Something About Mary

Image: Tony Sapiano / Rex 

For those of a certain generation, the name Mary Millington continues to resonate. And so I was interested to read that she - or, more accurately, one of the soft-porn comedies in which she featured - was recently commemorated with a blue plaque by English Heritage. 

Come Play With Me (1977) ran continuously for almost four years at the Moulin Cinema in Soho after its release, making it the UK's longest running film - ever!

What this astonishing fact reveals is that neither sex nor cinema is taken very seriously by the British. It's certainly difficult to imagine the French or the Americans, for example, making a blue movie that guest starred Bob Todd, Henry McGee and Irene Handl.

The former have Sylvia Kristel and the latter have Linda Lovelace. But we, for better or for worse, have Mary Millington and Suzy Mandel performing alongside Alfie Bass and Ronald Fraser in a work that is rooted more in the often grotesque and vulgar traditions of the music hall than the pornographic imagination.

Critics who fail to appreciate this and know nothing of the lost world of sleaze, showbiz and criminality that was post-War Soho - the world in which writer and director Harrison Marks made his living and was so very much at home - will never understand the queer, anarchic, almost punk character of this film.          

Thus it was entirely appropriate that Mary Millington - "fully cantilevered and gorgeous" - made her final cinematic appearance in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980); a sprawling mess of a film, safety-pinned together, which is as idiosyncratic, as vaudevillian, and at times as cringeworthy as Come Play With Me.

Afterword 

Mary Millington died, depressed and heavily in debt, of a drug overdose, aged 33, in August 1979, leaving behind her several suicide notes in which she accused the police and the tax man of hounding her. A feature-length documentary chronicling her colourful if tragic life, written and directed by her biographer Simon Sheridan, premiered in London earlier this month. 

Vajankle

 The vajankle designed and sold by Sinthetics

The vajankle - as the name suggests - is a sex toy designed for podophiles; a synthetic foot that comes complete with an inbuilt vagina. And a French pedicure. Whilst I'm sure it was developed with good intentions (i.e. to give pleasure), I think it fails for two reasons. 

Firstly, due to its almost-but-not-quite natural appearance it triggers an uncanny valley response (i.e. a feeling of revulsion). Thus the vajankle is aesthetically disturbing; it makes one think of heavy-footed zombies stumbling about or corpses lying in a morgue, rather than bare-footed beauties with dainty feet and lively little toes. 

Doubtless there are necrophiles aroused by the former and by fantasies of mutilation, but most foot fetishists love the vitality and playfulness of pretty feet as they dangle on the end of lovely legs; they wish to kiss and caress the objects of their desire, not chop them off.

Secondly, the vajankle completely misses the point of a fetish for a genuine devotee; it isn't merely a substitute for something else or a type of foreplay before the real event - i.e. genital penetration. Podophiles love feet and have no interest in sexual intercourse as traditionally conceived; they're not looking to ejaculate within a vagina, be it real or otherwise. 

In other words, they subscribe to an entirely different economy of bodies and their pleasures than those who automatically insert their penises where they've been instructed to put them. Foot fetishists, like paraphiliacs in general, want to find new uses for old organs; transforming sex into an exploratory ordeal in which, as Ballard puts it, the body becomes a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities. 

Placing a fake pussy into a rubber foot is, therefore, a banal and laughably naive gesture; both unimaginative and reactionary. There's nothing depraved or deviant about it. It's an attempt to bring the fetishist back into line by reinforcing the view that nothing is more gratifying or exciting than the membrane of a vagina (an orifice designated as the only legitimate and natural place of orgasm). 

Ultimately, what makes perverts philosophically interesting is the fact that whilst they may want to masturbate at every given opportunity, they also want to build bodies without organs and to have done with the judgement of God ...   

