TONIGHT I went down the Western Bar to get away from the Fringe. The fleshpits around Bread Street - the infamous Pubic Triangle - are the only part of Edinburgh that remain untouched by the tentacles of Fest.
Here troubled women do every night what most Fringe performers do for a mere month; that is, bare their all to the perfect antipathy of a sparse and distracted audience. But when someone says or does something the stripper dislikes, the lady will sho
ut an obscenity and have the fellow ejected. Strippers have that power. Strippers don't hire their own venue. Strippers don't have to "keep the mood light". Strippers don't get reviewed. It must be better, on the whole, to be a stripper than a comic.
Last night I saw the Jim Rose Circus with my friend Joanne, and we reflected that, if you have an attractive naked woman masturbating on stage, and a dozen men nonetheless walk out, then something has surely gone a bit wrong. I mean, unless they were the sort of men who didn't like that sort of thing, but then they wouldn't have been at the Jim Rose Circus.
There is unexpected nakedness, or the promise of it, all over the Fringe this year. Watching the play In a Thousand Pieces we were told not to view the girls in knickers as being sexual (it was about immigrants being sexually enslaved). Well, I tried, but the sexual slavery was just narrative, albeit a stark and important one. The girls in knickers, on the other hand, were a reality.
I maintain that no context, no application of art or politics, will ever persuade the average male to look at a girl in her knickers on stage and think anything other than "mmm, a girl in knickers". I'm sorry, but it's true. To believe otherwise you would have to be a delusional socialist, trying to talk a girl out of her knickers.
Which reminds me of the first time I performed at the Fringe, in 1992. Back then, even mentioning naked women in a comedy set would have you branded a Thatcherite rapist. But in the Teviot Wine Bar, then an open mic venue, people didn't just walk out when they were offended; they threw bottles at the acts without any sense of decorum at all. So all hail 16 years of progress. In 16 more we may all have the same rights as strippers.
Liam Mullone: In A Dead Man's Hat is at Gilded Balloon Teviot until 25 August, today 6:30pm. 