SEX IS BORING

Veronica Lodge argues that the novelty of

pornography has worn off but no one has told the pornographers

Following her article on Envy ('Outbreak of the poison-pen epidemic', 5 September), the author continues her series on the Seven Deadly Sins with a look at Lust.

WE ARE about to witness the raciest, raunchiest book — Sex — about a celebrity ever to be published: in a series of intimate Photographs, Louise Magdalena Ciccone (Madonna') will reveal her lesbian desires, her sado-masochistic daydreams, her love of funny costumes, whips and leather Clothes. We will know everything there is to know about the onanistic fantasies of this deeply fascinating person, vacuum- packed in a brown paper bag. Columnists will pontificate about the book — indeed many who have not yet seen it have already done so. Some reviewers will love it: 'A refreshingly candid revelation of one woman's fantasies.' All of them will miss the point: Madonna without clothes on is boring.

And it is amazing that it is necessary to Point this out. Not so many years ago, naked Madonna would have just been pornography. Now it is art — art with a capital F. It is, apparently, worth detailed analysis in grown-up newspapers. The Observer sent Martin Amis to interview her. The Sunday Times, going one better,

sent its editor, Andrew Neil. Madonna is mainstream, and when a mainstream celebrity takes her clothes off and poses with a woman whose nipples are pierced, it is supposed to be an event; certainly that is what Madonna herself intended it to be. She is so sure of its success that the first print run, which her agents are modestly calling a 'planetary launch', is 750,000 copies, at $50 apiece.

There is a spurious justification: the West is too prudish, Madonna says; it needs something radical to shake it out of its sexual malaise. 'I don't have the same hang-ups that other people do, and that's the point I'm trying to make with this book,' she told an interviewer. 'I think the problem is that everybody's so uptight about it that they make it into something bad.'

'It', of course, is sex, and using 'it' to shock the bourgeoisie and prove how avant-garde you are is hardly an original idea. Back in the days when Lady Chatter- ley's Lover (which contains one of the phonies sex scenes in the history of the recorded word) was scandalous, the use of sex in books and films was a political state- ment, usually left-wing. Sex was supposed to destabilise hypocritical polite society and break taboos. Sex, the artists said, was 'I didn't see it!' freedom: if you did not want to know about it, that meant you had not yet lost your chains. From the Bloomsbury group to the Beatles, free sex and radical thought, both artistic and political, have almost always gone hand in hand.

These days, though, there are hardly any taboos left to break. Sex appears in all sorts of unlikely places. Topless girls have crawled their way out of pornography and into tabloids, advertisements and films made for children.

The Times recently considered Fiona Pitt-Kethley's hack anthology of sex to be the most important book of the week and put it on the cover of its Review section. The Independent squeezes in as many 'health features' as it can on subjects like 'Why it is hard to have sex after you have children'.

What used to be shocking is now com- monplace. Once there was a fuss made when Marilyn Monroe's skirt flew above her knees. Now Madonna has to produce whips and chains in order to get attention. Once stern film censors forbade the film- ing of beds. Now explicit sex in films — whether important to the plot or not — is a part of the standard format, like the theme song at the beginning and the cred- its at the end.

More recently, the fashion has run to twisted sex, obsessive sex and peculiar sex. That is only to be expected, as everyday sex is no more interesting to film or describe than everyday breathing — most people do more or less the same things over and over again most of the time. While of great interest to those involved, it makes for dull watching and dull reading. So instead we have Roman Polanski's Bit- ter Moon, yet another film about sado- masochism, and Sin, the latest candy-wrapped novel by Josephine Hart, which is even worse. Sin contains no char- acters to speak of, no dialogue worth remembering, no plot and no authentic emotions. One thing happens: a woman has sex with her sister's husband. The les- son of Sin, in fact, is that perverse sex, unless it is part of a good plot with good characters, can be boring too.

But that is hardly acceptable. These days, if you tell anybody you don't think sex is interesting, they will nod wisely and blame it on your sex life. You may not have to be politically correct any more, but you do have to be sexually correct: to criti- cise the presence of sex in a film or book is unacceptable, as it will be taken to mean that the critic has sexual hang-ups.

An acquaintance of mine describes sit- ting at a screening of White Palace with his wife. She became offended by a long, explicit oral-sex scene, and insisted on leaving. They got up to go; afterwards, he felt embarrassed — but not because he had taken his wife to see a film with an explicit sex scene. No, he felt embarrassed because of what the other people in the theatre must have thought. It is not done to be offended by a sex scene. A normal couple are expected to sit there and enjoy it, and if they cannot, then there must be something wrong with their sex life.

I had a similar experience with Basic Instinct, which, in case you missed it, fea- tures Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone and other people who murder one another with ice-picks, usually at the point of orgasm. It was a boring film, badly acted, with scarcely credible characters and a silly plot. My companion fell asleep. I closed my eyes during the gory parts. Yet we didn't walk out — it would have been too humiliating, particularly after reading the review in Time Out:

A gutsy, tough, West Coast cop thriller with lashings of sex and obsession ... Aided and abetted by Verhoeven's raunchy, no-holds barred direction. Stone smoulders and snarls. If you like things unrestrained, hard,

Wow, let X equal the point of impact. .

adult and off the rails then Douglas and Stone are superb ...

And if you are bored by things unre- strained, hard, adult and off the rails — well, we're sorry about your sexual prob- lems.

There are other pleasures, and there are human stories to be told which have noth- ing to do with sex at all. But the quantity of sex on screen and in print is so out of pro- portion to the importance of sex in real life that you would never know this. Imagine if we had to read as much about food as we read about sex; imagine if we had to watch, in every film, an obligatory eating scene. After a while, we wouldn't be hungry, we'd be bored. It just isn't that interesting to watch, over and over again, and neither is sex.

The great writers knew this to be true. When Emma Bovary consummates her love for Rodolphe, all Flaubert describes is the two of them riding round and round Rouen in the back of a carriage. When Anna Karenina finally gives in to Vronsky, you don't get the sex itself, but the moment immediately afterwards. Both Flaubert and Tolstoy understood that sex itself is not nearly as interesting as the emotions sur- rounding it: Anna's guilt, Emma Bovary's imagination, the reactions of their respec- tive societies. Both authors also knew that sex is more sexy if left to the imagination — if we don't actually have to hear about what Anna or Emma does to Vronsky or Rodolphe.

There are, after all, a limited number of adjectives. Once you have used 'grunting and 'moaning' a few times, you run out. Once you have cut from the sweating cou- ple to a train going into tunnel or, as in the new Polanski film, to toast popping out of a toaster, you run out of film metaphors too. This is not to say that no one knows how to write or film good sex scenes. John Updike does sometimes, and Woody Allen had a classic comic sex scene in Annie Hall. But the exceptions do prove the rule. Out of all the boring, silly or irrelevant sex scenes you have read or seen, how many do you remember?

Sex does not even sell as much as it once did, but you would never know this from the media. In a hundred different ways, we are told every day that everybody is doing it, every night, in every way, with lots and lots of different people — and if you are not, never mind Aids or the pleasures of fidelity, there must be something wrong with you. In fact, the people who really want to watch sex on film, read about sex in books and buy hideous pictures of Madonna are the same sad people who have always want- ed to: the people who bought pornography and went to blue movies in the past. If you have a reasonably entertaining sex life of your own, you don't need to be inundated with clumsy versions on screen and on paper. Sex is boring — unless you are the ones having it.