Nicholas Whittaker in London
THAT Mr Polaroid has a lot to answer for. Picture this muddy snap, for instance, of a naked man on a hotel bed. Passing behind his knees and around the back of his neck, a doubled-up inner tube trusses him into a human hoop, head tucked well down towards his groin. “As a businessman who spends lonely nights away from home, I recommend this simple kit as an ideal way to give oneself fellatio without the expense or risk of visiting a prostitute.”
Male readers who gag on this (my story, not following his advice) should immediately cancel their daydreams of a girlie magazine apprenticeship. Did you really think they’d pay you 15 000 a year for drooling over pictures of naked women? This is no dream job. There’s the post to answer for a start – and this Polaroid is part of it.
Each day’s mail brings a thousand samplers of British sex life. Stitched together by patient subs they form a virtual Bayeux Tapestry, a bawdy frieze of fornicators, spankers, wankers, flashers, cross- dressers and knicker-sniffers. Bar-room wisdom insists these letters are the work of paid professionals. No way. Apart from penning the occasional “confession”, those who work in the titillation trade have neither the time nor the experience to create anything as fabulous as readers’ letters.
But, let’s be honest, sex is fascinating. Why shouldn’t those who like it have their magazines, their letters pages, their “that’s life” corner with its crazy snapshots? Isn’t it only snobbery that lauds these men while despising honest correspondents such as Ken of Leeds and “Mick the Masturbator” of Tunbridge Wells? Those who take the time to read between the lines will quickly catch on. These letters, for all their boastful tales of conquest, virility and 8-inch members, merely serve to highlight the gulf between male fantasy and the loneliness, dashed hopes and wrecked destinies that constitute real life.
But it’s not all bluster. Some of them need a doctor – and aren’t afraid to admit it. Even now, when every kind of help is available, there are things a man just cannot bring himself to talk about, except in the anonymous confessional that Britain’s girlie mags provide.
It must be obvious that sex mags act as a vital safety valve. Shocking it may be to discover what goes on inside the male brain; much more alarming that such fantasies, however bizarre or filthy or simply optimistic, should be bottled up.
Whatever you think of the guy and his fellatio kit, he’s breaking no laws.
Those who edit such magazines should, by association, be irretrievably corrupted. But, in the seven years I worked in the titillation trade, there was not one colleague I wouldn’t trust to babysit my children.
But why am I talking about guys all the time, when so much of the titillation trade, from editorial to management, is now in the hands of women? Perhaps this is a good thing, though I have noticed no softening of the contents. Who better to tell men what they want and then dish it out through rationed instalments?
My only worry is that this is a secret masterplan by feminists: gain control, hook the nation’s men and then, in one fell swoop, close down the entire industry due to a headache. Clever or what?