Not the Mail & Guardian is Robert Kirby’s startling and savagely satirical parody of the Mail & Guardian newspaper. Any similarity between real people and characters portrayed here is anything but coincidental
As Oscar Wilde once observed about social ambitions: ‘There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
This delightfully snide truism is enjoying rather bizarre proof in contemporary England where married couples — usually in the 30 to 50 age group, and where sexual boredom has led to a sort of desperate lack of inhibition and propriety — are taking part in a post-modern tribal ritual called ‘dogging”.
Dogging is becoming increasingly popular in Blair’s England. In its most rudimentary (no pun intended) explanation, dogging is when you and your husband go along in the family car to a secluded place where other enthusiastic
doggers have foregathered.
Dogging is a lonely car park social pastime with the emphasis on sex. In other words, an al fresco orgy with a touch of respectability if you’re a member of the Royal Automobile Club.
Once you’ve parked and sent out hermetic ‘dogger” signals by use of headlights and horns (still no pun intended), you and your old man clamber into the back seat — where there’s usually more room for carnal variation — and fall upon each other.
You start doing the bold thing right there in the car. Responding to the headlight signals and hooters, other doggers will slowly gather round the car and watch you as you heave, pitch and … well, yelp. Unless it’s mid-winter, you leave the car’s windows open because, as things heat up, the watchers might want to offer encouragement and, if necessary, advice.
You are free to open the door and invite them in. In serious dogging, anything goes — or comes. Having finished your first course, you will be expected to go and watch other performing doggers.
Inter-vehicle trans-dogging is approved, as is activity carried out on the boot or bonnet. Getting out and banging away in the grass is not generally encouraged as it is environmentally unsound. Currently there are stipulated gay dogging sites — apart from the docks, that is.
Doggers are advised to contact each other through websites, to make sure they don’t go dogging without spare batteries for the torches, to take along plenty of tissues and baby wipes and generally to behave in a civilised and considerate fashion.
One of the 10 commandments of dogging states: never get in the way of anyone else’s view. Most important: when male fellow doggers gather round your car they obviously get a bit excited and a few are known to achieve personal relief.
So, after a session it’s a sensible precaution to drop into a car wash on the way home. Never leave this till the morning as the deposits tend to set and can
be very difficult to remove.
Since, in dogging, everyone eventually knows everyone else, doggers will no doubt discuss among themselves and their friends what they have seen, who they have seen doing it and with what degree of finesse.
Authentic four-legged dogs (the canine variety) have a simpler version of dogging. What they do is go around diligently smelling their neighbour’s bottoms for a few weeks. The result is they experience just as elevated a sense of community as their human counterparts.
With human dogging, Wilde’s cynicism is vindicated in more than just its oblique sense. What he was saying was that, however it is acquired, in any society reputation is often more important than reality.
If you feel you have to go and park in the forest and screw each other in the back seat of your Range Rover in order to be noticed and gossiped about, so be it. It’s preferable, if slightly less obscene, than more traditional methods of self-gratification and exhibitionism. Like being a politician.
But there are other ways, apart from dogging, to get the neighbourhood tongues wagging (and that’s the last time I’m saying no pun intended), and that are safer, more comfortable, and offer significantly less danger of venereal cross-infection. (I was a trained theatre sister in my time.)
If you and your hubby are after nothing much more than plain sexual kudos; if you want to be discussed and pitied in lowered tones over the better dinner tables; if you need to know that you are regarded with envy as being fashionably degraded in your sexual habits, these societal appetites can be satisfied with a little imagination and very little outlay.
For a start, why not build a little platform in the corner of your marital bedroom, erect one of those shiny metal poles — the kind strippers writhe around in low-life night clubs — and surround the little stage with lurid gauze and coloured spotlights?
For effect, dress the set with discarded crotchless thongs, pink feather boas, spilt lubricant, a few sex toys, anything to increase the impression that the stage has been used recently.
Obviously you don’t have to actually use the thing — more than just to test it out now and then. Unless, of course, a few fellow doggers pitch up saying it’s too cold and rainy for auto-borne sex, in which case the stripper platform’s value will be without limit.
Imagine that plump little redhead, Juliet Bickerstone from that yellow Ford Focus, ECX 2334 Y, sinuously stripping while your old man and a couple of his fellow insurance salesmen from Orpington pull their wires.
But the real purpose of setting up a bedroom stripping pole is so that people think you and your husband use it in some far-out fantasy sex sessions. And getting that idea out and around is simple. When next the Bickerstones come round for dinner, tell them the downstairs loo is blocked and that they’ll have go upstairs and use the en suite one.
Unless they’re totally motherless, they’ll notice the little stripper-stage. Within a day or two your stature in the dogger community will rise to the point where you could get even receive a visit from the Methodist vicar. If he goes upstairs for a pee, make sure you’ve left a few sets of handcuffs lying around, some shiny black leather gear and definitely a few whips.
Christians understand suffering far better than most. If you’re in luck, you might find the step from dogging to dog collar is closer than you expected.
I asked my younger brother to have a look at this article before I sent it in. He hooted with acerbic laughter. ‘The only new thing about dogging is its name,” he said.
‘As schoolboys in Durban in the Fifties, one of our favourite weekend amusements was to bicycle down to the old Blue Lagoon, down there where the Umgeni river reaches the sea and which, in those days, was a well-known lover’s lane.
‘We’d creep through the undergrowth to where the cars were parked. Dogging techniques were different in our day. It was sniggering schoolboys who lined up to peer into the cars and, as often as not, the occupant lovers didn’t seem to mind. Once or twice older boys were invited to join in.”
Knowing my brother, I think he was exaggerating a bit. When James and I went to the Blue Lagoon we never saw anyone peeping in. Not that James would have minded. ‘Woof, Woof,” he’d have said. —