SHADES OF DOUBT

It remains vitally important, while the sun lasts, to remember not to respond to any sexual advances from people wearing shades, for the simple reason that you can't properly see what they look like. Sunglasses can be dangerously flattering. Indeed, most of us choose them with that precise effect in mind.

Faced with the unenviable predicament of having found oneself in a compromising situation with somebody who, now unmasked, turns out to be a googly-eyed horror, there is one possible recourse. We should quite properly ask our pursuer to put the shades back on again. For the same reason that the less one knows about a person, the easier it is to have unbridled sexual relations with them (think of Candy Clark in American Graffiti (1973) saying to the stetsoned Harrison Ford, whose car she has just got into as a way of punishing the long-standing boyfriend who has upset her, 'Don't say anything, and we'll get along just fine'), the less we can see of the face of somebody unattractive to us, the easier the deed itself becomes.

A young man in a baseball cap who invited another back home to his flat for sex kept his hat on more or less throughout the act. When asked by the other whether he ever took it off, he briefly removed it to demonstrate that he looked much more boring without it, and then put it right back on again. Is this gesture not indicative of the greatest, the most considerate, sexual camaraderie?