Liar
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Female self love is the thing to watch this fall in British media, it seems. Both on the telly, and the big screen.
Carol Sarler, whoever that is, is apparently not amused.
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An orgasm coach on TV and a film about sex toys - if that's progress I'm Queen Victoria
by CAROL SARLER
Last updated at 11:25am on 21st September 2006
Channel 4, scraping the bottom of its favourite barrel in an effort to titillate its jaded viewers, has come up with a wheeze that makes the rest of reality television look like high culture.
It is preparing to screen a programme called Masturbation For Girls that features — I kid you not — an 'orgasm coach' who teaches three ladies all her tricks, which they will demonstrate, live, to camera.
Should you seek to escape for a night out at the pictures instead, you may find you fare little better. The eagerly anticipated high point of the up-coming London Film Festival is Shortbus, a movie that has astounded many by getting a standard 18 certificate in the first place, and which has as its central character a female sex therapist who is in pursuit of achieving climax for herself.
Perhaps she has never heard of the Rampant Rabbit — although if she hasn't, she soon will; this shocking-pink plastic contraption is also to make its film debut this week.
For the uninitiated, the RR is a vibrator that lays claim to being 'the world's favourite sex toy' following a starring role in TV's Sex And The City.
And now we have Rabbit Fever, a film which is devoted entirely to the dubious appeal of the wretched rabbit, and which is being advertised heavily with the tagline 'Can you feel the buzz?'
Bizarrely, its (first time) writer and director have somehow persuaded our good and great to take cameo parts, among them Emily Mortimer, Germaine Greer and Stefanie Powers.
Their collective effort might well prove to be — as Mail film critic Chris Tookey informs me — one of the worst films of all time; nevertheless, it conspires with C4 and Shortbus to place female masturbation as quite the fancy of the moment.
There is, of course, nothing new about the activity — nor would anybody suggest it to be unhealthy, either. Whispers of ruination, infertility and going blind went out (at least one has to hope) with the Dark Ages.
What is new, unhealthy and, I would argue, retrograde is for it to be made this public, dished up for the entertainment of the mass market with a defiance which proclaims that to do so is, in some way, a mark of women's progress and of liberation, when in fact it's nothing of the kind. It's just cheap.
Mark Twain famously dismissed the act as an overrated pastime: 'As an amusement it is too fleeting. As an occupation it is too wearing.
And it is unsuited to the drawing room.' Note, please, the last point.
THE unforgettable scene where Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally was funny precisely because of the incongruity of its public location; had she been in the privacy of a bedroom, it would have been just another sex scene in just another film. In a café filled with ogling strangers, it became hilarious by dint of its toe-curling embarrassment.
No such bashfulness for the ladies lining up to appear in the Rampant Rabbit film or to strut their intimate stuff for a million strangers tuned to Channel 4. (One wonders whether they would have been quite so enthusiastic about taking part in a film devoted entirely to blow-up dolls, or other such demeaning male sex 'toys'? I rather doubt it.)
There is an excuse, mind. There always is. Sometimes it is justified as being in the interests of science or education. Or failing that, there is that great old standby of describing prurient tosh as 'art' that challenges 'bourgeois sensibilities'.
Whichever the excuse, it just doesn't wash. Because however high-minded your justification for exposing your private parts to public scrutiny, you still wouldn't be doing it unless either you enjoyed it or you were paid for it.
So call it anything you like, but that makes the women complicit in
these latest offerings at heart no different from either exhibitionists or porn stars. Or both.
And if they thought for a moment that their antics make them liberated women — the product and achievement of the years during which many of us fought for newer, brighter freedoms — then, my deluded little darlings, you can take it from me: it doesn't.
What women fought for was to become the equals of men, not to become exactly like them — which is just what this current vogue appears to invite them to try to be.
Take, for instance, the sales pitch for our friend the Rampant Rabbit: it promises, much in the manner of a Boys' Own guide to sports cars, 'zero-to-orgasm in 60 seconds'. Perfectly suited to the sexuality of Neanderthal men, perhaps, but not — surely not? — the sexuality of most women.
Male and female sexuality are inherently different, for all sorts of biological and sociological reasons.
Boasting, showing-off and notches on the bedpost have always been the province of the male, and in particular a certain type of oaf who will go to great lengths to lie about bedding wenches while dismissing as trollops any wench whose promiscuity is rumoured to match his own.
This may well, I grant you, be an inequality that deserves to be
challenged — but apeing the swaggering male strut is not the way to go about it. The right we seek is not the right to be like men but the right to be like women. And respected for it.
Female sexuality, left to itself, is altogether a more personal, nurturing thing. Few women feel arousal in the abstract; it's not like a hunger or a thirst which they pop out to assuage with whoever is handy.
FEW women seek sex with strangers, and where they do — for example, at swingers' parties or within this ghastly practice they call 'dogging' — it is widely observed that the instigators are usually their male partners.
Which is why this latest rash of explicit offerings on the TV and cinema screen fills me with such a profound sense of disappointment and unease.
For when misguided dollies are persuaded to prove their 'liberation' by letting it all hang out in the most public of arenas, who do we think they are appealing to? Not other women, that's for sure.
No. All they have done is turned themselves into sex objects, there for the salacious pleasure of priapic men, to be exploited and gawped at and belittled by those who get their kicks from peeping at women's naughty bits.
They can call it science, education or art if they like. All they've really done is got their kit off for the dirty mac brigade.
