by Jilly Cooper
Miss O’Connor suggested that from now on the husband could have as much sex as he wanted, but whenever he asked for it his wife had to take the initiative. For the first week he went berserk, like a small boy in a sweet shop, wanting it the whole time. By the second week it was down to every other day, and by the third and fourth weeks he was happy to have it twice a week, which was quite OK by her. He had only wanted sex all the time when it seemed he couldn’t have it at all. He assumed, because his wife had rejected him, that she no longer loved him.
I have always believed, like trying to re-heat cold baked potatoes, that once passion is dead you can’t revive it. Miss O’Connor disagrees and recommends titillation. One exercise she suggests is taking it in turns to touch each other all over except for the sexual organs. The person doing the kneading has to carry on for forty minutes, rather like making bread. Then you change roles, or rolls, and you become the dough, shutting your eyes and letting your fantasies wander. You are not allowed to cheat and have sex at the end. But evidently, after a few sessions, couples leap on each other like rabbits.
The most common cause of lack of desire, it seems, is hidden anger. A wife who won’t sleep with her husband is often secretly fed up with being stuck at home with the children and too much housework. Equally, if the husband has too demanding a job, or is bossed around too much, then he will cop out as well.
One of Miss O’Connor’s most bizarre solutions, if a couple are so burning with mutual resentment they can’t make love, is, instead of sex, for them each to take a string bag full of ping-pong balls and have a duel in the nude at about ten yards.
One couple who tried it came in next week, smirking. They had cheated and made love, they cheerfully admitted. It wouldn’t work in our house. We’ve got only one dented ping-pong ball, and that belongs to the new kitten. And at 90p for a half-dozen, new ping-pong balls are far too expensive anyway. Finally, my husband got stuffy and refused to have a go because he said it ‘would bring the game into disrepute.
Another of Miss O’Connor’s theories is that people’s sex lives improve when they’re feeling slightly naughty. One quaint suggestion was that the wife should put her foot in her husband’s crotch at dinner parties and wriggle it around. That wouldn’t work in Gloucestershire, where the husband would naturally assume it was one of the house labradors.
Other ideas (like ping-pong balls) seem rather pricey. You fork out for a baby-sitter, then spend the night in a motel. ‘We signed in as George and Martha Washington,’ giggled one couple. ‘The clerk smiled, we felt really naughty.’ That stickler for truth, George Washington, must have turned in his grave.
The author also has a bee in her bonnet about sex being more thrilling when one was a teenager, and believes we should recreate teenage skills: long, smooching kisses, petting sessions for hours in the back row. The latter should appeal to rugger players.
An even wilder concept is that we should regress to teenage giddiness and rediscover the lost art of mentally undressing people: ‘Imagine their bosoms, bellies, buttocks, and their sexual organs.’
I did try. Setting out for the village the other morning, I passed two ancient, woolly-hatted men from Stroud District Council in orange trousers, looking into a trench. I was so busy imagining their bellies and bosoms (something wrong there), and myself as the trench, that I bumped into a telegraph pole and stubbed my chilblains.
Next I met our neighbour’s eighty-year-old gardener, and tried to visualise his long white body, but got distracted when he insisted on talking about frost pockets. Then the vicar passed on his bike, and, as it’s nearly Lent, I looked the other way.
Finally, the junior dog, who has no such inhibitions, took off after her boyfriend, the milkman’s dog, and I gave up.
Even more outrageously, Miss O’Connor suggests you should install a full-length mirror in the bedroom, then strip off and make a speech to your partner, describing the beauties of your private parts. Then he makes a speech describing his. I wonder if one is allowed an autocue.
The next step, it seems, is to play doctors and nurses, in bed, which appears to turn on couples no end. One woman got so excited she festooned her husband’s organ with pink ribbons like a barrister’s brief, another started singing to her husband’s member – ‘Willy nae come back again’, presumably.
