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Cult hero No 40: Ilie Nastase

This article appeared as part of a year-long weekly series by the author in the Sunday Herald

Sir Jackie Stewart famously compared women to motor cars, but in his autobiography Ilie Nastase, Romania’s most famous sportsman, lit upon an even less romantic analogy when he likened them to showers. In his pomp Nastase tended to have a different girl every day, see. He later estimated his total number of showers at around the 9,000 mark, on hearing which his current and third wife, Amalia – whom he met at a Sting concert – declared she was happy to have conquered such a clean man.

In the 1970s women literally threw themselves at Nastase, so you can decide for yourself whether to deplore his utilitarian approach to sex, but there were other reasons for his dividing opinion. For this long-limbed, raven-haired tennis champ’s illustrious playing career was blighted by fines and disqualifications brought on his head by an inability to control his temper and a fondness for giving umpires the bird. He was, however, a good-natured sort off-court by all accounts – all the sex probably saw to that – and ever the entertainer, amusing spectators with mimicry and horseplay. And the ‘Bucharest Buffoon’ also happened to be one of the most naturally gifted players in tennis history – lightning quick, a masterful shot-maker, devastating from the baseline but equally adept at serve-and-volley.

Nastase was World No 1 for a year in 1973-74 and in a career spanning almost two decades won over 100 pro titles, including seven Grand Slams (albeit five of those were in doubles, either with Jimmy Connors or with countryman Ion Tiriac). He beat Arthur Ashe in five sets to win the US Open in 1972, won the French Open the following year without dropping a set and won the end-ofseason Masters Cup four times. After his retirement in 1985, Nastase wrote two novels and made an unsuccessful run for mayor of Bucharest. Earlier this year he followed in the footsteps of his doppleganger, that other great “swordsman” Gerard Depardieu, when the French made him a Knight of the Legion d’honneur.


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The pardoning of Jack Johnson

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

Kansas Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins’ timing really couldn’t have been any worse when, in August, she called on a “great white hope” to emerge from Republican ranks and challenge Barack Obama. She hadn’t been aware, she subsequently claimed, of the origins of a phrase that was first used by the writer Jack London in 1908 willing the restoration of white ascendancy after Jack Johnson had had the audacity to become the first black heavyweight champion of the world. Her gaffe was made all the worse, though, for the fact she’d not long before voted in favour of a resolution calling for Johnson – who was sent to prison on somewhat equivocal charges after putting several “great white hopes” in the shade – to be given a presidential pardon.

Spurred on by the campaigning of film-maker Ken Burns, whose 2005 documentary Unforgiveable Blackness charts the boxer’s life, and the sponsorship of Senator John McCain, a boxing aficionado, that end now looks to be within reach, Senate and Congress both having given their seal of approval. Fevered debate in cyberspace in the wake of President Obama’s silence on the matter to date, coupled with reactions to Jenkins’ blunder, have served as a reminder, however, of just how deeply Johnson’s career divided America, and how issues of race continue to map onto boxing to this day.

By the time London – a man of the political left – was citing the white man’s “30 centuries of traditions … all the supreme efforts, the inventions and the conquests” as evidence of his racial supremacy, Johnson, the son of freed Texan slaves, had won dozens of fights against both black and white opponents. Already World Coloured Heavyweight Champion, in 1908 he took the belt that mattered, from Canada’s Tommy Burns. Revelling in his status as America’s first black superstar, he then laid waste to several challengers before James J Jeffries, who’d refused to fight Johnson and retired undefeated in 1904, agreed to a comeback “for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”

When they eventually fought, in Reno, Nevada, in 1910, the ringside band played a song called “all coons look alike to me” and an all-white crowd chanted “kill the nigger.” But Johnson, faster, stronger and smarter than his opponent, knocked him down twice before Jeffries’ minders called time, after 15 rounds, in order to avoid a knock-out. His title now undisputed, Johnson walked off with $225,000 and black America erupted in spontaneous rejoicing. In more than 50 cities, however, there were riots, as the celebrations drew a violent response from white mobs. At least 20 men were killed in what was the most widespread racial turbulence the US would see until after the 1968 assassination of Dr Martin Luther King.

The day after the fight the Los Angeles Times intoned: “A word to the Black Man… No man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of your victor at Reno.” Johnson, meanwhile, refused to condemn his fellow blacks for having “provoked” whites and was not forgiven: two years later he became the first person to be prosecuted under the Mann Act, which forbade the transportation of women across state lines “for immoral purposes” and was designed to stop the “white slave” trade in prostitutes. The charge involved a young white prostitute, Lucille Cameron, whom Johnson subsequently married. She refused to co-operate and the case fell apart, but another prostitute with whom he’d been involved four years previously testified against him and the authorities got their man: he was sentenced to a year and a day in jail but chose to flee, first to Europe and then to Mexico, before eventually surrendering seven years later and serving 10 months.

While in exile Johnson lost his title to Jess Willard in Havana after being knocked out in the 26th round. He tried to resurrect his fighting career on his release from jail but Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion from 1919 until 1926, refused to fight him, and in 1928 he retired, aged 50, having lost seven of his last nine bouts but with an overall record of 91-14-12. In 1946, he died in a car crash after racing away from a diner in which he’d been refused service.

The recent resolution on Capitol Hill stated that “the racially motivated conviction in 1913… unduly tarnished his [Johnson’s] reputation.” Others, though, deny this version of events. In April the Chicago Daily Observer noted that Johnson certainly violated the spirit, if not the letter of the law, “as he openly consorted with prostitutes” and even bankrolled a brothel madam.

