• Want a relationship but have got into the habit of ‘shag first, think later’.
Goes well with …
• Dwell on Your Sense of Self
• Do Something Lofty
• Do Not Pursue
Lucy, 33, was out on the town with her friend Karen, 29. They met two guys, and it wasn’t clear at first who fancied who. Soon it became clear that both the guys fancied Karen. But Karen wasn’t up for it with either of them – one was downright unattractive, let’s call him Bill, and the hotter one, let’s call him Bob, didn’t do it for her either. When Lucy, who had been single for two years and felt insecure about her attractiveness, asked Karen if she’d mind if she took Bob home with her, Karen gave her the thumbs up. ‘But don’t expect anything,’ she called after Lucy as she got into Bob’s BMW. Karen worried about Lucy when she did this kind of thing, since she always wound up hurt or with a sense of self-loathing.
What happened next …
Lo and behold, the next day Lucy rang Karen to talk about Bob, who had not made much effort to show he liked Lucy either in the bar or after sex. Lucy knew he wasn’t a candidate – he was good looking but a typical sports-car-owning chump and none too bright. She knew she wasn’t supposed to have had any expectations, or to have developed any. And, like a ‘good’ girl, she’d made it clear to him the night before that it was a one-off. All the same, like a ‘bad’ girl, she’d developed expectations since they’d shagged. And now she felt rejected, angry with herself for doing this again, used and a tiny bit abused. What for? Because she was horny and it would be fun, she’d thought, but since he hadn’t been that into her, the sex hadn’t been warm or nice or horn-satisfying; it had been alienating and detached instead. She’d felt compelled to do it even though she knew it would be like that, she confessed to Karen.
What does ‘no strings’ sex really mean?
Technically, it means both parties walk away from the sack unfettered by commitment and, supposedly, any desire to commit. It means that you can sleep with lots of people at once. It means you don’t have to be burdened. In reality, it means that guys don’t have to do anything boring like call the girl or seem interested in dating her (or date her) after sex. As a woman, it means that you’d better not show attachment, need or expectation after sex – if you do, you’ve broken the rules and you have to go to your room for punishment. Bad girl. Above all, it’s a term that goes hand in hand with ‘fuck-buddy’ and ‘friends with benefits’, and that often doesn’t bear much relationship to reality – at least, reality as it is for women. Who are, of course, half the heterosexual sexual equation.
Why it’s a hoax
The drive to undersell our needs in love and in bed is amazingly strong. Recently a friendship of mine with a suddenly single man turned flirty. I suggested, as did he, that some sex could be fun, but refused to guarantee I would do it without feelings. ‘If we do it, it’ll have to be on my terms,’ he said. ‘What are they?’ I asked hopefully – rather relishing the prospect of something as-yet unnamed with him. ‘No strings,’ he replied curtly, accessing with instinctive ease that cold, sibilant rule that enables men (and women) to forbid the natural by-product of sex and one of its great joys – actual intimacy – to come anywhere near the act. Great for men, perhaps, to whom ridiculous amounts of research has attributed a desire for quantity over quality in sex, as well as a lower amount of oxytocin, the post-sex attachment hormone. But not great for me; or for most women. Post-Man Diet, I refused to recant this rule, and we didn’t end up doing anything. But there have been many times when my mind has returned to his offer. Even though I know I’d have hated it when, after we’d slept together, he’d inevitably have boasted about other conquests in front of me, and that I’d have to present this chipper, tough facade so that he didn’t think, God forbid, I’d felt a string of attachment.
The audacious Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), rages wonderfully against the injustice of a slightly different type of sexual servitude in 1792. Lambasting her infuriating contemporary, she writes:
‘Rousseau declares that a woman should […] be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself.’
She’s right: being ready to indulge male predilections for NSA sex, for fear of not being wanted at all, makes willing slaves of us. The Man Diet should ignite a resistance to being available for whenever a man ‘chooses to relax himself’ (for all intents and purposes).
Put those feelings away: why NSA is worse for women
The ‘no strings’ proclamation before sex is far more evil than it might sound. It slams the door not just on the here and now – as in, this sex will be about bodies only, so don’t you even think about enjoying it too much in your head or heart – but on the whole question of possibility and potential. It says: ‘You will only ever be about sex, because I don’t fancy you enough to think about anything else, and I will never fancy you enough to think about anything else.’ This is an immensely bitter pill to swallow for women (and perhaps some men), and yet so many of us – myself included – have swallowed it numerous times.
That a lot of no-strings sex is bad for women is widely acknowledged by the psychological community. Dr Cecilia d’Felice, clinical psychologist, says: ‘In studies we have found what you might expect: that if you offer men opportunistic sex, most of the time they’ll take it. If you offer women opportunistic sex, most of the time they won’t. There’s a huge difference in the programming of risk-taking between men and women. Women are biologically more risk averse for obvious reasons.’
Relationships therapist Val Sampson says women are hardwired to be quite choosy about who we have sex with. ‘So even if women say they’re fine with no-strings sex, it’s not necessarily the case. If you become just a vessel a lot of men have sex in, you’re going against the grain. Whereas men can compartmentalise sex more easily, women feel a sense of being let down. All that potential they could use in a sexual act isn’t being used – it’s actually being rejected and this triggers a feeling of “What am I worth?” She may end up feeling like a hooker but get no money at the end of it.’
No-strings sex and its spirit of female denial and stagnation is lambasted deliciously by Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch in 1970. In her forward to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition, she lists all the sexual freedoms women can now enjoy since the book was first published. ‘What else could women want?’ she asks dangerously. ‘Freedom, that’s what … Freedom from self-consciousness. Freedom from the duty of sexual stimulation of jaded male appetite, for which no breast ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever long enough … The argument in The Female Eunuch is still valid, for it holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality, which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances.’
Just say no … but why is it so hard?
For one, agreeing to no-strings sex is easy. All the terminology is laid out and ready to go: ‘fuck-buddy’, ‘friends with benefits’ and so on. And, as I said in the introduction, it masquerades as empowerment for women, whereby shagging like a man is what we do now because we can and, as ‘feminists’, we should.
But on a personal level, a deep fear of seeming needy has taken hold of women – the stereotype of the woman who encumbers her man and everyone around her with a bottomless pit of wanting and needing and insecurity has reached epic proportions, and floats tyrannously through our minds as we conduct ourselves sexually and romantically. Dr Janet Reibstein, Visiting Professor in Psychology at the University of Exeter and the author of a book reporting on what makes couples happy, observes: ‘It’s seen as somewhat shameful to say “I want to settle down.” The shame comes from admitting prioritising relationship over independence. If a woman says, “I don’t want to have sex with you because I want a relationship,” a man may respond with alarm: “uh-oh, she’s trying to capture me!”.’ Reibstein also thinks