The Man Diet

What they show, too, is how far women have internalised masculine sexual stereotypes, making them their own with a flick of the pseudo-feminist whip (and then, in the case of the more emotionally tuned-in, feeling lousy about it). As Germaine Greer puts it so well in The Female Eunuch: ‘Love-making has become another male skill, of which women are the judges.’

Natasha Walter’s excellent survey of contemporary female sexual culture, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, takes a searing look at women’s sexual mores and their context. One group of well-off, late-teen female students she interviewed spoke in hostile, competitive, mercenary and utterly soulless ways about sex:

‘I’m much more attracted to the guys who don’t give a shit,’

‘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 …’

They go on to cite their feeling of solidarity with Miranda in Sex and the City when she has to call her long list of past lovers after contracting an STD; they also admire Belle de Jour, the call girl, and other sex diarists as glamorous examples of non-committal, pornographically adventurous sex. Walter concludes: ‘Because they had so successfully subtracted emotion from their sex lives, these young women were perfectly in tune with the culture around them.’

These girls are probably a good deal younger than you and me – after all, they’re not even 20 yet. Perhaps their aggressive ‘I’m a shagger’ standpoint stems from the fact they’re not yet worried about settling down. But equally, I think it’s even more poignant that while they could be starry eyed and dreaming of ‘the one’, they’re setting themselves up as sexually liberated toughs for whom ‘no strings’ sex is the only sex. They’re the women of tomorrow.

The wrong kind of fun

The sex-mad, attachment-loathing students in Walter’s book seem more directly influenced by sexual imagery and sexual pressure than most of the professional women between 23 and 35 that I know (including myself). All the same, I have felt very driven by a particular notion of ‘fun’ attributed to and expected of the single woman. In fact, the word fun crops up a hell of a lot in relation to the no-strings sex single women are meant to be having lots and lots of. I remember in the early days of my current single spell somewhat shakily telling my friend Carol about an alcohol-drenched encounter with someone wholly inappropriate, and her replying: ‘Ah well, it’s just fun.’ Says Wendy, 31: ‘All my friends are pairing up so I do want to meet someone special. In the meantime … why not have fun?’ Or, as Ruth says: ‘People will constantly ask: “Why are you single?” You’re supposed to say: “I enjoy being single. I enjoy having unencumbered sex with strangers.”’

But all that pressure to have fun stops being fun and becomes more like an exhausting task. ‘[Sexual encounters with men] feel very achievement based,’ says my friend Molly, 27. Almost every woman I interviewed for this book used the words ‘tiring’ or ‘exhausting’ in relation to fun – whether it was in dating to the max, going out non-stop, or making the effort to appear fancy-free. ‘It’s exhausting being empowered,’ as my friend Michelle, 27, put it.

Bringing home the bacon

That mercenary, bedpost notch approach to men isn’t healthy and it doesn’t make most women particularly happy. But neither do a lot of things that seem (or are) fun at the time. Which is why, despite its seemingly obvious badness, I can relate perfectly well to the urge to ‘get the numbers up’. There’s something that seems empowering about it, like you’ve gone out hunting and have brought in several good pheasants that you can cook and share with your friends (what else is the post-shag narrative breakdown with your mates if not a triumphal communal meal, hosted by you?). There’s also the vague sense that you’re delivering one in the eye to those guys that think women always get all attached, needy and psychotic after sex. Needless to say, that’s a terrible reason to do something, not least because the only eye that’s getting something in it is yours, when you’ve slept with someone rubbish and he doesn’t even call. Delving deeper, I think some of us think that the more men you sleep with, the more attractive you must be. Enjoying the intense but often false intimacy that a sexual encounter provides is also a reason for accepting loads of NSA sex.

Note the bragging, bravado twang to the way I used to refer to hook-ups, before the Man Diet put me off that notchy approach: ‘bringing home the bacon’. It was tongue-in-cheek, but telling. With or without pork metaphors, friends often congratulate each other on numbers of men shagged or bagged. The presence of an alien pair of male shoes outside a flatmate’s bedroom door elicits back slapping the next day. A good friend of mine used to check in with me: ‘What’s your number [of sexual partners to date]?’ Still another would say: ‘I want to get to 35 before Christmas.’

