Sex, Sleep or Scrabble

by Hammond, Phil

  A lot of slimming products contain sorbitol and fructose, and also cause wind. Slimming drugs that prevent the absorption of fat cause a bowel explosion if you continue eating it. Fizzy drinks, gulping, eating too fast and overeating stack up the gut with wind that will escape either up or down, as does smoking, chewing gum and sucking on pen tops. Tight clothing and ‘hold it in’ underwear give your bowel gas fewer options.

  A brisk outdoor walk is a great way of reliving the pressure and a charcoal biscuit or tablet (available from pharmacies) can minimise the smell. Chemists have other anti-flatulence products and in extreme cases, Under-Tec pants have a carbon filter gusset or you can buy a cushion called a Flatulence Filter (with a tweed cover) to absorb the smell. Or simply put on a broad Australian accent, proclaim ‘better out than in’ and tuck into the sprouts.

  When is it OK to relieve yourself in public?

  It depends which culture you inhabit. In many countries, it’s deemed acceptable for a line of male strangers to pee and glance together, but there’s an unwritten etiquette that you space yourself out as far away as you can from any existing customers so you don’t mark out another man’s territory (or piss on his trousers).

  Peeing in the street is an unpleasant side effect of very cheap alcohol and a faulty ‘I’ve had enough button’. Eight pints go in and ten come out. There’s a risk of an indecent exposure charge for adults, particularly now there are security cameras on every corner, but convictions are rare. Pooing in front of strangers remains a huge taboo. Close family, rugby tours and confused patients aside, I’ve only observed two adults pooing in the flesh, both on a Westcoast Virgin explorer. The toilet doors on the new trains are so complicated, you need a physics degree to lock them. Many users inadvertently leave the lock sign flashing, which isn’t locked at all. As a result, I’ve surprised two fellow travellers and I only use the service occasionally, so God knows how many others have been caught with their trousers down. The natural reaction is to leap up and hit the close button, but it’s a good few paces away and then the door takes a good five seconds to shut. It would be hard to design a more effective ritual humiliation.

  Interestingly, the toilet on the Trans-Pennine Express I’ve just used has a similar sliding door, but a far more obvious flip-switch locking mechanism, so it can be done. If you’d like to join the Virgin Explorer Toilet Survivors Club (VET-SUC) we meet every first Monday in the bar of the Ring of Bells. There are separate entrances for the doers and the viewers, to allow time for mutual recognition before closure is achieved by a brief shake of the hands (washed first, of course).

  Forty per cent of the world’s population have it even worse than a VET-SUC doer. They’ve got no safe place to poo or flush. In the UK, going outdoors is frowned upon because of the public health risk, but in many countries, pooing outdoors is entirely normal because there’s no alternative. The charity Wateraid recently ‘raised public awareness’ of this by filming four volunteers doing very realistic fake poos on the pavements of London and posting them on YouTube. As Charlotte, who played the role of a traffic warden caught short while ticketing cars, put it: ‘I know it may look funny, but I felt really exposed.’ Ah, the things you do when you’re resting between jobs.

  In the UK, the Sanitation Bill, passed in 1848, has done far more for the health of the nation than the founding of the NHS a century later, but it’s good to be reminded how lucky we are. 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation and it kills 5,000 children every day. A single gram of human faeces weighs in with 10,000,000 viruses, 1,000,000 bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts and 100 parasite eggs. Hardly surprising then that water-related disease is the world’s second biggest killer. If we lived in a country where a good dose of dysentery was the price to pay for poor personal hygiene, then even doctors would wash their hands properly. If you want to witness a mock poo, search YouTube for ‘pooing in public’. Please try not to laugh or get sexually aroused. If you just want to donate to WaterAid, go to www.wateraid.org/uk/. Now wash your hands.

  If it moves, is it rude?