Like Muhammad Ali half a century later, Johnson made boxing an act of defiance and he was loved and hated for it in equal measure. He refused to know his place in white man’s America, lived his life as he saw fit and courted controversy by marrying three white women. The first, a Brooklyn socialite named Etta Duryea, he beat up several times. The second, Cameron, he wed less than three months after Duryea’s suicide. Johnson’s career unfolded against the backdrop of religious revival in America but there are few yardsticks by which he could be judged a saint.

Some have argued that a pardon in this context would amount to an empty gesture and that it is too late to do “the right thing.” Others go further, resenting the impugnation of the whole of white society at the time and pointing to Bernard Hopkins’ outburst before he fought Joe Calzaghe in 2007 (“I would never let a white boy beat me… I would never lose to a white person”) as evidence that boxing is a sport in which race seems still to count and in which racism cuts in various directions.

Johnson wrote in his autobiography that he had been determined to “act as if prejudice does not exist.” Obama has been clear that it did, and does. Whether that’s enough for him to see a pardon as meaningful remains to be seen.


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Cult hero No 38: Hugh Dallas

This article appeared as part of a year-long weekly series by the author in the Sunday Herald

Was there ever a more beloved arbiter, a more respected peacemaker, a more venerable man in polyester black, a more just custodian of the cards in all of Scottish life? Hugh Dallas united Old Firm supporters, soothed their hatreds and made placid bilateralists of the most rabid partisans.

Dallas, born in a schoolbook depository where as a child he nearly talked Lee Harvey Oswald out of a red-card offence, first brought his tranquil presence to bear in an Old Firm match at Ibrox in 1995. With the likes of Andy Goram, Pierre van Hooijdonk and Paul Gascoigne all playing, it was not a contest many considered governable. But Shug of the Beatitudes, for such was his handle, held tight to his peawhistle and kept proceedings in order, dispensing only nine yellow cards.

However, it was in a championship-deciding fixture at Parkhead in 1999 that Dallas demonstrated the full scope of his equability. With Rangers 1-0 in front, a flare-up in which Stephane Mahe responded angrily to being fouled by Rangers’ Neil McCann resulted in the Celtic man being sent off. Mahe, recognising the referee’s inherent rectitude, apologised for his effrontery, and one Celtic supporter manifested his esteem for the offical with a cash donation. Unfortunately, his proferred coin nearly took Dallas’s eye out. But if the target was put in fear of his own safety, he did not show it: moments later he gave Rangers a penalty when Tony Vidmar decided he didn’t like the look on Vidar Riseth’s face and went down in the box.

In 2002, Shug was Scotland’sole representative at the World Cup in Japan and South Korea. After receiving a ticker-tape sendoff at Hampden, however, he was to alienate his American fans by declining to award the USA a penalty when Germany’s Torsten Frings handled the ball on the line. Dallas was later awarded an MBE for his services to Scottish football and is now generally regarded as an avuncular Tony Benn-type figure.


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Two decades of house and techno

A version of this article appeared in The Herald Magazine

IT will doubtless be to the indissoluble chagrin of old hippies and old punks, in whose daydreams still lurk fragments of counter-cultural zeal or situationist argot, that they have been outdone and outlasted by a youth movement that’s as disinterested in political posturing as it is in guitars and leather.

Dance music – electronic dance music, consisting primarily of programmed, repetitive beats, lest you presume we’re talking about sarabandes and minuets – accounts for the most enduring youth phenomenon the UK has ever seen. Prone to constant self-renewal and reinvention and despite the best efforts of rock critics at proclaiming it dead every 18 months or so since about 1992, it is also the most diverse.

Bubbling up from the fag-end of the disco era in the US, “house” music – so-named after the Warehouse club in Chicago – came spluttering and cranking out of America’s north-eastern cities in the mid-1980s. Chicago DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy effectively played about with the raw materials of sound: experimenting with computer technology and already-vintage drum machines, they looped samples and collaged existing records, then laid down the results on new tracks or live in clubs. In Detroit, their contemporaries evolved the sparser, more alien and futuristic sound that would become known as techno.

At the legendary gay New York club the Paradise Garage, DJs fused these novel sounds with their own extended and distended mixes of funk and disco records. It was frenetic, euphoric underground music that found a captive audience, thanks in large part to a new club drug of choice: Ecstasy. Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, the “love drug”, induced overwhelming sensations of well-being and empathy and made it just about possible to dance all night.

Received wisdom has it that this potent, heady mix only breached the consciousness of young Britons after a few hundred bohemian drop-outs and itinerant suburban south Londoners experienced it in the bars and clubs of Ibiza – which had long been a haven for hippie jetsetters – in the summer of 1987. In truth, house records were being heard in clubs in places as far north of London as Scotland well before the Balearic-inspired scene began spawning its own records and its first distinctively British sub-genre, dubbed “acid house”.

At any rate, 1989 was the year dance music made Britain sit up and take note, the year it jumped from the underground into the charts, the newspapers and even the countryside. Twenty years ago, parliament and the tabloids were in the grip of consternation about illicit all-night “raves” at which young people were taking a new drug whose effects their moral guardians were smart enough to perceive were not those of alcohol. In England, rave entrepreneurs and the police were locked in a contretemps – having had events in disused inner-city warehouses busted, the former were staging huge parties on farms and greenfield sites around Oxfordshire. Alarm in the press – one scare story in the Sun reported that youngsters were “so drugged up they ripped the heads off pigeons” – gave the whole scene the oxygen of publicity and numerous events attracted upwards of 15,000 people. At one of them, Scottish proto-ravers the KLF demanded their fee of £1000 in Scottish pound notes, scribbled “we love you children” on them and showered them on the crowd. But by the following summer the government had passed new legislation introducing harsher penalties on organisers.