I’m not just moaning here, or being holier than thou. This attitude towards sex was making me feel fragmented, anxious and doubtful about my worth. I’ve seen it have the same effect on other women. And because something as simple as swearing off no-strings sex made me feel about a thousand times better – even though I’ve slipped once or twice – I’m hoping it’ll do the same for you, via the Man Diet.

Sex and the single girl

The neon pink link between fun and the single woman was drawn with powerful clarity by Helen Gurley Brown, former editor of Cosmo, in her 1962 classic: Sex and the Single Girl. No social theory here – oh no. Just jaunty tips and the dos and don’ts of having affairs with married men; decorating your apartment in a man-friendly way; and workplaces where you’re more likely to meet men. Reprinted in 2003, Gurley Brown jauntily speaks of not needing a husband in your prime years (read: prettiest). Indeed, she says that men are more fun taken in large quantities than on their own.

To be fair, it’s a hilarious book, and very frank. It’s just not particularly helpful to imagine us all as this ‘glamour girl’ troupe of burnished affair-havers with cute apartments in Greenwich Village.

Today’s single woman and Sex and the City

Have single ladies changed much since the 1960s? Of course – back then, Germaine Greer and the other feminists of the 1970s hadn’t made their mark yet. Crucially, we are also more economically successful. And with more cash comes more consumption, and with more consumption, more devouring. Not just of shoes and houses, but of sex, too.

Thirty-plus years after Gurley Brown showed us how a single girl can live – in a little apartment in the Village, having the odd affair, going out to dances with her girlfriends and working as a secretary at a man-tastic barge company – Sex and the City came along. It far more powerfully stamped an idea on our brains and an image on our retinas of how the single life should look – it should revolve around sex and men, a powerful, glamorous professional life, and lots of fun like shopping and drinking. New York writer Ariel Levy, a lover of the show just like I am, calls it a consumerist vision of ‘vertiginous gobbling’ that shows sex as something to be eaten up just like Manolos, cocktails and handbags. So seductive is its twinkling montage of intelligent girl chat, cosmopolitans, sanitised sex, wonderful clothes, great bodies, clinking glasses, hot restaurants and – most importantly – happy endings, that it was hard not to desperately want all that.

‘I’ll have an order of sex with that cocktail, please.’

‘Gobbling’ is indeed a good word for the SATC vision of sex. Meg Daly, a so-called ‘third wave’ feminist and author, has talked about Samantha-style sex in terms of the ‘swaggering pleasure’ that comes from counting the bed-post notches, and the joy of boasting about sexual techniques. Daly seems just as drawn to sex for the bragging rights as the pleasure of the act itself.

Recall the back slaps, bedpost notching and ‘bringing home the bacon’ attitude among my friends – are we merely gobbling men and sex, too? Sometimes it feels like it. Which is why, before I started the Man Diet, I felt like I was carrying around so much extra empty emotional weight. Gobbling will do that to a girl.

Mr Big: the ultimate NSA male

It’s also worth mentioning how the concept of closure is vilified in SATC – turning all sex, ultimately, into the strings-free variety. Yes, the Mr Right idea is the forceful, steady line drawn through the entire series – dangled, played with, and ultimately accepted. But as Joanna Di Mattia put it in her essay, ‘What’s the Harm in Believing?’: ‘It is a deconstruction of the Mr Right myth that enables romance to continue without closure.’ Ultimately, Carrie can’t deal with the closure Aidan offers – before she breaks away entirely, she tries to rebel, albeit feebly, by wearing the engagement ring around her neck. And, of course, she breaks into hives when trying on a white, frilly wedding dress. Mr Big, on the other hand, is constantly and obviously Mr Right waiting to happen. His defining characteristic, of course, is that he never offers real commitment. He’s so evasive, so no-strings that he doesn’t even have a name. Of course, Carrie’s resistance to romantic closure serves an important structural purpose: it makes way for years of single gal fun that we get to ogle. The impression is that closure and commitment get in the way of having fun and being wild.

And his female equivalent: the impossible Samantha

Carrie was never my favourite. Samantha was (and is). For years I cited her as the torch-holding feminist on TV. She was the only woman on TV who didn’t fall for slushy romance, ever reveal a true needy nature, nor desire the typical fairy tale marriage story. All this while exhibiting gobsmacking sexual appetite, without ever feeling low, used or at sea. In more recent times, I still adore Samantha, but I don’t try to emulate her now, because I realise she’s too good to be true. Or rather, she’s just not true and trying to be her was really not good for me.