Thoughts on the Phrase 'Black is Beautiful'

Photo: Rachel Marquez
Model: Janica @ Best Models
rachelmarquez.com

Whiteness, of course, isn't a colour, it's a normative cultural value; an ideal we are all obliged to accept and aspire to whatever our race or ethnicity. The paler the face the better the person; not only more attractive, but more noble, more spiritual. Darkness of skin betrays darkness of soul; something base and bestial.

Such thinking, of course, which has a long and ugly history, deserves to be challenged; I absolutely support those who subscribe to a political aesthetic that promotes black pride and defiantly declares in the face of white racism that black is beautiful.

However, things become problematic when those who subscribe to such and refuse to cosmetically alter their appearance start to assert their own moral superiority, sneering at those who don't sport afros and accusing them of racial treachery.

To turn a slogan conceived as a form of self-affirmation into a weapon with which to censure others is not only a form of militant asceticism and bullying, but often also betrays sexist hypocrisy on behalf of black males who, on the one hand, voice disapproval of the millions of women who do use skin lightening products and straighten their hair, whilst, on the other hand, dating light-skinned models or marrying white women.

Sometimes, when a woman of colour bleaches her skin, she's not denying her blackness due to self-hatred and internalised racism - she's not betraying her roots - rather, she's simply making a considered choice about how she wants to look and acting with a degree of realism in the world as it is rather than as it could be, should be, and hopefully one day will be.

In a miscegenated future I would like to think no one will feel pressured to wear whiteface and pass as something or someone they're not; but neither will it be any more reprehensible or controversial for a black woman to lighten up cosmetically or surgically modify her body than it is presently for a white woman to work on her tan and have lip injections.

In a world after Michael I hope that all skin tones and facial features are seen as beautiful - be they natural or artificial (human or inhuman) - and a free spectrum of colours replaces the rigid black and white binary designed (like all such binaries) to keep us in a fixed identity.

Loving the Octopus

Image taken from PZ Myers' blog Pharyngula 

The strangely beautiful and beautifully strange octopus has many attractive features and erotic properties; the silky softness of its flesh, the muscular elasticity of its body, the slimy, probing tentacles that insinuate their way into every orifice (more an exotic combination of tongue and finger rather than a phallic analogue, as the biologist PZ Myers rightly points out).

But they also have a razor sharp beak in the midst of all their soft beauty and for those men in whom the fear of castration - in either a literal or a figurative sense - is a primary concern, this abruptly brings thoughts of loving the octopus to a close.

The fiction of D. H. Lawrence, however, provides us with some interesting case material by which we might further discuss this topic ...

Always highly anxious about perceived threats to his manhood - particularly the threat posed by women - Oliver Mellors tells Connie of his past sexual experiences, including with his wife, Bertha, whom he not only found difficult to pleasure, but who would mutilate his penis with her beak-like genitalia:

"'She sort of got harder and harder to bring off, and she'd sort of tear at me down there, as if it were a beak tearing at me. By God, you think a woman's soft down there ... But I tell you the old rampers have beaks between their legs, and they tear at you with it till you're sick.'"

This male fear of emasculation and the beak-like vulva (or what we might term octopussy), is also central to Lawrence's short story 'None of That!' - a rather ugly rape fantasy that (amongst other things) badly misreads Nietzsche.

Ethel Cane is a rich, white American woman with a powerful will and a pageboy haircut, who subscribes to a philosophy based upon the idea of an imaginative transcendence of physical reality and material events:

"'She said the imagination could master everything; so long, of course, as one was not shot in the head, or had an eye put out. Talking of the Mexican atrocities, and of the famous case of the raped nuns, she said it was all nonsense that a woman was broken because she had been raped. She could rise above it.'"      

Of course, Lawrence soon has Ethel disabused of this belief by staging her violent gang rape at the instigation of a nasty-sounding, fat little bull-fighter called Cuesta, with whom she's fascinated and over whom she is determined to exert her influence and thereby prove she is stronger than he.

