Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  CLASS RULES

  The Class-endogamy Rule

  Like every other aspect of our lives, sex among the English is subject to class rules. For a start, there is an unofficial class-endogamy rule, whereby intermarriage between the social classes, although not actually forbidden, tends to be discouraged, and in practice does not occur very often. There are exceptions, of course, and such inter-class marriages are certainly more common than they used to be, but it is still very unusual for people from opposite ends of the social spectrum to marry.

  Outside the pages of Barbara Cartland and P. G. Wodehouse, the sons of dukes and earls tend not to disoblige their families by insisting on marrying humble waitresses. Upper-class males may have sexual adventures or even infatuations with working-class females, but they generally end up marrying girls called Isabella, Henrietta and Cressida (with children’s-book nicknames like Piggy and Tiggy) who grew up in large houses in Gloucestershire, with Labradors and ponies. The Henriettas and Cressidas, in turn, may have the odd rebellious youthful fling with a Jayden or a Darren, but usually ‘come to their senses’ (as their anxious mothers would put it), and marry someone ‘from a similar background’.

  Having said that, the two main factors affecting social mobility in England are still education and marriage. These two factors may often be connected, as universities are among the few places where young mate-seekers from different social classes are likely to meet ‘as equals’ (Prince William and Kate Middleton are an obvious example). Even here, the odds are against class-exogamous unions, as studies regularly show that when the English go to university, they have an uncanny knack of making friends almost exclusively with fellow students from identical social backgrounds.

  But despite these herd instincts, people from different classes find themselves thrown together in seminars or tutorials, or through sports or other extra-curricular student activities, such as theatre or music. And there are even some students who make a deliberate, determined effort to avoid associating ‘just with people from the same sort of families and schools as mine’, as one intrepid upper-middle-class girl explained.

  The ‘Marrying-up’ Rule

  Working-class intellectual males are often attracted to precisely this type of slightly rebellious upper-middle-class female, and may end up marrying one. Although there are no doubt many exceptions, such marriages tend to be somewhat less successful than those in which the female partner is the one ‘marrying up’. This is because an unwritten rule requires the partner who is ‘marrying up’ to adopt the tastes and manners of the class he or she is marrying into, or at least to make rather more compromises and adjustments than the higher-class partner, and upwardly mobile women tend to be more willing to do this than upwardly mobile men.

  When working-class males ‘marry up’, there is a conflict between snobbery and sexism – between the marrying-up rule and traditional male-dominance rules whereby women are expected to do more adapting and adjusting. Bright working-class men who ‘become middle class’ by education, and particularly those who jump several classes by marrying upper-middle females they meet at university, can sometimes be a bit truculent and resentful about having to change their habits. They may, for example, persist in referring to their evening meal as ‘tea’, plant pampas grass and marigolds in the garden, refuse to squash peas onto the back of their fork, and deliberately embarrass their snobbish mother-in-law by using shibboleth words such as ‘pardon’, ‘serviette’ and ‘toilet’ at her Christmas party. Those upwardly mobile males who do adapt willingly to their new class tend to have problems with their own parents, whom they may find both resentful and embarrassing. You can’t win.

  Although again there are exceptions, women who ‘marry up’ are usually more compliant, and make more of an effort to fit in. If anything, they can sometimes be rather too eager to adopt the accent, vocabulary, tastes, habits and manners of their husband’s class, and miss some of the all-important nuances in their anxious enthusiasm. They may wear the right clothes but wrongly combined, use the right words but in the wrong context, or grow the right flowers but in the wrong kind of pot – ending up with a sort of anagram of an upper-middle-class lifestyle. This fools nobody, embarrasses their in-laws, and alienates their parents. Trying too hard can be worse than not trying at all. And it involves committing a serious breach of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule.

  Partners do not have to come from opposite ends of the social spectrum for the marrying-up rule to cause tensions and conflicts. English people tend to despise the class immediately below theirs much more than the ones further down the scale. Upper-middles, for example, are often far more snooty and scathing about middle-middle tastes and habits than they are about those of the working classes. The boundary between middle-middle and upper-middle is full of booby-traps, and can be the hardest to cross.

