Can we all just admit that “erotic watches” are cringeworthy and embarrassing?

Luke Benedictus

Some chapters of our sexual lives are best left behind – so why aren’t erotic watches dead and buried?  This question sprung to mind last week after reports of Conor McGregor’s latest watch purchase that we wrote about here. In case you missed it, one of the pieces the UFC fighter bought was the Jacob & Co Rasputin Diamond Erotic Minute Repeater Watch, a $1.5m USD timepiece smothered with nearly 30 carats worth of sparklers over the case and dial.  Above the blue skeltonised hands, two swans gaze lovingly each other’s eyes until this innocent pastoral scene gets an X-rated twist. If you lightly press the slider protruding from the left side of the case, a secret compartment on the dial opens to offer a glimpse of a woman in black stockings being pleasured by her lover from behind.

How to make sense of this baffling object? It’s hilariously tacky, of course, and about as erotic as having a migraine on a bus. But there must be something more going on here to have persuaded The Notorious to fork out over a million bucks.

Maybe there’s something about the clandestine nature of the thrill? The sudden exposure of the hidden compartment to reveal the nudity within…

And I kind of get that. Back when I was a kid, my mate George and I used to ride our bikes to the grounds of a local factory purely to squint through the keyhole in the door of the caretaker’s office. Through that tiny peep-hole we could see a topless centrefold on the wall of a buxom goddess in turquoise bikini bottoms. That poster left an indelible memory. Peeping through that keyhole was at once naughty, taboo and wildly exciting in ways that we didn’t yet truly comprehend. After all, we were only nine years old.

 

 

But I’m desperately groping about for answers here. Because it seem pretty mind-blowing to me that wildly expensive timepieces displaying “secret” sex scenes are still even made in the modern world.  Decadence has never looked so lame.

Nevertheless, they continue to exist. Blancpain – the justly revered brand that made the very first dive watch – has knocked out a few dress watches whose classical dials conceal some mighty pervy casebacks. The price-tags for some of these one-off custom pieces are believed to fetch up to CHF1 million.

Similarly Antiquorum revealed a specially commissioned Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso à Eclipses where, if you spin the wheel on the outside of the case, the dial shutters open to reveal some sexy antics. But until I saw McGregor’s new acquisition, I assumed these watches were no longer made.

 

I don’t blame Blancpain and co for taking the commissions to make these watches. After all, I’d also struggle to resist taking advantage of some puerile halfwit with considerably more money than sense. No, what puzzles me is why anyone would ever think that buying a watch like this is a remotely good idea.

I appreciate there’s a long tradition of erotic art. Since man fashioned the very first drawing instrument, he’s regularly used it to depict sexual imagery. Archaeology has long revealed sculptures and artworks of graphic carnal exploits going back to practically the dawn of civilisation.

But such ancient erotica was surely designed, in part at least, for purposes of titillation. Today we live in a very different world. Anyone in search of visual stimulation can, I understand, now find a galaxy of material online. But if erotic watches no longer have a “functional” use, well, I actually find them even more moronic.

Bearing in mind how expensive they are, one has to consider the potential clientele. These will be men – and, yes, I do assume they’re men – who must be diabolically wealthy. McGregor is, of course, a sporting superstar, but otherwise you’d have to speculate these customers are big-hitting executives in high-paying fields like finance or law.

Are they motivated by the thrill of transgression? The idea of public virtue / private vice? That while addressing a boardroom full of corporates, hidden beneath the cuff of their business shirt is a mildly saucy picture of a couple getting it on? If so, it’s an act that’s about as subversive and dangerous as opening a milk carton from the wrong side.

The other possibility is that a salacious engraving constitutes a “talking point” of sorts. But this is equally depressing. Picture the following scene: “Psssst!” says the managing director to his head of accounts as he removes his watch with a conspiratorial snigger. “Get a load of this…”

Suffice to say, this is not dignified behaviour. Sharing mucky pictures is the sort of thing that happens behind the bike sheds when you’re 13 years old and coughing your way through your first cigarette.

Yet the thing I find most objectionable is that these pieces feed into that old assumption that watches are ultimately “boys’ toys”. My problem with that notion is partly that it’s dated, sexist and just plain wrong – I know plenty of women who enjoy nice watches. But it’s also such a divisive way to look at timepieces that sets out to exclude and deny.

Erotic watches inadvertently widen that schism. Don’t get me wrong, back when I was nine, George and I would’ve thought they were hilarious and edgy, too. But then we’d have grown up and realised that, in fact, the only thing that’s remotely obscene about them is their price-tag.