Normally I love what everyone else loves.

Because most people, like me, have little attention span. Much, much worse attention span since digital media and email began their staccato, insistent attack on the ability to focus. But the movies tends to be one place you can count on being entertained, not bored, even if it’s with a “bad” movie. At the cinema, even when it’s bad, it’s good, if you know what I mean.

But The Artist was…awful. I’m an insomniac who needs perfect quiet and darkness and horizontality in order to sleep.  Well, this film – an endless, thematically threadbare black and white affair that was so pleased with itself I was nearly sick into my Yoo Moo froyo (yes, the Curzon sells this genius alternative to Haagen Dasz) – made me close my eyes in stupefaction numerous times. I’d have fallen asleep- certainly I was bored enough- but the soundtrack, in the absence of dialogue, specialises in cocophanous bursts. And these keep you awake.

The Artist, if you haven’t seen it (keep it that way, honestly), is an homage to the days before “talkies”. Which is evidently a golden era the public cares passionately about. The fact that naturalistic sound/dialogue/speech adds valuable dimension to characters, story, and everything else does not seem to stand in the way of a nostalgia fest. Of course, it’s true, without “sound”, you can still follow a story. But this one, such as it was, could have been unfurled in about an eighth of the time. Silent movie star George Valentin falls behind the times, and then onto bad times, as the movies of the Depression era are all about talking actors – and he’s not getting any younger or handsomer. Once great, he’s now a drunken failure who- and this is the bulk of the action – refuses to be helped by someone as presumptiously successful as, gasp, a woman. This woman, Peppy Miller, played by Berenice Bejo, wife of the director Michel Hazanavicius, is also his love interest. But YEARS drag by (yes, the duration of the film) before they finally hug.

The tension in the film comes from the way in which the maddeningly vain (and corny-faced) hero Valentin refuses to be aided by the woman who loves him. She’s more successful. She’s loaded. She wants to help. That’s never going to work. But I could see that from the get go. It never does.

Scene after scene of George experiencing dissolution – drinking whisky in his  horribly downsized lodgings, being left by his devoted servant, watching dolefully as Peppy appears on billboard after billboard, drinking more, collapsing, drink more….and eventually setting fire to himself – is completely and utterly dull. Even with – especially with – his little dog at his side. Do we really need a slapstick faithful dog at the movies in 2012?

And so I am experiencing a sense of alienation from my fellow public that have made this movie such a success and continue to rave about it and pay 12.50 to see it. It seems they’re chasing a sycophantic inside joke that made its way out of Hollywood – and anything but adulation seems impossible. Allow me to say, then, that The Artist is the prefect reminder of why silent films are best left in the past. As one of the studio directors tells George in the film, about the oncoming age of talkies: “The public wants fresh meat. And the public is never wrong.” In the case of this film, I beg to differ.

No 30-something woman will be able to maintain the power with this man, an inevitable homme fatale.

In her brilliant, angry manifesto The Beauty Myth (1991), Naomi Wolf argues that the mechanisms for overpowering women have merely shifted from the public and private spheres to (mainly) the private one. Whereas before, women’s powerlessness was legislated quite openly – no voting, few or no property or marital rights and so on, as well as the usual sexual bullying on the homefront – now women were being kept down by impossible and no-win beauty standards. The battle against female empowerment, argued Wolf, was now being waged in the most private sphere of all: inside the woman’s head, where the her deepest, most fundamental sense of herself is stewed and set.

Wolf’s point still holds – why else would 100,000 women a year in the UK alone be getting breast implants, many of which (as we now know) have come from cheap ‘n’ cheerful, low-grade silicone stock? Why is carving and stitching great bloody gashes into the face to “lift it”, and injecting botulism into the brow to make it look younger, and having hot wax ripped from your deepest, darkest groin merely par for the course if it were not the case that women could not be happy with less?

This is not a power struggle with men, though. It’s a struggle within women – between their mature selves and their infantile, unvalidated selves. The self they love and the self they despise. Yes, images of female desirability, as disseminated by porn and adverts and movies and magazines, do suggest that taking drastic measures to look young and thin is reasonable, even necessary behaviour. But buying into all that is a choice that I don’t see as being too hard to reject: you just have to have a vague grip on reality to know that a) Kate Moss is Kate Moss for a reason; b) you’re never going to look like her and c) that’s no bad thing because beauty of that sort won’t lead to happiness in the way that being yourself will.

Anyway, assuming the exertion of woman-crushing power has moved from the public to the intensely private sphere, nowhere does it seem so live and kicking as in the world of…DATING. Fancy that!

There’s a whole mythology of women defined for their tremendous power over men. Cleopatra is one example – she’s not just a myth, either. Helen of Troy was more of a passive object than a powerful woman but still, she launched a thousand ships by dint of existing. More relevant, perhaps, is the notion of the “femme fatale” – a woman that holds the power, knows she does so, and wields it expertly, leaving men strewn and helpless at her feet.

But it seems to me the modern reality is very different – who are these femme fatales, these Cleopatras? Rather, it seems that the vast majority of women are subject to the whims of the “homme fatale”. When it comes to dating, any half way decent man – and I mean half way – quite simply holds all the power. Women have a few ways of keeping it: one, withholding sex for a while (though I think the idea that men are gagging for sex is obsolete – these days, typical real-life sex must seem terribly dull for men glutted on porn. Note also statistics showing men have fewer thoughts about sex per day, and women more thoughts about it, than previously assumed). Two: genuinely not being interested in the man.

Otherwise, it’s all him. We wait for him to take or leave us, as if we’re paralysed. The more disciplined of female daters claw back some power through a religious adherence to silence and seeming unavailability, but it’s only a matter of time before they too are beholden to the man’s turn of heart.

Two recent conversations with homme fatales illustrate the point. The first man, Pete, 30, was moaning about not finding the right woman. He’s dated lots and lots of girls in the past year or so, some from the internet, some from around and about. None have worked out. Going off a hunch – after all, he’s pretty good looking and nice and clever – I said: “Err, have any of these affairs ended through the woman’s volition?” Looking sheepish, Pete had to admit he’d ended them all. Every last one had happened or ceased due to his desire. I looked at his bulging biceps and trendy trainers and nodded to myself: of course he was calling the shots. Then I thought of my own dalliances – and my own relationship to the powerplay within them. The idea of feeling that everything was in my hands, that it was me that could go off him, that he would be waiting for my text etc, just seemed laughably distant.