In Scotland, there was little of the same tension at play, at least according to Ricky Magowan, a promoter whose company Streetrave – now Colours, the biggest organiser of dance events north of the border – was also putting on its first parties in ’89. “We didn’t really do anything to that level that was going on in England so we didn’t get the same flak for it – we were in established buildings and had health and safety certificates,” he says. “When we started, it was about us as clubbers creating a new scene. We were already running buses to different places like the Hacienda in Manchester, so we thought ‘why not start something for ourselves?'”.

“There was already a scene that existed with stuff like the soul all-dayers, but then this new generation came through in 1988 and 1989 and it became something totally new and different. We started doing a monthly night at the Ayr Pavilion, which got 1300 people every month and things just grew from there.”

Another former promoter, Andy Unger, who still DJs in Glasgow, says the years 1989-1992 represent something a “golden age”. “There was this whole package,” he remembers. “You didn’t need the drugs because the music was so good, but they were there for whoever wanted them. I think it was similar to what happened with punk rock but on a much bigger scale. Dance music felt like a revolution at the time, it was very inclusive and it triggered an enormous reaction in people. It was the last form of music that was entirely unlike anything else, and it inspired a lot of people to do something for themselves, like produce their own records or DJ or run a club night.”

Various commentators and social historians have argued that dance music in the UK both tapped into the individualism being championed by the Tory government and catered to a deeper need for communal experiences. Dance music and Ecstasy are variously credited with uniting black and white, straight and gay, and even pacifying football hooligans. A lot of vocal dance records rhapsodise along preposterously utopian lines, but notwithstanding anti-capitalist techno-hippies’ attempts at using ear-blisteringly awful hardcore techno to “hack the consciousness interface”, for the most part it’s been hedonism first, second and third on the agenda.

But just as the naive, loved-up idealism of dance music’s pioneers became diluted by gangsterism, the drug economy and rampant commercialism, throughout the 1990s the scene itself splintered and forked into scores of specialist sub-genres and sects. Some clubs stuck to the basic diet of house and techno, others branched off into hard dance and trance, and the burgeoning rave and hardcore scenes snowballed – ever-harder, ever-faster – with a logic of their own. With the emergence of jungle, breakbeat and drum n bass, all rooted in London’s long-standing black soul and funk subcultures, there was genuine innovation – this was music which sounded to mid-1990s ears every bit as radical and spell-binding as had Chicago house a decade before, and, in turn, it would go on to spawn sunnier subgenres like speed garage and two-step, as well as the more menacing grime. But by about 1995, rave had changed from being breezy, silly and fun into something aggressive, intoxicated and downright daft, due at least in part to people experimenting with more debilitating drugs – for some Ecstasy was no longer enough on its own; it had to be mixed with the likes of temazepam, cocaine, speed and ketamine, and with strong drink.

Ian Kinghorn, a 36-year-old Edinburgh-based artist, admits he was a “late starter” with dance music, but his experiences with Ecstasy – though fairly “melodramatic” – are not atypical. “I started going clubbing in 1999,” he says. “I went to mostly gay clubs that were playing trance and progressive house, but it was really Ecstasy that got me into it because I never really understood the music before that. When I took E everything made sense and sort of locked into place – I was converted almost overnight and after that it became almost a religious thing.

“I went through a sort of honeymoon period – you’re just in love with everybody and everything. I had suffered from depression before and I never knew that happiness like that was possible. For that time, in the club, I realised I loved who I was and because everyone was on the same wavelength it was a really beautiful, friendly atmosphere.”

Over a period of about two years, however, Kinghorn’s Ecstasy intake increased. He also started experimenting with cocaine and ketamine and while his weekend highs were “still worth it”, he began experiencing crippling mid-week comedowns. “The scene itself became a bit stale and predictable,” he says, “and I think I was trying to compensate for that, chasing that initial rush. There came a tipping point where it became too much and I just had to stop it altogether.”

Tales abound of Ecstasy users experiencing burnout – Kinghorn ultimately suffered a “sort of breakdown” – but for many more moderation militates against any real ill-effects. And for others the drug’s seemingly inbuilt provision of diminishing returns prompts them simply to realise good things don’t last forever. That which goes up comes down, and so it was with the superclub and superstar DJ phenomena that came crashing about the ears of the UK’s super-annuated dance music megaliths in the early years of this decade. Dance had forced the liberation of licensing hours up and down the country and become a part of the entertainment establishment, but large swathes of the population suddenly realised it just wasn’t worth paying £50 to stand in front of Judge Jules for five hours.

These are, perhaps, slightly saner times, and if you can drag yourself away from binge-drinking and fights in kebab shops- corollaries of what now passes for this country’s primary entertainment industry and by-products, in part, of dance culture’s all-night sensibilities – it is a comfort still to be able to sneak off to dark, underground spaces like Glasgow’s Sub Club and tune in to the universal language of house.

Daisuke Nakajima, a young Japanese journalist who spent four years in Glasgow reporting on Shunsuke Nakamura’s exploits at Celtic, knows the truth of this. Nakajima fell in love with dance music after seeing Underworld play in Tokyo in 2000, made most of his Scottish friends on visits to “the Subbie” and illustrates pointedly the music’s international, cross-cultural and cross-generational appeal. “Dance music brings people together,” he says. “To me it’s about friendship and being open-minded; it’s not about drink or drugs. In Japan no-one thinks of it as being American music or British music, either. It’s just truly global.”


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Down with sporting cheats

This article appeared in The Herald

Following Eduardo da Silva’s recent display of bare-faced simulation against Celtic last month, a friend told me he was thinking of giving up being a football supporter.