  The Working-class Potency Myth

  Some upper-middle females are fascinated by working-class males at least partly because of a widely held belief that working-class men are more virile and better lovers than middle- or upper-class men. There is no empirical evidence to justify this belief. Working-class males may start having sex at a slightly earlier age than the higher echelons, but in general they do not have sex more often, nor is there any reason to believe that their partners enjoy it more. The notion that plebeian males are more sexually potent and uninhibited is a myth, perpetuated among the educated middle classes by people like D. H. Lawrence and John Osborne, and elsewhere by the soft-porn industry, where it seems to be an established fact that middle-class females all spend their time having fantasies about hunky working-class firemen, builders or plumbers. The working-class potency myth has been given a further boost by the rise of the ‘Lad’ and ‘Lad culture’ – which celebrates traditional, and stereotypically working-class, masculine values and interests (football, cars, tits, beer, etc.).

  The persistence of this myth is, I think, mainly based on the mistaken assumption that the crass-and-boorish approach to flirtation, which is seen as more characteristic of lower-class males, is somehow indicative of greater sexual energy than the reticent-and-awkward manner, which is regarded as the preserve of the middle- and upper-class male. The truth is that both these approaches are symptoms of social dis-ease and sexual inhibition, and neither is a reliable indicator of virility or sexual competence. And in any case, the approach an Englishman adopts depends less on his social class than on the amount of alcohol he has consumed: all English males believe in the magical disinhibiting powers of the demon drink; the higher classes have particular faith in its capacity to make them as irresistibly crude and loutish as any proletarian sex-god.

  AND SO TO BED . . .

  But what about actual sex? Some of you may be feeling a bit cheated – in that I called this chapter ‘Rules of Sex’, and have so far said a lot about humour, flirtation, class-endogamy and so on but, apart from debunking the working-class potency myth, not a great deal about what the English are actually like in bed. And certainly nothing much about how our sexual performance differs from that of other nations.

  There are two main reasons for this. First, being English, I find the whole thing a bit personal and embarrassing, so I’ve been procrastinating. (If you were here in my flat, I’d be prattling nervously about the weather and saying, ‘I’ll just go and put the kettle on . . .’) Second, there is a bit of a, um, er, how shall I put this? A data problem. The participant-observation method is a wonderful thing, but the observation bit does not include direct observation of people’s sex lives, and the participant element does not involve having sex with a full representative sample of natives, or with a cross-cultural sample of foreigners for comparison. Well, anthropologists have been known to become intimately involved with the people they study (my father tells me that such liaisons used to be jokingly called ‘cultural penetration’), but this has always been rather frowned upon. I suppose it’s allowed if you’re studying your own native culture, as I am – and, yes, I have of co
urse had English boyfriends, and a few foreign ones, but nothing like enough to constitute a scientifically representative sample. And in terms of direct experience, I’m not qualified to comment on the female half of the population at all.

  But these are fairly lame excuses. A lot of social scientists write in great detail about sexual matters of which they have no direct personal experience. And although I have not had sex with a wide enough range of English people, my research has certainly involved enough discussion of the subject, with a respectably large and varied sample of both natives and foreigners, to gain at least some understanding of our sexual behaviour and its unwritten rules.

  Sex-talk Rules

  Discussing sexual matters with the English is not easy: although we are not particularly prudish, we find the subject embarrassing, and our methods of coping with or covering our embarrassment, such as knee-jerk humour and polite procrastination, mean that a great deal of my valuable research time is wasted on jokes, quips, witticisms, displacement weather-speak and tea-making. On top of this, the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule means that getting the English to give straight, serious, non-ironic answers to one’s questions about sex can be a struggle.

  To make my task even more difficult, there is an unwritten rule whereby English males tend to assume that a female who talks about sex at all, however indirectly, must be at least signalling sexual availability, if not actively chatting them up. An American friend of mine got into some trouble with this rule: she couldn’t understand why so many English men seemed to be ‘making passes’ at her, and taking offence when she rejected their precipitate advances, when she had ‘given them no encouragement at all’. Anxious to help (and spotting an opportunity for an experiment), I hung around and eavesdropped on some of her conversations with men in our local pub, and found that she was saying things like ‘but that was just after I discovered my first husband was gay, so I was feeling a bit confused about my sexuality . . .’ within about ten minutes of being introduced to someone. I explained that this kind of intimate disclosure, although perhaps commonplace in the land of Oprah, would be interpreted by many English males as the next best thing to a written invitation. When she somewhat reluctantly curbed her natural candour, she found that the unwanted attentions ceased.

