“Hmm, I wonder if the bookstore’s still open so I can read up on my role in this failed relationship!”

The Stairmaster, used without distraction, is deeply unpleasant. But it’s a good workout, folks, I’m telling you. For this reason I persist, but only with the double aid of music (UK chart, preferably) and reading matter.

Currently, my Stairmaster read is a book called Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life by Samhita Mukhopadhyay. It’s green and has a frog with a crown on its head on the cover (get it?). People, mostly the men in the weights room, are too polite to stare pityingly at me as I clutch it, sweat pouring off my brow. Probably they think I have enough on my plate, what with the sweat and the mastering of stairs.

The book is thought-provoking on many levels. It argues that the dating industry and in particular the self-help books that promise people love if only they do this or that (UNlike my book, The Man Diet), are feeding toxic and couterproductive ideas into the very bloodstream of the Western world’s daters. In moaning or implying that feminism has spoiled romance, in fact, argues Mukhopadhyay, it is the authors of such books that are ruining romance. Feminism didn’t ruin your love life, self-help books and other “sexist” outposts of the romance industry did.  While unpacking the ways in which it is women, not men, who must constantly try to change in order to succeed in the all-important search for heteronormative commitment, Mukhopadhyay is particularly enraged by the difficulties facing those attempting non hetero arrangements, or fat people, or poor people (especially poor men who are expected to perform chivalry).

But the thing that sends me into a welcome trance of thought (anything to escape the drudgery of the infernal stairs) are Mukhopadhyay’s moments of autobiography. So much of this is (varyingly robust) argument against the American powers that be, from dating norms, the wedding industry, to capitalism, heteronormativity and thinnism, that moments of personal experience stand out. There are several, and she inserts them well. The one that struck me today, at about 13 out of my 20 minutes, was about breakups. In a chapter taking down the myths put forward by dating self-help books, including He’s Just Not That Into You, Why Men Marry Bitches and Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Mukhopadhyay talked about what she does whenever she has a breakup. She, like many women apparently, head straight for the self-help section of the bookstore, looking for “answers”. For her, as for so many people, breakups are about “what I did wrong”, and the repetition of mistakes. They are, in short, about failing a test. Not a test of human decency, or people skills, but a test of how to do relationships.

I find this totally extraordinary, I have to say. I can relate, but only a tiny bit. Granted, this s a polemical book based on argument, not emotion (apart from a kind of anger running through the rhetoric that suits the topic quite well). But the way that  Mukhopadhyay talks about breakups as being about “looking for answers” as to why or where she and the millions of women with whom she sympathises did wrong “again” in the attempt to crack the romance puzzle, seems to be missing something kind of crucial.

There is no mention here, perhaps no space to mention here, the pain of losing a person you were fond of, dreamed of a future with, or just found adorable when they weren’t upsetting you. When a breakup happens, isn’t the sadness over never seeing the ex’s particular expression when you come home from a trip, or when you crack a joke, or when he is about to kiss you, or when he’s concentrating, MORE immediate, more heart-rending, and more affecting than the feeling: “I’ve got it wrong again! I must rush to the store and buy some books in order to improve my understanding of why and what to do better next time”.

Breakups happen almost exclusively for the good, in my view. Far from getting something wrong, isn’t it about mourning a person on the one hand, and recognising that if the thing broke down, then you’re much better off alone or perhaps eventually with someone else?

I see what Mukhopadhyay is driving at – namely that women, thanks to “our culture”, often see their failure to attain the romantic dream (heteronormative and leading to a big wedding) as an urgent reason to run to the bookshelves. And that these seemingly well-intentioned bookshelves are kept in place by women’s worst insecurities about ending up alone or seeming ugly or whatever and that this is exploitative.

But perhaps the bigger problem with dating culture is that people let the rules get to them too much. It should be remembered that dating and romance is only partially about a socially-sanctioned idea of success. The rest of it, an even larger part, is about the emotional experience of intimacy and loss, and that is a unique experience because of the simple reason that – as Mukhopadhyay is at pains to point out – all men and all women are not the same. If the enemy is essentialised notions of what makes a man and what makes a woman, then the battle should be waged in favour of individualism, and the pleasure and pain associated with being close to a particular person. If it doesn’t work out, in my view, it’s because that person’s needs and traits and particular composition at that time and place jarred too greatly with mine (or, of course, they just didn’t fancy me enough or vice versa). There may be issues of “what I did wrong wrong again” and these may be part of an anti-feminist agenda, but to me these puzzle-cracking questions have always been secondary to the sense of personal loss (sometimes tinged with relief) when a relationship breaks down.

Now, I am slightly misrepresenting the online labia thing. The site that sparked a bunch of interest a few weeks back (and this post now) is http://lovebiglabia.tumblr.com/ and was started as a supportive forum for women plagued by self-loathing and shame about what they perceived to be non-average genitals as well as for general awareness-raising and embarrassment-lowering about female genitalia. The only comments posted could be from supportive quarters- this was not a free for all for “are you hot or not” abuse. To be sure such a site has a feminist angle: women are indeed under so much scrutiny physique-wise as well as subject to porn’s exacting norms that it’s not surprising so many find their genitalia a source of debilitating self-consciousness. This has bad ramifications in terms of emotional and sexual health (see, for instance, Melissa Goldman’s piece in Role Reboot.

But scouting around the site, I found the supportive comments didn’t really make me feel good. They seemed weird. There were various labia posted with enormous spans, protuberances and so on. It’s good that these women are able to demonstrate pride rather than loathing in their parts – but I found myself wondering why their pride had to be based on the appearance of their “large labia”. The acceptance of their bodies that women should work toward is not in my view about renaming body parts beautiful when they do not match certain norms, but about looking at things holistically, in terms of personhood. Rather than revealing their vulvas to the cooing support of other vulva-havers, it would be better if they could speak frankly and analytically about the experience and feeling and perception of their body parts and gain support in those discussions. It would be better if instead of making everything visual, which only reinforces the dynamic that got us here, there was work done on saying: “I am a woman, I do things, I am a person, I am a package, my body is a living organism, not a template, it’s part of me, take it or leave it”. Equally, the sort of men who make them feel rubbish about their bodies should be ejected in good faith. That’s what needs work. Needing other people to say that your labia is “yum” is sort of oh I don’t know. Or maybe that’s just me – I regard private parts as curiously private, maybe because I don’t watch porn so I don’t have the same familiarity with naked in-your-face-on-screen genitalia as other people. So when I scanned the site and saw all those lady parts that weren’t mine, I thought, ooh, eww, erm or a mixture of these. I don’t think it made a difference to me that they were big or droopy or whatever – it was more that they were in front of my face, in large digital colour.

My other issue with all this “my vagina is beautiful” and “vaginas are beautiful” stuff that’s become part of the feminist discourse is that in my view vaginas ARE NOT beautiful. NOR ARE PENISES. Out of action, they are just neutral, faintly unpleasant/ridiculous body parts, both of them. In use, they come alive, their meaning as a connectivity device capable of extremely profound transmission between people, of emotion, lust, kaleidoscopic vision, life, is what makes vaginas and penises “beautiful”.

It seems particularly unfair to insist that we all find our vaginas “beautiful” not just to those of us who do not (but who enjoy and respect its uses and value nonetheless), but to the vaginas themselves. It’s like asking the hard core working mother with three kids to prepare a Michelin-starred dinner after an 11-hour day in the office. The vagina has enough on her plate- must she also look like a million bucks? She receives tampax, specula, penises, penis-like objects, IUDs, moon cups and other objects. She puts out uterine lining and babies. In the same vicinity, pee as well.

In all seriousness, focusing on the appearance of genitalia seems to miss the point of it. What we need is a less visual body culture, one less obsessed with the appearances of parts, whether for critique, consumption or – in this case “love”. Love should go deeper, and that includes for the lips of the vagina.

