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ОглавлениеRule Number 1 Refuse to Have No Strings Attached Sex
You need this rule if you …
• Have lots of No Strings Attached (NSA) sex but it doesn’t make you particularly happy.
• Feel crap when a guy completely loses interest after sex.
• Always say yes because you:
• don’t want to let them down
• think they might like you more if you do
• think it’s your ‘job’, as a single woman, to do it
• figure ‘better something than nothing’
• Are afraid of appearing demanding if you get attached.
• Want to show you’re a tough cookie and a modern woman and you are sure this is the way.
• Have a number in your head you’d like to get to.
• Want a relationship but have got into the habit of ‘shag first, think later’.
Goes well with …
• Dwell on Your Sense of Self
• Do Something Lofty
• Do Not Pursue
Lucy, 33, was out on the town with her friend Karen, 29. They met two guys, and it wasn’t clear at first who fancied who. Soon it became clear that both the guys fancied Karen. But Karen wasn’t up for it with either of them – one was downright unattractive, let’s call him Bill, and the hotter one, let’s call him Bob, didn’t do it for her either. When Lucy, who had been single for two years and felt insecure about her attractiveness, asked Karen if she’d mind if she took Bob home with her, Karen gave her the thumbs up. ‘But don’t expect anything,’ she called after Lucy as she got into Bob’s BMW. Karen worried about Lucy when she did this kind of thing, since she always wound up hurt or with a sense of self-loathing.
What happened next …
Lo and behold, the next day Lucy rang Karen to talk about Bob, who had not made much effort to show he liked Lucy either in the bar or after sex. Lucy knew he wasn’t a candidate – he was good looking but a typical sports-car-owning chump and none too bright. She knew she wasn’t supposed to have had any expectations, or to have developed any. And, like a ‘good’ girl, she’d made it clear to him the night before that it was a one-off. All the same, like a ‘bad’ girl, she’d developed expectations since they’d shagged. And now she felt rejected, angry with herself for doing this again, used and a tiny bit abused. What for? Because she was horny and it would be fun, she’d thought, but since he hadn’t been that into her, the sex hadn’t been warm or nice or horn-satisfying; it had been alienating and detached instead. She’d felt compelled to do it even though she knew it would be like that, she confessed to Karen.
What does ‘no strings’ sex really mean?
Technically, it means both parties walk away from the sack unfettered by commitment and, supposedly, any desire to commit. It means that you can sleep with lots of people at once. It means you don’t have to be burdened. In reality, it means that guys don’t have to do anything boring like call the girl or seem interested in dating her (or date her) after sex. As a woman, it means that you’d better not show attachment, need or expectation after sex – if you do, you’ve broken the rules and you have to go to your room for punishment. Bad girl. Above all, it’s a term that goes hand in hand with ‘fuck-buddy’ and ‘friends with benefits’, and that often doesn’t bear much relationship to reality – at least, reality as it is for women. Who are, of course, half the heterosexual sexual equation.
Why it’s a hoax
The drive to undersell our needs in love and in bed is amazingly strong. Recently a friendship of mine with a suddenly single man turned flirty. I suggested, as did he, that some sex could be fun, but refused to guarantee I would do it without feelings. ‘If we do it, it’ll have to be on my terms,’ he said. ‘What are they?’ I asked hopefully – rather relishing the prospect of something as-yet unnamed with him. ‘No strings,’ he replied curtly, accessing with instinctive ease that cold, sibilant rule that enables men (and women) to forbid the natural by-product of sex and one of its great joys – actual intimacy – to come anywhere near the act. Great for men, perhaps, to whom ridiculous amounts of research has attributed a desire for quantity over quality in sex, as well as a lower amount of oxytocin, the post-sex attachment hormone. But not great for me; or for most women. Post-Man Diet, I refused to recant this rule, and we didn’t end up doing anything. But there have been many times when my mind has returned to his offer. Even though I know I’d have hated it when, after we’d slept together, he’d inevitably have boasted about other conquests in front of me, and that I’d have to present this chipper, tough facade so that he didn’t think, God forbid, I’d felt a string of attachment.
The audacious Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), rages wonderfully against the injustice of a slightly different type of sexual servitude in 1792. Lambasting her infuriating contemporary, she writes:
‘Rousseau declares that a woman should […] be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself.’
She’s right: being ready to indulge male predilections for NSA sex, for fear of not being wanted at all, makes willing slaves of us. The Man Diet should ignite a resistance to being available for whenever a man ‘chooses to relax himself’ (for all intents and purposes).
Put those feelings away: why NSA is worse for women
The ‘no strings’ proclamation before sex is far more evil than it might sound. It slams the door not just on the here and now – as in, this sex will be about bodies only, so don’t you even think about enjoying it too much in your head or heart – but on the whole question of possibility and potential. It says: ‘You will only ever be about sex, because I don’t fancy you enough to think about anything else, and I will never fancy you enough to think about anything else.’ This is an immensely bitter pill to swallow for women (and perhaps some men), and yet so many of us – myself included – have swallowed it numerous times.
That a lot of no-strings sex is bad for women is widely acknowledged by the psychological community. Dr Cecilia d’Felice, clinical psychologist, says: ‘In studies we have found what you might expect: that if you offer men opportunistic sex, most of the time they’ll take it. If you offer women opportunistic sex, most of the time they won’t. There’s a huge difference in the programming of risk-taking between men and women. Women are biologically more risk averse for obvious reasons.’
Relationships therapist Val Sampson says women are hardwired to be quite choosy about who we have sex with. ‘So even if women say they’re fine with no-strings sex, it’s not necessarily the case. If you become just a vessel a lot of men have sex in, you’re going against the grain. Whereas men can compartmentalise sex more easily, women feel a sense of being let down. All that potential they could use in a sexual act isn’t being used – it’s actually being rejected and this triggers a feeling of “What am I worth?” She may end up feeling like a hooker but get no money at the end of it.’
