Fifty Shades of SOAS

Their eyes met across a crowded Zoom. 

It was Wednesday. It was quiz night. It was the peak of the lockdown quiz trend, and he’d been looking forward to this all week. The Group™ was back together again, and that meant that she’d be there too, a pixellated minx grinning at him from the corner of his laptop.

The Group™ had started their first year years ago, but nobody could quite figure out how they actually knew each other. She’d done an anthropology unit with her, and she shared a flat off Holloway Road with him, and he knew that guy somehow, the guy who was with her for a bit before splitting up and insisting they were still friends even though they all knew they were fucking on and off for years, and she knew him through protests, probably? It was something like that.

They’d meant to do some kind of reunion thing back in September to mark ten years since they’d first met, they had set up a WhatsApp group called “reUNIon?” and everything, but everybody’s busy, everybody’s so fucking busy, and it almost happened in October but then so-and-so had to go to New York for work that weekend and then in November what’s-his-face moved abroad and went almost totally AWOL and then Christmas was obviously out because everybody had gone “home” even though they hadn’t lived there for years and then half of them were doing dry January and then what’s-her-name had twins (fucking twins!) so that was that for a while, and then coronavirus hit and suddenly nobody had anything to do. And they started spending time together again.

His palms were sweaty. He was the host, and he was the only one on the Zoom so far. Hopefully somebody else would join soon. As long as it wasn’t the guy who had got really into sourdough during lockdown, and couldn’t talk about anything else exc-

shit. There she was.

It was just the two of them, for the first time in years. It was time to show her how he’d grown into a confident man with a career, and a pension, and a hairline that wasn’t receding that much for his age, who was comfortable in his own (now slightly wrinkly) skin.

“Hi. Uh, how’s working from home this week?”

Fuck’s sake, man. You’re thirty. You’ve got better chat than this.

“Same as ever. Lockdown, right?”, she said. 

She scanned her screen. It was still just the two of them. 

“You know, while it’s just the two of us, it’s funny,” she continued. “I don’t think you ever knew, but I had a massive thing for you back in the day.”

He felt a maelstrom of feelings all at once. It was like his brain was his inbox and his emotions were frantic emails coming from all sides like the SOAS alumni relations team asking for donations. This was good, right? She liked him! But wait, she had a massive thing? Had in he past tense? That’s not a good tense.

“Oh right?”, he said. 

“Yeah, I often wondered if we’d end up together.”

“Well”, he said, seizing the moment, seizing it harder than he’d seized the first and only job offer that came his way after graduating in the worst patch of austerity imposed by the Tory/LibDem coalition, “better late than never, right?”

He smoothly enabled the waiting room that would stop the rest of The Group™ from joining the call. It was like suavely, suggestively locking the door, but with an added air of conference calls. Unlike a conference call, he started to take his shirt off. She saw where this was going, and quickly moved from the kitchen, where her housemate was heating up a frozen pizza for the fourth time this week, to her bedroom. She got the impression of firm pecs - or perhaps some burgeoning moobs, it was hard to tell at this resolution. It left a lot to the imagination, and she liked it. She thought of six packs past, the lithe torsos and unblemished skin of her uni conquests, spirits eager, not distracted, bodies willing, not wobbling. She took her clothes off hastily, partly through untrammelled desire, partly because she hadn’t worn a bra for months. She adjusted her laptop screen to an optimal angle and lay back carefully, self-consciously, her elbows pinned to her sides to stop her breasts flopping into her armpits, hoping her camera wasn’t good enough to pick up the odd rogue hairs which defied plucking, determinedly worming their way back to the surface, yearning for destinations unknown. 

She reached for the lube, gave it a couple of vigorous pumps, and started squelching in and around her enraptured flaps. Maturity had brought expertise and efficiency, and she was soon arching her back as she skimmed her fingertips across her greasy love nubbin, feeling herself splurt and splutter as she spasmed. And as she watched him grapple with his own moistened meat, contorting his face like a dog eating a lemon, she felt the thrill of the experience mix with the relief that it was her and her alone doing this. Back at SOAS, the boys she fucked were young and taut and in their slim muscular prime, but the sex itself was terrible, all bitten nails and unwashed fingers scraping away at her clit, scratchy stubble against her inner things, sloppy uncertain tongues and stilted arrhythmic heaves. Yet as soon as the boys grew up, became men who listened and sensed and responded, men who took pleasure in pleasing, men who learned to love, they sagged and faded and stressed. What use was a delicate and skilled tongue tip, a virtuoso of vag, an artisan of arse, if he wasn’t fully in the moment, if his mind was on meetings and his waistline on the wane?

