Growing up in the Midlands in the 1990s, there were three main sources of information about sex: More magazine, late-night Channel 4 show Eurotrash and Judy Blume’s novel Forever. (Imagine my disappointment in later life when I realised that no man I met would ever admit to having a name for his penis, or a fetish for dressing up as a penguin.) The sex education lessons at my Catholic school were of the type parodied in Tina Fey’s film Mean Girls: “Don’t have sex … because you will get pregnant and die.”
When I was a teenager, sex was presented almost entirely in negative terms. Look at this photo of a genital wart! Listen to the voiceover describing the miracle of birth while a woman screams in agony! Understand that sex is largely terrible, boys will try to cajole you into it, and your job is to stop them. If you don’t, best of luck with the foetus and warts that will inevitably ensue.
There was only one problem with this approach – the same one that bedevilled the messages we were given about drugs. If these things were so self-evidently awful, why were so many people so keen to do them?
The sneaking suspicion arose that there must, in fact, be something to this sex business that people in authority weren’t letting on about. Yet a whole edifice seemed fixed in place to protect us from ourselves, and from the dangerous vaginas we were carrying around like unexploded bombs.
Warning young women about the dire consequences of what can happen if they succumb to sex is nothing new. Carol Dyhouse’s book Girl Trouble charts a century of moral panics, beginning with fears over the “white slave trade” in the 1910s and the idea that first world war soldiers were inducing “khaki fever” in a generation of girls. The signs of sin may change – from bobbed hair and miniskirts to grinding against Robin Thicke and sexting – but the message remains the same. Fall from your plinth, lose your purity, and the consequences will be scarring and irreversible. Except – wait. Is something, finally, beginning to change? Our culture now permits a figure US magazine Grantland once christened the “female fuck-up” – a woman who doesn’t just talk honestly about having sex, but something much more revolutionary: she talks about having bad sex. And this is a different kind of bad, far away from the life-destroying, shame-inducing, ruination-of-a-virgin stuff. This is groans-of-recognition-among-your-friends-when-you-tell-them-down-the-pub bad. Think of Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath, in HBO’s Girls, tentatively chipping in with “dirty talk” as her boyfriend masturbates on her chest. Think of writer and columnist Bryony Gordon’s revelations
that her lover is so wrapped up in his job that he makes her have sex “to the dulcet tones of Jeremy Paxman berating an MP over the financial crisis”. Think of Lily Allen’s boyfriend in her song Not Fair: “I look into your eyes, I want to get to know you/And then you make this noise and it’s apparent it’s all over”.
The work of these women revels in the messiness of sex, and how often expectation fails to match reality. It tells girls they don’t need to be perfect; that they can make sexual mistakes and get over them, learn from them and eventually find them funny.
Crucially, it also undermines the highly choreographed performances demanded by commercial porn, which, as 18-year-old feminist activist Yas Necati reminded me, is “where a lot of young people are getting their sexual education from, because schools are stuck in the stone age”.
When I put out a call on social media for young women, who have grown up on the web, to talk to me about their attitudes to sex, their responses to porn were varied and nuanced. Some watched it, some didn’t – but almost all were unhappy with porn in its current form. “The whole wham bam thank you ma’am of the porn industry doesn’t cater for the women and men who want more than lips, tits and moaning,” 27-year-old Olivia Hare told me. “And it doesn’t account for the women who want to watch porn without feeling bad about it or struggle to find the right thing to turn them on.”
Sophie Wilkinson, 26, told me that she had renounced porn altogether: “I gave up because I found myself getting off on things that men/boys could be using as justification for being horrific to women in bed.” The gay women I talked to were, on the whole, even more unhappy with what was on offer. “Most of the short scenes and films I’ve watched feel like it’s mostly a man’s idea of what we get up to,” said 29-year-old Carly Hanley. “I suppose the obvious way to change that is to have more women in creative control.”
Many young women have found alternative outlets to explore their sexuality. For example fan fiction (a genre of stories that combine the writer’s fantasies, sexual or otherwise, with mythical or celebrity figures) is a huge reservoir of female fantasies. A single site, Archive of Our Own, has collected more than 1.2m stories; a significant proportion of them are explicitly sexual. “There is a lot of PWP (short for ‘porn without plot’ or ‘plot, what plot?’) out there,” 23-year-old Julia Schnorrer said. “However, every sex scene in fanfic always has a narrative, since it is integrated in a realm of existing characters. Characters are well-rounded human beings who also have a sex life – not off stage but right in the middle of it. Most fanfic writers are women, and I think it derives from the male gaze that dominates visual pornography.”
