Let's Talk About Sex, Baby ... And Seventeenth Century Theatre

Yes! My totally grabby scandalous title brought you in! Read on, friends as I share my tipsily written, soberly edited thoughts on a seventeenth century spy, tinder and feminism. 

I recently watched the dress run of The Rover, probably the sexiest show currently on at the RSC. (If you don’t think that’s much of a statement, go check out Lucifer in a white catsuit, red lipstick and stilettos in Doctor Faustus at the Barbican, then come back to me. Elizabethan theatre is RAUNCHY.) 

It was very enjoyable. Aphra Behn, who wrote it, was one of the UK’s first professional female playwrights, when she wasn’t being a spy. She’s kind of like a seventeenth century John le Carre, except she wrote about far more universal and exciting things than international espionage: sex and travel, mostly. The play’s about three wealthy sisters who escape their brother’s restrictive watch to experience some fun and romance before facing the highly unromantic futures that have been laid out for them, which involve being shipped off to convents or into unwanted marriages. They disguise themselves as gypsies and join carnival season for one night of freedom, where they become entangled with three English travellers, who find the carnival equally new, exciting and foreign. 

The Rover © RSC

The whole play stinks of patriarchy, like most things from 1677 do. Amid the party atmosphere of the carnival, there are seriously solemn moments: one of the sisters has to not just forgive but pretty much laugh off two men who attempted to rape her (on separate occasions! in one day! And one of them goes on to marry her sister!), and the sisters all have to do exactly what their brother and father tell them. 

While that’s all important though, what I really want to convey here is how SEXY the show is. There’s sexy men, and sexy women, and sexy men having sex with sexy women, and sexy women having sex with sexy men, and sexy women having sex with unsexy men and skirts fly off and hands wander and everyone is just so excited to SEE EACHOTHER. It’s lovely! 

The Rover © RSC

As I sat and watched the scandal unfold, it felt terribly unfair to me that nearly 350 years later, such electric, excitable sexual adventure still feels like such a distant and fantastical notion. There’s something desperately numbing about watching people dance and kiss and argue and get so intensely entangled in each other, in a story that only takes place over 24 hours or so, and then go home and turn to the 21st century’s equivalent matchmaking tool - not carnival, but tinder. Masks and music and dance have given way to swiping through photos and forcing conversation with boring strangers on an app. 

HOW CAN THIS HAVE HAPPENED? We’ve had lots of progress since 1677. Microwaves and shorts for women, to name but two examples. It is very much a good thing that I am not forced to marry anyone I don’t want to. This play makes it abundantly obvious that women in the seventeenth century found it just as unsavoury a prospect as we do today. It is good that women can now report rape as a crime, and men are punished - occasionally. AREN’T WE LUCKY. But all these marks of progress come with serious caveats. I may not have to marry anyone I don’t want to, but that’s not the case for many women and girls in the world. We might be able to report rape as a crime, but women still have to laugh off rape ‘jokes’ in many situations.  

Rather than joining a carnival and dancing round in masks, meeting people, taking in smells and sights and sounds and feeling physical attraction, we join Tinder or Grindr or Happn, and virtually bat off weirdos and consign ourselves to random onslaughts of dickpics. Technology has somehow allowed us to do away with physical connection, but keep the abuse and objectification. How can we have let this happen as a society? We’ve kept the sexual oppression, and LOST THE ACTUAL SEX?!?! 

© Vice

I don’t think I’m being over dramatic here. A study released last month showed that millenials (specifically young people aged 20-24), have less actual, in person, kissy touchy sex than previous generations. And I can believe it. I mean, how do you even connect with people these days? We don’t go outside! Even if we did, what would we do? Technology has splintered the media so much that there’s very little that EVERYONE connects over any more.There’s nowhere that EVERYONE IS. They’re not at carnivals, or speakeasies, or punk gigs or raves. They’re on the internet. (And while you CAN have sex over the internet, I’m going to stick my neck out here and say it’s not as fun.) And yet these extra miles and messages and apps between us all haven’t kept us any safer. Young women have a 30% chance of being sexually assaulted on university campuses. We’ve kept the dark, oppressive demons of centuries past and cast off the fun side. 

Watching this 1677 play in 2016, the poignant, relatable aspects are the violence, sinister control and revenge many of the men seek to affect on the women, while the lively sexual banter feels ludicrous and dated. IT SHOULD BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND. The crazily overt sexism should feel distant and antiquated, and the SEX, the CONNECTION and the CARNIVAL, should feel universal.

The Rover © RSC

Love

I’m in love with Simon Amstell. 

