Sunday, April 27, 2008

One-Hundred-Eighty-Three

Paul Raymond: Self-styled ‘King of Soho’ who built a successful business empire from property and pornography
Raymond eventually settled in London where he again exploited a loophole in the law that allowed private members’ clubs to be virtually exempt from censorship from the London Guardian (March 2008)

The self-styled “King of Soho”, Paul Raymond was a self-made millionaire and pioneering sex mogul whose x-rated career spanned seven decades from coy post-war striptease to the hardcore world of the internet. He brought pornography out from under the counters of tatty corner shops and onto the top shelves of WH Smith, giving bare breasts a sophisticated sheen and earning himself a £650m fortune along the way.

Once described as “the most successful man in modern London who isn’t an aristocrat”, Raymond was the original British porn baron, a free-thinking entrepreneur who made nudity mainstream, yet preferred to be remembered as a theatrical impresario. He believed that sex didn’t have to be tawdry, hidden away in seedy strip joints. For him, “adult entertainment” was just that; a privilege of getting older and something to be enjoyed without embarrassment. “There’ll always be sex,” he said. “Always, always, always.”

He was born Geoffrey Anthony Quinn in 1925, the son of a Liverpool lorry driver, and was raised by his mother and aunt in Glossop, Derbyshire, after his father abandoned the family. On leaving school at 15, he sold hair nets and stockings from a barrow but hankered for a life in show business. He changed his name to Paul Raymond in 1942 and tagged onto the variety circuit, ending up as one half of a bizarre mind-reading double act on Clacton Pier called “Mister and Miss Tree”.

From performer he became producer and married Jean, a choreographer of dancing showgirls. Their first travelling variety show – The Vaudeville Express – featured topless girls who posed in saucy tableaux but remained completely still so as not to trouble the Lord Chamberlain, who had prohibited any jiggling by half-dressed performers. Raymond’s show eventually evolved into the Festival of Nudes (a cheeky wink at the Festival of Britain) and then Moving Nudes, where naked lovelies were winched high in the air on precarious wooden platforms.

Tiring of touring, Raymond eventually settled in London where he again exploited a loophole in the law that allowed private members’ clubs to be virtually exempt from censorship. The Raymond Revuebar, located on the corner of Walker’s Court and Brewer Street in Soho, opened in April 1958 promising a programme of striptease and beautiful girls. The venue’s garish neon display became as much a London landmark as the statue of Eros, emblazoned with the legend “The World Centre of Erotic Entertainment”. Raymond’s new venture was the first of its kind in Britain and regularly played to packed audiences of middle-class men seeking new nude thrills.

In 1961 a judge labelled the club “filthy, disgusting and beastly” and fined him £5,000 for keeping a disorderly house, but it barely dented Raymond’s burgeoning fortune. By the mid-1960s he had made his first million and was driving a black Rolls Royce, plate number PR11, and living in a mansion in Wimbledon.

Buoyed up by the success of his live shows, Raymond launched, in 1964, King (the “real man’s magazine"), distinguished by lush photographic studies of “tasteful” nudes and the obligatory articles on motor cars, cigars and military history. Designed as a British competitor to Penthouse or Playboy, the title was, surprisingly, not a runaway success and instead Raymond put his energies into buying the Whitehall Theatre. Here he staged extravagant nude revues including Pyjama Tops and its sequel Yes, We Have No Pyjamas, as well as Let’s Get Laid! and Come Into My Bed, which paired “family” comedians like John Inman with troupes of topless dancers.

Raymond’s biggest coup came in 1971 when he acquired the magazine Men Only. He was now dating the glamour model Fiona Richmond, and promptly installed his pneumatic new girlfriend as Men Only’s nominal editor-in-chief. Richmond became a household name as her self-penned articles documented her travels through the UK “road-testing men”. Other magazines, including Club International, Mayfair and Escort, would also be published by Raymond, following a format of porn presented as glossy Sunday supplement.

In 1974 Raymond divorced his wife, Jean, and she received a settlement of £250,000 after he admitted his affair. With Richmond established as his star attraction, Raymond bankrolled her first major film, Exposé (1975), a menacing sex drama full of blood, gore, surgical gloves and gratuitous lesbian love scenes. The film later enjoyed the distinction of being the only British entry on the infamous “video nasty” list compiled by the Department of Public Prosecutions.

Raymond stumped up the cash for two further Richmond romps – Hardcore and Let’s Get Laid! The former headlined the relaunch of Soho’s Moulin Cinema in Great Windmill Street in April 1977. A beaming Richmond posed for reporters outside the cinema with a selection of bananas and cucumbers. But no amount of fruity publicity could save the movie and Hardcore flopped when up against the sex comedy Come Play with Me, financed by Raymond’s porn-baron rival, David Sullivan.

Known for his long straggly hair, sharp suits and bevy of glamorous companions, Raymond became a larger-than-life figure in the West End but his association with pornography never afforded him the mainstream respectability he desired. In 1980 he returned to movie production with Paul Raymond’s Erotica, arguably the most expensive vanity project of his career.

