The Sex Lives of English Women

by Wendy Jones

  When I became a Christian, sex outside of marriage was bad. So the things that I did with my fiancé weren’t full intercourse, but to all intents and purposes it was a sexual relationship, just with guilt invested. The guilt was awful. The actual acts were pretty awful. He enjoyed them. There was no enjoyment for me but a lot of guilt. Whereas with that salesman it was like, do you know what, if I’d have had sex with him I might have enjoyed it. Possibly. How outrageous would that have been? I don’t think I could have coped with the guilt. Partly I wouldn’t have coped with the guilt of not being married but I would have felt absolutely mortified at me enjoying sex. Because I shouldn’t, basically. Enjoying something that was sin – to use the Christian term – would have been horrendous for me. Sex therapists would have a field day with me with this: if I enjoy something, why does a part of me feel like I’m betraying some painful part of me?

  So the last time I had sex was in 1993. What I did with my fiancé – who was a git and he didn’t marry me, he married somebody else – was that for six years my life became centred round him and I wouldn’t do things so I could see him. And I know that’s what I used to do with my dad, it started there, I would sacrifice stuff if I could go out with Dad. Because my dad – unfortunately – helped foster in me a sense of ‘I can’t be alive by myself,’ that to survive I needed him, and that started at a very young age. I’m so weak around men emotionally that if I was to get involved with one I’d be swallowed up. I don’t want that. I’d rather be alone than that. That is the worst feeling, waiting for that phone to go or for a text: I’m not doing that for all the tea in China.

  I’m glad I don’t have sex but I have moments of fear that I’m going to be an old bitter spinster, which I don’t like. I obviously don’t let myself think this very often but I do have this moment of thinking I’d love to be married, and what I’d love more than anything is for someone to sit on the sofa watching telly with me, that there’d be somebody when I come home from work; that I’m not always coming into an empty house. But I do not want random sexual encounters because I don’t want to have to wash my sheets! I’d like someone on the sofa – as long as they don’t make a mark! The shower is better because at least it will all rub off. I’ll have to wear ear muffs so I don’t hear anything. And I’d have to be blindfolded so I can’t see them looking at me. It’s not looking great really, is it? I do sometimes think it would be good to have sex in a walk-in shower, but then when I try and think about having sex in a walk-in shower there’s absolutely nothing, it’s just like, no. Then I think, well, actually the fantasy doesn’t give me any enjoyment in the slightest so I don’t bother having the fantasy. I’m all right with my jigsaw puzzles, really!

  There’s an asexuals’ group; I heard about it on Radio 4 – I love Radio 4 – but then some friends were like, ‘Deborah – you are not asexual.’ But is asexual different to being celibate? Celibate is a choice; asexuals don’t have a choice. Even when I think of Simon Cowell who is the typical bad boy with a horrible persona, the kind of guy I’d be attracted to, the thought of sex with him doesn’t do it for me. You know, I can live a fuller life as far as my understanding of a full life is without having sex; sex is not going to make any difference. My therapist’s challenge to me when I spoke to her last week was, ‘Deborah – I believe you can have that part of life as much as anybody else can have it.’ I don’t. But am I sitting here thinking, ‘Oh gosh, I’ve missed out because I’m not having sex?’ No. Quite relieved, in fact!’

  11

  Healer

  Gwyn, 49, London

  ‘Pleasure is a great healer’

  ‘My partner will come home from work and say, ‘I taught this kid how to play the piano,’ and I’m like, ‘I did a fanny massage!’ He says, ‘Oh, yeah, you have a different job from me!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, pretty much!’ Probably I have an unusual job, I can’t remember, I’m so immersed in a world where it’s normal. For the last ten years I’ve been helping people work with their sexuality, to heal it, or change it, or open it up and discover more about themselves as sexual beings.

  Vaginal massage is beautiful. Some people call it ‘yoni massage’. Some people say ‘vulva massage’. ‘Cunt massage’, actually, some people. Lots of women don’t have their genitals focused on unless someone wants something from them. Somebody’s only gone there to wipe them, to give them a gynaecological exam or because they want pleasure but never to just say, ‘Well, what you got going on here? Let’s have a look. Oh, what’s your clitoris do?’ To give it attention and to say, ‘Why, you’re beautiful, let’s honour you.’

  Vaginal massage is always a great honour and it’s always a very beautiful thing to do. I do it for different reasons. For some women it’s because something hurts there or isn’t quite working and they want healing. Sometimes they want to find their pleasure again. A recent massage was for a woman who was married for a long time, she had said no to sex early on, raised the kids, and she’d suddenly had a spontaneous sexual awakening, wanted to find out more about herself and didn’t want to do it with her husband. She said, ‘I’d like you to help me figure out what’s going on around there.’ So we did it like a fun adventure and exploration.

