Tom Cutler: SLAP AND TICKLE

I wasn’t going to bother with this when a friend gave it to me. The title, the cover, it all looked a bit puerile and crass. Well, yes, it is puerile and crass, but it’s at least as much fun as a Carry-On movie, with lashings of schoolboy smutty humour. For example, the Prince Regent is described as “a sort of proxy – not to say poxy – monarch.” The dress code and forms of address in BDSM sessions mean it “sounds like the Church of England”.

Some of the historical snippets we’ve heard before but it’s good to be reminded of them. Lord Wolfenden referred to homosexuals and prostitutes as “Huntleys and Palmers” during the gathering of data for his Report in the late 1950s. Mary Whitehouse was “a Christian social activist known for her prominent opposition to everything, and her pursed lips.”

Tom Cutler adds some droll details to sexual history. Professor Kinsley filmed his volunteers having sex in his attic; Mrs Kingsley provided clean towels and milk and biscuits. Stephen Ward had been a carpet salesman before he turned osteopath and high-society pimp. After the Profumo Affair Mandy Rice-Davies described her life as “one slow descent into respectability.” Sploshing was a new fetish to me, involving baked beans or custard or other “sploshy” foodstuffs. Do you eat them afterwards?

Words of wisdom that you may not have seen in quotation compendiums. James Joyce: “It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman.” Graham Greene (no less) praised the French classic Histoire d’O: “a pornographic book well-written and without a trace of obscenity.” Tom Cutler includes a few pages from four other porn classics, including Fanny Hill, my personal favourite which is like a bawdy sequel to Tom Jones – I bought my copy from a bookshop on the Via Veneto in Rome in 1969.

This is an enjoyable romp through many (most) aspects of Sex. I’ll close with what seems to me a great truth Mr Cutler quotes: “Somebody once said that the big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs less.” And a 1997 British Medical Journal study of men aged 45-49 found that those who had little or no sex were twice as likely to be dead ten years later than those who had two or more orgasms a week. Men in that age group may need to take themselves in hand.