Budgeted at £1.5m, the film starred the French starlet Brigitte Lahaie as a young investigative reporter seducing half of London. If cinema-goers weren’t put off by a sex scene set in Smithfield meat market then they certainly were by Raymond’s woeful attempts at acting. The Daily Express critic reported that it was impossible to hear the film’s dialogue over the sound of cinema seats snapping up as disillusioned patrons fled the auditoria. Raymond didn’t appear on screen again and, hurt by the commercial failure of the film, slunk back to relative anonymity running his publishing and property empire.

Raymond had started buying up huge swathes of Soho during the 1970s after a crackdown on unlicensed sex shops and peep-show premises by the Obscene Publications Squad. Again, after the property crash of the late 1980s, he started buying more freeholds. By the end of the following decade, he owned nearly 60 of the 87 acres in the district and had practically cornered the market in legitimate sex-shop outlets.

As Raymond neared retirement age he began grooming his daughter to take over the family business. Unfortunately, the flamboyant and undeniably talented Debbie Raymond, a former dancer at the Revuebar, had an addictive personality and died in 1992 after an accidental drug overdose, aged just 36. It was a tragedy from which Raymond never fully recovered and he became increasingly reclusive, rarely leaving his suite next door to the Ritz. His stranglehold on the business further loosened through the decade and, in 2000, his GP-brother Philip became director of the sex and mortar empire.

The Raymond Organisation also gave up the day-to-day running of the Revuebar and sold its name to the choreographer Gerard Simi. In February 2004, the business ceased operating after Simi claimed he could not afford the £270,000-a-year rent. Raymond’s iconic building is now occupied by a gay cabaret bar.

Simon Sheridan

Beneath the slight stammer and gentlemanly manners, Paul Raymond was often ruthless with rivals, former associates and even his own sons, writes Pierre Perrone.

I worked for Paul Raymond Publications for over 20 years, editing a French magazine and then the flagship title Men Only as well. When I joined the company in 1986, there was much to admire about Raymond’s instincts for tapping into Britain’s then unsated appetite for erotica. As a publisher, his eye for the smallest of details was still there, and he was prepared to back his hunches that France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada would buy a French-language equivalent of his classier magazine.

When the French government took a dim view of what Club Pour Hommes was trying to do – taking coals back to Newcastle in an “ooh la la” fashion, basically – and threatened to confiscate the title in the mid-1980s, Raymond hired a commanding law firm and threatened to take the case to the European courts before deciding that a change of title to Club Edition Française for France might just do the trick and enable us to carry on publishing, which we did successfully for many years.

However, after his beloved daughter Debbie died in 1992 there was a definite darkening of mood. Gone were the publicity stunts over the unlikely purchase of a football club. Gone was the dabbling in theatre and film production which had made Fiona Richmond a household name. Raymond became an elusive figure, more interested in building his property empire than broadening his range of publications.

By the time the publishing side of his many companies eventually decided to invest in DVD cover-mounts and a stand-alone website, Raymond’s magazines were caught between an increasingly liberal attitude to the import of hardcore material from continental Europe, the proliferation of x-rated internet content and lads’ mags like Loaded, Zoo and Nuts. By the mid 2000s, the market was shrinking, with Men Only and Club International selling a 10th of what they had in their heyday, and there was an unsuccessful attempt to offload the publishing company.

After many years editing the French titles, I was also asked to edit concurrently Men Only, a magazine which had gone through five editors in the previous 10 years. When this experiment did not achieve the desired sales spike, I was taken off the English title and continued editing the French title, which I had launched 20 years before with Debbie. Shortly afterwards, I was made redundant. I had to take the company to court in order to secure a fair settlement. The tactics used by some of Paul Raymond’s directors throughout the redundancy process and the subsequent shenanigans of his legal team “beggared belief”, said the judge, who ruled in my favour.

Paul Raymond may still have had the appetite for a legal fight but his showman attributes had long deserted him. The man who had once bought a mind-reading act, and said his younger self “was a total spiv”, had reverted to type.

Geoffrey Anthony Quinn (Paul Raymond), entrepreneur, publisher and property magnate: born Liverpool 15 November 1925; married 1951 Jean Bradley (one son, and one daughter deceased; marriage dissolved 1974), (one son with Noreen O’Horan); died London 2 March 2008.

* * * * *
Paul Raymond heirs to clean up in Soho
Girls in line for huge property estate, say Ben Laurance and Martin Tomkinson, London Times (March 2008)

THEY are young: Fawn James is 22 and her sister, India Rose James, is just 16. They live in Home Counties comfort, sharing a house with their father near Woking in Surrey.

And these two lively, attractive sisters sit on a fortune - from an empire that was built on the profits of pornography, and which controls swathes of prime London property.

The death last weekend of Paul Raymond - the man whose wealth was built with magazines such as Men Only and Club International - means one of Britain’s most successful private property firms is about to pass to a new generation. India Rose and Fawn - or, at least, trusts set up for their benefit - find themselves controlling property worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

For Raymond, porn was certainly profitable. He made his first money by launching Raymond’s Revue Bar in 1957, taking over the Whitehall Theatre in the 1960s and the Windmill Theatre in 1974. But the launch of Men Only in 1971 was to prove the first building block of a publishing empire that would finance his property investments. In 1993, Paul Raymond Publications made a pretax profit of £15m on turnover of £25m. By 1998, profits were £21.5m on turnover of £28m - an astonishing margin that others at the respectable end of publishing could only dream about.

