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Woo, sex!

Living, as we do, in such a sexually open and unrepressed society, pretty much every fetish is catered for in at least one medium or, more likely, all media. Heavily pregnant women, men dressed as babies, heavily pregnant women suckling men dressed as babies – images of whatever turns you on can be found in your newsagent, on your TV and on your computer at any time of the day, and you can enjoy them all in triple vision and, yes, I did only just resist writing ‘as a threesome’.

Now, some might query whether we really do live in such a sexually unrepressed society. After all, they might say, one need only glance at the local multiplex to disprove this claim: when a movie featuring sex is seen as potentially more damaging to children’s minds than one that shows non-stop, consequence-free violence and is rated accordingly, then that country still needs to readjust its value system out of the Savonarola setting in which it appears to be stuck.

Moreover, these perverted devil’s advocates could continue, when the ideal female body according to the celebrity world and the glossy magazine trade has about the same amount of body fat as an underfed child and the firm breasts of a Barbie doll, whose primary function is to have babies (‘IS JENNIFER ANISTON PREGNANT????’) but then to obliterate any physical sign on their body that they were ever pregnant as soon as they give birth (‘Nicole Kidman back in her jeans just three weeks after giving birth!’) in a manner not that dissimilar to societies that banish women to a special hut during menstruation (ew, women showing physical signs of being grown-up women that don’t involve men having sex with them – gross), that country cannot really then sneer at other cultures for their screwy attitudes to women and sex.

And finally, the sexual deviants could conclude, the fact that sex is still such an object of obsession, used to advertise all manner of unsexy products from chewing gum to movies starring someone called Ryan Reynolds, when the cover of a recent Vanity Fair magazine¹⁰ celebrating how brilliant TV is these days depicted four talented actresses lying apparently naked in bed (because that’s how people watch brilliant TV, you know: mid-Sapphic orgy), this suggests that modern society isn’t quite so unrepressed as it likes to think. Taking away the taboo of sex might have taken away the stigma but did not lessen the fascination. Ubiquity of sexual imagery and references is not quite the same as sexual sophistication. In fact, some could say it is the diametric opposite.

To these people I say, yeah, but have you seen the cover of GQ this week? Some chick from a TV show is wearing an unbuttoned men’s shirt – like she just had sex! And now can’t find her clothes! – and is pointing her finger at her mouth! I said, POINTING HER FINGER AT HER MOUTH! I wonder what else she’d like to put in her mouth, eh eh eh! Simone de Beauvoir WISHES she lived in such a sexually sophisticated time!

Yet, amazingly, despite all the talk about sex, images of sex and songs about sex that form the backdrop to most people’s daily lives (it is literally impossible to get from your front door to your office in the mornings without bumping up against at least seventeen references to sex. FACT), some people are not having their sexual needs slaked. This is not a proper state of affairs. After all, if there’s one thing we all learned from John Updike it’s that an author can get a surprising number of critical accolades if he writes with his penis. And if there’s one other thing we learned from Updike it’s that everyone should feel free to express their sexual needs and fantasies (especially if those fantasies are about how your neighbour’s wife clearly wants to bang you, even though you look more imp than human).

So it is time to attend to the needs of these poor, sexually uncatered-for people because at the moment they languish, their desires unsatisfied, their daily lives freighted down with the shaming awareness that their musings are not just uninteresting but downright unimaginable to even the most extreme of porn merchants. Pictures of women fucking furniture? Stories about men getting blow jobs from their dogs? Please – I can see such things from my front window. No, I’m talking about a far more specialist need. I’m talking about … sex tips for smart ladies.

Granted, just that phrase, ‘sex tips for smart ladies’, will not, in all probability, have you sighing with orgasmic pleasure. If anything, it will likely have you crossing your legs and covering your ears faster than if you heard your mother sighing with orgasmic pleasure.

But this phrase will not be used in its usual manner, that is, as a euphemism for ‘getting unnecessarily gynaecological’, ‘making women sound like morons’ or for a genre of literature that appears to exist solely to reassure men who use prostitutes that, really, they’re doing those gagging-for-it ladies a favour (feminism, you can go home now: your work here is done).

