The Sex Lives of English Women

by Wendy Jones

  One of the other guys at the dance class has a harem of women around him. All the women talk about it and they’re not that pleased. One woman said, ‘His cards are on the table; he’s looking for a shag.’ Every Friday night he goes to a bar and there are loads of women and more come there to meet him and he picks one – or two. Or three. The women are all quite sexy, they’re beautiful dancers, they’re all really in their bodies. I do have judgments and feelings about the harem thing. This friend was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really horrible and then he picks one and everyone thinks everything he says is really interesting.’ And I think, ‘Yeah, that is a bit shit.’

  A lot of the young girls in the class are rushing around him. I’m glad I’m older because I think, ‘I ain’t doing that one with you.’ I may not look like them, but I don’t do that kind of thing. People think you should pitch yourself according to how you look, so only people who look like elevens out of ten go out with elevens and people who look like four out of ten go out with fours. He’s an eleven and I’m a four but I don’t care. I think, I don’t care if I look like a four; you’ve got to work really hard if you want my attention. Which does feel empowering! I do feel like that. I’m glad I come from a very working-class background because I’m quite grounded.

  Last week in the dance class I really felt like the artist that I am in the room but I also felt sexy and the woman that I am. Because they’re combined for me. When my artist is up and I’m liking what I like and I don’t like who I don’t like, I feel very empowered, I’m interested in being myself. I don’t want to be part of his harem. I wouldn’t mind having my harem. If it was a woman having a whole load of guys around her I wonder what conversations women would be having about it? They have other language for that, which is, ‘She’s a slut, ergh!’ There’s something about a woman being really open, saying, ‘I’m going to pick one of you tonight. And that’s the deal. And none of you know which one it is. Whoever laughs hardest will get it.’ That would be quite shocking, wouldn’t it? My friend said about this guy with the harem, ‘When we got to this dinner place, more women joined the table.’ It sounded quite bizarre. I was like, ‘I don’t like that he’s doing it, but if I was doing that, I would like it.’

  Can you imagine it? You’re going out for a meal with five men, and they all want to really please you and they’re laughing at everything you say and then five more join and you can pick one, or none. And go, ‘Well, there’s five men, and there’s five more coming and I don’t know which one …’ Women don’t imagine they can have a harem of men. Why couldn’t a woman have a harem of men? There’s something about choosing as a woman that’s part of the sexual thing. When people say, ‘Women get involved,’ I think, ‘No, actually, I could do the opposite.’ There are all these precepts about how women work and there’s not enough research gathered. People say things like ‘Men can sleep with women and not care but women can’t do that.’ I think, there’s a whole fucking trade of women as prostitutes, what are you talking about? When men say women aren’t like that, it’s a bit of a head-fuck because how come prostitution is the oldest business in the book?

  I wrote this song called ‘White Spider’; it’s a jokey song. The end line is, ‘I’m going to run naked in the wilds and I’m going to sink my teeth into your parts and into your cock, then I’m going to rip your head off when I’m done.’ I do have that energy in me. Not the most romantic thing ever! Slightly praying mantis thing, and that is not something I’ve learned to do or be. When I’m singing that song, women laugh like hell. They laugh through recognition or they laugh that this little woman’s going, ‘I’m going to sink my teeth into your parts and into your cock then I’m going to rip your head off when I’m done.’ It’s the opposite of, ‘Oh, a woman gets broken in sex.’ I think women get fed. Often in our culture for a woman to have sex is depleting and it’s taking away from her respect rather than, actually, sex makes me more of a woman, more sexy and more of who I am. I’ve heard friends say, ‘I’ve got to the point now where I prefer not to have sex.’ You can see there’s a dullness in them. There are lots of benefits to having sex that are about our aliveness. Sex is about joy. It’s about joy for women, or why else do it?

  I haven’t done anything with anyone for a while – and there’s nothing like the real thing. Sexual fantasies tend to come to me more when I’m not being sexual. I used to have this recurring sleep dream that I was on the Orient Express train and I would go into a compartment and I would have great sex with a man and he would go out and I wouldn’t have to speak to him. Then another man would come in and if he didn’t please me I would reject him. The train was going to this destination but these men were coming in and going out and some of them I would tell to go and some of them I would allow to stay.

