The Sex Lives of English Women

by Wendy Jones

  So many people I see never get hugged. They live on their own or with a flatmate and they work in an office and they come home again. People don’t hug out there in the world. It’s painful. Painful. A few months ago I started something called Cuddle Sessions. No sexual touch. Both of us dressed or in pyjamas and just holding, and a lot of people came for it. But even in sessions where there’s something much more sexual-looking going on, it always ends with a deep holding. People need to know that their bodies are acceptable and that their desires are acceptable and it’s okay to be held.

  I come across a lack of sex education. Most parents don’t talk about sex. And mainstream porn is not doing anyone favours. I had one man come to me, he was thirty-two, he’d never had sex because he told me that his penis was deformed and disfigured. He was really upset by this. We emailed a lot – he was too afraid to come for a session. After a year of emailing, I said, ‘Look, don’t come for a session; come for a cup of tea. Come for a chat.’ I thought, what is going on? I was googling all these different disfigurations of the penis. Eventually he came and I said, ‘I’m going to have to take a look, because I’m not going to be able to help you unless I know what I’m dealing with.’ And he’d never been naked in front of a woman. I get that a lot.

  Eventually he managed to take down his trousers, take down his underpants, and I see this beautiful penis hanging there. He was like, ‘Please tell me if I’ll ever be able to have sex.’ I was like, ‘What do you think is wrong with it?’ He said, ‘It hangs to the left. I’ve seen porn and I know that they hang straight and mine doesn’t hang straight.’ I said to him, ‘Most men hang to one side or the other; you never see a flaccid penis in porn, so you wouldn’t know. When you’re erect you’re straight?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I am.’ I was like, ‘So it’s the same.’

  I said, ‘Even if your penis wasn’t normal because it hung to the left, women’s vaginas stretch. Babies can come out of there!’ He thought because it hung slightly to the left that he would hurt a woman. He had a few sessions and got to the point where he accepted that he was normal. What he really needed to do was just put his penis in a woman’s vagina to see that it would fit. Which is not something I offer. I referred him to a colleague who would do that and again another year went by – he was too afraid to do it. Eventually out of the blue I got a message from him saying, ‘I saw your colleague. She’s amazing! You’re amazing! I did it! I put it in! I’m normal!’ He’s free and liberated, he’s dating.

  Everyone to some degree has some concern around their sexuality. Whatever society, background, religion you grow up in, someone’s usually been taught fear, shame and guilt, or they’ve picked it up from society or advertising. Most people have travelled up to their head and they value thinking and intellect, and very few people live embodied. I think everyone is suffering sexually. Some people figure it out and have great sex lives. I just don’t see them that often. I’ve seen people who were married for twenty-something years and they’ve got divorced and there was no sex for the last ten years. Or people who are still married however many years down the line but there is no communication between them and they’ve suppressed who they were. Or their desires were rejected early on. I saw a man who was married for forty years but for thirty-nine of those years they’d slept in separate rooms at her request. He said, ‘I love her, I don’t want to leave her but I’m missing a huge chunk of who I am.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to go and see an escort but I need someone to wake my body up, remind me who I am as a sexual being.’ He had it back for himself. Which for me is the most important thing.

  I get turned on. Yeah. Often. Yeah! With both men and women. I’m using my sexual energy to draw their sexual energy out, not in a ‘Come on, baby, let’s do it’ way. It’s more like, my sexual energy is always on to some degree or another but I use it as a kind of like a template for their energy to come. I meet them where they are and then I turn it up a degree. There might be the desire in my body to have sex with them, the awareness that it would feel really good to have something penetrate me, but I don’t do that, because the sessions are not about my pleasure. I’m very clear that my needs and pleasures are taken care of outside of a session. I use my sexual energy to help this person who’s come to me expand and explore their sexuality, like a teacher might use their intelligence to create intelligence but they are probably going somewhere else to get their intellectual needs met. There might be the desire for penetration but it’s never that ‘Oh, God! I have to have it now!’ It’s more like, I can say to somebody, ‘Can you see and feel my body is turned on and aroused, this is you doing it,’ and they’re, ‘Oh, wow! I can turn someone on! Hurray!’

