Stephanie Theobald - Sex Drive: On the Road to a Pleasure Revolution

By the Same Author

Biche

Sucking Shrimp

Trix

A Partial Indulgence

For the Wizard of O,

Betty Dodson

In times of war and its always a time of war women especially need to seek out more pleasure. Because its the first thing they steal from us. You have to find a way to dissolve into hedonistic pleasure, you have to pander to your worst instincts .

Lydia Lunch

London, 5 October 2014

Sunday morning in bed. Only crumbs remain on the croissant plate and, any minute now, he is going to start looking at me in that way. Its become a routine on Sunday mornings after breakfast in bed and it does make sense. Womens magazines say it all the time: if youve been together for a long time then you should do it even if you dont fancy it, because it brings you closer together.

So I do do it. Only Ill probably be thinking of the sixty-six-year-old art dealer I had an affair with a few years back, although actually I wasnt always present with him either. Sometimes Id teletransport away from his boat on Chiswick Pier over to an imaginary barristers office in Lincolns Inn Fields, where Id be submitting to a pinstriped lawyer type. Yet within that fantasy, Id soon have to be back at the flat of the real-life dirty blonde from Harvey Nichols Id recently bought perfume from. In my head, wed become lovers and wouldnt she punish me good and proper when she found out what Id been up to with the lawyer?

So there I was, lying in bed on Sunday morning, wondering who the hell I was about to have sex with. Over the past few months, the sight of croissants has served to fuel my midlife crisis like the dogs and Pavlov. Wasnt it dishonest to have sex with someone while thinking about doing it with someone else? How did you carry on having sex in a long-term relationship, and what was this poly thing everyone was talking about? Wed been together for ten years but we didnt have children, so there was nobody to hurt apart from ourselves. Maybe hed be better off with someone who didnt make him feel like a freak for wanting sex. Maybe not wanting sex was part of the perimenopausal thing. Yet I dreamed about it all the time.

Mainly, I wondered, is sex important? Is it really bad for you if you dont have it regularly? I hadnt broken out with fangs and scales just yet, and my friend in Cannes hardly ever has sex with the father of her three children. Sometimes it just strikes me as so absurd, all that rumpy-pumpy bestial jerking, when you could be painting a picture or something. She seems to have sublimated her urges with vegetables. Shes always sending me emails about the amazing produce (baby broad beans, tiny artichokes and Perroquet tulips) that shes bought from the local market.

Id talked to other friends about my dilemma. The magazine editor looked worried and said, Relationships do go through difficult patches. (People hate it when their friends split.) My PR friend warned, Stay with the devil you know! which is rich, because she fantasises about her gym instructor every time she does it with her husband. My TV friend told me to, Have your cake and eat it! (Shes desperate to have an affair with a guy in her office and if she didnt have kids shed do it like a shot.) My twenty-four-year-old poet friend said, Go for it youve not been happy for a long time. But you have to be honest with him.

And I have been. More or less. The following Sunday, as I lay on his shoulder after the plate of crumbs and the ensuing sex, I managed to stammer something like, I will always know you. It felt like a lever, like the first bit of levering had taken place, which one day would uproot the jammed stone and send it rolling down the cliff. It was a feeling of moving something, but it was frightening too. There was a silence and then he joked that we could be like Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, the glamorous bisexual literary couple of the 1920s and 30s, who exemplified polyamory before the word was invented. I cheered up then. I said that yes, Id be Vita having sex with Virginia Woolf while Hadji would sit in his club in St Jamess smoking cigars with Winston Churchill (I didnt want to think too much about what my Hadji would actually get up to).

And then joking wasnt enough. Something needed to burst through. Maybe I didnt want an affair. Maybe I wanted a whole new life. The following weekend, I found myself in the kitchen with the man who used to be known as the brute boy of British fiction, surrounded by all the things that were making me feel buried alive: the BBC Radio arts review show, the roast chicken in the oven, the prospect of croissants the next day. Something came to a head. All year, Id been hungry for stories of people splitting up: how did they do it? What words did they use? How did the conversation start? Someone said, Wait until next time youre having a row, itll come naturally. But in the event, I just started to cry. Id never cried wolf in all our years together and now something terrible was coming out of my mouth: I was thinking that maybe we should split up.

It felt as though Id poured poison into his drink. He didnt drop down to his knee and say, No! Anything but that! He nodded and said, Yes. We were both in shock. He ran me a bath and brought me chocolate and wine and lit candles. I lay in the warm water thinking, The poison will trickle into his guts. Soon it will start to have an effect.

At the beginning of November, I flew to New York to visit some old friends and ended up bedding the art director of a US glossy followed by a night with a badass chef from a restaurant in the Meatpacking District. On my return to London, a week later, I was delirious. I had a meeting with my bank manager and I was thinking of saying to him, I want to talk to you about orgasms! because I was back in the sexual saddle after such a long absence. I was seeing the world through a phantasmagorical sea of stirred desire and deranged memories: a stuffy apartment, orange dcor, a pierced clit, a leather belt. The selfish, slippery, feverish mind of the born-again sex junkie.

Only I was a big phoney. I didnt actually have an orgasm with the art director until she was safely in the bathroom the next morning (Americans take ages in the shower). And I only climaxed in the badass chefs orange apartment when she left the room to answer the phone in the early hours. The next morning, I played distractedly with her breasts on the couch because I felt I should try and get turned on again. After a while, she said, Lets go get bagels.

Getting back into the sexual saddle isnt as easy as you think. The fact was that after being in a monogamous relationship for so long, I wasnt sure how to sit on the horse any more. And yet I knew I needed to come alive again. Id never been a shrinking violet about sex. Much of my journalistic reputation over the past twenty-five years had been based on it, writing about attraction to both men and women. Some people gain confidence from work, some from sport, some from trophy husbands. But for me it had always been sex.

And then I found something Id written in my diary in my late twenties. Id just been chucked by a girlfriend and when Id calmed down, I observed, I need some masturbation time. Some TLC for my own body. To try and remember my own body. Wanking off and eating straw always seems to be the starter for any creativity I have.

Wanking off and eating straw was shorthand in my twenties for afternoon autoerotic sessions when I was bored or looking for inspiration. After rutting under my sheets for fifteen minutes at a time several times a week, my bed resembled a stable that needed mucking out. I always felt guilty afterwards because all the wage slaves were in their offices working away. Mainly, I felt like a peasant because having real sex with good-looking people was what you were supposed to be doing.