The second man, Paul, was clearly a box-ticker – tall, handsome, 34, successful. He knows at some point he’ll go for that special someone and family bliss – but with that sense of “in good time” that men have until, well, they decide they’re ready. Meanwhile, London’s best lassies are his playing field. He tried to speak in a gentlemanly fashion about the whole process, as if he and the women he dates are on an equal playing field. But from the moment we began talking, it was totally clear that he was picking and choosing, deciding who to ask to leave his house after sex and who he wanted to have lunch with; bestowing a phone call or a text rather than anxiously waiting for one. I asked him: “Do you feel you have the power?” And, nice guy that he was, he had to reply, “yes.” After all, a man of 34 is considered ideal; a woman of 34 is assumed to be desperate to have babies and should be held at arm’s length. Paul said he thought it only fair to pay for women’s dinner (so long as they thanked him later) since when it comes to 30-something dating, the game is rigged far more in men’s favour.

A man can woo a woman, but the reverse is not true, which might explain why, in dating, many women feel they have no choice but to wait for the man to call the shots. This may be due to old, entrenched narratives about masculine and feminine roles and courtship and maybe it can change so that one day, it’s considered perfectly feminine and sexy and normal for the woman to do the asking, the bedding, the ringing- to take the control and the power. But such a world seems very far off. For at the end of the day, man is the instrumental partner in sex – woman as recipient seems encoded in the basic act itself.

This 1950s housewife seems perfectly to capture women today, as represented by Times writers.

I have a soft spot for The Times – I really do. I had my first job (of sorts) there and they published an article of mine just this week. Some of my favourite writers have or do grace its pages.

But when it comes to women: Wapping, we have a problem.

I have for some time felt a simmering contempt for the paper’s brand of smug housewifery, flaunted at length in Times2 by once-impressive female columnists. But after reading yesterday’s paper, I’ve moved into a new zone of consternation.

Let’s start with the imagery. Pictures of women with cakes, ovens, brooms, Christmas trees, etc: six, in the first three pages. The cover story is about women rocking the markets – not the financial ones, mind you, but the farmers variety. And so we have two of the newspaper’s prettiest twenty-something journalists pictured in front of heaped-up cake stands, their lips bright red, cheeks flushed, long brown tresses falling down over their aprons.

Turn to page two, and up pops a column I’d not clocked before: The Mothernator: “Diary of a woman whose son won’t leave home (he’s 24).” I had thought Slummy Mummy and its ilk already covered the journalistic range possible of motherhood’s trials but evidently I

I'll wager Hillary Clinton manages to contain her inner "domestic goddess" - even at turkey-tastic Christmas time.

am wrong. To illustrate The Mothernator we have a trim woman in high pumps, with perfect calf muscles, sporting a yellow apron over a figure-hugging floral dress, waving a mop and wearing some weird Terminator-style mask. She is not just a mother, evidently, who has no power whatsoever over her male offspring or home – she is (of course she is), a housewife too. The pull quote, fyi, says: “I don’t know who to hate more: blondie or blonder”, in reference to the girlfriend her son mooches about with – or the girlfriend’s mother, who is also thin and blonde. So the picture perfectly matches the content:  housewife and powerless mother feels jealousy over the youthful looks of younger women, and rivalry with her female maternal peers. Beauty, bitchiness, motherhood, the home. Femininity in one.

Across the page, we stumble upon more maternity. Behold Sarah Vine’s full-page column – Vine, Times beauty editor and author of The Great Big Glorious Book For Girls and Backwards in High Heels: The Impossible Art of Being Female, has evidently overdosed on 1950s pills and now writes primarily about domesticity, girliness, and makeup. When you google Sarah Vine, a Wikipedia entry for her husband, Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove, is the first hit. So in that sense, she really is the perfect 1950s wife – 100 per cent second fiddle to her husband. But back to her column. It is about the rearing of the female’s inner domestic goddess come Christmas time. “Christmas is the time of year when even the most ardent of feminists feels the stirrings of her inner domestic goddess – and what a swivel-eyed loon she turns out to be. A university degree, a successful career – it’s as if none of it ever happened.” Yes it is like that, Sarah. And thanks to columns like these, it’s becoming even more like that. Because I have to say – I know more men than women now who harbour inner domestic goddesses – and yet where is the term “domestic god”? It should be in the vernacular by now. And when it comes to “the most ardent of feminists” becoming obsessive about wreath pinnings, Christmas tree ornaments and having the best mince pies, I would beg to differ. My mother – who spends her life slaving as a patent lawyer in a male-dominated world (and kicking rather a lot of ass) – simply never had time or mental energy to become fixated on such things. Yes, she likes a day of cooking and providing like the next woman born in 1953 (and the next loving, nice family person, male or female, born anytime) – but she does not unleash some inner domestic goddess. Perhaps, then, by Vine’s standards, she’s not ardent enough a feminist.

But to the picture. Having now taken in the pink-hued cakes ‘n’ aprons bonanza of the cover, and the coquettish mop-wielder of page two, we are now given a woman in red polka dot high heels and a short skirt diving head first into a Christmas tree, with her legs bare and toned, all the way up to her upper thigh. Her head is not visible – nor, one can only conclude, necessary. We have, after all, her inner thigh to behold.

Vine’s not finished with feminism yet, though. In her second column to the right, she pours a knowing domestic godddess’s scorn on a blogger called Laura Nelson, who wrote a post claiming a role in Hamleys’ decision to put boys and girls stuff together. Nelson – no doubt sick of the endless categorisation of girls with all that’s pink and fluffy and pretty, and boys with tough and active and blue – came up with the term “gender apartheid”, to which she felt felt Hamleys was contributing.

“I’m sure she has the best of intentions,” sneers Vine. “but surely she can’t really believe that toy store labelling contributes in any significant way to gender stereotyping.” Err yes, that is exactly what she – and numerous other women, including mothers – believe. “Children’s likes and dislikes are driven by their peers: if the most popular girl in class is a pink freak, the other girls will emulate her…” Yes- but the most popular girl in class isn’t likely to be a blue freak is she? Of course she’s a pink freak. Girls are taught – thanks to commercial displays like those at Hamleys – that to be popular, you better like pink. The quickest way to be unpopular at school as a girl is to be into action figures, I’d imagine. So Vine is rather avoiding the issue.

The 1950s picture is perfectly topped off just below by a recipe column – “Dinner Tonight” – by Lindsay Bareham. It’s Sultana and ginger baked apples with rum sauce tonight, ladies. Which all good practice for when you turn over the page for the main feature on how to sell your cakes at market….

Quit those websites, people - lying in the right meadow at the right time may be the best way to find love.

