What Makes Women Happy

Illness

Illness is bad. But it can be very interesting, especially if it’s your own. Symptoms are fascinating. It’s another world, a bubble one, perhaps, and precarious, but those in it have already found a way to live with it. The skill of physicians and surgeons is inspiring. As is other people’s selflessness. The walls of your experience may narrow to the width of a hospital bed, but it is still a stage, this is your drama and you are the centre of it. A good performance will get good reviews. Understand and please your audience: the visitors who may or may not cluster round your bed; at the very least the volunteer who brings round the library books or the man who wheels the trolley of newspapers and junk food.

‘How are you today?’ they ask. Well, tell them. That’s pleasure in itself. If ill enough, you are excused selflessness and martyrdom.

And if you are temporarily in a hospital ward, try not to hate it. Go with the flow. The social life of the ward is rich and strange, never mind the routine. People elaborate their symptoms and treatments with a relish others share. They support and understand each other. They joke about death. The ward is a mini-tribe, sharing experiences.

In the private ward you have your comfort but you can be lonely, and another patient is more likely to come to your aid than a nurse. Sometimes money is not the universal solution.

When Children Are Ill

There is nothing good to be said about the serious illness of a child and not much comfort to be offered to the parents involved, other than to try to shift the perspective, see the small body as too frail and weak to support the intense existence of the mind and soul of this particular child. See how the latter exists, how clearly and powerfully it becomes apparent even as the body fails. The inner being makes itself clear – let the parents try to gain strength from it. Difficult, because parental distress is based in one of the most powerful instincts we have: to protect and save the children. The mind has little defence in these circumstances. The soul has. It is strong in the child. Those who suffer with children will understand the concept.

You can pray, though your sense of a benign universe will be somewhat blunted. That in itself is unsettling. The prayers would have to overcome your sense that you are picked out by fate for cruel and unjust punishment.

And it might help you, selflessly, to let the child go, to not struggle pointlessly for the continuation of its existence.

You could try Lourdes. I haven’t been there, but they do say that a community of the like-minded, on the edges of despair, within which you don’t have to explain yourself, with standards you can adapt to, however idiosyncratic and peculiar they may seem to the healthy and flourishing rationalist you once were lucky enough to be, can be a great comfort. You’re with the tribe you have inherited. It might seem grotty compared to the one you were born into, but it is a tribe.

Bereavement and Isolation

We’ll get on to these universal enemies later, and in more detail, when we are feeling stronger. I can be quite cheerful about bereavement, there are cures for isolation, and as for debt, well…

Debt

It’s probably your own fault. You had a vision of yourself which did not accord with reality. You upgraded yourself to a wealthier sort of person than you actually were. It happens. You should have listened to the Voice of Guilt. You have my every sympathy. Earn your way out of it.

Bitterness

Very little in life is fair. Some of us are born with longer legs than others. Some of us are born into poverty in the Sahara desert, others into prosperity in leafy suburbs.

It’s unfair that some are born thin, active, nervy ectomorphs and others are born rounded, easy-going endomorphs. Society these days smiles on the former rather than the latter, who have to spend their lives on diets, never eating what they want, except in those few places left in the world where obesity is valued.

Seeking natural justice is absurd: justice does not exist in nature. Seeking justice in the home is okay, but tends to end in exhaustion: it can be easier to wash his socks than argue that he should do it.

Resenting men, an emotion familiar to most women, is understandable but pointless. Don’t let it make you bitter. Some things are just not fair. It is not fair that for men the culmination of sex is always an orgasm – or at least for 98 per cent of them – and for women it is not.

Sex

Sources of Envy

10 per cent of women never experience orgasm.

20 per cent occasionally do.

50 per cent sometimes do.

20 per cent usually do.

10 per cent always do.

Or so the current figures say. But figures change. Someone in the 10 per cent ‘always’ category suddenly goes down to the next division: ‘My partner came back from his trip and he’d grown a beard.’ Someone in the ‘never’ group claims now to be in the ‘sometimes’ category: ‘I met another man.’ But the broad pattern is clear. The pleasure so liberally bestowed upon men by nature is only grudgingly given to women.

Of course women resent it. Listen to any conversation between women when men aren’t there: at the hen night, on the factory floor, over the garden fence, at the English Lit. tutorial. Women may laugh and joke, but actually they’re furious. ‘They can, we can’t, unfair, unfair.’ They may not know what’s biting them, but that’s it.