Cuesta, however, isn't at all interested in her - apart from her money. In fact, he despises poor Ethel: "'She is an octopus, all arms and eyes ... and a lump of jelly'". He explicitly compares her cunt to a cephalopod's rostrum and asks: "'What man would put his finger into that beak? She is all soft with cruelty towards a man's member.'"
   
It's disappointing that someone who risks his life in the bull-ring should be so cowardly when confronted by an independent woman and her deep-sea sex. If he'd been more of a man, then Cuesta would have accepted her challenge and confronted his own castration complex. Instead, he can subject her only to violence at the hands of others and find contentment with beakless native girls; docile, unimaginative, and non-threatening.        


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). Lines quoted are on p. 202. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'None of That!', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Lines quoted pp. 220 and 227. 

Ethnopluralism

Thomas Huxley's map of racial categories from 

On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind 

(London, 1870)

One of the central ideas of the so-called New Right is that of ethnopluralism - this as a radical alternative to multiculturalism and as a means of ensuring human biodiversity. Obviously, it entails an essentialist and völkisch-organic understanding of race and culture and obviously it soon leads on to calls for separatism and ethnoregionalism. 

Proponents, however, are quick to insist that ethnopluralism will result in a world of different but equal peoples living in peaceful coexistence. They vociferously deny they are racists and argue that the attempt to enforce a universal model of mankind has and will continue to result in violence as singularities that cannot be assimilated into a global world order assert their right to otherness and defend their unique identities. 

Of course, whilst ethnopluralism may have recently become a fashionable idea within certain circles, it's nothing very new. We can find it, for example, expressed in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence. In 'Future States', Lawrence imagines a time when our ideal civilization is over and the will to universalism has ceased:

"the great movement of centralising into oneness will stop 

and there will be a vivid recoil into separateness

many vivid small states, like a kaleidoscope, all colours

and all the differences given expression." 

Whilst in the following poem, 'Future War', he writes that where there is an infinite variety of people, there is no desire for conflict: "Oneness makes war, and the obsession of oneness."

I happen to think that last line is true. But it doesn't legitimize the piss-poor scribblings of Markus Willinger, nor necessarily validate the more sophisticated musings of those intellectuals on the New Right.   

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 526-27. 

Brussels

Carl Court / Getty Images (2016)

As Raheem Kassam, Editor-in-Chief of Breitbart London, rightly says in the wake of the Islamist attack on Brussels earlier this week, the by now predictable and formulaic public response is not only wholly inadequate, it's also somewhat shameful and humiliating:

"Teddy bears, tears, candles, cartoons, murals, mosaics, flowers, flags, projections, hashtags, balloons, wreaths, lights, vigils, scarves ..." and Lennonesque fantasies of a world living in harmonious unity, reveal us for the saps we've become.

Tweeting sympathy with the victims and their families, or displaying solidarity by simply updating your Facebook page, isn't really enough. Kassam is right to argue for a more comprehensive and more mature response in the face of that which threatens not only European security, but Western culture itself.

I only hope that he's wrong to think that this may require the taking of direct action by a citizens militia; that our governments will, belatedly, realise what needs to be done and have the courage to do it; implementing not only a change of policy, but a revaluation of values. 

Note: those interested in reading Raheem Kassam's article of 23 March, 2016 in full can do so by clicking here.

On Sexual Apathy and the Case of Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps

Pamela looks at Hannay as she removes her stockings - 

but he only has eyes for his sandwich.

Commentators often note the frigidity of Hitchcock blondes, but it's the seeming sexual indifference of Richard Hannay, played by Robert Donat, that surprises and interests most in the famous bedroom scene from Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935).

True, he invites Pamela, played by Madeleine Carroll, to take off her skirt - an invitation she declines (I shall keep it on thank you!) - but he shows very little desire when she does decide to remove her wet stockings. His offer of assistance is more polite than pervy.

And even when his hand (fastened to hers) brushes against her legs, it does so in an involuntary and strangely limp manner that renders one of cinema's most erotically charged and kinkiest scenes strangely chaste at the same time. Ultimately, Hannay seems far more interested in his sandwich - Thank God for a bite to eat - and getting a good night's rest than in Pamela's bare limbs and feet.