It’s interesting. As one nears 30, singleness becomes intense. Not necessarily in terms of personal, day-to-day reality, but socially. Before, the quest for “man action” or “happiness through man action” or even “a man full stop” was more childish – lived in violent ups and downs, giggles and mishaps, gory anecdotes.

But it’s all got a bit serious now. I mean, it shouldn’t be “interesting” or even surprising that it has – after all, society gets all het up about the biological clock time crunch, as do many women, justifiably. The fact is, the stakes for finding a partner in the magical five-year race towards the clock winding down are inevitably higher than they were – certainly for women.

Man, though. People are really tied in knots over it all. Singleness is a massive, all-consuming preoccupation, fascination, industry.  I guess I sort of knew this – hell, I have a whole book devoted to the topic. But what is becoming clear is that the “singleness problem” has spawned such an enormous, diverse industry that it’s sucking up  some of the brightest business brains out there. Every day someone tells me about an idea they have for a dating website, and lately, those people have been graduates of London Business School. The “someone for everyone” puzzle is getting more and more enticing with each wave of stats indicating fewer marriages, more single people, more unhappy women, more “unmarriageable” men.

But I fear they’re wasting their energy. On one level, anyway. Sure, moving pawns around in the right way can win you the chess game. But unlike in chess, no matter how well you’ve manipulated the pieces, check mate can not be guaranteed among the 30-something dater. Too much gets in the way: suddenly we’re old – things annoy us, time is precious (and considered money), people don’t fit the picture we’ve drawn of ourselves and our future. All these things mean we’re harder to impress, the chances of mutual impressedness are slimmer than ever and – crucially – chemistry failure is rife. We are too icy now, too unreachable – our actual availability is in inverse proportion to our technical availability. We sign up to things: we put ourselves out there “as single” but in reality, we’re not signed up, nor out there, when push comes to shove and that shove is a total stranger sitting opposite you jarring your nerves. A total stranger who, years ago, perhaps you’d have thought was “interesting” or “cute in a weird way” or “out there” or “worth a shag”. Of course, the dating industry is predicated on failure – or at least, just the right amount. Business can’t boom if everyone’s happily coupled, after all.

So back to the contortions and effort and dollars that people put into their singleness. I was having beers with some Swiss PRs from a chi chi ski resort the other night. One of them is single, in her early forties, and extremely good looking. Or rather, she was single when we met in August, in the shadow of the Alps, drinking Bernese wine. Now, though, she’s not single. She is dating a hot Australian of mysterious but certain means, who shares her passion for cowbells and mountains.

Guess how they met? She was dozing on a meadow on her own, midway up a mountain. The next day she was due to meet a counselor who would advise her on the single problem. The man spied her, said hello, and off they went. “He just found me,” she said. “I did nothing. Nothing. I’ve always known it’s better for a woman to be found than to find, but didn’t think that was reality.”

I know, I know. Woman as eternally and necessarily passive is not what we’re going for, nor what I think is true or good. But still. All the websites in the world couldn’t have got her that man. For a start, he’s not the type for dating websites or nifty dinner party businesses. But more importantly, human will (prolonged scoping for other single men; going to counselors) battled serendipity (man in meadow at right time) and the latter won. The thing is, serendipity has favourites, and until you can count on it, the single problem is going to remain. Unless, of course, you can think of a service that secretly – and for free – delivers handsome older men to your favourite outdoor resting spots unawares.

Life is so much simpler when this kind of male pops out of the party.

You walk into the dinner party, expecting the usual: couples. Suddenly, a hot man emerges from the throngs of coupledom and is introduced to you. You perform your now-habitual ring finger check and it reveals a blank – no ring, so there’s the chance he’s unmarried. Taken, though, surely – after all, he’s an attractive man in his thirties and there’s always a catch. But then it turns out you’re in the clear for that, too – the guy is single. Yippee! What luck. You bide your time, then settle into charm mode. The opening exchange will go well – how can it not – the man’s eyes are beautiful and yours aren’t bad either. You lock them into his and vice versa – this is how fairly tales start; imagine when your friends see what the cat brought home; the sex…

But wait. Suddenly it’s five minutes in and he’s expanded from his job description (you did ask) to an assessment of geopolitical shifts that are changing the shape of the world. While minutes ago you were sweetly talking about the warm Israeli weather, and talking about your holiday last week, now you find yourself diving in to discuss the ascendancy of China and the reluctance of the world to sacrifice US cultural dominance. He doesn’t want to hear your views on this – not because he is more interested in where you want to be taken for dinner on the date he is soon to propose, but because he isn’t really interested in what other people – least of all women – have to say on matters that he ALREADY KNOWS THE ANSWERS TO.

That universe in which you felt a surge of hope – that sense of “maybe him” (for sex, love, both, whatever) – seems entirely parallel now. Ten minutes in the real world have passed and you realise that he is staring straight ahead delivering his manifesto on global finance. You feel bad. Shitty. Invisible. Guilty – why did you lead him here?

No matter how modern they are, women carry deep ideas about how they’re meant to be with men they might like: the pressure to be “feminine” is never stronger than when faced with a potential date, and being “feminine” doesn’t mean, grill him about every aspect and implication of his work; about where men stand of feminism and fake blondes, and then disagree with almost everything he says because you just can’t help it. See? When we lapse from our femininity template, we get in trouble, which clearly we deserve (just ask Mother and selected married friends). Hence the guilt. Oops, I did it again and all that.

And so, it doesn’t matter that half an hour ago you looked in the mirror and thought you looked good. Feminine, in fact. Pretty. Because now – post sub-prime mortgage chat – you are not a viable woman, you are a stranger locked in slightly combatative conversation with this man, rocking on the seas of grownup mistrust.

Chemistry has died – and this micro-death is violent in its way, and oddly sad. A brief but heady spike of hope has bottomed out, hard. Reality has come back and interposed itself in that way reality has, whereby it shows how little it believes in fairytales, even if you do. And you know what? Reality is right to remind us that it determines the outcome of two people meeting, not the wishful narratives women keep in our heads, raggedly and often wrong-headedly passed down to us throughout the ages.

The Beatles' hometown has become something of a glamour mecca.

The breasts of Scouse females were voted largest in the world recently (I imagine finding people (by which I mean men) to help judge that study wasn't too hard). See what we were up against? All the London snobbery in the world falls flat in the face of a good pair of Northern melons.

I rarely leave London (zones one to three) unless it’s for Capri, Mauritius, Boston, or Gstaad. Ok, that’s a lie. (Sort of). But my point is, like many self-made Londoners who have chosen the city over the country as a whole, I am a completely urban-centric, London centric snob. Food, architecture, weather (yes, even London’s weather is tropical next to the North), literary output of residents – all go into the snob-files.

