The Man Diet: One woman’s quest to end bad romance

Clearly, the issue of porn is an absolutely huge one, and not what this book is about. But I think it’s helpful to acknowledge that its presence, all those ubiquitous, easily-activated pixels behind a billion clicks, only adds to the complexity of sex for women today. In a non-supportive, no-strings shagathon, that complexity is simply too jagged and unwieldy to be processed; and, like a piece of silk shoved in the washing machine, it turns out very badly.

Orgasm machines: women and a brave new (hypersexual) world

‘We have this thing that’s been superimposed on female sexuality, basically this orgasm-hunting tiger.’

What makes Lucy cry and Lisa close her eyes during sex is alienating detachment – the loneliness of an exposed female body being pounded by a male one. But this purely anatomic, male-orgasm-driving experience of sex sits very neatly with contemporary depictions of the act. Take London Amora, the European touring show that parked for a year in Piccadilly Circus, excitedly billed as ‘the world’s first attraction about relationships, seduction and wellness’. Its goal: ‘to make your world a sexier place’. This means more orgasms for women as well as men, of course. To look at the Amora website was to be confronted with numbers, exclamation marks, commands and bright colours. ‘Ten secrets women wished you knew’; ‘The silent clue men give off when they’re in love’; ‘250 tips and hints for a healthy sex life and wellbeing’, PLUS aphrodisiac lounge, Amora boutique, How-To workshops and – wait for it! – ‘Over 80 interactive and engaging experiences to enhance relationships and spice up your love life’. Yet there was something bordering on the depressing about the erogenous zones finder; the squeezing of various-sized dildos and designing your perfect partner on an interactive screen. Katherine Angel, a historian of sexual science at Exeter University observed in Prospect magazine that Amora was governed by the porn aesthetic; proof of how far pornography and everyday ideas of the erotic now overlap. Noting the predictable presence of numerous ‘ecstatic’ female bodies (far more than male), Angel concluded that the exhibit was ‘yet another’ place that invited women to self-scrutinise their bodies and sexual performance according to an ideal.

Along with linking images of hot female bodies with sexual ecstasy, Amora drives home the point that one orgasm isn’t enough to satisfy your average lusty woman. This is the general message on the airwaves. For example, CAKE (cakenyc), an ‘internationally recognised brand promoting female sexual pleasure’, is all about the new hypersexual woman. Reads the website: ‘In September of 2000, CAKE hosted the first of what would become the infamous CAKE parties at club FUN, under the Manhattan Bridge. Billed as a Porn Party, the hosts showed clips of explicit videos edited together and displayed on floor to ceiling screens.’

Yet the pressure to be an orgasm machine has reached what Melissa Goldman, the maker of a documentary called Subjectified: Nine Young Women Talk About Sex, calls ‘hysteria’. In the US, she says, ‘it’s got so bad that women think they have a pathology if they can’t orgasm through penetration. We have this thing – this Samantha from SATC thing – that’s been superimposed on female sexuality, basically this orgasm-hunting tiger.’ Indeed: the pressure exerted by contemporary ideas of sexiness, sex, and sexual pleasure as a measure of personal success exerts a hard, cold pressure on women. And nobody feels it more than the single woman, who is most open to accusations of not being sexy or attractive enough – if she was, wouldn’t she have a partner?

By refusing no-strings sex for a while, we might avoid Greer’s proclamation that ‘Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearteningly than ever before.’ We might also avoid the following image of the man who ‘politely lets himself into the vagina … laborious and inhumanly computerized’. Indeed, Greer speaks to the daters of 2012 with important prescience: ‘The implication that there is a statistically ideal fuck which will always result in satisfaction if the right procedures are followed is depressing and misleading. There is no substitute for excitement: not all the massage in the world will ensure satisfaction, for it is a matter of psychosexual release. Real gratification is not enshrined in a tiny cluster of nerves but in the sexual involvement of the whole person.’ Amen.

Giving up NSA sex: actually doing it (well, not doing it …)

A lot has been covered in this chapter. Hopefully you found some of it useful/interesting for adding context to the way you (or your friends) operate. I for one find it very helpful to see where I got some of my strongest and least helpful notions about sex. Having some idea of where I fit into the sexual culture around me enables me to challenge these notions more directly.

