MORE SEX, PLEASE, WE'RE BRITISH
Vicki Woods wonders at the prurient obsession of the British press, and compares it with attitudes elsewhere LAST week, both Auberon Waugh and Paul Johnson wrote in these pages in defence of Lord Gowrie who was photo- graphed by the Sun outside a massage parlour in Camden Town. Waugh said that Lord Gowrie should make a 'couple of hundred thousand, tax-free' if he chose to pursue the matter, and Johnson declared that in an ideal world the editor of the Sun should be `charged, convicted and sent to jail' for printing the story. I hope their sentiments gave the editor of the Sun some discomfort, and Lord Gowrie some relief. But I doubt it. I've met the editor of the Sun and he's a cocky sort of bloke, with a lot more on his mind than Lord Gowrie's lawyers. Madonna's bosom, for example. Madonna took up the entire front page of the Sun on Wednesday of last week, in the stunning frock and Marilyn Monroe hairdo she wore for the Oscars ceremony. Over four million readers goggled, and then ran their eyes over the astonishing bit of tabloid sub-editing that spelled out: `MADONNA WITH THE BIG BOOBIES — Has She Had Op Up Top? ALLO ALLO! It's Madonna wiz ze beeg boobies — sparking claims that she has had breast IMPLANTS . . . GONE was the 34in bust which used to fit into bras shaped like ice-cream cones . . . . Some fans claimed she was PREGNANT. Her spokeswoman Liz Rosenberg refused, to comment.' To a Sun reporter? You bet she refused to comment. I had an extended chat with spokeswoman Rosenberg two years ago while we waited for the globally famous star to join us for dinner, and she said, 'British tabloids are the worst in the world. The worst. They're sex-obsessed and they run old, old lies again and again.'
Weary by now of the diet of raw sex, garnished with humbug, that is constantly on offer, we must, however, return to the table and be British about it. Nanny says, Clear your plates. There's no escape. You may manfully stop taking the tabloids and thus avoid the original exclusive scoops about Mark Phillips and the New Zealand art teacher, but you cannot avoid the rechauffes served up in the quality papers (even in this quality paper). Tits, bums,, knickers and bonking — amtcha sick of 'em? Not by a long way. Not in Britain. We are all Sun readers now.
The 'respectable' broadsheets have abandoned any attempt to deny that sex or the promise of sex, which isn't quite the same thing — is the best hook into a dull page that they can employ. I've written before about the holier-than-thou Indepen- dent pretending to take a high moral tone in its 'Health' or 'Law' pages and instead writing about (and lubriciously illustrating) female condoms, gynaecological disorders or what goes on in the mind of a man who plays with little boys' laps and what he finds there. They eased up a bit while there was a war on, but they were back to form with last week's health article on Whither Vasectomies? It was accompanied by a large and carefully wrought illustration of a strapping pair of naked male buttocks and a scalpel shaped like a question mark. Buttocks? For a vasectomy piece? Er wrong naughty bit, surely? But I guess even the Independent's illustrator couldn't go all the way on that one. All the quality papers are at it like rabbits. The mere word 'sex' is exciting enough to warm the reader's blood and tug him towards a story he might otherwise not bother to read. 'Angela Carter on sex, crime and silent movies', the Guardian's front page announced last Thursday. She wrote a review of a book about silent movies and there wasn't much sex in it, certainly not enough to put on the front page. But what's a poor sub-editor to do? Another review on the same day dealt with a short and 'intensely cerebral' Czechoslo- vak novel, which I hope I dbn't get for Christmas, about a beer-drinking amateur philosopher who works in a waste-paper processing plant. 'Sex and slapstick under the hydraulic press', ran the rather desper- ate headline, but there wasn't much sex in that, either.
There should be no sex at all in the Financial Times. But what on earth was going on in the third leader one day last week? The British disease has struck even these august pages. The leader was headed `Sex and the over 60s'. I began to read, wondering how on earth the FTs dry, factual prose would tackle this delicate area, and in so short a space, too, but my head hit the breakfast table by the end of the first paragraph: 'The battle of the sexes has spread to the pensions industry, which is now debating the implications of the recent industrial tribunal ruling that Mr Alan Roscoe, a pensioner of the Belton engineering company Hick Hargreaves, was entitled to a full pension at 60 . . .' Sex and the over 60s? What a teasing cheat.
Only in Britain can journalists nudge and titillate in this wink-wink way. You couldn't serve up sex-with-everything in American newspapers. Americans are sex- ually prudish in print. They don't spell out the four-letter words (well, they do, of course, but you have to look on a different shelf for these publications, and they come shrink-wrapped to discourage browsing). `Buggery' is robustly written up in the Daily Telegraph, but not in the New York Times (`aggravated rape'). No American newspaper aimed at a general readership could risk irritating women readers with that matey butcher-boy tone that the tab- loids use here: `O000h!' and 'Corr and `Phew!'. CO000h, Ralph, you are awful!'
said a Sun front page camply, a couple of weeks ago, over an old photograph of Sir Ralph Halpern's bottom.) Americans would be horrified to find sex poking out of their morning papers, even their down- market morning papers. Violence, yes. 'Headless Body Found, Then Lost Again', I bemusedly read in the New York Daily News. Sex, no. The most sexually explicit tabloid headline I've seen in the News was the frank 'Best Sex I Ever Had!' which Donald Trump said of his young mistress Marla Maples; the accompanying pictures of Marla showed her clothed. Sexy, pretty, blonde; but clothed. A Sun reader would comb this gruesome tabloid, or any large- circulation newspaper, in vain for the naked bosom of a Page 3 girl. Pressure groups would form, American Moms Against Page 3 or some such would rise up to boycott supermarkets.