Part of the problem here is that while references to sex get more ubiquitous by the day, intelligent discussions about sex often feel as difficult to find as they were in the sixteenth century. Anything that claims to talk about female sexuality in a modern, smart and honest way is guaranteed to be brain-bleedingly obvious and crude (women masturbate! They have discharge! Tampon and penis traffic jams! Ha ha!), depressingly reductive and clichéd (men! They’re terrible at sex! Ha ha!) or will take an accepted truism and amp it up so that whatever nub of truth it once contained is now hidden beneath all the attention-seeking bells and whistles with which it has been decked. (‘Women love sex! Therefore, some women really love being paid for sex!’ as one recent trend in literature, which apparently existed solely to reassure men who use prostitutes that they’re doing women a favour, had it. Feminism, you can go home now, your work here is done.)

The most skating glance at Cosmopolitan magazine shows not just how little progress there has been in the last few decades when it comes to talking about women and sex, but how any progress that has been made has been in reverse gear. Oh, how starry-eyed that magazine once was! When Helen Gurley Brown assumed editorship of Cosmopolitan in 1965, she aimed to verbalise female sexual liberation and, for a time, she did just that. Now this once zeitgeisty publication runs features that range – as articles for women about sex generally do – from the inane to the obvious, e.g., ‘50 Great Things to do with your Breasts’ (‘Cook Dinner Topless, Apply a Little Tomato Sauce to your Nipple – Make Sure it’s not too Hot – and ask your Man if it’s Spicy Enough’) and ‘How Do I Have Phone Sex?’ (spoiler alert: you don’t have sex with your phone). I did not make those examples up.¹¹

This is the glossy magazine equivalent of the cinematic degeneration from Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant repartee to ‘romantic’ ‘comedies’ today that infantilise and humiliate women and star some actress who is down to her last couple of mill and so takes the pay cheque to present the most degrading portrayal possible of her gender, one that serves only to validate the assumptions of her male-dominated industry. Yes, it’s great that so many movies focus on women’s stories, and it’s great that magazines can talk about women’s sexuality so openly; unfortunately, many do so in such a manner that one wonders if the progress was a Trojan horse for misogyny.

Yet while there is literally endless talk about sex and depictions of sex in popular culture, there is next to nothing that treats it in a manner that might be useful to a halfway sentient person, and by sentient I mean a person who not only doesn’t fancy dunking her nipples in a jar of spaghetti sauce but requires warning to test the temperature.

Thus, it feels especially difficult to ask what would now be deemed a relatively basic-level sexual enquiry. How can one ask, at the age of twenty-seven, how to give a hand job when surely by that age you’ve had sex swinging from chandeliers, right? (A note about chandelier sex, by the way: watch out for the candles.)

This has led to the ridiculous situation of there being sex experts in pretty much every mainstream newspaper and magazine but a near dearth of any useful or even realistic advice because just to publish a letter from a reader asking for hand job tips would make the newspaper look as anachronistic as if it were published on a stone tablet. Far better to publish one asking what to do when one fantasises about having sex with his mum.¹² That’s so much more au courant.

Yet just because it feels like there are so few answers out there does not mean some women don’t still have questions. Which brings me to the night I went to a sex class.

Not very long ago, I attended an evening class in the sex shop at the end of my road. It was, as Snoopy would say, a dark and stormy night (lawyer’s note: Snoopy never went to a sex class). A dark and stormy Monday night, in fact. I’ll call the sex shop the Cunning Linguist, because that is pretty much the level of ingenuity the owners applied when naming their shop. Apparently, poor punning skills are not generally seen as an ominous reflection of abilities in other areas because the class was packed with twenty- and thirty-something women, all sitting amid the store’s rails of dildos and strap-ons, notebooks primly on their laps, ready to take notes and draw diagrams. Despite or, yes, because of the ubiquity of sex talk in the world, a lot of women still feel incredibly insecure about certain aspects of sex, and when I say that the class’s name was Blow Jobs to Blow the Mind!, you’ll have an idea of what one of those things generally is.¹³

Unfortunately, by the end of the two-hour class few questions were answered because the teacher and former porn actress, Madam Kim (‘You might have seen some of my work? No?’), was less interested in explaining the basics and a lot more interested in namedropping the extremely well-endowed porn stars she’d worked with (‘Dean Danners! Dean fucking Danners! None of you have heard of him? None?’), spinning theories about natural design (‘There’s a reason God made your arms long enough to reach the crotch. Think about it’) and describing in extraordinary detail a former colleague whose speciality was triple anal penetration, which seemed to me the complete opposite of what this class’s exclamation-marked name promised.