So I thought it high time to leave my bubble and get out a bit into this mythical place called England (no, the Cotswolds don’t count). So when a friend who had previously done PR for such places as Coco Island in the Maldives and the world’s most luxurious train in India announced she had jumped ship to Visit England and would I like to go to Coventry, I said Sure! Only not quite Coventry, but…Liverpool. Ex capital of culture, home of my favourite band and almost certainly willing to live up to whatever stereotypes my be-snobbed London mind carried.

Hollyoaks on the brain, along with Colleen Rooney, we checked into our curiously plum-coloured Mersey-front hotel, made our way out for the evening and – it turns out – saw more than we’d ever hoped. First up: Marco Pierre White’s chophouse. A rather posh place, in a new design hotel. Also a date place. Everywhere we looked there were couples: slightly overweight men in crap blue button-down shirts tucked into dark trousers and their missuses.

Well, this town belongs to the missuses. The one at the next table to us had been – as most of them soon turned out to be – surgically enhanced. Never mind the sunbed (at the Liverpool Museum, a video filmed a local calling the women who hit the clubs at night like “a terracotta army in stilettos”), her breasts were enormous melons, her hair had been styled into a wedding cake cascade of chocolate curls, her nose an upward-carved triangle of spray-tanned cartilage and her eyelashes were a bank of heavy black curtains, only slightly pulled up at the ends by an invisible tongs.

At another table were the blondes. Two or three of them, louchely lounging, and god I hoped that were Wags. The menfolk were irrelevant: it was the women’s sculptured hair – the colour of a pale, minerally Sauvignon blanc with egg yolk as highlights – that drew all the attention. And their tiny bodies in tiny black dresses, heaving brown melons and bondage-style Louboutins.

Beginning to realise that any arrogance we’d brought to Liverpool – “The great thing about the North is that you always feel really thin”, said my friend on the train – was not necessarily accurate,  we left Marco’s and hit Alma de Cuba, a massive glam bar/club, where at 11 pm they throw rose petals off a balcony onto the gyrating crowd.

Here we realised very clearly: We are invisible here. We are so shabby compared to these girls it literally looks like we came straight from bed, in our pyjamas, in our (non-sex) bed hair. We are wearing neither bright colours nor 5 inch stilettos. We are pale. Our breasts are fairly safely concealed from view. Our hair is tied back and contains no trace of rollers or hairspray. We are fat (relatively).

It was a festival of tiny (fake) tanned women with (fake) big boobs, all dressed in what appeared to me to be couture or its best approximation. Not Paris-style couture, but some monstrous reserve stock or line made just for women like these: as if Dolce and Gabbana had gone mad and been violently sick in a bondage shop. Nothing looked cheap, dreary or high street – just eyeball-yanking and a touch headfucking (see pictures below for more on a “northern” take on popular couture brands). One dancer – in a tightly sinched white shift – kept drawing up her hemline to show the black silky triangle of her pants. Never seen that before. One girl had her hair sprayed into the shape of two coathangers on either side: it was more a square of cotton candy than hair.

Above all, it looked like these women lived for their glad rags, for the heaving fashion shows – the bars and clubs – in which they get to show them off. This was Vanity Fair in 2011, and I can tell you one thing about the Liverpool: girls like us, London snobs, actually come away feeling like London slobs. But of course, that’s the way we like it.

A Louboutin (Wag range?) in Cricket, Colleen R's favourite shop.

Yes, it looks like the Serenghetti after a hunting spree. This, however, is another Louboutin, note foot slit in the front. The thing behind is a matching bag.

More Louboutin, from the bondage line.

I know what you're thinking. But no, these aren't from New Look. They are expensive YSLs (oil magnate wife range?).

————

* An unrelated point. It is interesting that Adele has achieved world fame as a young, straight female singer while also being distinctly chubby. Not chubby for showbiz – just chubby. This is not coincidence. She has had to be 4,000 times better everyone else to get there. Eat your heart out Cheryl, Avril, Katy and frankly vile Gaga.

But in reality, not so simple. First up: work-place romance. Should you or shouldn’t you. Well, you know the correct answer to that. It’s the second one. But the truth is, sometimes it’s the people we work with – who have to be nice to us (sometimes even charming),  who we see every day, smiling at us from behind the digestives bowl in the microkitchen, letting you go first at the water cooler, and who can be of a high calibre professionally and socially depending on where you work – that are the most desirable.

I think that out and out pursuing something with this person might be a bit odd. What do you want with him? If it’s a relationship, beware that many companies have anti workplace romance policies so one of you may have to move offices. But you may feel so strongly that you’re willing to cross that bridge (I for one wouldn’t want to have any direct professional relationship with someone I had done more than sleep with, eg “John, I’m going to need that forward planning list in my inbox by 3pm…oh and can you grab the catfood on the way to mine?”), then proceed.

How to proceed? Try to spend more time with him; first with colleagues (easy enough to concoct some excuse, be it socio-athletic or for “interdepartmental bonding”, or in your case intergenerational bonding), then basically show you’re keen in a “I’d like to get to know you” way, spring the awkward move of a one-to-one date rather than an “oops, everyone else has gone home” thing, and off you go. Be warned he may have issues – beyond the idea of a cheeky romp in the boardroom after hours with an older and possibly superior colleague – with anything serious.

And here we get to his age. I don’t know how young you mean by “much younger than me” but if you’re 29 and he’s 21 or 22, be prepared for him to be at his peak of ambition, and absolutely anything – like a workplace romance in a new job – that could derail him will be verboten. In this case, that means you. Do I care that he’s 22? Not at all, in and of itself. I hear good things about our younger male friends.

My advice is: give it a week. If you still fancy him, go out and find someone else to get your mind off him. If that doesn’t work, I don’t believe you have much choice but to ensure you look super-hot every day…and wait and see.

Could money be a romance-killer?

We have this fantasy, my friends and I, of marrying a very rich man who would “take care of all our problems”.

Then, seconds later, we slap our foreheads and say: “No! We will always depend on ourselves. We don’t want to depend on some man’s money.”

But I think what we’re talking about has little to do with gender. It’s about being rich without having to work for it. A husband is a convenient vehicle for this – if the lottery fails – and women don’t have the same issues about a richer partner as men do. Yet.

But I may have to revise the idea of the fantasy rich couple. Because it’s finally sunk in: rich couples look like they’re having a shit time together. They can be in the most beautiful place on earth, with all the luxuries their money can buy and they have nothing – but nothing – to say to each other. He looks uncomfortable, she looks peeved. Collectively they look incredibly bored. Nobody laughs. Ever.