And amazingly, even with the growth of the internet, giving easy, cheap availability to much more hardcore material, Raymond’s publishing profits continued to roll in after the turn of the millennium. Accounts show that in 2005, Paul Raymond Publications turned a profit of £8m on sales of £16.7m. About 15% of the business was in America, and there were offshoots in Belgium, France and Poland.

Porn was not the source of Raymond’s serious wealth, though. His masterstroke was to realise in the 1970s that Soho, in the heart of central London, was cheap. It was dirty, run-down and sleazy. Corruption in Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad meant it had become well-nigh impossible to obtain obscenity convictions in the courts. Soho was packed with hardcore film clubs. Westminster council appeared powerless to do anything about it.

Raymond would turn up at property auctions wearing one of his trademark fur coats and quietly bought up a string of properties. To begin with, he profited from the sleaze. Take one example: a Maltese-born Soho businessman, Charlie Grech, was paying Raymond £3,000 a week to rent a tiny cinema - and that was in 1980.

But whatever happened to Soho, Raymond couldn’t lose. Either he kept on collecting high rents from fly-by-night operators in the sex industry or Soho lifted itself into respectability.

Cannily, Raymond avoided being drawn into the corruption that blighted the area. He dealt with gangsters, but he wasn’t one himself.

He had been fined £5,000 in 1961 for “running a disorderly house” - the quaint legal description of the girlie show at his Revue Bar, but he avoided bribing policemen.

In the end, Soho was smartened up. Westminster council used the 1982 Local Government Act to clamp down on the porn merchants, introducing a strict licensing system for “adult” book shops and cinema clubs. The area was gradually transformed into a centre of the burgeoning industries of advertising, television and magazine publishers, eager to be based in the heart of London’s West End.

By 1987, Raymond was collecting rents from 136 properties in the area. He was a tough and unsentimental landlord. He jacked up his rents. Pizza Express founder Peter Boizot was the tenant of a restaurant that had been charged £90,000 a year. Raymond demanded £400,000. Boizot ruefully reflected: “I used to think Paul Raymond’s god was sex; now I know it’s money.” In the end, the rent was fixed at £235,000.

Raymond’s other strength was that he had sufficient cash to avoid relying on outside finance. There were no external directors to satisfy, no outside shareholders clamouring for dividends or City advisers trying to push him into their pet schemes.

The most recent figures for Raymond’s property business, Soho Estates Holdings, show just how conservatively it has been run. The 2006 accounts show investment properties valued at £290m - but this figure was struck in 2003, so doesn’t take into account the rise in property values over the past five years. The company had £27m in cash. And - strikingly for a property company - bank borrowings of zero.

Over the year, the company paid out dividends of only £1.3m - chicken-feed compared with the tens of millions paid in previous years. The highest-paid director - presumably Raymond himself - received £386,000.

In his declining years, as he whiled away his days drinking brandy in his flat near the Ritz in central London, Raymond became increasingly isolated. He had been devastated by the death of his daughter Debbie in 1992 and ventured out less and less. But sporadically, he would take sums out of his businesses in the form of dividends. He took £15m from Paul Raymond Publications in 2005 - equivalent to almost twice pretax profits.

Earlier - before a corporate reorganisation four years ago - one of his companies, Paul Raymond Organisation, had paid him a dividend of £2m in 2001, a further £2m in 2002 and £4.6m in 2003. During the 1990s, most of his payouts were taken from Soho Estates.

Since Raymond’s death, it has been widely suggested that he was probably worth about £650m. Some believe the real figure was far more. He was always rumoured to have assets overseas, but there is no public record of them. “His empire is worth billions, not the £650m that has been reported,” said one former associate.

Raymond was widely disliked by tenants whose rents were pushed up to what he called “commercial levels”.

Colleagues and rivals in the property industry respected him, however. David Coffer, former chairman of Earls Court & Olym-pia, said: “I never forget the time that he came to bid for the Rialto cinema, which we were selling. His driver brought him to our office and he gave me his offer and I opened it up, and it was simply a cheque for £14.25m. We exchanged contracts in 48 hours. He was always the epitome of professionalism in his property dealings, precise and prompt in his terms.

“He was charming, a very interesting raconteur. His knowledge of the West End and its characters stretching back six decades was almost unrivalled.”

Raymond also commanded respect from people in the sex industry. Oscar Owide, owner of lap-dancing clubs in Soho, said: “I always found him very nice and charming. He was always impeccably dressed - he always wore a tie and had lovely shirts and suits. He was always very correct. In spite of all you read, I found him very generous.”

But Raymond was defensive about his status as Soho’s biggest landlord. On one occasion, a newspaper said that West End property developer Laurence Kirschel had more space in Soho than Raymond. Kirschel received a phone call from Raymond, who said simply: “That may be true, Laurence, but you’re missing the point: I have no loans.”