In fan fiction communities, and on sites such as Tumblr, all types of sexuality are represented – as well as the absence of a sex drive entirely. “It is a place for non-straight people to voice their thoughts and opinions,” said Schnorrer. “I would have never thought about aromantic people or grey-a [asexual] persons if it wasn’t for the internet.”
Léa Jay, a 17-year-old who identifies as asexual, told me that she valued online forums as a source of information and reassurance about sex. “There was this huge reaction from an episode of Orange is the New Black where young women didn’t know you don’t pee from your vagina, and I feel like that’s a huge fault in society.
“We’re not taught about our bodies; we’re not taught to enjoy ourselves. It’s this idea that women have to be perfect and beautiful and virginal, and it’s so messed up.”
Some women now have a much better sense that it’s OK to make mistakes, and OK not to have all the answers. Their patron saint is arguably Tracey Emin, who literally aired her dirty linen in public with her 1999 artwork My Bed (featuring her unmade bed, with empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts, condoms and underwear). Despite the endless pictures of her falling out of bars and swearing on telly, she marched onwards: in 2011, she became the first female professor in the 253-year history of the Royal Academy.
The year before Emin showed off her laundry Helen Fielding published the first volume of Bridget Jones’s Diary, chronicling life as a “singleton” in London. It was less brazen, more apologetic than Emin’s work: Bridget faithfully weighed herself every day, recording everything (booze, fags and men) she put into her body, as if she could Excel Spreadsheet her way to happiness.
In the years that followed, the discussion of female sexuality in pop culture was dominated by Sex and the City. Miranda, Charlotte, Carrie and Samantha sometimes had bad sex, for sure – although in Samantha’s case it took breast cancer treatment to crush her libido – but the TV series ended with them all happily paired off.
The truly odd thing, though, is that although the Sex and the City TV series ended in 2004, the same year the second Bridget Jones movie came out, both are still used as cultural lodestones in our discussion of women and sex: they came up again and again among the twentysomething women I spoke to online. You’d think no one else with two X chromosomes got any action whatsoever until Lena Dunham’s Girls turned up in 2012.
Of course, that’s not true, but what Girls offered was an obviously female perspective on sex; something that had been lacking in the intervening years. Which is not surprising when you consider that the 2014 Hollywood Diversity report found that only 4% of films are directed by women and just a quarter feature a female lead.
When men control the story machines, is it any wonder that men’s stories get told more often?
“There was a sense that I and many women I knew had been led astray by Hollywood and television depictions of sexuality,” Dunham has said, adding that she wants “… people, ultimately, even if they’re disturbed by certain moments, to feel bolstered and normalised by the sex that’s on the show.”
That is also the aim behind Caitlin Moran’s definitely-not-autobiographical novel How to Build a Girl, and Bryony Gordon’s memoir of her turbulent 20s, The Wrong Knickers. Both authors are funny and dirty, and they are plainly writing, if not exactly to their younger selves, then to girls like they once were.
“I wanted [to write] a book, like Jilly Cooper’s Riders, that ‘told all the secrets’ of sex to teenage girls in an as amusing way as possible,” Moran writes when I email her, her enthusiasm for the subject resulting in fusillades of capital letters. “It’s obviously not JUST for teenage girls – most of my readers aren’t teenage – but teenage female sexuality is treated SO SERIOUSLY, like it’s a fucking DISEASE or CASE STUDY or ACADEMIC MATTER OF DEBATE, when of course it’s REALLY about desire and gossip and freedom and your head exploding and adventures and waking up feeling like the rest of your life has just started.”
Moran’s “no harm done” chirpiness is what her fans love. “Even now at 24, reading some of her pieces makes me realise that I’m not a complete freak, or hypersexual,” said Kathryn Felton, one of the women who responded to my Twitter request. “Caitlin Moran has, as far as I’m concerned, essentially written the Holy Bible on female sexuality,” said Erin Walker, an 18-year-old student. “I appreciate the lack of shame she expresses when talking about her past as a ‘slut’, and how she’s working to eliminate the negative stigma around being a sexually active female who enjoys being sexually active.”
