The Sex Lives of English Women

by Wendy Jones

  I’ve been both a man and a woman. It’s odd, that. I can’t say there’s many have done that. Not many people have had an orgasm as a man and as a woman, I’ll tell you. A woman’s is better. As a man you just want to relieve your tension. A man’s orgasm is short and sharp and quick. A woman’s is much deeper and longer-lasting, I would say. It’s much more pleasurable to masturbate as a woman – I’ve got a vibrator – than it was to masturbate as a man. It goes over a longer time, it’s much more intense. It blows your mind completely. With women it’s definitely much more with the whole body rather than just the head and the hands of the man when men masturbate.

  I was very straight as a man. Heterosexual. Now as a woman I sometimes fancy guys. When I was a man I never fancied men at all. Now, occasionally I might see a man and think, ‘Oh, very nice! Bit young for me, but very nice.’ I’m basically bisexual, you see. I wasn’t so much before. Sexuality is fluid. Very fluid. I can be much more feminine one day than another, or much more masculine. Because I’m really quite blokey as a woman. I trained as a quantity surveyor and I worked on building sites till the end of 2003. That’s why I’m doing the building works on my house. My qualification with my old name is on the wall. I’m actually an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Builders. It’s odd, but it’s me.

  I’m still a virgin as a woman. Told my kids I’m a virgin! Because I haven’t found a man to fall in love with. It might happen; I fancy men sometimes but they’ve got to be quite good-looking, sober, clean and intelligent. ‘It’s asking a lot,’ as someone said to me. Who knows? It might happen. I can’t think it will, but it might. I do feel curious to try sex with a man. Oh yes. But I’m waiting for the right man, that’s the thing. There are clearly Mr Wrongs but very few Mr Rights, you see. I’m not bothered. I’ve had my days of being married: thirty-four years. You get nine years for murder!

  I have sexual fantasies. Oh yes. Of having sex with men. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Quite conventional fantasies. Having normal sex face to face. Not up the backside, you know! I don’t really think about it a lot, to be honest. I think as you get older your sex life wanes a bit. I don’t know though: my mother-in-law got married at eighty-seven to her second husband. Shocked the kids, I can tell you!

  As a woman, I’m much more controlling. I’m much more dominant, much more bossy than I was as a man. As a man I was very introvert, if there was an office party I’d always be at the back, not getting involved. I never got drunk at the front, laughing. I’m a totally different person as a woman. My entire personality’s been released. My energy levels have gone through the roof. I’ve become a lot more confident. Miles happier. Now I get up in the morning and I think, What am I going to do today? I want to do things today. I became a workaholic when I became a woman. What I really noticed is that I can’t sit still and do nothing. I’ve got to be doing things all the time. As a man I’d sit and do nothing. Now I’m multi-tasking. I’ve got to be painting pictures, got to go out, got to be out in the West End talking to people, talking to gallery owners and having fun and going to museums and art galleries. I talk to friends and we say, ‘What would have happened if we’d never done this?’ I’d be the same age but a lot older. If I hadn’t changed I’d be incredibly depressed as a bloke. I know that. I would be sitting at home with no friends, no social life, not wanting to do anything, contacting the kids every now and then. I wouldn’t have painted a picture. Now, I go partying. My entire creative energy has been released. Sexual energy, I suppose, has been released.

  You would think on the surface it would be easier to be born trans now. I’m not so sure. I think attitudes haven’t really changed that much, as much as people would make you believe on Channel 4. Been to lots of meetings with transgender people and they talk about their lives. Being trans is becoming more prevalent. It’s in the water, I think. Actually, perhaps that’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. There’s a lot of oestrogen in the tap water these days. And it’s to do with the brain. There’s a little bit in the hypothalamus, it’s twice as large in the male brain. I think people are born with a female brain or a male brain; it controls your gender identity. I was born with a female brain. Definitely.

  How it seems to me now – which I didn’t really understand at the time – is, I was never male. Everyone assumed I was. But I was always a woman. When I had surgery I reverted to what I should have been. I got rid of a birth defect. Everything became right. The lights all went on: bang! Everything went from black and white into colour. Everything became normal. The funny thing was, years ago I thought if I ever did this it would be incredibly difficult and it would be awkward as a family and people would laugh at me. I thought it would be totally impossible. When it came to it, it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. It was incredibly easy, but then I was never a man. It’s been the main experience in my life. Nothing comes close to it in seventy-one years. The best thing I’ve ever done. The most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. Definitely. Without a doubt.

  It’s been fabulous, my experience of this. Fabulous being a woman. Fabulous. I was saying to my friend the other day, ‘I’d do it again tomorrow. The operation and everything. No questions.’ It’s now been thirteen years. It feels completely natural now. The idea of being a man now, I think, ‘What a ghastly idea!’ Sometimes I have to pinch myself; sometimes I think I’m going to wake up and I’m going to be a geezer again. Perish the thought!’