So why did Raymond have such an aversion to debt? One reason is that in the 1970s he became involved in a development that failed. “The banks crucified him for it,” said John Warden, a Raymond lieutenant for more than two decades.

But also, more than 80% of the shares in Soho Property Holdings are controlled by trusts, understood to be for the benefit of Raymond’s granddaughters Fawn and India Rose. In an interview some years ago, Warden indicated that the terms of the trusts made it hard for Soho Property Holdings to gear itself up. At that stage, in 2000, the two girls, then 15 and 11, received about £1m a year. Their father John James - widower of Raymond’s daughter Debbie, who died after bingeing on drink and drugs in 1992 - runs Soho Estates Holdings and is a trustee overseeing his daughters’ inheritance.

Warden said that some of the proceeds from Soho Estates Holdings would go to the girls when they reached adulthood; more would be handed out during their lifetimes.

What is not clear is whether Fawn and India Rose are still the main beneficiaries of Raymond’s will. Their mother Debbie was not Raymond’s only child - and towards the end of his life, the tycoon is understood to have had a rapprochement with his son Howard having previously become estranged (see below). Howard or his two children may benefit.

At 16, India Rose is too young to have any involvement with Raymond’s empire. But since September, Fawn has been a director of six Raymond companies.

Neither Fawn nor India Rose will struggle financially. From the seediness of Raymond’s Revue Bar to the respectability of property investment – their grandfather’s business acumen has left them wealthy.

OTHER HEIRS WHO MAY BE IN LINE FOR RAYMOND FORTUNE

PAUL RAYMOND was devastated by the death of his daughter Debbie from a lethal cocktail of drink and drugs in 1992. She was being groomed to take over the Raymond empire and it is thought most of the tycoon’s wealth has been left to her daughters, Fawn and India Rose. Their father, John James, has been running Raymond’s property company, Soho Estates Holdings, on a day-to-day basis since 1998.

But Raymond has two other children. The first is Derry McCarthy, the son of Raymond’s stage partner in an end-of-the-pier act that he performed in his youth. Derry was born in 1950.

Raymond’s other child is Howard, Debbie’s brother.

Howard Raymond is now 48, and is himself a director of two property companies, Provincial & Metropolitan Property and Provincial & Metropolitan Property Investment Company. He is also a director of a small leisure company, 1861, whose registered office was until recently given as Worksop Town Football Club.

The companies have not been notably successful and, in 2006, the Revenue obtained a winding-up order against Provincial & Metropolitan Property Investments Ltd. This order has recently been rescinded.

For much of Howard’s adult life, he was estranged from his father, but there had been periods of rapprochement. In 1979, one of Paul Raymond’s companies bought a house for Howard. In the 1980s, the two men fell out, when Howard had problems with drugs. “I was going for it in the mid1980s. Everyone was – seven grammes of coke a day was great,” Howard once told a reporter.

But, according to Howard, in recent years he managed to rebuild his relationship with his father. Paul’s companies once lent Howard’s businesses £166,500 in the early part of this decade, according to company accounts.

Howard was present at Paul Raymond’s deathbed. He said that recently he saw his father once a week or once a fortnight.

Whether the reconciliation was warm enough for Paul to leave money to Howard or his two offspring, Cheyenne and Boston, will be determined only when details of Raymond’s will emerge.

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Thursday, February 28, 2008

One-Hundred-Seventy-Seven

Jacqueline Gold: the woman who reinvented Ann Summers \

Jacqueline Gold is the woman who turned her daddy’s chain of sleazy Ann Summers sex shops into a multi-million-pound ‘retail experience’. But beyond the boardroom there have been far harder battles - like facing up to years of sex abuse. She talks to Lucy Cavendish, of the London Telegraph (February 2008)

For such a teeny tiny person, 47-year-old Jacqueline Gold carries a lot of weight on her shoulders. She may look like a little doll with her side-tied chignon and tight-fitting Alexander McQueen dress, but during the course of our conversation she coughs nervously and, at one point, tears come to her eyes. I hadn’t expected this.

Jacqueline Gold: ‘I’m a fighter. I had to fight for any grain of self-confidence. I had to fight to raise my head and get my voice heard’

When I walk into her suite in the Covent Garden Hotel in London, where she stays three nights a week - she lives in a converted barn in Kent - she looks so perky and businesslike that I forget why I am here. For a moment I gaze at her plunging neckline, tanned cleavage, heavily made-up eyes, false eyelashes and French-polished nails, and then I remember who she is. She is Jacqueline Gold, the chief executive of the Ann Summers sex shops. In fact, they’re not really sex shops any more - they still sell cheeky underwear and vibrators but, as Gold points out to me, Ann Summers is now ‘a retail experience’.

However, we are here to discuss not Ann Summers, but Gold’s autobiography. Called A Woman’s Courage, it originally came out last year with a picture of a besuited Gold on the cover. It is currently being reissued as Please Let It Stop and now has Gold as a child - cute, sweet, dimpled - on the jacket. It’s doesn’t take a genius to work out why. Books such as Please, Daddy, No and A Child Called ‘It’ sell, and this book is up there with the best of them. It is, essentially, the story of Gold’s life and the abuse she suffered as a young girl at the hands of her stepfather. ‘The publishers wanted to change the title,’ she says. ‘I am sure that’s for commercial reasons, but for me personally it was because I thought the original cover made it look like a business book whereas, in fact, it’s a personal story.’

