`WE MIGHT AS WELL MAKE LOVE'

The Germans love to mock British sexual attitudes. They are fine ones

to talk, argues Anne McElvoy I AM hopelessly prudish, petrified of the sight of my own naked body, let alone any- one else's, and only interested in the bed- room peccadillos of my elected representa- tives because I have not come to terms with my own libido. Yes, I must be British. The awful truth about my warped and infantile attitudes to sex have been revealed to me in the German press over the last few months, but having lived there for several years previously, I long sensed their conviction that we are not good at It.

Relations between Us and Them are admittedly not at their most friendly just now. We hit them with Nicholas Ridley, Robert Harris's Fatherland and the convic- tion that the Bundesbank is responsible for our fiscal woes. Even the politically- correct Granta has just published an edi- tion sensitively entitled 'Krauts!' There had to be a counter-offensive, and now they are hitting back below the belt with a spate of erotic defamation. It grieves me to report that The Spectator unwittingly handed them the first grenade to lob. Michael Lewis, leaving these shores for America last year, wrote a gently mocking article about his sojourn in London (`Oh, not to be in England,' 23 May 1992), con- cluding that he wondered how a nation as stand-offish as this ever managed to con- summate its affection, and conjuring up the amusing picture of a bedroom contrap- tion which catapulted the couples at each other in order to get the awful deed over with. I laughed, you probably laughed and the author doubtless let out the odd splut- ter of mischievous mirth as he wrote it.

But it was taken with deadly seriousness by Germany's leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, which intoned the following week, `In the everyday life of this puritan island, the Victorian notion remains prevalent that sex must not be fun and is really wily there for procreation.' A German television channel then devoted a half hour to our attitudes to nudity, giggling at the fact that we consider naturists to be odd, when of course everyone knows that it is perfectly normal to grill your sausages starkers while addressing your soberly undressed neigh- bouring sunbather as 'Herr Doktor'.

With the bit between its teeth Der Spiegel refused to let go, and unleashed its consid- erable investigative expertise in search of British sex. An unnamed female correspon- dent drew the office short straw of 'trying out some Englishmen'. Her conclusions were shrivelling. 'Lights out, then they climb on top of you and after three minutes they spring out of bed covering their geni- tals with a towel.' I hope they gave her compassionate leave afterwards to recover from the experience. Another seeker for truth, this time from the liberal Die Zeit, did the rounds of Christmas parties in Lon- don and marvelled that this repressed peo- ple abandoned its chastity with such gusto after two mince-pies and a Babycham once a year.

I could forgive all of this more easily if my years in Dilsseldorf and Berlin — East and West — had left me swooning with memories of the sheer sexiness of my hosts, but they did not. It is not just the fact that I do not find horn-rimmed glasses and green and purple checked jackets par- ticularly attractive, but it is also the unimaginative literalness of the younger generation of Germans when it comes to matters of the heart and loins.

I tried, I really did. There was the hand- some television journalist with the mes- merising green eyes behind the horn-rims. A brief conversation of strange, prickly intensity, the establishment of abstruse common interests, an invitation to dinner the next night — such romantic promise. I turned up for the date to find Eros already half undressed. 'Let's just take off our clothes and go to bed,' he drawled. I said I thought we were going out to dinner to discuss the crisis in East German litera- ture. He looked momentarily confused. `But why bother talking when we could just go to bed?' he said.

Being hopelessly prudish and alienated from my own libido, I related this woeful episode to another English friend in Berlin. 'Yours was quite romantic by usual standards,' she said grimly. Her dreamboat had lured her back for coffee, bemoaned the late-night television schedule and said in a tone of bored resignation, 'Well, now you're here we might as well make love.'

All cultures have their own peculiarities about courtship. The average British male, unless roaring drunk or ill-socialised, will approach cautiously throughout an evening until he is within striking distance, stroke a hand or touch a shoulder to check that he is not inducing a feeling of revul- sion in his prey and, if he feels the climate is right, lunge and hope to encounter a willing response. I have nothing against this, as it gives the woman ample chance to skip nimbly out of the way before it is too late.

The German approach of direct verbal petitioning does not leave that option open and causes embarrassment and ill- feeling if the answer is no. I don't quite know how to mend fences with a young politician who in the middle of a discus- sion on the flaws in the unification treaty said, think it is time to continue this conversation lying down,' and then stormed off accusing me of being (you guessed it) prudish when I declined, but I rather feel that he broke the fences of deli- cacy in the first place.

