As fetishes go, dressing up in the kind of costumes you’ll find in a high street sports shop has much to recommend it. Those strange, clingy tracksuits – or shell suits, or whatever they’re called now – pub trainers, tackily branded tops, white socks (de rigueur), even football kit – and add to the basket the jock-strap, if you must. They’re suggestive, okay, of some degree of healthy activity, which can serve to power-up its practitioners to vigorous sex, but that’s hardly the point – which is, that such clothing inevitably connotes the people who wear it in real life and think it looks good.
It might sound slightly pretentious at this point to use the word ‘common’. But that’s the gist. There is that lingering, irrational notion engrained in the traditionally class-ridden English psyche that the working class lad is better in bed than his middle class counterpart. Possibly there might once have been something in this, back in those Orwellian days when the English were almost as good at sex as they were at food, but these days… Still the notion holds. You doubt that? Think of it this way: Which random stranger would you rather go down on: the lusty lad in the England shirt, with all his spunk and vim, or your trainee bank manager?
It is partly to do with the desire for masculinity, some, erm, sectors of the demographic seeming more uncomplicatedly in tune with every masculine stereotype with which they’ve ever been presented. Remember the changing rooms, for instance, when the nice middle class boys cowered and struggled into their (grey) socks while the rougher lads held riotous sway in the showers, comparing todgers, presumably, discussing their ‘birds’ and dropping the soap, and when the wrong side of the tracks seemed to be the place to be if you wanted sex? Being common didn’t just spell teenage pregnancy. Some months, usually nine, before that it meant sex – quite gritty, raw sex at that, so one imagined. These were the boys who’d be groping their girls in the corridors, this at the age of about eight, while the nice middle class boys…
But now – call it psychic revenge – we can dress just like them and pretend. Need one say more?
The engagement with levels of status has also traditionally been part of the hidden gay lifestyle. The old boy prowling for after-hours trade might well flinch were his catch of the night to reply to his coded enquiry in tones as far back in his throat as his own. If, on the other hand, his class were clearly different, then homosexuality could be experienced as a series of isolated occurrences, discretely veiled and deniable, lying beyond the scope of the identity publically upheld within a narrow social orbit. In other words, forbidden homosexuality could be enjoyed on the side, in an underworld. This, of course, is to stereotype and to generalize crudely, but if you doubt the lingering presence of class attitudes and class aspirations, not to mention stereotypes, try hitting the nearest sceney gay bars and opening your ears to the fake accents there. Gay identities remain very strongly marked by stereotyping views of class.
The practical impact of this? It can be fun, and healthy, to dress deliberately down, to engage with one’s lingering inhibitions, to hold the whole class system up to bedroom mockery, and enjoy the way such violation of middle class attitudes might feel rather naughty. Mother wouldn’t approve.
And on a yet more practical level… The plastic fibres those tracksuits are made from feel particularly slinky – and sleazy, and cheap, and electrostatically clingy – when you sweat and the fabric gets damp. Watch out for nipple-rub. You’ll notice as well that they don’t soak up semen as quickly as natural fibres, but that’s kind of fun too. Snail trails ahoy!