  Up until last week it would be absolutely no penetrative sex ever for anyone. Most of the time whatever it is someone needs from me does not require penetration. Just doesn’t. I want to get someone to the point where they’re ready and confident and can go out and create their own sex life. They don’t need to get that need met with me. But last week, my partner said, ‘I feel like our relationship is evolving and your work is evolving, and were you to feel it was necessary for someone’s highest good it would be okay.’ I said, ‘Wow, that’s new.’ I started thinking about, have I ever needed to do that? Honestly, in the ten years I’ve been doing it, I’d say there were ten people where I thought that’s what they needed from me. And in those cases, it wasn’t gratuitous, although I hesitate to use ‘gratuitous’ around pleasure, because what’s gratuitous pleasure? But one of them just needed to put it in to see if it was possible.

  I’m so blessed to be with my partner. He’s actually gender-queer but he’s a man. Most of the time. He was born into a male body. He told me that he always wanted to be with someone who was in the sex industry, because he felt sex was so important that it rules everyone’s lives in some way, whether they’re getting it or not. Written in the stars or what? Every time my partner and I have penetrative sex I find myself going, ‘Oh my God, it’s still happening!’ because in all my other relationships sex fell off after ten, twenty times. I still wanted it, but they didn’t. Every time my partner’s inside me it’s like, ‘Wow, you still want to be inside me!’ Seven and a half years later, that’s still being desired of me. I am sexually satisfied. Yeah! With my partner, it deepens all the time. And because we both – this might sound weird – we can both move in and out of gender. Sometimes he’s the woman and I’m the man, he’s more gender-fluid than I am. And we play with power play as well, sometimes one of us is dominant, the other submissive. Sometimes we shape-shift and become other beings beside human.

  We talk of our sex lives in terms of Thorpe Park – the amusement park. We say, there’s the rides we know well and we go on frequently because they’re right at the beginning of the park and it’s easy. Then there’s some other rides, they’re a bit further back: when we’ve got time we go visit those rides. And there are some rides we know we’d like to go on sometime but the time has to be right. And there are whole parts of the park that aren’t even built yet, and that’s really exciting. And other parts are still under construction. So we can never get bored. We’ve got all these realms to play in and it never gets boring.’

  12

  Feminist

  Shirley, seventies, Leeds

  ‘There was always somebody ready to come and have sex with me’

  ‘When I was sixteen I met my first husband. I went to this party, I met him, that was it, I was totally in love with him from that minute on. Arthur was at university. For me, oh God! that was exciting. I knew I could never get to university. Nobody in my family had ever gone – I came from a very working-class family. It was one of those fantastic things that other people did, like people went on holiday abroad. It’s incredible to think how different life was then.

  The first date we had he told me his father had died that day, so instead of going to the cinema we went for a walk. I first had sex with him – and when I think back, oh my God! I wouldn’t do that now – when his mother
was in the house. My God, it was so risky. This was before we were married; I was sixteen, Arthur was nineteen. I was scared because it was not the right thing to do: it was against my morality – I knew that. But I was also very keen to have sex. I was a sexy girl. I was always desperate for it.

  I think because I was adopted – I’m sure this happens in ordinary families but this is my view of it – I didn’t fit my parents. They got landed with me, which must have been the shock of their lives. They had got this beautiful baby at six weeks and I turned into a really wild child. And they didn’t know what to do with me. I’d be outside cuddling a boyfriend, I would be out late, my dad would come looking for me because he was frightened that anything could happen to me: ‘Come on, lady! Or else.’ I don’t think people do this now. It was crazy! My dad would come out and he’d go one way and we ran the other way and then I’d be back home before him. I’m so ashamed now when I think of it. But I think it’s the strength of one’s sexual feelings, really.

