-nine pages and is full of what the trade calls 'floods.' Think of it (within reason) and it's there. I am sure it is a scholarly study. I can be sure because I haven't read it. I am not sure why it goes on for so long and is so fully illustrated. There is also a picture of a woman with a pouch and four breasts which really turned my stomach but might do something for somebody, I suppose. No; that is not fair. The article it was attached to was fascinating to anybody remotely interested in evolution, as I presume you all are.
Well, it's all very odd, to put it no higher than that. But even more odd is why the posh papers are going in for nudity in such a big way. You'll remember the Observer's nude white and coloured girls a month or two ago, designed to tell us (I know you've been won- dering for years) why their shapes are so different.
The other subject the Sunday Times and the Observer have been on about this week and last in their colour supplements is babies. Having them, particularly. The Sunday before last, both supplements had a baby on their cover; the Observer had one on its inside pages as well, by Caesarean section in full colour, and a series of etchings showing how they induce birth all over the world.
Which all poses two questions. First, the trivial one; why is it that week after week the Observer and the Sunday Times supple- ments run the same thing, with the result that the Weekend Telegraph, which some might ex- pect to be the dullest of the three, is nowadays quite often the most interesting, simply because it is different? And the second, more impor- tant, question is 'what they are going to do next? For, as a young actress said in an inter- view on the front page of the SuUday Telegraph last weekend, explaining why she wouldn't take her clothes off in a play directed by. Mr Charles Marowitz, 'There is now such a spate of nudity . . . it is going to become boring.' Not going to become, darling. Is.
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