Uncle Dysfunctional

by AA Gill

  Sir,

  Isn’t it true that human females are the only animals that have orgasms? And seeing as nature made sex so colossally brilliant – seeing as even after a gazillion years of civilisation and all the technology and ingenuity of millions and millions of people, we’ve yet to come up with anything that’s remotely as good or that we’d rather do – how come we don’t do it all the time, with everyone? I read that most women say they’ve slept with, like, four or five people in their lives. Why not thousands? Why don’t people give each other sex for fun? Why aren’t we doing it in queues, on the bus, in Starbucks? Why did we take the best thing we’ve ever been given, the thing that costs nothing, that is the most mood-enhancing feeling in the history of the universe and cover it in guilt and embarrassment and all sorts of weird religious rules and conventions and superstitions? Why don’t we all just get together and rethink the whole thing? And just go, “Fuck it, let’s get laid”?

  Gus, by email

  Hi, Gus. I’m guessing you’re not getting any. You’ve got no fingerprints on your right hand and the little peepee’s got a pistol grip. I’m sorry to have to tell you this: it is only you. Everyone else is having sex all the time with everyone else except you. We weren’t going to say, but now you’ve asked. You see, if we did take you up on your idea – which frankly, on the face of it, in a men’s magazine, has its attractions – you still wouldn’t be getting laid. Because sex isn’t like PE. Everyone doesn’t have to do it twice a week with a double period on Fridays. If we did decide to start humping like chimps, it would still be the alpha males and the prettiest females who got rogered rotten while the best you and your friend Derek could hope for would be a ritual buggering from a big bully as some submissive humiliation thing. Lady chimps would also say they’ve only had sex with four or five people. It’s just the same four or five people for all of them. Sex is never going to be fair and even all the stuff you complain about – the secrecy, the religious morality, the jealousy, the guilt, the yearning, well, actually, that’s what makes sex sexy. Without all that it’s just hands-free wanking – which may sound good to you at the moment but is not the real deal. Sex is about the expectation, the look, the whisper, the hint, the sniff, the promise. That’s what makes it the best thing ever invented. And let me tell you something about chimpworld, jungle erotics. Chimpanzees have smaller penises than humans, relative to their size. But they have huge balls. Really impressive, bow-legged orbs of generation. The reason is that their sex is perfunctory, rudimentary and fretful. You never know who’s coming up behind you. What Cheetah needs is not technique but spunk. Chimpanzees produce copious amounts of shoot-juice. They need it to wash out all the previously deposited effluvia from the other guys in the band. Chimps don’t go in for a lot of oral sex and that’s something to be borne in mind before we engage in your whoopee free-for-all global gangbang. The prime directive still remains. Sex is driven by genes. The pleasure is the packaging. They don’t really care if you like it or not. They just need to know they’re not sharing a womb. And here, incidentally, is your bonus fun fact: the ridge at the bottom of your bell end (or in your case the ridge that used to be at the bottom of your bell end), may have been designed as an airtight plunger to extract competing sperm from your partner’s vagina. Like a bicycle pump. Try slipping that into your precoital pillow talk, if you ever get that far.

  Dear Uncle,

  I really love sex. Really, really love it. I can’t get enough of it. I love the anticipation, the flirting, the seduction, the first touch of hands, the moment when a kiss turns from a peck into a snog, and a hand sliding down a back and a shrug of a jacket and the clasp of a bra and the warm hard nipples pressed against my chest, the . . . oh shit, oh shit, sorry, fuck, sorry, that’s never happened before . . . Oh, except of course it has, it happens every time. I have a real problem with premature ejaculation. I hate this useless hysterical knob, it’s like having Alan Sugar in your pants, always exploding too soon and inappropriately – and they look rather similar. To make matters worse there is so much of it, and it seems to be fired from some medieval siege engine. There’s jiz everywhere and . . .