In defence of Madam Kim, part of the problem might have been the subject. Perhaps there are only so many ways to skin a cat, so to speak. Bless her, she tried to zhoosh things up a bit, coining all sorts of terms such as ‘the taco hold’, ‘the clam’ and ‘the envelope’ that we all dutifully wrote down in our notebooks, but, even from my vantage point in the front row, they did all look exactly the same, even after I’d moved aside the giant pots of lube that had previously been partially blocking my view. Madam Kim appeared to concede the point when she told us the best thing for us to do was to come up with our own tricks, which is surely like telling someone who has come over to stay the night to go to the bathroom and masturbate and leave you in peace.

At one point she paused, lost in wonderment at the memory of a former colleague’s ‘most beautiful asshole’, and one of my classmates took advantage of the moment to ask a question: ‘Um, when you’re giving a blow job, how do you stop yourself from feeling like you’re going to puke?’

Judging from the chorus of relieved murmurs around her, this was the question the majority of the class had given up their Monday night to have resolved.

Madam Kim looked like Frank Sinatra being asked to sing ‘My Way’ again, if Sinatra gave up crooning in his dotage and moved on to Italian opera.

‘Uh-huh, sure. Well, you just gotta keep telling yourself he loves it. That’s a real turn-on. HE LOVES IT. Thinking that really helps to open the throat,’ she replied, slipping over the surprisingly slender line that divides self-empowerment and self-abasement when it comes to discussion about female sexuality. And then she went back to talking about the time she gave Dean Danners’s twelve-inch cock a clam hold.

Of course, why anyone would trust the wisdom of someone who labours under the occupation name of ‘sexpert’ is a reasonable point. Yet seeing as depictions and discussions of sex in pop culture have so roundly failed to keep pace with sexual liberation, it would be useful if someone out there could offer sensible advice. Someone, ideally, who does not speak in the dreaded newspaper sexpert tone which generally makes me want to vomit without anything at all in my mouth: palpably hushed with self-conscious solemnity and po-faced faux maturity, rather like a teacher reading out a note in front of the class that is full of dirty words. ‘This is a very serious subject,’ the tone intimates. ‘And anyone who laughs is simply revealing their own immaturity.’ As an irritation factor, it is rivalled only by the Sexpert Minxy Byline Photo: ‘Yes,’ say those pursed lips, those lowered eyelids, ‘I’ve had A LOT of sex. See how wild and loose my hair is? It’s because I’ve just had sex. See how I’m holding this pen in my photo? Just imagine what else I could hold so masterfully. See how my shoulders are bare. That’s because I just had sex. You hear me? Sex.’

Again, speaking purely from a personal perspective, they act like the image of Boris Yeltsin squatting naked on a coffee table used to act on Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World: the ultimate schwing-killer.

Whether pop culture’s sniggering voyeurism and retrograde misogyny reflect most people’s attitude to sex is a bigger question. They encourage that tendency, certainly, as anyone who has ever, despite themselves, bought a tabloid because of a front page story involving a footballer and his alleged ‘mid-romp’ puking (thank you, Ashley Cole) knows. But at the risk of upsetting every tabloid journalist who makes a living out of assuming that the thought of other people having sex is the most mind-bogglingly shocking concept this side of the Higgs boson particle, I’m going to say that, ultimately, no, it isn’t, or no more than Pringles reflect the human need for regular nutrition.

Well, at last, all those sex questions you’ve always wondered about will be answered and you won’t have to suffer a Sex Therapist Tone, Minxy Photo or tales of triple anal penetration to hear them. You’re welcome!

