Hard on the heels of its recent decision that women who wear tight jeans cannot be raped (because the difficulty involved in removing them suggests compliance), the Italian Supreme Court has come up with yet another legal wowser. From now on, it will be against the law for couples in Italy to make love in a car unless they first cover all the windows with blankets or newspapers.
Though the mental images this summons up are decidedly humourous – and it’s tempting to imagine the grimy alleyways of Mantua filled with gently vibrating Fiats, their windscreens blacked out by the entire business section of La Stampa – it highlights a serious point about sex in Europe’s most Catholic country. In a nation where premarital sex, and even contraception, are still frowned upon, young lovers are forced to take their pleasures on the hoof.
Unluckily for them, of course, Italian cars are not built for sex. Whether it’s a cramped Alfa Sud or a low-slung Ferrari, there is hardly any room for luggage, let alone a libido, in the automobiles that roll off the production lines in Turin and Modena.
For the real ”sex on wheels” experience, they can only look enviously to the United States. One of the bedrocks of teen culture in the US, as evidenced by movies such as Pleasantville and Animal House, is the drive with your co-ed chum up to lover’s lane.
Lyrically, too, this phenomenon was celebrated in the musical Grease, which saw John Travolta singing – with an eloquence he has seldom matched – ”You know it ain’t no shit/you’ll be getting loads of tit/ in Greased Lightnin”, and also by Fats Domino. When Domino crooned, ”I found ma-a-a thrill, on Blueberry Hill”, it highlighted the key fact that even someone with the nickname ”Fats” could enjoy this pleasure across the Atlantic, given that classic American cars are generally as roomy as Viking longboats.
Indeed, while the average Italian couple would consider it a feat of dexterity just to undo the man’s fly without cracking heads, the youthful owners of an Olds Cutlass or a ’57 Chevy could run through the entire Kama Sutra without having to leave the front seat.
In Britain the trend never really caught on. This could be because the British don’t have the same culture of schoolkids owning cars, but the result is that motorised sex tends to happen chiefly between kerb crawlers and prostitutes. And though British streetwalkers are considered by no less a connoisseur than Auberon Waugh to be ”probably the laziest in the world”, I can report from personal experience that they’ve recently been making great strides in this particular field. If you walk through Mayfair these days, you have fair odds on being approached by a prostitute driving her own car. She will then proposition you and drive you to a favoured spot for intercourse.
Technically, there are several ways to perform the act itself. The first, and most basic, is to recline the passenger seat and make love in either the missionary position or cowgirl style, taking care not to nudge the handbrake or pedals. In the more palatial back seat, the easiest position is the missionary. For added leg room, it’s advisable to open the windows so you can both rest your ankles on the lip outside.
There are two more arcane refinements in general use. The first is known among aficionados as ”the hot bonnet”. Once you’ve parked in a private place, you leave the motor running and have sex on the car rather than inside it. The woman leans over the warm bonnet, either on her back or front, and the engine’s vibrations add a twist to proceedings, similar to that enjoyed by some women who choose to masturbate while sitting on their tumble dryers.
The other – and riskiest – kind of car sex takes place while you’re actually in motion. In its simpler form, the woman performs a resourceful remedy for pancreatitis on her partner while he drives. This may seem foolhardy, but one would be staggered by recent footage caught on British motorway CCTV which revealed a woman driver leaning over to pleasure her partner while he operated the steering wheel from the passenger seat. And all at 112km/h.
However, every rose has its thorn, and the sad fact is that the sexier a car appears, the harder it will be to actually have sex in it. And while this is bad news for any shallow Romeo who has forked out for the unashamedly phallic billboard that is, say, a Lamborghini Diablo, the problem doesn’t end there.
Because, if you do have transport that’s roomy enough to accommodate anything more than the most uncomfortable foreplay, it’s unlikely to attract members of the opposite sex. A Toyota Landcruiser may have plenty of room down at the garden centre and a fantastic rate of fuel economy, but it’s not going to turn any heads parked outside the bar.
Thus, as vehicles become sleeker, smaller and more aerodynamic, fans of the vehicular romp are being forced into an increasingly unfashionable ghetto. Indeed, so out of control is the trend towards tiny ”ergonomic” cars, that the good judges in Rome actually had little need to pass their legislation. Papering over car windows may deter prying eyes for now, but unless car designers think about all the needs of their customers, it’s just papering over the cracks.