On the Sexual Act

Reflections on my experiences and those of others

I have had until now very little motivation to penetrate the subject of sexual intercourse in writing. It is not that the topic is without its interest. Just as some dull rocks of the beach reveal some shimmering mineral when flipped upon their side, or else some studiable insect, so too does the apparently dull subject of sexual intercourse pique the sensible man’s curiosity when he observes it closely and philosophically. The sexual act itself, I have always found, is akin to the Boy Scout meetings which Mother and Father always dragged me to on Saturday afternoons: Unpleasant to think about, but quite enjoyable once you are there.

I was first acquainted with intercourse when I worked as a bellboy in a Chertsey village hotel, at the tender age of twenty-four, where I was ravished by a rather handsome though rather hirsute Greek woman some years my senior who was staying in the hotel as a guest. I have related this event at length in another outlet, and was even praised by an LGBT publication for the “refreshing sexual ambiguity” of my work. But I have only told my story tal cual, precisely as it occurred, and no secondary meaning was ever intended. I received the same sort of unwanted praise when I wrote elsewhere of the “suspiciously wide-hipped sailor boys” of the Portsmouth docks, by which I meant only to refer to the 18th century practice of smuggling hams in boys' pants to avoid customs tariffs.

Rip me, please, from your pink pamphlets, but do not claim that I am unacquainted with or unable to write with authority upon the subject of sex. No — the difficulty of writing on sex arrives when one begins to consider that the nature of sexual intercourse nowadays is so changeable, so oiled-up and wriggly that it is increasingly difficult to pin down with the pen. Even the most traditional mode of sexual intercourse, prostitution, has been perverted by modernity. I must emphasise that I have no first-hand experience of the solicitation of sexual intercourse in exchange for cash, but I have the rich experience of friends and acquaintances to draw upon, and may write upon the practice as if doing so a posteriori.

---

The principal pleasure of soliciting a prostitute, I would imagine, is the frisson which accompanies the danger of being discovered. This risk is severely mitigated by the squeaky-clean prostitution machine now available on the internet, which is perfectly legal and sterile. The excitement of visiting a brothel, of being led by the hand down a dark hallway, and of being tossed onto a filthy bed in a half-lit room, has been replaced by the cold act of a debit card payment or micro-transaction. 

In Amsterdam there exist three neighbourhoods for soliciting prostitutes: In the first, the women are displayed in shop windows illuminated by the colour red. In the second, men are illuminated in shop windows by the colour blue. The third neighbourhood is magenta. A friend of mine once visited the third neighbourhood, and I followed closely upon his heel so as to be able to report his story with the precision with which I am relating it to you now. He and I had rehearsed what he was to say at the door, the terms which he was to stipulate before stepping inside, but the appearance of the creature which greeted him at the door must have provoked such a flurry of emotion within him that, no sooner had a few murmured words passed between them, he was whisked inside, and the door was slammed sharply upon the cold Dutch street where I stood, powerless to help.

The dozen or so acts which occurred in that room have since been fed to me in disparate parts. I have no desire to recall or retell them here, but they must have occurred in very quick succession, seeing that my friend emerged from that room not three minutes after entering it. Ignoring my gaze, he began walking rather quickly down the street, in the opposite direction. Only after pursuing and interrogating him did he tell me the following: That he had exceeded his budget, that the prostitute had confiscated his telephone, and that if he did not return with a further two-hundred euros she would be sending a text to his Mother to inform her of what her little man had done.

The issue was resolved, and, apart from getting his sick thrills, my friend learned a valuable lesson that day. The consequences of purchasing his sexual pleasure were immediately evident to him, and he never returned to gratify his needs in that manner, so present and deterring was the image of his Mother in his mind whenever the temptation came to him.

There is a conservative case for prostitution. It is a necessary evil, and perhaps even a social glue. The late Sir Roger Scruton once mentioned to me over dinner (and may have written elsewhere) that the increase in divorce rates was attributable to the decline in the popularity of the mistress and prostitution. Men, and increasingly women, are free to indulge in their sexual perversions in a safe, controlled and secretive manner via easily-accessible live-streaming pornography on the internet, which carry none of the risk or excitement of my anonymous friend’s little Dutch foray.

Sexual taboos are being pasteurised, sucked dry of their sense of the forbidden. Perversion is normalised. The result is a sexless population, which experiences one dry orgasm after another while never experiencing real pleasure. The great paradox of sex is that, the greater acceptance it finds, the less appealing it becomes. Britain’s Victorian era, supposedly an age of great sexual repression, has left us with tomes of its pornography from the burgeoning sex industry which sprouted on its watch. And how many homosexuals, now permitted to marry, to adopt, and are allowed —encouraged, even — to live out their sexuality in the open, feel a strange, tugging nostalgia for the glory days of glory holes? This might explain why so many new, strange sex acts and orientations are popping up nowadays; one last, desperate attempt to get the old boy twitching again before he withers away for good.

The solution, of course, is to go the opposite way: Mass repression of sexuality via censorship and the rekindling of old religious prejudices. It is the only way to make sex tolerable again. This repression, in its turn, will of course, eventually give birth to another counteracting sexual revolution, to be curbed again in a further fifty years by another, natural round of draconian repression. In this way the world goes on, pushing and heaving against itself, in constant struggle, grunting and moaning.

---

If you enjoyed reading this, please consider supporting The Pedestrian.