* Hey, why doesn’t the guy ever offer to put on a condom? Why is it always my job to tell him? I mean, it goes ON HIM, right? Even in the rare film that admits, yes, condoms are worn during sex, it’s still the woman who has to prompt the man. It’s not like I’m expected to tell a man to shave in the morning or to do any of his other manly self-care tasks, and I don’t expect him to tell me to put in a tampon, or whatever. So why this craziness, why why why?

Easy: it’s a little-known fact among the female populace, but a very well-known one among the male populace, that men cannot get sexually transmitted diseases. That’s right: just as they cannot get pregnant, so they cannot get herpes, genital warts, hepatitis, gonorrhoea, syphilis, HIV (am I turning you on yet?) and so on. Men also cannot pass on any STDs because none of them – not one of them – has an STD.

Moreover, if a guy doesn’t want to get the woman pregnant, he literally won’t get her pregnant. Isn’t that amazing? He just transmits a thought down to his penis mid-sexual encounter that says, ‘Penis, listen to me: I want to get laid but I don’t want a baby. So don’t shoot out the good stuff.’ And it won’t! Ah, the wonders of science.

So seeing as sex is consequence-free for a guy, why would he sheathe the mini-me?

Oh wait, what’s that? I’m getting word from a medical-type person that this isn’t the case. They CAN get STDs too? And pass them on? And they can’t telepathically send thoughts to their penises? Huh. So why –? Because they can’t get pregnant? And therefore they don’t grow up thinking of sex as having any consequence other than an orgasm? And because many of them think that, well, the woman can sort it – there are pills, right? And she’s probably on the Pill anyway, right? And because many of them live in the mistaken belief that it is very hard for men to catch STDs from women? Or pass them on? Because such things don’t happen to guys like them? And because they just don’t want to wear a condom? And because some of them, in the moment (and possibly beyond), are selfish jerks who are just thinking about one thing right then and it ain’t their health, let alone her health? And maybe this should make the woman think twice whether this moron deserves the privilege of gazing upon her naked body seeing as he has so little interest in its physical wellbeing? Oh. OK.

Hope that clears it up for you.

* How long is it normal for a single woman to go without having sex? Gosh. Well. THAT’S embarrassing. How long are we talking here?

* Oh, um, I didn’t realise I’d have to say. Well, there was this guy last summer but his, um, didn’t really go in, um –

STOP! I was just kidding! Please, I beg you, stop making those gestures with your fingers!

Contrary to common perception, one’s attractiveness is not measured in how many people have seen you naked. It’s actually measured in the quality of your dance routine to ‘She’s Like the Wind’ by Patrick Swayze. Personally, I’m VERY attractive.

As to how long it’s normal to go without having sex, the thing to remind oneself here is that the human body is not a car. It doesn’t need regular top-ups of, um, a certain viscous liquid that comes out of a nozzle which is inserted – whoa horsey! Sorry about that, I got carried away with my own metaphor. Let’s just say, your body is not reliant on regular top-ups, and we’ll stop there. In fact, it can run on empty for years and years and years. I realise this goes against the wise words preached by Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller (‘Seriously, do you, like, service yourself ten times a day?’), but this is one of those rare occasions, maybe even the only occasion, on which one must disregard the Holy Book of Zoolander.

Sex is, yes, a natural physical impulse, and while it might be necessary for most people to have mental equilibrium and feel a sense of fulfilment, it’s not actually essential to maintain bodily functions.

And yet, just as the so-called sexual revolution may have opened the gates to talking about sex and yet not actually raised the levels of maturity and intelligence in how sex is discussed or viewed, so it took away the social stigma of sex happening beyond the bounds of wedlock but seemed to replace it with a stigma of sex not happening outside wedlock. In other words, retained the sexual obsession, just transferred it over to the other side. If The Scarlet Letter were written today, it would be about an attractive twenty-something woman who went for eighteen months and counting without getting laid. Stone her out of town, the repulsive deviant!