But facts are facts and there we are. Deal with it. Life is not fair. Resenting the fact is no recipe for happiness.

Indeed, the less you think about orgasms the better, since the greatest bar to having one, if we’re to believe the research, is wanting one. Best if they creep up on you unawares. Women are at their most orgasmic when they are least anxious, but wondering why you’re not having one can make you very anxious indeed. Which is ironic, since what you want most you’re going to get least.

But a lot of life is like that. Want too much and it’s snatched away. An attitude of careless insouciance is more likely to pay dividends.

Because really, having an orgasm or not doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things, just as having an éclair or not doesn’t matter. Life goes on pretty much the same with or without. There are other pleasures. There’s true love, trust and sensual pleasure. Or, if you’re that kind of person, and I hope you are not, the victory of disdain. ‘See, knew you were no good in bed.’

But actually, it’s as likely, if not more likely, to be your doing, not his.

Unfair – but what you are after is happiness. Sexual repletion is not a necessary ingredient. Sexual satisfaction can happen anyway, and is not dependent on orgasm. If women were not so often described as ‘achieving orgasm’ then there would be no sense of failure when they didn’t. The word is wrong, not the thing itself.

‘I don’t do orgasm’ might be a more useful way of describing yourself, initially, to a partner, and it’s a bonus to both if it turns out not to be true. But having an orgasm is not a sign of true love any more than the lack of it is the opposite. I have read letters from girls who think they must end a relationship because sex between them and their true love does not conclude with an orgasm for her. Imagining sex has failed, they feel the relationship has failed. It hasn’t – all that has happened has been that she didn’t have an orgasm. So what? Better, more conducive to happiness, just to see orgasm as an additional extra, something special that happens, a bonus, a surprising gift from heaven which descends like manna from time to time, not your natural-born right – and then a whole raft of unhappiness will be wiped from your life.

In Any Case

Female orgasm has no apparent usefulness to the human race. This puzzles those who think that everything in nature has to have a purpose, those who personalize evolution as if it knew what it was doing and had some end of perfection in sight. Some say muscular spasms help the sperm on its way to the egg; others doubt it. It is not the longing for orgasm which makes the virgin girl fall in love – though it may be the boy’s. Another inequality, another injustice!

The peacock’s tail demonstrates sexual attraction in overdose as he struts before the female; his voice would be enough to put anyone off. I don’t suppose nature was after fairness, trying to balance things in the scales of justice, when she gave with one hand and took away with the other.

Why different birds have different voices no one knows – and no one’s worked out what they’re for – but those with (to our ears) the sweetest voices are the ones who sing the loudest and seem to relish their singing most. I like to think that the thrushes in my garden sing because it occurs to them that it’s a beautiful morning and they feel like acknowledging it. It’s an irrational thought, but it makes me happy for at least ten minutes, wandering in the garden and listening, but then the sun gets too hot and I worry because I haven’t got a hat.

Some say that, like male nipples and the appendix, female orgasm is a mistake which nature has failed to recognize as a non-necessity. Better to see it as a celebration and a reward just for being alive. But there are others – the exhilaration of ideas, conversations, the company of good friends and so on – which probably add up to more.

The Joy of the Fake Orgasm

Just fake. Happy, generous-minded women, not too hung up about emotional honesty, fake. Research tells us that when you do there is ‘activity in the part of the motor cortex that relates to the genitals, the amygdala, but not the deactivation of the cerebral cortex that occurs prior and after a genuine orgasm’. In other words you have to be happy to have an orgasm, but if you have an orgasm you will be happy.

Activate the positive. Deactivate the negative. That’s what it’s all about.

The more highly educated you are, the more likely you are to fake orgasm. I am not sure what we deduce from that. Is too much intellectual stimulation bad for the love life? Or does it just occur to clever women pretty soon that it’s only sensible to fake it?

Genuine orgasm experienced, acknowledged and stored away as one of the uncompromisingly good things in life, you will then no doubt leap out of bed and make breakfast, or squeeze orange juice or pour champagne or whatever your lifestyle, with the words ‘You are so clever’, or however you express enthusiasm, ringing in his – or her, of course, should you be a lesbian – ears.

If you are sensible you will do exactly the same if you’ve faked it, because half the pleasure of sex is being nice to the other person, and half is better than none, on the half-full, half-empty cup principle. Clever, judgemental, honourable people who feel deception is unworthy of them, who say, ‘But relationships must be based upon truth,’ are likely to be of the half-empty sort.