  Jason, by email

  OK, Jason, we’re going to have to cut it there. Too much warm, sticky information all over the breakfast table, thank you. This month’s column is going to be devoted to positive thinking, turning the “oh nos” into “oh yeses”, seeing that half-empty glass as half-full, or in your case, half-spilt. Let’s look at premature ejaculation. A sideways look, obviously. Take these two words: only one of them is a problem – premature. It’s the premature bit we want to cure. The ejaculating seems to be working fine, like the end of a Grand Prix. Premature just means “too soon”. So it all depends on when you begin. Don’t get the big guns out at the first squeal. Give your partner a head start – and that is a double entendre. Give her a hand: she’s a girl, so she can go round a couple of laps and you’ll catch her up later, bringing up the rear. Produce the Sugar man for the grand finale; she’ll be impressed by the pyrotechnics if not the technique. And you did say that anticipation is everything. In the end – and that’s another innuendo – sex is selfish, and just as you are only worried about your outcome, so is she. The thing you both care about is that you come second. And remember: if women could have premature ejaculation, they’d all want one, and there’d be sister workshops on how to get there faster.

  Dear AA,

  I just got a new girlfriend and she’s great. We get on well, have a laugh, we like the same music, films, books and stuff. The thing is she’s got politics, loads and loads of them. I had no idea someone could get angry about that much. She’s got opinions where I don’t have thoughts. She’s sort of lefty, I think. I’m not really interested. My family always voted Conservative, so we’re not really into politics and stuff. I always thought it was like taking an interest in street sweeping or railway timetables, but her lot are really into it. They argue about it and if I try and lighten it up, tell a joke and say “who gives a shit, let’s have a drink”, they all glare at me. And now she’s saying she doesn’t know if she can commit to someone who doesn’t care about the world, and the plight of the workers and badgers and immigrants and kids and roads and the environment and the Middle East and pensions and the disestablished Church, and what should I do? Should I just fake it and pretend to worry about Colombian peasants every time I pop into Costa?

  George, Bolton

  The short answer is yes, but you need to convert swiftly. You’ll need to do a bit of research, a bit of reading, but you can just get most of your convictions off Wikipedia. You’ll notice that politics is not really about being for things, because everybody wants the same things; it’s about being against stuff, so you need to learn to recognise the things you’re against: public schools, men in ties, semi-detached houses with double-drives, banks, plastic surgery, boxing, Elgar, flags but not banners, champagne, the missionary position and Switzerland. It’s not difficult. And then you have to be really, really strident about it – go on and on and on. And to begin with she’ll be thrilled, then after about a week of you banging on about the plight of Kashmir and the shameful lack of micro-loans for Malawian women’s collectives, she’ll show signs of getting fed up. No one likes to be out-leftied, and after a couple of weeks she’ll start suggesting you give the politics a rest and get drunk and have sloppy sex instead. You’ll think that’s it, that you’ve won and that you can go back to being a normal, ignorant cynical slob. Well you can’t. She’s just getting ready to slam you with the next thing, which is likely to be vegetarianism or 19th-century literature. Be prepared for “I could never sleep with anyone who hasn’t read Madame Bovary.”

  Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,

  My fiancée – my ex-fiancée – got hold of my phone and went through all my texts and emails. She discovered what she calls “inappropriate messages and behaviour”: a bit of harmless flirting and some bloke has resent me a pic of his mate’s mate’s girlfriend wearing a Queen m
ask with her tits out. You couldn’t even rattle one off the wrist over Her Maj, no matter how perky her top bollocks were. A bit of banter with mates about rows we’d had and a great weekend getting drunk with bum sex. You know, all the stuff blokes talk about. Well, she hit the Artex, accused me of not being straight and open and, of course, out of a clear blue Sunday, apropos of nada, taken off guard, I went on the offensive. I pointed out how bloody dare she go through my personal stuff and she’d crossed a line and it was deceitful and underhand, and by this time we were both yelling and simultaneously shouted, “If there’s no trust in this relationship we’d better call it a fucking day!” Then there was a stunned silence and we haven’t spoken for a week. I’ve let it be known that if she says sorry I’ll forgive and forget: clean sheet. She sent a message that if I apologise on my knees in tears in front of all her mates she’ll think about having me back. I’m right though, aren’t I?