Seriously. I fancy the tight little pants he wears in my head right off his sexy chiseled bum. Sitting on my own at home, watching him on TV, I find myself unconsciously laughing at his jokes extra loudly, and for slightly longer than I would naturally, then biting my lip while twisting a strand of my hair round my finger. His dark eyes and hunched, awkward demeanor effect some sort of cosmic dark magic that tickles me right down my spine. I intently follow his walk about the stage, consumed by the absurd notion that it would be just great to nibble at his hair…

Why am I making public my creepy obsessive tendencies? Because despite how clearly deranged it makes me sound, I know I’m not alone. The concept of celebrity crushes is something I have always been a bit confused by. It strikes me as more than a little silly to fancy someone you’ve never met. I’ve been openly freaked out by my friends drooling over film-stars, guitarists, Derren Brown … (well, that one still does confuse me). I’ve taken part in countless conversations that go a bit like this:

Me: ‘But you don’t know David Tennant. You’ve never had a conversation with him. When you see him on TV, he’s playing a character. How can you be deeply in love with someone who doesn’t know your name?’

Friend: ‘He is perfect. One day I will marry him.’

In the real world, it takes me more than a look, or even a conversation to decide whether I actually fancy someone. Probably more than two or three encounters. Even then I may still not know. I’m not exactly the hopeless romantic type. In fact, I think an official ‘sexual attraction and compatibility trial period’ would be a great system; you agree some dates with the candidate in question, and spend a week together in a hotel, maybe abroad. You turn your phones off, eat snacks, have tickle fights, play Pictionary and compare music collections. You also keep a log rating your excitement and tingles on a scale of one to ten each morning afternoon and evening, and a tally counting the number of times you fiddle with your hair, or speak in a ridiculously high pitched and yet husky tone completely unnatural to you. Once the week is over, you take your log home, catalogue your results (maybe draw some graphs), and see if you in fact might have feelings for the person in question. You then compare your results with the candidate: if you both tingled at least at a level 6 roughly 50% of the time, you can go in for the whole relationship thing. If you want. Like, seriously, I think this needs institutionalizing.  I mean, someone at some point chucked the whole ‘marriage’ thing out there.

‘William! Ranlyn! I’ve got it! This thing they do in the Bible? No, after the bit where they don’t allow prostitutes in Israel … before the command to add fringe to all clothing. Yes, ‘taking a wife’; I reckon we could make it big. We can sing songs and get rings, sign a Godly love contract, and then Godefryd’s your uncle! The girl is yours forever. Once ‘marriage’ has taken place, your wooing days are over my friend! She lives with you and looks after your sheep, and your children, and your mother when she gets old. Plus, you get official usage of the phrase ‘ball and chain’. Eh? Oh, hang on, hand me back the proposal, I’ve got an addendum ….. There. Her family also pays your family as much money as they can. Perfect, now it’s a good way to keep the women at home and richest people a class apart too! EH? EH?’

See, that took off. But I digress, that’s the real world**. I’m talking about the kind of slightly-a-bit-fictional world of fancying celebrities. I no longer find having a magnetic attraction to a public figure you know nothing about akin to an invasion of privacy. (Nor is it in any way equivalent to spunking over Megan Fox’s severely airbrushed tits/face in FHM. Lets just clear that up right now. I love Simon Amstell even when he has spots.) 

I’m never going to be in a room with Simon Amstell. People say my crush is silly because he’s gay. And!? Him being gay is not the only reason me and Simon Amstell being together is never going to happen. It’s not even the second or third reason. That I don’t know him and have never met him are also pretty solid grounds. That doesn’t pain me either. I have a ridiculous level of attraction to him, because the idea of us being actually together is such a surreal idea that I can be over the top and silly with it. In my head we get along famously and never have disagreements unless we’re discussing deep philosophical issues, which we do like to engage in occasionally over a glass of red on a Sunday night. It doesn’t matter that I don’t really know much about him at all, that his stage presence probably isn’t the real him at all, or that he may not like me back, or that he’s gay, and in a relationship. Hell, I like the gay thing. He’s my fictional perfect man. I’m just basing my fantasy in reality. It’s the ‘hot crush’ equivalent to reading Harry Potter when I was five and imagining the Great Hall at Hogwarts as my Grandma’s living room. Siobhan’s head Simon Amstell does not exist in real life. So yes, I do sound a little creepy, but it’s cool like, because I would never confuse Siobhan’s head Simon Amstell with the real one. With Siobhan’s head Simon, we play scrabble, say lovely sexy things and make each other origami sea-creatures (I make a mean narwhal). But if I met him in real life I probably wouldn’t hopelessly vie for his affections. I can’t even do origami. Instead I would probably tell him that while I find him hilarious and fantastic, much as I tried to like it, I really didn’t find Grandma’s House engaging at all. In fact I thought it was a bit egotistical. Sometimes love is cruel.

I used to think that fancying celebrities was ridiculous and a bit insane, given that it’s not a two way thing. But having my own obsession has taught me that it's actually brilliant. You never find out their flaws, no-one’s off limits, and as long as you don’t get weird on their twitter feed, hang around where they live or send their other halves hate mail, no one gets hurt! Edward Cullen, Kylie Minogue, David Cameron … Whoever floats your boat, they’re yours!

*Simon Amstell, if you are by some freak chance reading this, we should definitely have a drink some time. In fact no, let’s not. I don’t want you to burst my bubble.

**Not the completely historically inaccurate world of my head.