But here it was just her, doing what she knew, watching him on the screen, imagining him how she used to want him, imagining him doing what she imagined he could now.

Suddenly, he froze. Out of the corner of his eye, he’d seen his own video in the corner of his screen. His pre-cum-flecked snail trail, sweaty and matted against his stark white belly, which hung ponderously over his birds’ nest pubes, the occasional grey glinting in the light from the screen. His hand, jerking erratically, beating a rhythm against his work laptop, the IT department asset tag sticker lifting the corner and scraping his knuckles. His wizened ballbag, skin folds hanging like curtains, swaying with the motion, too loose against his dangling jizz orbs like the wrinkled surface of an old mouldy apple, uncannily soft, sprouting wiry tufts of pubes, a beige nightmare made flesh. And his straining glans, gleaming in his grip, peeking out like a shy tortoise, coyly withdrawing, tasting the air again. 

He tried to block it from his mind, his disgust at the absolute state of himself. But the more he tried, the more he was drawn to it, and as he finally made eye contact with his own mirrored image, he withered, his puckered pecker limp and slippery and unfulfilled in his frothy fingers.

He groaned, and pulled his laptop towards him.

“I’m so sorry,” he explained hurriedly, “I just... I guess I’m distracted, I accidentally made eye contact with my video, it weirded me out, and it’s also been a long day, I keep thinking of work, and the whole pandemic, and... can we try again? Not now, we’ve got the quiz, but another time, can we be in each other’s support bubble? Can we drive to Barnard Castle and check our eyesight together? Can we make up for lost time, can we refind ourselves? I love you, I think I always have, and I feel so trapped and scared here in my flat, watching the news and watching the deaths, I’m scared I’ve wasted my life, I’m scared of death and I’m scared it’ll be me and I’m scared it’ll be you, and I’m scared I’ll never say or do what I think matters. Can we start again properly, can we give this a go? Can we isolate together, quarantine together, can we help each other through this? Because all I know right now is that I’m alive and you’re alive and we’ve missed chances before and I never want to miss a chance again. What do you think?”

Their eyes met across a crowded room. Across a crowded table, in fact. But more on that in a minute.

He had made the trek from SOAS to King’s Cross. Past the wailing hordes outside the library, lamenting the loss of the library announcement man. Down the steps, picking his way through the freshers, who were eyeing their reading lists with delight and their Hare Krishna food with suspicion, and who would soon learn where their priorities lay. And then along past UCL, a glorious vision of what a truly corporate university could be, with its pristine branding, its soulless, samosa-less bar, and its plethora of international students crammed onto courses for those delicious international fees.

Until he was here, at The Guardian.

He walked into a corner office, and cleared the coffee table with a swoosh of his arm. The Banksy art books, the free range muesli, the Owen Smith tea coasters, all went crashing to the floor. In their place, he opened his bag, and piled up stacks of cash, one after the other. This stack funded the teaching of obscure languages, like Ancient Georgian, Western Mongolian, and French. This stack paid for disadvantaged students to study at SOAS without taking on the kind of large debt that would cripple them and their families. This stack went towards carefully maintaining the expensive instruments from around the world which are taught in the music courses, as well as towards buying random household objects for the samba band to hit with sticks.

She looked up.

“Please”, he whined, “I want to be inside you.”

She rolled her eyes.

“The Guardian is an exclusive, high class publication”, she said. “If you’re not trying to incite a gender war, you’re not coming inside.”

He pulled out his last stack of cash. This one, already small, paid the teaching assistants just enough to get by.

“Pleeeease”, he moaned, his voice cracking. “I’ll pay anything.”

He was desperate, he was pathetic. He never thought he’d pay for it, but here he was, brandishing his money, begging for it.

