towards sexual excess

Literally choking on my muesli at Howard’s continued refusal to apologise to Cornelia Rao – he’s thinking about litigation, but what sort of a person’s mind turns to litigation when confronted with the kind of treatment already proven to have been received from government departments in this case? It’s more than mean-spirited, it’s just disgraceful, and quite shocking that we’ve come to be led by such a hard nut. The liberal party in general deserves better than this, and they should consider dumping him, please.

I want to return to sex, any excuse will do. The earlier-discussed article on porn lit, as I’ve written, has Antonella Gambatto spouting about prostitution catering for dysfunctional male sexuality. While I think she’s right that there may be a tendency for a swathe of articulate ex-sex workers writing about their lives on the game to skew the perspective away from the harder edges of prostitution, which will perhaps always be a profession more engaged in by the drugged, desperate and self-loathing than by the coolly calculating and creative businesswoman, I’m not at all convinced about the dysfunctionality. or rather I largely agree with porn-lit writer Kate Holden that prostitution can be no more dysfunctional than marriage or monogamous relations in many circs.

Presumably to Gambetto a more functional male (and female) sex life would be monogamous (once the appropriate partner is found) with maybe the odd dalliance, but generally with the exercise of restraint and self-discipline, and of course growing respect for the partner, as shared memories grow and commingle, a situation given its best romantic gloss by the bard himself, in The Comedy of Errors:

Ah, do not tear away thyself from me;
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again,
Without addition or diminishing
As take from me thyself, and not me too.

The difficulty is that there are still those urges, for the male and the female, to spread the seed, to have a bit on the side, and it’s impossible to say in any general way which is more damaging to relations and to individuals, to suppress those urges or to give them free play. For males who follow the latter course there are prostitutes, and also more dangerous liaisons. It’s the oldest profession and it’ll always be with us, so to describe it as merely catering for dysfunctionality is just wishful thinking. For females, there are also the dangerous liaisons, but let’s not pretend that’s all there is.

As an occasional porn surfer I’ve come across sites which have alerted me to a new dimension in female sexual excess. Though the pics are splashed across different sites they seem to be drawn from the same location – a nightclub, probably somewhere in Europe, frequented apparently exclusively by women, real women obviously (not performers), in their twenties, thirties, some in their forties, a typical nightclub age range. Some are young and slim and beautiful, some aren’t, but all appear to be having a relaxed fun time, drinking, smoking, laughing and chatting, apparently oblivious of the video or other cameras floating around catching them in the act.