  Wobbling was the Lord Chamberlain’s criterion for the difference between art and obscenity. When flesh appeared on stage at Soho’s Windmill theatre, one dancer famously managed to hold it together during a bombing raid, but then freaked obscenely a few days later when she spied a mouse. When the Lord Chamberlain’s office shut up shop in the late sixties, there was a moving-flesh explosion: Hair, Oh Calcutta, Let My People Come and all the strip bars.

  Anything curved looks ruder when it moves because it suggests both action and friction. I thought the criterion had died out with the good Lord until I made a programme about erectile dysfunction for the BBC, with the help of a heroic nurse specialist called Nolly Biggins. Sister Biggins was carefully demonstrating the injection of a rubber penis with a hardening drug called Caverjet, a sequence we’d cleared with the BBC Thought Police for pre-watershed viewing. Alas, in the edit suite the penis was noted to have ‘wobbled offensively’ and couldn’t be aired.

  If a woman starts periods at the menarche, when does a man start ejaculating?

  At the ejacularche. The term was coined by Israeli and Scandinavian sexologists, but has yet to enter popular usage. ‘Look at these snail tracks on the duvet. Malcolm must have passed the ejacularche.’

  How do I choose which size sanitary towels to buy my partner?

  Tough call. We all want to be new, or rather ‘reconstructed’, men and what could be more thoughtful than clicking on female hygiene when you’re shopping online or hiding tampons at the bottom of a bulging basket? But what should you buy? The comic Ian Cognito did a great routine about panty liners: ‘Why the hell have they got wings? I’d have thought the last thing you want on a panty liner is wings. Sudden gust of wind and over you go.’

  There is no solution to the sanitary confusion, other than to ask your partner what she wants. If you guess, you’ll never get it right and you risk a terrible row. Never, under any circumstances, try to surprise her with Extra Heavy-Duty All-Night Cling-On Maxi Towels, even if you’ve found them in the Tesco Favourites list. Each one is roughly the size of a sheep. She’ll never forgive you for knowing.

  Why do women clean up when men pee all over the floor?

  I don’t know. Studies have shown that if men do their fair share of toilet cleaning, they make far less mess. I know one woman who, whenever her partner pees on the toilet seat, pees on his car seat. He still hasn’t twigged after sixteen years.

  Why does it hurt when I pee?

  This question, from the back of a theatre in Canterbury, was thrown at me wrapped round a urine sample (dark, smelly yellow in a proper sample pot with the lid tightly screwed on). ‘PS: Stings like buggery and can’t get an appointment. Please help.’ And why not? I tasted (sorry, tested) the pee on stage and it had blood, white cells and cranberry juice in it. For a second opinion, I tossed it to a local GP in the front row. Lots of women come to comedy gigs with urine infections but not many leave with a prescription for antibiotics. Not terribly ethical but better than spending the weekend pissing razor blades.

  ‘Why does it hurt when I pee?’ is also a seminal song from Frank Zappa’s 1979 rock opera Joe’s Garage. It includes the mighty fine rhyme:

  My balls feel like a pair of maracas

  Oh God I’ve probably got the gono-coc-coc-coccus

  Which is almost as good as his more famous couplet:

  Watch out where the huskies go

  and don’t you eat that yellow snow

  The character with painful pee is Joe, whose attempts to become a rock star have been diverted by a liaison with a lady at the taco stand. Being a bloke, Joe doesn’t use a condom and doesn’t want to admit he might have a dose, preferring to ascribe his symptoms to something he caught from the toilet seat. He doesn’t want a doctor to stick a needle (or an umbrella) in him, but the good news is that treatment has come on in leaps and bounds since 1979. There are no umbrellas and often no swabs these days
. Just a urine sample and some tablets.

  Frank Zappa can be a bit impenetrable (his children are Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen), but Joe’s Garage is a fine album. Zappa narrates as the Central Scrutinizer, whose job it is to enforce all the laws that haven’t yet been passed. The opera satirizes sex, the music business, McCarthyism, censorship and Scientology, and it flips my mood into something more mischievous. Zappa, alas, ceased being mischievous at just 53. He died from prostate cancer or, as his family put it, he ‘left for his final tour just before 6pm on Saturday’ (4 December 1993).