No-strings sex and its spirit of female denial and stagnation is lambasted deliciously by Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch in 1970. In her forward to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition, she lists all the sexual freedoms women can now enjoy since the book was first published. ‘What else could women want?’ she asks dangerously. ‘Freedom, that’s what … Freedom from self-consciousness. Freedom from the duty of sexual stimulation of jaded male appetite, for which no breast ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever long enough … The argument in The Female Eunuch is still valid, for it holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality, which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances.’
Just say no … but why is it so hard?
For one, agreeing to no-strings sex is easy. All the terminology is laid out and ready to go: ‘fuck-buddy’, ‘friends with benefits’ and so on. And, as I said in the introduction, it masquerades as empowerment for women, whereby shagging like a man is what we do now because we can and, as ‘feminists’, we should.
But on a personal level, a deep fear of seeming needy has taken hold of women – the stereotype of the woman who encumbers her man and everyone around her with a bottomless pit of wanting and needing and insecurity has reached epic proportions, and floats tyrannously through our minds as we conduct ourselves sexually and romantically. Dr Janet Reibstein, Visiting Professor in Psychology at the University of Exeter and the author of a book reporting on what makes couples happy, observes: ‘It’s seen as somewhat shameful to say “I want to settle down.” The shame comes from admitting prioritising relationship over independence. If a woman says, “I don’t want to have sex with you because I want a relationship,” a man may respond with alarm: “uh-oh, she’s trying to capture me!”.’ Reibstein also thinks there’s a political accent to the NSA idea: ‘Settling down is not part of the feminist heritage. It was a mistake of the feminists of the 1970s, of which I was one, not to stress how important relationships are.’
After the escapade with Bob, I asked Lucy what motivates her to offer herself no-strings, when inevitably she’ll want strings. ‘Feelings are NOT ALLOWED,’ she told me over sushi. ‘Even though we wish they were. But since they’re not allowed, we don’t go with them. But we have them. And so we’re confused. And fragmented.’
Of Bob, she explained: ‘That was casual sex but it was fine because I didn’t have any expectations. The worst is when you take a guy home and have expectations. With this guy I didn’t cry. So that was a win. So I say empowered, but what I mean is that it just wasn’t a disaster.’
The rise of the NSA creed has its roots in a culture that has turned sex into an anecdotal accessory, a must-have store of experience, and a branded display of power, as determined by the status of the person you’ve shagged or the quantity of ‘shagees’. Sex is the social currency (it’s what people talk about most), sexualisation is the social and entertainment aesthetic (advertising, magazines, posters, cereal boxes, newspapers are a jamboree of limbs and post-baby, pre-summer, post-break-up bikini bodies), porn is the private backdrop (‘A Billion Wicked Thoughts’, as per the name of the recent massive study of internet porn by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam), and choice of prospective sexual partners is almost infinite, thanks to the internet. As usual, women’s bodies, preferably naked or near enough, are at the centre of this highly visual culture of hypersexuality.
Women and the rise of the one-night stand
Modern female one-night-standers are riding the wave started by the feminists of the 1970s, who wanted us to have sexual freedom and a chance to explore our sexual natures beyond the strictures and servitude of mid-century wifehood. But those feminists split into warring factions: crudely divided into the ‘sex-positive’ (those in favour of porn as a slice of the sexual freedom cake) and the ‘sex-negative’ (those who saw porn as degrading to women). For various reasons, such as having the extremely rich Hugh Hefner on side, the sex-positive, pro-porn group won out, and their influence evolved into what many girls and women today call feminism – i.e., stripping, shagging, ‘choosing’ to use their own bodies for public or pornographic enjoyment. This is a deeply simplistic account, but I think it’s essential to note that the NSA norm originated – however perversely or ironically – from the brains and hearts of some of the 20th century’s noblest feminists.
Unsurprisingly, one-night stands have risen sharply. According to the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, in 1990, 53 per cent of men and 79 per cent of women considered one-night stands to be wrong. Ten years later only a third of men and half of women held that view.
Teenagers – tomorrow’s adults – are leading the charge. Teen specialist Raychelle Lohmann notes in Psychology Today that high school relationships are being replaced by a hook-up culture, where no-strings pulling rules. They are to become the women for whom Natasha Walter says, ‘having many sexual partners without much emotional commitment is often seen as the most authentic way to behave’.
It’s not that this kind of sex has been digested wholly by society – Hollywood, for one, is not comfortable with it. That doesn’t mean it’s not obsessed with it. Consider three recent films whose protagonists begin with a seeming paradise of strings-free sex but end up choosing monogamy: No Strings Attached has Natalie Portman’s character coming round from a booty call mentality to a relationship; Hall Pass has Owen Wilson’s totty-ogling husband given free rein by his wife to go off with other women for a week, and Friends with Benefits stars Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake using each other for sex.
All these films want to show us that no-strings sex is not a good idea – unless it’s leading to love. It’s a nice sentiment, but by showing repeatedly that shagging for shagging’s sake is one way into a happy, romantic ending (after all, who wouldn’t want to steal the heart of Ashton Kutcher?), Hollywood is, as it’s always done, giving us a fairy tale that has very, very little to do with reality. (Unless, of course, you look like Mila Kunis or Natalie Portman.)
NSA sex: the reality
Inevitably, raunch culture has taken a toll on the way women see themselves in relation to sex. We are voracious seekers of answers to the question ‘Am I hot?’, and tend to seek validation externally rather than internally. I know that when I go out hunting down a man, or hoping to be hunted, I’m looking for the thrill of a compliment – not of my brains, but of my beauty, or more specifically, my sexual allure, as much as for intimacy.
So for many women (although certainly not all), that quaint old duo of sex and love has been decoupled, leaving us performing sex for sex’s sake in a mechanical vacuum with our inner sexual impressions, feelings and needs somewhere tucked under the carpet, away from the public and the male eye. Putting the two back on the same track, if not the same train, feels much better when your self-esteem has been worn down by a single spell. It also helps with raising the quality (i.e., human element), rather than the quantity of sexual contact.
The sense of numbness and dissatisfaction that women experience in casual encounters is palpable and ruinous. Lillian, 28, told me she actually weeps during casual sex, such is her feeling of disconnect.
