In African packs of gorillas there is one dominant male. He is older, bigger and gets all the young nubile lady gorillas while the youngans wait in the wings. He is the Silverback. The Australian Film Ten Canoes, shows how some aboriginal tribes take the same approach, the old fella gets lots of wives, including the youngest and best looking.
I think the Silverback thing is alive and well in London today. Look at men who hit their mid-life crisis, they buy a Porsche and start trying to date 20 year olds. It is surprising the ones who can be successful.
One of my clients in his 40s intellectually wants a mature worldly woman, yet is consistently attracted to women in their early 20’s. A variety of studies have also shown that women are attracted to older men with power and resources, while men are attracted to women at their fertile peak.
Now this whole Silver back thing has interested me intellectually, but for the first time I have actually experienced it.
I was out dancing for a mates birthday and noticed what seemed to be a 20 year old flirting with me on the dance floor. Later I noticed another very attractive 20ish year old giving me some really blatent green lights inviting me to chat her up.
Both times I pinched myself, checked to see if there was hollyoaks look alike standing next to me, as these were the type of girls who wouldn’t have even given me a second glance in my early 20s. If I didn't study flirting body language as a living I would have dismissed it out of hand.
There is a real temptation to snipe at the sad old man and the silly young girl. But now, (highly suspiciously when hitting Silverback age) I’m starting to wonder if it really is a bit of a natural biological phenomena and secretly wished I used some grey hair dye in my 20s.
Are Silverbacks really attractive? And are there any other Silverbacks out there who have noticed the same thing?
Back to my favourite social anthropologist Kate Fox (by the way, shameless plug, if you are not British you must read 'Watching the English' which made what seemed like a peculiar mess crystal clear – suddenly I understood. If you are British you should read it and you might understand yourself and fellow Brits too!).
Kate Fox specialises in watching people and discerning the underlying social rules by what people do. So being a sexpertly type of course first thing I did was turn to her section on what are the rules in the British Bedroom.
Now let me say that before this I hadn’t really thought about how there were different rules in different nationalities bedrooms. Of course everyone is an individual, but there are definitely national differences. For instance, I realised (from anecdotal and personal experience) that the Australian rules in the bedroom for men were essentially meat and two veg. Basically Australian men stick to the basics and might throw in a bit of oral as a really special flourish.
What is really interesting about the Brits is that even though they are so polite on the outside, they stand in line and love to stick to the rules, in the bedroom there are no rules. The bedroom is the one place in Britain where you can pretty much do anything you want and it is ok. As long as you don’t have an embarrassing conversation about it in the morning. This was a very surprising aspect of the British persona, and seems to be backed up by the proliferation of Kinky stuff that the brits tend to get up to in the bedroom. I was pretty surprised when I came to London to find how common BDSM and swinging was, and even that there are whole brothels devoted to men dressing up as babies. What a contrast to the stiff British upper lip! You wouldn’t find that in Sydney, as far as I know anyway!
Maybe its all those rules that make Brits want to have a place where there are no rules – look at the Japanese. They have in many ways a very similar, highly polite, socially controlled society, but man are they Kinky! Have you seen their Manga? And as Al has been pointing out they are the world leaders in producing new and innovative sex toys.
So what have your experiences of the rules in the British bedroom? And for our international readers what are the rules in the bedroom of your country?
In African packs of gorillas there is one dominant male. He is older, bigger and gets all the young nubile lady gorillas while the youngans wait in the wings. He is the Silverback. The Australian Film Ten Canoes, shows how some aboriginal tribes take the same approach, the old fella gets lots of wives, including the youngest and best looking.