It starts with the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the man who was to become her stepfather, whom she calls John, moving in to her family home in Kent, with her mother, herself, and her younger sister, Vanessa. ‘John was a truly horrible man,’ she says. ‘He was very frightening and domineering. My mother was obviously dominated by him.’ Gold’s mother, Beryl, does not come across very well. ‘I don’t even remember her hugging me or Vanessa,’ she says. ‘In many ways I still can’t fathom her out. She couldn’t bear being on her own, which is why she let John move in. In many ways, I think she would have been happy living her life in the middle of a field with a bloke and nothing else. She was scared of everything, really.’

The sexual abuse started when Gold was 12. ‘I almost knew it was going to happen,’ she says. ‘His behaviour was always inappropriate.’ Most shockingly, she believes her mother not only knew about it but, in many ways, condoned it. Gold describes how her mother would tell her to go and sit on her stepfather’s lap to cheer him up if he was in a bad mood. ‘It was awful,’ says Gold. ‘I was terrified of my mother going out. She’d say she was going to the shops and I’d beg to go with her but she’d make me stay at home with John on my own. She’d do anything to keep him happy.’

The abuse stopped when one day, by then nearly 15, Gold told her stepfather he wasn’t to touch her again, and he didn’t. ‘I wish I’d known earlier on,’ she says. ‘But the thing with being abused is that the abuser makes you feel powerless. Somehow it’s your fault, so it takes a tremendous amount of courage to tell them to stop.’

Jacqueline Gold certainly has courage and yet, despite all that and her stratospheric success, her book is full of depression, divorce, failed IVF attempts, unfaithful partners, a boyfriend who gave her a date-rape drug, and more. Gold’s life seems to consist of one long list of disasters. But how can this be? This is the person who is regularly voted businesswoman of the year, who now has 136 Ann Summers high-street shops, who opened a shop in Dublin and faced down threats from the IRA. She even went to court in order to allow vacancies at Ann Summers to be advertised in Job Centres as, previously, they had been banned. And she has met the Queen.

‘I’m a fighter,’ says Gold. ‘I’ve always had to fight. I had to fight for any grain of self-confidence. At school I was bullied because I had no friends. My mother wouldn’t let people come back to our house so I was very lonely. I did have Vanessa but she’s seven years younger than me. So I had to fight to raise my head up and get my voice heard. When I started the business, I took on all these doubters. I have kept on going and it is that which has made me successful.’

Why is her personal life such a disaster then? ‘Oh, God, don’t ask me advice on relationships!’ she says. ‘I can help anyone professionally but when it comes to how you make a relationship work, I’m hopeless.’ But she seems so brave - it was pretty brave to publish the book - and she’s a risk-taker. ‘I do take risks,’ she says, ‘but I think I’m going to have to change to find the right man. I always feel I have to do everything. When I was with my husband, Tony, I wanted him to love me so much that I organised everything. I was very young when we married - only 20 - and I saw him and our life together as my get-out clause. My mother would never have let me leave home unless I was getting married. But I did love him so I did the cooking and the cleaning and the washing-up.’

She says her marriage started to go wrong when she realised that being a housewife wasn’t the way she wanted to live her life. ‘After about a year I got resentful,’ she says. ‘I now realise it wasn’t Tony’s fault. I didn’t give him a chance to help out and he got used to having everything done for him. But I knew I wanted a different life.’

To find this life she went to work for her father, David Gold, who, along with his brother Ralph, owned Gold Star Publications, which produced top-shelf magazines. They had also, however, started up some Ann Summers shops and, pretty soon, Gold was put on work experience in that section of the business. ‘Back then the Ann Summers shops were all pretty sleazy,’ she says. ‘They were full of what men wanted women to wear. I remember this nightdress. It was called the Royale and it was long and sky blue with a split up the side. It was made of very scratchy nylon and horrible lace. My idea was to make lingerie that women wanted.’

It all started in 1981 when Gold went to a Pippa Dee party - a sort of Tupperware party but with racy lingerie instead. ‘I couldn’t believe it!’ she says. ‘The women were having a great time and they were snapping up the goods. I thought, “Why not do Ann Summers parties?“‘

She employed two of the Pippa Dee girls to front the business and recruit party organisers, put together a business plan and showed it to her father. ‘He said I had to present it to the board, so I did. It was very difficult. They were all quite hard to convince. One of them said, “But women don’t like sex.“‘

In the end, the board approved it and Ann Summers has been proving that women do like sex ever since. Does Gold feel that part of the reason it has been so successful is because attitudes towards sex have changed dramatically over the past two decades? ‘Well, I don’t want to show off,’ she says, ‘but I hope we were important in advancing that change. I have always thought that women should be able to enjoy their sexuality despite whatever opposition there has been to it.’

