Stewart Hennessey Body Language >From Samuel Richardson’s instructive novel for young women, Clarissa (1747), to What a Young Woman Ought to Know (hot in the early 1900s), to the modern dating bible, The Rules, all the oh-so-earnest advice being dispensed to young women can be distilled into one dull command: don’t put out. This is not what men want to hear. Yet in recent centuries even they have taken to saying it. And this woefully acceptable statement of the joyless is the product of the femi-nisation of male culture, wherein men “feel for women” when they should just be plain feeling them. It’s wrecked the whole dating game. The fun battle of the sexes has been cancelled owing to men defecting. Take the exquisite and tragically well- selling example of John Gray’s sodden wet waffle for worriers, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Therein Uncle John tells our lost generation of lily-livered liberals that it’s wrong to just expect a woman to put out. Apparently sex is all about intuition, timing and sensitivity (the much-favoured term of the self-obsessed and touchy). Well, do me with a porcupine on a bamboo stick! Be lost without you, John. If you haven’t got sexy qualities you are not going to acquire them from a man who has nothing better to do with his time than boast in print about his wonderful technique and respect for womanhood. All modern sex manuals trade on neurosis and fear of sex and they show that the repressed worriers have the upper hand. They are nag-presents, given to cowed, modern men by fretting, modern women on the desperate assumption that a self- satisfied book will change their lover’s personality. And the prideless bloke even says thanks, on occasion. The worried and hormoneless have been buying these sex-as- problem books for too long. It falls to men to foil this conspiracy of neurotics. It falls to men to shark, shamelessly. Instinct, taste and perhaps alcohol will decree when it is a good idea to have one’s bones jumped. If you need a book to tell you then you’re already doomed to eternal wetness (and I don’t mean primed for fun). Reading a smug, worthy book about it is not going to help you judge. It’s just going to make you smug and worthy. That PC culture seized the mantle of repression from Victorians, and kept us worrying about sex, is well- documented, especially by those who say we have moved beyond that and are now really sussed; postmodern or post-postmodern or postman-pat or whatever it is. But, like the Third Way, it’s not a great fantasy. Where we would call our attitude to dating and sex “enlightened and sensitive” now, many of our more bawdy, ribaldrous and pre- Victorian forebears would call it touchy, self-obsessed, fearful and self-conscious. Most people would agree that one’s sex life is nobody’s business except one’s lover’s, so why are all these do-gooders writing self- satisfied books explaining (inexplicable) sexuality and turning it from a joyous and deeply personal mystery into a consciously comprehensible and very public social science project? Of course, they’re just trying to say “I’m a great lay”, yet their dry analysis suggests nothing more than a strong will to prove they are a great lay, and we all know how tiresome that is between the sheets. In his follow-up bestseller, imaginatively entitled Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, Gray tells us of a particularly good seeing-to he gave his wife. And right riveting it isn’t too.
There is a tragic dearth of self-help sages counterbalancing this supposedly sensitive attitude to sex. Most self-help manuals are of no practical use whatsoever except to make the uptight feel that their uptightness is “understandable” (as opposed to amazingly dull at parties) and “in hand” now that they’ve read Mr Great Lay’s opus. But where is The Guide To How To Have Sex That May Or May Not Be A Really Bad Idea But Right Now I Don’t Give A Monkeys? That’s the kind of book that would keep the species going, and make life interesting. There is no Put Outters Manual, no What A Young Shark Ought To Know. Until now … After much consultation with the kind of men you wouldn’t introduce your sister to, the compilation is under way for The Sacred Principles Of Counteracting Wet And Soul- Destroying Advice To Not Put Out, aka Sharking, aka A Young Man’s Duty. So far we’ve got four sacred principles: 1 Be happy. Nothing is more attractive than happiness.
2 Feign respect. No respect, no chance. Even the most drunken slapper wants to believe you respect her. 3 Diddley squat comes to he who waits. If you haven’t got the guts, technique and charm to shark, you’ll just get drunks, desperadoes and dullards, but mostly you’ll get nothing. 4 The art of chatting up is shutting up. It is entirely about getting them to do the talking – especially about themselves. Men, it is your duty to follow these rules. Shark first, worry later. The women will worry enough anyway without you telling them they’re right to do so. Thus it always was until the world turned wet. Stewart Hennessey’s debut novel, Drowning in the Shallows, an anti-PC satire on the immaturity of young adults, is out now, published by Review