  Tony, London

  Well, Tony, up to a point. That is, actually, in practical terms, no you’re not. Let’s look at where you stand. At this precise moment you’re engaged to your right hand and a mobile phone. How right does that feel to you? What we have here is a very fine example of double standards. Double like apartheid; that is, parallel and different. Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy. So while you think of your phone as being the modern equivalent of a gent’s study or shed – a sacrosanct place where you can mooch about with one hand down your trackies collecting things in old tobacco tins and writing dribbly memoirs – you imagine that it’s a space that is yours alone. What you look at or giggle over is fine as long as it stays in the shed. Women, on the other hand, will think that that’s self-serving bollocks. They’re right. That doesn’t make it wrong, it just makes it self-serving bollocks. It’s a thought crime, you see. Men think the action is what’s wrong. Women think it’s the intent. If you want to get legal about it, they’re both crimes. You imagine privacy is a vital part of a relationship. What happens in the bathroom and on the internet stays in the bathroom and on the internet. She thinks its duplicitous, secretive and humiliating. But here’s the thing: if you said, “I’m just going upstairs to describe the sex we had last night to my mate Ron, and then Skype my ex in the bath,” she’d say, “Don’t forget to mention that I came three times and tell me if Shirley still has one tit lower than the other.” But if in return she said, “I’m going out to have a drink with the girls and will be mentioning your cutie ickle-wickle cock, then I’m gonna have dinner with a bloke who once asked me out before I met you but I wasn’t interested,” you’d sulk for a week.

  For men, privacy means not being told stuff that would hurt. For women, secrecy is having stuff go on behind your back. So call all her mates, make a date, get down on your knees and snivel. Because whilst you’re both right, she’s righter than you. And always will be.

  Dear Unc,

  I’m a photographer. I specialise in portraits and glamour work. Nothing seedy, it’s all tasteful and sophisticated rather than raunchy. I was taking a series of snaps of girls in classic Sapphic poses and, as I was checking them on the computer, my lady-friend had a gander and exclaimed, “Christ! She’s got a weird vadge.” “Who?” I said. “What do you mean, ‘Who?’ The one with the deformed trumpet.” “Deformed?” I said. “I can’t tell the difference.” Well, that tore it. “You can’t tell the difference between a perfectly normal growler and Quasimingo?” Then she got her book group involved. And they all agreed that one of the girls had a kebab that belonged in a medical museum. But bugger me if I could see why. They kept explaining but it was like listening to people shout the instructions for folding ornamental napkins.

  Leon, by email

  Before I give an answer, I’m going to run the next letter, which is related . . .

  Uncle D,

  How do you address a new snatch? What do you call it? I pulled this bird the other night and we were getting down to the main course and I said, by way of encouragement, “Oi! Let the dog see the rabbit!” Next thing I’m standing on the wrong side of the front door wearing my trousers as a snood. What was I supposed to say? And don’t write “vagina”. I can barely type “vagina”.

  Jack, Manchester

  Funnily, neither can my iPad. It’s just tried to spell-check it as “Virginia”, “Virgoan”, “virgin” or “Virginian”. You could always try Virginia. In answer to both of you, the mons veneris, pudenda, labia both minor and major, perineum and clitoris will always be names on a map of a place we visit but are strangers to, a destination of which we know little though we have often gone down for the weekend. It is another country, and we don’t speak Cuntish. Jack, I sympathise. They’re pretty much all much of a muchness. They look the same, the way pastrami sandwiches all look the same. The ladygarden isn’t a delicate yielding place of fey petals in subtly dusty hues scented with musk and oud. It’s a mess. A lovely mess, a boy’s own mess, but it’s an edible laundry basket that was made in the dark by a gay God. And as for what you call it, best to wait to be introduced. You could try the creepily paternalistic opening, “Oh, and who do we have here?” If you think that’ll set the wrong tone, just leap in with, “Wow! You have one round the front as well!” Or you might like to introduce yours first. “Say hello to Mr Ruff Puff.” Or, “Meet Throb the Babymaker”. In the hope that she’ll say, “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure. This is secret Num-num Hideyhole.” Or, “The Toothless Cock Muncher”. But be warned. There are plenty of girls for whom a baptised penis is a deal breaker. Groaning, “Hey, bitch, beg Mr Muscle for more!” is a rare turn-on that won’t work for everyone. The naming of parts is one of the lacunae of language. Mind you, lacunae isn’t a bad name for it. It’s not that we lack colloquial terms for the organs of reproduction, it’s just that there are precious few that sound affectionate. So we’re going to start a competition for the best his and her names for the moist bits. The prize will be something suitably euphemistic donated by a major Esquire advertiser. We might also have a runner-up prize for the worst names, the ones that are least likely to get you a cooked breakfast. Like, Wizard’s Sleeve, Pottyhole, Splosh or – my most-least favourite – Slimepocket.

