Julie Burchill
Body Language
I don’t “do”, in this order: Germans, blond men, sportsmen or men called Boris. (“Give it to me, Boris!” You couldn’t, could you?) But, should I ever run into the blond German tennis ace Boris Becker, I may well or would, if I weren’t a married woman grab him by his Teutonic shock and drag him into the nearest broom cupboard.
For Boris, it turns out, is a five-second man! Anyway, that’s how long his “affair” with his daughter Anna’s mother lasted. Yay! Sod Esperanto and damn the fact I dropped German in third year: we’re speaking the same language, Boris and me. For, in a world of men bullied by wussy women’s magazines into believing that sex has to be a three-course meal (with appropriate sorbets, pickles and sauces), I reckon Boris has got it about right: sex, to be truly savoured, needs to be short, nasty and brutish.
I jest, of course; premature ejaculation isn’t a laughing matter for anyone, except for your friends when you tell them about it on the phone the next morning. My first marriage ended because the main event was invariably over before my husband got his socks off.
But then what happened? I left him for a legendary Lothario who after a few years made me recall the words of another earthy working-class West Country wench, Playboy bunny and Roxy Music model Marilyn Cole, who ended her affair with Hugh Hefner “because he went on so long it got boring”. There are many reasons to be repulsed by Sting, but the fact that he and his poor shattered wife have sex for six hours at a time “tantric”, if you please is the decider. No wonder she looks like a sick rhesus monkey.
Yes, enough is certainly as good as a feast, and over the years I have come to the conclusion that, like the perfect pop single, three-and-a-half minutes of sex always hits the spot. The song that always struck fear into my heart was an old R&B number, Sixty Minute Man, a Philly cover of which was a hit when I was but an innocent girl, during which the lead singer repeatedly threatened: “There’ll be 20 minutes of teasing/20 minutes of pleasing/ And 20 minutes of blowing my top!”
I used to physically blanch whenever I heard this; please, I’d moan inwardly, couldn’t I just have the 20 minutes in the middle and you could go and tease someone else, thus hopefully blowing your top all over their two-tone Trevira skirt?
I’ve had no reason to change my views over the years. Basically, the only people that like sex to go on for a long time are people who can’t come, and they tend to be women. Which always makes me wonder why they bother having sex in the first place it’s like eating without swallowing. All those broads who need candles, aromatherapy baths and long, “sensual” (must be said with a lisp for full comic effect) baths to get them “in the mood” come on! Come clean. You can’t come. Why don’t you stop wasting your time and get yourself a dog. A hobby. But don’t make some poor wage slave slog his guts out every night in the hope he’ll eventually bring you to the abyss of ecstasy, because you know and I know it ain’t gonna happen, girlfriend!
I feel it’s time that men, the poor suckers, were let in on the fact that, despite the porn stars you see “gagging” for it everywhere (who are, ahem, being highly paid to express these sentiments), the majority of women do not like sex for the sake of sex. Many of them merely pretend to want it all the time for the same reason they pretended never to want it at all in the Fifties: to be popular, and to be marriageable to rich, successful and attractive men.
Look at Denise van Outen. Never stopped banging on about shagging, yet now Jamiroquai’s made it clear to her that they’re never gonna saunter down the aisle, I bet she’ll live like a nun. She gave it her best shot, and it failed. Why keep on? And nine times out of 10 when you do get a woman who obviously does love sex, she was abused as a child, and that makes it all a bit weird and depressing.
Yes, guys, I’m afraid there are very few genuine “nymphos” out there. But if you find one, grab her by the nipples, bang a ring on her finger and turn a blind eye to her (many) faults for the rest of your natural life, because your love will come back to you twentyfold, as Jerry Springer might say.
She won’t see blowjobs as barter and she won’t get headaches. She won’t want cunnilingus she’ll think it “a waste of time”, as a famously sexy girl pop star once confided in me, going on to say that she had left a copy of my novel Ambition open by her bed, to give her over-enthusiastic boyfriend the hint, wherein the heroine Susan describes the act thus: “She felt a flash of nostalgia for those days she had never known, when men thought it disgusting. Men who were Bad In Bed were no bother; two minutes acting, five minutes reassurance and then you could go on to do something more fun. Men who were Good In Bed were another matter; five hours acting, two hours rave reviews and by then they were ready to go again! People made a big fuss about Bruce Springsteen doing four hours on stage big deal! The level of showmanship and stamina a modern girl needed nightly in the sack made him look like a two-minute wonder.”
You’ll know your real female sex fiend because she’ll want brief, rough sex five minutes, mind you, not five seconds! with none of the trimmings. Though she may well want it eight times a day, so you’d better be no older than 28. And when you ask her to “say something rude”, she does have a habit of getting it wrong and coming out with stuff like “Look sharp we haven’t got all day!” and “The column won’t write itself, you know!” But hey, nobody’s perfect.