The Helen 100

by Helen Razer

  I am glad that I said nothing. Although frequently preoccupied with depressing statistics, Maddie had been an agreeable presence on Facebook and I often enjoyed her reports. She was agreeable, too, when she arrived at my house quite early that morning. ‘You need some biscuits,’ she had told me by message and, good to her promise, arrived with a batch of homemade ginger snaps, which were covered with an actual gingham napkin, such as one sees in lifestyle cookbooks but very rarely in the wild.

  Although I was not able to eat Maddie’s baked goods due to radical sobbing, I was very grateful for the care with which they had been produced. And, I eventually became grateful for the detailed post-dump dating advice Maddie offered.

  Maddie was a fixer. Although she had not yet been successful in dismantling the patriarchy and/or equalising the front pages of world press, she was determined to fix my grief.

  ‘What,’ she asked as she removed a greaseproof bag to make a place to sit on my sofa, ‘would make you feel better right now? Tell me and I’ll help you find it.’

  I answered, ‘Yoga class,’ which was bullshit. I dislike yoga and all allied activity undertaken by women who have so much time for leisure they can afford to squander it lying on the floor listening to someone yabber in fake Sanskrit while hardly burning any calories at all. But ‘yoga class’ was the first thing that came to mind.

  When I realised Maddie had plans that required more from me than sobbing ‘WHY?’ I wanted her to fuck right off to feminist land. I decided that I would pretend to ready myself for yoga class. She would leave and I would learn if Eleven liked ginger snaps. Her good spirits were welcome on the internet but very demanding in real life.

  But Maddie was a better student of others than I had supposed. She said, ‘Girl, you’re so full of shit.’ She said she knew that I was the sort about as likely to be calmed by yoga as the women of al-Nusra might have been by enforced participation in the Miss Universe competition, or something else quite funny, and she demanded to know, ‘What do you really want?’

  ‘Death,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘To watch The Shawshank Redemption.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Maddie. ‘Besides which, it’s sexist.’ (This may be true. I’m not sure. You’d have to ask another serious feminist.)

  ‘Okay. You know how you’re one of those sex-positive feminists?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘Well, I think I want some positive feminist sex.’

  ‘Great!’ said Maddie, and offered to introduce me to a friend of a friend called Ines, a pretty pansexual and Head Sleepwear Designer for a well-known ladies’ chain store. Actually, I’d met Ines at a few Gay Baby-naming ceremonies. She had a sexy lisp and dressed for the tastes of a naughty mid-century man.

  I did take Ines’s number, but not because I thought she would have sex with me, or even that I wanted to have sex with her. I took it because I was in urgent need of a new sleeping garment.

  ‘Actually, I think I want positive feminist sex with a man.’

  Maddie was a heterosexual feminist, but a feminist nonetheless. And so, the displeasure on her face was plain as soon as I uttered this urge. She was disappointed I had abandoned woman-only activity.

  ‘Hm,’ she said.

  I felt obliged to reassure this feminist that I had not shunned the embrace of my sisters forever. And this moment of civility, my first in days, forced me to think about men, and why I wanted sex with one of them.

  I have never endured a preference for the company of just one sex. But now, a man was what I craved, and I really couldn’t explain this to myself, much less Maddie, who seemed so disappointed she needed an explanation. So I was forced to think.

  Perhaps, given that a woman had just dumped me, I had a need for distance from the feminine physique? That explanation was plausible, but I couldn’t offer it to a feminist, as it sounded sexist to ascribe the qualities of one woman to all. But, still, vagina. Ugh.

  Perhaps we could say that sex with men was easier than sex with women? I decided to elaborate on this idea of men as simpler partners.

  ‘Sex with men is over in more of a hurry,’ I said. ‘Sex with women tends to go on forever, especially on first dates.’

  This is actually true. Sapphic sex can often be a case of ‘Your turn, my turn’ and recalls an all-night game of basketball, only with orgasms instead of points. Half-time entertainment does not involve dancing, either, but listening to the story of someone’s childhood trauma. Or eating a wheat-free tortilla with pH-neutral beans. In short, first-date lesbianism is a young and fit woman’s game. Neither my ageing jaw nor my patience were up to it.

