by AA Gill
Ricky, Hull
Cheating is the most common subject of letters to this page. “Cheat” has two meanings: to break the rules of a game and to break the faith of a partnership. It’s interesting that the second definition has grown from the first, and it implies that love is somehow a game. A game with rules. What’s the only other thing that all games have? Winners and losers. So that rather implies that in love there is a winner, and presumably the winner is the most talented and skilled at it, and perhaps the luckiest. That may be what we mean by “lucky in love”. But if you lose at love, more likely than not it’s because the partner, or opponent, cheated, so cheating is actually the way to win. But that’s obviously not right. So I’m going to merge all the letters into one, which is like cheating on a lot of people at once.
Let’s kick off with Evangeline, who wrote simply to ask, “Is kissing cheating? My boyfriend says it is and if he ever caught me kissing another guy it would be grounds for throwing things – punches, vases, hissy fits, toys, prams – but, truthfully, I think that sometimes kissing’s just a dance move.” Evangeline has touched on what is the essence of cheating. If you think of love as being essentially naked rugby, then you need someone else to decide what’s a forward pass and a high tackle. And what was just exuberant games-manship. Actually, when you’re in love it does feel like naked rugby but then you’re only allowed to tackle the same person over and over. Different people pull out a yellow card at different things.
Trevor for instance, who wrote last year and is probably in some sort of locked facility by now, asked me to back him up when he insisted that his girlfriend wore a full veil and chador when going to the pub. It was the pub bit that interested me: what was a conservative Muslim doing taking his girlfriend down the rub-a-dub? It turned out Trev was a practicing “don’t know, don’t care”. He just thinks that veils are a really good idea and that, actually, preferably, girls should be kept in hessian sacks because they’re all nympho bitches who’ll blow tramps on park benches given half a chance. Bill Clinton from Washington famously didn’t think that a blowjob was cheating, and Emma from Pinner says she feels cheated if she finds her husband masturbating. “That should be mine – all mine,” she says. But Sylvie from Newcastle says she doesn’t mind if Chuka has one off the wrist as long as he’s thinking about her, which he swears, absolutely, on his life, he does every time. I would have printed photographs of Emma and Sylvie, which they included in their emails, but we couldn’t have got anyone to advertise for the next three pages. There are men who think that prostitutes don’t count as cheating or that having gay sex with strangers – as long as they’re tops – counts as cheating.
Arnold, 75, wrote to say he’d just left Helen, his wife of 45 years, because he caught her holding hands with the octogenarian next door. He pointed out that sex had not been an issue, or indeed a possibility, for any of them for a decade, but that the intimacy of holding hands seemed to be the most terrible betrayal, adding that, if they’d been younger, they might have got over it with the thought of the years ahead of them, and that the memories might have been buried in time. “But realistically,” he said, “we’re down to the wire, and are unlikely to move on. There’s nothing we can do to make it better.” So he’s off to an old people’s home. This is the trouble with cheating: there are no acceptable rules, or laws. It could be a smile, or dancing to a song that you considered to be indefinably “ours”. It can feel like cheating to go to a restaurant that you used to go to with someone else. Keeping photographs of exes can infuriate, like retrospective cheating. I don’t have a definitive answer to any of this, but I would say that it is easier to work on your own jealousy than police somebody else’s behaviour and thoughts.
The worst culprit for cheating is the mobile phone – sexting, texting. Most people who cheat do it on the phone, and they all get caught. My only piece of advice is that all of you consider every single text and Snapchat that you ever make as also being shared with your partner, because they all check your phones all the time – trust me on this one. And if you don’t trust me, then trust yourself because you look at your girlfriend’s texts when she goes to the bog like everyone else.