More work and less home-time would be just the ticket for the Desperate Housewives

There are two big questions that have sometimes niggled as I pursue my patriarchy-busting course through life (and the Mphil). I have always shot them down when other people mention them but that doesn’t mean they haven’t continued to niggle a little…until recently.

One involves the biological differences between men and women. I’ve always disliked the notion of “hardwiring”, felt it to be in the main a justification of the status quo, but there was a little insecurity there – women have ovaries, after all, and the unique challenges that come with them. Women do appear to have strong urges to have babies and to mother, and worse – far worse – when I look around, there does seem a confusing dearth of women in maths, science and leadership. I never consciously admitted to myself that this was because women were worse at these things than men, but if I’m being honest I bet some dark and embarrassed part of me wondered about it, a bit. Especially as I myself am so crap at all these things. Well, luckily that dark and embarrassed bit need lurk no longer – it’s been entirely flooded in the light of GOOD psychobiology books such as Melissa Hines’ Brain Gender; Rebecca Jordan Young’s Brainstorm and of course, Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender. Also by a new habit of mind I have: to take note of every quantitative woman I meet, or every instance of female quantitative flair and add her/it to my mental list of “exceptions”. The list, whose other part is composed of poetry-reading, dramatic, maths-phobic men, is now very large. So: the good news is this! Women are not worse at abstract thinking or math or staying calm or leading or whatever because of anything inborn. It really is society wot done it. Now we just have to work out how to fix that.

The other niggle is the mother versus career question. I have always been quick to claim that motherhood is no excuse for giving up work, tumbling off the career ladder and staying at home busying yourself with the niceties of children’s parties and school runs. But then I thought- well, maybe motherhood does exert an influence on women I have yet to experience. Maybe they really are happier and better off choosing the home instead of the office. Maybe the challenges and rewards of housewifery and childrearing really are equal to those of the workplace. Maybe….

But once again I am happy to say that this niggle has been laid to rest. Betty Friedan – albeit criticised for the white middle-class leaning of her work – appears to be right. I have met three women in recent weeks who gave up work to play mother and wife. All three have high-earning husbands (often the pre-requisite). All three were slightly defensive about their choice to give up work. But in all three cases, it was only a matter of minutes before they started to say things that made my stomach turn. Things like: “Sometimes I miss using my brain” or “I go crazy without anything challenging, which is why I do some part-time work with my friend- just to keep me sane”. For this woman, work was a sanity tactic- which is better than nothing. But it had nothing to do with the work itself- it could be anything (she’d been through a long slew of disconnected posts, which- as soon as they started to be demanding or result in promotions -she left). She’d done a degree in medical history yet when we passed an exhibit in front of the History of Science museum in Cambridge she looked bored. One woman seemed to have resigned herself to the life of the home and to looking after kids aged 12 and 14 who probably would rather she was off kicking ass instead of waiting for them to need her.  Another – a friend of my mother’s – treated me to lunch in London one day. She picked me up in her Jag and off we went. But immediately she seemed distracted. This distractedness, when queried, seemed related to a recalcitrant manicurist; still-unbooked flights to LA to visit her sons; a drinks party later that night for which she needed to rest and change and a general sense of “being so busy” that didn’t seem founded on anything but a long list of lifestyle boosts and pampering duties.

In the company of each of these three women I felt depressed. I felt I couldn’t really have a decent conversation with them about anything that wasn’t logistical or to do with small talk. Being in the middle of a brain-taxing course seemed a source of potential acrimony -nothing outright -but I felt that to discuss anything with an academic or work-related edge would be tactless. Mostly, I felt bad for these women. What had they to distract from the endless project of themselves and their families’ wellbeing? Only more consumption. I couldn’t help but feel that in keeping their time free to be good wives and mothers they were missing the thing that would have made them happy and more exciting as individuals, and through that, better wives and mothers. Namely, a career.

Transport is almost excessively well supplied, clear and functional. On arrival in the airport, I asked for the KAL Limo and was pointed towards a well-marked door where, indeed, not just one KAL limo drew up but a different one every two minutes. A nice man told me which one to wait for that would take me directly to my hotel: the 10:52. Iwas the only passenger in the spacious leather-seated bus, yet the charge for the hour’s drive from Incheon Airport to the heart of Gangnam was only 15,000 won – about £9.

The subway is my new hangout. In most foreign cities, not speaking the language or reading the characters makes taking enormous underground systems through megalopolises too daunting for words. Yet the Seoul subway is pleasantly clear: English where you need it; good signage; nice machines for dispensing tickets, and a map that reminds me of London’s – huge and sprawling. Nobody stares at you making you feel stupid and weird, either. As for the trains: they are frequent, spotless and very wide. A pleasant trumpet tune announces the imminent arrival of each. There are TVs in the cars, with the next stop announced in Korean and English, written and spoken, as well as the lines you can transfer to and their colour coding (eg “line number one, the dark blue line) – otherwise, you can enjoy scenes from Korean history relevant to the spot, makeup ads etc. Also curious but kind of cool: people stand without holding onto the numerous shiny handles provided, in a very straight line facing the seats. The subway costs £1.20 for a ride of 45 minutes, with no extra charge for the people watching. Everyone, but everyone, is engrossed in their large Samsung Galaxy Notes.

The food is unbelievably good, as you’d expect of a culture that openly fetichises it (who knew?) and insists on garlic and chilli with cabbage (kimchee) morning, noon and night. In Korean, after saying “hello” you don’t say “how are you?” – you say “Have you had breakfast/lunch/dinner?” There is a massive, diverse and eternally tempting street food scene, whether you fancy sweet and spongy and hilarious “fish breads”, chilli-smeared rice cakes with fish squares, deep fried seaweed-wrapped rice, tofu sweets, dumplings or green tea pancakes. Wagyu beef Korean BBQ for $30 a head goes down a treat too, especially washed down with local beer, large green leaves like steroidal nettles, fried egg and beansprout salad. Posh dinner features milky broths of transcendent delicacy, paper-thin green tea pancakes with grated mushrooms and radish, and the most insanely good beef stew, called bulgogi, I could imagine. (“Mine’s the bulgogi!”)

The bathouses. A bathouse is a place to go where you can do lots of things communally (only communally). These include a)soak butt naked in green tea, b)get scrubbed butt naked in front of everyone, c)get your whole face threaded under two weird lamps next to butt naked women walking about buying things and drying their hair d)sleep as long as you want on yoga mats, possibly drunk e)purchase potatoes and yams and then go roast them on coals IN the sauna f)get your fortune told, g) get nail art done, h)get cupping done all over your body while wearing a mask that will make you look like a dead person or grotesque mannequin, i) play arcade games, j) listen to a lecture on posture, k) eat at a restaurant, l)get a massage.

At least this book admits that the word requires a bit of unpacking.

“Feminism” is back in the limelight – obviously. Caitlin Moran, daily Guardian comment pieces, Indie pieces, Seth Macfarlane boob video backlash, Beyonce body-show analysis, widespread coverage and analysis of International Woman’s Day and last week (though it could be any week), a debate over whether feminists could be funny in their anger, or if humour is about trying to be liked by patriarchy… Even being a not-feminist these days is a stance that puts you in direct relation to feminism. Feminism, feminism, feminism, feminism, bleminism, memenism…sometimes, if I’m honest, the word goes blurry – though I admit that I’m inordinately lucky to be seeing it enough for that to happen.