All this makes me feel that the Americans are very, very different from us, more enthusiastic, earnest, naive and far, far less self-conscious to be receptive to these kind of ludicrous games. But I agree with Miss O’Connor on one thing: that people – particularly women – don’t set enough time aside for sex. We think nothing of spending hours a day cooking our husbands’ dinner, working, polishing, walking dogs, visiting friends, watching television, gossiping to our children. Sex so often seems to be last in our priorities, and if you leave it to chance it doesn’t happen.
Often, it’s a real effort when one’s tired and preoccupied to psych oneself into a receptive mood. But, as one man said: ‘It’s like jumping into the pool. Once I’m in, I adore it.’
Many, however, may balk at Ms O’Connor’s idea of ringing every Wednesday night on the calendar to be set aside for four hours of love. No television is allowed, which is tragic, as I’d miss Lytton’s Diary. The telephone is taken off the hook. Then she suggests, you simply take two tuna fish sandwiches and a bottle of wine to bed and fool around.
My husband was appalled. He said he’d need at least a crate of wine and the corkscrew would be the only thing that did any screwing, because he couldn’t stand all those sandwich crumbs in the bed.
According to Ms O’Connor, however, couples who tried the experiment found they were leaping on each other again and again. If it catches on here, it’s bound to send the national average rocketing up (not to mention sales of tuna fish and ping-pong balls). So we can all start worrying all over again that we’re not having enough sex, and graduate to tinned salmon and shot puts.
Part Two
I was touched and heartened recently by a story a man friend told me about a beautiful but tremendously respectable sixty-three-year-old woman. Blushing furiously, she suddenly informed him, she’s had to give up the chairmanship of the local W.I. because now her husband had retired, he liked her home in the afternoons, so he could make love to her. How marvellous that he feels like that after forty-two years of marriage.
But can a marriage survive that long without a good sex life? In the past, it had to, because divorce was so frowned on, and society required couples to stay together. I suspect sex in those days was something couples often enjoyed, but didn’t worry about too much.
Today, alas, so much emphasis has been put on sexual gratification, that if our sex lives aren’t absolutely perfect we worry ourselves into a frazzle. One girl friend, for example, absolutely exhausts herself looking after three young children, working a full day in the office and cooking her husband a proper dinner before sleeping with him every night. Having removed him from his first wife, because she offered a more adventurous sex life, she’s now terrified of losing him if she slackens off. Conversely another girlfriend boasts that she only sleeps with her husband once a year on his birthday. He is demented with misery, but puts up with it because he loves her so much.
Marriage often survives today because one of the partners is having a good sex life with someone else. Instead of working to improve their sex lives, couples start looking around. A local Don Juan excused his constant infidelities recently by claiming that his wife didn’t mind because, when he had something good going on the side, he was so much nicer to her. ‘And she also cleans up on guilt presents,’ he added smugly.
Equally I was staggered at a very large dinner party in Wiltshire the other day, when the hostess gave a new meaning to the word intercourse by literally disappearing in the middle of dinner (between pudding and cheese to be exact) with one the male guests. No one batted an eyelid with they returned twenty minutes later. Meanwhile the poor husband was left gritting his teeth, not least
at having to keep the priceless sweet white orbiting and orbiting the table.
People I find will endure infidelity and not being slept with, if they’re not humiliated too much. For the sake of her children, one girl friend endured both for twenty years. Then her husband took his latest bit of fluff to stay in their house in Spain – the house that the husband had built and the wife lovingly decorated for their retirement, where all the locals liked them and assumed they were happily married. Suddenly something snapped, and she walked out.
If you are frightened of loneliness, wrote Chekhov, do not marry. Certainly nothing is more lowering night after night than the broad turned-away male back of a man who doesn’t want to sleep with you. But it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s found someone else. He may just be frantically worried about some problem at work. Nor do marriages necessarily survive because a couple appear to be having riproaring sex.
