Читать книгу What Makes Women Happy - Fay Weldon - Страница 24

Just fake. Happy, generous-minded women, not too hung up about emotional honesty, fake. Research tells us that when you do there is ‘activity in the part of the motor cortex that relates to the genitals, the amygdala, but not the deactivation of the cerebral cortex that occurs prior and after a genuine orgasm’. In other words you have to be happy to have an orgasm, but if you have an orgasm you will be happy.

Activate the positive. Deactivate the negative. That’s what it’s all about.

The more highly educated you are, the more likely you are to fake orgasm. I am not sure what we deduce from that. Is too much intellectual stimulation bad for the love life? Or does it just occur to clever women pretty soon that it’s only sensible to fake it?

Genuine orgasm experienced, acknowledged and stored away as one of the uncompromisingly good things in life, you will then no doubt leap out of bed and make breakfast, or squeeze orange juice or pour champagne or whatever your lifestyle, with the words ‘You are so clever’, or however you express enthusiasm, ringing in his – or her, of course, should you be a lesbian – ears.

If you are sensible you will do exactly the same if you’ve faked it, because half the pleasure of sex is being nice to the other person, and half is better than none, on the half-full, half-empty cup principle. Clever, judgemental, honourable people who feel deception is unworthy of them, who say, ‘But relationships must be based upon truth,’ are likely to be of the half-empty sort.

Remember you are not in pursuit of justice, you are seeking what makes women happy. You must catch it as it flies, and if it flies just out of reach, well, it was a nice sight while it lasted, wasn’t it?

Faking is kind to male partners of the new man kind, who like to think they have done their duty by you. Otherwise they too may become anxious and so less able to perform. The more the woman rates ‘performance’, the more likely the man is to wilt and fail. Do yourself and him a favour, sister: fake it. Then, who knows, as a reward for your kindness, sublime pleasure may creep up on you unawares.

There is a great confusion here between the pleasures of love and the pleasures of sex. Both can carry on along parallel tracks, never touching, to the end of time. Or one day, who’s to say, they may meet.

My friend Olivia, now 69, had an orgasm for the first time when she was 54 and nine years into her second marriage. It took her by surprise. But she said it was like learning to ride a bicycle: once you knew how to do it, you could do it all the time. She’s been clocking them up ever since. Life does not begin at 20. She was doing well enough without them, was earning a salary at that time as CEO of a media communications firm and had seemed to me to be living a full, even over-full, love life since I first met her when she was 18.

Her first marriage ended in scandal and divorce – her husband, a writer, naming seven co-respondents. (In those days of guilty and innocent, sexual infidelity had to be proved. Illicit couples had to be discovered in flagrante, stained sheets produced and so on, before the judge would grant a divorce.) The press went to town. Oddly enough, the naming and shaming did Olivia no harm in the business world. Even then, everyone liked anyone who had their name in the papers. And then the sixties were upon us and a great deal of random sexual activity went on as a matter of course, and after that divorce was not a matter of right or wrong but about the division of property. Meanwhile Olivia rose rocket-like through the corporate world and who is to say, if she had had more orgasms, she would have bothered to reach such heights? A touch of discontent in the night may be good for all of us. Sexual satisfaction, sensual repletion and the irrational sense of gratitude which tends to go with them, may be the last thing a career woman needs.

Most women, I suspect, are after true love, rather than orgasm, though they will put up with many stages on the way, from pure lust to pride assuaged to boredom endured. And even if true love is not on your agenda, it is always gratifying to stir it in others. If faking it helps, do it.