Agent Provocateur Undercover
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16th September 2005
When I worked at Private Eye magazine in the early 1990s, my colleague Hilary used to say to me regarding matters of the heart, "When you get to my age, Rowan, nothing surprises you any more - NOTHING."
And as I moved through various love affairs and observed the amorous follies of others I came to know exactly what she meant. Appearances can be fiendishly deceptive - particularly when it comes to sex.
When I worked at Private Eye magazine in the early 1990s, my colleague Hilary used to say to me regarding matters of the heart, "When you get to my age, Rowan, nothing surprises you any more - NOTHING."
And as I moved through various love affairs and observed the amorous follies of others I came to know exactly what she meant. Appearances can be fiendishly deceptive - particularly when it comes to sex.
The hot couple in the pages of OK! Are inevitably celibate cult members, while the middle-aged headmaster and his librarian wife are invariably Surrey's leading swingers. So I wasn't shocked to learn that the twentieth century's ultimate sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe, did not experience an orgasm until she was in her thirties, and only then after her shrink told her how to. Well, why do you think they charge so much per hour? In transcripts of tapes Monroe made for her psychiatrist shortly before her death she blesses him for telling "me how to stimulate myself," and goes on to say, "By now I've had lots of orgasms." Monroe also told her shrink, "Speaking of Oscars, I would win overwhelmingly if the Academy gave an Oscar for faking orgasms." Which does makes you think they should widen the categories. Perhaps a retrospective award could be given to erotic author Anais Nin who, despite being internationally lauded for her suggestive prose, did not have an orgasm until her forties when a visit to a brothel yielded suitable instruction.
I trust customers of Agent Provocateur rarely suffer such setbacks. If AP undies don't help you on your way to the big O, nothing will. But the big question is, are you more likely to reach ecstasy in a pair of sensational, full-gusseted knickers or while sporting an itsy-bitsy thong? I only ask because new research reveals that the sale of g-strings across Britain in 2005 is down 20% on last year. The apparent reason is that women are recoiling from the string's more chav-tastic connotations as the garment is increasingly associated with the kind of girl who gets arrested in Faliraki. But I would have thought that's the whole big, damn, slutty point about thongs: they have an up-for-it quality that can inflame lust in the mildest-mannered men. True, I don't think they look very classy projecting from a pair of hipster jeans like a cheese-wire. But a beautifully-cut, lace-edged thong with a little substance to its tantalising construct looks electrifying when revealed, say, under a demure grey pencil-skirt. It also has the virtue of being easily pushed aside when you're backed up against a doorway, or a tree, or a car bonnet, and a surge of desire demands urgent fulfilment.
Talking of g-strings, the sexiest and filthiest read of the Indian summer is Henry Sutton's newly published collection of short stories, Thong Nation. The tales are loosely linked by four different brands of string, including, as you might have anticipated, one from Agent Provocateur. The reader is whisked through a host of scurrilous scenarios, including an oversexed shop girl in Church's who fucks her customers in the store room - but only if the shoes are a perfect fit - and a large-arsed, bored housewife who gets a lesson in grunting while practicing her serve with a tennis pro. It's the sort of book that simultaneously inspires moisture and hilarity. And it's published by the wonderfully subversive publisher Serpents Tail who are cornering the British market in sexually explicit fiction. May I also recommend One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (Italian schoolgirl has sexual awakening with just about everybody) and the about-to-be published Taming the Beast (different schoolgirl starts obsessive and transgressive relationship with English teacher). Saucy reads for sultry days.