She sighed. “OK. You get four paid-for articles. But you’re wearing editorial protection, quality writing costs extra, and don’t even think about sticking it up the home page.”

He smiled. He’d got what he wanted, but wasn’t sure how he felt. He knew it was ethically wrong, but it wasn’t totally illegal, was it? Surely, he thought, the newspapers are free to make their own decisions with their own finances, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of by two parties making a mutually beneficial transaction.

She immediately got going. She took two twenty pound notes, notes that would have bought an extra copy of an important textbook for the library, and rubbed her nipples with them until she was frothing at the cash. Queen Elizabeth the Second’s face gazed enigmatically off into the distance. He leaned up to kiss her, but she batted him away.

“No kissing,” she rebuked.

She pushed him down onto the table, and reached into his trousers to open his wank account. She worked furiously on his assignment, taking in as much of him as she could, scattering money that could have paid for sports societies equipment here, money that could have paid the cleaning staff better wages there, and spilling the word “heterodox” everywhere. He worked up a sweat, and more money stuck to him, clinging to his back, his thighs. His sticky crack alone ensconced enough money to make the AV system in the JCR work properly.

She was a professional, he thought. He loved how she made him feel attended to, cared for, even though he knew she did this with other paying clients all the time.  He thought how it wasn’t even high quality publicity he was getting, he just liked how it made him feel important.

As she drained his liquid assets, she made sure he came on the new plasticised waterproof fivers. He rolled off the table and onto the floor. He realised he’d just spunked SOAS’s money all over The Guardian. He’d bought publicity, but at the cost of most of his cash, all his self-respect, and everything that made him worthwhile in the first place.

(See http://stateofhawiya.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/post-dialogue-and-bloody-flags.html for the version where they argue rather than get it on.)

Their eyes met across a crowded room. Preparations for the Eurovision Song Contest in the JCR were in full swing... but so, too, was an Israeli flag. She couldn't put up with this. Righteously angry, she cut off the flag, and angrily horny, she stormed straight up to him.

"You fucking Zionist!", she screamed. "You're flagrantly showing your support for apartheid!"

He hesitated. There were two ways to proceed. He could attempt to engage her in reasonable discussion, but that was not the SOAS way. Or...

"I'm no Zionist," he said, slowly unzipping his fly. "Take a look."

And, as she beheld his own firm flagpole, she could quite clearly see that his flag had not been cut off.

"Israeli big!", she exclaimed.

Getting into the spirit of their "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" peace talk, she unhooked her Palestine-flag bra.

"They're Ha-massive!", he said approvingly, and they simultaneously reached out to each other in a way that Netanyahu and Abbas sadly never would. She massaged his peace stalk, while he moved his hand further down to her delicately-shaved Gaza strip, where his finger parted her like Moses and the Red Sea (although fortunately for him, no sea of red was forthcoming), and then went round her clit in circles like the latest round table discussions.

"Don't you want to Likud?", she suggested, panting with pleasure.

"Well, just so long as it's reciprocal," he replied.

They shifted positions and lay on the floor, licking and sucking and kissing and thrusting and grinding, and she surged with the heady delight of sexual (if not national) liberation more times than the borders have shifted in the last century, until he exploded inside her with the full force of his own personal rocket launcher.

As she swallowed his He-brew, he said, "I never thought I'd do this on the floor of the JCR ... maybe I have even fewer proper boundaries than Palestine does. That was amazing."

She grinned. "Well, you're certainly not getting nul points from me."

Yeah, probably. I graduated, left the country, and got a job; continuing this would feel like I was appropriating student culture (but who knows, maybe the three or four draft posts which were never quite good enough to publish might surface sometime...).

For wasting your time on tumblr but pretending it's educational "because SOAS", go harass sayitaintsoas. I think they're still there.

Their eyes met across ... fuck it, this is the last fiftyshadesofsoas post, let's change it up a bit.