This is because while a man not having sex is endearingly, even relate-ably tragic, a woman not having sex is simply tragic, worryingly pitiable, probably physically and almost certainly psychologically deformed. From Sex and the City (‘If you don’t put something in there soon it will grow over,’ one character is warned after it transpires she hasn’t had sex since her divorce a handful of months ago) to pretty much every women’s magazine on your newsstand, the assumption is now that a woman has the freedom to go home with any of the similarly single chaps she meets at whatever dreary house party she finds herself at on a Saturday night, surely she will take advantage of that freedom.

Yet the freaky truth is that while, yes, women can now have casual sex without being pilloried, and yes, this is a very good and right and equal state of affairs, some women don’t want to. Some women don’t want to sleep with people they don’t know all that well, even if it is on offer to them. Just because there is cake available at the buffet doesn’t mean everyone is going to have a piece of the cake. It’s not that you don’t like cake (who doesn’t like cake?), it’s that you’re not hungry right now, or maybe you don’t like that flavour of cake and you’d rather wait to get home and fix yourself the kind of cake you know you do – OK, I’ll quit the metaphors now.

Thus, if you are a woman who doesn’t really enjoy casual sex and you are also rather picky when it comes to relationships, preferring to be with no one rather than just anyone as you’re holding out for if not the One then at least someone, and are also rather shy or maybe a little self-conscious, you may indeed find yourself going without sex for, well, quite a while. And you know what? That’s just fine. It’s only because there is still such an immature attitude about sex that anyone would even think of judging that. Why not worry about when was the last time you went down a waterslide? Or read the latest David Sedaris article? Oh that’s right, because it doesn’t involve getting – giggle – naked. Well, I guess it could, but only if you didn’t mind waterslide friction rash. And really liked David Sedaris.

But I get that sex has more of a frisson than waterslides (if not more friction). But instead of focusing on when you last had sex, or how many people you’ve had sex with, how about thinking instead, respectively, about when was the last time you had sex that was more good than awkward and how many people you had sex with who wouldn’t cause you to hide behind a rubbish skip if you saw them on the street. And then once you’ve calibrated those figures, go back to learning the dance moves to ‘She’s Like the Wind’.

* OK, I’ve had a one-night stand with someone in my office. How do I convey to him the next day that I soooo don’t care about what happened and yet am open to it happening again but, you know, sooooo don’t care about it? Really, I’ve actually already forgotten about it!

You should walk past his desk as often as possible wearing as little as you can get away with while talking loudly into your mobile about all the guys who’ve asked you out recently (note: make sure you turn off your mobile when you do this. It is very embarrassing if one’s phone rings while having a fake conversation).

Then wait for an occasion that will involve you and him and alcohol in the same room at the same time. In Britain, sexual advances can only be made under the forgiving umbrella of alcohol. That way, if rejection occurs on either side, before or after the encounter, you can both put the whole thing down to drunkenness. Christ, you didn’t think I really MEANT to sleep with you, did you? Ha ha! This is known as faux ironic seduction and it is the only form of seduction the British can understand or accept. But even under the alcohol umbrella, you absolutely must not make any overt sign or, God forbid, declaration that you like this person. Drunken passivity is the name of the game here.

So in short, the answer is to act like a combination of Cher in Clueless when she’s trying to attract a young man (‘Sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds boys of being naked, and then they think of sex!’), Chandler from Friends and Hugh Grant in any movie: overly flirtatious, self-defensively ironic, unironically useless. And if that tack doesn’t work, instead of questioning the methodology of not showing someone you like them in order to get them to like you, just say to your friends that ‘it wasn’t meant to be’ and have them repeat it back to you until you almost believe it. Better that than actually being honest with someone and risking humiliation, right? You can’t fight fate!

* Now I’ve had another one-night stand with someone in the office and I really don’t care about it. How best to proceed with maturity, dignity and professionalism?

Never talk to them again. The end.

* How come in sex scenes in movies the woman almost never takes off her bra? Have I been doing it wrong all this time?

And why doesn’t she ever have her period? That’s what I’ve always wondered. Or maybe that’s why Hollywood likes its actresses to be so thin: so the women never menstruate and can provide sex on tap.