  Dear Nuncy Dysfuncy,

  I really, really fancy my fiancé’s father. The thing is he’s also my best friend’s dad. And my mother’s boss. And his wife’s dying of cancer. And he’s my family doctor. Do you think it’s worth having a quick no-strings how’s-your-father?

  Sheila, Newcastle

  Yeah, go on.

  Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,

  I lie. Actually to be honest I don’t lie. Never told a fib. On the kiddies’ heads and the grave of my saint of a mother. Actually, I haven’t got any kids and my mum’s a slag. She’s not really a slag, I don’t know why I said that. See? That’s what I mean. Or don’t mean. I don’t know why I tell lies all the time. Not all the time, obviously. At the moment, I’m flying in my Learjet to the Caribbean dictating this letter to Erica, the naked stewardess. I insist all my staff are naked above 10,000ft. You see, that’s not exactly the truth. We’re going to the south of France, not the Caribbean. The thing is, my girlfriend, who I love with all my heart, honest to God, cross my heart and hope to die, says she doesn’t believe me and I’m planning on asking her to marry me and I know she’ll just laugh and say pull the other one Penisocchio. That’s what she calls me, because she says I tell lies to get laid. Which is obviously a lie. Or not.

  Jake, Newcastle

  Hi Jake, nice to hear from you. See what I just did there? I told a lie. On a sliding scale of things that are nice, hearing from you doesn’t even register. Only we don’t call that lying. We lie about it and call it manners. Politeness is the polite word for porkies. Lies are the grease that allows culture’s wheels to spin without too much friction. So you say that she looks lovely in the frock when in fact she looks like something from Wayne Rooney’s wank bank, because you need to get out of the house. You say
the soup is delicious because you don’t want to hurt your mum’s feelings. You swear the dog ate your homework, you’ve got a dentist appointment and that you don’t mind taking out the rubbish, because that’s how we make life bearable. As a species, we lied before we could speak. Fibs are one of the types of communication we share with the birds and the bees. In the Kalahari, there’s a juvenile lizard that imitates the look and swagger of a bombardier beetle because nobody fucks with a bombardier beetle, but everybody fucks with a kid lizard. Flowers pretend to be insects and insects flowers. Everything lies. The moon doesn’t shine, it just nicks the sun’s light. Without lies it would all come to a grinding, tearful, furious, depressed, murderous halt. All of it: nature, evolution, the nation state, Netflix, everything is balanced on a judicious foundation of self-serving edited truths and wishful thinking. In other words – lies. But that’s not what you’re really talking about. What you’re worried about is trust. You lie so badly, so childishly, so amateurishly that you’ve spent all the capital in the trust bank. Even infant lizards lie better than you. The girlfriend doesn’t trust what you say. You see, grown ups lie to promote trust. She doesn’t expect that you’ll be on her side and support her all the time. It’s not the lies she minds, it’s that you’re such a bad liar. She can’t trust you to lie for the common good. The one thing all compulsively bad liars have in common is that they’re certain they are the only people in the room telling fibs. You think you have a monopoly on lies. Well, wake up and smell the mendacity. Of course, she knows you’re a vain fantasist. And she’s still around. She’ll make a joke of the proposal because she doesn’t want to marry you. She gets something transient out of this relationship. Dinner, holidays, access to people more interesting and sophisticated than you. But she’s not serious about it. She doesn’t love you. And that’s the truth. But on the plus side, Penisocchio is a brilliant todger moniker. We’ll keep that one, thank you very much. (I don’t really mean very much, or indeed thank you.)