  Back on Earth, it hurts when we pee because we’ve evolved pain receptors along our urinary tract to tell us when something isn’t quite right. Either that, or God decided to create them for you on a quiet day. (‘I know, I’ll line the mammalian urinary tract with pain receptors. But first, I’ll design an orchid that looks like the sexual parts of a bee.’)

  Either way, anything that inflames the bladder or urethra makes it hurt when you pee. Could be a urine infection from bugs in the bowel, a urethral infection in bugs from someone else’s urethra or bowel, the remains of a kidney stone, or a misplaced pipe cleaner. All of these can be treated if you conquer your embarrassment. Just highlight this section and show it to the receptionist. She’ll understand.

  Women tend to get more urine infections than men because the wee hole is closer to the poo hole (or at least it should be), and it’s easy to forget to wipe front-to-back (especially when hovering above the nettles on the hard shoulder). If you’ve survived the menopause, a bit of oestrogen cream can do wonders down below. It’s not easy discussing vaginal dryness with a GP and some of the drug names don’t make a trip to the chemist that comfortable either: ‘I’m here for my Vagifem.’ Get out the highlighter pen again.

  Dehydration can occasionally make the urine sting and is easily sorted, but sometimes we really don’t know why it hurts so we mask our ignorance with a silly name like ‘interstitial cystitis’ or ‘urethral syndrome’. Any pain that’s accompanied by pus needs to be shared with a doctor urgently (and before you share it with anyone else).

  And let’s not forget guilt as a cause of painful pee. Consultations in a sexual health clinic often start with something like ‘I was away at a conference/beach holiday/cider festival’, middling with ‘seven bottles of Thatchers’ and climaxing with ‘not sure what we did but it didn’t include a condom.’ Usually the guilt kicks in before any symptoms, and people bring it along to the clinic in the hope of absolution and a clean bill of health.

  ‘Not wanting to pass anything on to my partner’ often goes hand in hand with ‘Not wanting to tell my partner’, but for those who choose an HIV test, it needs to be done (or repeated) twelve weeks after the risky sex, during which time you’re advised not to have any more sex. A three month lay-off can be hard to explain to your partner unless you develop the mother of all migraines or ‘accidentally’ catch your foreskin in your zip … repeatedly.

  But even when every test for every infection has come back negative, some people still have the symptoms of an infection, as the brain comes to terms with the guilty secret. Pleasure needs a light muzzle, or at the very least a condom. And two minutes of gooey mess doesn’t always equate with long-term contentment.

  4

  Surreal sex guide

  FLYING SOLO

  Is wanking a form of genocide?

  No. Young men offload hundreds of millions of sperm, just for fun, on most days of the year. The comedian Bill Hicks pondered the lost civilisations wasted on his stomach but the good news is that, although women are born with all their eggs, the sperm factory stays in production until the day you die. So your losses are always replaced and there’s no need to feel profligate. Most sperm never get anywhere near an egg, even when you’re trying to make a baby.

  Do love eggs need to be fitted?

  No. They come in a variety of sizes and materials, so it’s a case of suck it and see. Most are roughly spherical, either metal, silicone, rubber or plastic, and of varying diameters. If you’re shopping abroad, they may be sold as Ben-Wa balls, geisha balls, Burmese bells, Thai beads, Ri-no-tama or Mien-Ling. Older versions are balls within balls, with a drop of mercury to aid wiggling or a silver tongue that vibrates. All are inserted into the vagina (not all at once) and are said to produce pleasurable sensations on running for the bus.

  Individual experimentation is needed to determine which are most likely to make you miss the bus, which are best for your pelvic floor, and which can be heard by small children and Labradors. But the fact that love eggs have existed in so many cultures for centuries suggest there must be something in them (other than mercury).

