Though Brigette Bardot represented freedom to others, she herself
came from a fiercely, repressive petit-bourgeois background. On her
wedding night (after the civil ceremony, but before the religious one),
her father stood at the end of the bed with a shotgun, ready to shoot
Roger Vadim if he attempted to enter the bridal suite. Though she appeared
nude in many pictures, BB - or the Sex Kitten, as she was known to a
generation - now devotes herself to animal rights and the restoration
of traditional values. In the summer she runs up and down the beach at
St. Tropez with a paddle, cursing topless bathers and swatting at their
parts.
------------------------------------------
It has been calculated that after three years of marriage the average
couple talk to each other for six and a half minutes a week.
------------------------------------------
The first incident of sexual harassment at work is now recognised to have
been the constant depredations Mary Queen of Scots made on her secretary
Rizzio. She would often keep him working late and embarrass him by making
leading comments in French.
-----------------------------------------
To the question posed in Cosmopolitan - 'Do you want a relationship
with a total person?' - a surprising 17% said 'yes'.
-----------------------------------------
Oral sex between consenting males is mentioned eleven times in the Bible
and never censoriously, yet any mention of it has been edited out of the
Readers Digest condensed version.
--------------
Women's liberation, involving their right to enjoy sex as much and as
often as men, has, ironically, coincided with a 340% increase in the
number of establishments where men can have their sexual expectations
satisfied by professional women simulating erotic capacity. In Great
Britain the number of brothels and massage parlours catering to
frustrated men has quadrupled since 1966, and in the United States it
is thought to be considerably greater.
----------------------------
Rizzio was forced to opt for early redundancy when his bowels were
drawn from his body and burnt in front of Mary - an interesting parallel
with today, when it is not the persecutor but the persecuted who in-
variably pays the penalty.
-----------------------
For the last five years of his life, Elvis Presley lived in virtual
isolation in his mansion, Gracelands, guarded by a private army of deaf
and dumb karate experts. He ate only hamburgers, brought to his room by
naked cheerleaders, who would oil his fantastically bloated body as he
ate. When he died he weighed a monstrous twenty-seven stone and his body
had to be craned from his bedroom window to the waiting hearse.
---------------------------
Marcel Proust slept by day in a cork lined room emerging at night to
wander the less salubrious parts of Paris (cottaging, it would now be
called), in the course of which he would dunk madeleines in absinthe and
pick up destitutes, whom he would take to the Ritz for breakfast.
---------------------------
In Ulan Batur, auto-erotic habits within marriage are impossible since at
that altitude semen stains everything it touches magenta.
----------
In the fourteenth century, unfaithful wives below a certain station were
sealed with red-hot irons. Modern experts, such as Christopher Booker
have now proved, however, that women enjoyed a greater measure of true
freedom in the Middle Ages than they do under today's liberal consensus.
----------
Ironically, it was only with the arrival of Christianity that sex and
aggression became confused. Erotica was driven underground and sado-
masochism - with predominantly homoerotic overtones - replaced it in the
visual arts. Beside the gentle image of the Madonna and Child, we find
the Pieta, the Crucifixions, Stations Of the Cross and a multitude of
martyrdoms, often depicting languorous young men. The flagellation
literature of the nineteenth century and the recent wave of video nasties
may be seen as continuations of Western traditions.
-----------
We now know that President Kennedy was unable to walk without callipers
and had to be carried around the White House on the back of a special
counsel to the President, yet his sexual appetite was so voracious that
he kept a permanent 'love-nest' in, ironically, the Watergate Building.
He would approach this at speed on a specially constructed underground
railway (wheelchair gauge), running through a complex of drainage systems
and ducts. A dumb waiter took him to the fifteenth floor and shot him
into his suite, where he would have sexual relations with Lucky Luciano's
mistress.
---------
On the twentieth anniversary of his assassination, a sample of students
at Harvard and Yale were asked what they most admired about Kennedy. 3
percent said it was his stand on civil rights, 1 percent his foreign
policy initiatives, 5 percent his support for the underprivileged and
91 percent said it was because he was always screwing young actresses.
-----------
George Gershwin, who with his brother Ira waged a lonely battle to make
jazz more respectable, composed Rhapsody In Blue with a black woman
sitting on his face.