This is fresh in my mind after a beautiful few days in Capri. For various reasons connected to my work, a friend and I wound up in the best (we like to think) hotel on that stunning isle of azure waters: Punta Tragara. As we lay by the pool, with stunning views of a superyacht-studded bay and the open sea, we were like pigs in mud. Sodas, sun, cigarettes (my friend’s, in the main). Books. But we didn’t get far with these (Mine: Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. Hers: James Joyce’s Ulysses. No wonder). We were too busy chatting, observing, giggling, swimming and asking for more Diet Coke.

But when we weren’t doing this, we were beadily looking at our companions. They were all couples.

The three we saw most, since they never left the hotel (we did – but whenever we returned to the pool, or partook of little cheese and honey stuffed pastries at breakfast, or ate dinner on the terrace, we saw them) were a young, hot-bodied  woman and an unattractive much older man (American); a hot-bodied Russian-Canadian girl with a strangely swollen face and a dark, Greekish looking English guy, and a skinny French girl of about 26 with a paunchy man of about 66. There were some kids in tow with these two.

The Americans didn’t say a word throughout dinner.

The swollen-faced girl and her hubby didn’t talk as they passed hour after hour by the pool. They listened to their ipods or stared at the ground. He never quite looked comfortable, she never looked happy. Least of all, did they look happy or comfortable together. The French couple had a more peaceful air, but still nothing to say to each other.

When we were in Naples airport en route home, we ran into the swollen-face girl and the Greeky boy. Did you have a nice time, we asked them of their holiday in one of the most beautiful spots on earth. “Yeah, it was ok,” he said with a blank expression. She echoed these strong sentiments. Nearly falling over the EasyJet luggage measuring bin with boredom, we parted ways from them and on the plane reflected that while they obviously had money, they didn’t seem to have much fun. But at least they had that in common.

Fanny Hill, 18th century lady of pleasure, at her favourite business

The idea of the nymphomaniac woman has both delighted and terrified men for centuries.

The vagina as vice-like clamp, hungry orifice, passageway to darkness: all this imagery has been used for and against women, but always to sexualise them to the exclusion of all else. A modern example would be Jennifer Aniston as the penis-gobbling dentist in bromance Horrible Bosses. She’s worthy of murder, her high-pitched hygienist Dale vows, because she won’t stop trying to have sex with him. At one point she sprays water on his crotch and, denoting the shape of what lurks within, cries: “Somebody’s circumcised. Shabbat Shalom!” Her rapacity is exaggerated and painted as a hysterical disorder (as Freud would say).

I had cause to reflect on Ms Aniston’s portrayal in Horrible Bosses – (oh, Natalie Portman is also a sexual fiend in No Strings Attached and Mila Kunis in Friends With Benefits) – as I have lately been devouring (by eye) Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, John Cleland’s famous 18th century story of a London prostitute. Forget Aniston’s dentist: never has woman been conceived of in such truly, whole-body, unadulteratedly sexual terms. Unlike many a modern heroine, the depiction of Fanny (love the name), is completely that of a woman who lives and breathes not just sex, but sensuality. There is none of the cynicism of the porn imitator, the feeling of detachment as things happen to her, as many a modern woman may experience. No, Fanny is every bit as sexually responsive and greedy in her pleasure as men are normally assumed to be. More than most men, though, and certainly more than Belle de Jour and the other sex diarists of today, she is wholly attuned to the physical and emotional onslaught of the sex experience *as a woman*.

It is worth noting that the book is written by a man: Fanny is conceived as the ultimate guy’s woman: the babe who really gets off on sex. Today she would be turned into a gruesome caricature like Aniston and called a nympho. But unlike Aniston and similar minxes and nymphettes and foxes like Belle and Girl With a One Track Mind Zoe Margolis, Fanny is a nice person and endearing from the start, as she loses her “country manners”. In other words, she’s not a freakish, deviant, emotional train-wreck, but a woman who truly marvels at her anatomy and the way it goes together with the male apparatus.

With that in mind, I am going to share some of the juiciest morsels, those fullest of the joie de sex and vivre. They are absolutely hilarious, too.

On tempting a sweet messenger “youth” to her couch:

“I stole my hand upon his thighs, down one of which, I could both see and feel a stiff hard body…that my finger could discover no end to”. Full of suspense, she rips open his breeches, to discover: “not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a may-pole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant.”

For more evidence of a woman who truly loves man: “I could not without pleasure behold…such a length! such a breadth of animated ivory, perfectly well turn’d and fashion’d, the proud stiffnes sof which distended its skin, whose smooth polish and velvet-softness, might vye with that of the most delicate of our sex, and whose exquisite whiteness was not a little set off by a sprout of black curling hair round the root…[it] altogether compos’d the most striking assemblage of figure and colours in nature; in short, it stood an object of terror and delight.”

You don’t hear Jennifer Aniston or Natalie Portman – or even many of your friends – talking about striking assemblages of figure and colour “in nature”, do you? No, it’s more “fuck me and I’ll hope for the best”. And, even though we’ve felt it, “of terror and delight” are not words to pass most of our lips (or brains) in the sack.

However, his “unwieldy machine”, this “furious fescue”, is so enormous it does not “gain entry” to the “breach” at first. Eventually, after much agony, cries and perseverance, he achieves a “home-made thrust, sheaths it up to the guard” and the result is – perhaps unrealistically – “excess of pleasure, which I now began to share, for I felt him in my very vitals! I was quite sick with delight! stir’d beyond bearing with its furious agitations within me, and gorg’d and cram’d even to a surfeit: thus I lay …”

Fanny notes with pleasure how the youth enjoys his induction into the “cloven stamp of female distinction”. The whole scene bubbles over with parts, juices (a “pearly” flood, mixed with blood, gushes out of Fanny after Round One), body-ness, swoons: the *complete melding of brain and body*.

Indeed, this is a tale of mixture: man and woman (literally, rammed pube to pube is Fanny’s favourite vantage); brain and heart, big and small, weapon and equally strong receptacle. Perhaps if we had a vocabulary as rich and imaginative and – crucially – so fired up with a genuine wonder at the sexual act, we’d also “faint away” in each others arms, drowned in a sea of “hearty kisses” and thoroughly less confused about sex. Sexual rapacity wouldn’t by hysterical and “nympho”; appetites would be healthier and more rooted in the grounded self and we’d find sufficient excitement in the mere presence of another body, without needing image after image to get off.

