[I offer another piece from the louche side of my street. I wrote the original of this around 2011 which made its topic 35 years old then, and nearly 50 now. To me the Readers’ Wife comes with a certain period charm. No surprises that it should be that of the Seventies. She was the big thing in porn for a while, boasting her own magazines (though no contemporary title amused more than the more than the egregiously hardcore Whitehouse, yes: named specifically for the odious, moralising Mary, chocful of pink, flap shots and kindred revelations). Fiesta where I found myself for a few months, always claimed to be her inventor, though later on Razzle, hymned by Ian Dury (‘I think you’ve taken one of my books’), had their own stable. They still crop up, of course, but as commonly referencing John Cooper Clarke’s eponymous verses: ‘They seem to be saying in their fashion / “I’m freezing Charlie - haven’t ya finished yet?”’ or some more or less niche site devoted to ‘book’ collectors than in the original format. Barbie herself goes from strength to roseate strength, but for my purposes it might be recalled that her origins were a sex doll, named Lilli, with platinum ponytail, heavy on the eye-liner and pouting lips and perched, think in-yer-face Fragonard, on a rope swing. Dogging, on the other hand, flourishes. As for the top shelf: it remains but more a literal object than generic for a world of fevered self-indulgence; a sad, vastly diminished presence, a seedy holdover in a world in which a mouse-click takes one to places of which the pre-internet porn-hunter could never reach.]
In the days – some 28 of them as I recall: it was February 1973 – when I was letters editor of Fiesta magazine (no, lady, don’t laugh; the former girlfriend had just launched the UK’s first feminist magazine – a bloke’s gotta fight back) one discovered certain cultural givens. The first being that the letters were the only genuine bit in the mag (genuine, that is, in the sense of actually appearing through our letterbox; I cannot vouch for the further reality of their content). The girls of course were of flesh and blood, but gorgeous pouting ‘schoolgirl’ Miss A (none of that Ms nonsense here) could reappear three pages on armed with a different wig and a few props as cruel, sultry ‘dominatrix’ Miss B. One captioned accordingly.
The second was that if there was one thing especially beloved of those whose hands groped upwards, ever upwards towards Mr Patel’s top shelf (Mr Patel himself having arrived somewhat precipitately from Uganda a few months earlier and with admirable industry taken the nation’s paper shops off its hands) it was what we professionals termed ‘watching the wife’. They liked watching the wife in various ways. The basic version was simply taking photos of her, a lingeried odalisque on a Romford sun-lounger: the Naked Maja meets Ann Summers (another pioneer of the period). They sent in the snaps and we printed them as ‘Readers’ Wives’. But better still they liked watching the wife professionally, or at least ‘on the job’ as their letters liked to put it. Ensconced in a convenient wardrobe – you couldn’t get the sightlines from beneath the bed or through the keyhole of the en suite – they were complaisant, nay, eager spectators of spousal hi-jinks. Slang, from the 16th to 19th centuries, termed them wittols, from SE woodwale, a bird that is often the target of a cuckoo, who lays its egg in the woodwale’s nest. (And I have written elsewhere on the counter-linguistic synonyms for cuckold).
As if members of a pornographic historical recreation society, devoted to the real-life reanimation of one of those 18th century ‘occupational’ ballads – double entendres where’er you look and populated by tailors with ‘needles’, butchers with ‘cleavers’, and millers with ‘grinders’ – they watched the wife with builders, they watched her with brickies, with movers, door-to-door opportunists and delivery boys. Fiesta was a resolutely blue-collar magazine. Herself was not at home to the bank manager and his snotty golf club pals. Nor were either she nor hubby, at least in this context, racist. They watched her – enviously, as they confessed (the stereotype was as expected) – with black boys too. The wife did not contribute her opinions, though we knew from our cleaner-collared peers (the likes of Penthouse, another publisher of epistolary fantasies) that the ‘bit of rough’ had its charms, albeit that the type tended to pleasure the fantasies of postcodes other than those of Essex, where its flesh-and-blood version was perhaps over-represented.
