Somewhere, carefully hidden, I’ve got a small notebook where I have written down the names of all the men I’ve ever slept with, in the order I slept with them. There’s a little coded dot beside each name for “serious relationship”, “someone I really liked but didn’t last long”, or “one-night stand”. When I married, it seemed important to put that book out of reach, although I never felt I should destroy it. In any case, when I slipped on the magic gold band I seemed to become invisible, and it seemed unlikely I would be making any new additions to the list. There were just a couple of dozen names, but, with the notebook now lost, I find I’m no longer sure of the precise order in which they followed each other.
That would be a quote from “Desperately seeking satisfaction; A 44-year-old woman writes about a lifetime of sexual highs and lows,” which is a book review of sorts.
I was originally inclined to dismiss this article in The Times (UK) as simply another in a long line of tacky tell-all confessions… from yet another woman complaining about the insensitivity and boorishness we all know to be inherent in men, as the received wisdom has it. In a way it is all that and a bag o’ chips, yet in another way it’s not…it’s fascinating. To me, anyway. YMMV.
At the very least you have to marvel about something like this appearing in (arguably) the UK’s flagship paper.
Thirty years ago, I was struck by the similarity of the UK's major papers with our national Enquirer when I saw the headline "Aliens Have Landed" on the front page of an otherwise respectable looking paper.
ReplyDeleteSurely there are some female memoirs which cast a suitable light on the male? I lost my list in some long ago move or I would prove so.
Well, I really enjoyed Jane Juska's "A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance," as did the reviewers at the NYT. NYT Review here. The premise:
ReplyDelete"Before I turn 67 -- next March -- I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me."
And how. Ms. Juska placed this personal ad in The New York Review of Books in the fall of 1999. Over the course of a month, she received 63 responses and spent the better part of a year following them up, an experience she recounts in her first book, "A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance" (Villard). It turns out that Ms. Juska did indeed have a lot of sex with a lot of men she liked, and still does, having seen one of them as recently as that morning. He's 35. Which might explain the lower-back problem.
Some folks, predictably, weren't impressed.