But I am concerned. For feminism. For women. For the world. Because the word “feminism” is fast losing its power and clarity as a conceptual umbrella. It has come loose from its meaning – that is, its history, context and clout and is now floating, balloon-style, into the ether. It’s a word we know expresses a belief in equality for women, and, that ‘women are people too’. But it is ever more fragmented, spun ever thinner as the 360-degree, 24-hour content demands of the digital press cycle put more strain on it. In the past hour or so, I have read articles by five women on feminism and anger, feminism and humour, feminism and singleness, women and patriarchy. Last week I attended talks on Feminism as a Global Term (Melanne Verveer, Obama’s women’s ambassador) and on the importance of the term/thing itself (Jude Kelly, head of the South Bank Centre, and Rachel Holmes, editor of Fifty Shades of Feminism). The talks – all given by speakers with peroxided blonde hair, interestingly – champion “feminism” and express outrage at women’s plight. The articles rage at “injustice”.

But there is a serious lack of inspiring rhetoric outside the increasingly stale and over-used catch phrases of the dominant journalistic and UN discourses. Melanne Verveer went on and on and on and on about one very simple though important point, so blindingly obvious to me that I am certainly missing something (else how could she have spent 50 minutes repeating it?): namely, women’s rights are human rights and vice versa. By the end I felt like I was hearing something like this: “women rights human human right women’s rights rights wrong human women”…

It is an awful and scary thing when the very words we rely upon to convey real meaning with an important mission become emptied out, cliched and consequently ignored. The digital news cycle and world of blogs, everyone desperate to get their two cents out there (myself included), ensures that what might once have been words with a slower burn-rate and richer meaning are now sizzled up like imploding stars. Devoured and then spat out, useless.

Meanings erode when the words meant to encapsulate them get too big and vague; when the word lets them down by taking on too many. In the West, we use “feminism” repeatedly as a kind of catch-all for all injustice done women, though actually we aren’t really thinking of Kenyan tribeswomen beaten daily. We’re thinking of us.  But even with “us” – who is “us”? Which is to say, “feminism”, even when expanded to denote a global basket of issues, or even a national basket of them, does not necessarily expand in meaning – rhetorical, semantic or otherwise.

I get the impression that in the West “feminism” is a different tool, with a different use, than in other parts of the world. We use it to hold society and individuals to account over pay gaps, terrible maternity care arrangements, sexual harassment, pressure to be thin/pretty/sexual etc, (illegal) domestic violence etc. In the West, in all those talks, all those articles, there are fights over what “feminism” should mean, who is practicing it and who is abusing it. There is talk of a nebulous “patriarchy”, there are “women”, there is “mysogeny”. There is anger. There are feminists criticising other feminists.

But in countries with the most awful condoned systemic violence against women, use of the word “feminism” may well be a luxury that people trying to stay alive and out of terror might not find terribly useful. I don’t know how often “feminism” is spoken of in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, bits of Pakistan.

So the word is in meaning-crisis. I’d say that if anything has killed off its semantic power, it’s the lack of specificity. In Verveer’s talk, for instance, genital mutilation, domestic abuse and Western pay gaps were bundled together into one smorgasbord of urgent female injury. It’s impossible to move under such a weight of different issues affecting different people in different ways. One literally does not know how to proceed. In the 1970s, there were clear objectives. Very clear. End discriminatory employment policies, get abortion rights, make rape illegal. Consciousness raising to help do this. Knowing how to progress meaningfully without such concrete, judicial goals can be tricky. We end up rowing about whether Beyonce’s Superbowl show was demeaning to women.

If I felt strongly that after a week of Women’s Day oriented talks and articles that “feminism” is like a food people have put on their forks and are simply moving round the plate in different ways, then I do hope the word has retained meaning elsewhere and thus the potential to create change. But I fear that without some serious conceptual work – where is the word from, what has it meant, what are its different meanings today, what SHOULD it mean, who is getting it wrong? – it’s going to flounder. And “women”, feminism’s object, will suffer. Again.

College Girls are lots of things, but what are we?

A male friend told me the other day over stale sandwiches in a Cambridge tearoom that Sex and the City depressed him. No wonder there – pretty much every man to whom I’ve ever mentioned SATC flies into a rage, or a frenzy of disgust. But on closer inspection, Samuel was not raging. He was contemplating. To him, Sex and the City is really just depressing; it lowers his spirits, not just about the state of TV but that of humankind. Womankind in particular, I suppose.

Don’t worry – I’m not going to keep talking about SATC- I realise I’m the only person left on earth who likes the show (someone last week, aged 60 plus, accused me of being “obsessed” with it – imagine!). But I think his point is worth lingering on. For the thing that depressed him was the pointlessness of their anxieties, dilemmas and quandaries. That is, all those tricky, fad-led etiquettes and norms which they then had to spend their whole time struggling with. Society made a din that couldn’t be ignored: “shag him, ditch him, buy this, don’t do this, do all at once” and so on.  But being humans (well, fake humans), the artificiality of these rules created tension. Lots of tension; lots of emotion. To Samuel, this tension between the sexuo-romantic circumlocutions whipped up by Manhattan culture and the characters’ emotional reaction to them was…depressing. Because self-generated and thus so futile. Like: let’s go create millions of fake issues, then worry about them endlessly?

Samuel has a point. Something’s only depressing if it has wider implications – in this case, implications for romantic/sexual culture. So do we create pointless problems in order to spoil our own fun? Certainly, modern relationship- and sex-havers do not act as happily as one might think a bunch of people liberated from rules about chastity, honour and propriety would be. We spend a lot of time being unhappy and expressing unhappiness, for which there is a wide and developed lexicon. So I think what’s “depressing” about SATC stems from some sense that “being the modern woman” (or man) is more like a tricky job than an easy flow of obvious action. In acting the role of ourselves – that is, modern urban liberal sorts (I know how limited this sounds) – we are not sitting back and relaxing, our minds free to concentrate on other things since the sex and relationships side is taken care of. No, we are busy acting – consciously or not – trying to adhere to a matrix of new norms, some fashion-led, some more deep-rooted. We are constantly expending energy trying to decipher rules of our own creation, when really we should be struggling to understand feminist philosophy or jet propulsion or RNA splicing.

An example. With a wide and open playing field for potential partners today, it has become customary to have a “checklist” of traits one looks for. Jezebel did an article the other day based on an actual written-out list by a single woman on the prowl for a partner. It was an entire side of A4 in length. Now, this woman – for all that she was able to express such specificity – did not seem particularly pleased with having to do so. She was single and didn’t want to be. She was not finding her checklist to be particularly helpful, in fact, it was making her more aware of shortcomings in men than perhaps was fair. The guy could be intelligent, successful, kind and good looking, but he might not like dogs. Dismissed. It reminded me of another list – an Excel spreadsheet constructed by a business school graduate friend, who ranked women he was interested in or sleeping with via a sort of algorithmic rating system. To be sure he got exactly what he wanted, you see. The result? Women, it turned out, are not like cars with various trappings that can be obtained through shrewd shopping.

People spend an awful lot of time agonising about their love lives. I’m not suggesting for a second that we regress to traditional roles. But at this point I am compelled to mention a spot of Foucault and a spot of Stephen Heath as I think they’re enlightening on why Sex and the City depressed Samuel and thus why we might feel a bit depressed contemplating dating culture in general. Foucault argued that a huge proliferation of discourses surrounding sexuality took place in the 19th century. So much for Victorian repression – it is just this repression that pushed sex into every single avenue of life and thought (elephant in the room style). Foucault is primarily interested in institutional ways of fostering and festering sex – medical and judicial techniques such as enforced physical examinations of prostitutes and homosexuality laws. But from this follows the idea of the “sexual secret” – that every person is a sexual person, every person has a secret, and every secret is, ultimately, a sexual secret. This is why we talk about sex and sex’s siblings, like relationships, so much. This is why, perhaps, the women of Sex and the City, and those of Girls, and you and me, talk about them so much. The point is, the talking takes on its own life, creating realities as it jabbers on. Talking about things, eg discourse, makes things exist (much late 20th century theory is based on “discursive construction” of various things, including gender). Moving on. Stephen Heath, the prodigal literary, film and sex theorist, wrote a book called The Sexual Fix. In it, he argues that sexuality (implicitly tethered to dating, courtship or relationships) is a thunderously created thing of the last 100 years, cooked up through psychoanalytic and other discourse. The “fix” idea is the most relevant here, perhaps. It is that we can all achieve that perfect authentic self through sexual fulfilment – we can fix ourselves if we fix our sexual-ness. The “sexual fix” is, as per Foucault, really “the self fix” or just “the fix”. Of course we can never actually achieve “the sexual fix” as that would imply that sex’s usage is finite which, Heath argues, in our present culture, it patently isn’t.