‘The amount of times I’ve had sex and cried and the person hasn’t noticed … I’m so detached it’s bananas. I’ll cry, waiting for him to notice. The callousness and detachment you feel is astounding. Sometimes I feel that I have no other option to express myself.’
What NSA sex does is just that: clamps down on your options to express yourself. Things got so bad that Lillian had started on a sort of Man Diet of her own. When I had a coffee with her a few weeks after the crying confession, she said she was now asking herself, ‘Why should I sleep with someone?’ rather than ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ I shared the Man Diet’s ‘say no to NSA sex’ rule, suggesting that she should not be embarrassed to send NSA wannabes packing. And that if she chose only to have sex with men that were offering her what she clearly needed emotionally (i.e., some degree of familiarity and affection), she’d feel infinitely better overall. Nor would she be missing out on anything apart from the odd bout of cystitis. Whereas previously she’d been having sad sex to prove something – that she is desirable – she found that not having sex (for the moment) was the thing that actually made her feel desirable. After giving the Man Diet a go (she did ‘Refuse to Have NSA Sex alongside ‘Do Something Lofty’ and ‘Dwell on Your Sense of Self’), I’m proud to report that her days of sobbing mid-sex are over. She still hooks up with men she’s not attached to and vice-versa, but having recognised that for her there is something uniquely alienating in intercourse, she stops at your trusty old foreplay. She now seems so much more relaxed and happy. Go Man Diet!
Just as Lillian did, many women feel numb or detached during non-intimate sex. But luckily, her story shows that you can work on it and improve your emotional experience of sexual contact pretty quickly.
Like Lillian, Lisa, 31, is in dire need of the Man Diet. I include her story because it so perfectly – and woefully – captures that detachment the modern sexual woman needs to combat. Lisa told me that she has sex with her eyes closed because not being face to face with an actual person helps her remain thoroughly detached and tough throughout. The one time she did open her eyes – with a boyfriend – she saw him looking everywhere but at her, and promptly closed them again.
Wham bam
Lisa’s a lovely girl, very warm, clearly sensitive, and open. And yet, she says defiantly, as though having subconsciously taken on the male preference for ‘wham bam’ sex: ‘I’m not a big cuddler – especially if I don’t like the guy.’ Also she says she ‘loves’ rough sex. ‘Doggy style is my favourite position,’ she says, obedient again to male preferences. Why does she close her eyes, why doesn’t she like to cuddle? ‘Because it’s all about me. It’s my moment.’ If that was the case, you’d think she’d at least be getting some serious ‘me-time’ pleasure out of it, but Lisa has never orgasmed with a man. ‘The truth is, we’re playing the men’s game,’ she says. ‘They’ve got all the rules set up to suit them. We can fight it or match it – so I match it. I’m a postmodern feminist – I don’t think we need to be like men, we’re good as we are etc etc, but … with sex it’s different.’ And clearly, as women like Lisa and Lillian make abundantly clear, the man’s game of strings-free sex isn’t exactly a non-stop jig of healthy fun.
What they show, too, is how far women have internalised masculine sexual stereotypes, making them their own with a flick of the pseudo-feminist whip (and then, in the case of the more emotionally tuned-in, feeling lousy about it). As Germaine Greer puts it so well in The Female Eunuch: ‘Love-making has become another male skill, of which women are the judges.’
Natasha Walter’s excellent survey of contemporary female sexual culture, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, takes a searing look at women’s sexual mores and their context. One group of well-off, late-teen female students she interviewed spoke in hostile, competitive, mercenary and utterly soulless ways about sex:
‘I’m much more attracted to the guys who don’t give a shit,’
‘We were saying that one week we should go out and try to notch up as many lovers as we can, with the most variety possible – age, gender, jobs, backgrounds …’
They go on to cite their feeling of solidarity with Miranda in Sex and the City when she has to call her long list of past lovers after contracting an STD; they also admire Belle de Jour, the call girl, and other sex diarists as glamorous examples of non-committal, pornographically adventurous sex. Walter concludes: ‘Because they had so successfully subtracted emotion from their sex lives, these young women were perfectly in tune with the culture around them.’
These girls are probably a good deal younger than you and me – after all, they’re not even 20 yet. Perhaps their aggressive ‘I’m a shagger’ standpoint stems from the fact they’re not yet worried about settling down. But equally, I think it’s even more poignant that while they could be starry eyed and dreaming of ‘the one’, they’re setting themselves up as sexually liberated toughs for whom ‘no strings’ sex is the only sex. They’re the women of tomorrow.
The wrong kind of fun
The sex-mad, attachment-loathing students in Walter’s book seem more directly influenced by sexual imagery and sexual pressure than most of the professional women between 23 and 35 that I know (including myself). All the same, I have felt very driven by a particular notion of ‘fun’ attributed to and expected of the single woman. In fact, the word fun crops up a hell of a lot in relation to the no-strings sex single women are meant to be having lots and lots of. I remember in the early days of my current single spell somewhat shakily telling my friend Carol about an alcohol-drenched encounter with someone wholly inappropriate, and her replying: ‘Ah well, it’s just fun.’ Says Wendy, 31: ‘All my friends are pairing up so I do want to meet someone special. In the meantime … why not have fun?’ Or, as Ruth says: ‘People will constantly ask: “Why are you single?” You’re supposed to say: “I enjoy being single. I enjoy having unencumbered sex with strangers.”’
But all that pressure to have fun stops being fun and becomes more like an exhausting task. ‘[Sexual encounters with men] feel very achievement based,’ says my friend Molly, 27. Almost every woman I interviewed for this book used the words ‘tiring’ or ‘exhausting’ in relation to fun – whether it was in dating to the max, going out non-stop, or making the effort to appear fancy-free. ‘It’s exhausting being empowered,’ as my friend Michelle, 27, put it.