——-

NB: Getting knocked up by unsavoury men of the 18th century, and dying of every disease imaginable unless God intervened, is not a price I’d pay for the above.

We chatted for a while – even after he told me he was in his second year at Exeter, making him 19 (that’s TEENAGED for those of you who are bad at maths) – because my mind was energetically thinking outside the box. I saw social prospects, perhaps even other prospects that my sober mind won’t admit to. He was studying Russian – not because of a love of Tolstoy and Solzenitzen – but because he believes Russia will be important financially for his imminent career in banking. He was on a think tank cruise. He was rocking a good suit. This guy was impressive. But our merry tete a tete – me smiling at his cheekbones as the rain sleeted down beside us on Tower Bridge – ended abruptly when he somewhat desperately ditched me. “I need to find my friends,” the boy said. All sorts of thoughts unkind to myself entered my head. Had I been a hectoring old lady (I’d mentioned the approach of my 29th birthday) to him? Was I coming across as mad, old and deranged?

Anyway, I cut him straight off as he’d wanted and found another person to speak to, not planning on repeating my mistake again that evening. Well, as I walked out of the boat, who should flag me down but Mr “I have to go find my friends, you old lady”, waving a BUSINESS CARD. There was I thinking we had struck up some kind of perverse social kinship – how mistaken I’d been. He didn’t see me as a hectoring old lady. He saw me as a contact, someone who’d be honoured to network with HIM. And with that, with the business card, the 19 year old looked me in the eye and told me to stay in touch, and that he was interested in the work of City AM and that it was good to meet me.

Doubly insulted, but also amused, I tottered down the gangplank computing some new data. First, the boat had been full of late-teens and early twenty-somethings looking at home in suits. There had probably been numerous business cards sequestered in their pockets. Second, that this boy had so confidently handed me his card even though he was a student and had no permanent job yet and was NINETEEN, implied a shift in the youths of today. They are mini-adults. They are just as confident as CEOs. No doubt, they’re going to go far – as long as they don’t piss off too many people like me on their way, of course.

What is it about men smilingly at your service?

I had suspected, in a shadowy way, that I have a thing for the staff.

Specifically, the catering staff. Waiters, barmen, sommeliers.

I’ve pounced on more than a few of each of the above types – in their male form, obviously. But it had been a while, and I had begun to think it was a phase, the last vestiges of an immaturity I’m moving past as I near 30. Yes, I’d had an out and out THING with one (as it turned out, cheating) sommelier, a passionate crush on another, snogged a few waiters and even, once, a canape server at the FT Christmas party. There was the champagne cocktail mixologist, too, at a financial PR party way back (pre crunch), whose understanding of what goes with what quite knocked me off my feet.

But recently I’d thought I’d moved into less, erm, obvious pastures. Ie, where the men don’t instantly appeal to me in the way that Playboy Bunnies appeal to, erm, men who frequent Playboy Clubs (of which there is one reopening in London as we speak).

Until the St Pancras Hotel opened. And now I realise: I have a thing, perhaps even a fetish, for the professionally serving man. The truth always outs in drunkenness, does it not? Well, at the opening of the hotel, there was a big bash. I had had a jeroboam (probably) of Perrier-Jouet by 11. By 1AM I thought it’s pull or bust. And despite there being swarms of suited men of all different types, who did I set my sights on but the bar supervisor. After all, there he was in his reassuring little uniform, ready to cater to my every need. Of course, he wasn’t really there to cater to my every need – just my needs relating to cocktails. My needs relating to drunken intimacy were not part of his job description. That didn’t stop me having a go. First, I talked to him for as long as I could before he had to go and serve OTHER PEOPLE. Then I hung around. By 2AM I felt that I’d been so persistent and had invested so much time, that if I didn’t get my man, as it were, I’d be rather cross. So every time he entered the room, tidying up glasses and so forth, I’d sally over to him and as good as say: “I’m waitttttiiiiiiiiiing!” He told me as clearly as his job permitted that he wasn’t going anywhere, least of all my place, so – shoving both my business cards at him (Ralph, if you’re reading this, HELLO!) – I retreated to the Spanish couple who had adopted me. Then, at 3:30, I gave up the ghost and grabbed a cab home, wishing I had someone in a suit to feed me canapes en route.

Not one to be put off, though, I realised instantly the power in my hands. He worked there, and I knew where “there” was. Not only that, his place of work is the type where the public can go – if a pervy (within reason) customer frequents a bar, what of it? If you frequent a law office with pervatious or flirtatious intent, it’s a different story. So I’ve been back three times with different friends – and, between deep and immersive conversations – I still find myself enjoying the occasional smile and wink with old Ralph more than I should. Last time I went, though, a complete hottie turned up to deliver the fourth glass of South African Chenin. His name tag said something rather interesting, so I couldn’t resist – I asked where he was from. (My two great passions are attractive men and strange origins. Combined, I have got into some degree of trouble). Then we had a good long conversation. When we left, I thought, I LIKE HIM. Another part of me thought: YOU HAVE BECOME A PERVY OLD MAN. Does fancying people who are paid to serve you drinks in a charming way amount to a pathology? I wonder. So, despite my friend suggesting I leave my number for him, I gathered myself up and left the half-hour tableside flirt where it was. After all, he could always find me if he really wanted – I paid by card, and there’s Facebook. So far, he hasn’t banged my door down, but again, that doesn’t mean I won’t be trying to bang his down again (or rather, stroll through it’s distinctly open frame).

So the question of this attraction to serving men does raise questions. Am I delusional, believing myself in need of a slave, servant or concubine (See earlier post on my desire for a male concubine figure) – like some sort of princess of the Orient, Egypt or France? Do I think I’m Cleopatra and can take who I want? Perhaps it’s more of an English thing, a Gosford Park style thing or, more poetically, a Lady Chatterley thing. Is it a sign of not feeling up to men who might want to be really super nice and charming to me…for the sake of it? (Could it, then, be a self esteem thing?!?!) Whether it’s perverse imperiousness or low self-esteem, it could also be simple attraction. Why?

-They wear snippety uniforms in the manner of tuxedos, suits and the like. Involving black and white and good trousers, this can be very attractive apparel. (Nametags are a downside if they have them but are good for starting conversation). Sommeliers looks particularly sharp and their wine knowledge is attractive. I also like their little grape brooches.

-They are the quintessence of courteous. Most men the modern woman encounters these days are not the quintessence of courteous. It is sad that such manners are now confined to paid waitstaff, but there we are.

-They form great associations. Man=drink. Nice man brings you lovely cocktail. No wonder I form an attachment.