Samuel was depressed by Sex and the City because it reminds him of the world in which he lives. It is a world in which the sexual secret and the sexual fix create endless striving and corrective behaviour – checklists, spreadsheets, date post-mortems, angst, divorce. It is analytically laborious to live in such conditions. Is there an easier route, though, when other complaints such as shelter and hunger are taken care of? Or do humans always turn angst when hardship is overcome?  I think perhaps we do.

If only multiple partners were this easy.

At the Union this week I opined on the whys and wherefores of the “loss” of sexual meaning in today’s world. What I wrote was, in the end, a relatively conservative speech. It came down to a plea for intimacy unmediated by video clips of humping strangers. Porn=ruinous, hypersexuality=bad. I went deep into anti porn arguments, the proof of how porn seeps into our everyday psyches, numbing us and forcing performativity into our bedrooms when we yearn, or I believe somewhere inside of our lizard brains, yearn for some kind of naked authenticity.

I lambasted hypersexuality – as Ariel Levy puts it, the “hypersexual thumping” of our society. I lambasted sex without “meaning”.

But I didn’t define what the right amount of sexuality is, and thus what the right amount of sex might be, when or with whom, nor what the relationship between that right amount and meaning and finally, happiness, might be.

That’s because I honestly don’t know, though I wish I did. Clearly the answer would not be the same for everyone, though what’s right for everyone is never the stuff of personal conviction. And nothing is right for everyone.

So, what I want to know is: would “we” be happier if we only had sex in relationships? Some people do just that, after all. Is casual sex a male-priveliging construct masquerading as liberatory action for women, or is it really a happy outcome of the “sexual revolution” that women can take a quantitative as well as a qualitative approach, or an impulsive one at any rate?

The problem as I see it is on the level of the psyche and the way feelings of guilt, allegiance and desire for devotion (which we feel ought to be reciprocal) have been built into our psyches. Rationally, “each to their own” should be just fine. You should be able to see, date, flirt with, kiss, maybe even sleep with whoever you want. Nobody owns you. And you can do all of that (though modern sexual etiquette tells you all the partners need to know they’re not the only ones). So why the rub, the angst here? Well, we have this terminology – “I’m seeing other people”/”I’m sleeping with other people”/”I am dating other people” as if these are isolated, detachable activities, like rock-climbing or going to the movies. They aren’t, though. To me, the casual simultaneity of the modern dating system seems like a false friend, a fake sell. Because unlike a spot of chess playing in the park with a stranger, each of these flirtations/encounters goes somewhere. They become either wastes of time, disappointments or real attachments. Wastes of time and disappointments are easier to deal with in a way- they’re the (occasionally destructive) detritus of sexual freedom. But when more than one of these things becomes a real, or a potentially real attachment as surely they must, that simultaneity begins to feel evil. The true modern at ease in their skin is meant to pick the favourite and ditch the less promising contender. For those less at ease, that pesky psyche kicks in and begins mewling. Feelings of guilt, fear of disappointing the “loser” or of being disappointed/making the wrong choice, creep in. Put in rational terms, you’ve done nothing wrong. You haven’t explicitly lied and I repeat, you don’t belong to anyone. You have no duty. And yet your mewling psyche is suggesting you might have a sense of duty and so in creep the the feelings of guilt, confusion and fun-spoiling nonetheless. This jarring, between stern psyche and liberal cultural framework, is extremely uncomfortable.  Now, if I was using “liberal” here in an ironic or sarcastic way, the case would be closed: ignore the evil credos of modernity, hark back to pre-feminist ideals and off you go with your virtue and moral purity in tact. But that’s not what I’m saying. For I believe that this sexually liberal society is a rational, clever structure, far preferable to what came before in the death-by-childbirth, dowry-wrangling and virginity-for-sale days. It pushes for individualism, self-ownership and not answering to anyone. This is “freedom”, of course. So, by participating in, or working towards, a modern feminist society, one feels rather like one ought to be enacting these manifestations of freedom. 

But what precisely do I mean by the “freedom dictates” of our sexually liberal society? (NB these seem applicable mostly to a certain socio-economic class for whim marriage and more traditional structures are not necessary for getting by either socially or economically). I mean the confidence to have non-exclusive relationships, having multiple partners at once on whim and without guilt, being open about this state, ie that one is “seeing other people“, not muddling sex with “signs” of intimacy, that is, being able to do both without one necessarily impinging on or ruining the other, calling one’s constellation of partners ”lovers” and thus evoking some old bohemian notion of free love unfettered by even older notions of guilt and the religious horrors this suggests.

Now here are a few of the inconvenient and contradictory feelings that may arise for people living among these sorts of discourses: a consumer attitude towards men alongside a questing for “the one” who gets it all, ticks all boxes, gets me totally, loves me totally; greedy; stressed; deceitful, dissatisfied, critical, annoyed at potential wastage of opportunities, exploitative, demanding, numb, worried.

Capitalism is another system I basically respect (sorry ’bout that, Marxist friends). Consumerism is its handmaiden. Indeed, much has been written about the relationship between capitalism, consumerism and romance. But what has not been satisfactorily resolved to my knowledge is our society’s elision of consumption/gain/accrual of resources with the consumption/gain/accrual of bed post notches/relationships/dates. At this point I volunteer myself as your classic greedy person. I am full of appetites. I want more. I want everything – the problem is that “everything” is, literally, everything. It’s chocolate, it’s fun, it’s holidays, it’s romance, it’s experience, it’s this kind of night out and that kind of night out; it’s conversations, ideas-sharing, and I want more youth. But sticking with economic capitalism, if I have enough money, I can buy the goods I want. All of them. Affluence brings the luxury not of choice but of *not* having to choose. In fact, the particular form of satedness that comes from having lots of everything, that is, the satedness of gluttony.

So what happens when gluttony – the fair and just desserts (as it were) of capitalist enterprise – seeps into emotions, sex, love, and the trappings of all three? When men become pawns in a game (as women for centuries have been for men) of power and validation? When you want more of them, when you get more of them (as nobody’s stopping you), and on and on? Utter confusion. Dark stirrings. A sense of wrong-ness. If you are entirely unfettered, or “monogamish” as America’s GGG (Good, Giving, Game) community of modern relationship-havers calls it, then how can you not feel that the main event, the partner figure, is holding you back from other opportunities? That the other opportunities, since you’re permitting yourself to have them, don’t ruin your time with your main event? And what if it’s true – that you ARE being held back?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. I suspect wisdom is the field in which the answer lies. It does seem to me, though, that if our  Puritanical (or is it our Marxist) psyches moan loudly enough, we will be forced to consider that more is not always more. At least when it comes to what we want the most: more.

Porny? Yes. Erotic? Not really.