Bringing home the bacon
That mercenary, bedpost notch approach to men isn’t healthy and it doesn’t make most women particularly happy. But neither do a lot of things that seem (or are) fun at the time. Which is why, despite its seemingly obvious badness, I can relate perfectly well to the urge to ‘get the numbers up’. There’s something that seems empowering about it, like you’ve gone out hunting and have brought in several good pheasants that you can cook and share with your friends (what else is the post-shag narrative breakdown with your mates if not a triumphal communal meal, hosted by you?). There’s also the vague sense that you’re delivering one in the eye to those guys that think women always get all attached, needy and psychotic after sex. Needless to say, that’s a terrible reason to do something, not least because the only eye that’s getting something in it is yours, when you’ve slept with someone rubbish and he doesn’t even call. Delving deeper, I think some of us think that the more men you sleep with, the more attractive you must be. Enjoying the intense but often false intimacy that a sexual encounter provides is also a reason for accepting loads of NSA sex.
Note the bragging, bravado twang to the way I used to refer to hook-ups, before the Man Diet put me off that notchy approach: ‘bringing home the bacon’. It was tongue-in-cheek, but telling. With or without pork metaphors, friends often congratulate each other on numbers of men shagged or bagged. The presence of an alien pair of male shoes outside a flatmate’s bedroom door elicits back slapping the next day. A good friend of mine used to check in with me: ‘What’s your number [of sexual partners to date]?’ Still another would say: ‘I want to get to 35 before Christmas.’
I’m not just moaning here, or being holier than thou. This attitude towards sex was making me feel fragmented, anxious and doubtful about my worth. I’ve seen it have the same effect on other women. And because something as simple as swearing off no-strings sex made me feel about a thousand times better – even though I’ve slipped once or twice – I’m hoping it’ll do the same for you, via the Man Diet.
Sex and the single girl
The neon pink link between fun and the single woman was drawn with powerful clarity by Helen Gurley Brown, former editor of Cosmo, in her 1962 classic: Sex and the Single Girl. No social theory here – oh no. Just jaunty tips and the dos and don’ts of having affairs with married men; decorating your apartment in a man-friendly way; and workplaces where you’re more likely to meet men. Reprinted in 2003, Gurley Brown jauntily speaks of not needing a husband in your prime years (read: prettiest). Indeed, she says that men are more fun taken in large quantities than on their own.
To be fair, it’s a hilarious book, and very frank. It’s just not particularly helpful to imagine us all as this ‘glamour girl’ troupe of burnished affair-havers with cute apartments in Greenwich Village.
Today’s single woman and Sex and the City
Have single ladies changed much since the 1960s? Of course – back then, Germaine Greer and the other feminists of the 1970s hadn’t made their mark yet. Crucially, we are also more economically successful. And with more cash comes more consumption, and with more consumption, more devouring. Not just of shoes and houses, but of sex, too.
Thirty-plus years after Gurley Brown showed us how a single girl can live – in a little apartment in the Village, having the odd affair, going out to dances with her girlfriends and working as a secretary at a man-tastic barge company – Sex and the City came along. It far more powerfully stamped an idea on our brains and an image on our retinas of how the single life should look – it should revolve around sex and men, a powerful, glamorous professional life, and lots of fun like shopping and drinking. New York writer Ariel Levy, a lover of the show just like I am, calls it a consumerist vision of ‘vertiginous gobbling’ that shows sex as something to be eaten up just like Manolos, cocktails and handbags. So seductive is its twinkling montage of intelligent girl chat, cosmopolitans, sanitised sex, wonderful clothes, great bodies, clinking glasses, hot restaurants and – most importantly – happy endings, that it was hard not to desperately want all that.
‘I’ll have an order of sex with that cocktail, please.’
‘Gobbling’ is indeed a good word for the SATC vision of sex. Meg Daly, a so-called ‘third wave’ feminist and author, has talked about Samantha-style sex in terms of the ‘swaggering pleasure’ that comes from counting the bed-post notches, and the joy of boasting about sexual techniques. Daly seems just as drawn to sex for the bragging rights as the pleasure of the act itself.
Recall the back slaps, bedpost notching and ‘bringing home the bacon’ attitude among my friends – are we merely gobbling men and sex, too? Sometimes it feels like it. Which is why, before I started the Man Diet, I felt like I was carrying around so much extra empty emotional weight. Gobbling will do that to a girl.
Mr Big: the ultimate NSA male
It’s also worth mentioning how the concept of closure is vilified in SATC – turning all sex, ultimately, into the strings-free variety. Yes, the Mr Right idea is the forceful, steady line drawn through the entire series – dangled, played with, and ultimately accepted. But as Joanna Di Mattia put it in her essay, ‘What’s the Harm in Believing?’: ‘It is a deconstruction of the Mr Right myth that enables romance to continue without closure.’ Ultimately, Carrie can’t deal with the closure Aidan offers – before she breaks away entirely, she tries to rebel, albeit feebly, by wearing the engagement ring around her neck. And, of course, she breaks into hives when trying on a white, frilly wedding dress. Mr Big, on the other hand, is constantly and obviously Mr Right waiting to happen. His defining characteristic, of course, is that he never offers real commitment. He’s so evasive, so no-strings that he doesn’t even have a name. Of course, Carrie’s resistance to romantic closure serves an important structural purpose: it makes way for years of single gal fun that we get to ogle. The impression is that closure and commitment get in the way of having fun and being wild.
And his female equivalent: the impossible Samantha
Carrie was never my favourite. Samantha was (and is). For years I cited her as the torch-holding feminist on TV. She was the only woman on TV who didn’t fall for slushy romance, ever reveal a true needy nature, nor desire the typical fairy tale marriage story. All this while exhibiting gobsmacking sexual appetite, without ever feeling low, used or at sea. In more recent times, I still adore Samantha, but I don’t try to emulate her now, because I realise she’s too good to be true. Or rather, she’s just not true and trying to be her was really not good for me.
‘Some have explained Samantha as basically a gay man in women’s Versace.’
