by Wendy Jones
I really got really irate about the Page 3 scandal. A lot of people – who are friends as well – are so ‘Yes! They’re going to end topless women on Page 3 in the Sun newspaper,’ I thought, who are you to tell a woman she can’t do that? I am really strongly feminist. For hundreds of years women have been told by men what they could and couldn’t do, and now it’s women telling other women what they can’t do. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it! If people want to do that and they’re making good money from it, let them do it. Nudity just doesn’t offend me in any way. Page 3 I don’t find offensive at all. I would much rather see a girl who’s a good size 12 and curvy and healthy than women in women’s magazines who are anorexic or starving, because that’s an unrealistic image of beauty. Women seem to put this pressure on themselves to be so thin and it’s really sad. It seems to be women going against other women. I think feminism’s eaten itself a bit for that reason.
My job does give me a good insight into men. Men are like children. Once you know that, you know everything about them. They want what they can’t have. They chase things to be stubborn. If you say, ‘You can’t have that, you can’t do that,’ they’re going to want to do the opposite. Women make the mistake of thinking men are more complicated than they are, whereas I think men do what they want to do when they want to do it and they’re not playing a game, they’re not over-thinking, they’re just doing what they want to do! It does make me a little bit sad when my friends have all these rules. One of my best friends, I love her to bits, but she’s all about game playing. As soon as she meets a guy it would be like, ‘Well, you can’t do this until this day, and you can’t send him that and can’t talk about …’ And I was like, ‘Why?’ I would do whatever I want to! If I want to message them I message them, if I want to have sex with them I have sex with them. That’s why I don’t really agree with game playing and not having sex until the third date. The way you play it isn’t going to change anything. I think, be honest from the start. Honesty is really, really important. If you can be honest with someone and they can be honest with you, I think you’ve cracked it.
I’ve slept with lots of people. I think it’s a lot. Thirty, thirty-one. Most of that was when I was travelling! I was in South America for three and a half months. It wasn’t that bad; it was fourteen, maybe fifteen. Everyone’s a backpacker in a hostel and everyone’s having a drink and most people are single, and it’s very easy to meet someone. It would be like, well, I’m having a good time with him and I want to go down to the beach, and then it just happens. I was like, it’s not me, I can do what I want and this isn’t usually who I am. No one can judge me because tomorrow I’ll be in a different country and no one will know this happened! I never felt bad about it because I thought, it’s the time of my life where I can actually do what the hell I want and no one’s going to judge. That was a bit of a mad era. I’ve just come back. I already want to go back again.
I haven’t got a boyfriend. When I went travelling I met an amazing English guy who lives in São Paulo, he’s lovely, he’s amazing but he’s obviously still in São Paulo and I’m here. We’re not in a relationship, we kind of are; it’s complicated. My head and heart are with him but there’s no way I could not have sex for that long! I could do about a month without sex and then that would be it. When I’m single I’ve always got a few boys and men that I have good relationships with, that I can message – ‘Do you want to come over?’ ‘Shall I come over?’ ‘Do you want to go for a drink?’ And then, you know … Actually I had a really, really good friend and we were sleeping together for six months. We were also best mates. None of my friends could understand it, they were like, ‘Well, you’re not having a relationship, you’re really good friends, it’s just sex?’ and we were like, ‘Yeah!’ Both of us were completely fine with it, we could both talk about other people, there was no jealousy, there were no strings, and that was fine. That’s rare, generally one person gets more attached and wants more.