  5

  Upright

  Christina, 42, Surrey

  ‘I’m meant to be morally principled’

  ‘It came out in a big argument. I remember screaming, ‘Why haven’t you asked me to marry you?’ And Jim screamed back at me, ‘Because we’re not fucking having sex!’ That pulled me up really short because he was right. That was the first time that one of us had said it out loud in an otherwise perfect – in inverted commas – relationship. The denial was popped.

  We started to see a psychosexual counsellor and what we established was that I had a lot of physical pain during intercourse. When Jim and I would be having sex, when his willy was banging against me, I would have this pain in my womb which felt like somebody was pushing something too hard inside of me and I’d be going, ‘Ow! ow! ow!’ I remember putting up with it, I would just lie there and let it happen, thinking, ‘It feels like he’s hurting me – it feels like I have to be passive in this, otherwise he’s going to get upset.’

  The counsellor suggested I get checked out medically. I go for the results to the gynaecologist and she said, ‘There isn’t any indication of endometriosis, which would be the first thing we consider, but I’ve got to tell you, Christina, most of the women who come to see me who’ve got pain during intercourse and who don’t have a physical complaint have usually suffered abuse from their father. And had an abusive – not necessarily sexual – scenario caused by the father in the home of the young girl.’ Which I’d never heard of before. And of course my dad was abusive in that there was a lot of physical violence that sometimes me and my sister would get on the wrong end of. Things would be thrown, doors would be slammed, walls would be punched, you know: rage. It was explained to me by my counsellor that an orgasm for men can be very similar to rage, in that there is a loss of control. Perhaps I was responding unconsciously to the loss of control element of intercourse, in the same way I used to respond to my dad, so it wasn’t a pleasurable experience.

  We then had to do this thing called touching exercises. Sex was banned. We had to make an evening whereby we would touch each other naked. This was before our daughter was born so that made things somewhat easier. First of all it’s not even on your boobs or your bum or your bits – it’s completely avoiding all of those sexy bits – just legs or hands or feet or hair or things like that. Then you build up to your erogenous zones. But I found myself in the bath once and Jim said, ‘Are we going to do touching exercises tonight?’ We’ve got a blunt knife in the bathroom because our sink plug doesn’t open. I had this little knife in my hand. I went, ‘Just
don’t! Just stop! Don’t ask me. Just stop going on about it!’ I looked at myself with this knife; I couldn’t be making more defensive gestures about the fact that I didn’t want to be intimate. To be in that space was too hard for me. No wonder I was avoiding having sex, no wonder he felt rejected, no wonder all that stuff was going on.

  Ironically, Jim went and had an affair. Unsurprisingly. It’s rejection, isn’t it? I was rejecting him constantly on a sexual level: ‘I don’t want you, I don’t need you, I don’t desire you, I don’t want to know.’ So what happens is that he goes off and finds that intimacy from somebody else. He left me for a week. Fortunately we were seeing our counsellor and he came back. But I thought he’d gone. I thought that was it. And that would have been a real shame: that the exposure to my dad’s temper when I was little had had such wide-reaching and profound effects on my ability to be in an intimate relationship. Me and Jim have reconciled but it’s taken a lot of work, a lot of commitment, and constantly having to go through the discomfort of looking at that side of our relationship, which we’d rather ignore, because who wants to look at the shitty bits? But it makes me sad when I think of other couples that haven’t got to the bottom of what all that’s about. So thank God Jim screamed in my face, ‘Because we’re not having sex!’

  I do have sexual fantasies. Mostly they’re fantasising about being a stripper in a nightclub – those hideous, dingy clubs in Soho. I would look like those typical porn women, with porny-type underwear, so I wouldn’t look like me. Or I have sexual fantasies about rape. I’d be in a club and let men have sex with me. They would absolutely sexually desire me. Absolutely. I would be an object of desire. The men would say the most horrendous things like ‘You’re going to love it, fucking whore’ – like you see on films where men are raping women, and they’d say the most disgusting, hideous things. I would be raped by a whole line of men. A line of them! Loads. All different – not ones I find attractive: fat, bald, sweaty, dirty, horrible men. Anyone. Oh yeah! The point in the rape fantasy would be that I didn’t get to choose. It’s the whole notion of being powerless that is sexually exciting. It’s submissive really, isn’t it? I’ve gone back to that fantasy again and again. For years.

  I’m meant to be morally principled and politically aware and for the right and for the greater good. Because my dad had a difficulty controlling his temper when we were growing up, if I even detect male oppression, I’m going to have a shit-fit irrespective of how that’s going to make anyone else feel. So maybe there’s a bit of childhood stuff going on in these interactions as well, I’m sure there probably is. I was listening to Radio 5 this morning and they were having a debate about sexual harassment in the workplace and this man called up and was amazed a male employee would no longer work for him because he’d tapped his employee’s wife on her bum at the Christmas party. I was shouting at the radio, ‘How dare you touch a woman’s bottom, bum, backside? That’s like touching her breasts. You don’t touch people’s breasts or their bottoms if you’re not having a sexual relationship. That is a gesture to suggest, ‘Are you up for it?’ Sorry, but it is. Yet in my sexual fantasy I’m playing out what would happen with that bloke who touched his employee’s wife – I’d let him have sex with me. I’d do that thing that I absolutely hate. I hate oppression. I hate somebody thinking they can do what they want without my consent – hate, hate, hate, hate, hate – and that’s what I’m using as a sexual fantasy.