‘Nancy was sleeping with me twice a day, seven days a week, right up to the day she shoved off,’ announced one outraged husband just before Christmas.
One would have hoped with all this attention to sex that people’s sex lives might have improved dramatically, but sadly this doesn’t seem to be the case. When Ann Landers, a hugely popular American columnist, asked her women readers whether they would prefer to be held close and talked to tenderly, and forget about the act, an incredible ninety thousand women wrote in – nine times that of a normal opinion poll. Seventy-two per cent said their sex life was so ghastly, they would willingly give it up for good for the sake of the odd cuddle and a few kind words from their husbands. And before you dismiss this as American hysteria or say that only women with lousy sex lives wrote in, our own Woman magazine’s findings, based on a long and reasoned questionnaire filled in by fifteen thousand readers last year, came to the same dismal conclusion. great excitement is that Philip Howard (of Graduate Gardeners), the local landscape gardener, has moved into a new house, where he’s building a splendid U-turn drive with an underground car port, flanked by a huge wall, known locally as Howard’s Way.
‘How high is the wall going to go?’ I asked my very good friend, the milkman.
‘High as possible,’ he grinned. ‘His mother-in-law’s moving in opposite.’
But the laughter is always gentle. Pretension is chiefly what makes people chunter in a village, like the male half of a couple (who work for a weekending video millionaire) referring to himself as an estate manager, when there’s less than two acres to manage; or like a local snob (nicknamed Tugboat because he chugs from peer to peer) who, on being asked the other day if he had any ducks, replied: ‘Only on the upper lake.’
In other villages people take fearful revenge. One Wiltshire landowner hated his neighbour so much that on learning his neighbour’s daughter was getting married and holding the reception in the garden, he deliberately moved three hundred pigs into the next field on the wedding day. Another villager in Hampshire, who’d been ordered not to take a short cut across her neighbour’s field, organised a sponsored walk along his footpath of two hundred dogs who hadn’t been let out all day.
In Bisley, to warn neighbour not to fall out with neighbour, there is a tiny lock-up, built in 1824. Here, too, Nemesis proceeds at a more leisurely pace. The ex-landlord of the Stirrup, who was also the village undertaker for some time, was ruminating the other evening about a local schoolmistress who’d bullied them all unmercifully when they were little boys.
‘I got my revenge in the end,’ he added with quiet satisfaction. ‘It was me that laid her out and buried her.’
Equally I was staggered at a very large dinner party in Wiltshire the other day, when the hostess gave a new meaning to the word intercourse by literally disappearing in the middle of dinner (between pudding and cheese to be exact) with one the male guests. No one batted an eyelid with they returned twenty minutes later. Meanwhile the poor husband was left gritting his teeth, not least at having to keep the priceless sweet white orbiting and orbiting the table.
People I find will endure infidelity and not being slept with, if they’re not humiliated too much. For the sake of her children, one girl friend endured both for twenty years. Then her husband took his latest bit of fluff to stay in their house in Spain – the house that the husband had built and the wife lovingly decorated for their retirement, where all the locals liked them and assumed they were happily married. Suddenly something snapped, and she walked out.
If you are frightened of loneliness, wrote Chekhov, do not marry. Certainly nothing is more lowering night after night than the broad turned-away male back of a man who doesn’t want to sleep with you. But it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s found someone else. He may just be frantically worried about some problem at work. Nor do marriages necessarily survive because a couple appear to be having riproaring sex.
‘Nancy was sleeping with me twice a day, seven days a week, right up to the day she shoved off,’ announced one outraged husband just before Christmas.