And yet there is something a bit dated about Ann Summers. After all, over the past decade so many upmarket lingerie and sex-toys-for-women shops, with their horsehair whips and silken blindfolds, have opened up that no one blinks an eye any more. Does Gold feel that Ann Summers is now at risk of being left behind by the likes of Coco de Mer and Agent Provocateur? ‘I think we are dealing with a different market,’ she says. ‘They all have shops in exclusive areas of London. I have them in shopping centres all over Britain.’

She is changing the shops, though, she says. Her vision for the future is to encourage women to have the aforementioned ‘retail experience’ so that they will, hopefully, remain in the shops longer. ‘We’re going for a boudoir feel,’ she says. ‘We’ll have peepholes in the changing rooms so that their partners can see them dress and undress. A bit titillating, really, but something that makes it an experience for a couple.’

This leads us back to talking about her own men. After her husband, Tony, there was unfaithful Ben, who used drugs, then Paul, who was serially unfaithful, then Dave, who spiked her drink, and then, finally, Dan, the much younger boyfriend who wanted to have a family.

Their relationship became irreparably damaged when it turned out they could not have children. ‘We had three failed attempts at IVF,’ says Gold. ‘It was very hard. All I can say to anyone thinking of having IVF is you have to be prepared for how difficult it all is, not just emotionally but physically as well. I’ve succeeded so well in my work life that I couldn’t believe how I was failing in my personal life.’

She says she and Dan tried their hardest to stay together but the relationship wasn’t working and they split up on New Year’s Day 2006. ‘I don’t want to end up like my mother,’ she says. ‘I’m not desperate to be with a man - any man - no matter what.’

This brings us back to her stepfather. By now, at the mention of his name, Gold is coughing a lot. She tells me it’s a nervous reaction. ‘Actually, that’s why I wanted to do the book,’ she says. ‘For years I didn’t tell anyone about the abuse. I still had to face him. I geared myself up mentally for every family event when I knew he’d be there, and it was torture. I developed this stress cough then.’ She worked this out only after she went for counselling. ‘I became very depressed during the whole IVF thing,’ she says. ‘I hadn’t realised I was, but then after Dan and I separated I realised I had no energy. It was an immense effort just to get up and feed the cats.’

In the end, after pestering her doctor, she went to The Priory for psychoanalysis. ‘I was diagnosed with depression and went on antidepressants and had counselling.’ It was during this time that she finally talked about what her stepfather had done to her. By this time she had told her sister and Dan, who were both supportive, but Gold says she felt a lot better once she accepted some professional help.

What’s interesting about this is that, although her mother died in 2003, John is still alive. Has she heard from him? ‘No,’ she says shuddering.

She says she has really struggled with the fact that, since the book came out, some relatives have come forward to say things like, ‘We thought something was up.’ ‘I don’t understand why they didn’t say anything,’ she says, now tearful. ‘One person told me that they had said something to my mother and that she’d brushed it off.’

She sits silently for a while. ‘I am not trying to make excuses for my mother but, actually, by the time she died, I felt sad for her in many ways. She was a very difficult and negative woman. The book has been very cathartic for me.’

Then she looks at her watch and jumps up suddenly. ‘Got to go,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a very important meeting in a minute.’ She smooths down her dress, pats her bun and goes off to greet her next investors as if she doesn’t have a care in all the world.

‘Please Let It Stop’ (Ebury, £6.99), by Jacqueline Gold, is available from Telegraph Books Direct (books.telegraph.co.uk; 0870 428 4115).

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Saturday, February 23, 2008

One-Hundred-Seventy-Six

A final farewell to sex
‘The most obvious thing about moving into my 70s was the disappearance of what was the most important thing in life: I ceased to be a sexual being.’ Diana Athill, 90, reflects on the affair that carried her into old age
from the The Guardian (December 2007)

All through my 60s, I felt I was still within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters. My 70th birthday failed to change this because I managed scarcely to notice it, but my 71st did change it. Being “over 70” is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up.

I have lived long enough to have witnessed great changes in being old as far as women are concerned. In my grandmothers’ day, a woman over 70 adopted what almost amounted to a uniform. If she was a widow, she wore black or grey clothes that disregarded fashion; and even if she still had a husband, her garments went a bit drab and shapeless, making it clear that this person no longer attempted to be attractive. My paternal grandmother, who was the older of the two, wore floor-length black garments to her dying day, and a little confection of black velvet and lace on her head, a “cap” such as Victorian ladies wore. (Judging by the skimpiness of my own hair in old age, which comes from her side of the family, she had good reason for adhering to that particular fashion.)

Nowadays an old woman would obviously be daft if she dressed like a teenager, but I have a freedom of choice undreamed of by my grandmothers. Even more than clothes, cosmetics have made age look, and therefore feel, less old. Having inherited a good skin from my mother, I still receive compliments for it, but nowadays I know that at least half its “goodness” is thanks to Max Factor.

Appearance is important to old women, not because we suppose it will impress other people, but because of what we ourselves see when we look in a mirror. It is unlikely that anyone else will notice that the nose on an old face is red and shiny or the broken veins on its cheeks are visible, but its owner certainly will, and will equally certainly feel a lift in her spirits when this depressing sight is remedied. I know for sure that I both feel and behave younger than my grandmothers.