As we also knew, and as my ex-partner’s magazine was constantly upbraiding us, men persist in the well-worn dichotomy vis-à-vis females: the mother and the whore. Usually seen as disparate entities; rivals even. What our readers were doing was, or so I felt, was getting two for the price of one. Though price didn’t come into it, other than for those entrepreneurial souls who, unsatisfied with ‘watching’ the wife, substituted, so they claimed and certainly described, the word ‘whoring’.
Innocent days. Two-dimensional days. For what we have now, and have had for around a decade [now three], is dogging. The participants, if the many sites [50m hits and counting] to which the Internet uncritically takes one have it right, are couples, of whom the principle performer is the wife. Her partners are multiple and random, although the sex is not invariably penetrative. Her husband, or so was his traditional role, remains an observer although a degree of pandering among the onlookers is acceptable. Souvenir images are captured, benefiting from the many advances in technology since the early 70s. These too can be found on line. The action takes place in secluded areas, usually rural or town-edge. It is a British invention though lesser breeds seem to be adopting it. And like much British porn it is resolutely amateurish. None of the polished beauties, hung studs and upmarket backdrops (Hollywood palaces, McMansions, BCBG flats in Paris 8ieme) of America or Europorn. This is a muddy clearing with lumpy people. Porn’s equivalent of a lay-by picnic, cheap tinnies and stale petrol station sarnies as the juggernauts lumber past.
Dogging represents those yellowing letters made, quite literally, flesh. Readers’ Wives up from the lounger and over the bonnet. Pink protuberances offered up as a multi-dish tasting menu through the passenger window. Ann Summers perhaps replaced by Agent Provocateur but still a profusion of bottle blondes, of ill-chosen miniskirts, of spiky heels no more suited to muddy clearings than they were to back gardens. And Porno Barbie, unlike her static predecessors, has moving parts. Hands that grasp, orifices that can be filled. Yet while the Readers’ Wives, as much anything that turned up in that office, were real, one is less confident in the credentials of many of the ‘genuine British housewives’ featured on line. They may not have the airbrushed, implanted implausibility of their Californian sisters let alone the indiscreet charm of the salopes bourgeoises who please the French, but not a few of these girls are professionals. Whatever the websites proclaim, I too have written these captions. Trust me: what a difference those wigs make.
Depending on source, it would appear that the origin of the term lies either in ‘walking the dog’, during which healthy pursuit one passes amongst or even stumbles upon those more lubriciously engaged, or the verb dog, as in ‘dog someone’s footsteps’, a usage that dates to 1519. The first time I met it was in 1992, interviewing a couple who, inter alia, had a dungeon under their immaculate front lawn (you couldn’t miss the air vent). Their own speciality was regular trips to a Paris gangbang club. The wife would accommodate multiple men as the afternoon went by. They told me of voyeuristic dogging: ‘it goes on in carparks. People drive up in their car and watch other people screwing.’ Participation by the viewers seems to be a 21st century thing.
But maybe we’re pushing too hard. After all, for slang’s purposes the dog and sex have always been buddies. The unadorned noun has meant variously the penis (as does hot dog although the underlying imagery differs, and puppy around 1710), and the vagina (a dog’s mouth being a narrow one), a promiscuous man or woman (and dog around or dog it, to act promiscuously), a prostitute, and a generic term for lust. Bird dog and hound-dog mean to look for sexual pickups, to have intercourse raw dog is what in other contexts is known as bareback; doggish is sex-obsessed, beat the dog to masturbate, clap the dog to stimulate the female genitals and stroke the dog, to fuck. That last in mind there is the terminology of rear-entry heterosexual intercourse: dog, dogfuck (though dogfucker is an all-purpose term of abuse) doggy, do the dog; doggies, dogways, doggystyle, dog-fashion. A dog’s marriage is sex (no position postulated); dog-water semen, a dog’s rig intercourse taken to exhaustion and dog-knotted is for the couple to be locked together following a vaginal spasm. Australia’s dog-stiffener, however, is a professional dingo-killer.
And then of course there’s bitch.
A very long time ago and in another country,
I think I might’ve missed all that 😅🤷🏻♂️