  Great, I thought. Another successful rule-testing experiment – and with someone else acting as unwitting guinea-pig and breaking the rules for me. My favourite kind of field research. But although this test confirmed that I had correctly identified an unwritten rule, I could see that the rule itself was going to prove something of a handicap in my attempts to find out about English bedroom habits. I got round this problem in the usual ways – by fudging and cheating. I talked mainly to women, and to men I knew well enough to be sure that they would not misinterpret my questions. Women – even English women – can be quite open and honest with each other, in private, about the quirks and characteristics and attitudes of their male lovers, and indeed about their own, so I learnt a lot about both sexes just from them. And to be fair, I also gleaned quite a lot of useful information from discussions with male friends and informants, including one who somehow managed to combine an encyclopaedic knowledge of English females’ sexual behaviour (thanks to a personal ‘sample’ of MORI-poll proportions) with an endearingly self-deprecating frankness about his own thoughts and habits.

  The Rule-free Zone

  So, after nearly twenty years of laborious, tactful information-gathering, what have I discovered about the private sex-life of the English? Actually, it’s good news. Bed is the one place where we seem to shed almost all of our many and debilitating inhibitions; where we are, albeit temporarily, magically cured of our social dis-ease. Shut the curtains, dim the lights, take our clothes off, and you’ll find we suddenly become quite human. We can, after all, engage emotionally with other humans. We can be passionate, open, warm, affectionate, excitable, impulsive – in a way you normally only see when we talk to our pets.

  This is genuine disinhibition – not the rule-governed, so-called disinhibition of our Saturday-night or holiday-resort drunkenness, where we are merely acting out a prescribed social role, a sort of hammy caricature of what we think uninhibited behaviour ought to look like. Our sexual disinhibition is the real thing.

  Of course, some of us are more free and abandoned between the sheets than others. In bed, we are ourselves, which means a wide range of different sexual styles – some a bit shy and tentative, others more confident; some talkative, others quiet; some clumsy, others expert; some creative or kinky, others more conventional; some perhaps a bit virtuoso-show-offy – depending on all sorts of factors, such as age, experience, personality, how we feel about a particular sexual partner, our mood, and so on. But the point is that these factors influencing our varied sexual styles are personal – nothing to do with the ‘rules of Englishness’ that govern our social behaviour.

  Every step leading up to the sexual act is shaped by these Englishness rules: where we meet our partner, how we flirt, what we eat at dinner and how we eat it, how we talk, the jokes we make, what we drink and the effects of alcohol on our behaviour, the car we drive home in and how we drive it (or our conduct on the bus or in the taxi), the house we take our partner home to and how we feel and talk about it, the dog who greets us, the music we play, the nightcap we offer, how the bedroom is decorated, the curtains we close, the clothes we take off . . . Everything, right up to that point, whether we like it or not, is at least partly determined by one or another of the hidden rules of Englishness. We do not stop being English while we are engaged in the sexual act but, for that relatively brief time, our actions are not governed by any particular, distinctively English set of rules. We have the same basic instincts as other humans, and exhibit much the same range and variation in our personal sexual styles as humans of any other culture. Bed, at least while we are actually having sex, is a rule-free zone.

  The Textbook-sex Imbalance

  Having said that, one can make a few generalisations 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. Even the illiterate can watch late-night educational sex programmes, or pseudo-documentary soft-porn, on various television channels (programmes that are helpfully scheduled to start shortly after the pubs close), and most now have access to the vast amount of sexual self-help material available on the internet – so our men are rapidly catching up. Many younger males – and even some 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

  Après 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 gen
uine, 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, often things that we in turn call ‘French’: their term for ‘French leave’ is ‘filer à 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 bottoms.114