Most of the time I feel sexually fulfilled. I’m a bit hedonistic. I find it really exciting when I’m with someone new for the first time. When I first start dating then sex has got to be exciting. When you start to know each other so well it becomes routine and you know what they’re going to do and it’s not exciting. Working at a marriage where people are monogamous must be really hard work. People who have been together forty years and have never cheated, I think, ‘God, I don’t know how they’ve done it’. It worries me and every time I bring this up with a friend, they say, ‘Oh, it will be different when you meet the right person.’ I don’t know if that’s true or if I’m always going to have to have an understanding with someone. If I’m with the right person they’re going to have to have the same ideas on sex as me, which is open-minded. There was someone recently, he was lovely, but he was so boring, he didn’t really stimulate my mind. The sex was very bog standard, missionary, then that would be it! For me that’s not exciting at all. In long relationships, I get really bored of sleeping with the same person. I was with my last boyfriend for four years, and until the last year I didn’t want to sleep with anyone else. He was very, very prudish and traditional in that if I ever mentioned about maybe we should have an open relationship then he would freak out.
In the bedroom I’m quite submissive, which is the complete opposite of how I am in real life. In my real life I’m single and confident and I can command a room in what I do. There must be some psychology behind that. I don’t know where that comes from. I like a submissive sexual relationship, just being completely dominated by somebody and having power taken away from me. Somebody telling me what to do, being tied up, anything where I’ve got no power and I’m giving somebody else power over me. In my real life I would hate that. It’s weird! I’ve never done it properly. It’s something I’d like to explore. One of my best friends is a dominatrix, and she’s told me about club nights. I think, ‘God, it is exciting,’ but there’s a difference between a fantasy and reality, so I don’t know if it would live up to anything I’ve imagined or if it would be a let-down.
It’s quite shameful for women to be sexually confident. Burlesque goes completely against that and says, ‘No, it’s fine.’ Burlesque is a lovely thing for women because it puts women up there. Men worship them like a goddess. A burlesque club is definitely a woman’s domain. When burlesque started during the Depression, showing a flash of knee was risqué. Knickers and nipple tassels isn’t that risqué by today’s standards. Nobody gets really horrified – I mean, some women do. It’s forty-year-olds. Sometimes I can see them in the audience and they can be scowling and not wanting to smile. I don’t know if they feel threatened. I get sad when I see couples that come to burlesque shows and the man seems like he can’t even look at me or he might get told off by the woman. They must not have a very close connection. Surely she’d know that he isn’t going to run off with me and I don’t really care about him! That couldn’t work for me. I’ve always been trusting with boyfriends.
When I was being told at dance college to lose weight, I did constantly compare myself to other girls. When I started doing burlesque it gave me so much confidence because all the girls were different. I never feel embarrassed or not good enough. There’s loads of things I don’t like about my body. There’s times where I’ve ate too much and think I need to lose a little bit of weight, or there are times where I’m drinking too much, but generally as long as I’m healthy – health is the most important thing. I always think there’s someone out there wishing they had what you had. So I just be grateful for what I’ve got.
I absolutely love burlesque. I find it really liberating. I feel the naked body shouldn’t be offensive in any way. It’s something about watching a woman, who isn’t a size 8 and who doesn’t have a perfect body, taking her clothes off in front of all these people and not caring and enjoying herself and people sense that and find it really impressive: you endear people to you for that reason. Because you’re not perfect and you don’t need to be. Imperfection is w
hat makes people beautiful. If somebody is too perfect, they lose something. Women can relate to burlesque. And men just find it sexy because it’s a girl taking her clothes off. Men don’t care if you’re a little bit overweight. They’re not as critical as women.
I never feel ashamed. Never. In the future when I look at pictures I’ll never think, ‘Oh God, what was I doing?’ I’ll think, ‘Look how great I looked then! At one point in my life I looked that good!’ It will be interesting in ten years’ time: it will make a good story at a dinner party. ‘Look what I used to do.’
2
Addict
Lois, 32, London
‘Sex with a woman is different’
‘Before I got together with my girlfriend, who’s my first sexual lesbian relationship, I was dating men and having sex with men – and often enjoying sex with men. The thing that I always loved about sex with men was the initial penetration. I miss penetration. I miss the way a man changes from not being aroused to being aroused: there is something spectacular about that. It’s funny because I would think, ‘I need it, I need it, I need it,’ and after the initial penetration I was like, ‘This is just the most amazing thing ever,’ then I would want to stop after that. As soon as possible. I wouldn’t enjoy it from about one minute in. I’d be waiting for it to be over. We might do different positions but I wasn’t present any more. And that would be how sex with a man played out for me.