It had been a long three years. Three years of reading impenetrable feminist articles, of confusing essays on confusing ideas, of exams and exam fuck-ups. Three years of social growth, from awkward Dinwiddy interactions, via painful flatshares and deliberate angry solitude, to a superficial but convincing relaxed self-confidence (as a fresher, the final years always seemed so collected, so adult; now, as a final year, one realises that adulthood is simply learning how better to conceal one's self-doubt). Three years of sex, once or twice indescribably brilliant, but more often only disappointingly fulfilled or frustratingly imaginary (every face was an unfinished story, a potential love affair not embarked upon, an intimate narrative never discovered, and in all likelihood, never to be discovered). Three years of small projects and small victories, of minor setbacks and minor interests, of defined development within a specific space. Three years which couldn't be condensed into anything so short as a paragraph, let alone a simple response, three years which defied accurate description or emotional categorisation (Oh, you went to SOAS? How was it?/Yeah, it was good, very interesting place./Cool.). Three years, in essence, of SOAS.

It was now Graduation Day, the culmination of those three years. Hundreds of people were milling around outside: parents adjusting mortar boards, smiling proudly despite their children's protestations that it "wasn't really a big thing"; students fiddling with neckties, unaccustomed to wearing them; camera flashes, awkward poses, shouts of fuck yeah, graduation! and fuck's sake why is this starting so late and fuck, where's the tickets, where's the fucking tickets.

The doors opened, and everybody slowly poured in. Before they even sat down, they were hot; the combination of itchy polyester gowns over ill-fitting smart clothes, a crowded stuffy room, and apprehension was an uncomfortable one. Time passed, and nothing happened. The old joke about SOAS preparing you for the third world with poor timing and poor air conditioning was brought out. Small talk was attempted, by parents with parents, by students sitting next to their alphabetical neighbours. The occasional mass silence fell, bringing as it always does nervous giggles and well-this-is-awkwards.

Finally, the music started, and overran. Academics in brightly-coloured gowns tiptoed onto the stage like over-educated birds of paradise. Speeches were made, and overran. The first student was called to the stage, to warm and enthusiastic applause; soon enough, the interminable procession sparked applause from parents and friends only. One or two felt the need to put their own individual mark on the walk-shake-walk; one dickhead tried moonwalking, another fist-bumped the man handing out the degrees, and the biggest twat of all pulled the Usain Bolt gesture on stage. It was lost on them that a degree is in itself an individual experience, that everybody in this room had had their own personal account of three years at SOAS, that this was merely a collection of hundreds of individuals who were already individually defined; it was lost on them that, by attempting to stamp their own individuality on the proceedings, it merely suggested that their experience had been anonymously run-of-the-mill.

And then, towards the end of the ceremony, something happened. Perhaps it was the interminable heat, perhaps it was the interminable speeches, perhaps it was the terror of walking away and leaving SOAS forever, but two onlyjustgraduates had begun wildly making out in their seats (no doubt their eyes had met across this crowded room). Oblivious to, or maybe even enjoying, everybody's attention, they intertwined legs, they ran their hands over and across and under their gowns, they discarded their mortar boards. Somebody whooped; several giggled.

Suddenly, the band had started up again, and the couple's movements synchronised to the beat of the samba drums, their bodies twisted to the strains of the sitars. And they were no longer the only ones. The room was filled with couples, threes, even fours, fucking and fondling and frigging and fingering and fornicating with reckless abandon and wild delight. On stage, the bright stripy gowns, no doubt emblematic of the dignity and prestige of various serious intellectual institutions, had been discarded; they formed a technicolour carpet on which the lecturers covered themselves in each other. Different faculties, so often at loggerheads over funding, quite literally came together. The scene was wilder still in the audience. Parents, united through pride, rekindled the spirit that saw the graduates' conceptions; jackets were thrown off, hairstyles meticulously coiffed for the occasion were joyously ruffled, pompous national dress of all varieties lay littered about the floor, quite forgotten. The graduates had formed a heaving mass of limbs and bodies. The showman who had performed the lighting bolt pose was now performing with his own relay baton with equal flamboyance. A hijabi girl, who had refused to shake the hand of the man giving out the degrees, was now shaking somebody else's sixth pillar of jizz-lam. A Jewish guy had removed his skullcap, and the girl he was going down on was wailing louder than Jerusalem's famous wall. The students of Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic had finally stopped their stultifying debate over which language was the most difficult to learn, and were happily communicating in a range of non-linguistic grunts, squeals, and moans. The rugby boys, sensing that internal social pressure had gone out of the window, embraced their closet homosexuality and set about a naked scrum, indulging in the kind of firm contact they'd been terrified of for years (they had always loved a good, hard tackle). Everybody was fucking everybody else; anthropologists with economists (who had a wonderful range of bodies, from micro to macro and everything between), economists with politicians (who could finally put to use their expertise in pubic policy), politicians with linguists (who knew exactly how to use their tongues). The law students, ever the clique, only fucked each other.