Almost unsurprisingly, there is an academic course offered as a tie-in to the show, called ‘Sex and the City and the Contemporary Woman’. In the Samantha section of the syllabus, billed as ‘the sexual woman’, the first question posed is: ‘Is Samantha a liberated woman or a slut?’ What a wrong-headed binary to strap her into. The implication of this question is that, indeed, sexual profligacy alone will make you either a slut (I had hoped this old woman-hating notion was dying out) or ‘liberated’ (the point is that nowadays, liberation shouldn’t really have to do with how many penises enter your vagina – but, as per Walter and Levy, it has become an essential part of the definition). It gives a hell of a lot of credence – moral, social and political judgements are squeezed in between ‘slut’ and ‘liberated’ – to the act of sex. And to pop good old Sam in either category with any degree of earnestness is silly, once again betraying confusion about how to interpret the reality peddled by the show. Some have explained Samantha as the product of gay scriptwriters and producers on Sex and the City – that she is basically a gay man in woman’s Versace. Whatever – there are women writers too on the show, and she’s a fabulous character. It’s just that to see hers as an achievable type of lifestyle, parcelled in a box of imperturbable self-sufficiency, is to be deluded.
SATC: influential, or what?
Many of the women I spoke to said Sex and the City hadn’t influenced their actual way of behaving – and if they did identify with a character, few admitted it was Samantha (although one said ruefully she wanted to see herself as Carrie, but in reality she was probably more Samantha). But without doubt, SATC infiltrated female culture and its ideas of sex, fashion and urban lifestyle since it hit the air in 1998. One strong bit of research that explains why a mere TV show like SATC could actually impact the decisions women make – whether they admit it or not – was done by Albert Bandura, in 1977. He proposed Social Learning Theory, the idea that if you watch someone else do something, you can learn what rewards/consequences are attached to that behaviour (and thus if you should do it, how to do it). This research was innovative because Bandura found that watching a real person or a person on TV (as a character) doing something could be equally effective in observational learning. The different components of this ‘watch-and-learn’ model are Attention, Retention, Reproduction, Motivation. Your motivation reaches you through the rewards presented when you watched someone else do whatever behaviour.
According to Janet Kwok, who studies human development and education at Harvard, ‘Watching the ladies on Sex and the City find their happy endings despite participating in problematic behaviours was a large-scale social learning theory crisis, if we want to be dramatic. Their behaviour was easy to remember (Retention) and there were attractive rewards depicted (Motivation) without the potential consequences that might have been more representative of the viewers’ experiences.’
I’d add to Bandura’s theory and say that the fun of watching Sex and the City can be confused with the fun of actually doing what they do – i.e., have lots of no-strings, fun (if problematic, but ultimately brunch-analysed) sex. The problem is, while the SATC ladies proved to some extent that sex could result in the outcome most women desire (husband, kids, riches, happiness, success), we cannot always be assured of the same outcome. And our path to getting there will be all the rockier until we realise it’s not possible to be Samantha, either in numbers or approach. Or, for that matter, while we deny ourselves the right to bear strings.
The sex diarist: seductive mistresses of the strings-free shagathon
There’s another thing confusing our notion of ‘fun’ that is closer to home, perhaps, than the bars and bedrooms of Upper Manhattan. And that is the sex diarist, who romps the streets and clubs of London, and inhabits the pages of UK newspapers and the shelves of UK bookstores. I knew this culture of do-and-share a bit from the inside, since for one and a half years I was the Girl About Town dating columnist for thelondonpaper, a now-defunct but wildly popular evening freesheet. I was a novice, and at first I shared too much. People loved it when I did; all the same, I pulled back, feeling deeply awkward at the idea that everyone, from the Islamic extremist who threatened to kill me to my 12-year-old cousin, was reading about my exploits.
When I wasn’t enthralling the world with my numerous dates and hook-ups (of which a good few were, ahem, embellished), it was my job to depict a sort of glamorous lifestyle, a bit like Carrie. I was encouraged to namedrop cool bars and locations around town that made it sound like I had a big night out every night, never got tired, and was always getting into exciting scrapes. I created a world in which sexual adventure, romantic mishap and great nightlife flowed seamlessly together. I assume it was seductive – I stuck to it for a year and a half, after all, and people still fondly remember the column today.
But I was only a dating columnist. I was completely vanilla – even alongside the others on the same paper. My rivals were a different story. They were properly telling all – Catherine Townsend of the Independent was spilling the beans about the length and strength of her orgasms; Belle de Jour (real name: Brooke Magnanti, scientist) was setting the world alight with her stories of sex as a call girl.
Zoe Margolis’s book Girl with a One Track Mind, published under the pseudonym Abby Lee, set out to address the problem of prudishness. ‘My own friends appear quite happy to sit in a pub, swapping Sex and the City anecdotes and joking about rabbit vibrators. But, the thing is, if I want to get into more detail and mention something like, say, wanting to try out a cock ring on a guy, whole fingering his arse, they all suddenly become rather quiet … And I’d be left sitting there staring at the bartender’s trouser bulge …’ And in case you were unclear about the kind of sex she likes to have, and its exact definition, she’s included a handy list: The Girl’s Guide to Fuck-Buddies: Definitions. ‘A fuck-buddy is someone with whom you are sexually involved, but with no romantic or emotional strings attached. They are NOT a friend that you fuck … the fuck-buddy relationship is purely sexual.’ Or, lest you foolishly still thought that you might be allowed to squeeze a bit of humanity into the transaction: ‘With a fuck-buddy, there is no real intimacy beyond nudity and mutual hotness … It’s not like meeting up with a mate to watch a movie and talking about the plot afterwards over dinner. By definition a fuck-buddy relationship happens on a physical level only.’
A far cry from the words of early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman in Living My Life, who was put in prison for her defence of women’s rights to contraception: ‘I have propagated freedom in sex. I have had many men myself. But I have loved them; I have never been able to go indiscriminately with men.’
Ricky Emanuel, the psychotherapist, is despairing at the One Track Mind culture. He told me in the canteen of the Royal Free Hospital: “This is the commodification of sex and it’s extremely damaging to girls. I have some patients having sex with five people at the same time, described as “friends that I do stuff with”. This is infantile sexuality; it’s about excitement, fizziness, completely devoid of emotional depth or benefit. Young women feel they have to do it – but the lack of meaning makes them depressed. I have to ask: what’s happened to courting? Getting to know someone? It’s not by chance that biblically they used “know” as a meaning for deep and emotional sexual contact. These days much casual sex has nothing to do with knowing.’