Sex with a woman is different. I’m not in control most of the time. Men do work quite hard to satisfy a woman because a man wants to satisfy a woman. And get off, obviously. With sex with a man, it was all about making the man want me, and want me again. There was a lot of performance and control. When I had sex with a woman for the first time, and ever since really, I don’t feel I can do that performance and control. With a woman there’s more of a connection, or maybe sex with a woman demands more of a connection. I mean, I’ve only slept with one woman but it feels like we’re both more present. I find it very difficult to be present. The one time I was really present with my current partner, I cried. I had one of those orgasms that people talk about where you cry at the end. I felt like it had been too intense. It was just too much.
It was really easy to come out as a lesbian. It was just the easiest thing. I had one friend say, ‘You used to really like sex. And you used to really like penises!’ And I did. There was no lie there. Another friend said, ‘I know what this is, you’ve fallen in love with one woman.’ She was implying that I wasn’t really gay, that I’d fallen in love with one specific woman as if that was the point. My parents were fine; they just wanted to know if I was still going to have kids. And wear dresses. Like I was not going to be feminine and pretty any more and it’d be such a shame! I could tell the people who had to go away and think about it for a while for their own reasons, but it didn’t feel like anyone was homophobic. People take it as is and that makes me feel really good about it.
Me and my girlfriend are in a proper relationship and have been for three years and we really know each other and have a family. I love my partner and she loves me and it’s a successful relationship as far as I know a successful relationship to be. Ultimately the question I have in my mind is, ‘Am I actually straight but I can’t cope with men and how crap they are so have gone somewhere else?’ Because when I met my current partner I was at the end of my tether with men. I was pretty unhappy. I felt like I couldn’t really understand men and what their needs were and why I couldn’t meet them. If I picture sleeping with a man now it feels quite awkward. Funnily enough, before I got into the relationship with my partner a friend asked, ‘Would you ever sleep with a woman?’ I said, ‘I haven’t, but I would be open, if the right woman came along, to having a relationship with her.’ Then it happened eight months later, which is weird.
My current girlfriend was a friend and we hung out a lot. When I first met her I felt like there was something there and I thought, ‘Is it because she’s gay that I’m getting feelings for her, and from her?’ Every time we saw each other there was a really big chemistry and I would think about her in a sexual way – but mostly in a romantic way. I thought about the intrigue of us falling in love and then we kind of did and yeah, here we are now.
My partner has a child whom she conceived right when we got together. I knew, having been her friend for three years beforehand, that she was planning to have a child, but it was just something a friend was doing. Then she did conceive. We’d just slept together for the first time. We’d had a picnic and we’d talked about the future. I was happy that we’d slept together and we’d agreed that it wasn’t an awful nightmare and we weren’t going to run away from each other and it was all fine. Then two days later she called me and she was all kind of weird and she was like, ‘Hi!’ and then she was like, ‘Well, that’s great, bye then.’ And hung up. And I was like, ‘Weird conversation.’ Then she called back straight away and said, ‘Actually, I called you up to tell you something and didn’t know how to tell you: I’m pregnant.’ I had to ask her recently what my reaction was because I couldn’t remember: she said there was a long pause and I went, ‘Wow.’
I think the way I looked at it was if I couldn’t find a reason to leave, then there were probably a lot of reasons to stay. I could have instantly gone, ‘Oh God, this is a massive commitment, what a nightmare,’ but I didn’t because I remember thinking, ‘Imagine myself without this relationship; do I feel better? No, not really, I don’t feel better. I really like her and maybe even love her already.’ There was no reason to make a big drama out of it. I didn’t know what it was going to mean, I didn’t know much about babies. It was just a day at a time.
