So, according to Stephen Fry, women don’t like sex. ‘Sex is the price they’re willing to pay for a relationship,’ he boldly asserted in Attitude magazine, probably with that wise twinkle in his eye we’ve all come to love, you know the one – he normally reserves it for Alan Davies’s ceaseless idiocy. ‘Do they go around having it the way gay men do?’ he asks, adding that ‘if women liked sex as much as men there would be straight cruising areas’, ‘Women would hang around in churchyards thinking: “God I’ve got to get my fucking rocks off”.’ I’ll allow a moment’s pause to imagine the venerable Fry uttering that last line. The idea of a national treasure getting his ‘fucking rocks off’ is more than a little disturbing, I think you’ll agree.
Naturally the nation’s feminists have gone mental talking about how much they love shagging. Can the feminine subaltern speak, Spivak asked. Apparently she doesn’t bladdy shut up when her enjoyment of a good fuck is in question, eh lads? Cue manly guffaws and testicle repositioning. This literally is not worth getting our collective panties in a twist over. A gay man talking about women’s lack of enthusiasm for sex is like a Christ Church student complaining because his membership to the Labour Party was rejected. Don’t read that analogy too closely, I’m not enitrely sure it holds up. Sounds good though. Women obviously like sex as much – if not more – than men do. It’s so much less fraught for the fannied among us, there’s no worry of flying half mast when essay stress hits, and while boys can shark around for weeks without a sniff of labia, a girl has got to be seriously facially-challenged if she manages not to get groped/come on to/cum on to in Bridge on a Thursday night. Maybe that’s why men are so strident about their enjoyment of it. Women don’t need to be. When you see a Rugby Blue in Wahoo on the wrong side of an initiation ceremony, topless, desperately rutting against the leg of the nearest female, do you immediately think ‘Now he is a sexually awakened, virile young man’? No. You think, ‘I bet you’re going to go home, begin indulging in the onanistic impulse, then remember you’ve got labs early tomorrow, and go to bed’. Plus on the practical side, if I wanted to go dogging (which I might, mightn’t I?) then I genuinely have no idea where to go. Where is Oxford’s prime dogging spot? Queen’s College perhaps? More guffaws. In the end though, this whole argument is pointless. How can a man who looks like a spoon talk about getting more sex than me? It beggars belief. Or maybe it buggers it.