  ‘So, you are saying that sex with men is quicker, less meaningful, and therefore more transactional?’ she said, hopefully. Maddie was nearly as disappointed by my refusal to be A Lesbian as the men on the XXX app, although for different reasons.

  ‘Yes! I don’t want involvement, Maddie. I want to make an exchange. I want efficient sex that ends when someone comes. Because, frankly, I’m both horny and exhausted.’

  Although pacified by my account of men as single-use vaginal wipes, Maddie still wasn’t entirely pleased. She admired women-only enterprise, even if this enterprise was pleasure and even if it did mean a little extra work. Maddie herself was a tireless worker for the cause of female emancipation, showing active dedication to raising funds for women-only spaces and the like. I am pretty sure she thought the least a non-activist like me could do was eat a little muff.

  But the matter of desire, unlike women’s housing, is not political. Sex can never be governed by good intentions, as my newly waxed ex-girlfriend would probably concede.

  I said, ‘I do imagine I’ll see women again,’ to reassure her. Then I said, ‘Sexuality is a spectrum, you know,’ which is something I’d heard other young feminists say. I knew that ‘fluidity’ was a popular theme with serious feminists, so I took it up.

  ‘I think I need to be more fluid,’ I said.

  Maddie said, ‘Right,’ and opened her MacBook, bringing almost the same resolve to the provision of penis as she did to the maintenance of women’s safe houses.

  ‘Let’s find you some cock, then.’

  ‘Do you think I could get someone to fuck me? I mean, I haven’t seen Eleni the beauty therapist in months and I suspect I look a fright.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Maddie said. ‘You are effortlessly stunning.’

  You should know that I am not ‘effortlessly stunning’. Give me forty-five minutes in a bathroom and I’ll produce ‘moderately presentable’, but nothing more. ‘Effortlessly stunning’ does not legitimately describe the appearance of most humans, much less one who has been dumped in the middle of summer. I have selfies from the period and ‘week-old offal in a nightgown’ comes much closer to capturing the vision.

  In the effort not to look like budget meats, I called Eleni and made the appointment for the afternoon. It was not yet lunchtime and Maddie had decided that the day had sufficient stuff left in it to unite me with one and possibly two persons in possession of a functional penis. Clearly, a dolphin was required.

  ‘We’re going to write you a good, traditional dating profile,’ she said. ‘Like on the old-timey internet. Not one of those young people’s location-based sex apps.’

  She explained that I was vulnerable. Too vulnerable for Tinder or for the hard stink of the filthy XXX application I had previously tried. ‘Get off those things. Stop looking for the penis icon in your postcode. Proximity can’t be your only criterion,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll do it this way, and if you have to travel a bit to meet your penis, at least it will be attached to someone who probably shares your taste in film.’

  I may have been too vulnerable, but probably, to be honest, also a little too old for the instant fix of the mobile-only application. She wanted me to slow down and think for a minute and jolly well act my age.

  ‘You can still access this one on your phone,’ she said.
‘It’s an app, but less impulse-friendly than Tinder. No “dick near me” coordinates.’

  Maddie was right. I had looked at Tinder. It seemed very much like Uber, but for sexually transmitted infections.

  Slow down. Take a minute.

  She asked me to think, slowly and specifically, about what we’d write in the yet-to-be-published dating profile she guaranteed would have me meeting one or two more-or-less suitable persons with penis inside a day. I explained to her that there were hundreds of men on the XXX app who didn’t really care to read a profile or discuss cinema at all. Surely this was a waste of time and I should simply dress as a sheep.

  ‘You are not,’ she said, ‘twenty-five anymore. You are in your forties. And a bit of a grump.’ Her point being that I was, both generationally and genetically, disinclined to be tolerant when meeting new people.

  Besides which, she said, ‘You are a known snob who would have a fit if you met some bloke whose favourite band was Coldplay.’