I am aware that some of you reading this chapter will be saying to yourselves: all this NSA sex sounds great – at least it’s sex! For those of you in, or familiar with, an interminable drought, I feel your pain. I’ve been there many times, and have ridden out barren stretches with a mixture of anger, frustration, acceptance and ‘get-it-where-you-can’ promiscuity, followed by remorse.

To the drought lady: putting this rule into play will improve your state of mind too. I promise. Here are some pointers to get you going, as it were.

1.Recognise your state of mind

Are you feeling like you’ll never meet someone, that nobody ever fancies you, and that you may well be re-virginising? If so, be extra careful because right now you’re most prone to self-destructive sexual behaviour. It’s been at my most ‘dry’ that I’ve been taken in by the false promise of sexual servitude, thinking ‘at least it’s sex’. But that idea proves misleading when you feel not only left by the wayside afterwards, but tarnished by having sex with someone ranging from the unavailable to the disinterested to the downright awful. That’s if you do have sex with them. You can equally get drunk and try – and fail, even when you’ve relaxed your standards, which is awful too.

2.Challenge the belief ‘At least it’s sex’

Thinking that you better take it because, like money, you should grab as much of it as possible, is a surprisingly common belief. When I went on the Man Diet, I was fully on board with it – that is, taking far too seriously my ‘job’ as a single woman to be wild, crazy and report lots of great stories. Dry patches tortured me.

I was genuinely happy to be uncommitted – I’d recently come out of a relationship, and my personality had gone a bit wonky under the strain of being a ‘cool’ (i.e., permissive, generous, not-needy, relaxed) girlfriend. But I assumed that the alternative to ‘I’m not ready for a relationship’ was ‘I am going to get out there and bed as many people as possible’ and ‘if I’m not seeing someone or some people, I’m wasting valuable time as a young, single woman, panic, panic, what is wrong with me’. Stopping, staying still, and allowing the borders of myself to extend to other spheres than my sexuality was balm to my soul.

3.Gotta be cruel to be kind: go cold turkey

If there’s a lot of NSA on offer, just stop it abruptly. Turn them down, defriend them on Facebook, block their number. (I did a lot of the Facebook defriending to prevent sudden chat popping up, taking me where I didn’t want to go.) After that cruelty, kindness dawns fast: as soon as I brutally sloughed the NSA types out, I felt clean, clear and energised, and acutely aware that I’d been dragging myself down before. Relationship counsellor Val Sampson says:

‘It’s not that being Victorian prim gives you high self-esteem. But sleeping with the guy that doesn’t want to go on a date, or who doesn’t find you particularly interesting as a person, is bad for self-esteem.’

4.Extract yourself from a friend

This is a different story from getting rid of the one-, two- or five-night-stand guy. Certainly you two will have a deeper or different intimacy than with someone you don’t know. You may well be in love with him. It’s the hardest thing in the world to pull away because so much is mixed up in it. But the bottom line still applies: he’s getting the milk without the cow and sees no need to change that fact. So, if you can summon all your strength, you just need to come clean. It shouldn’t be hard. He’ll run a mile – thereby making the job easy for you – if you say: ‘Next time you initiate something, I’ll assume it’s because you want to date.’ Or if it’s you who booty calls him, make it plain you’re going to want more – and he’ll probably stop encouraging or even allowing your late-night visits.

5.Think about what you want

Women seeking a serious relationship need the sex (or sex-on-mind) hiatus time for gathering thoughts about the correct approach going forward. Janet Reibstein believes one of the biggest issues facing women who self-define as being non-committal, or who proceed by default with no-strings sex, is habit that will stitch them up later. ‘If you want children, we don’t have the freedom to put things off the way men do,’ she says. ‘Women have to be more honest with themselves about what kind of relationships they’re getting themselves into – if you’re saying “this is NSA” and you’re 28, and you’re still doing it at 30, and that’s the modal way you’re doing your relationships, you’re dwindling your chances of meeting someone to reproduce within a committed relationship.’

I’m not sure about children yet. But I take to heart something else Reibstein says: ‘Until you figure out your own terms, you are likely to be pleasing the man on his own terms.’ This part of the Man Diet is there to help us figure out those terms, which is no easy task in a (still predominantly) male value society. But giving yourself time off the biting, stinging sex jungle is the best way to start.

