Molly So what have you been up to this week, Tad? Has your Y chromosome spared you from the urge to see Sex and the City and then cogitate over which character you most identify with?

Tad Oh, I already know which character I and every other guy out there identifies with - Samantha. And she is also the one that most annoys me.

Molly Why's that? I would have thought a sex goddess like her would have the male vote stitched up.

Tad “Sex goddess”? More like pin cushion. The woman is a slag.

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Molly And yet Mr Big, who has bedded pretty much everything in North America with a designer handbag, isn't remotely sleazy, I suppose?

Tad Please. It's completely different for men.

Molly So that old double standard is still alive and well.

Tad It's not remotely a double standard. Convincing any woman to sleep with you is bloody hard work. It requires a high level of determination and skill. Whereas for a woman to sleep with a lot of men requires only the ability to walk in to a bar. Same result, but not equally deserving of admiration.

Molly Whose admiration exactly? Women don't admire men who sleep with a lot of women.

Tad You'd be surprised.

Molly Listen Tad, we might credit someone who has had a lot of partners with having reached a basic level of competence as a lover, but the real draw is the possibility of becoming the person for whom he gives up the endless cycle of humping and dumping.

Tad So you admit that women are impressed by a man who has a reputation as a Casanova?

Molly You're confusing quantity and quality. A man with a string of great ex-girlfriends is very different from the guy at the end of a party who goes around picking off any old girl too drunk or grateful to refuse him. Anyone can get laid a lot if they want to badly enough. It just comes down to how low that person is prepared to drop their standards.

Tad Let me tell you, even to get an unattractive woman to sleep with you is not easy. God knows there have been nights . . . But anyway, I'm afraid you are still missing the point.

Molly Which is?

Tad Single men are at all times shagging at their maximum capacity. If a bloke sleeps with two women a year, that is because he found only two women who agreed to have sex with him. Women, on the other hand, are the gatekeepers - they get to choose who they let in and who they don't.

Molly So why the disgust towards the women who let them in? I think - although men would hate to admit this - that it all comes down to emotions.

Tad Oh, this I have to hear...

Molly If all men really cared about was shagging at maximum capacity, as you put it, surely they would use prostitutes. But most of them don't. The fact is that, at some level, men want to feel that the woman they are sleeping with thinks there is something special about them, otherwise they have to grapple with the idea that she wants nothing more than a physical connection with them. Comes right back to the double standard of men denigrating women who behave like men.

Tad Hey, it's not just us men. I've heard plenty of women refer to other women as “sluts” - and I don't think they mean it as a compliment. Fat lot of solidarity that is. At least we men back each other up.

Molly Other women don't look down on sluttish women for being cheap. They view them with pity because the truth is that, sexually, women get much less out of one-night stands than men do.

Tad Sounds to me like you're just picking the wrong guys to have one-night stands with.

Molly Oh wake up, Tad. Why do you think so few women choose Samantha's routine of one-night stands rather than a relationship? Girls generally start to relax and really enjoy themselves in bed on the third or fourth or fifth encounter rather than the first. For us, sex gets better when it happens with the same person over time. Consequently we sense that the one-night standers among us are trying, and failing, to achieve something much rarer and more valuable than orgasm - affection, respect, comfort - by repeating a situation that will never deliver it.

Tad True. There is the suspicion that women who sleep with a lot of men do so because they are often emotionally needy. Whereas men who sleep with a lot of women do so - because they're studs.

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