  I’ve lived out quite a few of my fantasies. There was one guy – I was with another guy at the same time as him who I nearly got married to until I realised that really wasn’t the right thing, I said, ‘Yes’ because he asked me! Anyway, that’s a whole other subject. This other guy had a fantasy about having sex on public transport. I said, ‘Okay, I haven’t thought of that as a fantasy of mine, but I’m game.’ He said, ‘That’s quite interesting with your Irish Catholic background – what you’re meant to say is, “Don’t be so ridiculous!”’ One time we were on this train and there was hardly anyone on it – there was someone a few seats down – and we didn’t have sex but he basically gave me an orgasm, let’s put it like that. It was exciting because I had to keep quiet and there was that moment of ‘Oh, is someone moving?’ I don’t know if they had cameras, I don’t know if we were filmed. After we finished the guy got up and walked towards the toilet and we both looked very happy and I think he was thinking, ‘They’ve definitely done something, they didn’t look like that when they got on the train.’ But what can you say? Can’t say anything. We were fully dressed. And we were smiling. We did it loads on public transport. Not on the tube, obviously. It was passionate. He would grab me in the street and we would find somewhere really quiet and there was something dirty about it, which was appealing to me.

  I once met this guy at a party and a friend of mine said, ‘He’s really into you.’ She said, ‘Just go for it.’ Anyway, we went for a date and he was all those things I thought he was: he was a rich boy, lived in Notting Hill, worked in the arts world. He was Mr Perfect and he took me out for a really nice drink in Notting Hill and we went for a meal. Yawn. ‘Any chance of going in the back of an alley?’ I’m not saying these days I’m into the back-of-the-alley thing, but there was something really fucking boring about it. He wasn’t naughty. It was a real eye-opener for me. He was so fucking boring. I can’t tell you. I kept going to the loo. He did say, ‘You go to the loo a lot.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re really boring.’ Quite outrageous, but I felt that I was supposed to be grateful that this blond Adonis, trustafarian, Notting Hill artist was interested in a number four. I sat there and thought, even if he has all the boxes ticked and I get off with him, I would die of boredom. I really got it: I would die of boredom with this man in every way. I wouldn’t even be interested in being in a bedroom with this man. What people think of as romantic is really fucking dull. I remember hearing this yoga guy saying, ‘Just have a good sniff of that person, literally smell them.’ People forget that mating is about smell and if you don’t like someone’s smell, get the hell out of there: even if they’ve got the right job, the right place, and you’re on the same pitch, you ain’t going to get happy together. It’s about sex, about animals; it’s about smelling each other.

  Later on I was with a more mature guy; there was something about him that was so attentive in an erotic way. He was a dark horse because he didn’t look like someone who was erotic. Once he was in the bedroom he was quite … he knew where to touch; I don’t mean the actual acts of sex. He was the one that taught me about the back of my neck. He was drawn to touch the back of my neck and I was like, ‘Ah, I’d do anything for you now!’ It was just the way … It was a
lmost like a whisper. It wasn’t like, ‘Right! Let’s get you in here, girl!’ He was so attentive to every part of my body and I found that really erotic. He really would ask me what I wanted: ‘What do you want me to do?’ And I would say, ‘Yep, go down on me!’ I would order him and he would say, ‘Oh, I don’t feel like doing that,’ and I was like, ‘Oh well, if you don’t feel like doing that you’re not getting anything else. I don’t want you to fuck me, I want that.’ I would literally throw him on the bed and say, ‘Come on, I want you to please me.’ And I think he was like, ‘Shit!’ And that is quite scary: an under five-foot woman going, ‘Right, you’d better please me or I’m going.’ We used to laugh a lot when things didn’t go right, and that’s nice too. I was quite immature at the time. Kind of, ‘Let’s see what you’ve got, then.’ I was putting him under pressure. I wasn’t saying it like that, but he felt it. I had this appetite in me that I wanted satiated.