Sex scenes are, of course, an essential part of pretty much every film, whether it’s one about such unerotic subjects as the sinking of a giant ship (Titanic) or Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in a relationship (Eyes Wide Shut). Yet once the man and this never menstruating woman do have sex, the actress – unless she’s Jamie Lee Curtis, circa 1984 – will refuse to take off her bra. So let’s get this straight: the actors need to have sex because that, apparently, turns audiences on, so obviously the female character can’t have her period or anything else that would impede the action. But actual breasts won’t be shown unless the actress gets paid an extra $10 million. Meaning that, at most, audiences will be watching people who in real life probably hate one another and are maybe married to other people dry hump one another in their underwear. I don’t know about you, but just talking about it is turning me on.

* Speaking of the cinema, what are you supposed to do if you go to the cinema on a first date and suddenly there’s a very graphic sex scene?

Don’t go to the cinema on your first date. Seriously, why on earth would you opt for an activity that involves the two of you sitting awkwardly next to one another in a darkened room, each afraid to laugh at the funny bits because you’re worried whether the other person will judge you, plus with added sex scene risk? And it’s not like you can pretend you need the loo during the sex scene because your date will either think you’re a massive prude or that you’ve just snuck off to, to paraphrase Zoolander again, service yourself. Neither of these are things anyone wants their date to think, mid-date or ever. So if you find yourself in this situation, watching a sex scene on a first date, you may as well just run out of the cinema screaming, spraying popcorn all around you.

* So is it possible to give a blow job without feeling like I’m going to vom?

Look, sometimes you’ll feel like you’re going to vom. Sometimes you’ll feel spectacularly bored. Sometimes you’ll hate it and wish you were doing literally anything else. And just occasionally, you will actually like it. Hey, it ain’t called a job for nothing.

* Blow jobs are easy because a guy is grateful for any oral action you give him down there. But what about hand jobs – how do you do those?

Why are you asking me? Ask the guy himself. He’s had literally decades of experience tugging at the thing. I’m sure he’d be happy to demonstrate.

* Why are blow jobs a given but cunnilingus is a special treat?

Because it’s harder to spell. And because you are sleeping with selfish jerks. Next!

* Why is sex, of all physical desires and behaviours, the one freighted with so much guilt and fascination in that order?

Yes, it is funny, that. Outside my window I can see Richard Dawkins, bless him, waggling his fists and bellowing, ‘It’s because of religion! It’s because religion freighted down sex with so much guilt and fear out of men’s paranoia about the paternity of their children and out of a way to control the populace! And they did this so effectively that even today, even people who haven’t been in a religious building since their parents made them go through the traditional infant rites to placate the grandparents feel it too! Arg! Must! Get! Angry! On! TV! Again! Soon!’

But just before I slam down that window I lean out and shout, ‘Oi! Dawkins! You’ve only got it half right! You’ve forgotten the American Pie factor! And a man of your intelligence, too. Sheesh!’

The American Pie factor – named in honour of the film, mind, and not the song – is the deeply embedded belief that sex proves one is a grown-up, one is desirable and one is cool. Of course, in that film the characters were eighteen whereas the large majority of the populace is not. In fact, the vast majority is older than eighteen. Nonetheless, their attitude to sex is not much more mature than that of the young chaps in that film.

So when you find yourself stuck in the dentist’s waiting room and gazing upon the cover of another men’s magazine in which an actress promotes her latest lame movie in that time-immemorial manner – posing in a pair of bikini bottoms while twisting up her T-shirt and talking about how much she loves freaky sex and how empowered she feels – ponder upon a parallel universe in which a different physical action other than sex was fetishised. Like, oh, let’s say, defecation.

Movies would be censored for having too many bathroom scenes (with extra parental guidance urged for actual shots of the toilet); underground orgy parties would feature laxatives and excellent plumbing, and God only knows what the fetish gear would look like. Presumably chaps would still work. And pity the Catholic priests! The terrible bowel troubles they would suffer due to their mistaken belief that God has forbidden them to defecate. Some of them, somehow, would learn to twist their internal organs into such a way so as to adhere to this inhuman commandment, but many, many others would secretly try to find outlets to relieve their urges, outlets that would offend God far more than simply using the toilet.

