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

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СКАЧАТЬ pill to swallow for women (and perhaps some men), and yet so many of us – myself included – have swallowed it numerous times.

      That a lot of no-strings sex is bad for women is widely acknowledged by the psychological community. Dr Cecilia d’Felice, clinical psychologist, says: ‘In studies we have found what you might expect: that if you offer men opportunistic sex, most of the time they’ll take it. If you offer women opportunistic sex, most of the time they won’t. There’s a huge difference in the programming of risk-taking between men and women. Women are biologically more risk averse for obvious reasons.’

      Relationships therapist Val Sampson says women are hardwired to be quite choosy about who we have sex with. ‘So even if women say they’re fine with no-strings sex, it’s not necessarily the case. If you become just a vessel a lot of men have sex in, you’re going against the grain. Whereas men can compartmentalise sex more easily, women feel a sense of being let down. All that potential they could use in a sexual act isn’t being used – it’s actually being rejected and this triggers a feeling of “What am I worth?” She may end up feeling like a hooker but get no money at the end of it.’

      No-strings sex and its spirit of female denial and stagnation is lambasted deliciously by Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch in 1970. In her forward to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition, she lists all the sexual freedoms women can now enjoy since the book was first published. ‘What else could women want?’ she asks dangerously. ‘Freedom, that’s what … Freedom from self-consciousness. Freedom from the duty of sexual stimulation of jaded male appetite, for which no breast ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever long enough … The argument in The Female Eunuch is still valid, for it holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality, which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances.’

      Just say no … but why is it so hard?

      For one, agreeing to no-strings sex is easy. All the terminology is laid out and ready to go: ‘fuck-buddy’, ‘friends with benefits’ and so on. And, as I said in the introduction, it masquerades as empowerment for women, whereby shagging like a man is what we do now because we can and, as ‘feminists’, we should.

      But on a personal level, a deep fear of seeming needy has taken hold of women – the stereotype of the woman who encumbers her man and everyone around her with a bottomless pit of wanting and needing and insecurity has reached epic proportions, and floats tyrannously through our minds as we conduct ourselves sexually and romantically. Dr Janet Reibstein, Visiting Professor in Psychology at the University of Exeter and the author of a book reporting on what makes couples happy, observes: ‘It’s seen as somewhat shameful to say “I want to settle down.” The shame comes from admitting prioritising relationship over independence. If a woman says, “I don’t want to have sex with you because I want a relationship,” a man may respond with alarm: “uh-oh, she’s trying to capture me!”.’ Reibstein also thinks there’s a political accent to the NSA idea: ‘Settling down is not part of the feminist heritage. It was a mistake of the feminists of the 1970s, of which I was one, not to stress how important relationships are.’

      After the escapade with Bob, I asked Lucy what motivates her to offer herself no-strings, when inevitably she’ll want strings. ‘Feelings are NOT ALLOWED,’ she told me over sushi. ‘Even though we wish they were. But since they’re not allowed, we don’t go with them. But we have them. And so we’re confused. And fragmented.’

      Of Bob, she explained: ‘That was casual sex but it was fine because I didn’t have any expectations. The worst is when you take a guy home and have expectations. With this guy I didn’t cry. So that was a win. So I say empowered, but what I mean is that it just wasn’t a disaster.’

      The rise of the NSA creed has its roots in a culture that has turned sex into an anecdotal accessory, a must-have store of experience, and a branded display of power, as determined by the status of the person you’ve shagged or the quantity of ‘shagees’. Sex is the social currency (it’s what people talk about most), sexualisation is the social and entertainment aesthetic (advertising, magazines, posters, cereal boxes, newspapers are a jamboree of limbs and post-baby, pre-summer, post-break-up bikini bodies), porn is the private backdrop (‘A Billion Wicked Thoughts’, as per the name of the recent massive study of internet porn by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam), and choice of prospective sexual partners is almost infinite, thanks to the internet. As usual, women’s bodies, preferably naked or near enough, are at the centre of this highly visual culture of hypersexuality.

      Women and the rise of the one-night stand

      Modern female one-night-standers are riding the wave started by the feminists of the 1970s, who wanted us to have sexual freedom and a chance to explore our sexual natures beyond the strictures and servitude of mid-century wifehood. But those feminists split into warring factions: crudely divided into the ‘sex-positive’ (those in favour of porn as a slice of the sexual freedom cake) and the ‘sex-negative’ (those who saw porn as degrading to women). For various reasons, such as having the extremely rich Hugh Hefner on side, the sex-positive, pro-porn group won out, and their influence evolved into what many girls and women today call feminism – i.e., stripping, shagging, ‘choosing’ to use their own bodies for public or pornographic enjoyment. This is a deeply simplistic account, but I think it’s essential to note that the NSA norm originated – however perversely or ironically – from the brains and hearts of some of the 20th century’s noblest feminists.

      Unsurprisingly, one-night stands have risen sharply. According to the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, in 1990, 53 per cent of men and 79 per cent of women considered one-night stands to be wrong. Ten years later only a third of men and half of women held that view.

      Teenagers – tomorrow’s adults – are leading the charge. Teen specialist Raychelle Lohmann notes in Psychology Today that high school relationships are being replaced by a hook-up culture, where no-strings pulling rules. They are to become the women for whom Natasha Walter says, ‘having many sexual partners without much emotional commitment is often seen as the most authentic way to behave’.

      It’s not that this kind of sex has been digested wholly by society – Hollywood, for one, is not comfortable with it. That doesn’t mean it’s not obsessed with it. Consider three recent films whose protagonists begin with a seeming paradise of strings-free sex but end up choosing monogamy: No Strings Attached has Natalie Portman’s character coming round from a booty call mentality to a relationship; Hall Pass has Owen Wilson’s totty-ogling husband given free rein by his wife to go off with other women for a week, and Friends with Benefits stars Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake using each other for sex.

      All these films want to show us that no-strings sex is not a good idea – unless it’s leading to love. It’s a nice sentiment, but by showing repeatedly that shagging for shagging’s sake is one way into a happy, romantic ending (after all, who wouldn’t want to steal the heart of Ashton Kutcher?), Hollywood is, as it’s always done, giving us a fairy tale that has very, very little to do with reality. (Unless, of course, you look like Mila Kunis or Natalie Portman.)

      NSA sex: the reality

      Inevitably, raunch culture has taken a toll on the way women see themselves in relation to sex. We are voracious seekers of answers to the question ‘Am I hot?’, and tend to seek validation externally rather than internally. I know that when I go out hunting down a man, or hoping to be hunted, I’m looking for the thrill of a compliment – not of my brains, but of my beauty, or more specifically, my sexual allure, as much as for intimacy.

      So for many women (although certainly not all), that quaint old duo of sex and love has been decoupled, leaving us performing sex for sex’s sake in a mechanical vacuum with our inner sexual impressions, feelings and needs somewhere tucked under the carpet, away from the public and the male eye. Putting СКАЧАТЬ