In spite of this, however, the most obvious thing about moving into my 70s was the disappearance of what used to be the most important thing in life: I might not look, or even feel, all that old, but I had ceased to be a sexual being, a condition that had gone through several stages and had not always been a happy one, but that had always seemed central to my existence.

It had started when I was four or five with the announcement that I was going to marry John Sherbroke. He was a little boy who lived a few houses up from us. I can’t remember John at all, except for his name, and that he was my Intended. His successor is clearer in my memory because of his beautiful, sad brown eyes and the glamour bestowed on him by his great age - he was Denis, the gardener’s boy at Hall Farm where we had gone to live under the wing of my mother’s parents. I doubt whether I ever spoke to Denis, but I did, with great daring, spit on his head out of the lavatory window when he was working the pump by the back door. He was followed by loves with whom I did communicate - indeed, I and my brother spent much time with them: Jack and Wilfred, sons of the head cowman at the farm, remembered even more clearly than Denis because of the amount of time I put into trying to decide which I loved best.

Those two were the first beneficiaries of my romantic phase, in which love took the form of daydreams. The object of my passion would be placed in a situation of great danger - his house on fire, perhaps, or he was being swept away in a flood - and I would rescue him, the dream’s climax being that when he recovered consciousness, he would open his eyes to find me leaning over him, my cloud of black hair enveloping him like a cloak (I was a skinny child with a mouse-coloured bob, but I confidently expected to improve with time).

Then, at 15, I fell in love as an adult. It was with Paul (I called him that in Instead Of A Letter [a previous memoir], so he can keep the name here), who came during one of his Oxford vacations to earn a bit of money by coaching my brother for an exam. He dispelled daydreams by being the real thing, but he did not dispel romance. I loved, I assumed love equalled marriage, and I was certain that once I was married to the man I loved, I would be faithful to him for the rest of my life. I did have the occasional, fleeting daydream about my beautiful white wedding, but to embroider my romanticism beyond that, once I was old enough to hold Paul’s attention and we became engaged, was not easy, partly because of how everyone went on at me about how poor we would be and how I would have to learn to be a good housewife. Paul, who had gone into the RAF, was still only a pilot-officer whose pay was £400 a year, which seemed to him and me enough to have a good time on, whatever “they” said, but still the warnings were sobering; though less so than something that happened about six months after we announced our engagement.

We went, with his sister, to a party with a group of rather louche friends of Paul’s. One of them had brought along an extravagantly sexy-looking girl who made a dead set at Paul the moment she saw him, and to my incredulous dismay he responded. After an extremely uncomfortable hour or two, he shovelled the task of seeing me home on to his embarrassed sister, and he ended the evening, I was sure, in bed with that girl. During the following two weeks I heard nothing from him, and felt too crushed to write or call myself, and when he let me know that he was about to fly down from Grantham to spend the weekend at Oxford with me, as he often did, I was more anxious than relieved.

During the Saturday evening we drank too much and he collapsed into almost tearful apology. He had behaved horribly, he was so ashamed of himself he couldn’t bear it, I must, must believe that it had meant absolutely nothing, that girl had turned out to be a ghastly bore. (What a slip-up! Suppose she hadn’t been?) Never again would he do anything like that because I was and always would be the only woman he really loved, and so on and so on. It was better than silence had been, but it was not good.

Next morning we took a taxi to “our” pub in Appleton and dismissed it before we got there in order to dispel our headaches by walking the last mile. Paul seemed relaxed, scanning the fields on either side of the muddy lane for fieldfares; I was dismally silent, mulling over his apology. It had meant nothing: yes, I accepted that. But his declaration that such a thing would never happen again: no, that I was unable to believe. I don’t remember being as shocked as I ought to have been at his doing it under my nose, thus betraying a really gross indifference to my feelings. I had a humble opinion of my own importance, carefully fostered by a family that considered vanity a serious sin. What I knew I was thinking about was how this flightiness of Paul’s must be handled. I remember thinking that once we were married I would have to learn to be really clever. “It will be all right for quite a time,” I thought. “He will go on coming back to me while we are like we are now. But when I get old - when I’m 30” - and I saw a flash of my own face, anxious and wrinkled under grey hair - “then it will be dangerous, then he could fall in love with one of them.” Would I learn to be clever enough? I’d have to. The whole of that day remained dismal, but not for a moment did it occur to me that I might not want to marry him, and soon our relationship was restored to its usual enjoyable state.

So I don’t think there was ever a time in my adult life when I didn’t realise that men were quite likely to be technically unfaithful to women, although it was not until Paul had finally jilted me that I saw that women, too, could be cheered up by sex without love. I “recovered” from Paul in that I fell in love again, twice, and heavily, but both times it felt “fatal”, something impossible to avoid - and anyway, I longed for it - but which was bound to bring pain.