Catherine Townsend’s well-written book, Sleeping Around: Secrets of a Sexual Adventuress, is about: ‘Threesomes, sorbet sex, drunk dialling, multiple orgasms, girly gossip-swaps, buying silk underwear – welcome to dating the modern girl’s way.’ Wait, so if I have sex with (or is it while eating?) sorbet and buy silk underwear and cosmos, I’ll have multiple orgasms? This is similar to the picture presented in Sex and the City, the seductive mixture of lifestyle and sex – but even in SATC you’re not guaranteed a multiple orgasm. That’s because even having one orgasm during sex isn’t easy for a lot of women – it’s thought that 20 to 30 per cent of women can do it through vaginal penetration; the rest require a degree of confidence to ask for other stimulation in a particular fashion, which takes time and a bit of trust.
The sex itself
Have you noticed that the sex you have when you don’t know or like the person you’re sleeping with is sort of actually not that great, when you think about it? What happens is that you do it, you get excited by this fact, tell all your friends, then forget the actual moments of alienation in the sex itself.
We saw earlier how Lisa and Lucy talked about their casual sex experiences – one cries during sex, hoping to be noticed, the other keeps her eyes closed. A friend of mine, Melissa, was devastated by a one-night stand she had with a much older man she met in a bar; weeks later, the lack of intimacy and the repulsion she realised she’d felt for him when she sobered up still made her depressed. She mainly remembered just praying he’d hurry up and come – an experience common to many a casual sex encounter, when you’re just guessing what’s going to work. I am not writing off all casual sex for women in a Protestant fury, but this rule stems from the observation that while we think it’s great and fun at the time, it’s often damaging later.
‘You have to act ridiculously into it’
Junk-food sex ranges from the dangerous – unprotected – to the callous and insultingly selfish, to the pseudo-intimate, whereby it’s good and you wish strings were allowed. More and more, though, you’re expected to do whatever it takes to be sexy. Ruth, 31, says:
‘I told a guy I wasn’t going to sleep with him, and he said, “At least, let me put it in your ass.”’
Indeed, a desirable male acquaintance told me that women compete to sleep with him, offering him anal sex immediately ‘to distinguish themselves from the other girls.’ Holly, 32, a successful fashion journalist says:
‘There’s massive pressure to be good in bed – having to act ridiculously into it and up for everything; giving the “knowing” blow job etc – it’s not enough to just do your basic missionary. Which is ironic, because mostly boys are shit in bed.’
Another lethal junk-food sex trend is men saying they can’t possibly perform while wearing a condom, thus making the woman feel guilty if she insists on safe sex. Ruth says: ‘I can’t believe that would influence me – but it does. All you’re supposed to be is sexy and make them come, that is the most important thing. I never think about my own pleasure – the only time I will ever orgasm is in a serious relationship.’ Statistics about women and anal sex are telling – anal sex, for most women, is not a pleasant experience (anal beads can apparently help) and is not usually one that women will proffer. It’s more something they do because men want it. In a 1992 study that surveyed sexual behaviours, published by the University of Chicago, 20 per cent of women aged 25 to 29 reported having anal sex. In a study published in October 2010 by the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, the instances of anal sex reported by women in the same age group had more than doubled, to 46 per cent.
Self-consciousness
Even loving, relationship sex often has a whiff of the casual encounter’s anxiety about it – one friend of mine said she’s so paranoid about her boyfriend of four years seeing her in an unbecoming position that she never had sex without a camisole covering her torso (she lets the straps down). Indeed, Company magazine commissioned me to write an article for them revealing seven sex positions that not only achieved G-spot access (which is still not properly understood) but were flattering, too. For example, anything where your stomach is stretched out and your head thrown back. Try fitting that in with remembering your G-spot, and then the fact that there is another real live person participating, too.
That self-consciousness – whereby a woman is fully occupied in trying to make her body appealing – is nothing new. Naomi Wolf, author of the essential feminist manifesto The Beauty Myth, explains with typical ingenuity the way in which the female experience of her own body is fragmented. She notes that since the 14th century, masculine culture has revelled in deconstructing women’s bodies. Troubadors specialised in listing the feminine ‘catalogue of features’, while poet Edward Spencer took this catalogue to a new level in his hymn Epithalamion. This fragmented approach to female features, says Wolf, continues today in ‘list-your-good-points’ features in women’s magazines, and in collective fantasies about female perfection fuelled by heavy marketing. She’s right: whether you are selling watches or yoghurt, it seems that images evoking the perfect, milky-skinned package is essential.
Porn-consciousness
‘I trotted out every parlour trick and sexual persona I knew.’
Commercial culture’s jamboree of female torsos, lips and legs aside, I believe that much of the self-doubt in the sex experience for women is the awareness and ubiquity of the porn standard. I don’t watch porn, it feels like a pollutant to me, but many people do, women included (about a third of porn is viewed by women). I’ve seen it, though, and I know how extreme (to me) even its most savoury acts seem. I also know that most men, including those I’m likely to end up in the sack with, will be porn consumers. They may not require the porn standard – I interviewed dozens of men for my last book and most of them were far more generous about our bodies than we believe. But we know porn’s there, a click away, which is almost as bad.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a prominent American writer, has captured very well the jig the single woman plays in bed, as well as the discomfort she’ll happily accept to make the man come – that is, to get past Go and collect $100. She talks about a one-night stand with a well-heeled, polite old acquaintance of hers in which the sex failed miserably. He couldn’t stay aroused, despite her trying every trick she knew, from playing the coquette to acting submissively; from yelling with (fake) excitement to going silent. In the end, he requested anal sex. Vargas-Cooper asked why that – of all things – would arouse him. The reason he gave was that it was the only thing that would make her uncomfortable. Instead of walking out, Vargas-Cooper instantly complied. Looking back, she notes how this encounter does not exactly fit the feminist template of sexuality. The reality is that pleasure and displeasure are two sides of the same sexual coin, a contradiction ‘neatly’ resolved through porn, and thus, she notes, very much in favour of men.