  I couldn’t argue with her logic. I was a terrible snob, and so was my vagina.

  ‘Come on, Sugar Tits,’ she said. ‘You’re the copywriter. Advertise yourself.’

  There are those who manage this sort of self-promotion with ease. But I approached it as I approach most activity: with crippling reflection. In any case, I had never been particularly good at advertising. I would never be an in-demand copywriter because my work, as some important tool at an important agency assessed during interview, was ‘Edgy, but bad edgy.’ He said that my bad attitude would prevent me from ever writing, or enacting, a slogan half as good as ‘Just Do It’.

  I know there are vigorous persons who live their lives to the motivation of ‘Just Do It’, and they even sometimes win. I am simply not one of them. I tend to think at length before committing to an intimate or professional action. This does not mean that I act wisely, or even that I act at all. It does mean, however, I am painfully conscious that the ‘Just Do It’ advertising slogan was inspired by the final words of a convicted murderer, Gary Gilmore, as he faced the firing squad in the United States.

  When I mentioned this to Maddie she told me to shut up, cease all thoughts of homicide—reminding me that women are more likely to be brutally killed by their husbands than by internet suitors, which was an oddly uplifting application of a depressing feminist statistic—and to have a think about what I might like to say about myself.

  ‘I am a 43-year-old newly divorced chicken carcass,’ I suggested.

  Maddie was having none of it.

  ‘What shall we say you do for a living? Writer?’

  ‘I reproduce history’s hopeless cycle of material desperation.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I exchange my labour for money.’

  Maddie, who was in the journalists’ union, said that this one was not great, but okay, she’d let it through.

  Due, perhaps, to her many years of volunteer counselling for frontline women’s services, Maddie had developed a knack for psychological massage. At first it seemed she was just being annoyingly perky in demanding that I describe myself well to an audience. Very Optimitorium. Then it struck me, after I had written ‘Sexually ambivalent middle-aged crank’ and ‘Infrequent showerer’ and other palaver she rejected, that she was applying a form of therapy.

  The composition of a dating profile is not just a lark. It can be a treatment.

  I remembered that some years before, back when I was working on some commercial copy for a seniors’ dating start-up venture, I spoke with a lady who had completed a postdoctoral thesis on internet dating. An interesting subject to encounter in this dull line of commercial work, she had focused particularly on the over-55s.

  ‘They learn to write the self,’ she had said as I transcribed it. ‘They write themselves into the kind of partner that they would like to be.’

  ‘At first, they dislike writing about themselves,’ she went on. ‘They tell bad jokes and use poor grammar and they do everything they can to avoid a reliable and clear self-description. Then, after a while, they begin to enjoy it. They know it’s good for them. Writing a profile is good, therapeutic work.’

  She had read me some of her favourite senior profiles and these struck me as really warm or funny, or both. I looked for these fragments on my laptop and read them to Maddie:

  I have always enjoyed reading a good Whodunnit, and I have collected these until there’s no space left. But I’d clear them out in a second if it meant I could solve the mystery of love. I’m 72 years bold, a widower and in pretty decent nick, thanks to three of the world’s fastest grandchildren. I am a Lions Club Member, an avid gardener and a swimmer. My life is as crammed as my bookshelf, but there’s always space for a happy conclusion. Ladies 65 and over, message me and we’ll see if we can’t come to the end together.

  Yes, I’m a cranky man with an aversion to loud chewing noises and the thought of children on my lawn. No, I will never leave your side.

  I’m a loud septuagenarian minx who drinks Chablis by the drum. I have been known to wheel my Yorkie in a stroller. But if you look past the dog lady and ignore the white wine pong, you’ll see that my jugs still stand up on their own and that us two old fools belong in the sack. (That’s you and me, baby. Not my two jugs, AKA Cagney and Lacey. No separating those girls.)