-They tend to be good looking. The head barman at St Pancras told me last night (yep, was there again), that at Bungalow Eight, Amy Sacco only wants “bar staff I would want to have sex with”. I hear you Amy, but it’s not enough, they have to also bring you your drinks.

Wow. This list is convincing. While I’m waiting for my Bach-loving, Tolstoy reading, Economist subscribing, tax-paying homeowner future husband to roll into view, I think I might pass the time daydreaming about the men who bring me drinks with a smile thrown in.

The most frustrating of these cosmic jokes is the one you speak of. I’ll wager that at other times in your life, you haven’t know what to do with the men throwing themselves at you. “God! I can’t take any more male attention! I’m sexed out! I’m loved out!” was probably your battle cry. And now, it’s been a few months, you’re horny as hell, everyone else seems to be copulating like there’s no tomorrow and you’re left high and dry. So you go out, look your best, down flagons of punch, and put it out there. Resulting in crushing defeat and the fury of denial. Rage at how incomprehensible and unfair it all is.

Ok ok, I might be projecting a smidgen. But here’s a fact: when you go out looking for it, you never get it. And if you do, it’s always disappointing – awful guy, bad hookup, and so on.

This holy of grail of minding your own business and just being happy in your own skin is the one you need to go for. Don’t artifically cultivate it as that defeats the point (“I must look laissez faire! I must come across as blase and happy in my own skin with or without men!” You get it). Ideally, you can see that you can’t force these issues and that you ARE lovely just as you are, and that men should come for you, not require you to beg for them. But if you can’t, just accept this fact as a strategic one: seek and ye shall NOT find.

How to actually translate this into party behaviour. Well – look good, sure. But don’t walk up to men and talk to them – just move around organically with whichever group you happen to fall into. When you do talk to a guy, just chill out – if he’s keen, he’ll make it known. If not, there’s nothing you can do short of trying hard to lure him which never ends well. Leave when you’re tired -don’t get drunker and drunker and hold out for action. Take it from me: it’ll only lead to disappointment.

The cosmic joke has one upside – it’ll take pity on you when it’s ready. So just bide your time with intelligence, humour and productivity till then – and make peace with your vibrator as an interim friend.

Princess Eugenie in gap year garb in Goa. Better than the Philip Treacy she wore to the Royal Wedding, to be fair.

I just got back from a great trip in Thailand and Laos. I had reservations about Thailand and whether it would be possible to find any authenticity there – since if there’s one country that has suffered the rampage of sex-seeking, booze-swilling Europeans, it’s Thailand. To take precautions, we steered clear of the islands, sticking to Bangkok and then, via overnight train, Chiang Mai. It was a good plan – there were certainly your average tourist aplenty (just like us), but in Bangkok it was easy to lose them, and find yourself at the mercy of taxi and tuk tuk drivers who didn’t understand a single syllable that came out of your mouth; and to sit at street food cafes where you were the only Westerner making a show of down n’ dirty eating. (NB: I scoffed everything from weird rice pudding with tap water ice and neon pink rice noodles covered in condensed milk to pork sitting out on a grill for god knows how long and never had even a twinge).

Luang Prabang in Laos I figured would be a far more untouched zone. I even thought I was being an intrepid traveler, leading the charge of touristic exploration, by boarding a Lao Airlines flight (propeller) and flying over the border mountains. How wrong I was. Luang Prabang is simply charming – a gorgeous spit between two rivers, the Mekong and the Nam Khan, threaded through with magenta flowers, cafes, massage shops, market stalls, restaurants and – most spectacularly – temples in all hues, but almost always carved in gold.

Something as jewel-like as this doesn’t just go unnoticed.

Not by upper-crust tourists – we ran into the head designer of French fashion house Lanvin at the airport – nor by backpackers and gap yearists.

The latter two gave me pause for thought – and the odd mixed feeling. When something is pure cliche – as the backpacker going round SE Asia looking to “find” herself  is, and the gap year student on tour with mates most definitely is – it’s somehow shocking to see that thing just as the cliche describes it. So, having never “gone traveling” myself, having never lived from guesthouse to guesthouse, downing the local beer and smoking the local weed with randoms I’ve just met but who are now my best friends – I assumed the cliche wasn’t a direct representative of reality. Sure, I recall my peers heading off on what seemed epic and scary trips after school but that was 1998, we were 18, and it seemed true, authentic somehow.

In 2011, as a 28 year old, I found it funny. Backpackers really have backpacks. They really do walk into town with rucksacks the size of their bodies with shoes hanging off them – from the bespectacled girl to the chubby boy to the bronzed hippie. They really do wear those harem pants – often in tye dye. We came across a trio of Frenchmen of indeterminate age but certain intoxication, who were staring out at the Mekong, beers by their sandalled feet, leaning far back in their chairs with their legs sprawled alternating between their native tongue and the phrase “No stress, no stress, just chill, relax” (seemingly their mantra). And – in the case of the gap yearists – they honestly do favour beer kegs with pipes straight to the mouth and say things like: “I think I’m going to move here after university, man”. You always overhear them saying to their new friends: “Yeah, we were in Cambodia and we’re going to Vietnam next. Siem Riep was wicked.”

The main thing we noticed -my 30-year old travel companion and me (28) – is how old you feel when you’re in a town like Luang Prabang. Every time we went anywhere – waterfalls; caves; Mekong lookout point, bar – we came across troupes of stringy boys in wifebeaters and caps and girls in whatever it is that 18 year old travelling girls wear these days. Sometimes we talked to them – it was interesting, not least because my friend was researching an article about Jack Wills, the clothing company beloved of well-to-do high school preppies. We’d say, hopefully, “how old are you?” And the answer would be “18″ or sometimes “22″. They’d say: “How old are you?” and – already feeling aged – tell them. 28 was old- 30 seemed incomprehensible. We’d have kept talking to them but they would lose interest and head back to the beer kegs.

Then there was the fact that they were all – almost to a person – highly attractive. It could have been the tans – but the girls all had good bodies, shown off in their shabby-chic travellerwear; the guys were tan and blue-eyed and wily. We felt fatter and dowdier with each second that passed.

But they didn’t incite envy – or if they did, it was of a sort that belongs to nostalgia with the lid very firmly on. It may be that going on a gap year is formative. I’m sure it is. But I couldn’t picture myself doing it now – having to spend all that time with those kinds of kids; obliged to say everything’s cool; obliged to be up for adventure at all times. Lucie and I found that if we were old, our age reflected tastes more conducive to pleasure but not necessarily in opposition to adventure either. Tastes involving margaritas and wine; cool and comfortable beds, not boiling guesthouses (the joys affordable when traveling while employed). And a more poignant difference – a hyper-finite period of travel for us, whereby real life is only on pause, not – as it might be for those living for an intdeterminate time from a backpack the size of an island – slipping away entirely.