‘Some have explained Samantha as basically a gay man in women’s Versace.’

Almost unsurprisingly, there is an academic course offered as a tie-in to the show, called ‘Sex and the City and the Contemporary Woman’. In the Samantha section of the syllabus, billed as ‘the sexual woman’, the first question posed is: ‘Is Samantha a liberated woman or a slut?’ What a wrong-headed binary to strap her into. The implication of this question is that, indeed, sexual profligacy alone will make you either a slut (I had hoped this old woman-hating notion was dying out) or ‘liberated’ (the point is that nowadays, liberation shouldn’t really have to do with how many penises enter your vagina – but, as per Walter and Levy, it has become an essential part of the definition). It gives a hell of a lot of credence – moral, social and political judgements are squeezed in between ‘slut’ and ‘liberated’ – to the act of sex. And to pop good old Sam in either category with any degree of earnestness is silly, once again betraying confusion about how to interpret the reality peddled by the show. Some have explained Samantha as the product of gay scriptwriters and producers on Sex and the City – that she is basically a gay man in woman’s Versace. Whatever – there are women writers too on the show, and she’s a fabulous character. It’s just that to see hers as an achievable type of lifestyle, parcelled in a box of imperturbable self-sufficiency, is to be deluded.

SATC: influential, or what?

Many of the women I spoke to said Sex and the City hadn’t influenced their actual way of behaving – and if they did identify with a character, few admitted it was Samantha (although one said ruefully she wanted to see herself as Carrie, but in reality she was probably more Samantha). But without doubt, SATC infiltrated female culture and its ideas of sex, fashion and urban lifestyle since it hit the air in 1998. One strong bit of research that explains why a mere TV show like SATC could actually impact the decisions women make – whether they admit it or not – was done by Albert Bandura, in 1977. He proposed Social Learning Theory, the idea that if you watch someone else do something, you can learn what rewards/consequences are attached to that behaviour (and thus if you should do it, how to do it). This research was innovative because Bandura found that watching a real person or a person on TV (as a character) doing something could be equally effective in observational learning. The different components of this ‘watch-and-learn’ model are Attention, Retention, Reproduction, Motivation. Your motivation reaches you through the rewards presented when you watched someone else do whatever behaviour.

According to Janet Kwok, who studies human development and education at Harvard, ‘Watching the ladies on Sex and the City find their happy endings despite participating in problematic behaviours was a large-scale social learning theory crisis, if we want to be dramatic. Their behaviour was easy to remember (Retention) and there were attractive rewards depicted (Motivation) without the potential consequences that might have been more representative of the viewers’ experiences.’

I’d add to Bandura’s theory and say that the fun of watching Sex and the City can be confused with the fun of actually doing what they do – i.e., have lots of no-strings, fun (if problematic, but ultimately brunch-analysed) sex. The problem is, while the SATC ladies proved to some extent that sex could result in the outcome most women desire (husband, kids, riches, happiness, success), we cannot always be assured of the same outcome. And our path to getting there will be all the rockier until we realise it’s not possible to be Samantha, either in numbers or approach. Or, for that matter, while we deny ourselves the right to bear strings.

The sex diarist: seductive mistresses of the strings-free shagathon

There’s another thing confusing our notion of ‘fun’ that is closer to home, perhaps, than the bars and bedrooms of Upper Manhattan. And that is the sex diarist, who romps the streets and clubs of London, and inhabits the pages of UK newspapers and the shelves of UK bookstores. I knew this culture of do-and-share a bit from the inside, since for one and a half years I was the Girl About Town dating columnist for thelondonpaper, a now-defunct but wildly popular evening freesheet. I was a novice, and at first I shared too much. People loved it when I did; all the same, I pulled back, feeling deeply awkward at the idea that everyone, from the Islamic extremist who threatened to kill me to my 12-year-old cousin, was reading about my exploits.

When I wasn’t enthralling the world with my numerous dates and hook-ups (of which a good few were, ahem, embellished), it was my job to depict a sort of glamorous lifestyle, a bit like Carrie. I was encouraged to namedrop cool bars and locations around town that made it sound like I had a big night out every night, never got tired, and was always getting into exciting scrapes. I created a world in which sexual adventure, romantic mishap and great nightlife flowed seamlessly together. I assume it was seductive – I stuck to it for a year and a half, after all, and people still fondly remember the column today.

