"Hands on" – My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

 

[Erika Lust_Pic: Monica Figueras]

On a crisp but sunny early afternoon last month, I took myself to (lower) Sant Gervasi-Galvany, part of Barcelona city. I had volunteered to be interviewed for a documentary and before stepping through the door of the rented film studio on the building’s 8^th floor, a young woman asked me and two other participants to speak in a whisper and only when necessary.

 

Filming had already started. The hushed silence inside only added to the strangeness of the experience. I was there – only for research purposes of course – to answer questions about masturbation for what was apparently “a non-explicit video to celebrate self-pleasure.”

 

As we came in, we were asked to sign several legal documents, including one that confirmed we did not have Covid. I was given (here’s a piece of full disclosure) an envelope with 50 euros cash inside. Then we were taken by a different woman (who repeatedly told me how exciting it all was) across the bare, wide concrete studio floor and into a separate area.

 

A young man began to put makeup on the face of the next interviewee. I waited on a sofa with a guy with a North American accent. He was avoiding eye contact and only mumbled something unclear when I made a friendly observation, suggesting we were doing something very different today.

 

On the other side of the thin wall, I could hear talk from the middle of the room. I could make out some questions I’d probably be asked and from the woman answering I was also able to get a sense of what I might say. That helped.

 

I chatted to the curly-haired Argentine who painted and patted makeup over my nose, eyes, and cheeks. Paris wasn’t to his liking but Barcelona was, so far. Then I was up: it was my turn to sit on a stool in front of an especially bright light. A microphone was clipped onto my shirt and an assistant reminded me that I wasn’t obliged to try and answer any questions that I wasn't “comfortable with.”

 

The person asking the private questions and getting answers for her public, was the owner of the company. She uses Erika Lust as her business name and her website states she is “an award-winning filmmaker, producer, and writer [whose] focus on female pleasure, cinematic values and ethics in adult cinema have helped to change how pornography is consumed.”

 

I quickly found Erika to be a skilled interviewer partly because her questions were thoughtful and related specifically to the answers I gave. She was a good listener, that rare quality. The session seemed exploratory, not a dry run-through of a list or a pre-prepared line of interrogation. Instead, it quickly became a more open ended, fast-moving quarter of an hour. I was impressed, for example that she also wanted to know how I educated my son about sex and bodies. Her intelligence was obvious. I later discovered she was named as one of the BBC’s 100 Most Influential Women of The Year in 2019.

 

As her press kit states, “Erika defends the importance of having women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people behind the camera in all key positions.” Her all-female production crew – young, efficient, English-speaking, and keen – were working a 9-hour day.

 

Finally, Erika asked me to wish the viewers “Happy Masturbation Month”. I was more than okay to do that and hammed it up, waving my arms and added with a laugh, “Go for it!” On the way out, I nibbled on the free lunch provided then headed back outside to Carrer Arribau with the sense that I’d done something good. And surely so was everyone else there.

(The end result...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfppLfTomd0)

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2022.]

"Getting Orwell wrong" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo of  Julian Barnes © Alan Edwards]

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In the New York Review of Books not long ago, the well-known British author Julian Barnes ran his eye over some compilations of George Orwell’s work. Thinking about the school where a young Orwell was sent to live and learn, Barnes decides:

“You have to feel a little sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan Wilkes, or “Sambo” and “Flip” as they were known to their [students]. During the first decades of the twentieth century, they ran St. Cyprian’s, a preparatory school in Eastbourne, on the south coast of England. It was no worse than many other such establishments: the food was bad, the building underheated, physical punishment the norm… [The children’s] daily morale was dependent on whether a boy was in or out of favour with Flip.”

So Barnes would have us keep our sympathy for the pair of sadists who ran Orwell’s primary school like a hideous boot camp and he justifies their cruelty by maintaining that other schools were much the same. He expresses no feelings at all for the unfortunate people that Orwell spent time writing about in his essays ‘How The Poor Die’ or ‘The Spike’ (destitute tramps).

Just as importantly though, according to Barnes (as an adult), Orwell was a “moralist and a puritan”. But a single quick read of Orwell’s novel “1984” would show you that Orwell was well-versed in matters of the flesh and desire. The sexual relationship between the main character Winston and his lover Julia makes it abundantly clear that Orwell was no puritan. (Apparently, away from his writing Orwell was somewhat of a lech, whose methods of seduction occasionally included the sudden kiss and grope technique).

As far as Orwell being a moralist, of course Barnes is right. I have read all of Orwell’s non-fiction (much of it several times) and can see that there is hardly a sentence that does not have a moral aspect to it.

But Barnes is using the word moralist as uncomplimentary in his book review. The question must be whether someone’s morals are humanitarian and progressive morals, not whether they have any at all. An absence of morals or ethics is a vacuum of beliefs about how we treat each other.

He also correctly criticises Orwell for being wrong about the future, and Orwell was certainly mistaken about some aspects of the “1984 Orwellian world”. For example, the state is shrivelling rather than being the monster machine Orwell predicted. That function has been assumed by international capitalism rather than international government.

Julian Barnes also says that Orwell “is deeply untheoretical and wary of general conclusions that do not come from specific experiences.” But of course a thought is an experience and when it is repeated then built on it can become un-singular enough to produce theories.

I think Orwell was profoundly theoretical, in fact. He simply did an excellent job of disguising it because he did not trust in ideas alone. A good idea can quickly become a bad one when it bumps up against the physical world and human nature. Communism is an example of this, as he discovered.

I think it would be more accurate to say that Orwell was certainly suspicious of those who did not ’love the soil’ as he did. He had a sensible distaste of pretence, pomposity and the grandiose. In short, he disliked intellectuals as a species but used his intellect to point out his own shortcomings as well as those of others.

Barnes is wrong to say that Orwell was “deeply untheoretical” just because Orwell’s writing did not use obviously theoretical language. Underneath the plain phrases and continual drawing from his experiences, Orwell’s work was bursting with theories about the human condition.

It’s a pity that Barnes has seemingly missed that.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2017.]