Stephen Bayley on cars and sex, at 5x15

Add this video
to your playlist

Stephen Bayley on cars and sex, at 5x15

28 Oct 2010

Speakers: Stephen Bayley

Why now?

Cars have long been described as symbols of, or indeed replacements for, masculine sexuality. Now watch design guru Stephen Bayley explain exactly why. Spraying out a score of cultural references - amongst them Francis Picabia, John Steinbeck, James Dean, Roland Barthes, the Beach Boys, medieval religious architecture and a curvaceous TV presenter called Dagmar - Bayley looks at the curious relationship between cars and sex.

He talks of jazz musician Roy Brown Jr who designed the disastrous Ford Edsel, and what, after Ford executives were confounded enough by the car's commercial failure to gather together a focus group of consumers, get them to clinics and put them under hypnosis, turned out to be the surprising problem. Bayley also talks of the 'phallomorphic' Jaguar E-type, and how revving up your car outside a US high school came to be known as the 'mating call of the arsehole'. Whether you're a petrol head or just a learner, this is a hugely engaging talk.

Summary

Bayley begins his talk with a confession that, “not for the first time,” he had “totally misunderstood the brief,” and would be spending his fifteen minutes talking about his love of cars, rather than the act of viewing, as intended. Bayley then expands upon the symbolism, sexuality and “whole new worlds of fabulous opportunity” inherent in these “gasoline buggies”. From their invention as a means of escaping the “mind-crushing tedium of life on a Midwest farm,” to the Beach Boys and their vision of Californian perfection, Bayley explains how cars have always been about so much more than locomotive functionality. He quotes Barthes in saying that, "Cars today are our cathedrals," in that they are “made by anonymous craftsmen, but recognised everywhere for their extraordinary symbolic force.” To Bayley, quoting Tom Wolfe, they represent “freedom, style, sex, power, motion, colour - everything”.