But I was only a dating columnist. I was completely vanilla – even alongside the others on the same paper. My rivals were a different story. They were properly telling all – Catherine Townsend of the Independent was spilling the beans about the length and strength of her orgasms; Belle de Jour (real name: Brooke Magnanti, scientist) was setting the world alight with her stories of sex as a call girl.

Zoe Margolis’s book Girl with a One Track Mind, published under the pseudonym Abby Lee, set out to address the problem of prudishness. ‘My own friends appear quite happy to sit in a pub, swapping Sex and the City anecdotes and joking about rabbit vibrators. But, the thing is, if I want to get into more detail and mention something like, say, wanting to try out a cock ring on a guy, whole fingering his arse, they all suddenly become rather quiet … And I’d be left sitting there staring at the bartender’s trouser bulge …’ And in case you were unclear about the kind of sex she likes to have, and its exact definition, she’s included a handy list: The Girl’s Guide to Fuck-Buddies: Definitions. ‘A fuck-buddy is someone with whom you are sexually involved, but with no romantic or emotional strings attached. They are NOT a friend that you fuck … the fuck-buddy relationship is purely sexual.’ Or, lest you foolishly still thought that you might be allowed to squeeze a bit of humanity into the transaction: ‘With a fuck-buddy, there is no real intimacy beyond nudity and mutual hotness … It’s not like meeting up with a mate to watch a movie and talking about the plot afterwards over dinner. By definition a fuck-buddy relationship happens on a physical level only.’

A far cry from the words of early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman in Living My Life, who was put in prison for her defence of women’s rights to contraception: ‘I have propagated freedom in sex. I have had many men myself. But I have loved them; I have never been able to go indiscriminately with men.’

Ricky Emanuel, the psychotherapist, is despairing at the One Track Mind culture. He told me in the canteen of the Royal Free Hospital: “This is the commodification of sex and it’s extremely damaging to girls. I have some patients having sex with five people at the same time, described as “friends that I do stuff with”. This is infantile sexuality; it’s about excitement, fizziness, completely devoid of emotional depth or benefit. Young women feel they have to do it – but the lack of meaning makes them depressed. I have to ask: what’s happened to courting? Getting to know someone? It’s not by chance that biblically they used “know” as a meaning for deep and emotional sexual contact. These days much casual sex has nothing to do with knowing.’

Catherine Townsend’s well-written book, Sleeping Around: Secrets of a Sexual Adventuress, is about: ‘Threesomes, sorbet sex, drunk dialling, multiple orgasms, girly gossip-swaps, buying silk underwear – welcome to dating the modern girl’s way.’ Wait, so if I have sex with (or is it while eating?) sorbet and buy silk underwear and cosmos, I’ll have multiple orgasms? This is similar to the picture presented in Sex and the City, the seductive mixture of lifestyle and sex – but even in SATC you’re not guaranteed a multiple orgasm. That’s because even having one orgasm during sex isn’t easy for a lot of women – it’s thought that 20 to 30 per cent of women can do it through vaginal penetration; the rest require a degree of confidence to ask for other stimulation in a particular fashion, which takes time and a bit of trust.

The sex itself

Have you noticed that the sex you have when you don’t know or like the person you’re sleeping with is sort of actually not that great, when you think about it? What happens is that you do it, you get excited by this fact, tell all your friends, then forget the actual moments of alienation in the sex itself.

We saw earlier how Lisa and Lucy talked about their casual sex experiences – one cries during sex, hoping to be noticed, the other keeps her eyes closed. A friend of mine, Melissa, was devastated by a one-night stand she had with a much older man she met in a bar; weeks later, the lack of intimacy and the repulsion she realised she’d felt for him when she sobered up still made her depressed. She mainly remembered just praying he’d hurry up and come – an experience common to many a casual sex encounter, when you’re just guessing what’s going to work. I am not writing off all casual sex for women in a Protestant fury, but this rule stems from the observation that while we think it’s great and fun at the time, it’s often damaging later.

