‘We were saying that one week we should go out and try to notch up as many lovers as we can, with the most variety possible – age, gender, jobs, backgrounds …’ said Ruby. Anna, their slightly quieter friend, smiled and agreed. ‘We should do that.’ Far from feeling isolated by their desire to remain promiscuous, these girls took heart from the way that the culture around them reflected and reinforced their behaviour. They liked the sexually explicit culture in which they moved. ‘It means we can talk about anything we want to when it comes to sex,’ said Anna, ‘and no one tries to make us feel ashamed or whatever.’ They talked about all the television series and books that reflected this uncommitted lifestyle back to them. Sex and the City was the first television programme they mentioned with approval. ‘You know that bit when Miranda got an STD and had to ring all the people she had ever slept with, and she was totting them up and couldn’t believe how many it was – I thought, that’s me one day,’ Bella said, smiling. They also mentioned The L Word, the Sex and the City for lesbians, and books such as Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl which chronicle uncommitted and paid-for sex.
For these women, the whole mystique of virginity and first times has died a death. ‘I didn’t have an orgasm the first time,’ Ruby remembered, ‘but it felt good. Really good. I was the first person in my group of friends to have sex. It was someone I really fancied, but wasn’t in love with. I knew he was a real slag and had loads of sex. I really dreaded the idea of a romantic first time with a boyfriend, you know, that we talked about for a long time and then it didn’t measure up or whatever. I really didn’t want that. I wanted sex. It felt really good. I felt empowered.’
Bella took a while to remember her first time, and then she smiled: ‘It was with a friend of mine, we used to meet up every summer, it was this camp site I always went to. One summer I saw him and I thought, wow. We had suddenly grown up – we were both drinking and smoking. We sat on the beach, we got drunk, we smoked, it was like, what next. He was only there for two days.’ Did that make her sad, that the first person she had sex with was only around for two days? ‘No, not at all. Another guy I fancied arrived that day.’ So you moved on? ‘Yeah, exactly. I find it really hard to remember anything about it, to be honest.’
Because they had so successfully subtracted emotion from their sex lives, these young women were perfectly in tune with the culture around them. When I asked them what they thought of the way that magazines published pictures of women purely as objects, Ruby raised her eyebrows and said witheringly, ‘What do I think? I think, wow, she’s hot. Or not.’ Similarly, when I asked them if they would ever think of doing something like glamour modelling, pornography or lap dancing if they needed the money, Ruby stepped in again. ‘Yes, I would. I wouldn’t do it for the money. I don’t need an excuse. I would do it for enjoyment. I’d enjoy it.’
For these three girls, the only impediment in their desire to ‘run’ their sex lives as they wanted was the unfortunate fact that many of the men they met wanted something more. When I asked them, in true Sex and the City style, whether they thought that women could have sex like a man, they laughed and decided deliberately to misunderstand me. ‘I don’t have sex like the men. Men always go soppy on me,’ Ruby said, and Bella joined in. ‘It’s pathetic, they are always talking about love.’ ‘That’s right,’ agreed Ruby. ‘It’s the boys who keep talking about love. They are so emotional and wimpy.’ Why is that pathetic, I wondered? ‘It makes it difficult for me to run my sex life the way I want,’ said Ruby. Bella agreed: ‘It just is … I met this guy in a pub the other night. We had sex once, and … it’s pathetic. We’re lying there … and he says, are you going to sleep with other people? I thought, who are you, why are you asking me this? Obviously I’m having sex with other people. He decided he loved me, he was texting me and phoning me for days. After having sex once! What’s that about?’
Isn’t it possible he might have felt a real connection? The girls look at me, shaking their heads – that isn’t how sex works. ‘You don’t get so heavy with someone after one night,’ says Ruby. ‘Yes, for the first three dates or whatever, first month, there are no rules, that’s how it works … that’s the minimum, then you can start talking about whether you want to make it something more.’ ‘I’m much more attracted to the guys who don’t really give a shit,’ said Anna. ‘God, yeah, there’s nothing attractive about a guy who gets all emotional on you,’ said Bella.
