Headhunters

We just got back from a well-deserved holiday-ette in New Zealand's Deep North, somewhere around Whangarei, where we stayed with our good friends Christopher and Robert on their estate - converted woolshed, actually - in the middle of nowhere surrounded by acres of exotic forests. A few days of indulgences of the foodie and imbibing kind with little in the way of distractions such as TV or radio or newspapers or internet.
I did do some reading, a novel called "Headhunters" by John King. I didn't expect much in terms of literary quality, in-depth characterisations and spellbinding plotlines, and I wasn't disappointed, but it was a mildly interesting and occasionally funny insight on how the other half lives - as in straight urban working class male with nothing but booze, soccer and birds on the brain. I presume it's the demographic for magazines like Loaded and there was certainly nothing metrosexual about the lads. If I were to let my queer eye roam over their lives I would certainly encourage them to have more actual sex with women rather than with their palm, but there's nothing new in the observation that males have more sex using their imagination rather than their genitals.
The story sort of wandered all over the place and after the initial interesting premise of a "Sex Division" where men score points according to what they got their sex partners to perform on them, it fizzled after not many pages as only one of the contestants was any good in the bird scoring department. And even he, Carter, the Unstoppable Sex Machine, never got it on with anyone more interesting than slappers "who have been servicing three men a week for the last 10 years".
I suspect a gay version of the "Sex Division" wouldn't work very well competition-wise, because it would be too easy for everybody involved, despite no handbags for easy point-scoring!
Still, it was interesting to read how straights and I really live in parallel universes and I thank the godess every night I wasn't born straight.

A female review of the book is here.