So this is the speech I gave last night at the Cambridge union in support of this proposition. I will warn you now that there is some STRONG LANGUAGE in here- part for the topic, really. What did I realise in writing this speech? I really am a second-waver (feminism). I know. Old school. Also: please remember it’s a little exaggerated- I can’t possibly think sex has lost all meaning for everyone all the time etc etc – this was something people in the chamber quibbled over. But oh well – you can’t take things too literally in life. Look forward to your views…

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A year or so ago I interviewed a group of women for my book about being a single female in the West today. In particular, I was interested in the effects of strings-free sex on women. My interviewees’ responses were instructive. Let’s start with Susan, 28. Sex – having lots of it – was her MO. As she told me, in terms of Sex and the City, she wishes she was Carrie but she’s more Samantha. To fulfil this persona, she doesn’t “personalise things”. “I am sensitive,” she clarified, “but I have a thicker skin when it comes to guys, because nothing has ever happened like I want it to and I learned that sex doesn’t make a guy like you. So I just keep going anyway, I have a slim figure and long brown hair so it’s easy to get them to sleep with me – I guess I’m not sure why I do it,” she added. I was curious about what this thicker skin “when it comes to guys” meant exactly. Susan clarified. “With sex, I don’t need to see their face. I don’t really want to see their face. It’s too…much.” I asked Millie, 24, if she could enjoy sex with someone she doesn’t like. “Depends on the sex,” she said. Then there was Mona, 29. Mona – beautifully groomed, intelligent, highly flirtatious – also fulfilled her duty as a modern single woman by giving sex the old college try. It wasn’t the numbers of men she slept with that caught my attention, but the anxiety and pleasurelessness with which she discussed her sex life. In the first place, Mona could not begin to rate the experience as a success if she failed to make the man come. In fact, his orgasm was to be obtained in any way possible – blow jobs that made her skull ache, enthusiastic performances and positioning, studied submissiveness – anything to, in her words, “get the job done”. When the job was done, did she then enjoy herself? “Sometimes,” she said. “But not really. It’s hard for it not to be a performance.” Did it help when the sex was “meaningful”? I asked. She sniggered. “I wouldn’t remember at this point!”

My argument tonight hinges on my conviction that sex is better when it involves intimacy beyond the thrusting of polished genitals and the expert use of luxe toys – and meaningless, and thus pointless, when it lacks that intimacy. I will argue that sex has been denatured, denuded, sanitised and commodified into a series of exchanges that are motivated more by the grim acquisitiveness of the umpteenth metallic orgasm than by anything like proper chemistry between two people. The engorgement of the global sex industry and the more general flood of sexual imperative flowing around us has turned copulation into a never-ending performance – a performance that’s all about short-term consumer satisfaction and display, rather than emotional or even intellectual eroticism. When Mona told me she couldn’t not perform, she spoke for the hordes of women today trying but failing to assume the powerful role in the sexual landscape of booty calls, fuckbuddy relationships and strings-free hook-ups. So much sex, so many tiring calculations, so little proper pleasure – and no, I don’t think a stash of Coco de Mer’s most expensive wooden cock rings or jade-engraved dildos in the bedside table is the missing ingredient, here.

I’m going to take my argument up a notch. Sex has not just lost its meaning. That would make it a neutral act. Sex has become something else, something with a negative energy. It has mutated into the plaything of strip club impresarios and online editors, who commission a grateful band of young women to go out, shag, and write about it in detail. Sex has morphed into a brand where sterile libidinousness and the agility of fake seduction pays big bucks. In other words, sex has become porn’s Mini Me. Thanks to porn, with its brutish nihilism, a dark energy has oozed into the libidos of millions – even as it helps them come more often. It oozes off popular sites like Gag Factor, Anal Suffering (advertising a new “suffering slut” in “agonizing anal pain every week”), and Fuck the Babysitter. It oozes off gonzo porn, off the spanking, open-handed slapping, and gagging that happen in 88 per cent of hetero-porn scenes. [source: Wosnitzer and Bridges, Aggression and Sexual Behaviour in Best-Selling Pornography, 2007]

I’m aware that any person speaking negatively of porn these days has to face accusations of being sex negative, some kind of hideous out of date fun-ruiner,  and hairy in all the wrong places. And, when she identifies as a feminist, she is seen to be letting down the side by viewing all women as helpless romantics unable to orgasm without a diamond on her finger and a house in the ‘burbs.  I’ll take that risk. Because porn is massive – worth around $96bn, 13,000 properly produced films released each year, 450m internet pages and a fast rising number of people reporting for porn addiction therapy – women as well as men. With such a tsunami of distended groins throbbing in the ether, it’s no wonder sex has become de-sensitised not just for us, but for the next generation too. How can it not? Boys are commencing their life’s sexual journey with lashings of gonzo on their iphones under the desks at school.  And even if you, or they, don’t tune into Gag the Babysitter daily, porn’s message is clear everywhere, in everything from the strip clubs both men and women frequent, to car ads to Superbowl half-time shows. The mainstream displays of perfected female sexual readiness and hot bulging men on billboards, TV ads and elsewhere are merely porn’s more tasteful backdrop.

Perhaps I’m being dramatic, you say. After all, people can compartmentalise – can separate real life sex from porn. But I would have to disagree. Because porn is in our brains and in our bodies – not just on our screens. I don’t know if anyone here remembers Duke University student Karen Owen, a prime example of how pornographic norms can be internalised to the detriment of sexual meaning, not to mention mental and physical wellbeing. In 2010 her “fuck list” went viral – this was a powerpoint presentation that ranked every member of the Duke lacrosse team that she slept with. What was notable about the fuck list was how awful the sex sounded – on every level. Mostly the guys would take her home when she was too wasted to resist, often she’d pass out. But when she didn’t, her analysis of their body parts was razor-sharp. It’s as if she carried a protractor and ruler with her to get accurate readings of their penises. Sex seemed partly about dimensions for Karen. The other part was about roughness. She described liking the bruises she often had the next day, of being barely able to walk – hard and fast was her watchword. The rougher they were with her, the more she felt it was a success. There was no mention of pleasure in any of her powerpoint slides, however – scorn for her ravagers was the main point. People loved it – Owen was hailed as a true woman of her era.

Another example of porn’s reach into “real life”. I was at a party the other month – a wedding party, in fact. A lawyer, a guy I remember from a few years ago being clear-eyed and upbeat, cornered me drunkenly. He wanted to tell me how he broke up with his long-term girlfriend and several after her because he stopped feeling anything. In particular, the sex. “I got bored of her pussy,” he told me. “And the next one’s”. I asked him why he thought that had happened. “Porn,” he said. “Porn has ruined sex for me,” he said, nearly in tears, his beer sloshing dangerously. This sorry encounter brought to my mind a bit of wisdom the feminist Naomi Wolf wrote in a New York Magazine article a little while back. It was a write-up of various interviews she had conducted with young men and women on college campuses about what porn had done for their relationships. “Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike,” wrote Wolf. “They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.” And that is because it is unbelievably hard to undo porn’s work.  As one woman I know put it: “I had to spend years undoing the work of the video clips my partner’s had in his head for a decade.”

Now, a debate about sexual meaninglessness would not be complete without some mention of pubic hair. And here I offer you this tidbit from porn scholar Gail Dines’s book Pornland. Dines is reporting on a lecture she gave to some students at “a large West Coast university” in spring 2008. The female students spoke openly about how they preferred a totally hairless pubic area because it made them feel “clean”, “well groomed” and “hot”. Fine. But when the conversation turned to their boyfriends’ preferences, things got distinctly less hot. Dines recalls that “the excitement in the room gave way to a subdued discussion of how some boyfriends had even refused to have sex with non-waxed girlfriends, saying they ‘looked gross’.” That’s right – gross. One student gave his girlfriend a waxing kit for Valentine’s Day (I hope none of you have done this) while another was overheard sneering to a friend about his girlfriend’s “hairy beaver”. When sexual appeal is about waxed vaginas above all else, I think it starts to become pretty clear that sex has lost a good deal, if not all, of its meaning.