*OK – here are some bonus  Holiday Horn pics from the trip. Some sizzling hot Laotians (am I allowed to flaunt my erotic tourism so nakedly? Well, too bad) and the most insanely good looking Israeli poseur at a waterfall just outside Luang Prabang. ENJOY.

What can I say? Apart, of course, from "Lucie, get your zoom lens out RIGHT NOW".

More Mekong muscularity.

Clearly he thinks this is a GQ shoot. And well, frankly, he might.

The idea that giving yourself physically to men too early kills the spark and makes men feel they’ve “had” you and thus won’t be needing you again is so deeply entrenched that neither women nor men know if it’s true. We just know that that’s the thinking and so we make it true.

That said, I think that sex on the first date isn’t always ideal – mainly because it’s often not really when the woman first wants it. She often does it to impress the man or to get another notch on the bedpost or to have a good story to tell her friends or because she thinks the horniness she felt earlier that day and that abstract longing, will continue into the sack where a strange man is pounding her. So it is an act of submission that might be as much a sign of trouble to come as appearing keen.

You didn’t sleep with him – thinking you were being a good girl. But if giving a blow job felt like giving for the same reasons you might have shagged him, then there really isn’t much material difference between the two. He’s already done very nicely out of your body. But did you enjoy yourself? If you did, I think that’s sexier than any rule-following.

So did you go too far? Well – how long is a piece of string? The question you should think about is: Did you act naturally? Did you act in accordance with your comfort? If so, you were “being good” and whatever happens will do so for a reason, even his silence. It’s worth saying, though, that if you’re a woman who both loves sex and hates rejection after sex, you might have to choose which is better: no sex and less painful rejection (or not being rejected), or going for it and possibly being rejected.

Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, author of The Rules, a bible for how to get a man. Interestingly, Fein got divorced - messily - in 2000.

Which bestseller contains these gems of wisdom for women?

“We can all look better than we do. Many of us don’t realize our potential until we get a makeover, which, by the way, is often given for free with a minimal purchase.”

“Don’t leave the house without wearing makeup. Put lipstick on even when you go jogging!”

“If you have a bad nose, get a nose job.”

“Men like women. Don’t act like a man, even if you are head of your own company. Be feminine. Don’t tell sarcastic jokes.”

“Don’t be a loud, knee-slapping, hysterically funny girl…When you’re with a man you like, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile. Don’t talk so much. Wear black sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex!”

“You don’t have to do anything more on the date than show up. He’ll either love you or not.”

“Trust that one day a prince will notice that you’re different from all other women he’s known, and ask for your hand!”

“Dances may be fun for other women who just want to go out and have a good time. But you’re looking for love and marriage so you can’t always do what you feel like.”

“Men love a challenge – that’s why they play sports, fight wars, and raid corporations. The worst thing you can do is make it easy for them.”

Answer:

a) The Housewife’s Guide to Snaring a Husband

b) Women Just Want to Get Married

c) Don’t Be Yourself, No Matter What

d) It’s Ugly And Desperate to Ring Men Back

e) Think You’re Pretty? Guess Again, Sister!

f) All The Rules, by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider (1995)

The answer is f – the others don’t exist as far as I know.

Its title is less outlandish but its content is largely described by the others. I wanted to write about the Rules because it is an extraordinary document and has a lot to answer for. The book fell into my hands as I searched for relevant materials for the book I’m writing – The Man Diet: Wean Yourself Off Junk Food Love. In seeking to unearth how we (specifically women) came to have voracious appetites for  fast food sex, junk encounters, cheap instant chats and bloating banter, I thought I better look at one of the dating books that most shaped our current thinking. Many of us are too young to have read dating books in 1995, but nevertheless, it was this book that instilled in gender relations, once and for all, the notion of “treat them mean to keep them keen”.

I say this book has a lot to answer for. Reading it, though, is a lot of fun. It’s so insane, so hectoring, insulting and clearly lacking humanity or wisdom that you can sit back and marvel at its use of exclamation marks, it’s non-sequiteurs and its barking commands about “man and woman”; femininity, wars, and not returning phone calls. It’s also wonderfully dated – “singles dances”, personal ads and answer machines that switch themselves on after 14 rings show how our world’s changed and how the mechanics of dating have too.

But once you’ve chortled and thrown the book aside with a sneer, its shrill insistence continues to jangle in your head. “Never call him and only return his calls rarely”. Dim memories of the noisy, clever girl at school NEVER getting the guy are stirred. Perhaps also recollections of girls with ugly clothes or mothers who didn’t wear makeup or shave being ridiculed. The girls who certainly didn’t wear lipstick when jogging. You might remember the guys you’ve liked with whom it never went anywhere and remember how you showed you were keen and actually asked them out. Then you’re thinking back to that text you sent last week to the guy you met and had a great chat with at work drinks. And suddenly you worry – have I got it all wrong?

Then you’re on a date. You’re participating actively in the conversation and trying to be lively – perhaps even to show him your wit and sparkle. But instead of feeling natural and relaxed, you’re aware that you’re breaking the cardinal Rule of “just being there” and “letting him do all the work” – indeed even of perverting “the natural order”. (“We trust in the natural order of things – namely, that man pursues woman”). Have you misunderstood the sexes? Is the man you’re with a Rules-style MAN? Are you being too nice? Is it a sign of desperation and weakness that you DO want to chat and ask questions? If you play by the Rules, and it feels all wrong, which it would, are you merely exerting a vile and vacuous form of power that would send any nice man  – as opposed to those that the authors of the book would date – running? Or are you being clever and seductive?

The reality is that women have been made to feel deeply that they can’t be themselves with men, and this book reminded me of that. God forbid we show any enthusiasm or pleasure about seeing a date again, without deservedly unleashing the catastrophe of spinsterhood and eternal rejection upon our heads -the rightful dues for a desperate woman. This message was screeched over 400 pages by Ms Fein and Ms Schneider in the 1990s (Fein got divorced, NOT amicably, in 2001, would you believe). You’d have thought it would have been overlaid by other ideas and currents in a society full of iPads and Angela Merkel and dating sites.

But judging from the discomfort with which many women still approach dating – the endless game-playing that doesn’t make them happy (“Oh my god, I’ve put him off by saying the word “weekend” in a text) – it would appear that The Rules are still firmly entrenched. I dare you to go out and break them – and propose to the next man you like, on the first date.