  You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but we were having amazing sex; I was screaming completely. There were these Turkish garages underneath his flat and he said, ‘You’ve got to walk past all those guys afterwards.’ That particular morning I walked past and they were like, ‘Morning!’ He wasn’t ashamed of me, but a lot of men can be suppressed around that sort of thing: ‘You can let me know you’re enjoying it, but not too much.’ I remember a guy saying that to me: ‘Do you have to scream that much?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I do. Clearly!’ There’s something about really enjoying sex. In trapeze everybody calls me The Screamer – I mean, I scream all the time. There’s something about the adrenaline, and the sound and the expression. It’s really pleasurable and delicious when I make that sound.

  I’m not going to say how old I am. In my thirties. It’s been really good for me not to be with someone for a while. Now I feel ready for something, but I want that person to be the person they are and to be as honest as my ex is – even though it really hurt when we split up. But that’s part of life. I feel really grateful I had that relationship with him: it was amazing. We had lots of trauma, and people go on about the bad parts, but the good parts … more than any man I’ve been with, I became the woman that I am with him and he taught me about my own beauty. And my desire. My desire, what was inside me, came out with him.

  Sometimes after I’ve had too many wanks I think, ‘I’d like to do this with someone.’ Yeah, I’m quite good at it, but I’d like someone to … That’s what a partner can do; they can up my game. They give me something I hadn’t even thought of. People don’t see relationships like that; that people can offer you something. All the different men – all the different men, wow! – I’ve been with have revealed something about myself that I didn’t know. The best relationships, the key relationships, in my life have unlocked some other level of myself. They’re literally keys, they’re key relationships. I wouldn’t have known other levels of myself if I hadn’t met those men.

  When I do the trapeze I’m standing on the platform, I’m really frightened because it’s the unknown and there’s this adrenaline and I get really excited and then I jump off the trapeze and I’m swinging. Suddenly I’m doing these positions and I don’t know how I’m doing them. There’s a love of life in it. There’s a verve in it. And when I had really great sex I felt this love of life. It releases joy. Last night, when I came down the guy who was pulling the lines just could not stop laughing. He said, ‘I want to give you feedback on your trapezing but I need to calm down. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen.’ That’s how I feel; I love life. I come from a strict Irish Catholic background, I’m a carer, but I love sex. Sex brings out what’s hidden. And when I say that, I guess I’m talking about trapeze. I mean, trapeze is not all about sex, but there is some similarity: you’re there, there’s nothing behind you, you’re about to jump off a platform, it’s unknown and with someone you don’t know. Sex is a massive risk and adventure because you don’t know who you’re going to reveal in yourself.’

  23

  Womb

  Helen, 36, Hampshire

  ‘When the man comes to you as a man, then it’s beautiful’

  ‘When I met my husband I was deeply, deeply masculinised. My mother is a formidable woman, formidable, and a bit like Margaret Thatcher. And my father is equally as formidable. So I’d grown up in an environment where it’s okay to be a man but it’s not okay to be a woman; that vulnerability, that softness, the sensitivity was completely disregarded. I’d learned to be hard-edged and tough. Well, of course, coming into a relationship, who’s going to be the man? It’s going to be the person who stamps their feet hardest. If the woman is becoming the man, what happens to the man? In a heterosexual relationship there has to be the yin and yang – the man and the woman – which means the man will drop into that feminine energy and be wimpy and the woman gets away with everything and she’s stamping all over him. And that was very much my experience of my early marriage. It’s not satisfying for either party. Sexually I don’t want a man who’s acting like a woman, and he didn’t want a woman who’s acting like a man.

  After I had my son I became postnatally depressed and it kind of ripped us apart because I stopped being the dynamic, outward woman that I am and I became this woman sleeping in the foetal position who was lost; I was just so lost. When we started to rebuild our relationships we thought, ‘Oh, swinging would be good! Because it’s going to add some spice into our lives.’ So for two years we explored the swinging scene and there were elements of it that were really good fun. We were young when we got together and it helped my self-esteem that men did actually want to have sex with me when I didn’t want to have sex with myself. I really liked watching my husband have sex with other women because, um, he looked really hot! So it was great. There were times if I didn’t find anyone – we used to call it ‘to play with’ – if I didn’t find anyone to play with, and he would be playing with someone then that could be quite painful, which I can see was coming from my wounded place. But when I was playing with someone too, then watching him was incredible: ‘Oh, right, so that’s how he looks. That’s awesome,’ and he found it the same, he thought that was great. But there was some safety in the fact that we would be in the room together. Also a lot of times it became quite self-abuse-ish because we’d go into a party with several hundred people and it was about seeing if you could fuck the best of a bad bunch. For a lot of these people the most controversial and cutting-edge thing, the most radical thing they are ever going to do, is have sex with someone else’s wife. It was just a bit, ‘Really?’

