What is it about the British and bums? Buggery and bottoms,
and Philippa’s behind?
In Italy and Spain, where Mama’s boys don’t leave home until
well in their thirties and married, the obsession is on cleavage - and lots of
it. Bosoms sell cars and shampoo, the ads are aired when children are having
their tea. Understandable then, this fixation on the breast, where grown men
don’t want to let go -and are not encouraged to do so- by possessive matriarchs.
‘Mammone’ sounds suspiciously like mammary
glands. Well, if the Mediterraneos are tied
to the teat, stuck on oral, the Brits are definitely anal fixated.
Just one up on Freud’s hierarchy of psychosexual stages.
The pages and pages of print dedicated to Pippa’s posterior,
post Royal Wedding, last summer , threatened to eclipse any serious ‘news’ of
note that month (take note, not ‘week ‘ but ‘month’) to say nothing of the
overshadowing of the event’s real protagonist; her sister, HRH Kate, Duchess of Cambridge. Philippa/Pippa
or her ‘Royal Hotness’ as she was subsequently referred to, was the latest
fixation in a lineup that has included
KylieMinogue, Beyonce, J LO and Kim Kardashian all of whom the British
have bottomed up to, because they look best from behind.
Kylie in particular was a washed up, try-hard, has been on
the British pop scene until she donned a pair of the skimpiest gold lame hot
pants and spun around. Tabloid elegies
compared her derrière to a ripe pear, a peach and every fruit under the sun.
She was the ‘it; bottom until Pippa came along. No other nation has waxed so
lyrical for so long on the subject of buttocks. But why?
Fittingly in a class obsessed society, the genesis of all
toilet humour can be traced to and blamed on parents sending (read offloading)
their offspring onto boarding schools, precociously early in their unformed and
uniformed lives. Homogeneity is a desirable, it also lets the parents off the
whole disciplining process and keeps up with the Joneses. If institutionalized homosexuality and
emotional constipation are by products, so be it. Dig further and you’ll find a
stiffie in that stiff upper lip. Restraint, especially when it comes to bowel
movements, has a habit of doing that. A massaged prostate gland is a massaged
prostate gland no matter who, or more pertinently, what ,is providing the pressure.
According to Freud, the primary focus on the libido in his defined ‘anal stage’
was on controlling the bladder and bowel movements. Mastering control,
encouraged by parental involvement and praise, results, he postulates, in a sense
of accomplishment and independence. Introduced too early, by pushy
overachieving parents, inadequacy in the toilet training department might lead
to what Freud coined: ‘the anal-retentive personality’, in which the individual is ‘stringent,
orderly, rigid and obsessive.’ Weather? Time? Political correctness? Civil
Service? Class Conscious? Queues?
Bottoms? Tea?. Tag the word ‘obsessive’ onto any of the above and something
familiar and particularly nationalistic
in its ability to generalise to Englishness emerges. For goodness sakes,
Selfridges self references all said
hitherto, in its current Jubilee window display that snakes around an entire blog.
Bottoms and homosexuality are announced explicitly, if of course a tad
eccentrically. There’s the road maintenance man, bent forward, bum up, trousers
southbound, flashing his union jack underpants and then there’s the punk and
the policeman poised to engage is some serious lip action. As long as its
eccentric it’s safe.
Which brings me
back to boarding schools. ‘Fagging’ as in ‘toilet seat warming’. inflicted by
grade seniors upon naïve freshmen, may be a rite of passage that ended with
Roald Dahl, but the obsession with the act has not.
Humour, like eccentricity is the safe exposition for the
sublimation of the unsaid and undone. ‘It’s only a Joke’ ..yeah right!. Not
just limited to the public school educated, a comedy routine, that doesn’t
reference the rear within 5 minutes, well it just ain’t British. Watch any
sitcom or stand-up comedian, toff or
yob, high brow to slapstick, and the gags ‘bog ‘down pretty quick.
Take
the ‘In-Betweeners ‘ a runaway hit T.V.
series, charting the sexual mishaps and growing ‘pains’ of a gangly mob of comprehensive school, 5th form,
misfits. Targeted at the testosterone charged, ‘red hot blooded male’, market, every other
joke is about farting, turds, easing a
nugget , taking it up the rear and an entire Kama Sutra of gay sexual positions. Do ‘gay’ films and comedies constantly refer to female genitalia
, entering into microscopic detail concerning heterosexual acts of congress , I
wonder?. The answer is they do not. There is an obvious fascination and
obsession however with anal sex in most
British ‘straight’ Comedy. Now is
this, I catch myself wondering again, because the vast majority of people
running the country received their education in a public school ?
On the other hand, Freud, pointed out that an overly laissez
faire attitude to parenting and potty training could result in an
anal-expulsive personality’; messy, wasteful and self-destructive. This, though,
is the subject of another digression. Could the excessive political correctness
and the fact that parents are too tired to train their offspring at the end of
a hard day’s slog mean that the potty pendulum might be swinging the other way?
There is also another theory, a sort of sexual evolution of
the species, describing how eroticism was transferred, cleavage and all, from buttocks
to bosom as the preferred point of entry and congress shifted from the rear to
the front (face to face). Maybe the national male psyche has lingered at the
watering hole, arriving upon a potential mate bent over and scooping up.
Foreplay never quite entered the equation because with your back exposed doing the
deed, you were vulnerable prey to bigger beasts so quickie was best all in the name of preservation of the species.
Which begs the question who was doing the potty training back
then?
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