Remember you are not in pursuit of justice, you are seeking what makes women happy. You must catch it as it flies, and if it flies just out of reach, well, it was a nice sight while it lasted, wasn’t it?

Faking is kind to male partners of the new man kind, who like to think they have done their duty by you. Otherwise they too may become anxious and so less able to perform. The more the woman rates ‘performance’, the more likely the man is to wilt and fail. Do yourself and him a favour, sister: fake it. Then, who knows, as a reward for your kindness, sublime pleasure may creep up on you unawares.

There is a great confusion here between the pleasures of love and the pleasures of sex. Both can carry on along parallel tracks, never touching, to the end of time. Or one day, who’s to say, they may meet.

My friend Olivia, now 69, had an orgasm for the first time when she was 54 and nine years into her second marriage. It took her by surprise. But she said it was like learning to ride a bicycle: once you knew how to do it, you could do it all the time. She’s been clocking them up ever since. Life does not begin at 20. She was doing well enough without them, was earning a salary at that time as CEO of a media communications firm and had seemed to me to be living a full, even over-full, love life since I first met her when she was 18.

Her first marriage ended in scandal and divorce – her husband, a writer, naming seven co-respondents. (In those days of guilty and innocent, sexual infidelity had to be proved. Illicit couples had to be discovered in flagrante, stained sheets produced and so on, before the judge would grant a divorce.) The press went to town. Oddly enough, the naming and shaming did Olivia no harm in the business world. Even then, everyone liked anyone who had their name in the papers. And then the sixties were upon us and a great deal of random sexual activity went on as a matter of course, and after that divorce was not a matter of right or wrong but about the division of property. Meanwhile Olivia rose rocket-like through the corporate world and who is to say, if she had had more orgasms, she would have bothered to reach such heights? A touch of discontent in the night may be good for all of us. Sexual satisfaction, sensual repletion and the irrational sense of gratitude which tends to go with them, may be the last thing a career woman needs.

Most women, I suspect, are after true love, rather than orgasm, though they will put up with many stages on the way, from pure lust to pride assuaged to boredom endured. And even if true love is not on your agenda, it is always gratifying to stir it in others. If faking it helps, do it.

The Naturalness of the Hen Night

Girls together is good, girls together is fun and usually noisy. But notice how bitterness against men seems to be hardwired, as if nature had bred us to be suspicious of the male, on the lookout for bad behaviour. There’s something in us of the female cat, not letting the tom near the kittens in case he eats them. Put us together and there’s no stopping us. Listen in to the talk and laughter at a girls’ night out: anecdotes about the follies of men, jokes about the minimal size of their parts, tales of male vanity and self-delusion – their stumbling mumbleness, their crazy driving.

We egg each other on to disloyalty. We are the women; we close ranks in opposition to men. The food gets cold on the plate in our excitement. The wine is quickly drunk, and more wine, and vodka shorts. We are the Maenads just before Orpheus comes on the scene to get torn to bits.

And then the mirth gets bitter. It isn’t really funny, it’s real. Someone begins to cry.

Men who leave, men who won’t leave, men who fail to provide, men who don’t love you after all, men who are a sexual disappointment. Past husbands, vanished partners, the ones who never washed, the ones who had the au-pair girl. Men: ridiculous, pathetic, sad.

The noise diminishes and fades away. Silence falls. Time to count heads and divide the bill. Those who have partners slip away, feeling guilty and grateful. Those who haven’t go home on their own, or walk each other to the bus, and tell themselves all they need is their friends.

I have in my time enjoyed such gatherings immensely. They are a great pleasure. Life is good. The trick is to pay and leave just before the silence falls. And try not to be the one collecting the money and tipping the waiter.

Go to Norway and Sweden and notice how the restaurants are full of men. Few women eat out. Yet in theory these are super-equal societies. The women, one supposes, can only prefer to stay at home. These all-male meals – tables for four, six, eight, ten, more – tend to be silent, grim affairs. Men like to sit side by side, silently, metaphorically locking horns, and don’t seem to have nearly such a good time as women do. But they do seem to get happier as the evening progresses, not the other way round. Life gets better, not worse. It isn’t fair.

Nothing’s fair.

It’s unfair that some people like sex a lot, some very little, some not at all. The capacity for pleasure is not doled out equally or fairly.

