Column

Doctor, I swapped the wife!

Eric the Heretic puts the boot into beefcake sexperts

Something very worrying has been happening in the popular media of late. No, I don’t mean all that Charles and Di cobblers. (I’d be wasting my time talking about an issue of mass public interest with such a select readership, now wouldn’t I?) No, something far more insidious - doctors presenting themselves as ‘sexologists’.

In recent weeks I’ve been opening up my favourite Sunday papers (do excuse me for reading journals actually read by someone else in the country) and seeing some stethoscope-adorned, straight-faced medic telling us all why, from a doctor’s perspective, you shouldn’t go in for a spot of ‘wife-swapping’ now and then.

So where, I ask you, in our white-coated friend’s ‘the-hip-bone’s-connected-to-the-thigh-bone’ parroted recitations did they impart that gem of wisdom? When this bimbo was being programmed like the rest of the fact-crammed automatons, who slipped what between the pages of Gray’s Anatomy? Maybe he was enlightened under the tutelage of some spicy old codger during his GP training? Maybe he saw a nasty case of it in casualty one time?

Leave it out. I’m reaching for my white coat and diagnosing a severe case, yet again, of meddling medics on the rampage. These people never know when to stop. Give them an inch in the delicate area of intimate relations and they’re in - colonising the landscape of sexual behaviour for mile after mile.

And who is lining up behind this pulpit of prurient pontification? On the TV we’ve got the beefcake bimbos, the Julians and Quentins who have muscled in on the sofas beside the short skirts and super-glued smiles to manfully shore up the other side of the sexual equation.

But they are just the photogenic vanguard of a broader assault force - taking the whole thing to its logical commercial conclusion (if such a notion can be understood by anyone not dogmatised by half the lecturings in this magazine).

They’ll all be at it - and just look at the array doctors telling us how to do what, as if we didn’t know. Some boozy old buffer down at your local surgery who can just about get his pen up to his prescription pad, or worse, hand-wringing, middle class, metropolitan missionaries, angst-busters for the neurotic nineties.

As anyone who reads the right papers knows, we can leave the working classes to get on with their nookie well enough on their own. For the medics I might prescribe a little less of the moralistic hand-wringing.