How to Build a Girl is casually explicit about bad sex the way that Moran’s earlier book, How to Be a Woman, was about what childbirth does to your pelvic floor. “In all the dirty films I’ve seen, only the men ever come,” reflects its narrator Johanna. “I have no template for where you would fit [a female orgasm] into sex – or how. … I don’t want to be a difficult case, and give someone RSI. I don’t want to get a reputation as a ‘hand wearier’.”
Later, Johanna has sex with a man nicknamed Big Cock Al. “I feel like the snake handler on Blue Peter … the last time I saw something like this, it was at dead Fat Nanna’s house, across the bottom of the front door, as a draught excluder, with two buttons for eyes.” She finds that she spends the entire time thinking only about what he’s thinking. “There is very little female narrative of what it’s like to fuck, and be fucked,” Johanna reflects. “As a 17-year-old girl, I couldn’t really hear my own voice during this sex. I had no idea what my voice was at all.”
Moran once said that her strength as a writer was her complete and utter lack of shame. Someone has to write about laughing so hard they coughed out their Mooncup, and by God if no one did, she would. So why did it take her so long to write the two books in which she outlines her experience of having a female body in such eye-watering detail?
Here’s a clue: in 2011, Moran was on a panel at the Cheltenham literary festival with fellow journalist Grace Dent, who has written 11 novels for teenagers, starting with 2003’s It’s a Girl Thing. When someone in the audience said that they were so funny they should have their own television show, both women laughed.
The trouble was, Dent said, that she was surrounded by people – television producers, subeditors – who wanted to “save me from myself”. Her self-deprecating, acerbic jokes were sliced out in the edit suite; vulgar remarks that were deemed insufficiently ladylike were excised from her column. With social media there was no invisible hand to stop her. “At the age of 35, I felt like someone had opened a gate into a fantastic secret garden full of gobby Amazonians,” Dent writes in the book How to Leave Twitter. “I’m thankful every day to Twitter for giving me a platform to say pretty much whatever I want. On television, women are still used as screen parsley stuck on the side of the plate.”
That’s why these women have broken through in the places they have, sprung up like weeds through the concrete of male-dominated popular culture. The more control women have over what they say and where they say it, the more likely you are to hear the unvarnished truth.
Not that the old pressures have completely vanished. “I felt when I was writing it, that I had to write it with a heavy dollop of shame,” Bryony Gordon tells me when I call her to talk about her book. “There’s still a slight shock that a woman can have casual sex … in a way that there isn’t with men. I think if a man had written The Wrong Boxer Shorts nobody would have given it a second glance.”
And of course, there’s the ever-present threat of backlash. For Moran and Gordon, it came in an unexpected form: the Athenian figure of Jenni Murray. As the presenter of Woman’s Hour on Radio 4, Murray is the closest thing Britain has to an official feminist matriarch. “Once there were some things a woman would take with her to the grave,” she thundered from the pages of the Daily Mail on 17 July, lumping the writers together with singer Lily Allen. “Now even the most embarrassing exploits are worn as badges of honour in the name of ‘honesty’ and being ‘real’. I suppose the resulting sales spike is just an added bonus.”
The reaction from feminists, including the writers she attacked, was less offence or anger than baffled disbelief. Was this really the same Jenni Murray who has spent her career tackling topics that were once considered taboo, discussing “urinary incontinence over elevenses” (her phrase)? Apparently so.
On closer reading, it seems that Murray’s real beef was that these were not “the secret confessions of women down on their luck, lamenting lives woefully misspent, or perhaps a cathartic unburdening. If only. These lurid and squalid tales come from some of the most successful women in the country.” In other words, these women had bad sex – and got away with it, scot-free.
It’s easy to dismiss Murray’s criticism as the voice of an older generation railing against the immorality of the youth. We’re back to those flappers, with their jobs and their knee-length skirts and their dangerous opinions about politics, or the girls of the 1960s destroying the traditional family by wantonly taking the pill.