Here’s a letter I got last week. It doesn’t warrant or ask for a reply – it’s just a story – but I thought you might like it. Bob had a row with his brother. A big row, in the course of which his brother told him that he was in fact the father of Bob’s only child, a daughter, who is now 18. Bob is still married to his wife. He said the news was devastating. “I went for a walk. I came back after an hour and I sat my brother down, and quite calmly, I told him to consider who’d been cheated in this relationship. I’d had a daughter, who I’d shared Christmases and holidays, homework and bedtime stories with, who I taught to ride a bike and bought her first car, who brought her boyfriend home to see me. I had a wife, we’d made a life together, and a home. He’d had sex with someone else’s wife but never managed to find one of his own, and he had a niece who thought he was a bit creepy. And he used to have a brother who looked up to him. Which one of us had life cheated?”
I’m fed up with waiting for you all to write to me with engaging and entertaining, thought-provoking problems. Why is it that young men think all problems begin and end with their penises? Yes, Derek, it is unnaturally small, but frankly that’s the least of your worries. Go straight to the hospital for tropical diseases, your GP is not going to know what that is. And Thomas, thank you for that but I don’t think “the guys” need to have the rules of “Is-it-cock-or-is-it-balls” explained to them, and your photographs weren’t helpful or indeed printable so we’ve sent them to a specialist website with your email. Gregory, it shouldn’t smell of anything. And certainly not the last days of the Roman Empire. The words “smell” and “genitalia” rarely sit happily within the same sentence. Few people have ever said, “Mmm, I love the smell of cock in the morning.” Or, “D’you know, I really get homesick when I remember the smell of my sister’s Friday night pants?” So just to break from your punningly insecure pud-pulling, I’ve decided to take some letters from famous philosophers. This one’s from Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany:
Dear Sir,
Don’t you think that the man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends? Don’t bother replying, I already know the answer. I know the answer to everything. And whatever you say will only annoy me. Because if you’re wrong, the answer will be bovine and stupid, and typical of the small-minded masses who don’t deserve to exist. And if it’s the right answer, it will be even more annoying because I will have to agree with you, which is plainly impossible for a man of my philosophical stature and perfect foresight. Nurse, nurse! Come quickly! I can’t get the top off the bottle!
Friedrich, by email
Greetings, Friedrich. This is an interesting conundrum for young men, who are particularly attached to groups of friends, for whom belonging and loyalty attain a paramount importance. Young men tend to think that friendship transcends outside abstracts like right and wrong. Most young men wouldn’t think twice about giving a friend a false alibi. Indeed the definition of friendship might be that you are prepared to lie for a mate, to take one for the team. There are effectively two moralities: the one that applies to everyone outside the gang and the one that applies only to those inside. Gang morality will always be seen as a higher order than whatever it is the rest of the world lives by. But what you’re talking about here is a third imperative, which is to be true to yourself and your knowledge despite everyone else, which I assume you mean as wisdom rather than merely facts. You need to be profoundly honest to give up merely personal animosity and attraction and you’re plainly having a dig at your less clever thinker, Jesus Christ. But, of course, if you do love your enemies and hate your friends, you would simply invert your life and have a lot of mates you couldn’t stand and a lot of enemies you were secretly fond of (which could be the definition of late middle-age.) I think the answer to your question, Fr
eddie, is that you should be equally fond and critical of both friends and enemies and have a personal morality that you expect to apply only to yourself.
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
Pick the bones out of that, you bourgeois apologist.
J-P Sartre, Paris
Thank you, Jean-Paul. Freedom is a concept that we very rarely ask to have explained. The young are particularly keen on freedom because they notice all the facets of it that they don’t have. Their freedom is defined by the things that constrain it. Freedom is effectively understood to be not a thing but the absence of the obstacles to the thing: if you took away all the stuff that hemmed you in, then you’d be free. So, freedom is the absence of obstruction. But it is a quality that must by its very nature apply to everybody equally. Well, almost immediately your freedom is in mortal conflict with everyone else’s. You can see that a world of complete freedom would be one of constant repression and restriction, a cacophony of argument, intensely dangerous and uncertain. The only freedom that is acceptable and workable is collective freedom, where we all agree to the maximum amount of liberty that can be allocated to each member of society to facilitate the greatest freedom of the whole. Most of this we organise ourselves. The bits we can’t agree on we need governments to decide on our behalf.
