Joan Smith Body Language The excuses are familiar: I’ve got a headache, I’m too tired, it’s the wrong time of the month. But now it’s not just women who are finding reasons for avoiding sex.
Contradicting age-old assumptions, more and more men are going off it and some of them are prepared to say so, in public and at length. The traditional male terror, not being able to get an erection, is being edged aside by men who say they feel used, abused and treated as sex objects – just like women 20 years ago. Sex therapists say this piece of role reversal has been going on for some time, long enough to start showing up in the statistics. But it was dramatically highlighted recently by the revelations of Jimmy Gulzar, estranged husband of Spice Girl Mel B, who has confided to The Sun that he refused to have sex with his wife for the final three months of their marriage. Another man, Alan Quigley, got into the tabloids last week when it was revealed, during a court case, that he wrote to his ex-girlfriend complaining that he felt like a “typical woman”, only wanted for his body.
This kind of problem is rarely discussed so openly but there is no doubt that it is cropping up more often. Julia Cole, a couple counsellor, says research carried out in 1996 showed that 7% to 8% of men seeking counselling said they had gone off sex. These were not, she points out, men with medical problems that meant they could not get an erection. For one reason or another – tiredness, stress, a feeling that the relationship had gone wrong – they were simply saying no to their partners. The latest research, says Cole, shows that the figure has doubled to 15%. “There’s been a steady climb since the 1980s,” she says. “Men want a partner who is considerate, sensitive and sensual. My experience in therapy over 12 years is that when you talk to men, they may start by saying they want more sex. But what they say after a while is that they want to be touched and caressed, in the same way as their partners.” Does she mean, gulp, that men want foreplay? Yes, although not all of them realise it, says Cole. When couples are advised by sex therapists to concentrate on touching non- genital areas of the body, the men apparently find it “a revelation”. Gulzar’s problems with Scary Spice had probably gone way beyond the point where this kind of exercise could help, judging by the long list of complaints he laid bare in The Sun. And he revealed a traditional male anxiety when he insisted, in inimitable tabloid style: “I’m not gay … I went off sex after Mel put boob op before baby.”
Quigley, whose ex-girlfriend went to court asking for half of the house they had shared, complained that she had treated him like a male prostitute. “I need to be appreciated and not just because I can give you another orgasm,” he said in a letter submitted to the court.
Gillian Walton, a marriage counsellor, confirms that in the early days of sex therapy this used to be a predominantly female cry for help. She believes that the problem of men feeling unloved or unappreciated was masked, in the past, by their tendency to display physical symptoms – erectile difficulties and premature ejaculation.
What has happened since is a significant change in attitudes: sexual matters are much more in the open, women are no longer prepared to blame themselves for problems in bed and men are less inhibited about discussing their own difficulties. Yet it is one thing for a man to admit to vulnerability and low self-esteem in private to a counsellor and another to do it quite as publicly as Gulzar has done. There is a confusion between patriarchal attitudes and broader, biologically based assumptions about male sexuality. One of these, the notion that male desire is almost entirely a physical phenomenon, stimulated visually and beyond men’s control, still surfaces in rape cases. In the 21st century, defence lawyers continue to claim that their clients could not control themselves on seeing a woman in a short skirt, a myth that is as insulting to men as it is dangerous to women. It has not been helped by the modish discipline of evolutionary psychology, whose most extreme exponents claim that men are genetically programmed to rape in order to maximise the number of their offspring. The most recent claim of the neo- Darwinians, that women are naturally promiscuous in order to get the best quality sperm, is equally reductive. What couple counsellors are seeing is men and women who complain that they do not enjoy sex when it is perfunctory, about nothing but bodies and divorced from feeling. Yet, what also seems to be happening is the erosion of another stereotype, the male who can perform in all circumstances given the right stimuli. “Perhaps there is a stage when men are very young and can be up for it just by looking at a sexy picture,” says Cole. Beyond that, she believes, the men who come to her for help want more than a fantasy about an exciting stranger. It’s also a long way from the laddish culture of pin-ups and relentless male performance we became used to in the Nineties. Perhaps that explains why these changes have been taking place, over the past couple of decades, largely behind closed doors. And it says something about our age that it has taken the spectacular break-up of a pop star’s marriage to reveal that men, too, sometimes need to say no.