I am not one of life's natural interrogators. It wasn't the way I was brought up. In fact, looking back, I suspect there were North Korean children who questioned aspects of the regime under which they laboured more closely than I did. It never occurred to me to ask why we couldn't have a drink with soup1, why bumphled cushions couldn't be sat on before 2pm2, why butter was for grown-ups and margarine for children3 and why napkins had always to be folded so the motif was in the bottom left-hand corner4. (Answers, extracted much later in life, below.)
However. Things change. Maybe it's late-onset teenage rebellion, maybe it's some kind of early pre-menopausal hormonal adjustment, but of late I have felt a certain new questioning spirit stir within me, a light but distinct scepticism colouring my vision and displacing some of the head-bobbing compliance that has led so many to dismiss me, rightly, as eight-tenths mud turtle.
Two recent stories have encouraged me across the threshold into this new world. First, there was the article in the British Medical Journal on how drug companies tried to parlay a claim that 43% of women suffered from "sexual dysfunction" into a lucrative market for Viagra-like pills among the female population. I remember thinking, back in 1999, when the survey in question first appeared, that it seemed more likely – based on anecdotal evidence, common sense and possession of a vagina – that most of those women were, in fact, suffering from "crap shag syndrome". Due to the simpler and happier arrangement of their genitals, men can enjoy themselves by putting said genitals more or less anywhere, as Portnoy's Complaint famously testifies. Julie Burchill once wrote a column opining, in passing, that most men would have sex with mud if there was nothing else on offer. She got a letter from one reader the next day saying that in his adolescence he had done exactly that. Quod erat, possibly on a bit of boggy wasteland near you, demonstrandum.
Until they are much older, wiser and/or forcibly instructed otherwise, men approach ladies' bits in the same gung-ho manner. Disappointment is bound to ensue. Such a survey makes you suspect that there are no women involved in science at all. Anyone who has been drinking with her girlfriends and heard the vastly differing sexual experiences that dwell within any one of them, let alone the group, will tell you there's no such thing as a genital attrition rate of 43%. It's all down to chemistry (in the metaphorical rather than pharmaceutical sense) and the dextrous or otherwise wielding of the penoid. I knew that. We all did. But an assertion came from an authoritative-looking group and I thought, "Oh well, there must be something in it." Fool.
Ditto the news last week that women being "too posh to push" was a myth. Again, I always thought that one didn't stack up. I know a lot of women. I know quite a lot of doctors. And knowing what I did about them all, I never could visualise a situation in which they'd ask for and agree to (respectively) a caesarean in order to avoid the messy business of natural birth. But again, I presumed that somebody, somewhere knew better. And now, new research reveals, they don't. The vast, vast majority of C-sections are apparently done for medical reasons. That makes a lot more sense.
Of course, eventually I shall have to question the new answers, but for now I'm going to concentrate on following up old questions. At last, I'll have a hobby. I'm going to start by asking my mother why the napkins always have to be folded so that the motif lies in the bottom left-hand corner. "Because that's the right way" will no longer suffice. It is a new dawn, and I need answers.
1 Because soup's a drink and a meal. 2 To make the bumphling worthwhile. 3 Because of the war. 4 Because that's the right way.