But still, when you find yourself as free as you can be, when you leave the bespoke constraints of school, home and age, when you’re old enough to have a job, to vote, free to make money, then you realise that actually your choices and desires are marked and limited by the things that have already been done to you by other people’s freedoms. The way you’ve been brought up, the way that your parents and grandparents were brought up, how you were educated, the society you grew up in, what you have been exposed to and shielded from. Freedom isn’t really delineated by the things that hem it in, but by your ability to envisage and utilise it. The greatest restriction of freedom is your fear and anxiety. There is in this the distinction between the freedom to and the freedom from: the freedom to keep slaves and the freedom from being a slave.
Thank you for that, Jean-Paul. And I’d like to pass on my favourite Sartre observation. You should say this out loud in a French accent, while having got up a photograph of Jean-Paul himself for the full benefit: “If I became a philosopher, if I so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women, basically.”
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
This may sound like an unusual problem – not the sort of thing that most blokes complain about – but my girlfriend is driving me mad, demanding sex. All the time. It’s a balls-ache. Constantly, she’s got her hands down my pants, and hers. “Come on, let’s fuck: there’s an R in the month,” she says or, “It’s St Priapus’ Day” or, “Go down on me – Sheffield Wednesday just won.”
“But you don’t even support Wednesday,” I say.
“I do if they get me off,” she replies.
Whenever I try to put her off, or at least postpone it, she says I’m just intimidated by female sexuality and it’s because she’s behaving like an alpha male that I feel belittled. But that’s not it. I just don’t find it a turn-on. It’s not sexy. It’s boring. It’s like constantly being told to take out the rubbish or go and fill the car with petrol – it’s become a chore. I’ve just told her I’ve got a headache. It’s so humiliating.
Tim, South Yorkshire
OK, Tim, you limp-dick little shag-dodger. Get back in there and make her beg for mercy. Munch and lunge till you make her eyes roll back in her head. Frot and rock till she’s sitting on an ice pack, praying a mantra to the majesty of your testicles. Pound the crack of moan till she screams in tongues known only to charismatic Alabama churches. Cover her with the spume of love till she wants to start a business manufacturing scented candles that waft the beguiling odour of your sweaty taint. Pump her till she’s feeling like a shelf of charity shop scatter cushions. Get a grip. Get some dick-bone. Clench your pelvic floor muscles. You’re not just letting this bint goalkeeper off the hook or letting yourself down, you’re letting every human with a pair down. Sex is a team game: them against us. If you dribble and dive under par, if you can’t make the whole 90 minutes, you shouldn’t be in the squad. Remember, sex is a game of two halves: the top half and the bottom half. There are winners and there are losers, and if you don’t feel like a winner then you must be the other sort. And if you can’t deliver a weeping multiple then get off the minge and let someone who’s got the balls to do it have a go. So, Tim, go and knock one out in the bog, and consider your position as a man.
I don’t actually believe any of that but I just wanted to know what it feels like to actually write it down. I wanted to stream my testosterone locker room. It was fun, but disgusting. Like eating a box of Krispy Kremes while watching Saudi Arabian porn: weird at the time but you feel like a seedy shit afterwards. Really seedy. Like budgerigar turds.
Your letter reminds me of another thing that happened a couple of weeks ago. The United States Food and Drug Administration agreed to license Flibanserin, or female Viagra (don’t tell your girlfriend). There’s a social and anthropological conundrum here: one of the main reasons for allowing a female sexual performance-enhancer to be prescribed was not for mechanical malfunction. Viagra and Cialis facilitate erections by increasing blood flow, and this new one does the same for women. But they don’t need erections. And it’s supposed to have a relaxing, uninhibiting mental element. But the real reason is that it’s fair. If men can have a pill for sex, then so should women. Not licensing it would have been unfair. Even if it’s not comparably necessary, it would have been sexist and discriminatory. You, more than anyone, will appreciate the irony of that.
