What my mother’s friends stumbled across came from observing their own lives, and those of their daughters and grand- daughters – is namely, that women (unless they are drunk, or mad, or abused, or prostitutes, or trying to prove something) are not generally sexually promiscuous. Neither are most men, but they probably would be, given the chance. Women are given the chance every day, and choose not to use it.
This fact has been obscured in recent years with much excitable chatter about “ladettes” and “female orgasm”. Whether either ever existed outside of the feverish minds of copywriters is a matter for debate, but I would refer said copywriters to the example of Zo Ball.
It took the genuinely affecting shock and delight she expressed on becoming engaged to pop star Norman Cook to throw into relief the filthy phoniness of her former persona as the resident non-stop drinking, dancing, shagging party animal. In the face of her friend, Sara Cox, betrothed of Leeroy from The Prodigy, there is the same unmistakable relief at not having to Put Out any more.
Not having to be sexy has, paradoxically, made them both attractive, to women as well as men. Ball’s statement that true love means you are able to pass wind in front of each other is simply a coarser version of Mrs Patrick Campbell’s “deep calm of the double bed after the hurly burly of the chaise-longue”.
In the Spice and Saints babies, and in the nesting of Denise van Outen with Jamiroquai, we see not a rejection of feminism, but an adoption by the most favoured and fashionable young women in the United Kingdom of the working-class model (marry young, have kids, get on with career) over the middle-class ideal that has dominated the past couple of decades (slag around, get panicky, get married, take ages to conceive, become a mother, feel totally shagged out and retire prematurely).
This tough-minded, clear-eyed, pragmatic attitude to sex and marriage, which can be seen in any classroom or call-centre, is at odds with the image of young and/or working- class women subscribed to by Vanessa Feltz and, it turns out, Germaine Greer – seething hormonal stews, their lives ruled by their vaginas, forever ready, willing and able to be dragged along the nation’s high streets of a Saturday afternoon wearing nothing but a double- headed dildo by a group of lusty young men, and thence to be had in common in front of Primark.
In fact, there has probably never been a time in history when women knew so much about sex and wanted so little of it. The sexual revolution dreamed of by the turn- of-the century feminists – that women would make love when, and to whom, they pleased, without censure or coercion – is nearer to realisation than it has ever been.
The sexual appropriation of the Sixties and Seventies, however, when women were persuaded to let men take all manner of joyless liberties with them, is receding. Women have voted with their vaginas, and the result is a generation of men rather surprised that they are getting less sex than a young man would have got 20 years ago, but bearing up gamely by resorting to porn, chatlines and the massive 80% of all Internet hits that access pornography.
A new study, the biggest since the Kinsey Report, in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 40% of women have no interest in sex, compared with only 8% of men. English women have sex twice as much as Americans, when they’re having it, but 40% of them also couldn’t care less. Panicky sexologists have tried to explain this by pointing to health problems, lack of time, job pressures and money problems, but women are healthier, richer, more successful at work and have more labour- saving devices than ever. This is probably why they are having less sex: because they don’t have to Put Out anymore.
We are not talking about women rejecting sex out of fear and shame, but out of enlightenment and confidence. And because of the very simple fact that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman will almost inevitably end in an orgasm for the man, but is unlikely to for the woman. This, more than tiredness or worry, is the point: for a lot of women, sex doesn’t work – therefore, it is only sensible to stop it.
A man puts 50 pence in the fruit machine and hits the jackpot every time: watching him for a while, a woman sooner or later starts asking herself why she should throw good money after bad, seeing as how she has put in a tenner and come up with row after row of lemons.
So sure are we, despite the reams of propaganda, that more women are faking it than making it, that the female orgasm has become a signifier not of wild, unbridled hedonism but of good manners and socialisation. When, in When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan does her number in the deli, it renders her even nicer, not nastier; on British television the female orgasm is used to sell Organics shampoo. Can we imagine the male orgasm, in all its sticky authenticity, ever being used on prime-time TV to sell a product?
If most female orgasms are faked, there can be no offence in them. Apparently, men’s pupils dilate when they see photographs of naked women – women’s pupils dilate when they see pictures of naked babies. Houston, we have a problem.
In a rare moment of lucidity, Sigmund Freud said that all a human being needed to be happy was love and work. How, then, could he ask, “What do women want?” The very things that make a human being happy, of course. It is a triumph of the 20th-century woman that she has achieved both these things, against all odds.
Is it any wonder that sex comes a poor third?