(It is probably a good idea that people with equivalent levels of sexual energy partner one another, if they want the union to last. People need to wear each other out in bed. Three times a day, three times a week (the norm) or once a year – so long as both are suited, what’s the worry?)

Mind you, the easy-orgasmers, the lucky 20 per cent, are not always popular with others. The papers this morning were in a state of outrage about Sandy, a feckless girl of 19 who went on holiday to Spain leaving her three children in the care of a 15-year-old. When summonsed home by the police and the media, she refused to go. She was having too good a time, she said. She had her photo taken burying her head into the bare chest of a semi-naked waiter. I bet she had orgasms at the drop of a hat. She knew how to enjoy herself. She was not anxious. She did not feel guilt. She well and truly broke the ten-minute rule. She stretched it to a whole week of drink, drugs, sex and ecstasy before guilt set in and she flew home. That’s one way of doing it.

It Isn’t Fair But It’s a Fact

The fight for gender equality is bad for the looks. It makes no one happy, unless you find some reward in struggling for a justice that evolution failed to deliver. It will just develop your jaw, wrinkle your brow beyond the capacity of Botox to unravel, muddy your complexion so much that no amount of Beauty Flash will clear it, and in general do you no good.

Fight for political justice by all means – join the party, reform and re-educate. Fight for domestic justice – ‘Your turn to clean the loo’ – if you must, though personally I don’t recommend too much of it, it’s too exhausting. But do not fight for physiological equality because it does not exist.

If you have a period pain, you have one. Accept it. Don’t fight it. Sit down. Take a pill. A male voice raised is impressive; a female voice raised creates antipathy. Accept it. You are not trying to be a man. You are proud to be a woman. Do not shout your enemies down at the client meeting – leave that to the men. Get your way by smiling sweetly. The end is more important than the means.

Accept that for women happiness comes in short bursts and the ten-minute rule applies. For men it can last as long as a football match before they realize they’re late picking up the child from school.

So is the sum of human happiness greater for a man than for a woman? I suspect so. Lucky old them.

Be generous. You can afford to be. At least you occupy the moral high ground, and they know it.

Occupying the Moral High Ground

It’s quite nice up here these days. Women can look out over the urban landscape and know they are nicer than men, more co-operative, more empathic, better at communication, better at getting to university and better at getting jobs. Women multi-task – everyone knows. They can do many things at once. Men tend to do one thing at a time. If a woman loses a sock she finds another which will do just as well; a man continues the search until he has found it (albeit in the bin where he threw it), by which time the train has gone and the meeting has begun.

Women abjure the idle languorousness of sexual contentment and get on with things. Women leap out of bed after sex to feed the cat and wash out their smalls so that they’ll be dry by morning. Men just go to sleep gratified and satisfied, happy that all is well. (Though if it’s not his own bed he may well want to regain it before falling asleep. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ he says. Oh yes!)

Women worry in advance. They search through their bags for the dry-cleaning ticket before they even get into the shop. Men wait until they’re in there and then hold everyone up.

Just Accept It

Accept gender differences, don’t deny them. That way you make the most of what happiness nature did allow you as a woman.

Evolution has allowed you an intellect that’s pretty much the same as the male’s.

(Though the male bell curve when it comes to IQ is a little more flattened than for the female. That is to say there are more males at the extreme ends of the spectrum – extreme intelligence, extreme lack of it – which is why you get more male double-firsts at Oxford than female and more males held in police cells overnight than females.)

Evolution has also allowed you an aesthetic appreciation equal to that of the male. There are as many men as women listening to flute concertos at the Wigmore Hall, as many men as women wandering round art galleries.

(Nature might slightly favour the male when it comes to creative activity – men’s books may be ‘better’, if less readable, than women’s, their paintings fetch more in the art market, and so on – but that claim would take a whole book on its own to discuss.)

The traditionally female qualities of caring and nurturing, sharing and co-operating were not always seen as admirable. Inside the home a woman did them for free; outside the home they commanded low wages. Society favoured to male virtues: dismissing and disposing, self-control and a stiff upper lip. But then women, released by technological advance from the domestic drudgery required just to keep the children alive, have used their new power brilliantly. Theirs are the qualities now most valued in Western society. Forget the old male values of never apologizing, never explaining – they’re out-moded. Presidents weep, prime ministers apologize, monarchs explain. To have to accept your genetic make-up, the femaleness of your body, its irritating habit of keeping menstrual time with the moon, is not so bad a fate. These cosmic forces are too great for you to take on single-handed anyway.

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