The Textbook-sex Imbalance
Having said that, one can make a few generalizations about English sex. For example, English males are, as a rule, less likely than their American counterparts to read those earnest self-help books and manuals about sexual techniques. English females, even if they don't read the books, get a lot of this kind of information from women's magazines. Until fairly recently, this has meant a slight imbalance in the sort of 'textbook' sexual expertise that one can acquire from such reading.
But the most 'laddish' English men's mags now feature illustrated articles on 'how to drive women wild' and 'three easy steps to multiple orgasm' and so on - and even the illiterate can watch late-night educational sex programmes on Channel 4, or pseudo-documentary soft-porn on Channel 5 (programmes that are helpfully scheduled to start shortly after the pubs close) so our men are rapidly catching up. Many younger males - and even some trendy older ones - seem to have gathered, for instance, that performing a bit of token oral sex is de rigueur, just to prove you're not a total wham-bam Neanderthal. Some have even got past the stage of expecting to be awarded a medal for this.
Post-Coital Englishness
Apres sex or, if we have fallen asleep, the next morning, we revert to the usual state of awkward Englishness. We say:
'I'm terribly sorry, but I didn't quite catch your name...?'
'Would you mind very much if I borrowed a towel?'
'I'll just go and put the kettle on...'
'No! Monty! Put it down! We don't eat the nice lady's bra! What will she think of us? Drop it! Bad dog!'
'Sorry it's a bit burnt: the toaster's a bit temperamental, I'm afraid - doesn't like Mondays or something...'
'Oh, no, it's very nice. Ooh, yes - tea! Lovely, thank you!' (this delivered with at least as much enthusiasm as the cris de joie of the night before.)
All right, I'm exaggerating a little - but not much: all these are genuine, verbatim morning-after quotes.
Le Vice Anglais and the Funny-bottoms Rule
In The English, Jeremy Paxman devotes the first four pages of his chapter on sexual matters to what the French call 'le vice Anglais' - 'the English vice': flagellation (spanking, caning, and other assaults upon the bottom). At the end of his entertaining anecdotal survey of the topic, he admits, 'It would be silly to claim that 'the English vice' is widespread among the English. It is not. Nor, despite its name, is it unique to the English'. Quite. (And he might have added that even the name is hardly significant, as the French randomly designate as 'Anglais' things they disapprove of or wish to poke fun at - things we in turn call 'French': their term for 'French leave' is 'filer a L'Anglaise' - to run away like the English; a 'French letter' is a 'capote Anglaise'.)
But if this particular sexual kink is neither widespread among the English, nor unique to us, why give it such a lot of space and prominence? Paxman says that the 'central ambiguity' of this practice, 'that punishment is reward, and pain, pleasure - rings with English hypocrisy'. Well, maybe. But I think there is a simpler explanation for why he starts his sex chapter with this not-particularly-English vice, and that is the knee-jerk humour rule. When faced with any sort of discussion of sex, our humour reflex kicks in, and we make a joke of it. We also regard bottoms as intrinsically funny. So, if you've got to talk about sex, start with some funny stuff about bottoms62.
Page Three and the Un-erotic Bosoms Rule
Then, if possible, move on to bosoms, which we also find highly amusing. Paxman claims that 'English men are obsessed by breasts', citing the daily parade of page-three bosoms in the tabloid newspapers as proof of this fixation. I am not so sure. Breasts are a secondary sexual characteristic, and men in many parts of the world like to look at them - in magazines and so on, as well as in the flesh. I am not convinced that English men are any more obsessed with breasts than, say, American, Australian, Scandinavian, Japanese or German men. The daily breast-display on page three of the Sun, and in other tabloid papers, is, however, an interesting English phenomenon, and worth looking at a bit more closely.
In a national MORI survey, only 21 per cent of us expressed moral disapproval of the page-three breast parade. Of all the representations of sex in the media, topless page-three girls attracted the least condemnation, by a long way. Even among women, only 24 per cent had moral objections to page three, whereas nearly twice that number, 46 per cent, objected to soft-porn magazines in newsagents' (such as Playboy, with similar images), and 54 per cent thought cinema pornography was immoral. Now, this does not of course mean that the other 76 per cent of women actively enjoy looking at page three, but it does suggest that many do not regard it as 'pornography' - perhaps seeing it as something more innocuous, even though the pictures are much the same as those in soft-porn magazines.
When I read these statistics, I was intrigued, and started asking my own questions, trying to find out why both men and women seemed to regard page three as somehow different from other soft-porn images. In terms of numbers, although my 'sample' was much smaller, I got much the same results as the MORI poll - only about a fifth of my informants objected to page three. I was surprised to find that even some of my more feminist-minded informants could not work up much indignation about page three. Why was this? 'Because, well page-three girls - I mean, they're just a bit of a joke,' said one woman. 'You can't really take it seriously.' 'Oh - I suppose we're just used to it,' explained another. 'Page three is more like those saucy seaside postcards,' said a particularly astute informant. 'It's just daft, with the silly captions full of awful puns. You can't really feel offended by it.' A teenage girl was equally dismissive: 'Compared to what people download off the Internet, or even what you see on the telly - well, page three is so innocent, it's sort of quaint and old-fashioned'.
I noticed that almost all of the people I asked about page three, even a few of those who expressed disapproval, tended to laugh or at least smile as they responded. They would roll their eyes or shake their heads, but in a resigned, tolerant way, much as people do when they are talking about the minor misdemeanours of a naughty child or pet. Page three is a tradition, an institution, somehow reassuringly familiar, like The Archers or rainy Bank Holidays. George Orwell described the English working class as 'devoted to bawdy jokes' and talked about the 'overpowering vulgarity' of rude comic postcards. The ludicrous puns, wordplay and double-entendres in the page-three captions are as much a part of this tradition as the naked breasts, reminding us that sex is a bit of a joke, not to be taken too seriously. It is hard to see the 'tits and puns' on page three as pornography, any more than the bosoms and puns in a jokey seaside postcard or a Carry On film are pornography. They are not even really sexy. Page three is somehow just too daft, too cartoonishly ridiculous, too English to be sexy.
'England may be a copulating country, but it is not an erotic country' said George Mikes in 1977. This was an improvement on his original claim, in 1946, that 'Continental people have a sex-life; the English have hot-water bottles', but still not exactly flattering. He does have a point, though, which is borne out by my page-three findings: only the English could manage to make pictures of luscious, half-naked women into something quite as un-erotic as page three.