To conclude, the hypersexuality of modern culture does not mean we’ve been sexually liberated. On the contrary, it is creating an ever-bigger void where the real thing, the human exchange of something other than just fluids, is meant to be. Without doubt, I’d rather be numbly hypersexual than stigmatised or restricted in my choices. I wouldn’t undo the sexual revolution. But we can do better. We should be carving out a sexual landscape in which it is considered neither uncool, regressive, anti-feminist nor Tory to value meaningful sex and to NOT value meaningless sex. Otherwise, we can look forward to a world of Karen Owen-style shagging with its bruises and its faceless brutes. Which is just such a waste.

I’d rather tutor snotty-nosed kids on weekends than be faced with the kind of work involving proximity to a man of this ilk.

Just a brief note on the “record” numbers of Cambridge lady-students signing up for sugar daddies on seekingarrangements.com.

Ok, so, yah da yah da, the site offers young “goal-oriented” women the chance to get extra cash for newly expensive tuition fees. £9,000 per year, after all! No wonder they’re turning in droves (168 out of roughly 4,700 female undergraduates) to a website where they can offer their youth and beauty in exchange for cash.

Two things are apparent from this previous paragraph: one, actually a very small proportion of women are seeking arrangements with old rich men to help them get through Cambridge in style and two: I thus rather disapprove of the disproportionate coverage of this whole thing. Actually, I think I’d disapprove of it even if the numbers were much bigger. This is because, despite glaring problems with the whole setup and what it says about lots of things, everything I’ve read so far has been entirely dictated by the site’s own press release. The implication if one reads enough of the coverage is a wholly unexamined sense that when the chips are down, and tuition fees go up, proffering your tasty AND clever young booty is a fair recourse for cash. Yep, both young and clever. No wonder these men are fawning. We’re expected to agree that the prospect of a young woman at Cambridge is most exciting for the sexual possibilities it offers than for the intellectual or professional or social possibilities – and the downsides of having those threatened by higher prices.

There are lots of big stuffy superior things to say about the sort of people who go for this. I am tempted to wag my finger as the girls and say, can’t you get a job at a cafe or as a weekend tutor? Isn’t it worth earning a bit less but not putting yourself in this position?

But I don’t know their circumstances. So I’m going to focus on the two things I do know.

One: That many young women today see their bodies on a direct continuum with commercial gain and consumerism, eg gifts and pampering, is disturbing but no surprise. As Ariel Levy argued in her fabulous book, Female Chauvenist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, hotness is the ultimate currency these days, sexual attractiveness has more power than a briefcase of greenbacks – it buys you everything, from happiness to power to actual, measurable wealth. Love and inner beauty are the laughable stuff of old innocence. What everyone wants to be and to have these days is non-ageing tans and botox, diets and hairless vaginas, to strive for total thin-ness, perfect toning. Women like that get more. Because (some) men want women like that. And many women want to be women like that. So in a way, it is only natural that young women in possession of a very hot piece of property (body gold in currency terms) – youth, beauty and the sexual spark that brains add to that mix – should go straight to market. Whether or not modernity has done its work to the degree that the psychological landscape of the sugar babies can seamlessly assimilate this voluntary arrangement is another story. I rather hope they feel freaked out and grossed out by the scenario. Not because they’re doing something incredibly akin to prostitution – it’s not the same since they don’t have to offer sex – but because it is gross and freaky. For the below and second reason.

Two: The men who are signed up for this site know that they are only being suffered because they have cash. This means that they are probably ugly and/or socially maladapted since good looking and/or suave wealthy older men have no issues finding willing younger babes in “normal” offline scenarios. It’s an obvious but unmentionable axiom of a site like this. Which means that they know that the women they are seeing know that they know that they are only being used for cash. A man happy to pay for the guise of a real relationship, with a bit of sex thrown in by a woman almost certainly repulsed by him, is odd enough. But that he knows the girl knows that this is the case going into it – that his attractiveness is *not* why she is with him – is just somehow more disturbing because it indicates the kind of man that one would probably not want to date at any cost. Not even for want of champagne and tuition fees.

I know that stripping and pole dancing and getting naked are any woman’s prerogative, to get all Britney on it. But I’m afraid I’m going to go all old-school and judgemental and say that I think that women lucky enough to be at Cambridge are lucky enough to have earning potential that should free them from this sort of thing. I say “lucky”. That’s because I don’t think that it’s generally something a woman after personal and professional fulfilment would opt for as a first or even a second choice. If it is, fine, but I’d want that desire closely questioned if it were mine.

According to the NY Times, this is what you can expect a date to look like in 2013. Maybe it is – in college campus America.

Not everyone loves those pieces in the New York Times, Atlantic and so on where a relationship trend – normally headed “The End of…Men/Women/Love/Sex/Etc”- is heralded based on interviews with four or five upwardly mobile Manhattanites.

But I love them. Or at least I regard them with more than a snort of disdain.

Because frivolous as they may be, they seep into the ether in a surprisingly powerful way, shaping the discourse surrounding relationships even as they pretend to be merely reporting it. I feel that they should be paid some attention to, if only by people like me.

Well, I’d like to comment on a recent one filed under the catchy heading: “The End of Courtship?”

The question mark is the key thing here. But that’s not to say the article didn’t ring true…for Americans. As for everyone else, I’ve conducted a straw poll and I have good news: COURTSHIP IS NOT DEAD. If, of course, the guy likes you.

Now, a disclaimer. I am aware that I’m talking about it as though the only way in which this trend manifests itself is through men and their decisions – but the fact of the matter is, it kinda is. Unfortunately. It’s still very few women who take the lead in dating, and very few men who secretly resent the woman not paying for his dinner on the first night out, particularly if sex ensues.

The article argues that the old dating format – ie the one that involved direct verbal contact with a person followed by a one-on-meeting- is dead, replaced by a more casual “hanging out” style tweet/text invite. Hazards the NY Times: “Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.”

Phone calls requesting a date for two have been replaced by a last-minute “sup”. The woman cited at the start of the study was indignant that a plan for a meeting with a date turned into a 10pm bulletin that he was hanging with college friends at a bar and she could come join. The reporter ventured that she needn’t have been so put out – this is the norm for youth of the digital age.

Lots of reasons (or excuses) were cited for this kind of behaviour – in a competitive online dating atmosphere of extreme choice, you date so many people that a dinner or a one-on-one could get too costly both in terms of money and time. Then there’s the fact that in the digital age of instant messaging and social networking, people have lost the ability to communicate outside of real time. Indeed, they’ve lost the art of being rejected- ask someone out and they could reply “no”. Which would, obviously, be a catastrophe of the highest order. So instead they just tweet “sup” and hopefully love will be born?

My gut reaction to the end of courtship is that it’s just not true. But one psychologist quoted here interviewed college seniors and apparently they really are clueless:  “They’re wondering, ‘If you like someone, how would you walk up to them? What would you say? What words would you use?’ ” the psychologist said.

So I have to say it must just be in America. Or among the very stupid young.

Which brings me to the more upbeat part of this blog. And the most sexist. And heteronormative. (Please forgive me, gender studies colleagues).

When a GUY likes a GIRL – ie regards her as a human being that he would like to get to know better and maybe in the biblical sense too – he does ask her out. In the last few months, friends of mine have experienced:

-First dates complete with high quality restaurant food – in one case, 2 Michelin star

-Persistence on more dinners

-Dinners cooked for them

-Phone calls

-Emails

-Direct messaging on Facebook, including a question requiring an answer that could just be a rejection.

-Requests to “date”, almost the modern day equivalent of going steady

I asked as many men as I could about the end of courtship. They all said that they would never ping ‘sup at 10pm to a girl *if they liked her*. And none of them were particularly comfortable admitting to pinging them if they didn’t like her – it struck them as a bit crass. Plus ca change in that case, for those familiar with the unfortunately brilliant He’s Just Not Into You. Granted the guys I asked seemed to be all rather sensitive types – but I struggled to find INsensitive ones. Which points to something else – if you look hard enough, or with different spectacles, you’ll see there are plenty of non-brutes out there, boatloads of men who are nice people just like we are (right?), who have very fragile confidences but are willing to power through these to spend time with YOU. Who will not succumb to the digital slurry of half-dates, quasi-put downs and deeply stingy group hangouts. I made sure to talk to a few youngsters, recent college seniors themselves, and they knew just how to ask a girl out. Indeed, had done so just recently and – in some cases – were in committed relationships. One such chap, 22, noted that he felt alienated from the overwhelming choice of partners that gets pushed at people nowadays.”It makes people look at other people and try to maximise their use of them. I prefer to see people as an end in themselves.”