Their eyes met across a crowded room. It was her final exam of her final year, and everything was riding on this big one. But all she could think about was riding on his big one.

"Turn over your papers," he declared in that deep, grainy voice that had enchanted her through lectures all year. "You may begin."

She sighed as she looked down at the questions. How was she supposed to concentrate on anthropology when all she could think of was man-throb-ology?

She had always had a soft spot for the arrogant nerdy boys. There was some kind of irresistible sexual dissonance about them, with the way their skinny chests and patchy neckbeards belied a cocksure swagger which accentuated their intellectual muscle, their academic brawn. Sure, they'd never lift a girl off her feet (which she'd always thought was a little bit rapey anyway), but they'd give her a thorough cognitive fucking.

Her lecturer was an arrogant nerdy boy all grown up; he had the floppy hair and the "nice guy" veneer, but he was worldly-wise and experienced enough to teach her more than the anthropology curriculum which she was struggling to remember during the exam. 

She knew what she wanted. Fuck the exam, she thought, let's fuck him instead. She put her hand up, and he paced over.

"I need the toilet," she smiled apologetically, "I know we've only been in here half an hour, but..."

He looked at her, hard, and she looked at him, hard, and everything just seemed to be hard. She got up, and he escorted her out of the exam hall. She was aware of his eyes directly behind her, and made sure to accentuate the way her hips moved.

He paused outside the toilet, but she pulled him in, first into the cubicle, and then into her. His narcissistic streak became especially pronounced during sex. She felt that he took pleasure not from her, but from the reflected glory of his own sexual proficiency. True, he was one of the better ones, technically speaking, but sex was about fulfilling desire, not criteria (she could almost hear him thinking "five minutes here, then two minutes there, then back again at twice the speed, then simultaneous touching, then ..."), and his total self-absorption meant that her earth and heavens remained steadfastly unmoved. He finished with a flourish, which put her in mind of an artist flamboyantly signing a piece of work, and that climax represented in microcosm what both attracted and repelled her about him; she felt exactly like a piece of work, designed and used only to allow him to shine with greater, hollow lustre.

Their eyes met across a crowded room. They were both caught up in an angry mob in the library, where a massive debate seemed to centre around two photographs on display. Some people were screaming obscenities about consent, others were deploring the othering of African children, and some were even prudishly objecting to body parts; most people, however, were there for the entertainment. Somebody had even brought popcorn.

She saw the confusion in his eyes, and sidled over to explain.

"What's going on?", he whispered out of the corner of his mouth, "I don't understand what the fuss is about, but I'm too ashamed to admit it in front of people shouting anthropological discourse."

"Well," she replied, taking a deep breath, "there's this exhibition of photos and one of the photos is a photo of three naked black kids standing in the sea."

"Oh, so it's just about the nudity?" he said. "That seems a little bit sanctimonious."

"No no," she replied, "people at SOAS are absolutely fine with seeing foreigners naked. That's generally the main reason people choose to do Chinese, Japanese, or Swahili. The problem here is about consent."

"Oh, you mean that the library didn't consent to hosting this display?"

"No, the library is fine with it. But two of the kids in the photo are unaware that the photo is being taken."

"Well, didn't the photographer ask them afterwards?"

"Maybe, we don't know."

"That seems like a fairly small issue to get so worked up about."

"It's not just that," she sighed. "A lot of people believe that this photo portrays Africa as exotic and Africans as primitive savages who are in aberration to a western, civilized norm."

"Oh," he said, furrowing his brow with the effort of working out whether it was semantically possible for Africa to be orientalised. "But this could just as easily be a western image. I've got family holiday photos of me and my brothers paddling naked in Cornwall. Isn't that the same thing?"

