Nigella Lawson Body Language For the first time in years, someone asked me how many men I’d slept with. To tell the truth, I couldn’t remember. That’s not because my youth was spent in such an oblivious promiscuous whirl – I think I probably lack the promiscuity gene, although I don’t, either, claim a nun-like past – but simply because who really keeps a tally? What sort of person makes notches on the bedstead? We’ve always thought that that’s male behaviour, the province of those who feel that their sexual conquests say something significant about them. Perhaps the reason women don’t, on the whole, is because you have to be very narcissistically self- delusional to feel that having sex with someone is very much a coup. That’s to say, what man says no? In other words, you don’t have to be madly attractive to find a sexual partner, merely be female. Where’s the credit in that? Strangely, even though Gemma Butler, the 23-year-old who has been giving interviews about her 50 lovers in a year, seems to glimpse that incontestable truth, she interprets it differently. If a man won’t say no, why should she? And I agree. Casual sex isn’t a crime, but it isn’t much of an improvement to turn it into an obligation, either. Germaine Greer said that when she was young women felt they had to say no; now they feel they can’t. She’s right. And even if Butler feels that by behaving as men have traditionally behaved, she’s the embodiment of that sad spectre, girl power, there has to be something wrong when a young woman feels that by sleeping with every man she comes across she is thereby empowering herself. But then, I’d think there was something wrong with a young man who felt the same way. Much as I hate those mantras which intone about the need to feel good about yourself from within, it seems to me that to feel that your worth is measured by how many sexual partners you have had is to place yourself in an undesirably vulnerable position. And when Butler says she loves the sense of power that comes from initiating a sexual encounter and then breaking it off if the man wants to take it further, she’s surely claiming no more than the power of the bully. For her, strength lies in someone else’s weakness. And the textbook reading of such a case is almost embarrassingly obvious: if you feel that anyone showing any interest in you is a sign of his weakness, what does it say about your feelings about yourself? Empowerment? I don’t think so. The desire for a mate, even serial mates, is an expression of basic human need; but when it goes beyond that it begins to look like lack of confidence. In other words, the only woman who’s worth anything is a woman men constantly desire. If it were simply a case of wanting sex and being happy with that, fine – as in the joke on Frasier, when Daphne says to Frasier: “You men, you’re always using sex to get what you want,” he retorts: “What do you mean? Sex is what we want!” But it isn’t. It’s part of a search to gain some sense of worth. I don’t say this because I long for the days of the double standard, when men were allowed to be sexually experienced and women had to stay pure. Indeed, by making such a song and dance about one’s sexual appetites, surely women are somehow perpetuating the double standard: look at how wonderful and different I am! I’m a woman who wants sex! I’ve always distrusted any man or woman who feels the need to wear a badge saying “I’m sexy”. While it doesn’t fill me with horror that Mills & Boon has decided to open the bedroom door, it does make me wonder how evolved we are. We seem to have gone, rather, full circle, with women not being able to hold on to their identity unless it’s an identity approved of by men. And the danger of locating one’s sense of power in one’s sexual power is not just because that goes, but also because any power that lies not so much in one’s actions, but in other people’s reactions is limited – and often dangerous. For you cannot control anyone’s reaction. Of course, I don’t believe that any woman who goes to work in the Japanese sex industry, however much on the periphery, and then goes disturbingly missing, as Lucie Blackman has, is herself to blame, any more than I believe that a victim of a rape is herself culpable. But I do think that by making so light of sex we are all in peril of underestimating the danger of it all. Just because a woman feels in control or “empowered” clearly doesn’t mean she is. But it’s this power argument that’s so wearying. Life isn’t a set of balances, whereby one person is strong, the other weak. We’ve seen how a desire to reduce everything to the differences between the sexes is mistaken: the Victorians felt that man was strong and noble, and woman weak and unreliable and needed masculine protection; contemporary wisdom holds that the future is female; we hold all the cards now, and it’s your turn to suffer. I dare say there is some biological imperative that makes us cling to this binary view. After all, the perpetuation of the species relies on difference, on sexual opposition. In the current climate, we seek, out of some retrograde impulse, to locate all truth in biology. But the point is, we’re all in this together. In life as in sex, what we need is fusion not combat.