All the odder, then, that they look with particular distaste on our interest in politi- cians' sex lives. According to Der Spiegel, whose coverage of this land is limited to two basic stories, 'Britain's Economic Decline' and 'The Island of Puritans', the case of David Mellor 'reminds Britons of what a wide discrepancy yawns between national sexual prudery and their inex- haustible sexual voyeurism'. A letter to the Berliner Zeitung berates the British habit of `snuffling under MPs' beds' and concludes, yet again, that this is a mere reaction to our miserably unfulfilled love-lives. The obses- sion with our mating habits has become so advanced that it has taken on a fantasy life of its own. The usually sensible Berlin Wochenpost this month reports that we suf- fer more from premature ejaculation than any other western Europeans (what ghastly research that must have entailed for some poor reporter) and that it is 'quite usual for Tory politicians to dress up in baby-doll nighties and have themselves whipped . allowing the sadistic Super-Ego to pun- ish the Ego of lust'.

Not that there is much chance of our catching Helmut Kohl or his ilk in a baby- doll nightie. When a magazine alleged that the prominent Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine frequented Dfisseldorf brothels, it rather than Herr Lafontaine became the subject of opprobrium in Bonn. If this were to continue, a sonorous newspaper leader remarked, the country could end up with the 'British disease' of the tabloid press `relentlessly snuffling in the intimate spheres of politicians' lives', and wouldn't that be awful?

A propos of brothels, the Wochenpost proffers the valuable piece of information that there are four times fewer of them in Britain than in the old Federal Republic, a discovery which no doubt is a sign of our economic and sexual weakness rather than reflecting an excessive liking for prostitutes on the part of their countrymen.

Scandals in Germany are always of a financial rather than a sexual nature, which is very convenient for the politicians but makes for inordinately boring newspapers. It also strengthens rather than diminishes the blackmailer's hand. The late Willy Brandt, a notorious womaniser, was closely watched by the internal security service, and the material they garnered on his mis- demeanours was almost certainly used in the internal party trickery to oust him from office in 1974, behind the smoke-screen of the discovery of an East German spy in his office. Attenuated secrecy makes moun- tains of molehills much more effectively than a prurient press.

Sex, like a lot of other facets of German life, is riven with contradictions. The soci- ety which prides itself on a 'natural' approach to the body has satellite televi- sion channels like RTL which pump offen- sive pornography into every living-room. These are remarkably horrible even by the standards of the industry, with many so utterly weird that one wonders who on earth gets the remotest pleasure from watching them.

Like the series of tales from a gynaecol- ogist's surgery, a nightmarish mixture of cod 'medical advice' (which I will spare you), interspersed with sex scenes and shots of the ghoulish doctor peeling off his rubber gloves and casting them into a pedal bin. Very high viewing figures.

East and west, they like their naughty films. Erich Honecker, when his senile dementia allowed the recognition to per- meate that the regime was not entirely popular with its subjects by the mid-Eight- ies, spent precious currency reserves on importing Petites Folies, a charmingly dated French porn series full of buxom chambermaids, well-hung plumbers and not a gynaecologist in sight. It was calcu- lated to distract the plebs from the lack of citrus fruits and stimulate the falling birth- rate at the same time. When Honecker's cupboards in the Wandlitz compound were opened to the public gaze, it was discov- ered that he had the whole set and other similar offerings not considered suitable for the working class in his tape library.

You can hardly fail to become rich in Germany by peddling sex aids, particularly now that the market has expanded to the east. As I travelled through the blighted small towns of Saxony soon after currency union in 1990, I drove down a main street which had but one new western investor to enliven its dreary frontages: Dr Muller's sex emporium had arrived. The population was understandably aggrieved that while they couldn't get fresh vegetables or a pizza in a 25-mile radius, they had 35 potency cures on their doorstep.

A befugged Teutonic view of life in Britain persists in Germany which seems to have been forged somewhere about 1890 and has altered little since. Along with the lore that we all sit down to tea and toast at four o'clock sharp before mak- ing our way home across cobbled streets in a pea-souper fog, stopping only to address our fellows as 'Sir', goes the iron convic- tion that we are verklemmt — uptight. Has no enterprising London correspondent of a German publication seen Margi Clarke interviewing deadpan Liverpool house- wives about their favourite positions on The Good Sex Guide or twisted his neck trying to follow Jeremy Irons' sado- masochistic exertions in Damage? I suspect they have, but can't bear to let their read- ers in on the secret of our enlightenment and spoil the fun.

While I was mulling over these peculiari- ties, another girlfriend called from Berlin to relate an evening of heavy-handed ban- ter from her hosts about the British prefer- ing hot-water bottles/cricket/a cup of tea to Doing It. As they left the café, one young stud whispered to her with the magnanimi- ty of a philanthropist in a poor-house, `You can sleep at my place if you want.' But hang on. If we are all so bad in bed, why do they proposition us with such des- perate regularity? And if they are all so good at it, why do they need to?

Anne McElvoy is on the staff of the Times in Moscow, having escaped from Germany.