Shagging the Tudors and Stuarts

While I’m having a go at the Scots, I am going to settle down and have a thoroughly good bitch about Mary Queen of.

I have finally pinned down what annoys me about Mary Stuart-Darnley-Bothwell or whatever her surname was. Some people are ruled by their heads, some are ruled by their hearts and some do all their thinking with organs that are slightly lower down, and I suspect Mary Stuart was one of these. There are lots of good things about having a powerful libido, however far too many women whose cognitive abilities have been washed away by their hormones deny that they have a strong sex drive and present themselves as being sensitive, emotional or romantic, because it’s nicer than being a hot babe. Their admirers describe them as ‘passionate’ though that’s often no more than a polite euphemism. In fact many of them are drama queens, and the rest of them are just plain needy because all they want to do is buck like rabbits but they can’t face the implications, so they wrap their lust up in pink bows and say that they are longing for a relationship. As I said, Mary Stuart’s series of overly-emotional and frequently disastrous marriages suggest to me that she came into this category of self-indulgent and rather precious women.

If we look at Elizabeth we find a much cooler customer. Whether or not Elizabeth bedded her various favourites is a matter of speculation but whatever her sexual history she didn’t for a moment get off on the emotion of it all. She sometimes comes across as ruthless and cold-hearted, but in fact I think it is simply that she had a very strong survival instinct, honed by the extreme precariousness of her upbringing as the sometime illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. Elizabeth could never afford to put a hair wrong; her mother had been executed while Elizabeth was still an infant and she had veered from heir to bastard and back again depending on the political and religious inclinations of her father and siblings. Whatever other speculations you make about Elizabeth’s sexuality and gender, it is quite clear that personal survival was a primary goal.

Mary by contrast was raised as the golden little darling of the French court, feted, spoiled and flattered, and never developed any of the survival instincts which Elizabeth learned as a toddler. Maybe Mary didn’t need them, maybe she was just incapable of developing them. Mary comes across as emotionally self-indulgent and short term: Liz Taylor to Elizabeth’s Katherine Hepburn.

It is probably unfair of me to admire Elizabeth’s self-control and dislike to what I see as Mary’s self-indulgence, but women who wail about love and betrayal when all they want is a good shag scrape on my nerves like chalk on a blackboard. If you want a good shag, go out and shag someone.

Right. That’s the Scots insulted. Again. I’m off to read up about Owain Glyndwr now.

Needing being needed

When does being supportive slip into co-dependency?

My Grandma, who had a large part in my raising, was born to a well off middle class family in the 19th Century. The role of womanhood which she presented was to help and support her men-folk and I imbibed co-dependency with my morning cereals. On the other hand I also learned that although men are loud and shouty and useful for heavy lifting, they aren’t necessarily that bright and in fact it takes a woman to understand the subtleties.

I emerged from my up-bringing believing myself very capable, thinking that men only see half the picture, and believing it is appropriate for me to enable my partner to Do His Work. Grandma acknowledged that the Work men Do is often Important, even if it is lopsided and frequently misses the point. On the other hand, she sent her daughter to university and certainly we grand-daughters were expected to enter professions rather than get jobs, so maybe she was a seething mass of feminist frustration all along but being a five year old, I didn’t notice. She could certainly be very impatient with men. Her motto was “‘I’ll do it myself’, said the Little Red Hen”, and my problem with feminism has always been to question why women should lower themselves to equality.

Now, whenever I get into a relationship, I can end up putting myself out to enable my partner to Do His Work. I do it consciously, I do it sparingly, and I tend to do it when it really does make a difference. However, I have previously been supportive of partners to my own emotional, financial or professional detriment. I am rougher and tougher than I used to be, and have much firmer boundaries, but the instincts to be supportive are still there.

What I struggle with, is whether or not it is a Bad Thing.

John Grey and Dorothy Parker

What I say is what I mean.
what you see is what you get,
what I think shows on my face,
and yet you’re still confused, my pet?

Lust, actually

The one I go to bed with	I’m wild with desire for you
Aphra (pleased and flattered)	Wild with desire…? Really…?
The one I go to bed with	Well, a bit pissed off with desire, actually
Oh well

… but then again, too few to mention …

When you get a text message at a quarter to midnight saying “Are you still awake?”, what are you going to do? That’s right. I rang back.

My friend has a complicated life. I’m used to being the soap opera around here, and it is rather odd to find myself the stable one while my friend ricochets from situation to situation like the ball in a pinball machine.

He has some choices to make and, for once in my life, I didn’t have advice to give.

I am great at giving advice.

No, really I am.