Now, this could be because he's really very tired and hungry, having been on the run from foreign agents trying to kill him and policemen looking to arrest him for a murder he didn't commit for several long days.

But even at the opening of the film when a mysterious beauty asks him to take her home with him, Hannay makes no attempt at seduction. Rather, he cooks her fish in a manly manner, as A. L. Kennedy puts it (non-euphemistically), and then beds down on the couch; again, more concerned with sleep than in exploiting the opportunity for a sexual liaison.

Is this chivalry, or is it a sign of something else? I don't know.

I'm going to assume however - since I hate to pathologise - that Hannay is a true gentleman and not suffering from any form of sexual dysfunction; albeit a gentleman who appears to enjoy the company of women more than bedding them and who, one suspects, if obliged to eventually make love to them looks forward most of all to lighting up a post-coital cigarette.

On Women and Fish in The 39 Steps

Lucie Mannheim as Annabella Smith and Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret

in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935)

Starring a very dashing Robert Donat as Richard Hannay and an ice-cold and elegant Madeleine Carroll as Pamela, Hitchcock's The 39 Steps is a masterclass in how to construct a compelling cinematic narrative in which melodrama seamlessly combines with screwball comedy.

Obviously, the most memorable of all scenes is that in which Pamela - whilst still handcuffed to Hannay and unsure whether he’s an innocent man desperate to clear his name, or a sadistic murderer on the run - awkwardly removes her wet stockings. It remains an unsurpassed moment of kinky delight that lovers of film and fetish have cherished for over 80 years.

However, there are two other scenes and two supporting performances that I’m also very fond of, each involving a vulnerable woman - and a fish.

The first takes place in Hannay’s London flat when he cooks a haddock for Annabella, the mysterious spy played by Lucie Mannheim, a Jewish actress forced into exile from her native Germany by the Nazis. As one who knows what it is to genuinely fear for her future and have to flee and to hide, she plays the part with real conviction and makes Hannay's ironic remark about persecution mania cruelly apt.

The second scene, which parallels and reverses elements of the above, unfolds in the crofter’s cottage. Hannay charms the young wife, Margaret, played by Peggy Ashcroft, who asks him if it’s true that all the ladies in London paint their toenails, before cooking him a fish for supper and then helping him escape from the police in the middle of the night, thus vicariously fulfilling her own desire to flee the loveless existence to which she's been doomed by marriage to an older man (played by John Laurie).

Both these women seek out and desperately require Hannay's help. They are, in a sense, as caught up in circumstances beyond their control as he is. And yet Hannay is unable to save either of them; Annabella is murdered and Margaret abandoned to a life of rural misery and domestic violence.

Only Pamela refuses to be bullied or victimised by any man. She may be dragged all over the Scottish moors by Hannay, but she never loses her sangfroid. Say what you like about Hitchcock blondes, but they're never going to allow themselves to be done up like kippers ...  

Tickets Please (On the Buses with D. H. Lawrence)

Pat Ashton as überclippie in the ITV comedy On the Buses  

Literary scholar Brian Finney cleverly identifies a loose classical parallel between Lawrence’s short story ‘Tickets Please’ and Euripides’s play, The Bacchae. But as one who wasn’t reared on ancient Greek tragedy but, rather, on 1970s British sitcoms, I have to admit that, when recently re-reading the tale, the thing that immediately came to my mind was On the Buses.

It’s not only that inspector John Thomas (or Coddy) resembles a cross between Stephen Lewis’s Blakey (sporting the same toothbrush moustache and peaked cap) and the sex-mad driver, Jack, played by Bob Grant; it’s that the girl conductors as described by Lawrence sound just like the buxom blonde clippies personified by Pat Ashton: sharp-tongued, fearless young hussies in ugly blue uniforms, with skirts up to their knees (and beyond).*

However, whereas On the Buses was often crude and vulgar, it doesn’t really belong to the pornographic imagination; it lacks the perverse aesthetic and sadomasochistic elements that crucially define the latter. Lawrence, of course, understands these elements all too well; understands them, and gleefully exploits them in his fiction.