A Celtic fan based in England, he was, in fact, in the habit of attending the Emirates with some Arsenal-supporting friends and, even before their Croatian superstar’s coup de theatre, he’d been grooming a justifiable chip on his shoulder over the disparity in the size of the jackpot on offer contingent on which of the sides won that tie. Had Celtic got to the Champions League group stages they stood to rake in £12m if they were lucky; Arsenal will rack up at least £35m. The answer, said my friend sorrowfully, was to go and watch cricket instead. I can only imagine he hadn’t heard about all the sledging, ball-tampering and match-fixing.

The level playing-field we like to fantasise about in sport is akin to a brownfield site in a run-down part of town that’s about to be redeveloped as a call centre. The Corinthian spirit may yet exist but it’s a shy, shrivelled, elfin thing; it tends to stay at home, embarrassed by all the cheating it sees on television. Perhaps it was ever thus, but what is undeniable is that, as sport has become more saturated with finance, as its elites have grown more dominant and as the rewards on offer at the sharp end have grown, so the temptation to cheat has grown commensurately.

As the Renault scandal broke these past few days, the conclusion was unavoidable that the only reason it did so was because the whistleblower himself, Nelson Piquet Jr, wanted revenge after being given the heave-ho. As a result of Piquet deliberately crashing, his team-mate at the time, Fernando Alonso, was able to win a race he would otherwise have not. Under normal circumstances these things do not emerge at all, which is why when egregious cases do come to light, punishment from the relevant authorities must be swift, decisive and retributive.

Over the last decade or so, the scale of doping in cycling has emerged bit by bit. The signs now are that the sport has started to reform itself but so widespread and intractable was that form of cheating that the tipping point only really came when the whole thing threatened to become a PR bloodbath. Other sports may be yet to face such self-immolation; other forms of cheating we may not consider to be so heinous. There are degrees of cheating, but to what extent, if any, does the absence of prima facie pre-meditation mitigate against the seriousness of the crime?

Was the Spygate affair in NFL, where the New England Patriots were caught videotaping the New York Jets’ coaching signals – the sporting equivalent of espionage – a more reprehensible instance of foul play than Diego Maradona scoring past Peter Shilton with his hand? Was the “bloodgate” scandal in rugby less intolerable than the “Calciopoli” match-fixing debacle in Italian football?

What is certain is that, the more cheating occurs and the more it is plain to see – whether because whistle-blowing has become more profitable or because televisual evidence is more dependable than ever – the less we are inclined to trust sportsmen and women, umpires, coaches, clubs or directors of sport. The court of public opinion is a powerful chamber and if people perceive that they are being duped they will make themselves heard.

Instances of the opposite of cheating – magnanimous gestures of fair play such as Paolo Di Canio’s when, playing for West Ham United, he opted to catch the ball rather than score past the injured, and grounded, Everton goalkeeper Paul Gerrard – are so rare that we cherish the memory of them.

Equally, cheats go unforgiven. Eduardo’s reputation will remain tarred. When Aberdeen play Rangers, their supporters will remind Kyle Lafferty of how he contrived to have Charlie Mulgrew sent off at Ibrox last season.

When people cheat in exams or in relationships, or when governments defraud their citizens or banks their customers, our sense of fair play demands a reckoning. We may hope for one but we do not expect it.

Sport is different: it’s neither love nor war; it’s not supposed to be about the dictates of the market or winning at all costs. If it takes retribution, retribution, retribution to preserve what sport should be about, then so be it.


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Porn – what is it good for?

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

BASED on the evidence on offer in dentists’ waiting rooms, it seems to me there was a time in the 1990s when women’s magazines always contained articles about the frequency with which men think about sex.

Such information seems difficult to come by these days, the reason being, perhaps, that post-feminism, post-religion, and whatever else it is we’re post- these days, women themselves are allowed to think about sex all the time, too. More than that, they’re entitled to be at it (and, my old son, it had better be good. Or else).

But still, I often wonder whether us chaps are thinking any more or any less about sex than we used to. Every seven seconds it was at one time, I think. My feeling is that it must be more now; every four seconds, say, and sometimes even during the other seconds in between. For try as we might to ignore it, female sexuality confronts us everywhere: on the high street, in the background noise of advertising and pop videos, in the negligees and thigh-boots women go out in at night. Shame and modesty are old hat; Girl Power is rampant.

And then there is pornography. Yes, there is pornography. And the internet. From the beginning porn was a major driver of the worldwide web: one of the first industries online, it helped shape a consumerist model of it. Now there are some 450 million adult web pages out there, a vast ocean of naked flesh, gift-wrapped femininity, straightforward, kinky, perverse or just downright disturbing sex. And it’s all just there, always, at the click of a mouse.

Perhaps inevitably, pornography has also gained a foothold in mainstream culture. Soft pornographers like Hugh Hefner have long been part of the plutocracy in America; nowadays the world takes an interest in what Paris Hilton is doing, Hollywood churns out fluffy comedies about porn stars, and chat show hosts like Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross are rarely stuck for semi-ironic but still cool-with-it repartee about pornographic sex.

And the word, too, has started to drift in meaning: to label reality television or documentaries about the Nazis “pornographic” is to be derogatory about those things, but also betokens cultural acceptance of pornography itself.

Being cool about porn has, in fact, become almost an assertion of one’s lack of stuffiness. Any debate over its rights or wrongs tends to focus on whether the women who feature in it are empowered businesswoman or exploited victims; but it’s a debate many liberals shy away from. Put off, perhaps, by the thought of coming down on the side of both hardline feminists and the religious right, most tend to take the view that so long as children aren’t involved this is something that should be left to the dictates of the market. Some go further, though: Salman Rushdie has argued that a free and civilised society can be judged by its willingness to accept pornography.