Clearly, the issue of porn is an absolutely huge one, and not what this book is about. But I think it’s helpful to acknowledge that its presence, all those ubiquitous, easily-activated pixels behind a billion clicks, only adds to the complexity of sex for women today. In a non-supportive, no-strings shagathon, that complexity is simply too jagged and unwieldy to be processed; and, like a piece of silk shoved in the washing machine, it turns out very badly.
Orgasm machines: women and a brave new (hypersexual) world
‘We have this thing that’s been superimposed on female sexuality, basically this orgasm-hunting tiger.’
What makes Lucy cry and Lisa close her eyes during sex is alienating detachment – the loneliness of an exposed female body being pounded by a male one. But this purely anatomic, male-orgasm-driving experience of sex sits very neatly with contemporary depictions of the act. Take London Amora, the European touring show that parked for a year in Piccadilly Circus, excitedly billed as ‘the world’s first attraction about relationships, seduction and wellness’. Its goal: ‘to make your world a sexier place’. This means more orgasms for women as well as men, of course. To look at the Amora website was to be confronted with numbers, exclamation marks, commands and bright colours. ‘Ten secrets women wished you knew’; ‘The silent clue men give off when they’re in love’; ‘250 tips and hints for a healthy sex life and wellbeing’, PLUS aphrodisiac lounge, Amora boutique, How-To workshops and – wait for it! – ‘Over 80 interactive and engaging experiences to enhance relationships and spice up your love life’. Yet there was something bordering on the depressing about the erogenous zones finder; the squeezing of various-sized dildos and designing your perfect partner on an interactive screen. Katherine Angel, a historian of sexual science at Exeter University observed in Prospect magazine that Amora was governed by the porn aesthetic; proof of how far pornography and everyday ideas of the erotic now overlap. Noting the predictable presence of numerous ‘ecstatic’ female bodies (far more than male), Angel concluded that the exhibit was ‘yet another’ place that invited women to self-scrutinise their bodies and sexual performance according to an ideal.
Along with linking images of hot female bodies with sexual ecstasy, Amora drives home the point that one orgasm isn’t enough to satisfy your average lusty woman. This is the general message on the airwaves. For example, CAKE (cakenyc), an ‘internationally recognised brand promoting female sexual pleasure’, is all about the new hypersexual woman. Reads the website: ‘In September of 2000, CAKE hosted the first of what would become the infamous CAKE parties at club FUN, under the Manhattan Bridge. Billed as a Porn Party, the hosts showed clips of explicit videos edited together and displayed on floor to ceiling screens.’
Yet the pressure to be an orgasm machine has reached what Melissa Goldman, the maker of a documentary called Subjectified: Nine Young Women Talk About Sex, calls ‘hysteria’. In the US, she says, ‘it’s got so bad that women think they have a pathology if they can’t orgasm through penetration. We have this thing – this Samantha from SATC thing – that’s been superimposed on female sexuality, basically this orgasm-hunting tiger.’ Indeed: the pressure exerted by contemporary ideas of sexiness, sex, and sexual pleasure as a measure of personal success exerts a hard, cold pressure on women. And nobody feels it more than the single woman, who is most open to accusations of not being sexy or attractive enough – if she was, wouldn’t she have a partner?
By refusing no-strings sex for a while, we might avoid Greer’s proclamation that ‘Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearteningly than ever before.’ We might also avoid the following image of the man who ‘politely lets himself into the vagina … laborious and inhumanly computerized’. Indeed, Greer speaks to the daters of 2012 with important prescience: ‘The implication that there is a statistically ideal fuck which will always result in satisfaction if the right procedures are followed is depressing and misleading. There is no substitute for excitement: not all the massage in the world will ensure satisfaction, for it is a matter of psychosexual release. Real gratification is not enshrined in a tiny cluster of nerves but in the sexual involvement of the whole person.’ Amen.
Giving up NSA sex: actually doing it (well, not doing it …)
A lot has been covered in this chapter. Hopefully you found some of it useful/interesting for adding context to the way you (or your friends) operate. I for one find it very helpful to see where I got some of my strongest and least helpful notions about sex. Having some idea of where I fit into the sexual culture around me enables me to challenge these notions more directly.
I am aware that some of you reading this chapter will be saying to yourselves: all this NSA sex sounds great – at least it’s sex! For those of you in, or familiar with, an interminable drought, I feel your pain. I’ve been there many times, and have ridden out barren stretches with a mixture of anger, frustration, acceptance and ‘get-it-where-you-can’ promiscuity, followed by remorse.
To the drought lady: putting this rule into play will improve your state of mind too. I promise. Here are some pointers to get you going, as it were.
1.Recognise your state of mind
Are you feeling like you’ll never meet someone, that nobody ever fancies you, and that you may well be re-virginising? If so, be extra careful because right now you’re most prone to self-destructive sexual behaviour. It’s been at my most ‘dry’ that I’ve been taken in by the false promise of sexual servitude, thinking ‘at least it’s sex’. But that idea proves misleading when you feel not only left by the wayside afterwards, but tarnished by having sex with someone ranging from the unavailable to the disinterested to the downright awful. That’s if you do have sex with them. You can equally get drunk and try – and fail, even when you’ve relaxed your standards, which is awful too.
2.Challenge the belief ‘At least it’s sex’
Thinking that you better take it because, like money, you should grab as much of it as possible, is a surprisingly common belief. When I went on the Man Diet, I was fully on board with it – that is, taking far too seriously my ‘job’ as a single woman to be wild, crazy and report lots of great stories. Dry patches tortured me.
I was genuinely happy to be uncommitted – I’d recently come out of a relationship, and my personality had gone a bit wonky under the strain of being a ‘cool’ (i.e., permissive, generous, not-needy, relaxed) girlfriend. But I assumed that the alternative to ‘I’m not ready for a relationship’ was ‘I am going to get out there and bed as many people as possible’ and ‘if I’m not seeing someone or some people, I’m wasting valuable time as a young, single woman, panic, panic, what is wrong with me’. Stopping, staying still, and allowing the borders of myself to extend to other spheres than my sexuality was balm to my soul.