Thus, ‘Tickets Please’ doesn’t end in bawdy farce, but eroticised violence. In a scene that Eric Stanton might have sketched, Lawrence has John Thomas get his comeuppance at the hands of half-dozen girls whom he’s recently fucked round with: Annie, Cissy, Laura, Muriel, Polly and last, but by no means least, the rather pale, but well-built and vindictive Nora.

Having lured the crumpet-loving Coddy into their staff room at the depot, the clippies give him some tea served with bread and dripping. They tease him, gently at first, then more aggressively; demanding that he choose one of them – and only one – to walk home with. He tries to laugh things off, but he’s rightly uneasy and mistrustful as they make him stand with his face to a wall, tittering excitedly behind his back:

“And suddenly, with a movement like a swift cat, Annie went forward and fetched him a box on the side of the head that sent his cap flying and himself staggering. He started round.
      But at Annie’s signal they all flew at him, slapping him, pinching him, pulling his hair, though more in fun than in spite or anger. He however saw red. His blue eyes flamed with strange fear as well as fury, and he butted through the girls to the door. It was locked. He wrenched at it. Roused, alert, the girls stood round and looked at him. He faced them, at bay. At that moment they were rather horrifying to him, as they stood in their short uniforms. He was distinctly afraid.”

John Thomas demands that they unlock the door and let him go. But things turn nastier when Annie takes off her belt and, swinging it, fetches him a “sharp blow over the head, with the buckle end”. He grabs her to try and prevent another blow, but “immediately the other girls rushed upon him, pulling and tearing and beating him” like strange, wild creatures determined to have their sport and their revenge:

“Nora had hold at the back of his collar, and was actually strangling him. Luckily the button burst. He struggled in a wild frenzy of fury and terror, almost mad terror. His tunic was simply torn off his back, his shirt-sleeves were torn away, his arms were naked.”

Finally, they get him down and then they kneel on him, with flushed faces and wild hair; their eyes glittering strangely. John Thomas lies still, beaten and at the mercy of the young women. His face was scratched and bleeding. The sight of his white, bare arms excited the girls. Polly is part hysterical, part ecstatic; when not laughing, she gives long groans and sighs. Annie slaps John Thomas and again commands him to choose one of them. And so, finally, he chooses her.

This brings the attack and the story to a close, if something of a ruined climax; for nothing is consummated. The girls let him up and then stand about uneasily, “flushed, panting, tidying their hair and their dress unconsciously”, as the bruised and battered Coddy picks up his torn clothes and absurdly puts his cap back on in a vain attempt to regain his lost authority.

‘Tickets Please’ is then a classic piece of Lawrentian kinkiness, involving explicit elements of dominance, submission, and fetishistic fantasy wherein a previously powerful and cocksure male is assaulted, stripped and humiliated by fully-clothed – indeed uniformed – young women filled with supernatural strength and sexual malice.

As the song says: There's always gay life on the buses / You'll find it thrilling when you ride / And you can get it on the buses / Upstairs or down inside.**


Notes and References

D. H. Lawrence, 'Tickets Please', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 34-45. All lines are quoted from this version of the text.

* I'm aware of course that Lawrence's story concerns a group of East Midlands tram girls, not London bus conductresses.

** Lyrics for the theme song to the film, On the Buses (dir. Harry Booth, 1971), were written by Roger Ferris. For those interested in hearing this charming ditty in full, please click here.