One would have hoped with all this attention to sex that people’s sex lives might have improved dramatically, but sadly this doesn’t seem to be the case. When Ann Landers, a hugely popular American columnist, asked her women readers whether they would prefer to be held close and talked to tenderly, and forget about the act, an incredible ninety thousand women wrote in – nine times that of a normal opinion poll. Seventy-two per cent said their sex life was so ghastly, they would willingly give it up for good for the sake of the odd cuddle and a few kind words from their husbands. And before you dismiss this as American hysteria or say that only women with lousy sex lives wrote in, our own Woman magazine’s findings, based on a long and reasoned questionnaire filled in by fifteen thousand readers last year, came to the same dismal conclusion. Nearly two-thirds of them were miserably unhappy with their sex lives. They were fed up with mechanical grabbers who jumped on them without any subtlety.
Another chilling finding which perhaps explained why so many women are prepared to go without the act was that only forty-two per cent of wives and twenty-four per cent of unmarried women ever achieved orgasm through straight intercourse. But so conditioned are women by the belief that straight intercourse is the only adult way of achieving orgasm, if they don’t succeed they think they’ve failed. Even worse, so that men shouldn’t think they’ve failed, two out of every five women fake orgasms. This means bleakly that forty per cent of the wives who’ve been moaning in apparent ecstasy in their husbands’ arms all their married lives are actually pretending. It’s called ‘the act’ because you need to be a good actress.
The main problem seems to be that, unlike their American counterparts, who are only too ready to tell a man what they want, and often frighten him off in the process, English women find it incredibly difficult to talk about their sexual needs. Half the women who had awful sex lives held back from asking for something that would have given them more pleasure because they were embarrassed. Most unspoken requests were for oral sex, manual stimulation and more affection and cuddling.
Many of them felt men want sex too much. Since I heard that one man insisted on making love to his wife, who had agonising cancer, up to the day she died, I am prepared to believe any crassness of some men. On the other hand, I do think, as a sex, they’ve been having a difficult time. At the beginning of the sexual revolution, we women were so busy flexing our pelvic and abdominal and vaginal muscles during intercourse, as we’d been told by Cosmopolitan and the sex manuals, that instead of achieving any pleasure, our heads nearly fell off.
In the same way men have been conditioned, certainly those over thirty, to believe that the great lover plunges his elbows into ice buckets and distracts himself by memorising Latin verse and the county cricket teams of his youth, and keeps going all night, in order to satisfy a woman. And often he does magnificently. But with a large number of women, he is having to suddenly learn additional skills, like having to switch to a manual gear box, after a lifetime of driving automatics.
No wonder men have st
arted faking too. As one man told a sex therapist recently, ‘There reaches a point when I’m tired, and I want it all to be over. With my faking, I get out of it quickly without the woman feeling bad.’
What then is the answer out of this dismal impasse? For both partners to buy a lie detector? I’ve never thought there was much harm in faking occasionally when you’re tired, but not all the time. Nor will anything be achieved by confessing after ten years that all the moaning and the ecstasy were only a sham. Why not have two large vodka and tonics, and suggest something else as an extra, saying: ‘I’ve read that it’s marvellous, why don’t we give it a whirl?’
A wife too should try to be both more selfish and unselfish in bed, not only lying back and not feeling guilty about letting her husband do the things she loves long enough to give her pleasure, but also giving pleasure in return when it’s her turn.
A good sex life also needs imagination and novelty, whether it’s a change of location, dressing up, reading pornography or watching blue movies. Although I do wish they’d have better actors in the latter. Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud would be much more convincing than all those frightful models.
Sex also needs privacy. It is surprising how few couples have locks on the bedroom door. And if you can keep the lines of communication open, it’s amazing how sex lives can pick up after the children leave home or go to boarding school, or university, and the husband and wife have more time for each other.
Marriages are also more exciting if there’s some sexual tension. My grandmother once told my mother that she’d rather enjoy it if my grandfather fell for another woman, as it’d be such fun luring him back. In one of the best sexual liaisons I know, on top of the bedroom wardrobe for twenty years ready packed have been two suitcases. As a reminder that at any moment either partner could walk out. They never have. But if you’re not entirely sure of someone, you make more effort to please them.