  When I was eighteen I went to be a nurse in Sheffield. In those days there were matrons and it was all very strict. God knows what made me think I could be a nurse. I remember the first time I went on the wards I fainted, I was never going to be a nurse. Never. But the idea was to get away from home; it didn’t matter what I did. Arthur came to Sheffield to a chemical company on his university placement and he had a little flat. Then of course the inevitable happened and I got pregnant and I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t tell a soul. I knew I was going to have to tell people I was pregnant and the whole world was going to be mad with me.

  I told my mum and dad; they were horrified. They were furious at Arthur. Oh my God, it was awful. My family were difficult; they said Arthur was too thin. Arthur’s family thought I wasn’t good enough for him because they were an academic family. They lived in a little house – a very poor house because the money had all been spent on sending the four boys to university. Where I lived wasn’t rough but it was a village outside the town and they thought, ‘This little …!’ I was very insensitive to them. I thought I was okay, but looking back, I think, ‘Oh, Shirley!’ I was like my granddaughters are with me now: ‘I know everything! You know nothing!’ So a bit of that. It was decided – there was no thought about it – that we were going to get married. My mum and dad said they would buy me a wedding dress because they wanted it to look as if it was a real wedding. And it all happened and we got married in church. His family refused to come, which is interesting in itself.

  We stayed with my mum and dad, then I had Richard. Arthur graduated and eventually we could afford to buy a house in Leeds because they were cheap. Then my mum was making noises about, ‘Are you going to have another child?’ This was in the sixties. Arthur was not interested in sex. He had a very low sex drive and I didn’t. I remember one time he came home and I said, ‘Come here.’ ‘No.’ I realise looking back: that is weird when you’re twenty-one. Once we went to stay the night at his boss’s house – him and his wife were charming – and Arthur wouldn’t have sex because he didn’t want to mess the sheets. By that time, or very shortly after that, I had affairs with people, one affair after another. I was having affair after affair. I’d be nineteen, twenty. I was obviously really needy.

  I was like a little Stepford wife. Arthur would invite his bridge group over – I was making stuffed tomatoes for them. I was the little one at home with the boys. I was having sex with my husband but not very satisfactorily at all. We had a lovely 1930s house in Leeds, a front room with a bay window, and a dining room with doors out to the garden and a lovely breakfast room – it was a lovely, lovely house. I was very happy with my two boys, and I had this sex on the side, always, and when one person went, another person just appeared. I remember thinking, ‘This is like a sort of magic.’ Somebody went, there was always somebody else waiting in the wings. It was almost as if there was nobody that I wouldn’t have sex with. I think they were all married. Sometimes it was friends’ husbands. I think I was starving, actually, sexually. I lived quite happily with my husband at the same time as having affairs with people I met at the library and, interestingly, mostly men from other cultures: Asian men, African men. Other cultures meant excitement, exotic, interest, something different, with lots to learn about the culture, about everything. Exciting. I always did want to do exciting things and be with exciting men. I’ve always been involved with foreign men, always.

  Eventually I thought, ‘I can’t do this my whole life long.’ I told Arthur I’d had all these affairs – maybe thirty, something like that, a lot. He went into shock. I said, ‘How could you not know?’ Because he did things like bring his friends home – young men from work – and they’d sit around. He’d go to bed and leave me with them. When I look back I think, ‘That’s not normal.’ Now, with my ability to think psychoanalytically, I think something was going on! I always thought I was a very bad person. But was I? Was I really the baddie? It wasn’t as if I was immoral, but it looks as if I was. So interesting.

  I went to some event at the City Hall and met this penniless Mexican seven years younger than me – I was twenty-six, he was nineteen – and just totally fell in love, whatever that is. And had sex all the time at the beginning. Terrific. I ran off with Javier to a bedsit in Hastings and I left my children and, oh God, it was a terrible time in my life. I was happy in a way but I missed my children very much. I cried several times to come back to my husband. I wanted to come back and I wanted it to be okay but I just couldn’t. I’d come back for a day and it was as if I’d died, then I would go to this other guy again. And eventually Arthur said he was divorcing me.