How I followed this rule:

Pre-Man Diet

I had no ‘say no to NSA’ policy in place at all. I knew it didn’t make me particularly happy, but I thought it was an essential part of my single-woman persona – that of the liberal, adventurous, sexual singleton. My romps made for great stories but too often they smacked of adventure for adventure’s sake. This, I think, is because my view on sex was: ‘Why not?’ rather than ‘Why?’

How I did it

All I did was think about it more. I reflected on the simple idea that going through the motions – albeit often pleasurably, or at least excitingly – wasn’t really how sex was meant to be. That disconnecting real intimacy from physical intimacy probably wasn’t the best I could do. It’s amazing how much just thinking can achieve – in merely reflecting on this topic I began to be far more choosy. Not because I was depriving myself of anything – just because I stopped feeling like having such a simplistic approach to sex, since I am not a simple person. Nor are you.

The other thing that kept and still keeps me in check is this question: ‘Do I want to be exhausted tomorrow?’ Let’s be honest – NSA sex often involves unplanned sleepovers with next to no sleep involved. On weeknights they’re lethal. On weekends, pretty sad if you had any plans to do things the next day.

Specifically, if a guy came along and it was on the cards, I would …

• Just leave. If he wanted my number, great. If not – had I lost anything? Probably not, apart from a notch.

• If something was happening, like a smooch, I’d just extricate myself. ‘It’s getting late’ or ‘I need to take the Tube’.

• I considered very carefully how I wanted to feel the next day. Usually, the desire to be alert and well rather than wrecked and pointlessly buzzed triumphed.

How it felt

Good. Very good in fact. I felt in control, and very clearly that I was respecting myself. And, banal as it sounds, I also felt smug at saving myself a lot of trouble (attachment to guys who were far from appropriate; potential worries over STDs and so on). Did I feel deprived of lots of wild no-strings sex? Not for a good while. Which brings me to …

What I let through the cracks

I find going for very long periods without any physical intimacy rather tricky – many women do. And so, every now and then, I let situations take their course – or even, in (usually intoxicated) extremis create the situations. I’m not sure I feel better after, but I feel different. It shifts my energy. But allowing for NSA is a last resort.

And now?

I try not to partake in NSA sex. It seems unsatisfying. And upsetting in subtle ways if it goes nowhere or is with someone below par. I used to call this kind of thing ‘fun’ – now I’m more careful with my definition of fun. When desire for something to happen takes over, I go into it with eyes wide open, but even being realistic doesn’t necessarily help – a little part of you always either wants sex to be meaningful or thinks it will go somewhere.

SOS!

If you’ve had one NSA sex experience after an empowered run of dieting, you’re either feeling a) sated or b) remarkably shitty. Well, take hope from the fact that if it’s the first, you were able to enjoy it exactly because of a period of declining it (the Man Diet) and your strength and self-esteem has risen. If b) you now know you’re not missing anything even remotely great by saying no to NSA sex and you’re very much on the right track with this rule. Here’s what else:

• Don’t beat yourself up about it. You haven’t done anything wrong – you’ve just given yourself a bit of short shrift. You will either be feeling a naturally negative reaction, which is punishment enough – or you’ll be moving on with your life. Do the latter, but don’t think, ‘That didn’t fuck me up, I’m going to do it all the time!’ Because that would be a pointless back step. And a sure-fire way to feel fucked up (possibly again, depending on your past).

• If you feel post-sex strings, acknowledge them to your heart’s content but there’s no point making the whole thing worse by prostrating yourself at the man’s feet. If it was NSA going into it, it was almost certainly NSA to him and will remain so.

• If, by chance, the no-strings part of the sex came with heavy boozing and lax protection, don’t brush it under the carpet. Go along to the clinic in three months (the HIV incubation period – yes, sex can have a long afterlife), and make sure you’re good to go.

Rule Number 2 Cut Down on the Booze

You need this rule if …

• Once you start, you can’t stop.

• The bulk of your sexual encounters as a single woman follow excessive drinking.

• You can’t imagine not drinking on a date.

• You worry about being boring when sober.

• You think you only come alive sexually after a bottle.

• You frequently do things with men when inebriated that you later regret.

