Wendy Jones - The Sex Lives of English Women: Intimate Questions and Unexpected Answers

WENDY JONES is the author of the bestselling biography of Grayson Perry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. She writes the Wilfred Price novels: The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals and The World is a Wedding. She also writes for television.

Wendy Jones has a PhD from Goldsmiths in Creative Writing and the books of Studs Terkel, and was the first person to do the MA in Life Writing at the University of East Anglia. She lives in London.

THE SEX LIVES OF ENGLISH WOMEN

Intimate Questions and Unexpected Answers

WENDY JONES

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Serpents Tail,

an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X 9HD

www.serpentstail.com

Copyright 2016 Wendy Jones

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 78283 165 5

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to be themselves

Betty Friedan

For women

Some thoughts

This book is not about how to be a woman; it is about how women are. Women are always being told how to be a woman: how to be sexy/thin/fashionable/beautiful/attractive to men, how to organise a perfect wedding/decorate/cook/lose weight/dress, how to be pregnant/give birth/mother, what jobs they can do, what rape is, how to stop ageing, what colour powder to put on their eyelids, how to have good self-esteem. And so on. There is so much telling women how they should be, and so little asking them who they are and what they want. I thought someone should at least have the courtesy to ask.

This is a book of interviews with twenty-four English women talking about sex. When I began, I had no agenda, I wanted to listen to women, to give women the space to speak. And I wanted to interview English women, who so often have a reputation for being sexually repressed. I had two questions: what is it to be a woman? and, what do women want sexually? This book is my answer.

I found the women in various ways. Shirley, a feminist in her seventies, sat next to me on the train; the Muslim teenager served me in the supermarket; a friend of a friend suggested interviewing Mary, the 94-year-old. I met Hilary, the Girl Guides leader, at a conference on domestic violence; I went to a burlesque class to find Samantha. I turned to social media, and women came forward. If I had an instinct about someone, I asked, and she invariably said yes.

I wanted experiences and stories. I didnt want statistics such as that the average act of intercourse has three hundred thrusts, true though that may be. I didnt want to reduce women to facts and figures about orgiastic spasms, orgiastic discharges and so on: that seemed dehumanising and I was in search of the womens humanity and individuality. I wagered that through our sexuality our humanity is revealed. All names, identifying details and places, have been changed to protect the womens anonymity. Every woman had right of veto.

From my own experience I was able to understand a lot of what the women were saying. Yet, as a heterosexual woman, I didnt know other women the way an average heterosexual man or gay or bisexual woman would: from sleeping with them. I knew women and didnt know them. I wanted to reveal what was hidden.

The women had a lot to say the unedited interviews came to half a million words. Beneath the armour of respectability, behind closed doors, women are full of it. When women talk about sex they talk about their bodies and their vaginas. Paula describes her vagina as fat. Gwyns job is massaging vaginas. Marys vagina was surgically constructed from the skin of her penis. And they talk about orgasms. Victoria describes having seven or eight in one session, Deborah, forty-one, thinks shes never had one. Helen describes womb orgasms, Pandora, a trapeze artist, likes to scream.

I was curious about womens fantasies. In fantasy, unlike in reality, there is absolute freedom. What does a woman want if you take out the restraints of monogamy, marriage, age, health, religion, social mores, and financial strictures? What does a woman choose to do when she can desire anything? May imagines the sea as her lover. Sigourney, a shop assistant, wants a threesome. Pandora wouldnt mind having her own harem. Ariel, a beauty contestant, fantasised about sex in a hot tub so she had it. But women dont always want their fantasies to come true. Christina didnt want to be raped, despite her fantasy; Farah would like to do vampire stuff, but didnt want to be bitten too hard on her neck. There can be a gap between what a woman desires in her mind and what she wants in her life.

I had thought some women would know a lot about sex and some wouldnt. But it was more complex than that. Yvette had four children before she knew what her own vagina looked like. Charlotte, the gynaecological nurse, didnt know what an orgasm was. And Jackie, despite having slept with ten men a day, was scared to hold a mans hand. I saw it again and again in the interviews: that slice of rich experience and that space of innocence. They are interviews of innocence and experience. The sharp distinction between the virgin and the whore came to seem wholly artificial another false construct to try to shove women into, like poorly fitted and contorting shoes.

When women talk about sex they talk about religion. Their parents even their ancestors religion and its coercive bonds often echo in their own life, decades later. Yet, if sex is not a sin any more, it is often a source of anxiety. There is a sense of unease around pornography, and differing viewpoints. While Lois is illuminated by porn, Lola, twenty-three, feels sad after shes watched it. Because of porn, Farahs boyfriend wants her clean-shaven. Olive first watched porn when she was a nun. And women mentioned difficult sexual experiences in many interviews. Caused not only by men, but by chance, by genetics, by other children, by mothers, by family, by society. There is a sadism in our society towards female sexuality. Sometimes a womans sexuality is a decimated landscape. Yet women survive and are full of power and life force. English women dont lie back. They dont think of England.

When women talk about good sex they say yes a lot. James Joyce described yes as the female word, and many yeses lace their way through these conversations. Yes is the nearest women have to express their deepest joy, the only word left when all others fail to express what she is feeling. It is the word of the sexually happy woman. Look out for the yeses.

Thirty-two thousand years ago, men and women painted a cave in Chauvet, France, and in the middle of the cave they painted a womans pudendum. The first humans understood that female sexuality is central to life and its creation and they honoured that in a seemingly guiltless and open way. Through writing this book I came to see the wisdom and beauty of this ancient perception from the beginning of human consciousness; that female sexuality is an intense and vital force at the centre of human experience then and now and that through our sexuality our humanity is revealed.

Women have borne the brunt of sexual repression. But all women have the ability to express themselves sexually. Every woman has a unique sexuality and a unique story to tell about her sexuality. If I were a man, I would be in awe of women. There is more to say. Here are the interviews.