Illustration by Captain Shame: redlionstreet.blogspot.co.uk
The County of Essex, we are told, is a hot spot for dogging; that peculiarly British pastime in which strangers meet up - often randomly and in masked anonymity - in fields, woodlands and lay-bys, in order to casually exchange sexual favours whilst observed by voyeurs happy to derive their own delight from the car shaking activities on display.
I'd perhaps not quite go so far as to describe dogging as idyllic, but, nevertheless, there is something romantic about such semi-pastoral (and semi-illicit) pleasures.
Others, however, quickly resort to the language of moral outrage and tabloid journalism which, for some reason, has a particular penchant for words beginning with the letter 'd' - such as disgusting, degrading, and depraved, for example.
And Lawrence too - for all his enthusiasm for alfresco eroticism - would also have been quick to condemn dogging I'm sure. One has only to recall what he wrote in his extraordinary essay on John Galsworthy to find evidence for this. Here, he vehemently attacks 'doggish amorousness' as something profoundly shameful and as a sign of social decadence. He writes:
"When the individual remains real and unfallen, sex remains a vital and supremely important thing. But once you have the fall into social beings, sex becomes disgusting, like dogs on heat. Dogs are social beings, with no true canine individuality. Wolves and foxes don't copulate on the pavement. Their sex is wild, and in act, utterly private. Howls you may hear. But you will never see anything. But the dog is tame. And he makes excrement and he copulates on the pavement ...
The same with human beings. Once they become tame, they become, in a measure, exhibitionists ... They have no real feelings of their own. Unless somebody 'catches them at it', they don't really feel they've felt anything at all."
- D. H. Lawrence, 'John Galsworthy', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, CUP, 1985, p. 217