Sometimes it’s advice, sometimes it’s an opinion, sometimes it’s a suggestion, and one of the things that makes me a good person to ask for help is that I am always really clear on which it is. I’ll even give people advice that I really don’t want them to take, if what is good for them is painful for me. For some reason that’s the one set of advice I have a 10/10 take-up on. Oh well.

So I told him about a couple of ways that I make sure I end up with as few regrets as possible. Coward that I am, I don’t like the idea of regrets.

The first is to kick start some hindsight. Imagine yourself five, ten, fifteen, twenty years in the future, or at the far end of your career, or the far end of your life, and look back on the situation you are in. What would you wish you had done? What would you regret the least? A powerful question that. (Ha!) Use it wisely.

It’s an odd thing to do the first time you do it, but it is so powerful and so useful that it can end up becoming habitual. It helps you get some perspective on the thing and sort out the short-term gain or pain from the lasting consequences of your decision.

The second is to take time to notice that the decision you are making is the right one, given the circumstances you are in right now. This is something that good abortion and adoption counsellors do. They take the time to make sure that, whatever happens in the future, the woman knows now that the decision she has made (to terminate the pregnancy, to give the baby away or to go through with the whole thing) is the right one given the situation she is in and the information she has available.

This one makes it easier for you to forgive yourself for your own mistakes because you know you did the best you could at the time.

The third thing is to be aware when a decision really is not your call, and you are just a factor in someone else’s decision-making. Deluded fools that they are, they think the world revolves around them. Don’t they realise? You see, you can have all sorts of reactions to the consequences of another person’s decisions but unless you caused them to take that decision, regret cannot be one of them.

So there you are. Aphra’s guide to regret-free decision-making. Mind you, you may still make completely lousy choices. You may still lie awake staring at the ceiling and aching with pain. But at least you’ll have got there really really carefully.

Grandmama, Grandmama, here’s this lovely egg. Listen up while I teach you how to suck it.

Category Errors #1 - Pre-Nup discussions

I am fine with all the questions in this NYT list of Things To Discuss Before Marriage - very wise and prudent they are too. I did in fact discuss all of this and more with the former Mr Behn before I jumped over the broomstick with him. Didn’t make a jot of difference in the end, but there you go.

So there I was reading this and checking them off in my mind - have I Discussed this with the One I Discuss These Things With? But then my mental train jumped the track for a minute:

1. check
2. check
3. check
4. check
5. check
6. check
7. huh……….? I mean …………? HUH…………?

I am sure that relationships deteriorate into acrimony and end awash in bitterness because of this. It used to be toothpaste tubes before they were plastic and you couldn’t squeeze them in the middle; and of course times change.

But is it me, or is #7 in a completely different category from all the others?

Disgrace notes

2004. I am waiting in the foyer of a London hotel to meet the man I am having an affair with. My handbag is large and slung from my shoulder. It contains a selection of scarves, condoms, lube and other bits and pieces. I have no other baggage. It is February and there is a light sprinkling of snow on the ground. I am wearing a fur coat. The young man at the desk accepts my payment up front without bothering to ask if I will be wanting a newspaper in the morning. I realise that he assumes that I will be making a profit out of the afternoon, though in fact I am an amateur doing it for fun.

---

2006. My lover wakes me suddenly out of a sleep he didn’t know I was having. There is some confusion and I end up crying as I tend to when woken quickly from post-coital sleep. He ends up bewildered and distressed. Neither of us know what we are fighting about. Neither of us want a complex scene. As I go down on him, I reflect that oral sex is the great ender of squabbles and that if it weren’t for the risk of infection I would like a tongue piercing. Sometimes I wish I was not quite so sensible.

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1982. Students. I have arranged a girls’ night out with a friend. I have a shower, wash my hair and I ruefully acknowledge as I shave my legs that I am preparing my body as I would for a lover. Later, I realise that sex with another woman is the nearest I will get to sex with myself; I love the soft mirror-image of myself in bed beside me.

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1983. Still students. I am at a party, a formal ball in fact. The young men are in DJs the young women in satiny gowns. It is late and four of us are piled, kitten-like, in a huge arm chair. For no particular reason I am kissing her escort, and she is kissing mine. Someone elsewhere in the room says “swap partners” but we already have. I look at her and she looks at me. We smile and start kissing each other. The quality of silence in the room changes.

---

2002. I am standing outside a hotel with my lover and a young girl who works at the hotel. She is bright, funny, clever, sexy, charming. Who wouldn’t fancy her? She is also talkative and, standing in the street lights as we say goodnight, I do not have the time to say to him “I fancy her, do you fancy her?” So the three of us go our separate ways. I see her once again some time later and we go out for a meal and some drinks. She is the first person I tell the story of how I lost my virginity. I don’t sleep with her that time either. Looking back, I am not sure why.

