SEX IN THE HEAD

"Jillian Ryan prides herself on being liberated, but she isn't really so," Gary Giles stated for the benefit of the dark-complexioned man seated in front of the steering wheel, as the bright green Citroën in which they, and their respective girlfriends were travelling, turned a wide bend and headed along a busy stretch of city road. "She insists on being made love to in a conventional manner, without my having recourse to certain ... post-atomic practices - the most obvious, if least distinguished of which, would entail some discomfiture in her rear."

Gerry Flynn chuckled politely as he briefly referred his attention to the driving-mirror in order to witness the embarrassment on the reflected face of the young woman in question, who, induced by the context of friendship to adopt a good-humoured response to her lover's unflattering allegation, surreptitiously laid into the latter's ribs with a hostile forefinger. "Is there any truth in that?" he wanted to know.

"None whatsoever!" Jillian had no hesitation in replying. "For I can't understand how being liberated should entail allowing some depraved man to pervert one!"

"That's only because you're an incorrigible bourgeois," Gary opined with a modicum of good humour, "and tend to mistake your partial liberation for a truly radical break with tradition, when, in actual fact, you insist on being treated like a woman."

"Don't listen to him!" she protested.

The young man in the driving seat chuckled good-naturedly but offered no comment, largely because traffic congestion was obliging him to keep most of his concentration on the road. But his girlfriend, a blue-eyed blonde in her mid-twenties, opined that unconventional sexual relationships were feasible, provided they didn't unduly impinge upon or entirely supplant the conventional variety! If a man wished to extend his lust into lesser channels from time to time, that was all right with her, provided he condomned up and was still interested in conventional inclinations on a fairly regular, if intermittent, basis.

"Unlike my subversive lover," Jillian declared, referring to the faintly-amused passenger beside her, "who prefers to impose unconventional inclinations upon one as often as possible."

"Not true!" Gary objected. "Though I don't see why I shouldn't occasionally oblige you to prove your claim to being a liberated female and not simply an old-fashioned, conservative heterosexual, as your behaviour or, at any rate, objections to my more calculated advances could lead one to suppose. Theory is all very well, but it should be supplemented by practice from time to time. Otherwise your claim is spurious."

"Not as far as I'm concerned!" Jillian defiantly retorted. "I'm as liberated as I want to be."

"Yeah, in other words only moderately liberated," her boyfriend observed, as the car turned down a narrow street and was brought to a halt by some negative traffic-lights.

"Of course, being liberated in that sense isn't just something which applies to women," Gerry Flynn remarked. "Getting free of nature or natural inclinations is a struggle for men as well as women, though the latter perhaps find the going tougher or choose not to recognize it. Most people, even in this relatively advanced age, are more often than not accomplices of nature rather than its transvaluated enemies. Though that wouldn't apply to your brother, Petra."

The blue-eyed blonde next to the driver conceded, with a brief nod, the relative truth of this statement and, largely for the benefit of their back-seat passengers, said: "Steve is a deeply religious man who never has sex with anyone, but exclusively indulges himself in pornography and sexual fantasies! He is one of the few people for whom sex is predominantly in the head - a radical intellectual."

Jillian pulled a wry face and cried: "I find it difficult to understand how anyone could be satisfied with that!"

"I'm not surprised," Gary commented on a subtly sarcastic note.

"After all, you're not exactly a deeply religious person yourself."

"Oh, enough of your sarcasm!" she protested, her wry face suddenly veering towards the grotesque. "You'll be telling me, next, that a liberated woman should be sexless."

"On the contrary, I know full-well how impossible that would be for a woman as beautiful and substantial as you," Gary countered. "Only an ugly woman would stand a decent chance of becoming sexless."

Gerry chuckled aloud as he drove away from the traffic lights and steered his car down an even narrower street beyond; for he was only too aware of the fact that Jillian Ryan was by no means beautiful but, if not exactly ugly, then simply attractive in a petty-bourgeois kind of way. And he knew, too, that Gary Giles prided himself on steering clear of genuinely beautiful women, of whom he had a spiritual distrust. He would never have taken a fancy, for instance, to Petra, who was quite beautiful, and this in spite of her being the sister of someone she regarded, rightly or wrongly, as deeply religious. There was indeed a commitment, in more than one sense, to post-atomic sexuality by the short-haired man on the back seat. Jillian was a suitably plain intellectual who could be depended upon, sooner or later, to live-up to Gary's quasi-homosexual expectations, even as regards the controversial subject to which they had already alluded. All he had to do was play on her vanity as a liberated female, and thus establish guidelines by which she could mould her destiny more closely to his own.