The point of this little segue is not to promote coprophilia, but to point out how weird and, frankly, retrograde an obsession with sex is. To paraphrase the oracle on the subject, George Michael, yes it’s natural, yes it’s good, not everybody does it but everybody should. But, honestly, world, get over it. It’s an obsession that ultimately causes pain to millions and millions and millions of others. It feeds into religions’ cruel and weird fetishisation of it which then can damage its followers. It encourages the condescension of grown adults by pop culture. And finally, it leads inexorably, unavoidably to the Sex Therapist’s Tone. So for all our sakes, grow up.

* So I’m about to sleep with a new gentleman caller for the first time. Should I go get a Brazilian wax?

Well, I don’t really know. Is your gentleman caller a paedophile? A porn merchant? If so, then the state of your pubic hair is really the least of your problems. If not, no. So in short, the answer, in all scenarios, is no.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of ladies’ pubic hair, without, hopefully, finding anything nitty or, indeed, gritty in there, let us first get a grasp on the linguistics of the subject while struggling, ever so diligently, not to make any ‘cunning linguist’ jokes. I leave that to my local sex shop.

The bikini wax is, as its Ronseal-does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin name suggests, a wax around the sides so that one can go to the beach without sparking too many comparisons to Grendel’s mother.

The Brazilian is a very extreme bikini wax, leaving one with just a mere centre line of pubic hair which some people insist on referring to as ‘the landing strip’ which in turn suggests that they only do missionary position.

And then finally, there’s the full Brazilian, where absolutely everything is removed. This is also occasionally known as ‘the Hollywood’, which tells you everything you need to know about that town: it insistently remakes foreign products with American dialogue and it prefers its women to resemble Barbie.

Now, I am very much of the belief that, as long as it’s legal, a woman should be allowed to do pretty much anything if it makes her feel happy and confident in herself and, yes, that does include the styling of her pubic hair. What she should not do, however, is feel pressurised to torture her genitals because she assumes that is what sexual partners and society itself expects of her. Yet at some unspecified point over the past twenty years, pubic hairlessness became a shorthand for mainstream female sexiness. Once women with hairless vaginas were something one saw on cards in public phone boxes. Now such a thought is as outmoded as the phone boxes themselves. If anything had to cross over from the porn industry, I wish it had been the commendably straightforward movie plots (‘I’m here to fix your photocopier.’ ‘Great!’) but, sadly, it turned out to be pouring hot wax around one’s labia and ripping out the hair. Oh well.

Look, I am as susceptible to the daftest fashions as the next person who has a subscription to multiple fashion magazines and I accept that fashions and expectations change, even in the pubic hair industry, as such a thing does indeed seem to exist.

But the advocation of the Brazilian wax and in particular the Hollywood is where I throw down my copy of Sunday Times Style, sell my flat and move to a mud hut in the Hebrides and spend my days carving recorders out of twigs and playing ‘Annie’s Song’ to passers-by. There is nothing fashionable about following a trend that is derived so wholesale from the porn industry, nor is there anything trendy in encouraging gentlemen callers to think of it as both sexy and a given.

I never thought about Brazilian waxes much when I lived in London in my twenties. In fact, I thought the only people who had them were crazy-eyed trophy wives who were forced to submit their bodies to all manner of indignities so as to stop their piggy-eyed husband from shagging the sloaney nanny too often. This is because I believed – and still believe – that the only kind of people who dislike signs of female sexual maturity are ridiculous, repulsive people. Here’s a slogan to embroider on a pillow on a rainy Sunday: sexual maturity is an attractive quality in an adult.

When I moved to Manhattan in my thirties, though, I could barely move without some white-coated woman trying to rip out all my pubic hair.

Every time I went for a bikini wax I had to have lengthy discussions explaining that, no, I did not want hot wax poured inside me, nor did I want to return home afterwards with my knickers full of blood as though I’d just had a backstreet abortion. The beauticians looked at me as though I were a wholesome German hippy, explaining why I brush my teeth with a leaf and plait my underarm hair.