But part of the reason Murray’s criticism misfires is that The Wrong Knickers and How to Build a Girl don’t champion a life of casual sex with selfish, blundering men. Neither does the work of Lena Dunham. “Girls reminds me of how terrible my 20s were – being lost and awkward, having terrible sex with terrible people, being perpetually broke, eating ramen,” writes Roxane Gay in her essay collection Bad Feminist. “I am not nostalgic for that time … watching the show makes me slightly nauseated and exceptionally grateful to be in my 30s.” That’s the same feeling I get from the work of Caitlin Moran, Bryony Gordon and Lily Allen – all of whom are now married with children. “Life is much better now I don’t have casual sex,” says Gordon. “But there are probably plenty of other reasons for that! It’s important for women to know you can have casual sex and you won’t die. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up about one-night stands or walks of shame.”
The idea of your 20s as a carefree period before a woman starts her “real” life of monogamy and child-bearing is not a new one: see the end of John Cleland’s Memoirs of A Woman of Pleasure, published in 1748, where 300 pages of masturbation, orgies and lesbianism are followed by a “tail-piece of morality”, and protagonist Fanny Hill explains that she is much happier now she’s put all that filthy shagging behind her.
We must not begrudge any woman her happy ending, but the next revolution will be an acknowledgment that happy endings come in many forms. One in five women aged 45 has never given birth to a child; only 67% of weddings mark the first marriage for both partners; nine in every 100 women are gay or bisexual. Our lives are changing, and it’s not just our roaring 20s when women are having casual sex and making mistakes any more.
We just need to emulate the unnamed woman that Wendy Cope wrote about in her poem Rondeau Redouble: “she’d never made the same mistake again: she always made a new mistake instead.”
What women wish they had known about sex
Viv Albertine, musician, 54
What I wish I’d known about sex as a teenager
I wish I’d known it’s not a crime to change your mind at any stage during “heavy petting”. Even once he’s “in” you can go off the whole idea, but guys always made you feel like you were the worst person in the world if you stopped them, and bullied until you gave in.
Sometimes I’d enjoy kissing a guy but not want to go any further, but he’d start to get aggressive and – scared he would become violent – I went through with it. Having “consensual” sex seemed like the safest option. Friends have told me they’ve been through the same thing. More than once.
I wish I’d had the confidence to tell a guy “not without protection”, or at least to go and wash himself first. Maybe if I’d done that, I wouldn’t have contracted cervical cancer (one of the very few cancers that is a virus; men are carriers).
What advice I’d give to today’s young women
When I was young, sodomy was illegal, even within marriage. Nowadays, young people have access to so much porn, they see anal sex all the time. Neither the boys nor the girls realise that it has to be done very carefully and skilfully if at all (and I think, very very rarely and preferably with a guy who has a small cock).
But these young girls think it’s normal to have anal sex every night because they’ve seen it so often, and get asked for it all the time by boys who think it’s their right. My advice is don’t start taking it up the rear in your teens or 20s. If they start doing it from the age of 15, 16 or 17 their sphincters are going to be in a hell of a state in five or 10 years’ time. I feel so strongly about this that I’m tempted to go round schools giving talks and showing slides of piles and sphincters all droopy and bleeding. By the time they have a baby, which puts a massive strain on that area too, their insides will fall out and they’ll need colostomy bags.
This is the first generation who have been bombarded with porn from such a young age but haven’t been educated about the pitfalls. The next generation won’t be so vulnerable.
Gemma Cairney, Radio 1 DJ, 29
What I wish I’d known about sex when I was a teenager
Sex doesn’t compensate for a bad relationship, it doesn’t always equal joyous love. In my teens I was truly, madly, deeply in love with someone who emotionally was damaging in the way he treated me with everything apart from sex. It made me feel loved, I remember that in many ways sex gave status. A social, and at the same time, intimate validation to enter the grownup world which felt like the most important of life aims. I wish I knew how much more sacred I would find it later in my life. I now feel so much more protective of my sexuality. I have a totally different relationship with my body and heart. I don’t want men to find me an irresistible, cartoon-like fantasy. I’d spend hours Immac-ing every strand of hair on my body and hoisting my A cups into a Wonderbra. Sex is about so much more than being “sexy” for a partner.