• Your big nights out involve necessary consumption of ten times the government’s recommended weekly number of units.

• Your hangovers trouble you far more than ‘my head hurts’.

• You worry that your boozing is affecting your overall health and mental alertness.

Goes well with …

• Refuse to Have NSA Sex

• Dwell on Your Sense of Self

• Do Something Lofty

• Do Not Pursue

• Know Your Obstacles

Sarah’s alarm went off. She couldn’t bear the task in hand: getting up and going to work. She prolonged the agony of getting out of bed by trying to decide what was most horrible about her current situation. Was it her physical state – pounding heart, vile aftertaste of red wine sharpened with gin from the G&Ts she’d thought were a good nightcap, inflamed eye sockets and sharp head pain? Or was it the inevitable mental distress that would descend when events from the night before came creeping back?

Her eyes are still closed, her alarm still beeping. Sarah’s normally a cheerful, emotionally stable woman. But when she wakes up like this, which she does no more than any of her friends or the other millions of women in the UK who occasionally binge drink, she’s not cheerful, or even okay. She feels an intense horror at herself; dread at what she might have done. Or has done. She pictures a massive black well out of which she must pull herself in order to regain her hold on life.

What happened the night before …

In this case, what Sarah had done wasn’t particularly bad, but it was the fact that she’d been making a habit of it. The night before had started out as work drinks; some lawyer contacts had hired a space at a bar for a group of her colleagues. A bottle of wine per person was already waiting for them on the table, along with some nibbles. It went fairly rapidly; and suddenly it was closing time. Feeling a naughty pulse rise in her – the desire to make some kind of trouble for herself involving men – she decided to see what she could rustle up. She wanted sex; she felt reckless, wild, her romantic dissatisfaction and fragile ego about to be pummelled under a wave of alcoholic courage.

It was a multi-pronged attack: first, she dispatched a few texts to men she’d either had something with before, or thought she could have something with now. She didn’t like any of them enough to see them when sober. Then, she started homing in on the seemingly interesting candidates that were out with her. Keeping up this dual-pronged attack, she eventually made headway. None of her textees replied – something that bothered her but that she could deal with in the morning. But thank God, one of the guys that turned up at the after-hours place they went on to seemed up for it. As soon as he showed unmistakeable interest, she suggested they go back to hers.

What happened when they got back hadn’t been all that great; it was certainly not the intoxicating orgasm fest suggested in some representations of unfettered, big-city casual sex. Rather, it had been made plain how little regard they had for each other, and while Sarah enjoyed faking intimacy, the guy didn’t have the slightest inclination to do so. He banged her (two seconds before condom; 20 minutes post-condom), he came, he suggested anal, she said no, they napped for an hour, and then he said, ‘Shit, I have to go’, got his stuff and left, only just remembering on his way out to ask for her number. It was just a vague politeness reflex; anyone could see that.

Now she felt horror – why did she always have that impulse to take someone home with her when drunk, even though she was too old for these completely unrewarding encounters? Why did she give herself to some random who couldn’t even pretend to be polite in bed? And, worst of all, what of those seconds of sex before the condom went on? Was she willing to even risk her health when drunk? And for what? Through the cloudy pain of these reflections, she haltingly pulled on her clothes and made it to the Tube without being sick. The day was not pretty.

The regret had largely faded by night, though, and the next day she was ready to go again, the dark hole of the previous morning forgotten, and the sex of the night before already related to her friends as a highly amusing story.

It was Saturday night, and Sarah and her flatmate Lynn had a birthday party to attend. They got ready to the sound of their favourite tune, also Lynn’s BlackBerry ring tone: Jamie Foxx featuring T-Pain’s ‘Blame It [on the Alcohol]’.

Flash forward to midnight. Lynn’s snogging a good-looking guy. Sarah has drunk more than she should have, though less than the other night, and is now in guy-searching mode. Nobody bites, though, and she’s starting to feel like she has no vibe. When a cutie hoves into view and offers to get her another drink, she gratefully accepts, even though she doesn’t really feel like it. But in the presence of her potential ticket out of here tonight, she sucks the double Absolut through a straw and makes flirtatious conversation. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and when she comes back, the guy’s gone. She looks for him everywhere, but can’t find him. Now her buzz is gone, she’s drunk, and she’s got nobody. She starts talking to other guys, but it’s a no-go. Eventually she gets a cab home – it’s 3.30am and Lynn has gone off with that guy she’s been wrapped around for the last three hours.