---

1971. Childhood. I am standing in a secluded part of the playground at school with another girl and a boy. We are playing “aliens”. It consists mainly of cautious explorations of each others’ bodies. There are no kisses. There are no naked parts. There is however sexual tension, though we do not understand it at the time.

---

2006. Another formal ball. My lover’s gynaecologist is there. He is a little drunk and rather puppyish. Like all male gynaecologists he is deeply charming. He remembers my lover’s hysterectomy and tells him about other work he has done with trans-people since then. He keeps on saying “good on yer, mate”. At one point he blinks at my myopically and says “… but you look so straight….”

---

The bauria language in India has a word which means “to love falsely”. Well, there’s a thing.It also has a word which means “to love for the last time”.I dread that.

Self-control

I had a phonecall at work from a friend the other day. He is trying to retain and maintain a relationship shattered by his girlfriend’s infidelity. The girlfriend is still in touch with the chap she had sex with that one time, and my friend wanted to know if he was being unreasonable in wanting her to stop the emails, or at the very least to stop actually telling him about them.

The answer I gave, of course, was no, you are not being unreasonable. I reminded him that this was a case of the pot calling the kettle a bit grubby; he’s had e-relationships of his own although, as he rightly pointed out, his e-relationships had not involved any actual fucking.

He then said that he did not dare say It’s him or me, on the grounds that she would choose him.

Whoooooooops-s-s. He’s right about the outcome but wrong about the reason for it. As I pointed out, he’d say him or me, and she’d hear control or independence, and choose independence, the irony being that her independent intelligence is one of the things that makes her so attractive.

I doubt very much that this is about him at all; I suspect it may be about her previous relationship and that he is just the poor sap who’s around while she spreads her wings and flaps around. Personally, I think she is being discourteous and cruel and that this is a self-indulgence which she should give up, however he is the last person in the world who can ask it of her. I do admire him for thinking about it though and understanding the subtleties of what is going on, and it is fascinating watching him mature through this.

But oh dear. Oh dearie dearie dear.

Good news, bad news

I don’t have to wait until the afternoon of Christmas Day to read the autumn Terry Pratchett

I have to buy it myself

No-one tells me “that dress is really unflattering from behind”

I can’t tell when what I’m wearing is really unflattering from behind

My bank balance is nobody’s business but my own

Paying off the mortgage is up to me

Sex is dirty again

It can also be infected

Buying erotica at the bookshop is a symptom of how liberated and sexually at ease I am with myself

Sometimes flirting with the guy at the till in the bookshop is the nearest I get to an erotic encounter

Someone else will raise his teenage kids

Someone else is raising his pre-schoolers

I can use any colour I like to paint the bedroom

I am the one who has to paint it

I don’t have to choose Christmas and Birthday presents for his family

I no longer get the gossip about his sister’s latest lunacy

I can eat pasta with pesto every night for a week if I want to

I am putting on weight

And finally:

The loo-seat is down when I go to the bathroom

Nope. There isn’t a downside to that one

A matter of trust

When we say we trust someone, do we mean that we have faith in their integrity, or do we mean we have faith in our ability to predict their behaviour?

One of the most disorientating things the former Herr Behn said to me was I do not trust you any more. When I challenged this he said I do not trust your judgement. For want of a better way of putting it, he trusted my inputs but wanted to be able to predict my outputs. (We were geeks. Sorry).

That was eight years ago, but I’ve been thinking about  the nature of trust in relationships a lot recently. The partner of a friend of mine caused upset and ruckus recently by playing an away game. My friend was shaking, not just with anger and shock and a sense of betrayal, but also with the realisation that a relationship which at times felt too good to be true had turned out to be just that. It’s tough when you turn round to yourself and say I told you so.

More or less simultaneously, I have got to the point when I can pack up and send some books and a valedictory letter off to a guy whose final words to me, in the middle of February, were I’ll ring you next week.

The one thing that was solidly certain during our relationship was that, no matter what happened and what didn’t happen, he would never ever be deliberately cruel to me. I knew that there would be an ocean of hurt, but no cruelty.

Yeah right.

My sense of reeling dislocation this spring was not just because I was betrayed by someone else; it was also caused by letting my own expectations run away with me.

Ultimately it was because I had to come to terms with the realisation that I have little or no ability to predict how another person will behave.

So far, I lack the generosity of spirit to thank him for that revelation.