  One thing I do still fantasise about was a party in Canary Wharf where it was something like a hundred people and everyone had paid an astronomical amount of money – I mean, I thought it was astronomical – £150 per person – and it was this incredible penthouse in Canary Warf, dripping money, thirtieth floor, looking out over the banks, floor-to-ceiling glass, champagne on tap, half-naked waiters and this huge sixteen-foot bed which everyone’s piled up on. It was like a Roman orgy. I can’t remember if we had sex with anyone else but we had sex with me up against this glass wall and as I turned round there must have been thirty people watching us. That for me is still … That was amazing.

  Now I run a Red Tent with a collective of women in Hampshire. It is very much using the menstrual cycle as a path to a woman’s spirituality, creativity and her sexuality. Fascinating. Our bleed is when we’re at the peak of our femininity. It is literally what separates us from men. When we are shunning our bleed, we are shunning our sexuality, shunning our deep power and deep wisdom. Those bloody awful tampon adverts where women go roller skating and kite surfing – I don’t want to do that. It’s all very masculine. I want to be quiet and calm. The more we take our attention away from our cycle, the more we start to become men. And if we are taking on more of a masculine energy, how are we going to have good sex? How are we going to be in our sexuality? I no longer see my menstrual cycle as an inconvenience. When I bleed, it’s a real joy, I celebrate what my body is doing and I can really honou
r it. Honouring my body and what it means is transforming everything.

  The history of the Red Tent is so beautiful. In biblical times when a woman was bleeding she was sent to the Red Tent. Of course, modern-day feminists would go, ‘Oh, that’s disgusting: she was treated as unclean.’ But that’s not actually what happened. Women were sent to the Red Tent so they didn’t have to do the work in the village. The tribe elders would be there to look after the children, they would be doing the cooking, and the women between them would create this community. It was a time when the women talked about what was really happening, the issues with their husbands, the problems within the village, with their children. The men who were left would also have this time to bond with their brothers, the other men. They would do the real talking then. We’ve lost this time of real deep connection and communication.

  There was a woman, I believe it was fifteen years ago, and she was a single mother and a chambermaid and she had no support and she’d read a book about the Red Tent and she said, ‘I need this in my life. I need the support of women who usually judge me. We need to break apart this patriarchal competition and come back to this connection.’ And she started the Red Tent movement in America. And it’s really exciting. In America there are thousands of Red Tents. They set one day of the month when the women come together – it’s not only when women are bleeding. You bring how you are; that’s the beautiful thing. Oh, it’s just amazing.

  The structure of the Red Tent tends to be that we will have a sharing circle. This isn’t tea and sympathy or Stitch ’n Bitch. It’s not like that at all. When someone is talking, they communicate with real authenticity about what’s going on for them, it’s not just ‘Oh, I’m really pissed off with my husband,’ it’s ‘Wow, I’m feeling this really deep pain around so-and-so.’ Really what’s happening. A real passion of mine is getting under the bullshit and getting to what’s really going on for people. Although if I’m honest, I usually feel a lot of resistance before I go because my work in the National Health Service is quite emotional, with a lot of holding of emotional space for my clients, so sometimes I can go, ‘Oh, it’s a bit like work.’ In America, because they’re so popular, they have these huge Mongolian yurts: just beautiful, beautiful. Another really great place is the Goddess Temple in Glastonbury, it’s amazing – it’s the only consecrated female-worshipping place in Europe – it’s been open for over a thousand years – to worship the female form of the goddess, which is actually how the UK was. Bridget is the goddess of England; the British Isles were called the Brigit Isles. Britannia is actually Brigit-annia, a year of Brigit. It’s really fascinating.