What advice I’d give to young women today
Sex changes endlessly; the more I talk about it with my peers, the more I feel this is true. How much you want it, what it means to you, how you want to do it, who you want to do it with. Not forgetting the painstaking ongoing logistics of birth control and sex safety, which are essential. I think, it’s plain to say that all these quite serious attachments to what’s sold as lip glossed, steamy, hot and happy, passion will remain relevant throughout our sexual lives. It’s normal to stay a bit mystified by sex, it will change endlessly it seems. So let’s enjoy the ride.
Julie Myerson, author, 54
What I wish I’d known…
Our parents were always open with us about sex and sexuality, but when I was 12 my sisters and I suddenly gained two stepbrothers and Mum decided that the five of us - all on the excruciating cusp of puberty - should be educated about the finer points together.
I remember a book called The Tell Me Why of Love, Sex and Babies and I remember how we all gazed hotly at the ground as words like “masturbation” and “erection” came up (excuse the pun) (if you will excuse the pun). So I knew a lot about sex. But it all seemed like a very big deal and I suppose what I wish I’d known was that boys weren’t really that scary, that desire is as much in the head and heart as it is in the body and that one day it would all become a pleasure rather then some terrifying kind of test.
What advice I’d give to young women… today about their sex lives
I’m torn about whether it’s ever worth giving advice about sex: sexuality is so individual and private and anyway the young need to make their own mistakes, just as we did.
But I suppose what I wish for my own children,, both male and female, is that they are physically cautious – empowering themselves by taking precautions and using protection – and that, just as importantly, they learn to take emotional risks. Be honest, be kind, but be daring. Don’t be afraid to give yourself.
Sexual rejection and heartbreak aren’t such bad things. I think that Love is one of the very few areas in life where the more upheaval and vulnerability there has been, the greater the chance of future fulfilment and happiness.
Laurie Penny, journalist, 27
What I wish I’d known…
It took me years to work out that I was polyamorous and pansexual. I’m also a proud slut – and I wish I’d learned sooner that liking sex and having a lot of it doesn’t mean people get a free pass to treat you badly. Nor does it mean that you can’t take good care of yourself and other people. Go out, explore your boundaries, learn your limits, and have fun – just don’t let it interrupt your work schedule. Very few lovers are worth missing a deadline for.
What advice I’d give to young women…
Talk about sex. Read about sex. Learn about sex, even if you don’t see yourself having much of it. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want, even if what you want feels shameful or shocking. And kick aside anyone who refuses to respect you. Sex is about fun and pleasure and adventure, not about keeping other people happy or preserving some worn-out notion of reputation.
Katharine Whitehorn, journalist, 86
What I wish I’d known…
I didn’t know much but it didn’t matter; I was boarding with a family that had two handsome sons to fall harmlessly in love with without ever a touch being exchanged. At college we were just young maidens from school but all the males had done National Service, many in the war, and they knew a thing or two, which they were anxious to teach us.
What advice I’d give to young women…
My first fiancé would have been a disaster to marry but he was a wonderful lover - so what I’d tell the girls of today, deluged by sex at every turn, is not to have sex for the sake of it. Hold out for something that’s really exciting and important.
Miranda Sawyer, journalist, 47
What I wish I’d known…
That it’s sexy. That it’s easy. That it gets better if you practise with a friend.
What advice I’d give to young women…
The only important rule is: never have sex with someone who doesn’t actually like you. Also, it’s best if the person you’re shagging is mentally there, as well as physically: meaning, not too out of it and wanting to sleep with you, rather than that attractive bottle of whisky/anyone with breasts/the coat-stand. What else? Sex is about bodies, not the shape of your body. Your shape is irrelevant: your actual body – including your wit, your mind, your excitement, your desire - is important. Be aware that, if you’re a young woman and you’re desperate for some action, you can always get it. But this may well make you realise that you’re not that desperate, so why not have a wank or a cup of tea or a laugh with your friends? It’s boring, but always have a wee after sex: raging cystitis is a proper passion-killer. Use contraception if you don’t want to get pregnant, use condoms if you don’t want an STD. Porn is not sex: not your own, amazing, mind-morphing, life-changing, personal-to-you sex. It’s porn. Oh, and don’t make sex tapes. They’re never as much of a turn-on as you think they’re going to be.