Take that, US college seniors.

And for the ladies, at least those in the UK, no need to despair. Just nip in the bud anything sounding like a “what’s up bro” when you’re expecting “hello, would you like to go for a drink?” Online or offline, courtship is alive and well, for better or worse.

This fruit-eatingwoman appears to be enjoying her proscribed diet. But her smile might be bigger if there was a glass of wine and a hot bath – both officially off the table for pregnant women – on the scene.

I have no doubt that, when you want a baby, the pains of pregnancy are worth it.

But peering into my own future – one that is cloudy with a chance of pregnancy (I can’t say what per cent chance) – it’s hard not to feel some trepidation about the process. Although I’ve never thought pregnancy sounded like a party, in recent times I’ve had the opportunity to observe just how un-partyish it is. That is: as more of my friends become pregnant and then (amazingly capable) mothers, I’ve looked on with horrified fascination.

I find the swelling bellies of the girls I was going on the lash with only a year ago oddly riveting. How could I not, when I recall their anguished debates about whether bringing children into the world is philosophically right, or the outpourings of others who wondered if they’d ever find a man to date, let alone to father their child. Like a baby myself, I prod their bumps with curiosity, ask them in grotesque detail about their physical trials and – once they’re mothers – make them rehearse in detail their births.

Now, a leap from fascination to consternation, if I may.

The leap concerns a certain aura that surrounds pregnant women. It’s not that pregnant women (PWs from now on) don’t deserve an aura – one that excites commiseration and support. PWs go through all manner of hell that goes uncompensated at work or anywhere else – excessive tiredness, throwing up, often in the most embarrassing and unexpected ways, hormonal fluctuations. It is yet another unpaid form of work that women launch into (admittedly willingly – usually).

What I object to, though, is the way this aura becomes a way of fetishizing the pregnancy (never mind the initial stages of motherhood) to the detriment of the woman. That is: it is often done in a way that makes life less efficient and comfortable for her and insults her intelligence at the same time . The ”mum to be” is conceived of – though not necessarily treated like (as the oafs on the Tube who fail to get up for PWs show) – as a delicate vase.

This perceived delicacy manifests itself in several irritating ways. First, the woman is assumed to be stupid – particularly by the medical profession. Everything must be explained as though to a child, sometimes even in a baby voice. Thus, shows of independent thought and critical questioning by a PW are greeted with great discomfort. A friend of mine who had a problematic pregnancy reported that she was treated in a distinctly hostile manner by nurses for having tried to look up and make sense of some of the science. “It was as though they couldn’t believe I’d actually gone and Googled some of my own issues, and more shockingly still, demonstrated some basic scientific knowledge about them”. A different friend, a lawyer with a phD from Oxford, felt sickened by patronising, simplifying tone of the leafletry handed out to her before her first scan.

But you don’t need a phD to have common sense: “They talk to you like you’re some little ignorant lady-child from the 19^th century,” said another friend (who, umm, doesn’t have a phD but makes fabulous bunting and bags from home).

It’s not just doctors, nurses and official pamphlets that patronise – the worst of it, often, comes from other women, who seem to think they have (at least) part ownership of the bodies of their pregnant brethren, asking even those they barely know the most deeply personal questions about their bodies. Or, just as bad, drawing untimely conclusions – eg “oh! Not eating cheese I see, or glugging red. You must be EXPECTINNNNGGGG!!!!” Some friends have reported virtual strangers telling them the name they have chosen for their child is “awful”, often because they “once knew a Colin who picked his nose” or similar.

So on one hand, “mums” and would-be mums (including mothers and grandmothers) go utterly ga-ga. Screaming with joy is a normal reaction, and cooing for the remaining 6 months the natural sequel. At the same time, they become a kind of police force, briefed to make sure their fellow breeder isn’t slipping up or harming the unborn child.

Which brings me to the real crux of the issue and its most intrusive manifestation in every day life: what PWs can and can’t put in their gobs. These detailed rules seem to me to be an overzealous application of medical science. After all, babies want to survive. Mothers offer strong, relatively imperturbable environments for their doing so inasmuch as they offer bodies, and bodies are fairly hardy, surviving despite all the crap and harm we do to them. If we can binge drink for 15 years of our lives (from 15 to 30, say) several times a week and still keep going (and many people throw drugs into that mix, not to mention all sorts of bad foods) then it shows that our flesh lives on in spite of what we do to it, not because of it.

So are PWs really such delicate vessels for life? I’m not saying that pregnant women should head out and buy a pack of fags and a bottle of vodka – it’s not ethical to ignore known danger factors to unborn foetuses. So we’re stuck because the info is out there.

But the degree to which food and drink are sorted into “dos” and “don’ts” for PWs seems to be more about neurosis and making sure women have even less enjoyable lives than need be when pregnant, than about realistic risk. For example, cases of listeriosis, which can arise from eating mould-ripened cheese, is more problematic in pregnant women than in other cases. How frequent is it, then? According to the NHS, in 2010 there were an estimated 156 cases of listeriosis in England and Wales, 17 of which were in pregnant women. Our foremothers drank like Betty Draper and smoked like her too – a bit of sushi or mouldy cheese is hardly likely to wreak disaster. Nor a hot bath, also off the list, as a newly pregnant friend found when reading patronising advice to “enjoy lukewarm soaks”.

The official amount of alcohol pregnant women are told to drink is zero, even though the medically accepted amount is 2 units a week (or similar). Why not change the official figure, then? Because, I learned last week from an NHS insider, it might be confusing for women. Who – it can only be assumed – would hear the news and rush to the nearest offie for a celebratory bottle for one. The intelligence of pregnant women hardly seems held in high regard. Until 2007, expectant mothers were advised to drink in moderation. Before that, the official guidance was 8 units a week and, according to drinkaware, “midwives even urged their charges to drink stout because it’s high in iron”. The advice was changed, though, after research found that almost one in 10 expectant mothers drink more than the recommended limit. There is nothing said here about the harm that was doing. And one in 10 is a very small percentage.

Almost certainly I’d do the same. Bar the booze. I’d definitely take them up on the two units a week thing, and maybe push it to three.

Phew. It did. At least, so far.

This is, of course, a public conception and a public pregnancy, bearing the future queen or king of the realm. Apparently

The violent process of reproduction is not the sort of thing one wants all trussed up and lived out in public – not that it hasn’t been thus for millennia for royals.

, it might be twins. How WOULD that work?

The public nature of it is really rather horrific, though.

Pregnancy, from what I can tell, is a grisly, deeply intimate business, albeit with an inescapably public presentation. Childbirth is even grislier and more bodily and thus intimate, if universal.

The idea of my sexual congress, the horrible nausea and violence of my morning sickness, the work of my womb and cervix, ovaries and uterus being utterly public, is horrible. The idea of the nuances of my changing person; the way in which biological processes take hold of my very materiality and commandeer my body, being a matter of public hope, pressure, excitement and analysis, is beyond hideous.

Sounds like Kate’s having a really shit pregnancy. She was so sick she had to go to hospital to have an intravenous drip to rehydrate her after excessive vomiting. What if she gains, like, a million pounds? Pukes in public? Develops uncontrollable farting? Or worse- miscarries?

Already the public and the Prime Minister and editors are busy speculating, congratulating and eyeing.