But what of the users of porn? Men and boys in civilised societies have taken an interest in depictions of sex for at least two millennia, as the Victorians were rather shocked to discover when excavations of Pompeii were undertaken in the 1860s. But the Victorian attitude to pornography – that it should be forbidden to the masses – is distinctly at odds with our own; and neither the Romans nor the Victorians had to contend with hardcore.

Studies have revealed that a sizeable minority of children in the UK are now being exposed to the most “adult” material imaginable at a stage when they are only just discovering their own sexuality. Today’s adolescent has ease of access to the whole gamut of the polymorphous perverse. What does he take away from it? Do the myths peddled in pornography about female sexual availability influence how boys, and men, see women generally? Do we start assuming they’re wearing hardly any clothes because they want to attract our attention?

Pornographers, like advertisers, are smart: they know they must drip-feed stimulation. And so they tease and tantalise, but ultimately they give the hard sell, they show you everything, they frame it for maximum exposure, the pneumatic breasts, the flat stomach, the luminescent skin, the hairless crotch. There can be little doubt that women nowadays feel pressure to conform to certain ideas of anatomical correctness. Pornography, in its commodification and regimentation of such correctness, is unlikely to foster reasonable expectations among men of how women should look.

Psychologists and psychotherapists have all manner of theories about why it is boys take an interest in pornography and girls, generally speaking, don’t. In their book Raising Cain: Protecting The Emotional Life of Boys, Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon argue that objectifying sex comes easy to boys because from the moment they start getting erections they become aware of their physical hardware making its own demands.

Pornography, thereafter, offers the adolescent male release from the alienating experience of continually striving against his peers, provides a sphere in which he is in control, in which the object of his desire is eager to please and cannot pass judgement on his performance. Most young men will have experienced this as a “phase” on the way to more fulfilling sexual relations; but the more time is spent in this illusory world in which real women are kept at arm’s length, the more pornography acts as a fix.

In Pornified: How Porn Is Ruining Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Family the American writer Pamela Paul argues that the ubiquity of online pornography has created an epidemic of male addiction to the instant gratification of “adult entertainment.” Using interviews with “sex addicts” as her source material, she extrapolates the theory that young men start out curious about softer pornography but quickly become “desensitised” to such material. They then expand their menu of pornographic interests to the point where their habits make them neglectful of real-life partners or indeed less likely and less able to form relationships in the first place.

But as one of Paul’s critics, the author and “mating” columnist Amy Sohn pointed out when Pornified first came out in 2005, it would be unwise to deduce general trends from the stories of men being treated for sex addiction. “The real question,” she wrote in the New York Times, “is whether the ease of access afforded by the internet is changing American male sexuality for the worse, or simply appealing to male urges that predate the internet – and porn – entirely.”

In his 1966 essay On Pornography, Gore Vidal penned the now oft-repeated line about the only thing pornography causing being masturbation. By contrast, in 2004 anti-porn advocates stood before the US Senate and likened pornography to heroin; which is probably reason enough to steer clear of talking about porn “addiction” at all.

Oliver James, the clinical psychologist and author of Affluenza: How to be Successful and Stay Sane, says anyone who becomes addicted in any real sense to pornography is already likely to have other problems. “Boys who access pornography are much more likely to do so if they’re depressed or lonely or feeling inadequate,” he told me. “The great majority of boys will be curious at first but very quickly switch off. The same goes for men. Those who become addicted happen to become addicted to pornography, but they could easily have become addicted to something else.”

Besides “addictive isolation”, he says, pornography can encourage promiscuity. “The sort of teenager or young man who watches quite a lot of porn is often more likely to have multiple partners. He’s more likely to be sexually adventurous.” So pornography might actually help some men, um, get laid? “Well, it’s probable that it encourages them to play fast and loose and to imagine that all women are gagging for it. And they’ll be more likely to attempt sexual practices that they wouldn’t otherwise.

“But there again, there is a potential up-side of that. There’s a book by Brett Kahr called Sex and the Psyche, which is a study of the sexual fantasies of 20,000 Britons. It shows that there is a huge gap between people’s fantasy lives and what they actually do in practice. So, yes pornography may cause problems to do with addiction and the stereotyping of women, but it must also be said that it may lead to better sexual relationships in some cases.”

More openness between sexual partners is perhaps a desirable thing, but while consenting adults may rejoice in society becoming a bit more, well, Dutch, this does not address the as-yet unknown consequences of a generation becoming sexualised with the internet for company. In an investigation for the BBC earlier this year, the journalist Penny Marshall discovered that a growing number of girls in their teens and early 20s think nothing of posting naked or semi-naked pictures of themselves online, for “a bit of a laugh”. Their male peers are then seizing on these images and passing them around on their mobile phones.

Parents may well be concerned, but they are increasingly powerless to regulate the online activities of their clever-dick offspring. Arguments about freedom of expression and the rights-based society seem all-persuasive, but perhaps we forget about the rights of young people to grow up without feeling pressurised to conform to a pornographic yardstick; or indeed the rights, as Paul has put it, “of people who don’t want pornography shoved in their face everywhere they turn.”

A feminist conceit Paul repeats is that women cannot enjoy pornography. Anti-porn campaigners in the 1970s, including Andrea Dworkin and John Stoltenberg, said it was all about hating women and linked it to rape (not on any evidential basis, mind: more that, uh, they had a hunch about it), but Dworkin subsequently lost credibility for her crusade when she extended her argument from pornography to all male-female sexual intercourse.

