supperware.net » writings » seriously what week?

This week, you may have been told, is Seriously Sexy Week. So, come Tuesday or Wednesday, you may possibly have seen your cohorts in a corner of the Union, hilariously filling subsidised condoms with shaving foam and squirty cream. This is all very well, because it’s an Amusing Activity with a Serious Message — that in the midst of a fug of alcohol and adrenaline, that split second before you abandon yourself to the warmth of the tight-skinned big-eyed little first year with her cute laugh, or lose yourself to the handsome guy with the charming smile and the motorbike, you should pause for a couple of seconds to imagine spending the rest of your life incubating gonorrheal pustules, pissing blood, and possessing an infectious kind of infertility.

Sex, you will be told with multiple exclamation marks, is great!!!!! But for those of you who are lucky enough for proper, substantial temptation to come your way, don’t abandon your critical faculties. Oh no. With capability comes responsbility, and all of you young adults need to stop acting like you own the patent for sexual intercourse. You naughty, naughty people.

It’s important that you’re careful, of course, and frankly, you owe it to the rest of us. I’m referring not to your subsequent partners, but to the rest of us who, numb with frustration and choked by boluses of bitter tears, watch you as you drift along in pairs, hands enfolded within manipulating hands, uncaring for our plight. I speak for those among us who would otherwise suffer in solitude the squeaking bedsprings, the suffocated panting gasps, and the rhythmic nocturnal thudding of headboard against bedroom wall. Those of us who despise your apathy towards us: all your cooing and your baby talk, and your undemocratic monopolisation of our kitchens, our living rooms, and our sleeping hours.

Amid the decadence and preaching this week, I would like to voice an alternative point of view. As the function of a Union is to assist the downtrodden and to support the weak, it would be an excellent idea to devote just one week next semester to those of us who really need your help. We are the huddled masses who are mystified by the stifling self-destructive Mummies and Daddies roleplay of so many campus couples, who are oblivious to the allure of casual sex, and who are ignorant of the delights of the ‘Superclub’ ambience to which the Union is determined to aspire. A huge wealth of untapped profit could be released by exploiting us.

Next semester, I would like to propose a Seriously Tragic Week at the Union, in celebration of those people who have never been to Friday Night Out because they’re too busy working. To glorify those who can never appreciate the point of going clubbing, ostensibly to socialise, if the music’s turned up so loud you can’t actually have a conversation. Those among us who, feeling like fish out of water, set foot in the Union only to patronise the weekly fruit and vegetable market.

Seriously Tragic Week could be a great success. I can see Friday night now: a sober, well-lit Student Union full of stony-faced postgraduates, pint glasses in hands, hypnotised by laptop screens and Powerpoint demonstrations. The disco lighting could be set to sweep slowly and rhythmically overhead to remind us of the joyless hours spent in the photocopying rooms in the library. Walls would be covered with cloyingly arcane poster presentations about nuclear physics and organic chemistry. Photographs of financially successful alumni would nestle amid pictures of faraway, forgotten wars: anything to remind us of the depressing, hedonistic mentality which it is our own miserable legacy to perpetuate, and to reinforce the fact that the world is crammed with billions of other people who matter just as little as we do.

Rather than forking out tons of money hiring an ironic band to mime their ironic music ineffectively to an ironic Minidisc, you could hand Toni Borneo fifty quid to stand on stage, quietly and carefully reciting some of the less accomplished works of Philip Larkin, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, John Betjeman … anything to set us in the right frame of mind.

Published in barefacts 1042 • 31 October 2002