If that's progress, I'm Queen Victoria. And I'm not amused.
Carol Sarler, whoever that is, is apparently not amused.
------------------
An orgasm coach on TV and a film about sex toys - if that's progress I'm Queen Victoria
by CAROL SARLER
Last updated at 11:25am on 21st September 2006
Channel 4, scraping the bottom of its favourite barrel in an effort to titillate its jaded viewers, has come up with a wheeze that makes the rest of reality television look like high culture.
It is preparing to screen a programme called Masturbation For Girls that features — I kid you not — an 'orgasm coach' who teaches three ladies all her tricks, which they will demonstrate, live, to camera.
Should you seek to escape for a night out at the pictures instead, you may find you fare little better. The eagerly anticipated high point of the up-coming London Film Festival is Shortbus, a movie that has astounded many by getting a standard 18 certificate in the first place, and which has as its central character a female sex therapist who is in pursuit of achieving climax for herself.
Perhaps she has never heard of the Rampant Rabbit — although if she hasn't, she soon will; this shocking-pink plastic contraption is also to make its film debut this week.
For the uninitiated, the RR is a vibrator that lays claim to being 'the world's favourite sex toy' following a starring role in TV's Sex And The City.
And now we have Rabbit Fever, a film which is devoted entirely to the dubious appeal of the wretched rabbit, and which is being advertised heavily with the tagline 'Can you feel the buzz?'
Bizarrely, its (first time) writer and director have somehow persuaded our good and great to take cameo parts, among them Emily Mortimer, Germaine Greer and Stefanie Powers.
Their collective effort might well prove to be — as Mail film critic Chris Tookey informs me — one of the worst films of all time; nevertheless, it conspires with C4 and Shortbus to place female masturbation as quite the fancy of the moment.
There is, of course, nothing new about the activity — nor would anybody suggest it to be unhealthy, either. Whispers of ruination, infertility and going blind went out (at least one has to hope) with the Dark Ages.
What is new, unhealthy and, I would argue, retrograde is for it to be made this public, dished up for the entertainment of the mass market with a defiance which proclaims that to do so is, in some way, a mark of women's progress and of liberation, when in fact it's nothing of the kind. It's just cheap.
Mark Twain famously dismissed the act as an overrated pastime: 'As an amusement it is too fleeting. As an occupation it is too wearing.
And it is unsuited to the drawing room.' Note, please, the last point.
THE unforgettable scene where Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally was funny precisely because of the incongruity of its public location; had she been in the privacy of a bedroom, it would have been just another sex scene in just another film. In a café filled with ogling strangers, it became hilarious by dint of its toe-curling embarrassment.
No such bashfulness for the ladies lining up to appear in the Rampant Rabbit film or to strut their intimate stuff for a million strangers tuned to Channel 4. (One wonders whether they would have been quite so enthusiastic about taking part in a film devoted entirely to blow-up dolls, or other such demeaning male sex 'toys'? I rather doubt it.)
There is an excuse, mind. There always is. Sometimes it is justified as being in the interests of science or education. Or failing that, there is that great old standby of describing prurient tosh as 'art' that challenges 'bourgeois sensibilities'.
Whichever the excuse, it just doesn't wash. Because however high-minded your justification for exposing your private parts to public scrutiny, you still wouldn't be doing it unless either you enjoyed it or you were paid for it.
So call it anything you like, but that makes the women complicit in
these latest offerings at heart no different from either exhibitionists or porn stars. Or both.
And if they thought for a moment that their antics make them liberated women — the product and achievement of the years during which many of us fought for newer, brighter freedoms — then, my deluded little darlings, you can take it from me: it doesn't.
What women fought for was to become the equals of men, not to become exactly like them — which is just what this current vogue appears to invite them to try to be.
Take, for instance, the sales pitch for our friend the Rampant Rabbit: it promises, much in the manner of a Boys' Own guide to sports cars, 'zero-to-orgasm in 60 seconds'. Perfectly suited to the sexuality of Neanderthal men, perhaps, but not — surely not? — the sexuality of most women.
Male and female sexuality are inherently different, for all sorts of biological and sociological reasons.
Boasting, showing-off and notches on the bedpost have always been the province of the male, and in particular a certain type of oaf who will go to great lengths to lie about bedding wenches while dismissing as trollops any wench whose promiscuity is rumoured to match his own.
This may well, I grant you, be an inequality that deserves to be
challenged — but apeing the swaggering male strut is not the way to go about it. The right we seek is not the right to be like men but the right to be like women. And respected for it.
Female sexuality, left to itself, is altogether a more personal, nurturing thing. Few women feel arousal in the abstract; it's not like a hunger or a thirst which they pop out to assuage with whoever is handy.
FEW women seek sex with strangers, and where they do — for example, at swingers' parties or within this ghastly practice they call 'dogging' — it is widely observed that the instigators are usually their male partners.
Which is why this latest rash of explicit offerings on the TV and cinema screen fills me with such a profound sense of disappointment and unease.
For when misguided dollies are persuaded to prove their 'liberation' by letting it all hang out in the most public of arenas, who do we think they are appealing to? Not other women, that's for sure.
No. All they have done is turned themselves into sex objects, there for the salacious pleasure of priapic men, to be exploited and gawped at and belittled by those who get their kicks from peeping at women's naughty bits.
They can call it science, education or art if they like. All they've really done is got their kit off for the dirty mac brigade.
If that's progress, I'm Queen Victoria. And I'm not amused.