So she had a child, Edward, who lives with us half the week and half the week with his father who is a good friend of hers who lives round the corner and they co-parent together. There was no sexual exchange between them; it was completely, you know, a transaction, like a sperm donor. He’s gay and lives with his partner. And Edward is the child of all of us. He’s my partner’s and his father’s son but I co-parent in that Edward lives in the house with us and we do things together and I act as a parent in as much as doing the daily routine and cooking dinner and all that sort of thing. I don’t get up in the night! And it’s just him; there are no other children.
I was thinking today when Edward was screaming his head off that I can’t have my own children, I’m too controlling and I don’t have that patience a parent needs. I can handle Edward because he’s only there half the week. There’s this glorious thing where we all have a break. Could I do this all the time? I don’t think that I can. It would just be hell for any child I had. And I would be beating myself up the entire time until I worked a lot of that stuff out. I feel like I’m destined to help children in some other way. But direct parenting isn’t for me.
I was trained to be a good girl. My mum is an academic and an active alcoholic. She was very shut down, and me and my sister and brother got very shut down around her. There was a lot of avoiding drama, and people-pleasing, and trying to be a good girl. My dad is a lecturer and he left when I was twelve and my dad leaving was my first heartbreak. I didn’t process that grief, and without a doubt my compulsive romanticising and the controlling of sexual relationships was the result of that heartbreak. Otherwise everything else was pretty normal, everybody acting out in their own way, but nothing major. I went to university and did languages and then I went to live in Spain. I had quite an intense relationship for a year with a Moroccan guy, lots of drama and screaming and great sex – exhausting!
I think about sex a lot. All the time, and I always have. The first time I had sex I remember thinking, ‘My God, this is just the best thing ever. I can’t believe I waited this long.’ And I had a lot of it; it was really fun. I had a relationship with porn a lot during my teens and my twenties; it wasn’t daily but whenever I wanted it. There were periods when it was rather a lot! I transferred that to compulsive sexual relationships so there was less emphasis on watching porn and more
on doing. I was in a cycle of compulsive sex and trying to find something in people I was never going to find.
Porn can be really triggering – instantly triggering. It has never failed to turn me on ever. It is so quick; it is almost instant. It is like I am illuminated by it. I don’t need to watch it for longer than two minutes. There is that feeling of how quick it is, and how powerful, really powerful and really fast. Sex in relationships is not really powerful and not really fast. Not for me, yet, anyway. Afterwards I have no desire to keep watching. As soon as I’ve had an orgasm it is like I am watching white fuzz, it is like, ‘What’s that? Turn it off.’ That’s the point of porn, you just get off and that’s it.
I’ve always thought that the most successful sexual relationship I’ve had was between myself and porn because I’m in total control. I can choose what I want to watch, I can choose what I want to do, and that’s perfect for me. I’m talking about porn where men and women are having sex, not hardcore porn or things featuring animals and all the rest of it. Because I’ve always watched male porn I was wondering if even though I’m in a gay relationship I’m not actually gay. I don’t know if I’m bisexual or whether I’m gay or whether it matters.
I’ve used the fantasy/masturbation ritual since I was twelve when I started masturbating. I saw pornography really early, about eleven, and then I had a fantasy made for me that I could use. The man in command works for me, particularly the feeling of the woman being overpowered, not really aggressively or violently. I know that’s not healthy. Throwing against the wall quite roughly always comes into my fantasies. If I fantasise about a woman it’s me pushing her against a wall. If I fantasise about a man it’s a man pushing me against a wall or a door. It’s passionate. It’s about letting go of inhibitions and doing whatever I want to do, losing control, and for the other person to be okay with that. I’ve got this weird fantasy that keeps coming into my mind about being on the TV programme Question Time – so ridiculous! I’m asked my opinion and I have the answers to a social conundrum. I would have the best answer and that would make the person fall in love with me. There’s something about it being intellectual. It’s that thing of, I’ll be really loved for the things I say as well as the things I do.