To return briefly to Madonna: she is cavorting about half-naked in this month's Vanity Fair (published in New York, but with an English editor) in a sort of recrea- tion of Bert Stern's last pictures of Mon- roe. Vanity Fair is, of course, 'Art' and 'Literature' compared to the Sun, but American Moms Against Vanity Fair may be marching up Madison Avenue. It's a bit shameful to appear sex-obsessed in Amer- ica. Anyway, they have other hooks apart from 'Sex' to seize the reader and drag him towards the appropriate page. 'Fame' is one, 'Race' is another, 'Money' another.
When I worked on a tabloid for a short time, I had many difficult moments over sex coverage. Some of the problems were daft and annoying, but simple. And forgiv- able: the men on the paper (the Daily Mail) were of the Old, rather than the New breed. So — man of unspecified hair colour was frequently found dead in car with blonde; any wife/lover/husband story which ended in tears was inevitably a 'Fatal Attraction!' But some were more complex, and baffled me. I once had to fill the top half of a double-page spread with a fashion article; the bottom half was filled by the advertising department with what they called 'lingerie' and women call knickers and bras. 'A class ad, really gorgeous,' said the advertising manager laying before me a recumbent torso photographed from the neck down in cheap white nylon, down to suspender-belt and stocking-tops. I didn't mind the sexy get-up, nor the headlessness, nor the come-hither pose, but the image was so huge that it dominated my page. So I ran a busy crocodile of primary-school children over the top, larking about in bright new chainstore jeans and tracksuits. And the advertising manager went bana- nas. I was baffled. I went to see him and we shouted at each other for ten minutes while I tried to glean what was the matter. 'It's a beautiful ad,' he said. 'Gorgeous. You can't put little children over the top. It makes it — disgusting.' Why? 'Oh, come on. You know exactly what I mean.' I didn't. 'If you can't see it,' he said, 'you're the one with the problem.' I was blank. 'A woman's body . .' he said. You mean men will be aroused by the knickers and stocking-tops? I said, light suddenly dawn- ing, and you mean that thinking about children is a sexual turnoff? He writhed and flailed at this explicit language and blustered: 'You're the one with the dirty mind.' But where do you think children come from? I said in a fury. 'Oh, Christ,' he said, chin on his knees with embarrass- ment. I backed out of his room feeling unbelievably discomfited, not least by the fact that most of the Mailmen I showed the 'offending' spread to were offended, more or less, in their turn. Lying lasciviously on their desks were the jutting bosoms of the Sun's Page 3 girl, childless, undisgusting, unfecund, 'gorgeous', 'provocative', sexy.
This is what is underneath newspaper attitudes to sex in Britain. It is deeply depressing: sex as 'hand-relief, sex as `honking' — low-rent, pub-grubby, vague- ly threatening. In France, the population at large seems to have cottoned on to where children come from, and ex-politicians are not photographed on the steps of massage parlours. Gerard Depardieu was inter- viewed (in French) on Channel 4 recently. He was asked where he was happiest. `Mm. In bed,' he said, 'with a woman; not necessarily making love, but lying there and talking. Or in my wine-cellar,' he added. Depardieu did not take up a lot of macho eye-contact with his interviewer when he said 'in bed with a woman', or use a tone of bravado, or acknowledge his bit of 'naughtiness' with a sly smirk, as an English film-star would have felt obliged to do. It is generally acknowledged in France that almost everyone over the age of consent enjoys sexual intercourse — be- cause it's enjoyable. The newspapers do not cry 'O000h! you are naughty' when people in public life turn out to be the same as everyone else, nor do they 'Curvy Karen's Perfect Pair' on page 3 of any- thing. (Though bosoms abound all over
France: 'Tits, tits, tits,' said an English fashion photographer at the haute couture collections, 'every advertisement hoarding, every magazine. Yogurt ads — a pair of tits. Cars — a pair of tits. Floor-cleaners, bathroom fittings, life insurance — a pair of tits. You'd think they see enough on the beach.') But bosoms are allowed to be pretty — and sexy — in France, without being naughty. They are openly admired by men in bathrobes showing rather more chest hair than we are used to seeing in British magazines.
Sometimes they are even nuzzled by babies, too. British newspapers don't like to associate bosoms with babies. In Paris I drove past a huge advertisement hoarding for women's tights. It was a charming image. A naked little scamp buries his face in his mother's skirt; a tight, short, very French-looking skirt. The picture is shot at the child's height, so you don't see the woman's body above the waist, only her skirt, her stunning legs in sheer black tights, slender high heels and the little boy with his chubby bottom. The copy says something factual like 'Mummy wears tights by Dim'. You get the impression that Maman is hurrying out to a vernissage with Papa, and the little boy is refusing to get into his pyjamas for the babysitter. Utterly sweet. Couldn't run it here, of course, because of the . . . the juxtaposition. High heels equals sex — and sex plus Mummy equals problem. Short skirt equals sex and sex plus naked little scamps equals God knows what horrors of creepy 'abuse' to reverberate from here to Orkney.
It's a newspaper cliché that Tory scan- dals are all about sex and Labour scandals are all about money. Perhaps the Tories have been in power too long, and we should hope for a Labour government next time. It might be rather refreshing to find unsalacious stories about graft and slagheaps in the papers again.
`And on the left we have the Tuileries.'
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