‘You have to act ridiculously into it’

Junk-food sex ranges from the dangerous – unprotected – to the callous and insultingly selfish, to the pseudo-intimate, whereby it’s good and you wish strings were allowed. More and more, though, you’re expected to do whatever it takes to be sexy. Ruth, 31, says:

‘I told a guy I wasn’t going to sleep with him, and he said, “At least, let me put it in your ass.”’

Indeed, a desirable male acquaintance told me that women compete to sleep with him, offering him anal sex immediately ‘to distinguish themselves from the other girls.’ Holly, 32, a successful fashion journalist says:

‘There’s massive pressure to be good in bed – having to act ridiculously into it and up for everything; giving the “knowing” blow job etc – it’s not enough to just do your basic missionary. Which is ironic, because mostly boys are shit in bed.’

Another lethal junk-food sex trend is men saying they can’t possibly perform while wearing a condom, thus making the woman feel guilty if she insists on safe sex. Ruth says: ‘I can’t believe that would influence me – but it does. All you’re supposed to be is sexy and make them come, that is the most important thing. I never think about my own pleasure – the only time I will ever orgasm is in a serious relationship.’ Statistics about women and anal sex are telling – anal sex, for most women, is not a pleasant experience (anal beads can apparently help) and is not usually one that women will proffer. It’s more something they do because men want it. In a 1992 study that surveyed sexual behaviours, published by the University of Chicago, 20 per cent of women aged 25 to 29 reported having anal sex. In a study published in October 2010 by the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, the instances of anal sex reported by women in the same age group had more than doubled, to 46 per cent.

Self-consciousness

Even loving, relationship sex often has a whiff of the casual encounter’s anxiety about it – one friend of mine said she’s so paranoid about her boyfriend of four years seeing her in an unbecoming position that she never had sex without a camisole covering her torso (she lets the straps down). Indeed, Company magazine commissioned me to write an article for them revealing seven sex positions that not only achieved G-spot access (which is still not properly understood) but were flattering, too. For example, anything where your stomach is stretched out and your head thrown back. Try fitting that in with remembering your G-spot, and then the fact that there is another real live person participating, too.

That self-consciousness – whereby a woman is fully occupied in trying to make her body appealing – is nothing new. Naomi Wolf, author of the essential feminist manifesto The Beauty Myth, explains with typical ingenuity the way in which the female experience of her own body is fragmented. She notes that since the 14th century, masculine culture has revelled in deconstructing women’s bodies. Troubadors specialised in listing the feminine ‘catalogue of features’, while poet Edward Spencer took this catalogue to a new level in his hymn Epithalamion. This fragmented approach to female features, says Wolf, continues today in ‘list-your-good-points’ features in women’s magazines, and in collective fantasies about female perfection fuelled by heavy marketing. She’s right: whether you are selling watches or yoghurt, it seems that images evoking the perfect, milky-skinned package is essential.

Porn-consciousness

‘I trotted out every parlour trick and sexual persona I knew.’

Commercial culture’s jamboree of female torsos, lips and legs aside, I believe that much of the self-doubt in the sex experience for women is the awareness and ubiquity of the porn standard. I don’t watch porn, it feels like a pollutant to me, but many people do, women included (about a third of porn is viewed by women). I’ve seen it, though, and I know how extreme (to me) even its most savoury acts seem. I also know that most men, including those I’m likely to end up in the sack with, will be porn consumers. They may not require the porn standard – I interviewed dozens of men for my last book and most of them were far more generous about our bodies than we believe. But we know porn’s there, a click away, which is almost as bad.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a prominent American writer, has captured very well the jig the single woman plays in bed, as well as the discomfort she’ll happily accept to make the man come – that is, to get past Go and collect $100. She talks about a one-night stand with a well-heeled, polite old acquaintance of hers in which the sex failed miserably. He couldn’t stay aroused, despite her trying every trick she knew, from playing the coquette to acting submissively; from yelling with (fake) excitement to going silent. In the end, he requested anal sex. Vargas-Cooper asked why that – of all things – would arouse him. The reason he gave was that it was the only thing that would make her uncomfortable. Instead of walking out, Vargas-Cooper instantly complied. Looking back, she notes how this encounter does not exactly fit the feminist template of sexuality. The reality is that pleasure and displeasure are two sides of the same sexual coin, a contradiction ‘neatly’ resolved through porn, and thus, she notes, very much in favour of men.