  That’s like my dark side, isn’t it? It’s like my shadow self that is the realm of my sexual fantasy. I have to conjure up scenarios where I’m effectively a prostitute. This isn’t what I politically think – but then maybe the whole point about sexual fantasies is they’re about archetypes, they’re not about reality. It’s almost as if I have to be the negative version of myself in order to enjoy sex. My sexual fantasy is absolutely what I would abhor in normal life. It’s like a negative of my conscious life.

  In my sexual life with my husband everything is consensual. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But my sexual fantasies are the opposite of that: it’s public, it’s non-consensual, it’s unprotected, it’s dangerous, no one cares, I’m objectified, it’s not married sex. It’s not in a relationship. It’s paid for. It’s not free. It’s a job, no one cares. I’m objectified. I’m not married, not in a relationship. It’s abhorrent, actually. This is the shit that I have a sexual fantasy about.

  I used to suffer from panic attacks. When I was five, my dad kicked me when I was on the floor, and I remember being pulled up off the carpet with my face really close to the carpet. My mum was there and she couldn’t do anything because my dad was in a rage and I remember feeling, ‘I’m fucked. He’s not in control, she’s not in control, who’s in fucking control? No one’s in control. I am at the whim of this man.’ I’ve turned this abject horror and terror of dying into this sexual playground in which I dance and jump and skip and I love it, you know. It’s like my psyche dumps all that shit and fear into this sexual bin and then the fear of that shit is exciting. You can’t say, ‘I’m five, I’m not going to dump that into my sexual fantasy pot.’ It’s happening unconsciously. And we’re talking about the sexual drive, which is second only to the drive to stay alive; that’s what I’ve heard.

  I wonder if other people act out their fantasies of prostitution because they like feeling dirty? I would never do that, it would never occur to me to do that. I’m not being judgmental; I’m just saying that the fucking lid is shut really tight on that. I wouldn’t act out my fantasies with my husband. No. No! My fantasy is an extremely private affair. I know this man extremely well, I’m forty-two, we’ve been together since I was twenty-nine and he was twenty-four; I have not told him about the line of men having sex with me. Or me being some dirty whore in some nightclub, letting anybody do what they want. I’d be embarrassed, I’d be exposed, I’d be vulnerable. I’d be in danger – bearing in mind I know that Jim wouldn’t hurt me. It’s bringing it into the light, then showing somebody, which is a risk. It’s like showing somebody your dirty knickers, isn’t it? Why would you show somebody you love the dredges of your psyche? Because he might judge? Because I’d feel shame? Would he think less of me?

  I don’t have any desire to act out my fantasy. But maybe that’s part of my fucking problem in terms of my avoidance of sex. Maybe I could act a bit of my fantasies out, maybe I could bring some of that stuff into the bedroom with my husband, who’s up for it. If I brought it into the bedroom with my husband whom I love and trust, and vice versa, maybe that would be a way of healthily incorporating that into our sex life. I don’t know. Oh my God!’

  6

  Lesbian

  Paula, 53, south London

  ‘Vaginas are like flowers’

  ‘When I was fifteen I had my first relationship with a cousin. I knew it was wrong because I was having sexual feelings and being intimate with my cousin. I didn’t think anyone would approve because she was female. People in the family knew but it wasn’t spoken about. That was my first encounter of a same-sex relationship. And it was based on trust, love, warmth, comfort.

  I’m the oldest of nine children, five to my mother and four to my father. Having been sexually abused from when I was six years old to aged ten by my mother’s husband and his friend, for those four years I lived my childhood thinking I would be pregnant: didn’t really know how you got pregnant but I was just terrified of being pregnant. It made me feel very ugly and I couldn’t smile. People would say, ‘Why does she never smile?’ I had this thing going on in my life that no one saw.

  My childhood shaped a lot of the choices I’ve made. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to be like my mum who tolerates a husband that has relationships with lots of other women and who is not considered good enough for him’ – because that’s what her husband thought. And I didn’t want to be like some of my aunts and my cousins in the West Indies because they accepted what men did to them. They’d say things like, ‘Well, that’s what men do: they all play away from home. They c
ome back to die. Or when they’re not well. Or they come back when things are not okay out there.’ I was really determined to not have that kind of relationship, or allow anyone to have that kind of relationship with me.

  I remember having a boyfriend when I was sixteen and that felt like my choice. He was the boy next door. I wasn’t allowed to be alone with him. My mother’s new partner was really, really against it. He wanted me to have a relationship with his son, which felt so incestuous – more incestuous than me having a relationship with my cousin because that felt right. But this was like way serious – we lived in the same house. I had to stop having my relationship with the boy next door. He was absolutely besotted with me, he was lovely, he was a gentleman. I can’t say anything wrong about him. He came from a more normal kind of family where women were treated differently. He was really brilliant and he went on to be the father of my daughter years later.