"Nope," she said, "Your parents took those photos. Could you imagine how upset they would be if a complete stranger, let's say a photographer from China, took a photo of you, naked, as a child, and presented it back in China as a portrayal of how people live in the West?"

"I guess they'd want him to ask permission first," he mused, "but the thing is, that is how people live in the West. Kids go paddling naked in the sea. It's pretty much the same thing."

"But that one photo is mis-applied to an entire culture!", she fumed.

"I don't think the photographer is explicitly saying that all Africans live like this," he replied, "it's just a photo from a trip he was on, isn't it?"

"Yes, and that photo represents all of Africa as savage and primitive!"

"I'm not sure I agree," he said, "because there is more than one photo of all of Africa. And, there's this other photo of some white guys in the same poses. Doesn't that misrepresent all white guys?"

"That's exactly the point of that protest photo!" she exclaimed, exasperated. "Just because there's one photo of white SOAS students reading too much into things, that doesn't mean that all white SOAS students read too much into things."

He wasn't convinced. They generally do.

"I'm not entirely sure that this makes sense, or that the people protesting about this have thought things through properly," he opined. "Isn't this a bit of a non-issue?"

As an anthropologist, she was appalled. However, she had to concede that he had seen through the anthropologists' technique of using long words inaccurately as a smokescreen for unsubstantiated rage. Also, she found his post-anthropological metalogical dialogue discussion quite impressive and engaging.

"Come on," she suggested, "let's go have a beer in the JCR."

"Don't you mean the Malcolm X JCR?", he asked.

Their eyes met across a crowded room. It was nearly four o'clock and the faculty office was absolutely heaving with a panicked mess of human flesh and the heady air of resigned regret. He alone was confident. He'd been avoiding the cliché SOAS ideasplurge of unsolicited opinion by writing his dissertation in UCL, and in the last week alone, he'd had at least four people notice his ballin' post-colonial ethno-swag on Spotted: UCL library. Like every shallow superficial monstrosity at UCL, he firmly believed that body image self-esteem was a direct correlate of academic achievement, and so he was thoroughly unruffled as he hustled through the scrum in the faculty office.

He reached the desk, and was confronted by the gorgeous sight of the faculty office lady. Everybody wanted the faculty office lady; she could certainly teach you a thing or two. Korean politics, Uighur soundscapes, Kenyan coming of age rituals, Zulu kinship terms, the semantics of the Other, Japanese economic analysis, post-feminist discourses on the self-identifying trans-other community ... she had seen it all over the years. You just knew that nothing would shock her, however outlandish.

He'd been watching her work that stapler for weeks, and relished the way she stuck the tip of her tongue out in concentration as she firmly pressed her pen on the paper hard enough to create forms in triplicate. Fuck Turnitin, he was happy to put it in in person. He'd give it to her. He'd give it to her good. ISP? Incredible Sexual Prowess. Instant Satisfaction Power. Intermittent Softness Problems.

He whipped it out with a flourish, and her jaw dropped. In anticipation, he hoped.

"Oh my god," she gasped, clutching her RECEIVED stamp to her chest, "that's the biggest one I've ever seen."

"You're fucking right it is," he said, nodding smugly. "And I bet you'd love to take it right here, right now."

"Yeah, because that's my job. But I can't. It's too big for me to take." She sighed, regretfully. "This is way over the word limit."

"Well, you know what they say," he winked, "once you go ..."

"... over the word limit, you lose five percentage points of your grade, and that increases until you are automatically assigned zero if it reaches 13000 words."

His face fell. His dissertation was well over that number, and there was no time for serious editing. So, he did what any SOAS student would do - he angrily quoted Marx at her.

" 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'. I was able to write far more, and you need to read them."

"Yeah, well, 'the production of too many useful words,' " she retorted in kind, "results in too many useless people. You are one of those."

Defeated, he submitted his work, knowing that a big fat zero was coming his way. He felt bereft of purpose now that his dissertation was submitted, and no amount of Marx, ponchos, or police kettling would fill that void again. No matter what he did now, whatever job he took or however far he went from London, a little piece of SOAS that he'd never be able to shake off would forever be with him. A bit like chlamydia, really.