Putting the fun back in fake news

The one whose shit one eats is the one whose words one speaks. (Or something like that. Old Flemish saying.)

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Sometimes, even fake news has its place.

For example, in 2011 I drove from Auckland southwards to Wellington with my mates JJ, Liam and Steve. I bought a newspaper with my garage pie and in the middle of it I came across a story about a porn star midget (who looked like Gordon Ramsay) whose half-eaten remains were found in a Welsh badger hole.

JJ laughed so hard he had to pull the car to the side of the road. Then Liam asked that I please call home the story to his partner, Marcelle, then she also had to pull over and switch on her hazards. There she sat in Jozi rush hour traffic, laughing her head off in the yellow lane.

More serious newspapers also fell for it.

We knew deep down that it was too bad to be true, but for 24 hours we laughed our heads off every now and then, and my recitation of poor fictional Percy Foster's plight was by late night a small masterpiece, although I guess you had to be there.

Itchy Balls Sturvey

Then this week it was reported that Sweden had officially decided to declare sex a sport.

Seriaas?

But it was, alas, that dubious media baron Itchy Balls Sturvey's IOL that spread the word locally. It's from the same stable that Tiet Ramte… sorry, Piet Rampedi, fabricated a the Tembisa tale about 10 babies born to one mother, but still…

Like the little Ramsay lookalike in the badger hole, the worst cruelty of the truth was that it was so much more mediocre than the story.

The lie that IOL helped to spread possibly orginated from The Times of India, but it was immediately refuted by the Hindustan Times; yet the mere thought confused me for two days.

The Springbok nail team

Look, art is more or less art if someone says it is art, but sport?

When I was a child, Springbok colours were assigned to many a human activity. There was even a Springbok hairdressing team. Another child at school said there was even a Springbok nail team at Dwarskersbos, but they were certainly not registered with the SA Olympic Committee at the time.

In this case, the Swedish Sports Federation was the spoilsport who put a stop to this, but the Swedish Sex Federation is nevertheless going ahead with a European Sex Championship, even if the Olympic Games are not beckoning.

Swedish Sex Federation?!? Janee, sometimes the bureaucracy in a social democracy just gets too weird.

“Like any other sport, it requires practice to achieve the desired result. Therefore, it is only logical that people also start competing in this domain," the organisers say.

Of course, practice and experience make you more adept at virtually every human activity, but I don't see cooks or gardeners or interior decorators insisting what they do is a competitive sport.

However, nowadays man has an unquenchable need for all kinds of frenetic competition, so perhaps that day is not so far off either.

But back to the sex.

“Matches" will last between 45 and 60 minutes. Participants will have to impress the judges in 16 different “disciplines". These include seduction, body massage, exploration of erotic zones, oral sex, penetration, endurance, physical appearance, position performance, creative position changes and number of orgasms.

It sounds like a jol

I foresee difficulty.

There is something unsatisfying about having sports sorted out by judges. Granted, referees often make people swear, but judges' thought processes are often murky, and from boxing to ice skating to surfing, results often raise eyebrows.

And where will you get the judges for your sex contest?

It might sound like a jol if you don't think too much about it, but anyone who has ever watched a blue film will be able to tell you that it is fun for a maximum of 10 minutes. As the writer Erica Jong said, after five minutes of a blue film, you want to have sex immediately, but after 20 minutes you never want to have sex again.

How many “matches" will the average judge be able to watch before he castrates himself out of pure frustration? The Swedish sex tournament will be decided in a few weeks. And there will also be no plot so that, for example, plumbers or pizza delivery people can provide a slight change.

And how are you going to fit everything from seduction through foreplay and multiple orgasms into a 45-minute “match"?

Although physical attractiveness is a category that is judged, it is unclear how much it will matter.

If two hideous people tease and seduce each other through the Kama Sutra and pile up a 10/2-F/M orgasm score, are they honestly going to win against two beauties, three standard positions and a 3/1-F/M orgasm score?

Exactly what constitutes seduction is itself an open question in this case.

Today's young people sort each other out on a phone app. Veterans like me in days gone by would just sit at the bar and wait for cute girls to come and order a dop and then hopefully laugh at my jokes, a tactic that admittedly worked much more rarely than today's youth apps.

Faster, deeper

One thing I know for sure is that the world gets stranger faster and faster as one gets older. Maybe one of these days sex will be a fully-fledged sport. After all, the Citius, Altius of the Olympic motto sometimes translates as Faster, Deeper.

Everything sounds smarter in Latin. Maybe the Swedish Sex Federation can distort Julius Caesar a little for class. Vidi, Vici, Veni.

In the meantime here's the great Marvin carrying on about how sex can heal you:

But don't be in a hurry:

They don't say “sex" anywhere, but Basement Jaxx sampled a single groan from Armand's X-Rated Dubs to make sure your mind wasn't wandering in the direction of cooking or football. What they mean when they say Banging House is certainly more erotic than the European Sex Championship:

♦ VWB ♦

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