notches on the bedpost has become a widespread symbol of empowerment, but in my view a false one, because the quantity over quality equation doesn’t add up to happiness for most women. This conviction is based partly on my experience as a single person – numerous generous offerings of my body with little repayment of the friendly, caring or (God forbid) emotional variety. (Random Italian men with sub-zero IQs in hasty encounters in borrowed flats and drunken German cheaters in broom closets at parties may sound like rollicking fun but they lose their appeal very quickly.) It is also based on a whole host of research, some convincing, some not. After all, the last thing you need is male researchers saying that science shows women should be chaste while men should continue to enjoy rampaging the field because it’s in their DNA. And authors such as Natasha Walter in Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism and Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender are excellently enraged on the topic of biological determinism and will convince any thinking woman to take prescriptive biological arguments with a rigorous pinch of salt. But there are grains of useful, fair evidence about women and sexual profligacy that can help substantiate what I have learned from experience and observation, of which more later.
The idea of ‘throttling up on power … and having sex like a man’ seduced a whole generation of young women through the delicious portal of Sex and the City. We thirsted to see Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and, of course, Samantha, the show’s proudest sexual figurehead, hilariously and frankly discussing, then actually having ‘sex like a man’ (their stated goal in the first episode). There was a kind of competitiveness to it, and many of us watching this and numerous other episodes in which the girls indulge in purely utilitarian sex (the norm for Samantha) felt an urge to chant ‘yeah!’ and fist pump the air. After all, it looked an awful lot like feminism – indeed, the casual and experimental sexual ideal presented in SATC helped define the kind of feminism known as ‘third wave’. US magazine Bust co-founder Debbie Stoller has said that in their quest for sexual fulfillment , the ‘lusty feminists of the third wave’ are leaving no stone unturned. Toys, techniques: we’re trying them all.
However, I think a friend of mine called Kristen, 32, presents a picture that’s closer to reality than the powerful one of clacking Manolos and perfectly coiffed just-had-sex hair in SATC:
‘There’s this expectation that we’re supposed to be having casual sex, that it doesn’t touch us – but it does. We see casual sex as empowerment. But when I was having “casual” sex with my flatmate, I would lie there sobbing in my room while he had sex next door with someone else. It didn’t feel all that empowered.’
Several of the young women interviewed in Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs explain frighteningly well how they and their friends are using a gung-ho, blokeish approach to sex to show they’re not ‘girly’.
Boatloads of casual sex does not signify actual empowerment (though it’s not necessarily contrary to it). Empowerment isn’t feeling like shit when a guy has used you as a masturbatory aid, or pretending you don’t care. Empowerment isn’t insisting: ‘I can do what I want and if I want to get hurt and misused and undervalued and feel corroded and lower my self-esteem, I can!’ And it’s not about performing empowerment through sex. You are empowered if you pay close attention to what really builds your sense of wellbeing, and to knowing and understanding the difference between fun and crap treatment masquerading as fun.
Social discomfort and the single woman
As if the cake needed any more topping – single women today still feel an anxiety about their non-manned status that ranges from the manageable to the debilitating. Women are no longer defined by their childbearing and house-cleaning skills. But that doesn’t seem to diminish society’s obsession with female romantic and sexual status. In the US, successful professional women are known to take two years (TWO YEARS) off work to plan weddings.
‘There is this societal pressure whereby if you’re a single woman in your 30s, you’re seen as mad, desperate or somehow lacking. It’s like Stanford in Sex and the City says: “you’re nobody until someone loves you”. But I don’t want to reach 50 and be really successful and live in a nice flat and all anyone can see is I’m single. I don’t like being reduced to that – a failure because you haven’t got someone to shag you long term.’
Ronnie Blue, 30, journalist
Reality shows about weddings and man-finding are cultishly popular and spawning like rabbits: Bridezillas, The Bachelorette, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and dozens of others. In the UK, the hen party has become a kind of adulation akin to goddess worship and money is not meant to be an object to the full homage the bride-to-be deserves. ‘Marriage has become a cult,’ says Ronnie. ‘The hen-dos have become insane as if getting married is the biggest achievement a woman can have. If you’re single, it makes you feel like you’re a total failure. But if there wasn’t that pressure, that view, you wouldn’t become so anxious about finding someone, and that anxiety affects the way you are with men. It makes you less attractive.’
The waning glory of the single woman: from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I to Bridget Jones
It’s worth remembering our proud origins. The most terrible epithets were thrown at non-widowed single women – they were, at the bare minimum, assumed to be either shameless whores or hideous spinster frigid virgins. But many of our predecessors, from Joan of Arc to Florence Nightingale, saw their singleness as essential to the pursuit of the kind of work they wanted to achieve. Cleopatra spoke nine languages fluently as ruler of Egypt and could barely tolerate lover (not husband) Antony’s idiocy. Elizabeth I remained a virgin, ‘wedded to her people’. Catherine the Great of Russia had numerous lovers who she paid off generously when they no longer satisfied her – meanwhile changing the course of European history.
Such stateswomen were, of course, rare among rare exceptions to the rule of ‘to be a single woman is to be pitied and kept down’, and the obstacles facing them were enormous (men mainly, and the laws written by men). Now that we’re free to get on with doing whatever we want with or without a man, with as kinky or polygamous a sex life as we want, we should be racing ahead, full of the joys of freedom.
Yet instead of seeking to emulate Catherine the Great’s astonishing approach to lovers and imperial policy, it’s Helen Fielding’s hilarious but terrifying model of early-mid-life singleness, Bridget Jones, that exerts real influence. We adore that chaotic jumble of career ineptitude, vulnerability, embarrassment and frustration in part because it seems to say, ‘this is you, too’.
On the page, in that nice font, it’s all charming and fine and ends in a fairy tale marriage. Reality is different, though, and we can do better. The more I observed and considered, the more it became blazingly clear that Dr d’Felice was onto something – we’re filling our lives with too much junk-food love and instead of making us stronger, it just bloats us with dead emotional weight. So I decided to give the Man Diet a go.
The Man Diet explained: what’s it for?
The Man Diet explains and explores ten rules designed to wean you off junk-food love, namely:
• negative man-related experiences
• corrosive man-obsessing thoughts
• damaging man-related actions
It is designed to tweak your behaviour – mental and social – in such a way as to strengthen your core sense of self. In doing so, it should make your singledom healthy, creative and, yes, happy. Many books either add to the stigma of being unattached, by trying to show you how to snare a man, or aggressively trumpet the message that you can be happy even though you’re single. This one shows you how to treat yourself well – emotionally and intellectually – while you’re single.
Diets
