Sports Calendar

She goes on: “We’ve primped and preened so much that our bodies haven’t a whiff of a pheromone about them.” Charlotte Roche explores this in Wetlands, a novel about sex, shame and the mucky functions of her body. “My liberal feminist mother still didn’t teach me about masturbation or menstruation,” she says. “Even in front of my husband, I felt embarrassed about my body, I learnt from society that so many things about it are bad. A lot of men don’t think women have body hair, believing a shaved woman is normal. Porn women are shaved so you can see more. It is their work. But why do we have to copy porn? Ads and porn are nothing to do with real life, real-life sex is hairy and messy.”

Interestingly, in a recent Cosmopolitan survey, given the sentence “An unforgettable lover must…” to complete, 57% of respondents chose “love all my body”. Least popular was “have a big penis” — 5%. There is always that reassuring truism that, actually, men don’t care about cellulite and bikini lines. But interviewing on the streets of Brighton, Anna Richardson, the Channel 4 Sex Education show presenter, was appalled by the results. “We discovered teens are waxing all their pubes because they feel it’s what they should do and what boys want — guys are going on about it to them.” She goes on to describe boys’ reactions to hardcore porn and to images of normal female bodies. Take a guess which bodies they found shocking. “They can’t discern between porn fantasy and reality,” she says.

Adults, and female ones at that, are responsible. Boynton was invited to go on GMTV recently. “They wanted to do something about empowering women [sexually]. I said: ‘Let’s talk about the clitoris.’” They didn’t like that, “but they were having a pole-dancer on”. No wonder we’re paranoid. You can’t bang on about female self-esteem being the root of all sexual happiness, if everything in culture takes a big pop at it. Even apparently tough females are not immune. Take the rather terrifying duo of Lette and Edwards-Jones, the editors of the book In Bed With. Edward-Jones sees porn everywhere. “Pop videos are soft porn, really, which is intimidating if you aren’t 22 and can’t lick your own nipples. If you are constantly being told you are hairy and overweight in a sex-fetishised culture, it doesn’t make you feel very sexy.” Lette adds: “When I was researching How to Kill Your Husband, I learnt that women in this sexually liberated millennium are having less sex than our more repressed sisters from the straight-laced 1950s. Today, the pressure to stay young and nubile is soul-destroying. And, really, is there anything more ridiculous than a middle-aged woman waxing off her pubic hair to look prepubescent?”

What happened to love?

A divorcé describes his first forays into the 21st-century dating scene: “She wanted to shag like a porn star: longer, harder, bigger, better,” he says. “She used her Rabbit [vibrator] so much, orgasms were reserved for that efficient machine, then, when we were in bed, she was all, ‘Harder, harder’.” His female counterpart, a woman in her fabled “cougar” years, says she went on a fellatio course because “I was terrified I wouldn’t be good enough”. You’d think — hope — someone older wouldn’t be so insecure, right? Wrong. In fact, the cougar is a lesser-spotted urban myth, says Boynton. “A lot of them are buying into getting their act together, but haven’t thought ‘What turns me on?’ Many women want to learn deep-throat techniques, and I have to ask them, ‘Why? Why do you want to learn to relax your throat muscles?’”

Whatever happened to, ahem, making love? Richardson says: “Love has become a dirty word. We’re afraid to admit we want romance.”

“I used to f*** like a bunny, and was proud of it,” says a female hotelier, who describes a late-twenties transformation after she took a course with a Harley Street sex psychotherapist on how to get the best out of sex. “[After the course] I became more quality-controlled. And my partner was annoyed, because suddenly I didn’t see the point in giving it the whole showy thing.”

Paula Hall, a sexual psychotherapist and spokeswoman for Relate, says: “The sexualisation of the high street and media has left a lot of people with a lot more anxiety, a feeling of, ‘Oh God, there’s so much I don’t know.’ We’re selling just one model of female sex, which is raunchy, commanding, glossy and expensive. This thing of there being only one way of being — in your face, aggressive and masculine. People assume if they don’t fit the stereotype, then they don’t have it all. People need permission to be themselves again.”

Times recommends

• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?
• Video: How to do glamorous smoky eyes