Nowadays there are those, like Paul, who claim that female enjoyment of porn can only ever be a performance for the benefit of men, and others who insist that it offers modern women an avenue in which to explore the innumerable facets of their sexual identities. Meanwhile, feminists on the whole tend not to have such a problem with pornography when it’s written down (by women) and given a bit of literary polish, as in Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M, a best-selling account of the author’s best efforts at shagging her way around Paris and, for the most part, enjoying it.

Simultaneously a new wave of female stars – from the risqué Pussycat Dolls, to the queen of burlesque, Dita von Teese, to Sasha Grey, the porn “actress” who stars in Steven Soderbergh’s new film about a sex escort, The Girlfriend Experience – are busy hawking a narrative all about pushing boundaries and pioneering female sexual freedom. Grey has said: “I am a woman who strongly believes in what she does – it is time that our society comes to grips with the fact that normal people, women especially, enjoy perverse sex.”

This is where we are at now. One no longer has to look at pornography to find the pornographic in our culture. And in a sense online pornography and what it may or not be doing to men is inseparable from a more general depersonalisation of our interest in sex. Grey, like Rushdie, clearly believes in a free society; but free societies must have the moral conviction to protect those things they cherish most, including modesty and innocence. The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton has written that sexual shame arises not, as moral shame arises, “by the thought that you are being judged as a self, a free being,” but rather that you are being “judged as a body, a mechanism, an object.”

For better or worse, sexual shame has been abolished; the genie is out of the bottle. And yet we must be clear that it would a catastrophic stain on liberalism if the realm of pornographic fantasy were henceforth to be allowed to dictate sexual norms.
In our state of shamelessness perhaps it will become easier for fathers to talk to their sons about women and sex – whether or not young men come away from watching pornography feeling hateful of women, hateful of themselves, recklessly lustful, perturbed, unperturbed or unaffected may well depend on what other influences are at play in their lives.

A small minority of them may come to ruin using it. At the other end of the commercial equation some women are victims pure and simple. But, in another sense, pornography is equally degrading to us all as a species. Oliver James says of hardcore pornography: “It is a complete bore. It’s a tedious succession of bits of meat colliding.” More than that, perhaps, it enjoins us to discount the differences between ourselves and the other animals. By observing the machinae animatae, the human animal, at such close quarters, we disavow the duality of body and soul; we judge others and come to be judged as mechanisms. And ultimately we risk feeling somehow less human.

Pornography’s champions point to the fact that “obscene images” were outlawed in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Being afraid to challenge the smug consensus that porn is a mere benign indulgence is unlikely, however, to benefit our overall sense of freedom or well-being.


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Cult hero No 29: Robert Millar

This article appeared in a year-long weekly series by the author in the Sunday Herald

Great British cyclists tend to come along with all the regularity of flu epidemics. And as the podium at this year’s Tour de France dangled the promise of sporting immortality under the nose of an inspired Bradley Wiggins over the last week, it seemed apt to remember that it is now 25 years, almost to the day, that a taciturn yet charismatic young Glaswegian was crowned King of the Mountains and gained fourth in the overall classification, an achievement never bettered by a British rider.

Robert Millar was a oneoff: a lad born in the Gorbals who devoted himself to a somewhat alien sport, a prodigious talent who dripped native sarcasm. Millar moved to France at the age of 21 and started riding for the Peugeot team. In his first Tour, in 1983, he won the Pyrenean stage from Pau to Luchon and finished 14th overall, a prelude to his greatest achievement in the sport a year later. He would finish in the top 20 in six Tours, finished second twice in the Vuelta a Espana and once in the Giro d’Italia. He also won the Dauphine Libere in 1990.

His descent from such pinnacles was to be rocky, however. In 1992, a drug test revealed abnormally high testosterone levels in Millar’s body. He dismissed the result, seeming to suggest his vegetarianism had something to do with it, and got back on his bike. But in 1995 he left his family and, when his team went bust, retired from cycling, resurfacing briefly as British national road coach the following year but thereafter becoming ever-more reclusive.

In 2000, a tabloid tracked him down and ran a report claiming he’d had a sex change; two years later he turned up at the Commonwealth Games very much his old self, but sightings of this strangest of birds have since been rare. When the journalist Richard Moore tracked him down by e-mail for his 2007 book In Search of Robert Millar, his subject complained of the “morbid attitude to privacy in this country”. Millar’s King of the Mountains jersey can be seen hanging in Billy Bilsland’s cycle shop in Glasgow’s Saltmarket.


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Cult hero No 28: Ronald Ross

IN the beginning there were only sticks and balls. And God decreed the sticks were called camans and said let there be shinty, but not on the sabbath. But lo, Kingussie were rubbish with their camans, being a place of but a few score men, and beasts like to be rustled by knaves and anyway it looked like a bit of a rough game. But then Ian Ross, he of the Rosses of that place, made an oath to instruct the young men in being fleet of foot and hand so that other men would look upon them when they held their camans and be afraid. And this Ross took to him a wife, Mrs Ross, and they did bring forth a son, Ronald, some time in the 1970s, ’75 to be precise.

And when Ronald, son of Ian, came to be a man, Kingussie had by then become feared and were making light work of Fort William and Oban and Newtonmore and the other team that plays shinty. But what they lacked was a man hewn of the substance of his maker, like Eric Cantona, and so Ronald spake forth and said let me show you all how it’s done, but probably in Gaelic.

And Ronald took his caman and scored more goals by himself for Kingussie than the other teams could score among them, and all who beheld him said he was the Ronaldo of the Glens. And he did it with a smile around his face, and was virtuous and never took strong drink before games and was an example even to the kiddies, who saw that he valued health and safety by wearing a helmet and did follow suit sharpish.

