Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies. Hadley Freeman

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СКАЧАТЬ is to have babies (‘IS JENNIFER ANISTON PREGNANT????’) but then to obliterate any physical sign on their body that they were ever pregnant as soon as they give birth (‘Nicole Kidman back in her jeans just three weeks after giving birth!’) in a manner not that dissimilar to societies that banish women to a special hut during menstruation (ew, women showing physical signs of being grown-up women that don’t involve men having sex with them – gross), that country cannot really then sneer at other cultures for their screwy attitudes to women and sex.

      And finally, the sexual deviants could conclude, the fact that sex is still such an object of obsession, used to advertise all manner of unsexy products from chewing gum to movies starring someone called Ryan Reynolds, when the cover of a recent Vanity Fair magazine¹⁰ celebrating how brilliant TV is these days depicted four talented actresses lying apparently naked in bed (because that’s how people watch brilliant TV, you know: mid-Sapphic orgy), this suggests that modern society isn’t quite so unrepressed as it likes to think. Taking away the taboo of sex might have taken away the stigma but did not lessen the fascination. Ubiquity of sexual imagery and references is not quite the same as sexual sophistication. In fact, some could say it is the diametric opposite.

      To these people I say, yeah, but have you seen the cover of GQ this week? Some chick from a TV show is wearing an unbuttoned men’s shirt – like she just had sex! And now can’t find her clothes! – and is pointing her finger at her mouth! I said, POINTING HER FINGER AT HER MOUTH! I wonder what else she’d like to put in her mouth, eh eh eh! Simone de Beauvoir WISHES she lived in such a sexually sophisticated time!

      Yet, amazingly, despite all the talk about sex, images of sex and songs about sex that form the backdrop to most people’s daily lives (it is literally impossible to get from your front door to your office in the mornings without bumping up against at least seventeen references to sex. FACT), some people are not having their sexual needs slaked. This is not a proper state of affairs. After all, if there’s one thing we all learned from John Updike it’s that an author can get a surprising number of critical accolades if he writes with his penis. And if there’s one other thing we learned from Updike it’s that everyone should feel free to express their sexual needs and fantasies (especially if those fantasies are about how your neighbour’s wife clearly wants to bang you, even though you look more imp than human).

      So it is time to attend to the needs of these poor, sexually uncatered-for people because at the moment they languish, their desires unsatisfied, their daily lives freighted down with the shaming awareness that their musings are not just uninteresting but downright unimaginable to even the most extreme of porn merchants. Pictures of women fucking furniture? Stories about men getting blow jobs from their dogs? Please – I can see such things from my front window. No, I’m talking about a far more specialist need. I’m talking about … sex tips for smart ladies.

      Granted, just that phrase, ‘sex tips for smart ladies’, will not, in all probability, have you sighing with orgasmic pleasure. If anything, it will likely have you crossing your legs and covering your ears faster than if you heard your mother sighing with orgasmic pleasure.

      But this phrase will not be used in its usual manner, that is, as a euphemism for ‘getting unnecessarily gynaecological’, ‘making women sound like morons’ or for a genre of literature that appears to exist solely to reassure men who use prostitutes that, really, they’re doing those gagging-for-it ladies a favour (feminism, you can go home now: your work here is done).

      Part of the problem here is that while references to sex get more ubiquitous by the day, intelligent discussions about sex often feel as difficult to find as they were in the sixteenth century. Anything that claims to talk about female sexuality in a modern, smart and honest way is guaranteed to be brain-bleedingly obvious and crude (women masturbate! They have discharge! Tampon and penis traffic jams! Ha ha!), depressingly reductive and clichéd (men! They’re terrible at sex! Ha ha!) or will take an accepted truism and amp it up so that whatever nub of truth it once contained is now hidden beneath all the attention-seeking bells and whistles with which it has been decked. (‘Women love sex! Therefore, some women really love being paid for sex!’ as one recent trend in literature, which apparently existed solely to reassure men who use prostitutes that they’re doing women a favour, had it. Feminism, you can go home now, your work here is done.)

      The most skating glance at Cosmopolitan magazine shows not just how little progress there has been in the last few decades when it comes to talking about women and sex, but how any progress that has been made has been in reverse gear. Oh, how starry-eyed that magazine once was! When Helen Gurley Brown assumed editorship of Cosmopolitan in 1965, she aimed to verbalise female sexual liberation and, for a time, she did just that. Now this once zeitgeisty publication runs features that range – as articles for women about sex generally do – from the inane to the obvious, e.g., ‘50 Great Things to do with your Breasts’ (‘Cook Dinner Topless, Apply a Little Tomato Sauce to your Nipple – Make Sure it’s not too Hot – and ask your Man if it’s Spicy Enough’) and ‘How Do I Have Phone Sex?’ (spoiler alert: you don’t have sex with your phone). I did not make those examples up.¹¹

      This is the glossy magazine equivalent of the cinematic degeneration from Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant repartee to ‘romantic’ ‘comedies’ today that infantilise and humiliate women and star some actress who is down to her last couple of mill and so takes the pay cheque to present the most degrading portrayal possible of her gender, one that serves only to validate the assumptions of her male-dominated industry. Yes, it’s great that so many movies focus on women’s stories, and it’s great that magazines can talk about women’s sexuality so openly; unfortunately, many do so in such a manner that one wonders if the progress was a Trojan horse for misogyny.

      Yet while there is literally endless talk about sex and depictions of sex in popular culture, there is next to nothing that treats it in a manner that might be useful to a halfway sentient person, and by sentient I mean a person who not only doesn’t fancy dunking her nipples in a jar of spaghetti sauce but requires warning to test the temperature.

      Thus, it feels especially difficult to ask what would now be deemed a relatively basic-level sexual enquiry. How can one ask, at the age of twenty-seven, how to give a hand job when surely by that age you’ve had sex swinging from chandeliers, right? (A note about chandelier sex, by the way: watch out for the candles.)

      This has led to the ridiculous situation of there being sex experts in pretty much every mainstream newspaper and magazine but a near dearth of any useful or even realistic advice because just to publish a letter from a reader asking for hand job tips would make the newspaper look as anachronistic as if it were published on a stone tablet. Far better to publish one asking what to do when one fantasises about having sex with his mum.¹² That’s so much more au courant.

      Yet just because it feels like there are so few answers out there does not mean some women don’t still have questions. Which brings me to the night I went to a sex class.

      Not very long ago, I attended an evening class in the sex shop at the end of my road. It was, as Snoopy would say, a dark and stormy night (lawyer’s note: Snoopy never went to a sex class). A dark and stormy Monday night, in fact. I’ll call the sex shop the Cunning Linguist, because that is pretty much the level of ingenuity the owners applied when naming their shop. Apparently, poor punning skills are not generally seen as an ominous reflection of abilities in other areas because the class was packed with twenty- and thirty-something women, all sitting amid the store’s rails of dildos and strap-ons, notebooks primly on their laps, ready to take notes and draw diagrams. Despite or, yes, because of the ubiquity of sex talk in the world, a lot of women still feel incredibly insecure about certain aspects of sex, and when I say that the class’s name was Blow Jobs to Blow the Mind!, you’ll have an idea of what one of those things generally is.¹³

      Unfortunately, by the end of the two-hour class few questions СКАЧАТЬ