a curious book review

[deadman]

Following is a book review some may find interesting. 'My Secret Life'are the memoirs of 'Walter' (his real identity remains unknown to this day), an 18th century English aristocrat with an inordinate desire to fornicate. This work is a detailed account of a life devoted to lechery, deciept and obscenity. This being said, I think it would be a curious mentality that would find My Secret Life an erotic work per se. The author doesn't go into enough lewd and descriptive details of his sexual encounters (damn!) for it to be a work of eroticism. I think it is of interest primarily as an account of a mans incessant need to.....ummm, well to put it bluntly, to fuck.

It seems Walters infatuation with the furry magnet began at a very early age. One of his earliest recollections was that of regularly attempting to explore what lay beneath his governesses petticoats. In short, Walter will saddle any girl with a pulse. Although the majority of his encounters in his later life were with prostitutes, he would try to persuade and coax any girl he came across. As he wrote in the preface: 'women were the pleasure of my life. I loved cunt, but also who had it; I liked the woman I fucked and not simply the cunt I fucked, and therein is a great difference'.......hmmmm, I'll drink to that, a great difference indeed! The persistence with which he pursues his carnal longings is almost tragic (if he were not so damn successful that is). He will stop at almost nothing short of physical force to quell his desires.

Being the aristocratic gentleman that he was, Walter had the financial means to pursue his 'ámatory longings' (as he puts it) on a full time basis (and lets face it, how many of us out there would like to have the means to do this?). Despite a generous allowance in his younger days, and a healthy inherintance later in his life, he was always on the verge of penury, squandering everything he got on women (ahh....a kindred spirit). Although his lecherous ways also exacted a cost on his health, with him being periodically out of action with an assortment of STD's. Many of the girls he was with also bore the cost of his insatiability, for he fathered (and forgot) many an illegitimate child.

Certainly his accounts contradict the current feminist 'NO means NO'and 'what part of the word NO do you not understand?' campaign so popular in the West. There is hardly a girl he meets that doesn't offer initial resistance, saying how they could NEVER consider such a thing, blush, act angry, refuse, close her thighs....only to willingly yield to his smutty hints, bawdy utterings and romantic flattery. Of course how many of us have taken a 'respectable' gal back to our apartment only for her to tell us she is not THAT type of girl.....if she wasn't that type of girl she wouldn't be alone with a farang in his apartment in the first place (let alone in public)! NO, NO, you mustn't (at least not without more flattery).

In my favourite chapter Walter meets a high class French hooker who becomes a regular, 'never have I found such a young wench more ready to learn obscenity' he utters. And she says: I am a born whore, for I like it, and like to see a man amuse himself with me'(shite, why can't there be more gals like this?). Having exhausted themselves in 'bawdy variety', she then proceeds to procure him another girl, and another, and another, until he had 'át least six altogether at once, and made them play the devils delight', sounds a bit like an 18th C version of Eden club.

'My Secret Life'is regarded as the longest and frankest sexual autobiography ever printed. Unfortunately, the books over attention to detail can tend to make it somewhat laborious reading. Despite this, I found it worth persisting with given the insight it offers into a true philanderers psyche. Perhaps more than anything, this work has relevance because it shows how the insatiable nature of the carnal imperative can draw a man into a slow but steady downward spiral (but what a way to go). Certainly reading this book leads me to conclude that ones own lecherous compulsions are perhaps not as desperate and perverse as some (well not yet anyway, although with my impending relocation to LOS only weeks away, perhaps I'd better not be too smug!)

cheers

dm

[Sukhumvit]

Curious indeed.