The next day’s hangover is both better and worse than the one before. It’s worse in that, when the pain of it dries up, she’s got nothing concrete to show for it. No hook-ups. She feels like a failure of a single girl; she’s meant to be able to hook up whenever she wants when out on the razz, and last night was a reminder that she clearly can’t. But the hangover’s better in that she’s woken up guilt- and loathing-free, hasn’t put herself at risk in the sack or given her body to someone undeserving. Oh, and crucially, she doesn’t have to go to work. Still, her body is in a bad way and the calories she consumed last night were ungodly. She’ll have to write off the day.

So I say …

Take a break from the booze. Giving your body a rest – and showing it some love – will give you a fresh perspective.

The single woman and her tumultuous love affair with booze

This is not an unusual or crazy snapshot in the life of a single, fun-loving woman. It’s not typical, perhaps, but it’s a scenario that most British women aged 18–35 will relate to. When researching this book, I asked women in their twenties and thirties if they drink more when single. Here’s what they said:

‘Defo, drank a hell of a lot more when I was single.’

Naihala, 34

‘Yes, definitely – I got wasted all the time, it was the only way to get over my shyness with men. I lacked confidence and was massively body shy. So needed to be pretty out of it to disrobe.’

Laura, 35

‘Definitely. And there’s a lot of alcohol consumption when you’ve just started seeing someone – you know, lots of going out, getting pissed, eating crap, staying out late.’

Laura, 32

Another woman, a good friend of mine called Mary, frequently blacks out when drunk. ‘I have missed lots from blacking out – I don’t remember meeting half the people I’ve dated; and sometimes I’ll wake up next to someone and not remember how we ended up in bed.’ She’s no basket case; Mary is a successful, grounded person who does not have an alcohol problem – it’s just that a few drinks, even as few as three, can make her forget what happens to her. But instead of being terrified by the experience and its implications, she just accepts that it happens on big nights out. Such is the single woman’s cross to bear.

Rising alcohol consumption among women is a horn that is tooted with great insistence by the media, and rightly so: the numbers suggest that we’re the fastest growing demographic of boozers in the UK, with the image of the hard-partying single gal right up there. After all, women aged between 18 and 24 in the UK drink more than in any European country (Datamonitor, 2005). Across the pond, CBS news in the US did a shock-horror ‘Sex and the City syndrome’ story, inspired by a rise in DUI (driving under the influence) accidents among young women. They worried about the ‘girls’ nights out and those pink drinks’ SATC popularised. And well they should.

Reality check: do we really need to give up the booze?

This Man Diet rule is not about lecturing and tut-tutting; it’s about giving you a respite from habits that might be dragging you down. Alcohol is not a simple topic – i.e., ‘bad for you’ – and it plays an enormous, complex role in most of our lives. Kate Spicer, a journalist, wrote a courageous ‘life’s too short not to drink up’ piece for The Sunday Times. In it, she confessed to ticking a good handful of what the government might call ‘alcoholic’ boxes, but argued that when used appropriately, excess alcohol can be a source of pleasure and relaxation without necessary punishment. It’s not alcohol that creates a mess, she concludes; it’s people.

Spicer’s view is appealing, and there’s no chance I’ll be giving up social drinking and occasional drunkenness for government-guideline-style imbibing any time soon. But when the single woman – under pressure to have more fun than everyone else (see NSA and No Talking chapters) – ends up in a run of alcohol-fuelled promiscuity followed by self-loathing hangovers, it’s time to take a breather. In the same Sunday Times feature, I felt that student Ruth Gilligan more accurately captured the mania of acquiring the experience, stories and gossip that alcohol often facilitates. She describes the experience of sitting in her college room, whilst next door, thumping music starts up, heralding the arrival of the girls invited over by the lads in the house. She listens as the word ‘stawpedo’ is bellowed en masse, then sighs with relief when the music stops – the group have headed out into the night. It’s only Part One of the evening, though: she’s certain at least three of the girls will be back later and that a sizzling stew of gossip will be ripe for the stirring in the morning.