  Because I was so afraid that Arthur would commit suicide, when we got divorced I left Richard with Arthur; that was another terrible mistake I made. I think Richard’s never forgiven me. And of course Arthur neglected Richard and Richard eventually came to live with me. I made such terrible decisions … But I was terrified Arthur would commit suicide because he was very broken. To tell you the truth, I don’t think Arthur ever recovered.

  I lived with the two children in this really cheap, ghastly house in Leeds. Did my best with it. Had no money. I was very miserable. The boys and I always used to sleep in the same room because we were scared. I was totally reckless: Javier went to Mexico and I decided I was going to see him. So I left my children with this German lodger I had and I went off to Mexico. I must have been bloody crazy. When we came back, the relationship started to wear off and I got terribly afraid and it all got very ugly. And it’s so funny because he got in touch with me latterly – he’s a lawyer now – and I thought, ‘Oh my God, he is so pompous; what was I doing in those days?’ It must have been sex. It was sex, nothing else except sex. Because I think now, ‘Oh God Almighty!’

  So I came back to Leeds, I went off to university, did my BA in History and English. I remember applying for university and waiting. When I got the letter to say that they’d accepted me I was delirious with joy. It was terrific. Because it opened me up to world literature. I remember reading Solzhenitsyn and going, ‘How could I have lived without knowing this?’ Terrific. And I did philosophy and all those ideas were fabulous. I graduated and then I got a job in a small school. Oh! In my class I had Muslims, Confucians, I’d have Hindus, people from the Caribbean, I’d have Catholics, I’d have everybody in the same class altogether. It was a wonderful school.

  At that time I had a series of boyfriends – I don’t know what I must have thought of myself. They were all younger than me. And all very interested in sex, as I was. I had a boyfriend who was a scaffolder but he was a furniture remover as well. I went to York with him in his big furniture van and we – it was crazy – set up the bed. The people were coming the next day and the night before they got there we slept in their bed! There were no curtains so every time I saw a car I thought, ‘Oh my God, they’re coming!’ I mean, he was totally unsuitable. Then I got somebody else who was equally difficult. That was quite a violent relationship physically. Then there were bits and pieces.
There was this other guy and it was sort of finishing but I thought, ‘Right, I’ll try and revive it. I’m going to Turkey for a month with this man.’ So I went to Turkey and I took my two children.

  Once we got to Turkey it was obvious this guy wasn’t interested. On the third day, I went out with my two little boys on the bus and the bus stopped halfway to Istanbul and everybody got off and this very attractive young man came up to me and said, ‘Parlez-vous français?’ and I said, ‘Un petit peu.’ Well. That was it! Oh my God. He told me he had been on his way back to university but there had been a military coup and somebody had come into his class and shot someone and the university had been closed, so instead he came swimming with us and we spent the whole week together.

  He was Turkish. Another great love affair. I went back and forward to Istanbul the whole time. Eventually in 1979 Amir came here and we got married. We’re not married now. We had eleven years together and he is the father of my youngest son, Adam, and, yes, we had some really happy years together. He was fifteen years younger than me, which is a lot. Amir must have been twenty when I met him and I was thirty-five. We were happy together for a while. He was very … cherishing, I think, is the word. The problem was me, actually. If I’d had some understanding of myself as a person, it would have lasted. I did push him away: it was very difficult for me to make a space for him. When all his books came, I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I want to make a space for them,’ and he had a tiny space for his books.

  When I was married to Amir I didn’t have affairs, I didn’t have to. Because sex was good. I didn’t ache to have affairs. I suppose he was my dream man, he was very handsome, funny, very hospitable, lovely personality. Maybe that’s why I was so devastated when he went. I was devastated, totally devastated, for years. He went off with somebody else whom he’s still with – Margaret. I can remember having dreams of tearing Margaret apart with my teeth, because it was so awful. It was the worst time of my life. For years I couldn’t see Amir. Adam went to him for weekends but I couldn’t see Amir when he came to pick up Adam: I was always not in, or the door was left open.