Rowan Pelling: Quit moaning and get your sexual satisfaction softly

Do you make too much noise when you bump and grind? Photo / Thinkstock

Opinion

When you are one of five siblings growing up in a cottage with thin walls, you learn to conduct certain scenarios with the rigour of a Trappist monk.

Try bringing a boyfriend home for the weekend when your little sister - 11 years your junior - has appointed herself Chief Inspector of the Sex Police. You learn to kiss without squelching and to get intimate so slowly, you might as well be doing Tai Chi. I can only presume that Gemma Wale, of Small Heath, Birmingham, never underwent that kind of close family scrutiny.

She has just been jailed for breaching the terms of her Asbo by making "loud sex noises" in the small hours of January 29. One irate neighbour said: "Gemma started screaming and shouting whilst having sex, which woke us up. This lasted 10 minutes."

Just the 10 minutes, then? It seems to me the woken sleepers were let off lightly. I once had a strapping young neighbour whose girlfriend had an orchestral range of appreciation and whose exploits ensured his headboard was hammering into our partition for half the night. The effects were so dampening to ardour on our side of the wall that we thought about abandoning the pursuit altogether and taking up crochet instead. For loud sex is not just disruptive, it's the cruellest form of bragging. The message transmitted to those close by is: "Our coming together is so beautiful and ecstatic, it transcends your claim to dreary old sleep."

No erotic vocalisation is as unkind, or long-remembered, as that suffered during undergraduate days - and no audience as vulnerable as the hormonal mass of virgins for whom sexual fulfilment is yet as mythical as Atlantis.

A friend recalls the Cambridge contemporary who pleasured his librarian girlfriend so deafeningly that a staircase neighbour left the following note pinned to his door: "You may be enjoying your sex life, others aren't. Keep it DOWN." Unfortunately the perpetrator wasn't chastened so much as proud that the note's author lived a whole two floors above him.

But then, as Ms Wale's neighbours have discovered, corking a screamer can be a Herculean task. One old pal swears by timing the offending act, from first moan to climactic howl of rapture, and then slipping a note under the offender's door that reads: "Congratulations! You lasted 14 minutes and registered 95 decibels - roughly the same volume as a French horn."

Another friend was bedevilled by a neighbour in a hotel who kept beseeching his inamorata: "Show me your po-po, show me your po-po!" After half an hour, he was about to intervene when he was beaten to it by a still more irate guest, who yelled: "Just show him your damn po-po and we can all get some sleep!"

My worst memory of intrusive rumpy-pumpy came courtesy of a woman in a Parisian hotel, who yelped and groaned for six solid hours. I nearly phoned emergency services, bearing in mind the Seattle woman from the reality series Sex Sent Me to ER, who "suffered" a three-hour orgasm. In Paris, however, it seemed likely that she might be in the running for the Legion d'Honneur for such effusive copulation.

In such circumstances, it's restorative to bear in mind Meg Ryan's skilful faking of an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. She who moans loudest generally moans most fraudulently. Perhaps then it's as well that our great national institutions (boarding schools, the Armed Forces and HM prisons) have trained inmates to reach the heights of pleasure in tremulous silence.

Many lovers are so mortified that anyone in a 10-mile radius might overhear their lovemaking, they swaddle metal bedsteads in towels to prevent unseemly squeaking. They know discretion in love spares the hearts of the lovelorn, and is more likely to be genuine too.