“There were two blokes sitting side by side, watching a man and a woman having sex,” Ms. Perkins said, describing what happened as she strolled with her dog on the hill between her house and the Hog’s Back ridge. “Nearby, there were two men sunbathing together, wearing nothing but tight little white underpants.”
Later, she found a pink vibrator in the bushes.
“I gave it to the police,” she said. “They said, ‘What should we do with it?’ I said, “Put it in Lost Property.’ ”
Puttenham, about an hour’s drive from London, has fewer than 2,500 residents and is famous for its ancient church; its friendly pub, the Good Intent; and its proud inclusion in both the Domesday Book — an 11th-century survey of English lands — and “Brave New World.”Unhappily for many people here, it is also famous for being featured on lists of good places to go “dogging” — that is, to have sex in public, sometimes with partners you have just met online, so that others can watch. So popular is the woodsy field below the ridge as a spot for gay sex (mostly during the day) and heterosexual sex (mostly at night) that the police have designated it a “public sex environment.”
Public sex is a popular — and quasi-legal — activity in Britain, according to the authorities and to the large number of Web sites that promote it. (It is treated as a crime only if someone witnesses it, is offended and is willing to make a formal complaint.) And the police tend to tread lightly in public sex environments, in part because of the bitter legacy of the time when gay sex was illegal and closeted men having anonymous sex in places like public bathrooms were routinely arrested and humiliated.
Read it all here.
Public sex or "Dogging;" I suppose the name fits - acting like dogs. I guess that that is the definition of freedom in Great Britain today.
But what a rotten break for the people of Puttenham; it looks like Brave New World is coming true right down to the detail of it happening in Puttenham.
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1 comment:
I doubt it was this dark. C.S. Lewis pointed out that a culture that has never heard the gospel and one that has heard and rejected it are alike in the same sense as a virgin and a widow are alike. There is a similarity in one sense, but also an immense difference.
Lewis saw pre-Christian paganism as in some sense straining towards the truth of the gospel even if it didn't know that's what it was doing. It at least typically believed in the transcendant. Post-Christian paganism, by contrast, is trying to escape from the gospel and generally believes in nothing beyond the realm of matter (and it's own desires).
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