Dancing Barefoot (with Reference to the Case of Alice Howells)

From Zarathustra to Patti Smith, there has long been a perverse fascination with the thought of young women dancing barefoot and defying the Spirit of Gravity. One evening, for example, when the former was walking through the forest with his disciples, he came upon a group of girls dancing together in a meadow. When, upon realising that they have been discovered, they cease their movements, Zarathustra approaches them in a friendly manner and implores them to continue:

'Please, I beg you, do not stop, you nimble creatures! I'm no killjoy who looks upon you with an evil eye; no enemy to divine dancing, or to girls' feet with fair ankles.'

I've no doubt, therefore, that had he lived and retained his sanity, Nietzsche would have enthusiastically supported the barefoot dance movement of the early twentieth century, which not only challenged received ideas of what constitutes classical dance, but also wider notions of social decorum. For bare feet had long been regarded as obscene within Western culture, no matter how passionately the advocates for such made reference to the ancient world or the enlightened practices of the Far East.

Indeed, for many Edwardians any form of public nakedness remained profoundly shocking and when Maud Allan performed her barefoot Dance of the Seven Veils in 1908, it scandalised London theatre goers. Critics regarded her as the embodiment of uninhibited sexuality and, as such, a threat to public decency. But it would take another dancer, Isadora Duncan, to really shake things up, however. Duncan, a feminist and self-declared communist, revolutionized dance and liberated the naked female foot; divorcing the latter from perceptions of obscenity and linking it instead to ideas of freedom, innocence, and natural harmony.

Finally, we come to the (fictional) case of Alice Howells, a young widow in D. H. Lawrence's short story, 'The Blue Moccasins' (1928), who seduces a married man, Percy Barlow, by dancing barefoot before him on stage in a play entitled The Shoes of Shagpat.

In the play, writes Lawrence:

"Alice was the wife of the grey-bearded old Caliph, but she captured the love of the young Ali, otherwise Percy, and the whole business was the attempt of these two to evade Caliph and negro-eunuchs and ancient crones, and get into each other's arms."

In her role as Leila, Alice wears white gauze Turkish trousers and a silver veil. She also wears a pair of blue moccasins that belong to Mrs Barlow (and which have been borrowed without permission): "The blue shoes were very important: for while the sweet Leila wore them, the gallant Ali was to know there was danger. But when she took them off, he might approach her."           

Seeing Mrs Barlow sitting in the front row, so calmly superior, suddenly let loose a devil in Alice Howells: "All her limbs went suave and molten, as her young sex, long pent up, flooded even to her finger-tips Her voice was strange, even to herself, with its long, plaintive notes. She felt all her movements soft and fluid, she felt herself like living liquid. And it was lovely."

Lawrence continues:

"Alice's business, as the lovely Leila , was to be seductive to the rather heavy Percy. And seductive she was. In two minutes, she had him spell-bound. He saw nothing of the audience. A faint, fascinated grin came on to his face, as he acted up to the young woman in the Turkish trousers. ... And when, at the end of Act I, the lovely Leila kicked off the blue moccasins, saying: 'Away, shoes of bondage, shoes of sorrow!' - and danced a little dance all alone, barefoot, in her Turkish trousers, in front of her fascinated hero, his smile was so spell-bound that everybody else was spell-bound too."

Apart from the outraged wife, obviously, whose indignation knew no bounds. Unfortunately, she has to sit throughout Act II, as the imaginary love scenes between Percy and Alice become ever more nakedly shameful. As the second Act comes to its climax, Leila again kicks off her shoes of bondage and flies barefoot into the arms of Ali: "And if ever a man was gone in sheer desire, it was Percy, as he pressed the woman's lithe form against his body ..."       

Not surprisingly, Mrs Barlow doesn't stay for the third Act. By then, however, it is too late: her husband's podophilia has got the better of him and he's crucially transferred his allegiance to Alice. Leaning down, backstage during the interval, "he drew off one of the grey shoes she had on, caressing her foot with the slip of his hand over its slim, bare shape".


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Blue Moccasins', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 165-79. All lines quoted are from this edition. 

Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), see 'The Dance Song' in Part Two of this work. Note that the line spoken by Zarathustra as it appears here is a paraphrase rather than an accurate quotation.