These questions – of how much, who and the quality differential – are the meat and two veg, the missionary position, of agony columns. Almost every desperate enquiry boils down to: too little, too much, not good enough. And the answers are invariably touchy feely, like Liberal Party manifestos: love one another, talk to one another, sweat the details. And between you and me, it’s all bollocks. Sex isn’t about being a kind person. It’s not a big generous sedative or gently charitable. Getting your rocks off is utterly me-centred. That’s what makes it good. If sex were the exercise version of Red Nose Day, there would only be half a dozen people left in the world. It’s not her demands of you that’s the problem, it’s your low expectations of yourself. It’s not having too much sex, it’s having too much mediocre sex. Mediocre, grudging sex. You don’t like having sex with yourself because you’re not very good at it. And you’re not very good at it because you don’t do enough of it. The way you get good at sex is the way you get good at everything: practice. Doing more, not less. But only doing the stuff that you really, really like. And tell your girlfriend to do the same. Last one to scream an expletive is a sissy.
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
It was my girlfriend’s turn to choose the film. Last time, I took her to see Mad Max: Fury Road, which she said wasn’t a proper date film. But it had loads of girl shit in it: pregnancy, romance, tits. Anyway, she made me watch the cartoon movie about the inside of some girl’s head. What’s all that about? I have no idea why anyone would want to see this movie, or why they’d want to show it to children. What’s wrong with Ninja Turtles? But my girlfriend loved it – sobbed a river and said I was a typical man. And what’s wrong with that? I’ve been aiming at typical masculinity all my life.
Bryan, Knutsford
I feel your dude pain in a sort of lumpy, blokey way. By the time your letter gets printed I expect they’ll have launched the sequel. For those of you – the single reader – who have managed to avoid Inside Out, the premise is that our emotions are run by emoticon homunculi: joy, sadness, disgust, anger and then some other bloke who I didn’t really make sense of. Indecision or anxiety, or something. Anyway, as I had to sit through it, to keep myself from punching the people behind I tr
ied to imagine the Esquire Uncle Dysfunctional version of this movie. It would be about the two quite cute little emoticons that live in your scrotum: The Ball Brothers, The Testy Twins. Sort of Dumb and Dumber. Two young, working-class farm workers who spend their lives breeding and herding semen. They like their work and they care a lot about their sperm family. But the bane of their life is Dick Bellend, who lives next door. Every night, Dickie comes down and rustles the sperm, and every morning The Ball Brothers wake up and their flock has been shot into a sock. That Bellend is a proper wanker, a cocky bastard, and he’s been getting above himself. So, together they start to work out how to make him fall in love, turn gay or become impotent. I can’t work out which. It’ll be a brilliant movie. I can see it now. The Bollock Brothers will be played by Matthew McConaughey and Tom Hardy. And Dickie Bellend is obviously Benedict Cumberbatch. There might be an opening for an arsehole, and I’m thinking Ray Winstone.
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
I just got into trouble for tweeting that my mate’s mum looks like a tranny. Now I’ve got to go into hiding.
George, Salford
You have fallen foul of the current nomenclature trend, George. This is serious. You need to keep up. You can’t say, write or, indeed, think tranny any more. Tranny is a pejorative and derogative hate word, it is the sort of language that intimidates those in our society who are the most vulnerable: young men and women who feel that they have been mislabelled with the wrong ingredient. Just imagine how brave you have to be to tell your family, grandparents, school friends, the other members of the mosque, that you are, in fact, not the gender appearing on your Tinder account, but the opposite. Exactly. These people are in the most topsy-turvy, uncertain, vulnerable position it’s possible for a human to find themselves in, and before they can realign their own jewellery requirements and genitals, they should be able to choose what they call themselves.