  Maddie was moved, and as she began to cry I found that I could finally stop. As I had outsourced my tears, I began to wonder a little more rationally if I could do what these seniors had in their profiles. It couldn’t be that different for me, I thought. Perhaps my elders were prone to describe their physical selves in profile less often as ‘hot’, as Maddie had generously advised I do, and more as ‘not yet insulin resistant’. Otherwise, Dr Over-55’s advice, which came back to me that morning, held: Write the self. Write the self that you want to be with others.

  I stared at the field: describe yourself. Others on the site Maddie had showed me wrote, ‘Into sports’ or ‘Likes a laugh’ or ‘Compassionate towards my fellow humans’. I couldn’t think of anything save for ‘Ageing poseur with possible interest in spanking.’ I remembered that my academic lady had said that shitty jokes were initially quite common.

  You start out laughing. You end up thinking about the self you want to be with others. That’s what she advised. And then you can laugh again with others.

  ‘You have to write and rewrite in life,’ she had said. ‘This is how I finished my thesis and this is how I, also an over-55 dater, got myself not only laid but sane.’

  The part of the dating process her survey respondents often found the most personally profitable was not actually going out and finding senior sex by internet, but the act itself of writing a profile. ‘Writing can give you time to think,’ she said. ‘It gives you time to think about how best to be with others.’

  (This is absolutely not true for the kind of writing demanded by discount advertising.)

  Some of the interviewees reported that the act of creating themselves in text helped them connect better back in the physical world. One lady had said that even though she ended up finding dates the old-school way, through friends and family and the like, the practice of editing a profile had really helped her confidence. She knew a little more of who she was, and who she wanted to be, after writing it down twenty times.

  None of these findings were useful for the shit portfolio copy I was commissioned to write, but they were very useful to recall that morning with Maddie, who, as a very upbeat person even when crying, was interested to hear me read all this Oprah-style self-actualisation aloud.

  ‘The internet asks us questions like, “How would you describe yourself?” and “What are you looking for?’’ and when we answer them, we do so not only to find someone, but to find ourselves,’ said Dr Over-55.

  I recited this from my laptop to Maddie, who said, ‘You should answer these questions. And, perhaps for the first time, Sugar Tits, you should give honest answers.’

  It was daytime TV in here. I shouldn’t have been
surprised if someone had said, ‘EVERYBODY GETS A CAR!’ when we’d finished weeping. Maddie would have driven home in a new Ford with a Deepak Chopra decal.

  Maddie showed me some other good, readable profiles, including that charming one she had written herself years before. It was sweet and as honest as an act of online-reputation management could be. ‘I want to learn you really well,’ it said. ‘I want to learn you better than I ever learned anything.’

  This writing had provided her with a good feminist husband. And, she said, the act of writing had helped her ready herself not only for this fulfilling marriage but for the several liaisons that preceded it and the happiness that continued to flow.

  ‘I know you’re not looking for love, like I was,’ said Maddie. ‘But the same rules apply. Be honest in your approach so that others can approach you honestly.’

  Maddie had been fluent, but I was creatively constipated. I was suffering a very bad case of mocking detachment. I wrote like I was only half present and, even then, there entirely on a whim. I had acquired the internet’s pervasive voice of indifference. I was snarky or I was smarmy, and when I used a superlative like ‘brilliant’ or ‘great’, no one could know what I meant.

  The voice of the internet is so non-stop it can no longer be certain of its mood or its meaning. It is never reflective. Things become one thing or the other thing at such speed they then become nothing at all. On the internet, we are always outraged or enthusiastic; we are dangerously happy or bereaved.

  Public Service Announcement: Slow down when you are looking for sex on the internet. Slow down to the point you might actually connect with a meaningful penis.

  Tell us what you are looking for. Others wrote, ‘Nothing serious’ or ‘Not one-degree south of absolute passion’ or ‘Polyamorous Kink companion’. I wrote, ‘Recently bathed human’, ‘Partner in complex hate-fucking’, and ‘Distraction from suicidal ideation’. All of which are things I meant and didn’t mean at all. They were self-distancing non-thoughts: the sort produced by the internet.