  Newer, high-tech love eggs are more bullet-shaped (typically three inches by three quarters of an inch) and slip easily into (but less easily out of) the vagina and anus. If an adults-only egg hunt sounds too much of a fiddle, you can get eggs connected to a wire and control panel that allows various modes of electrical vibration (the forward surge or the side-to-side shuffle, or a mixture of the two at varying speeds). The wire aids retrieval but makes covert use on the bus more of a challenge.

  Top of the range are the battery eggs that can be controlled remotely using wireless technology. This allows you a whole range of pleasurable sensations whilst pretending to play Nintendo on the top deck. You can also buy sleeves for your eggs with ‘textural nubs and ribs’ for added pleasure. Then there’s the infamous double-yolker, to satisfy the heartiest of appetites. So why not go to work on an egg?

  NOTE: A lost love egg is not quite a medical emergency, and may not get the priority you feel it deserves during a flu pandemic. To avoid embarrassment, always buy eggs with strings attached, rather than free-range.

  Do voice activated vibrators work?

  Not very well, judging by the number of them in the Christmas sales. The trouble with VAVs is that most people train them to work with their normal voice, which is a completely different pitch, intonation and even language from their masturbation voice. If, on the other hand, you train your VAV to understand your ‘unique pleasure tones’, you’ll find that all sorts of things will set it off (the Hoover, the children squabbling, an egg whisk, a hungry pony). Most vibrators are complicated enough (three heads, four fingers, five speeds, iPod docking port, sat nav for the clitoris). Voice activation is unnecessary icing on the cock.

  Do people who work from home masturbate more?

  Almost certainly. It’s known as hot-desking. The relationship between self-pleasure at work and its effect on productivity is unclear. There seems to be a delicate balance between reducing stress and frustration on the one hand, and dozing off afterwards or having to call out the keyboard engineer, on the other. But the overall effect appears to be positive. How long before we see wank stations next to the water cooler?

  How do you stop a teenage boy wanking all the time?

  Don’t. Adolescence is tough enough without losing your principal pleasure. And never burst in trying to catch him mid-wank. It’s even more psychologically damaging than waking a sleepwalker. Privacy is important once the hormones kick in. Knock loudly, count to ten elephants and only enter if summoned. ‘Just a minute’ generally means just that.

  Masturbation is entirely healthy within the constraints of the culture you’re living in (don’t do it in public, do try to get at least some of your homework done first). It helps develop the imagination and should be the cheapest guilt-free fun anyone can have. Many boys (and men) find their dominant hand runs a shuttle service between knob and nose during the waking hours, and if it’s causing difficulties during, say, a dental examination, use an enigmatic code word to break him out of his reverie. In a recent Sunday Times survey, the top three scratch-and-sniff breakers were ‘orchid’, ‘avocado’ and ‘flange.’

  Who invented masturbatory guilt?

  Masturbatory guilt goes back at least to the Middle Ages, and continues today for those who’ve been poorly parented or got in
with the wrong church. Degeneracy theory held that all diseases were due to the loss of semen and some other vital fluid, and that demons collected the semen from masturbatory and nocturnal emissions, and used it to create new bodies for themselves. But as any teenage boy knows, not even the Devil cleans up after you and the only way to hide the mess is to use a wank sock or wipe it on the curtains.

  The semen-demon theory took a bit of a pounding in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as science tried to fight back. Then in the 1750s, up popped Swiss doctor Simon Tissot who was convinced that every disease (even in women) and death itself were related to the unnecessary spillage of intimate secretions. Women’s secretions were apparently ‘less valuable and less matured’ than their male equivalent, but could still kill women if they indulged in excessive sex, particularly of the type that ‘sent them into spasm’.

  John Harvey Kellogg may have invented that golden flake of corn but for a doctor, he had a shockingly regressive view of masturbation. Circumcision without anaesthetic was advocated for boys caught having a fiddle: ‘The brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.’ Girls and women caught touching their genitals fared little better: ‘The application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.’ Dr Kellogg died in 1943, aged ninety-one, without once ever masturbating. Yeah, right.