We live in a highly sexualised society, one that has handed women the
ostensible right to be as free, as wild and as pleasured as they wish. From
the cultural looks of things, you’d think women were having sex round the
clock. Agent Provocateur is a brand like no other. Soon it will add
furniture and bed linen to its sales of erotic books, £175 handcuffs and the
sort of sellout frillies seen on your favourite female fashion icons.
In China, vibrator manufacturers are one of the few industries weathering a
global recession. Rampant Rabbit enthusiasts rave about the latest model,
the bumper stickers on their cars proclaiming, “My other ride is a rabbit”.
Sex toys are chic lifestyle accessories. Recently, a PR punting JimmyJane’s
Little Something line of precious-metal vibrators closed her pitch with
“Kate Moss bought the gold one”.
Older women are characterised as foxes or, the more predatory American term,
cougars. Just work at it and you fortysomething pluses can retain a
plumptious, fecund look well into middle age. If you don’t find that
older-lady-loving junior down the pub, meet him online at the unequivocally
named Toyboywarehouse.com.
We appear to be living in a golden age of female sexual awareness and
fulfilment, doing anything and everything on top of what our sexually naive
mothers and grandmothers apparently did out of duty or for a washing
machine. Our favourite lady authors have written In Bed With, a collection
of erotic stories that its editors, Kathy Lette and Imogen Edwards-Jones,
call “female masturbatory material”. Nike sells sport to women with the
promise that it will improve their sex lives. Even our favourite blusher, by
Nars, is called Orgasm.
Performance anxiety
Yet, in among the glossy portrayal of our intimate moments, the truth about
our sex lives is notoriously difficult to track — not least because people
lie in surveys that are already suspect in their mission. What is clear is
that women find the cultural environment a gigantic cause for performance
anxiety. It wasn’t hard to find someone who had actually experienced the
following scenario, outlined to me by Brett Kahr of the Society of Couple
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists: couple in bed, wife “down there” performing
an “oral sex act”, husband neatly propped up on the White Company best,
answering e-mails on his BlackBerry. And this very obvious example of the
modern world entering the bedroom is only the proverbial tip. The window of
Agent Provocateur is not the window into the sexual soul of British women,
more’s the pity. Kahr’s study of 14,000 British people found that 21% of us
have no sex at all, 32% have it once a month and 44% once a month to once
a week. According to these figures, women are having less of everything than
men, except celibacy. And while the April cover of Cosmo screams, “Your
orgasm! The secret to super satisfaction every time”, a Stanford University
study found women in sexual liaisons orgasm only 80% as often as men, when,
in theory, they could easily beat men hands down, as it were. Finally, in
totally unscientific cyber-noseyiness, I posted something on Facebook asking
women if they were “getting enough”. Most answered, “no”, citing the
obvious, such as tiredness, stress, kids and lack of time and/or men.
Selling sex
Fifty years ago, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir described womanhood as
a socially constructed activity; today, after several waves of feminism, and
a recognised right to contraception, sexual pleasure and all that, we still
find our sexuality defined by pop music, glossy magazines, advertising and
pornography. Dr Petra Boynton, a sex psychologist, sees the very
commercialisation that makes us seem so free as the reason we’re not
satisfied. “The scented candles, the lingerie, the stuff — it doesn’t
explain how anything works, it just presents a dream,” she says. “Sex has
become mandatory, competitive and commercialised. Vested commercial
interests suggest it could be great, if only you had their product.”
Are the women walking down the street proudly swinging their pink-and-black AP
bags empowered, sexually charged and free, or are they just... shopping —
our sexual empowerment often seems all about the bucks and not the actual
bang. Joe Corre, the owner of Agent Provocateur, sees the brand as
empowering — and on a fundamental level, who isn’t going to give three
cheers for nice knickers? “Our ideal is to create a sense of sex and power,
of celebrating femininity,” he says. But the pressure can be crushing. “Two
years ago, on my birthday, I spent a lot of money in Agent Provocateur,”
says a thirtysomething on her second marriage, including “handcuffs,
stockings and several sets of lingerie. It was memorable for all the hope I
pinned on it. My husband and I stayed in a hotel and I remember a great
sense of disappointment that the sex wasn’t perfect”.
The idealised body
At Beautcamp Pilates, a chain of exercise studios that serves the very women
who like to swing by AP to see what’s new in, there are whispers about women
having the odd orgasm during class. Its workout machines, called reformers,
involve taking a very coital position, legs spread wide in the air, in
something like gynae stirrups. The owner, Dominique Day, is circumspect,
however. “A few yummy mummies have admitted they come here as a replacement
for sex,” he says, “because they are not getting any from their stressed
husbands.” Meanwhile, Rowan Pelling, the sex commentator and writer, says
the reason women aren’t getting enough is that they’re “too busy going to
the gym when they should burn off those calories in bed”. The attempt to
hone an idealised sexy body is certainly part of the passion-killing
zeitgeist. Boynton says the commercialisation of sex as status symbol “sets
up the idea that sex only happens in really pricey knickers. It excludes
women. It’s an elitist model from which women without money or a certain
body shape are excluded”.
A lovely-looking make-up artist in her mid-thirties agrees: “It’s all so
competitive. Women are made to feel they have to look the part for ever, you
can’t just let it go. My partner left me eight months after I had a baby,
saying he ‘couldn’t feel a thing’. Deserted, I felt fat, saggy and
unattractive. I find everyone, from Madonna to Kerry Katona, totally
depressing, with their sparkly looks put down to ‘lots of fruit and veg’,
when we all know it’s personal trainers, Botox and retouching.”