The birth itself, if it were me giving birth that is and perhaps not Kate (Will, it could have been me!) , would be the stuff of existential confoundment – there I’d be, utterly overwhelmed by the violence of my body’s rendition of childbirth, engaged in the most elemental, least-prone-to self-consciousness activity possible on earth, while knowing that the WHOLE WORLD cared what happened in that room and would, quite soon, know every last detail about it. Whether it was an easy or a hellish birth, if I needed stitches, how long the labour took, if there were any scary moments and what they were, what I said to my husband as the baby came out…Or maybe I’d have a c-section. In which case I might be accused of being “too posh to push”.

Just imagine if the baby was unhealthy, deformed, or – as is more common than people realise, born intersexed.

The public appropriation of and fascination with the processes of the female body is nothing new. But that it hasn’t slackened at all, perhaps has become even more hysterical, is notable.

Glad it’s Kate and not me. Just saying.

Concerning, especially where children’s access is concerned, but not the culprit perse.

The Leveson report has included some damning words on how British newspapers present women. (Funny, I’d have thought they’d get full marks. Still, I’m sure Leveson’s frown is going to help a great deal – “hey guys, be fairer to women! You know, fairer! On a scale from one to ten, your representation of women gets a 3, bring it up to an 8 at least! Go!”)

As there’s only recent research on how the British press treats women (guess in the 1790s/1970s they weren’t really into that – shame on them and very mystifying), the Beeb helpfully compiled a list of five things the press does worst in its representation of women. It spoke to “experts” including…other journalists, and – enjoyably, Germaine Greer.

The objectification of women in an overt and borderline pornographic way was a first complaint. It is problematic and weird that at 7AM a little kid could look over their parent’s shoulder at “Coco”‘s buttocks in the Sun or Daily Sport, or indeed skim any number of pages and see any number of images telling an unsavoury story of women.

What’s a bigger issue is the appetite for papers like the Sport. I can say this from my ivory, Times-reading tower, of course – but to assume that a certain socio-economic class likes that kind of thing BECAUSE of their class is even worse. Not to obsess about the 18th century, but the working classes then devoured the likes of Newton (his Optics), not to mention a plethora of medical texts and, of course, the smutty engravings by one Hogarth, which we now view in the Tate. Maybe one day Page Three snapshots will be in the Tate.

But I digress. The complaint I took issue with, so to speak, was the one about women learning from air-brushed images of celebrities how they’re meant to look, and then feeling crappy when it doesn’t work out like that.

Ok – so here’s a word to the wise, such as Paul Staines of mega political blog Guido Fawkes, who senses his daughters will develop painfully unachievable body image from the airbrushed likes of Kiera Knightley and so on (and what about Kate Middleton? Is she too sacred, too “real”, to contribute to poor body image?). The word is: it’s not going to be Daily Mail pictures of movie stars that make your daughters feel like crap. It’ll be the knowledge that the men they want to relax with and impress – in bed and other places-  will have been watching porn every day for their entire post-pubescent lives. Men may ogle the naked women in the Sport over tea in the morning – horrifyingly because so publicly. But it’s the privacy of porn that makes it go deep, the power of the orgasmic association that forges helplessly deep, visceral triggers of attraction and new tastes. It’s this knowledge that will do the harm, instill a deep sense of self-doubt in your daughters – will make them feel that they can never be wild, coy, thin, hairless, boobalicious/androgynous and open enough for the true desires of their sexual partners who will, hopefully, be too polite to say so.

Do men get off on images of Kiera Knightley? I’ve never met one. Do they get off on glamour models and porn stars? Of course.

The work of body image problems does, of course, start with the rain of images of beautiful famous people. But the work of porn – the knowledge of its power I mean* – will dig the tunnels of self-doubt deeper and more windingly.

Now I know that female body image is not all, or even mostly, about pleasing men – people aren’t usually anorexic for the people they want to attract. It’s a matter of control in a chaotic, often difficult personal universe; desire for self mastery and so on.

But the sense of deep insufficiency deriving from the ubiquity of porn is even harder to deal with than plain body dissatisfaction (NB: I am NOT referring to anorexia here) as it’s a personwide thing, not just a body thing. Nobody feels they ought to BE like Sienna Miller even if they think they should look like her. But we might feel we ought to be a bit more like a porn star.

*Yes, I know, women watch porn too. About a third of porn is watched by women. I think it can be positive. Women who watch porn enjoy it. Or else they wouldn’t watch it. I think. As for its effects on their body image, I don’t know.

Once a glorious thinker, now a giggly pseudo-science pusher.

Naomi Wolf was my first feminist hero(ine?) because of her astoundingly good book The Beauty Myth (1991), which asserts with utter brilliance that oppression of women has moved from the outside inside. Women can never look good enough and so they can never feel good enough to proceed as fully realised, confident persons.

That book was so powerful it made me furious for months, and to this day I am hyper-aware of the comments women make about their appearance and, in the same breath, their perceived degree of presentability to the world (“No way am I leaving the house; someone might see me. I look awful/forgot my concealer/feel fat”). I make those sorts of comments too. Frequently. I labour under the beauty myth too. (I know!)

But in recent times my hero(ine?) has seemed to go downhill. Her recent book Vagina: A New Biography has been utterly panned. Everyone has taken issue with her use of science – there is lots of “neuroscience now tells us” but such claims are not really presented with empirical rigour.

Many people have railed against Wolf’s insistence on the “brain-vagina” connection, saying that it is simply reducing women to their bodies/vaginas once again. Which, of course, could be seen as odd work for a feminist icon.

And still I withheld judgement because – batty as Wolf may now be – I am still in awe of her. And so with great excitement I went along to see her in all her vadazzling glory last week at a Trinity College Cambridge Literary Society event. (She herself charmingly noted the oddness of talking vaginas in an oak-panelled room lined with the portraits of dead white men.)

She was all tousled hair, high-belted hips, burning blue eyes. It was hard to know how to bring up the topic of the vagina biography tactfully. I mentioned that I’d written an early piece about it for the Sunday Times and an icy gleam appeared in her eyes. To counteract the assumption that I was an evil detractor, I gushed that I was in that very room – doing an MPhil in Gender Studies – because of The Beauty Myth.  She grinned, her ego fluttering warmly, and said: “that never gets old”.

But she let me down. The Beauty Myth author was nowhere to be seen. While I have no problem with her central claim that “we have misunderstood the vagina by thinking of it as a sexual organ”, I had a problem with the flirtatious, girly creature I saw giving a talk, gigglingly talking about rat coquetry and dopamine, “the ultimate feminist neurotransmitter” (part of her “science now shows” bit).  Wolf talked about the “incredible cocktail available to women” in the form of opulates, dopamine and the bonding hormone oxytocin, which I think most people learned about in high school biology or perhaps through that Jay-Z (or is it Kanye?) song about women and their post-sex bonding habits.

Wolf talked about male wiring and female wiring (essentialism much?),  charmingly describing how the female neural-genital wiring system is a bit like Rio at Carnival, while the male network is Manhattan, all grid and up-and-down. “The thing is,” she murmured conspiratorially, “Every woman’s neural wiring is absolutely unique.”

It felt less like a feminist manifesto for the 21^st century woman (and man) and more like a Women’s Institute cupcake party or sewing convention. “Grab a glass of Merlot ladies, let’s talk about the vagina!”

What with the climax-tastic Fifty Shades of Grey, the pressure to explore – then talk all about about – one’s orgasms seems to be mounting (as it were). Wolf – though she thinks she’s helping – would have done better to bring her considerable academic talent to bear on the history of fear and loathing in relation to female sexual pleasure than a pseudo-scientific, personalised look at “our” misunderstood vaginas. Make us strong and fulfilled, make us bright and engaged, help us choose and forge good relationships – surely these things, not the orgasm itself, is what makes women empowered, happy and creative.