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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.
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 (#ulink_1af447ce-6c39-559e-baa9-7faff4794dbc)
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