  I always ask permission for each move I make. I start with lots of massage on the body, then focus on opening the hips and the thighs and getting them relaxed and then I eventually do some stuff on the outside of the vagina, just holding, and massaging around the public bone and the bum and the inner thighs because it’s all connected. Also, for a woman to let you in she has to feel relaxed and safe. I am taking the outer labia and pressing it and rolling it. Some women want it done quite hard, some women don’t. We hold tension in our genitals – well, women who come here do – so it’s about relaxing the muscles and the skin and the fibres, giving it love, telling it it’s beautiful. Sometimes women are holding their thoughts in there, their fear, shame.

  I always start on the outside, lots of stroking, lots of calming. Some women might say, ‘Carry on,’ or they might say, ‘I need a break,’ or it will bring stuff up and they’re in floods of tears. Eventually if it feels right I’ll say, ‘Can I enter?’ I might go inside the lips first and a little bit on the clitoral button without actually penetrating, then ask about penetration. I start with one finger with the pad up and to really slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly let her body take you in and then be still and let her get used to that … and then I might press. The idea is to release tension inside. We map the clitoris out like a clock. Then very slowly when we both feel ready I’d move to one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock … First of all I might use pressure and they might say, ‘Can you do little circles?’ or, ‘Can you tap?’ or, ‘Can you press harder?’ so we see what the clitoris wants and we move and we keep moving.

  Sometimes they orgasm. With some women it’s the first time they’ve felt arousal in a long time. Some of them are going, ‘Oh, oh, I’m all turned on,’ and I’m like, ‘Great! Do you want to run with that?’ And they might say, ‘Oh, is that allowed? I don’t know, oh, but it feels so good.’ ‘It’s up to you.’ Pleasure is a great healer.

  I had one client who couldn’t orgasm. She wanted, at her request, to masturbate in front of me, so as she got close to orgasming I could tell her what to do to get her over the edge. I was watching her and she was orgasming. She wasn’t having a big expression but her body was doing it all. I said to her, ‘That’s an orgasm.’ She said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘It’s not the big be-all-and-end-all, but it is orgasmic energy.’ And she was like, ‘It is?’ I was like, ‘If you can learn to ride that wave you’ll get to the bigger ones.’ She emailed me weeks later and said, ‘Oh my God, I can orgasm now!’ So for her it was me witnessing what was going on and her tweeking it a little bit.

  My background wasn’t open but it wasn’t massively shameful either. Normalish, I guess. I remember at thirteen finding my dad’s Playboy magazines and it felt like coming home. It was like, ‘Wow, beautiful. Naked bodies!’ and
I was most interested in the sex stories. I remember feeling very excited – what I know now is turned on – and a little bit of shame because the magazines had been hidden and I knew not to tell anyone I was looking at them. But there was something very familiar and safe to me in them. There was always a big draw to sex and it always felt good and normal and exciting to me. As I went through my life I had lots of good experiences but I had a lot of bad experiences as well, sexually. And everything in between. Lots of different relationships, marriages, the whole thing.

  Before this, I was doing massage in a charity for people with disabilities. When I went on the training course to do this work, I could not say the word ‘cunt’. When I grew up it was the worst word that you could ever say, worse than ‘fuck’, worse than ‘bitch’. In fact, I would have struggled to say ‘the c word’ even, because that referred to cunt! Couldn’t do it. The first week of the training course, I was absolutely terrified. One woman on the course looked round at the men and says, ‘I’d like to sing you a song I’ve written. It’s called “The Cunt Song”.’ And she sings this gorgeous song set to this jazzy tune about, ‘Oh, piss, flap, cunt, vagina …’ And all these crass terms for vagina and vulva and the chorus was, ‘It’s the holiest holy hole’.

  She said we need to reclaim the word ‘cunt’. It’s used in a derogatory way – so: ‘you cunt!’ Why would we say that about our most sacred place? We do it with ‘dick’ as well: ‘He’s a dick.’ ‘She’s a cunt.’ We used our genitals as swear words because they’re shameful. I started practising saying the word ‘cunt’. I wanted to be an empowered woman! I wanted to claim mine back. Roll forward many years and I ran a workshop called Cunt Love. We started with, ‘What do you call yours?’ Nobody would speak so we wrote down all the words we could think of for vulva and vagina and put them up in the room and tried to get women to say them, and they couldn’t. What is it when we can’t say the name of our bodies? I couldn’t even say ‘cock’ too! Instead of ‘penis’. Now I say it all the time. I love it. Great word!

  In another training workshop, we were in groups with four women. We showed our cunt and talked about it and said, ‘This is what it looks like, I quite like this bit,’ and, ‘I shave mine because …’ or, ‘I don’t shave mine because …’. ‘I like it when …’ and, ‘These are some good times we’ve had together and these are some bad times,’ and talked about it while they looked at it. It was one of the most amazing things I ever did. It was the first time in my life I realised, ‘Oh yeah, yours is different from mine! Cool!’ It’s quite hard to see the vagina – it’s not like the penis. Definitely not like the penis.

