The Weekly Whims Of HatManJim: Is Noisy Sex Anti-Social Behaviour?
January 23, 2010 No Comments
A weather-beaten eye cast over the media: HatManJim looks at a story in the headlines and as a feminist with a penis (Menimist? Femi-meni-mist? I just believe i n women’s rights, I’m not having gender-reassignment. OK?), attempts to map the sexism inherent in the press, without inadvertently saying anything lecherous about breasts.
Funniest recent headline on the BBC website: ‘Noisy sex’ woman spared prison.
So, how loud exactly? Apparently, this couple was keeping the next-door neighbour up, who described the sound of them doing the bad thing as: “The noise sounds like they are both in considerable pain. I cannot describe the noise. I have never ever heard anything like it.”
Seriously? The article doesn’t specify whether they live in a terrace or detached house.
Personally, I’ve never been woken by the sound of neighbors/housemates doing the nasty, although I have been a waker a couple of times (hey, I said waker…). Once a guy I shared a house with sent me a text, after my girlfriend had stayed over, that said: “I HEARD u enjoyed yourself last night.” Another time and another girlfriend, whose birthday it was, made sufficient noise for her housemate to knock angrily on the wall to which, after a few second’s pause, she responded candidly with: “F**k off! It’s my f**king birthday!”
At the time I put all this down to youthful hi-jinx and dismissed the complainers as being a bit stuffy and irritable. But now I come to think of it, I’m not sure how I’d feel about being woken in the middle of the night by a couple getting it on (the neighbourhood foxes are bad enough).
The neighbour in the BBC article even claims that she was late for work due to Mr and Mrs Cartwright’s mid-night moaning keeping her up all night and causing her to oversleep. Still, putting an ASBO and a suspended sentence on a woman for having noisy sex does seem a little extreme.
Another question that the BBC article fails to raise is why only Mrs Cartwright was charged when the witness has said that “both” made unusual noises. It seems his wife gets all the blame while he gets public kudos (apparently these incidents “went on for hours”). Without knowing the ins-and-outs of the case (smutty guffaw) does that indicate some kind of sexism in the UK criminal justice system?
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