Of course those sultry days seemed rare if, like me, you were in Blighty for the summer. Nevertheless, there were considerable compensations. Edinburgh is the sexiest city in Europe while the Festival runs its course, full of overexcited actors, punters and writers, all looking for a clinch down one of the numerous dark alleyways. But for my money London's the place to be, and it'll take more than a few terrorists to keep me away. I like to spy on the batty octogenarian in Regents Park who changes into her bikini in the rose bushes as long as the temperature's somewhere above freezing. And for anyone set on an erotic odyssey, the Wallace Collection and Victoria & Albert Museum are sound bets for visual stimulation. I was suitably touched by both the suggestive, wild landscapes of the Wallace Collection's Salvator Rosa exhibition (open til the 18th Sep) and the sensational Touch Me exhibition at the V&A. This last included a "Lap Juicer" (a naughty chair designed to squeeze oranges while a dancer gyrates her butt above it) and "Painstation", a desktop video game which "punishes faults with electric shocks, whiplashes and heatwaves on the left hand." Now that's what I call masochism. A row of tiles that formed part of one display carried a quotation in Braille by the poet Rupert Brooke: "In every touch more intimate meanings hide." No one who has ever brushed their hand down a pair of silk AP knickers can doubt that.
I trust customers of Agent Provocateur rarely suffer such setbacks. If AP undies don't help you on your way to the big O, nothing will. But the big question is, are you more likely to reach ecstasy in a pair of sensational, full-gusseted knickers or while sporting an itsy-bitsy thong? I only ask because new research reveals that the sale of g-strings across Britain in 2005 is down 20% on last year. The apparent reason is that women are recoiling from the string's more chav-tastic connotations as the garment is increasingly associated with the kind of girl who gets arrested in Faliraki. But I would have thought that's the whole big, damn, slutty point about thongs: they have an up-for-it quality that can inflame lust in the mildest-mannered men. True, I don't think they look very classy projecting from a pair of hipster jeans like a cheese-wire. But a beautifully-cut, lace-edged thong with a little substance to its tantalising construct looks electrifying when revealed, say, under a demure grey pencil-skirt. It also has the virtue of being easily pushed aside when you're backed up against a doorway, or a tree, or a car bonnet, and a surge of desire demands urgent fulfilment.
Talking of g-strings, the sexiest and filthiest read of the Indian summer is Henry Sutton's newly published collection of short stories, Thong Nation. The tales are loosely linked by four different brands of string, including, as you might have anticipated, one from Agent Provocateur. The reader is whisked through a host of scurrilous scenarios, including an oversexed shop girl in Church's who fucks her customers in the store room - but only if the shoes are a perfect fit - and a large-arsed, bored housewife who gets a lesson in grunting while practicing her serve with a tennis pro. It's the sort of book that simultaneously inspires moisture and hilarity. And it's published by the wonderfully subversive publisher Serpents Tail who are cornering the British market in sexually explicit fiction. May I also recommend One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (Italian schoolgirl has sexual awakening with just about everybody) and the about-to-be published Taming the Beast (different schoolgirl starts obsessive and transgressive relationship with English teacher). Saucy reads for sultry days.
Of course those sultry days seemed rare if, like me, you were in Blighty for the summer. Nevertheless, there were considerable compensations. Edinburgh is the sexiest city in Europe while the Festival runs its course, full of overexcited actors, punters and writers, all looking for a clinch down one of the numerous dark alleyways. But for my money London's the place to be, and it'll take more than a few terrorists to keep me away. I like to spy on the batty octogenarian in Regents Park who changes into her bikini in the rose bushes as long as the temperature's somewhere above freezing. And for anyone set on an erotic odyssey, the Wallace Collection and Victoria & Albert Museum are sound bets for visual stimulation. I was suitably touched by both the suggestive, wild landscapes of the Wallace Collection's Salvator Rosa exhibition (open til the 18th Sep) and the sensational Touch Me exhibition at the V&A. This last included a "Lap Juicer" (a naughty chair designed to squeeze oranges while a dancer gyrates her butt above it) and "Painstation", a desktop video game which "punishes faults with electric shocks, whiplashes and heatwaves on the left hand." Now that's what I call masochism. A row of tiles that formed part of one display carried a quotation in Braille by the poet Rupert Brooke: "In every touch more intimate meanings hide." No one who has ever brushed their hand down a pair of silk AP knickers can doubt that.