3.Gotta be cruel to be kind: go cold turkey
If there’s a lot of NSA on offer, just stop it abruptly. Turn them down, defriend them on Facebook, block their number. (I did a lot of the Facebook defriending to prevent sudden chat popping up, taking me where I didn’t want to go.) After that cruelty, kindness dawns fast: as soon as I brutally sloughed the NSA types out, I felt clean, clear and energised, and acutely aware that I’d been dragging myself down before. Relationship counsellor Val Sampson says:
‘It’s not that being Victorian prim gives you high self-esteem. But sleeping with the guy that doesn’t want to go on a date, or who doesn’t find you particularly interesting as a person, is bad for self-esteem.’
4.Extract yourself from a friend
This is a different story from getting rid of the one-, two- or five-night-stand guy. Certainly you two will have a deeper or different intimacy than with someone you don’t know. You may well be in love with him. It’s the hardest thing in the world to pull away because so much is mixed up in it. But the bottom line still applies: he’s getting the milk without the cow and sees no need to change that fact. So, if you can summon all your strength, you just need to come clean. It shouldn’t be hard. He’ll run a mile – thereby making the job easy for you – if you say: ‘Next time you initiate something, I’ll assume it’s because you want to date.’ Or if it’s you who booty calls him, make it plain you’re going to want more – and he’ll probably stop encouraging or even allowing your late-night visits.
5.Think about what you want
Women seeking a serious relationship need the sex (or sex-on-mind) hiatus time for gathering thoughts about the correct approach going forward. Janet Reibstein believes one of the biggest issues facing women who self-define as being non-committal, or who proceed by default with no-strings sex, is habit that will stitch them up later. ‘If you want children, we don’t have the freedom to put things off the way men do,’ she says. ‘Women have to be more honest with themselves about what kind of relationships they’re getting themselves into – if you’re saying “this is NSA” and you’re 28, and you’re still doing it at 30, and that’s the modal way you’re doing your relationships, you’re dwindling your chances of meeting someone to reproduce within a committed relationship.’
I’m not sure about children yet. But I take to heart something else Reibstein says: ‘Until you figure out your own terms, you are likely to be pleasing the man on his own terms.’ This part of the Man Diet is there to help us figure out those terms, which is no easy task in a (still predominantly) male value society. But giving yourself time off the biting, stinging sex jungle is the best way to start.
How I followed this rule:
Pre-Man Diet
I had no ‘say no to NSA’ policy in place at all. I knew it didn’t make me particularly happy, but I thought it was an essential part of my single-woman persona – that of the liberal, adventurous, sexual singleton. My romps made for great stories but too often they smacked of adventure for adventure’s sake. This, I think, is because my view on sex was: ‘Why not?’ rather than ‘Why?’
How I did it
All I did was think about it more. I reflected on the simple idea that going through the motions – albeit often pleasurably, or at least excitingly – wasn’t really how sex was meant to be. That disconnecting real intimacy from physical intimacy probably wasn’t the best I could do. It’s amazing how much just thinking can achieve – in merely reflecting on this topic I began to be far more choosy. Not because I was depriving myself of anything – just because I stopped feeling like having such a simplistic approach to sex, since I am not a simple person. Nor are you.
The other thing that kept and still keeps me in check is this question: ‘Do I want to be exhausted tomorrow?’ Let’s be honest – NSA sex often involves unplanned sleepovers with next to no sleep involved. On weeknights they’re lethal. On weekends, pretty sad if you had any plans to do things the next day.
Specifically, if a guy came along and it was on the cards, I would …
• Just leave. If he wanted my number, great. If not – had I lost anything? Probably not, apart from a notch.
• If something was happening, like a smooch, I’d just extricate myself. ‘It’s getting late’ or ‘I need to take the Tube’.
• I considered very carefully how I wanted to feel the next day. Usually, the desire to be alert and well rather than wrecked and pointlessly buzzed triumphed.
How it felt
Good. Very good in fact. I felt in control, and very clearly that I was respecting myself. And, banal as it sounds, I also felt smug at saving myself a lot of trouble (attachment to guys who were far from appropriate; potential worries over STDs and so on). Did I feel deprived of lots of wild no-strings sex? Not for a good while. Which brings me to …
What I let through the cracks
I find going for very long periods without any physical intimacy rather tricky – many women do. And so, every now and then, I let situations take their course – or even, in (usually intoxicated) extremis create the situations. I’m not sure I feel better after, but I feel different. It shifts my energy. But allowing for NSA is a last resort.
And now?
I try not to partake in NSA sex. It seems unsatisfying. And upsetting in subtle ways if it goes nowhere or is with someone below par. I used to call this kind of thing ‘fun’ – now I’m more careful with my definition of fun. When desire for something to happen takes over, I go into it with eyes wide open, but even being realistic doesn’t necessarily help – a little part of you always either wants sex to be meaningful or thinks it will go somewhere.
SOS!
If you’ve had one NSA sex experience after an empowered run of dieting, you’re either feeling a) sated or b) remarkably shitty. Well, take hope from the fact that if it’s the first, you were able to enjoy it exactly because of a period of declining it (the Man Diet) and your strength and self-esteem has risen. If b) you now know you’re not missing anything even remotely great by saying no to NSA sex and you’re very much on the right track with this rule. Here’s what else:
• Don’t beat yourself up about it. You haven’t done anything wrong – you’ve just given yourself a bit of short shrift. You will either be feeling a naturally negative reaction, which is punishment enough – or you’ll be moving on with your life. Do the latter, but don’t think, ‘That didn’t fuck me up, I’m going to do it all the time!’ Because that would be a pointless back step. And a sure-fire way to feel fucked up (possibly again, depending on your past).
• If you feel post-sex strings, acknowledge them to your heart’s content but there’s no point making the whole thing worse by prostrating yourself at the man’s feet. If it was NSA going into it, it was almost certainly NSA to him and will remain so.
• If, by chance, the no-strings part of the sex came with heavy boozing and lax protection, don’t brush it under the carpet. Go along to the clinic in three months (the HIV incubation period – yes, sex can have a long afterlife), and make sure you’re good to go.
