VOYEURISTIC EDITORS

Vicki Woods on

the way 'respectable' papers get sex into stories

HOW many times a night one likes to have sexual intercourse is not a permissible topic at dinner; nor is it a fit subject for a columnist on the Times or the Independent. Sex talk — Doing It, Loving It and Bragging About It — is for the lower classes, isn't it? and the grimy papers they read. Sex and violence and smut and sleaze: it brightens up their dull lives and keeps them going between Giro cheques. The lower classes bonk away in an uncon- trolled manner in their underprivileged housing — 'I Had Sex at 13 and I've Never Stopped' and grubby men in raincoats write about it for the grubby papers — 'Are there orgies down your street? Tell us any day 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on 071 7824498.' These headlines are from last Sunday's News of the World.

The shoe-wearing classes are assumed to keep this sort of thing well tucked in, like a shirt-tail, and undiscussed, except sotto voce with a close friend, or wordlessly, like Sicilian mafiosi using only eye-contact and raised eyebrows. Sex is very powerful, of course, and will sometimes burst the con- fines even of the pinstriped trouser, which is why the middle classes, especially men, have a great fear of being discovered in flagrante themselves by the News of the World or the Sun. It isn't so much a fear of being discovered to have bonked (almost everyone bonks, after all, and one's wife may forgive) but a fear of being for ever tarred by those shudder-making lower- class headlines saying, 'O000h, Five Times a Night!' and the pictures of Sex Mad Karen or Debbie (as it might be) who looks like one's cleaning-woman or her daughter and the copy beneath written in the same curiously dated demotic as the Beano and the Dandy, about toffs and blokes and pals and kids and boozing and kinky stuff and fancying sex-mad raving nymphos like crazy. No man in public life or a decent shirt, no merchant banker, no Harley Street doctor, no moderately successful television scriptwriter even, wants to see his own haunted photograph slammed up alongside that of Mrs A. and Mrs B. posing and smiling in their favourite undies.

Newspapers with downmarket reader- ships, then, print as much about sex as they can, in order, presumably, to keep Kevin and Sharon in a permanent state of arous- al. And newspapers with upmarket read- erships have to get their attitudes to bonking and undies pretty firmly sorted out, or they run the risk of losing not readers — never that — but class.

The Daily Mail, which I once worked on, prides itself on its upmarket readership despite its tabloid shape and it has a unique line on sex stories. The Mail knows full well that 'tits' and 'bums' and bonking are horribly lower-class, but it also knows that sex sells. So — write about it. Often. But do it with 'taste' (no hard language) and decorum (no dirty pictures) and flag the sex feature with urgent straplines that tell your readers they will learn important lessons about themselves and the human condition by reading it: the Rape Story Every Woman in Britain Must Read, for example, of Jill Saward's account of her assault at the Ealing vicarage, or What Pamella's Story Tells Us About Men of Power, of Miss Bordes's life and times with Arabs and newspaper editors. In the case of Jill Saward's book, the important lesson about the human condition failed to come across. My neighbour the headhunter's wife bought the Mail every day last week, in sympathy with a young woman who had been horrifically treated, she felt, both by drunken intruders and then subsequently by the judiciary (the trial judge observed that Jill Saward's 'trauma . . . was not so great' — after she was raped by various means including a knife-handle — and gave the rapists astonishingly light sent- ences). My neighbour the headhunter's wife was disappointed with her purchase. She learned no important lesson. 'I couldn't work out why they'd bothered to print it. I wanted to understand how on earth she coped with it, and with life afterwards, but I didn't understand any better after reading every word.' What the Mail bought, for its £250,000, was a flawed book: Miss Saward, who has suffered greatly, wrote her story `to help other women', but she doesn't write well enough to make her readers feel her suffering as she did, or to learn from her suffering. Apart from cutting out 'most of the God bits', the Mail's adaptation was fair, but the book itself is unemotional, flatly writ- ten and pedestrian. Therefore, what the Mail bought was simply the chance to run scaremongering (for women) and titillating (for men) copy for five days on the trot headed, 'RAPE: Every Woman's Night- mare.' And the circulation bumped up by 30,000 extra readers.