And then after many years of scoring goals at shinty, Ross did reach his 1000th goal, equalling the feats of the great Romario, but in fact bettering them because some of Romario’s goals were in pub games. And Hugh Dan McLennan, verily the Moses of shinty, did call it a staggering achievement for Scotland, even though shinty does not exist outside of Scotland. And Alex Salmond threatened to put it on television instead of the cricket. But Ross did shrug and put his helmet on and score some more goals.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald


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An interview with Blowers

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

In interviews with sportsmen and women, the talk is often incidental: we’re interested more in what it tells us about battles won or lost, opponents better or bested, than the talk itself. In the case of Henry Blofeld, talking is the sport. And few are better at it than he.

Regarded variously as a “national institution” and “the voice of English cricket”, Blowers, who turns 70 in September, has been talking since 1972, the year he joined Test Match Special from The Guardian. He has talked a lot, too much for some of the cloddish contrarians who’ve written in to the BBC over the years; but for the remainder of his auditors there is good news: “I shall never retire,” he says. “I may be incapacitated and therefore have to stop working, I don’t know, but I shall never deliberately retire. Work is more fun than fun.”

So the voice endureth, though it be of a vanishing timbre, plummier than an orchard garden, delectably upper class. Blofeld’s anecdotes swarm with swashbuckling references to wonderful chaps and extraordinary matches. He is painstakingly polite, his humour gentle and Wodehousian, his delivery rat-a-tat-tat, all so much so that his on-air gaffes – “Ryan Stringfellow” for Ryan Sidebottom, “Monty Python” for Monty Panesar and “Yasser Arafat” for Pakistan’s Yasir Hamid – are both in-keeping and somehow explicable.

In further mitigation, 400-odd Test matches is a lot of talking hours; it is a great many innings, not to mention rain delays, to bring to life. But while Test Match Special remains a big part of Blofeld’s life, – “I enjoy it immensely” – like his old friend and former colleague, the late Brian Johnston, he has been able to develop his interest in talking away from cricket. “My main life is on the stage now,” says the man who, it should be recalled, grew up with Noel Coward as a family friend. His one-man show, An Evening With Blowers, has now been staged some 130 times. Last month he performed it in front of 2,500 people at the Royal Albert Hall, and in August he will bring it to the Edinburgh Fringe.

“There’s hardly anything about cricket in it at all,” he says. “It’s all about people I’ve met and people I’ve known.” His life is “good value”. Besides Coward, the people he has known include the actor Tom Courtenay, Ian Fleming (the friend of his father’s who borrowed the family name for James Bond’s arch-enemy), Johnston and the other mainstays of Test Match Special, and cricketing friends Keith Miller and Fred Trueman.

“It’s funny,” he says. “Even if say so myself. It makes people laugh.” Laughter there may be but Blofeld’s formative years weren’t all japes and mirth. His Edwardian mother he describes as “a cross between Queen Victoria and Attila the Hun.” “It was quite a tough upbringing actually, incredible when you compare it today. I never saw my parents practically until I was about 14. It was all nannies and boarding schools.”

At Eton, Blofeld scored a century for the Public Schools against the Combined Services at Lord’s but in 1957 had the misfortune of being run over by a bus. “I was incredibly lucky not to be a cabbage,” he says. “In fact, I was lucky to be alive.” He spent 28 days unconscious and his eye socket had to be reconstructed, and though he recovered well enough to play first-class cricket for Cambridge University, his career as a sportsman soon fizzled out.

A brief spell in the City followed an unspectacular academic career before a “lucky break” gave Blowers the chance to write his first cricket match report. The rest, besides the foregoing, is all in the show, although if his radio commentary is anything to go by there will also be plenty of tangents, encompassing everything from pigeons and cakes to ‘elf and safety. But there is also a postscript to Blofeld’s own cricketing career. England, on tour in India in 1963/64, were bedevilled by injury and illness when, on the eve of the Bombay Test, David Clark, the tour manager, took Blofeld to one side and told him he might have to play. “I would certainly play if needed,” replied Blowers, “but if I scored 50 or upwards in either innings I’d be damned if I would stand down for the Calcutta Test.”

In the event vice-captain Micky Stewart hauled himself out of his hospital bed and turned up at the cricket ground, thus denying Blofeld. Any regrets? “I was rather thankful, actually,” he admits. “I’d have made an idiot of myself probably.”

He may never have played for England, but neither did he sledge. “No, you never saw sledging when I played cricket,” he says. “But I’m the wrong generation. Different times produce different customs and I think cricketers probably respect each other less than they used to. Cricket, like any other sport, reflects society at the time. There’s far less discipline than there was 50 years ago.”

And so he is off on an agreeably arch critique of modern sport. Sledging, greed, bad manners: all are ripe for a clobbering. But for all he is unmistakeably of the old school, there is a telltale hint of relish too, an element of tilting at windmills in the best, most entertaining, traditions of Test Match Special.

“It’s no good people my age saying this or that didn’t happen when we were young,” he relents. “We lived in a very different world in the 1940s and 1950s.” What of Twenty20? “I like the Twenty20, I think it’s good fun. The danger is it mustn’t be allowed to swamp cricket. Players can’t learn the lovely cricket strokes and techniques through playing a game that is about bottom-handed slogging.”

Time’s up and we haven’t got round to talking about the Ashes, other than to establish that it’s all very evenly-matched. Not to worry. Twenty20 matches are over in a flash, but Test cricket brings you hours and hours of talk, pigeons and cakes inclusive.