  Sometimes the women I work with go on to have more fulfilled sex lives. A lot of women learn to masturbate better, because a lot of them don’t masturbate, or not much, or not well. They know, ‘Touch this part of the clitoris and not that part,’ or, ‘I need to use a dildo,’ or, ‘I don’t need to use a dildo,’ or whatever it is. They learn more about their own bodies and what works so that they have better orgasms, whether that’s on their own or with a partner. Mostly, though, I work with men.

  Men come to see me for lots of different reasons. Things like premature ejaculation or difficulty getting or maintaining an erection. I see men who have little or no experience of sexuality. There was a chap today and I’m the only person he’s had any sexual experience with. He’s thirty-seven. A virgin. Right as he hit puberty he needed some operations. He then decided his body was disgusting, horrible and disfigured, and he shut down. A little bit of body dysmorphia going on there. He thinks his body’s grotesque; there’s a scar here or there. I keep showing him my scars, I go, ‘Look! People have scars.’ He has very low self-esteem. It’s been twenty years of him dealing with that and he’s terrified of being with a woman and not knowing what to do and getting it wrong and of her rejecting him because of his body.

  I work with men who can’t orgasm – or don’t orgasm – often because there’s a fear of release. They were told early on, ‘Don’t you get a woman pregnant!’ A lot of men are frightened of being powerful, or fear letting go. Many men want to learn to separate orgasm from ejaculation. Because for men orgasm is separate from ejaculation – well, for women also, but that’s a whole other thing. So orgasms are all nice feelings, ripples through the body, while ejaculation is the expulsion of semen. It happens at the same time unless you learn to separate it or you’re very lucky. They want to orgasm without ejaculating to last longer. They want to have sex for longer.

  Some men come because they want to learn to be a better lover. I used to get a lot of emails where guys would say, ‘I want to learn methods and techniques for pleasing a woman.’ I would teach them how to touch a woman to a degree. But I would always say, ‘You don’t need to learn methods and techniques. Maybe a few – touch this bit and not that, and make sure there’s enough lubricant.’ But it’s not about techniques. Most of what I teach is how to be present. Because if you can be present with someone, you will intuitively know what to do.

  One chap came here and he wanted to figure out how to please his wife, he didn’t think he was pleasing her very well and part of that was he really had a bit of an obsession with breasts and he would keep playing with her breasts when she asked him to stop. He said, ‘She’ll ask me to stop but I can’t, I’m really focused on them.’ So I said, ‘Well, that’s not going to be pleasing her! Imagine I was playing with your penis and you asked me to stop and I kept playing with it?’ and he was like, ‘Oh!’ Finally struck home.

  We did this session and I could feel as if his inner baby was desperate for breasts, starved. Like a bit of him was almost withered and desiccated. I said, ‘This is what I feel, and I think this is why you struggle to let go of your wife’s breasts when you get access to them.’ He was like, ‘Yeah …’ That made sense to him. We agreed it would feel good for him to receive that mothering energy he needed. Held him like a baby and, oh! it was fascinating because the way he held my breast and put his mouth there and sucked was just like my daughter used to. It was baby, it was not man. After a few sucks he went into bliss and peace, calmed right down, and I don’t know how long we were like that. Then I moved him over to the other side. One gets sore! Afterwards he was blissed out. He emailed me a while ago: his whole life’s changed, everything looks different, he feels more grounded, he’s much more present with his wife.

  I’ve seen musicians and lawyers and people in the church, people from all religions, Muslim, Jewish, Christian. The majority of the male clients are Caucasian. A lot are Indian, Asians. Far fewer black men. All different financial backgrounds, lots of businessmen, some hippified people, artists, lots of engineers, and bankers. Anybody! Anybody! Sessions are a minimum of two hours. And it goes really quickly. We have a chat, we decide together what we’re going to do. Usually we move to a mat on the floor. Often I’m naked or clients are naked. I’m trying to get someone to relax, become present in their body and limbering up arousal. For some people just gentle strokes on their body and they’re in tears, or angry, or back into memories. For others, being allowed to experience pleasure and not be rejected for it is healing. It’s like, oh it is okay for me to experience pleasure. For some people it means being witnessed in their arousal and not being judged and still being loved.

  They don’t have to pull me or emotionally tangle with me, they don’t have to do my washing-up. Men rarely get attached to me. I would say that I’m so clear with what I’m offering, and I’m so clear with boundaries. I mean, I get a few adoring fans but they’re not attached in any unhealthy way. I never feel scared. I’ve always trusted my intuition, one thousand per cent. I trust my own instinct and I’ve never been wrong. When I was first doing this work a friend said I should have a rape alarm, so I had one for a few years. Forgot all about it, found it a few years ago, I was like, ‘I don’t need this any more; I’m not afraid to take anyone where they need to go any more.’ So I chucked that out. No, I don’t feel afraid.

  The youngest I’ve worked
with is twenty-one, which was pretty much on the edge for me. The oldest was eighty. He told me all sorts of sexual desires he’d had in his life but they had been shamed out of him through boys’ public school. He had shut off his sexual self. He got to a point where he was like, ‘Screw that. I’m not getting any younger. I want this part of me back! And I want to be touched!’ He hadn’t been touched in fifteen years.