These women bear witness to a very real cultural shift. The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles tracks the change between 1990, when the first survey was carried out, and 2000, when the second survey occurred. The average number of partners over a lifetime increased between 1990 and 2000, from 8.6 to 12.7 for men and from 3.7 to 6.5 for women. The average number of partners over the past five years was four for men and two for women. But people under twenty-five had a different pattern of sexual activity: those under twenty-five reported higher numbers of partners in the past five years, with 14.1 per cent of men and 9.2 per cent of women reporting ten or more. The proportion of men and women having more than one partner at the same time has also increased. Over 14 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women in 2000 had been in such relationships in the past year, as opposed to 11.4 per cent and 5.4 per cent in 1990. And this proportion was also far higher among younger age groups, with over 20 per cent of 15–24-year-old men and 15 per cent of 15–24-year-old women having concurrent partnerships in the past year.6 While self-reporting is a notoriously unreliable way of assessing actual behaviour, what we can see from such surveys – or from the conversations of girls such as Bella and Ruby – is that aspirations have shifted. There has also been a big change in attitudes to one-night stands. In 1990 53 per cent of men and 79 per cent of women considered one-night stands to be wrong. Ten years later only a third of men and half of women held that view. Now, nearly ten years further on, we might wonder if these figures have already fallen by another 30 per cent.
As I talked to Ruby, Bella and Anna, I could see that the attractions of this approach to sexuality are pretty obvious. There is the sex itself, which for these women is neither the scary taboo, nor the uncomfortable duty, that it was for so many women in previous generations, but a reliable, freely chosen source of physical pleasure. And building a carapace around oneself that does not allow too much emotional softness to show is, obviously, part of the sense of empowerment. All three of these young women had learnt, as they saw it, from the vulnerabilities of women of previous generations. ‘My father left my mother,’ Ruby told me, ‘and since then she hasn’t really had a relationship. He’s had lots of girlfriends. I never want to be in that position. Never.’ I believed her; this is a generation of women many of whom have learnt from hearing their mothers cry in the night when their fathers left home, and have resolved never to be so vulnerable.
There are many books, films and television series that reflect the new validation given to a casual attitude to sex. I was intrigued that the media representation of sex that these young women mentioned to me as being most like their sex lives was Sex and the City. I had thought its popularity was greater among my peers, thirty- and forty-something women, than among teens who had just started having sex. But it’s clear why these girls find it so attractive. Although many other films and novels have foregrounded the experienced, even predatory sexual woman, previously she has tended to be rather lonely and embattled. At the end of the day, Mrs Robinson or Scarlett O’Hara end up alone. And indeed, that was the message of Candace Bushnell’s original columns – that women in New York were negotiating a hostile sexual environment in which they were likely to lose out. But the television series changed that, by making these women so popular, with their glittering social lives and close friends, and so beautiful, according to the twenty-first-century ideal of beauty, with their bony bodies and huge designer wardrobes. It was not just that the series allowed sexually frank and sexually experienced women a voice, it was
that they made that voice the one that viewers wanted to have; these were the women whose gang you wanted to join. The table where funny, articulate, experienced women were detailing their one-night stands and experiments with bisexuality or group sex was the table that you wanted to be sitting at – not with dull married women or inexperienced girls.
Although most of Sex and the City’s heroines were still chasing a committed relationship, there has been a cultural shift towards embracing sex with no emotional commitment, seen in the burst of popularity of sex memoirs by women. While women have written about sex and relationships for generations, what’s different about these new books is that they record little or nothing of an emotional journey; they move, typically, through a gamut of experiences from sex toys to threesomes, from orgies to sex with strangers, with extremely detailed records of underwear and positions and physical quirks, but with almost no emotional resonance to each encounter. And yet they are not pornography; they are not written with intent to titillate and communicate fantasies, but in order to present an honest and realistic view of the narrator’s sexual experiences.