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Football supporters have fewer rights than animals

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

What will it be like, watching football, say ten years from now? The Great and the Good like that sort of question, probably because they get to sound like Barack Obama without having to grapple with their own impotence, contradictions or doubts. A seat for everyone and everyone in his (or her) seat? Well, they’ve got that one nailed down already. Family-friendly atmospheres? Sure, we all like families. No sectarianism, racism or homophobia? Even better.

But wait. It’s important to get this straight, because it is surely obvious to all but fools that once social ills are eliminated from sport they’ll soon up and evaporate from the rest of life too. How are we to achieve this eradication of nastiness? The answer, of course, is via CCTV, dossiers of offensive chants and lip-synch technology; by herding, stifling, monitoring and ultimately spying on supporters. They tend to be quite big on civil liberties, the Great and the Good, but not when it comes to people attending football matches. And going on burgeoning evidence, fans around the UK are frequently beheld with a presumption of guilt.

For the most part they are suffered like naughty children, enjoined to turn up, sit down and shut up. One supposes that is progress from the days when they were caged in behind fences like animals, but just as in the aftermath of the G20 protests and the Damian Green affair people are wondering what exactly the police are for, it’s worth noting that patrons of what is one of the country’s biggest leisure industries still seem to have fewer rights than animals.

Last year, Cliff Auger took his two teenage sons to Stamford Bridge to watch their team, Chelsea, beat QPR in the FA Cup. When, after the game and walking away from the ground, 16-year-old James was bitten by a police dog, Cliff instinctively jumped in and kicked it, only to be set on by officers wearing riot gear, who broke several of his ribs and landed him in hospital for the next four days. He was then found guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to a protected animal and fined £500.

“There was a simple presumption on the part of the police that he was a trouble-maker because he was a football fan,” says Michael Brunskill of the Football Supporters’ Federation, a body which represents 142,000 registered members in England and Wales. “There was no acknowledgement that a father protecting his son is a natural instinct.”

Policing and stewarding in and around football grounds is one of the FSF’s main areas of concern and they receive complaints from fans about mistreatment every week. Stewards, says Michael, are often little different to bouncers: “An example of that is at Newcastle, who decided they would have a singing area but, of course, there was to be no standing. If you sing in church, you stand, it’s natural, but these guys go in and effectively man-handle people, which they’ve no more legal right to do than you or I.”

The FSF are also worried by the new ploy of locking supporters in pubs near stadia so that they miss the game. Section 27 of the Violence Crimes Reduction Act 2006 allows police to restrict the movements of individuals in this way but the law has been misapplied. In November a group of around 80 Stoke City fans were kept in a pub in Manchester for two hours, even though, according to the publican, their behaviour was exemplary.

I haven’t heard of the tactic being used in Scotland, but Steve Sutherland of Aberdeen’s Red Ultras supporters’ group, which was set up almost a decade ago with the aim of putting some colour and passion back into Scottish football, recognises the intent behind it. “We’ve had guys arrested for as little as handing out bags of confetti, or for standing up, or for not moving where they’re told. It’s the same for other groups like ourselves around the country. It’s amazing that something so innocent as wanting to support your team can become so complicated.

“The issue of standing is a bit of a sticking point. When Elton John played a concert at Pittodrie, the whole place was standing; but then there’s a football game in front of a half-empty stadium and all of a sudden it’s considered dangerous.”

Gone today are the swaying terraces of yesteryear, and with them much of the chorused banter and vitriol that formed part of the cultural experience of watching football. A generation has grown up for whom watching on television either at home or in the pub is the authentic ticket, and if you do go to the game, at whichever identikit stadium your club or their opponents were forced to erect to keep the bureaucrats happy, it’ll be made quite clear that if ever football was the people’s game it is no longer. Having forked out handsomely to watch men who care more about wresting ever-greater sums of money from the club’s chairman than they do about its traditions, you won’t know much about what your fellow fans are shouting or singing anyway because your ears will still be hurting from the Robbie Williams song they played when the teams ran out.

It’s not this uniformly drab in other parts of Europe, mind. When Spurs travelled to Wisla Krakow in the Uefa Cup recently, the Polish crowd mocked the atmosphere at White Hart Lane the week before by sitting behind their newspapers for the first 15 minutes of the game. And in Germany most grounds have designated safe standing areas where fans can jump around, sing and do all the other stuff that would have the authorities here spitting feathers and clutching for the health and safety manual. Not even Lord Taylor, let’s remember – in his report in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster – was able to argue that standing at football matches is inherently unsafe.

Football clubs and their governing associations in the UK have instead assisted in the stifling of passion and spontaneity at grounds. They have done so to placate sponsors and politicians and, perhaps, because like everyone else they must be seen to reinforce political correctness. “We’re not saying we want a return to the bad old days and there should be no place for racism or homophobia in football, but it’s arguably naive to think that football supporters can or should be made to behave like boy scouts,” says Brunskill. “How far do you go? Shouldn’t we have a debate, for example, before people who’ve verbally abused this or that player are named and shamed on Crimewatch?”

In Glasgow it is well known that chorused invective can be as an overture to real violence, but in most cases it is understood that going to the football involves a partial suspension of the rules of everyday life. Spurs fans, case in point, do not go about calling Arsenal supporters “HIV c***s” at work, do they? Tribalism, rivalries and petty antagonisms are all realities on which the game thrives. If they’re being honest the Old Firm clubs know this full well. And where there is no real social basis for a vicious footballing rivalry, one evolves anyway – how else do you explain Kilmarnock versus Ayr United?

I remember going as a boy to the football with my dad and hearing, for the first time, all manner of swearing and vitriolic abuse. It didn’t put me off going back, but nor did it set me on the path of recidivism. It told me, I think, that football could be a bit rough around the edges, that here was a man’s game. Is that really so bad?