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The Dabbler’s Hallowe’en visit to the woods was a surprise too far for some of our readers, but not, of course, for Mr Slang. Here Jonathon Green provides the last word on ‘dogging’. Clicking ‘continue’ is not for the easily offended – you have been warned…

In the days – some 28 of them as I recall: it was February 1973 – when I was letters editor of Fiesta magazine (no, lady, don’t laugh; the former girlfriend had just launched a feminist magazine – a bloke’s gotta fight back) one discovered certain cultural givens. The first being that the letters were the only genuine bit in the mag (genuine, that is, in the sense of actually appearing through the letterbox; I cannot vouch for the further reality of their content). The second was that if there was one thing especially beloved of those whose hands reached upwards, ever upwards towards Mr Patel’s top shelf (Mr Patel himself having arrived somewhat precipitately from Uganda a few months earlier and with admirable industry taken the nation’s paper shops off its hands) it was what we professionals termed ‘watching the wife’.

They liked watching the wife in various ways. The basic version was simply taking photos of her, a lingeried odalisque on a Romford sun-lounger: the Naked Maja meets Ann Summers (another pioneer of the period). They sent in the snaps and we printed them as ‘Readers’ Wives’. But better still they liked watching the wife professionally, or at least ‘on the job’ as their letters liked to put it.  Ensconced in a convenient wardrobe – you couldn’t get the sightlines from beneath the bed – they were complaisant, nay, eager spectators of spousal hi-jinks.

As if members of a pornographic historical recreation society, devoted to the real-life reanimation of one of those 18^th century ‘occupational’ ballads – double entendres where’er you look and populated by tailors with ‘needles’, butchers with ‘cleavers’, and millers with ‘grinders’ – they watched the wife with builders, they watched her with brickies, with movers, door-to-door opportunists and delivery boys. Fiesta was a resolutely blue-collar magazine. It was not, however, racist. They watched her – enviously, as they confessed – with black boys too. The wife did not contribute her opinions, though we knew from our cleaner-collared peers that the ‘bit of rough’ had its charms, albeit that the type tended to pleasure the fantasies of postcodes other than those of Essex, where its flesh-and-blood version was perhaps over-represented.

As we also knew, and as my ex-partner’s magazine was constantly upbraiding us, men persist in the well-worn dichotomy vis-à-vis females: the mother and the whore. Usually seen as disparate entities; rivals even. What our readers were doing was, or so I felt, was getting two for the price of one. Though price didn’t come into it, other than for those entrepreneurial souls who, unsatisfied with ‘watching’ the wife, substituted, so they claimed and certainly described, the word ‘whoring’.

Innocent days. Two-dimensional days. For what we have now, and have had for around a decade, is dogging. The participants, if the many sites (10.3m hits)  to which the Internet uncritically takes one have it right, are couples, of whom the principle performer is the wife. Her partners are multiple and random, although the sex is not invariably penetrative. Her husband, as is traditional, remains an observer although  a degree of pandering among the onlookers is acceptable. Souvenir images are captured, benefiting from the many advances in technology since the early 70s. These too can be found online. The action takes place in secluded areas, usually rural or town-edge.  It is a British invention though lesser breeds seem to be adopting it.

Dogging represents those yellowing letters made, quite literally, flesh. Readers’ Wives up from the lounger and over the bonnet. Ann Summers perhaps replaced by Agent Provocateur but still a profusion of bottle blondes, of ill-chosen miniskirts, of spiky heels now ill-suited to muddy clearings. And Porno Barbie, unlike her static predecessors, has moving parts. Hands that grasp, orifices that can be filled. Yet while the Readers’ Wives, as much anything that turned up in that office, were real, one is less confident in the credentials of many of the ‘genuine British housewives’ featured on line. They may not have the airbrushed, implanted implausibility of their Californian sisters let alone the indiscreet charm of  the salopes bourgeoises who please the French, but not a few of these girls are professionals. Whatever the websites proclaim, I too have written these captions. Trust me: what a difference a wig makes.

Depending on source, it would appear that the origin of the term lies either in ‘walking the dog’, during which healthy pursuit one passes amongst or even stumbles upon those more lubriciously engaged, or the verb dog, as in ‘dog someone’s footsteps’, a usage that dates to 1519. The first time I met it was in 1992, interviewing a couple who, inter alia, had a dungeon under their immaculate front lawn (you couldn’t miss the air vent). They told me of voyeuristic dogging: ‘it goes on in carparks. People drive up in their car and watch other people screwing.’ Participation seems to be a 21^st century thing.

But maybe we’re pushing too hard. After all, for slang’s purposes the dog and sex have always been buddies. The unadorned noun has meant variously the penis (as does hot dog although the underlying imagery differs), and the vagina (a dog’s mouth being a narrow one), a  promiscuous man or woman (and dog around or dog it, to act promiscuously), a prostitute, and a generic term for lust. Bird dog and hound-dog mean to look for sexual pickups, to have intercourse raw dog is what in other contexts is known as bareback; doggish is sex-obsessed, beat the dog to masturbate, clap the dog to stimulate the female genitals and stroke the dog, to fuck. That last in mind there is the terminology of rear-entry heterosexual intercourse: dog, dogfuck (though dogfucker is an all-purpose term of abuse) doggy, do the dog; doggies, dogways, doggystyle, dog-fashion. A dog’s marriage is sex (no position postulated); dog-water semen, a dog’s rig intercourse taken to exhaustion and dog-knotted is for the couple to be locked together following a vaginal spasm. Australia’s dog-stiffener, however, is a professional dingo-killer.

And then of course there’s bitch.

image ©Gabriel Green

You can buy Green’s Dictionary of Slang, as well as Jonathon’s more slimline Chambers Slang Dictionary, plus other entertaining works, at his Amazon page. Jonathon also blogs and Tweets.