For instance, Girl with a One-track Mind, which started out as a non-fiction blog, was turned into a book in 2006, and became a bestseller. Its pseudonymous author, Abby Lee, who was soon outed as Zoe Margolis, shows herself seeking as varied as possible a menu of sexual encounters, and although she requires these to be mutually respectful, they never seem to arise from any great emotional connection. She includes a number of tips and advice lists that tell us not just how her sex life is, but how she thinks we should all be behaving. These are striking in the way they normalise the separation of sex and emotion. For instance, the ‘Top Ten Guide to One Night Stands – for women’ includes, at number 4: ‘Relax, for goodness’ sake. It’s just sex. It doesn’t have to mean anything’, and at number 10: ‘If he says, “We are made for each other” – run.’ The adjoining ‘Top Ten Guide to One Night Stands – for men’ is almost identical, together with some strict instructions on not getting too lovey-dovey, as the north London teenagers would put it. ‘Intimacy,’ Zoe Margolis writes stringently, ‘can confuse the situation.’7
Just as with the teenagers I met in north London, the narrator explains how she often faces an impediment in running this uncommitted, easy sex life – and that impediment is the emotional resonance that some men find in sex. For instance, one day she agrees to have completely anonymous sex with a journalist who is writing an article about having sex with a stranger. The whole thing is organised through a friend, and a couple of emails. ‘I set out to Ladbroke Grove well armed,’ she writes, ‘see-through basque, black stockings, tiny g-string, knee-high boots, condoms and lube.’ He opens the door, they immediately go into his bedroom and take off their clothes. ‘I went down on my knees and sucked his cock. He put a condom on, pushed me onto my front, slipped his cock into me and began to fuck me from behind. I was so excited that I came straight away.’ After two more orgasms from her, he loses his erection. ‘And proceeded to tell me that I reminded him of his ex and that he was too upset to shag any more.’ They lie talking for a while, ‘not exactly the aphrodisiac I wanted,’ the narrator says scornfully. ‘I did wonder what I was doing there, listening to some guy I didn’t know pour his heart out to me … when he should have been giving me a good rogering.’8
Girl with a One-track Mind is not a one-off. Zoe Margolis was inspired by the blog of Belle de Jour, the anonymous prostitute (who later unmasked herself as Brooke Magnanti) whose Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl also became a bestseller when it was published in 2005. That was preceded by other memoirs of promiscuous sex lives, from A Round-heeled Woman, my late-life adventures in sex and romance, by Jane Juska, who was sixty-seven, to One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed, by Melissa P, who was sixteen. It has been followed by others, including Wendy Salisbury’s Toyboy Diaries and Catherine Townsend’s Sleeping Around: Secrets of a Sexual Adventuress, both published in 2007. These often followed the same pattern as Girl with a One-track Mind, which is a pattern of increasingly experimental encounters with little intimacy. Although Catherine Townsend sometimes talks about finding a committed relationship, like the other authors in this genre she is fundamentally unconvinced by the idea: ‘Maybe with girls like me, after so many years of à la carte sexual encounters, the thought of a set menu for the rest of our lives makes us panic. Maybe it’s not the men we don’t trust; maybe we don’t trust ourselves to stick to the diet,’ she says, or: ‘Increasingly, it’s women, not men, who are afraid to commit. Though I would love to find someone amazing, on the whole I prefer short love affairs to monogamy. I crave the rush of the first three months.’9
This new celebration of promiscuity in our culture exists alongside a continuing attachment to monogamy; we live in a society that still celebrates the big wedding, and the stable family as the place to bring up children. But for women who are not married, having many sexual partners without much emotional commitment is often seen as the most authentic way to behave. What’s more, women who celebrate promiscuity are often seen as the true feminists. As one journalist wrote about Zoe Margolis’s work: ‘Sleeping with whoever you fancy and objectifying men, not just waiting to be objectified…. I think she is the voice of third-wave feminism.’10
It is wonderful to know that many women, just like many men, do feel that they can now choose their sexual partners and their sexual behaviour with such confidence, and to know that they will not be shamed by old ideas about appropriate feminine behaviour. You only have to look at societies in which traditional views of honour still operate to know how essential this change is for women’s freedom; it is vital that women who do not choose monogamy are not made to feel shame. But I do think it is worth looking again at the equation that is now so frequently made between liberation and promiscuity.