I did think for a much longer time than I ever expected to muse upon the state of my pubic hair whether it is hypocritical for me to be disgusted by the rise of Brazilian waxes (THE RISE OF THE BRAZILIAN WAXES: now there’s a horror movie I’d like to see, if only for the poster) and yet get a bikini wax before any occasion that necessitated me wearing a swimsuit in public, and I decided that maybe it is, a little, but not truly. My objection to the Brazilian is that it is such a weird combination of the aesthetics of porn and paedophilia and it encapsulates so many of the very wrong ideas that exist about women, sexuality and sexiness. Bikini waxes, for me at least, have nothing to do with sex. They are about not wanting to flash my pubes on the beach, because while there are some things I don’t mind sharing with the public (my pubic hair care, apparently), my actual pubic hair is not one of them. A bikini wax is about, at the very least, privacy. Tidiness, too, like brushing my hair (on my head, that is.) And for the record, I’m not all that keen on seeing men’s pubic hair creeping out of those tiny Speedos on the beach. I am an equal opportunities prude.

Brazilians are a whole different pubic hair ballgame.

‘You really should try it,’ said the New York beautician, frustrated again in her pursuit to pour hot wax around my labia, ‘your boyfriend will love it.’

‘If he did, he would not be my boyfriend much longer,’ I huffed, a retort that perhaps would have carried a bit more heft if I wasn’t at that point lying prone on a table wearing paper knickers.

Why any woman would sleep with a man who likes their women to resemble porn stars or pre-pubescents is just one of the great mysteries of the modern bedroom, along with why is it called a one-night stand as surely some people must still do it lying down.

It is so obvious that impossibly high heels are nothing but a modern-day version of foot binding and the normalisation of Brazilian and Hollywood waxes is the twenty-first-century western version of genital mutilation that it feels incredible that this even needs to be said. No, Brazilian waxes do not involve a clitoridectomy and destroy any chance of a woman experiencing sexual pleasure (although awareness that one is sleeping with a man who likes his ladies to have childlike genitals might kill the buzz a little). But they do involve pouring hot wax all over a woman’s vagina and ripping out her hair in order to turn on a man who has presumably spent at least 89 per cent of his life wanking over porn.

When I ask my New York female friends – smart, funny, seemingly normal women – who do this to themselves on a monthly basis why on earth they bother, they always give the same two answers:

1 ‘It’s because then he goes down on me more often. I mean, there is a lot of hair down there so it’s only fair.’

2 ‘Because it gives me sexual confidence.’

Both of these are, clearly, nonsense. In regard to the first answer, any guy who says he is not giving a woman oral sex because she has pubic hair is a lazy selfish jerk who is making a phoney excuse for being all take and no give, or is a paedophile. Take your pick, ladies! Yes, hair is closer to the main dish on a woman than it is on a man but I can think of other things a woman has to contend with when giving oral sex that a man does not. So next time a guy says he’ll only go down on you if you get rid of all that hair say, ‘Sure! But only if you shove a massive dildo down your throat every time I go down on you, right? THANKS.’

As to the second point, if you need to rip out your own vaginal hair to feel confident, your vaginal hair is not the problem.

Pubic hair is proof of sexual maturity and if your partner finds that a turn-off, you should probably reconsider that partner.

So, in short, no, you do not have to have a Brazilian to get laid. In fact, any guy who likes a Brazilian shouldn’t be in your bed at all. So following that logic, having a Brazilian will actively prevent you from getting laid.

Don’t be mean to your genitals. After all, they are so nice to you.

¹⁰ May 2012.

¹¹ To be fair to Cosmopolitan, its, shall we say, limited concept of feminism does mirror that of the woman most associated with the magazine. While Brown commendably encouraged women to enjoy their self-sufficiency and sexuality, the emphasis on pleasing men was soon seen to undermine the point. By the nineties she was urging women who suffered from sexual harassment, including Anita Hill – who in a high-profile case accused Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas – to ‘just shut up. Leave the poor guy alone. Did it kill them?’

¹² ‘I sometimes thought I was having sex with my mother when I was in bed with my girlfriend. Is that normal?’, Guardian, 29 July 2011.

¹³ I am sure many men feel insecure about sex, too. However, despite having been to a sex class, I can only deal with one gender at a time. I’m vanilla like that.