Not many women work on the Mail; almost none in positions of power. It's an old-fashioned, woman-fearing place: women working there are treated with top-heavy gallantry by Sir David English and his male colleagues. The Mail's favourite sex stories reflect these attitudes precisely: they have a unique, Sapperesque moral line that can be summed up briefly in the words, Beware, chaps! There are loose women out there and they can sap a chap's strength.

Of course, each paper deals with sex in its own way. The Times can review a new ludicrous sex book by Shere Hite as well as anybody; it can report marriage break-ups (sex), 'Satanic child abuse' (sex) and the divorce rate (sex) in carefully-written prose. There are still, as ever, those closely detailed sex-crime stories on the home news pages of the Telegraph; there are social-worker sex stories in the Guardian about underprivileged people who live in unfortunate housing schemes and have to put up with all sorts; and there are fashion pages in every paper which show, young models looking sulky-mouthed and sexy in knickers and bras or clingy evening frocks. What would you? We are not monks. But what the upmarket papers do not do is to write firsthand about sex itself: Why I Love It Five Times a Night. That's titillation, simply. If you want to read about mucky things, read a mucky tabloid.

Or you can read the Independent. The Independent is the most serious-minded of Britain's newspapers, and its readership, to the Daily Mail's frustration, is both upmar- ket and young/female as well as young/ male. It's so serious-minded as to appear gratifyingly stuffy: no smut, no sleaze, no salaciousness, no Royal Family. Which is why its coverage of sex is so baffling.

Readers of the Independent are used to finding, on the 'Living' or 'Health' or even 'Law' pages, just as explicitly written arti- cles on How Much, How Big, How Often as readers of the Sun and the News of the World. On the Health page of 1 May appeared, 'Frank testimony of a child sex abuser', straplined: 'Is there a cure for men who sexually assault children? Here, an offender writes about his crimes and his treatment. His wife shares the pain of her experience.' The illustration shows a big heart made of sponge leaning on and squashing a little heart made of sponge.

Each heart has the biological symbol for a male on it. The copy is as gruesome as you might expect. Here, the writer describes 'fooling about' with a 12-year-old boy: 'It happened that my hand fell in his lap and I began stroking, almost in fun.' It's the 'almost' that gets me, and the illustration.

Readers of the Independent gaze, week after week, at giant female condoms the size of freezer bags; lasciviously positioned 'anatomically-correct' dolls with a man's eye locked on the dolls' genitals; little putto-like babies' thighs with the one eye of (this time) a woman child abuser gazing at the baby's fleshy bottom. The drawings are well-executed, but rather lubricious.

And what's the point of them, except to titillate? In August, the Health pages of the Independent ran an article on vaginis- mus — painful intercourse — from which 27,000 women are supposed to suffer. I suppose there is a place for cogent, reasoned help on this painful condition on a paper's health page. Why not? But the Independent ran the feature with a big (five inches by eight) illustration. Now — how on earth do you illustrate a feature about painful intercourse, in an upmarket news- paper? You draw a man's finger pushing at a woman's tightly-curled fist. And then, in the background, you draw a stone phallus with an Assyrian's head on the top of it, and a massively erect stone penis in the middle of it. Get it? You bet we do.

Last weekend the Independent had a centre-page article from America on Satur- day, headlined, Dial a Dream Girl for Safest Sex. The next day the Independent on Sunday's lead feature in their Review section was called 'Damaged Goods'. It was an unpleasant tale about the life and times of a violent Londoner who took cocaine every night and beat people up.

Having read it once on Sunday and twice since, I still can't work out why they printed it, stuffed full as it was of blood, beatings, bruises, bricks in the eye, broken knees, blows with hammers. It was the sort of feature that is given as a present to the chief crime reporter by his local nick: a feature about how dogged 'honest copper- ing' finally gets Chummy slammed up for a good long stretch. It was written in the ingenuous style of True Detective ('Theories — the police had plenty') and was depressing to read on a bright Septem- ber Sunday. Why was it there? Because the man was a pimp and the people he beat up were prostitutes. Equals sex, of course, and the illustration showed the backside of a naked woman in bed with the ominous shadow of a man holding a stick creeping up on her.

As I say, if you want to read mucky things, read a mucky paper.