"By the way, what do you think about the campaign currently being waged by some female students at the university to obtain the right for women to receive SA's rather than BA's in the event of examination success?" Petra Power asked on an impulse.

"You mean Spinster of Arts degrees instead of Bachelor of Arts degrees for women?" Jillian endeavoured to establish, preparatory to a confirmatory nod from her fellow-female, an ironical chuckle from the driver, and a contemptuous grunt from her boyfriend. "What's so objectionable about that?" she demanded of the latter.

"It's absurdly ridiculous!" came his denigratory response. "We live, don't forget, in an age when women are increasingly being regarded as though they were male and accordingly treated as men's equals to the extent that, as effective supermen, they can't be discriminated against simply as women. A Spinster of Arts degree for someone who was effectively a superman would constitute a flagrant concession to atomic dualism by discriminating between the sexes! Now that they live largely in a man's world and behave increasingly like men, with intent to study academic subjects, they must be regarded as men and duly accorded Bachelor of Arts or, for that matter, Master of Arts degrees, in loyalty to the developing post-atomic nature of the times."

"So you don't approve of the sexist campaign currently being waged at the university," Petra deduced, half-turning towards Gary Giles.

"Indeed not!" he confirmed. "Those involved in it are simply reactionary ignoramuses who'll never succeed in getting their way - at any rate, not if sense is to prevail!"

"Yes, I guess I'll have to agree with you," said Jillian by way of affirming her allegiance to post-atomic criteria. Gary's views, she knew from experience, were usually correct, since founded on a solid base of logical argument. Even what he had said, the day before, about proletarian males generally preferring short zipper-jackets to overcoats or macks because they responded to supermasculine criteria under the artificial influence of urban conditioning, testified to a profound insight into sartorial distinctions based on class differences. To the extent that an overcoat or a mackintosh established a kind of skirt around the legs, it was a feminine mode of clothing, since this skirt-like impression connoted, as in a dress, with the female sex organ, considered as a tubular depth. Not so the short-length zipper jacket which, in tightly clinging to the waist, allowed the phallic connotation of a man's trousers or, more usually these days, jeans ... to assert itself in unashamedly masculine terms. Clearly, a class that lived closer to nature, in suburban or rural environments, would be more disposed to endorse the feminine overcoat than the masculine zipper-jacket in winter! Gary thought so anyway, and who could say he was wrong? He might be accused of over-intellectualizing by some people, but they were more likely to be the kind of people whose intellectual powers were mediocre, in any case, and who rarely if ever exercised their intellects at all. He had learnt, over the years, not to allow himself to become too impressed by such people! He swam in a deeper, more metaphysical depth.

"Well, I think we're going to be in time for the start after all," Gerry Flynn observed with a sigh of relief, as he braked the Citroën to a halt a few yards down the road from the Climax Cinema. It was 2.40pm now and the film they were intending to watch was due to roll in five minutes. Only a short queue of people was still standing outside, mute devotees waiting to make a sacrificial offering to appease their gods. So it looked as though everyone would get into the cinema in the nick of time.

A man in a navy-blue zipper cast them a glance from his position near the front of the queue, before averting his attention with embarrassed swiftness. Then he moved inside the foyer to pay his entrance fee and disappeared from view. But nothing had been wasted on Gerry, who now burst into a characteristically ironic chuckle. "I always thought we'd bump into your brother at one of these places sooner or later," he declared, for Petra's dubious benefit.

"Ah well, that's sex in the head for you!" sighed his girlfriend as she pushed her way onto the pavement. "Steve has evidently come along to have an affair with one of his spiritual partners."

"Quite a one-sided affair, too!" Jillian opined while climbing out beside the others, only to blush darkly when she noticed Gary staring at her with a meaningful grin on his face.