This connection that is often made between the liberated and the promiscuous lifestyle tells us not only that women can choose to have uncommitted sex in which both individuals refuse to invest in emotional closeness, but that they actually should choose to have sex in this way. Once upon a time many feminists enunciated the opposite idea; they talked of the idea that women and men should meet equally in the bedroom, but rather than seeing this as an equality founded on lack of feeling, they idealised freely chosen sex characterised by intimacy and emotional connection. Unemotional sex has not been seen by feminists as a source of power and liberation for very long.
Western feminism was originally produced by the encounter of two cultural movements. The first was the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, whose leading voices argued that progress relied above all on reason and science. The second was Romanticism, whose leading voices at the start of the nineteenth century emphasised the primacy of emotions and intuition, and put their faith in the authenticity of an individual’s passions and desires. Mary Wollstonecraft, the founder of modern feminism, wrote her seminal works as the eighteenth century ended and the nineteenth century began, and she crystallised both the reason of the Enlightenment and the passion of Romanticism in her life and work. She produced the influential polemic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which argued that it was by reason that women would progress. Women required the same education as men, she argued, and should use their rational faculties to become equal members of society. In that work Wollstonecraft was scathing about the way that many women saw their lives defined by love. But in her own life Wollstonecraft invested a huge amount of energy and idealism in her romantic relationships. This nearly destroyed her when her first lover left her, and she tried to commit suicide, but she went on to find her soulmate, William Godwin, and to put her faith in her relationship with him. She was condemned during and after her life for choosing to live with men outside marriage, but she did so because she believed in the romantic ideal of total intimacy. She told Godwin that with him she felt that ‘the senses are exactly tuned by the rising tenderness of the heart’.11 She was hardly alone in wanting to move forward women�
��s rights while looking for an authentic, intimate relationship with a man.
At the very beginning of the twentieth century the anarchist Emma Goldman, who at one point went to prison for defending women’s rights to contraception, was defiantly in favour of free love even though her position put her beyond the pale of respectable society. She left her husband, and had relationships with a number of men without wanting to be married. But it was free love, not free sex, that she was seeking. As she wrote in her autobiography: ‘I have propagated freedom in sex. I have had many men myself. But I loved them; I have never been able to go indiscriminately with men.’12
It is even a travesty of much second-wave feminism to suggest that women were then seeking uncommitted promiscuity. Michèle Roberts, the novelist, was a committed feminist from an early age and recently wrote a memoir, Paper Houses. In it she discusses what she and her peers were seeking in their emotional lives. ‘We believed in passionate sexual love between men and women, as equals,’ she wrote nostalgically.13 Her memoirs detail how difficult that was to achieve, but you never get the sense, as you do with the memoirs of sexually free women today, that it is a journey in which emotional engagement is marginal. When she fell in love with her partner for seventeen years, Jim, she wrote, ‘Jim and I were in love. I always compare starting writing a new novel to leaping off the cliff and hoping the angel will swoop down and bear me up on his strong wings, and I think falling in love is similar. You leap into the unknown. And yet you leap at the same time into the known. Your lover knows you, satisfies that deep desire you have to be truly known, and you do the same for him. You discover you are cut out of the same stuff … Our minds flowed out and touched. We chose each other. I felt that very deep down we were kin. We were alike. We were soul-mates. We belonged together.’14 As she said in the same memoir: ‘Our belief in free love entailed valuing sex in a way that nowadays, when sex is more commodified and pornogrified than ever, seems perhaps hopelessly romantic.’15
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Page 10