The first time it was with a married man much older than myself, and I never envisaged him leaving his wife for me. No doubt if he had suggested it I would have accepted, but I admired him far too much to expect it: I was his wartime fling, or folly (there’s nothing like a whiff of death in the air to intensify desire, the essence of life), while she was his good and blameless wife who had just become the mother of their first child, so leaving her would prove him cruel and irresponsible, which I was sure he was not. I would not have loved him so much if he had been.

My second after-Paul love was available, even eligible, but his very eligibility seemed to make him too good to be true. He liked me a lot. For a time he almost thought he was in love with me, but he never quite was and I sensed almost from the beginning that it was going to end in tears, whereupon I plunged in deeper and deeper. And it did end in tears, both of us weeping as we walked up and down Wigmore Street on our last evening together. With masochistic abandon, I loved him even more for his courage in admitting the situation and sparing me vain hopes. (And in fact such courage is something to be grateful for, because a broken heart mends much faster from a conclusive blow than it does from slow strangulation. Believe me! Mine experienced both.)

That, for me, was the end of romantic love. What followed, until I met Barry Reckord in my 44th year, was a series of sometimes very brief, sometimes sustained affairs, always amiable (two of them very much so), almost always cheering-up, and none of them going deep enough to hurt. During those years, if a man wanted to marry me, as three of them did, I felt what Groucho Marx felt about a club willing to accept him: disdain. I tried to believe it was something more rational, but it wasn’t. Several of the painless affairs involved other people’s husbands, but I never felt guilty because the last thing I intended or hoped for was damage to anyone’s marriage. If a wife ever found out - and as far as I know that never happened - it would have been from her husband’s carelessness, not mine.

Loyalty is not a favourite virtue of mine. When spouses are concerned, it seems to me that kindness and consideration should be the key words, not loyalty, and sexual infidelity does not necessarily wipe them out.

Fidelity in the sense of keeping one’s word I respect, but I think it tiresome that it is tied so tightly in people’s minds to the idea of sex. The belief that a wife owes absolute fidelity to her husband has deep and tangled roots, being based not only on a man’s need to know himself to be the father of his wife’s child, but also on the even deeper, darker feeling that man owns woman, God having made her for his convenience. And woman’s anxious clamour for her husband’s fidelity springs from the same primitive root: she feels it to be necessary proof of her value.

There are some things, sexual infidelities among them, that do no harm if they remain unknown - or, for that matter, are known and accepted. I have only to ask myself which I would choose, if forced to do so, between the extreme belief that a whole family’s honour is stained by an unfaithful wife unless she is killed, and the attitude often attributed to the French, that however far from admirable sexual infidelity is, it is perfectly acceptable if conducted properly. Vive la France!

This attitude I shared, and still share, with Barry, with whom I eventually settled down into an extraordinarily happy loving friendship, which remained at its best for about eight years until it began to be affected not by emotional complications, but by Time. This was not a sudden event, but its early stage, which took place during my mid- and late 50s, was followed by a reprieve, which made it possible to ignore its significance. Gradually I had become aware that my interest in, and therefore my physical response to, making love with my dear habitual companion was dwindling: familiarity had made the touch of his hand feel so like the touch of my own that it no longer conveyed a thrill. Looking back, I wonder why I never talked about this with him, because I didn’t. I simply started to fake. Probably this was because the thought of “working at” the problem together struck me as tedious and absurd: if something that had always worked naturally now didn’t work - well, first you hoped that faking it would bring it back, which sometimes it did, and when that stopped happening, you accepted that it was over.

That acceptance was sad. Indeed, I was forced into it at a time when our household was invaded by a ruthless and remarkably succulent blonde in her mid-20s and he fell into bed with her. There was one sleepless night of real sorrow, but only one night. What I mourned during that painful night was not the loss of my loving old friend who was still there, and still is, but the loss of youth: “What she has, God rot her, I no longer have and will never, never have again.” A belated recognition, up against which I had come with a horrid crunch. But very soon another voice began to sound in my head, which made more sense. “Look,” it said, “you know quite well that you have stopped wanting him in your bed, it’s months since you enjoyed it, so what are you moaning about? Of course you have lost youth, you have moved on and stopped wanting what youth wants.” And that was the end of that stage.

Soon afterwards came the reprieve, when I found, to my amusement and pleasure, that novelty could restore sex. The last man in my life as a sexual being, who accompanied me over the frontier between late middle age and being old, was Sam, who was born in Grenada in the Caribbean. Whether he had come to England in order to volunteer for the war, or his arrival just happened to coincide with its outbreak, I don’t know. He joined the RAF Regiment, in which he worked as a clerk, and in his own time came to know black elders of that day who were concerned with establishing the black man’s rights in Britain. He gained a good deal of experience in broadcasting at this time, which served him well later, when he moved on to Ghana and soon attracted the attention of Kwame Nkrumah, who put him in charge of his government’s public relations. He remained Nkrumah’s trusted servant and friend until the coup that brought the Redeemer down, simultaneously putting an end to Sam’s palmy days in Africa.

Because he was known in Accra as an honest man who took no bribes, he escaped prison, but he had to leave the country at four days’ notice, taking nothing but his clothes. When I met him, all he had left from those days was a beautiful camel-hair overcoat with a sable collar, and a gold watch on a handsome bracelet given him by Haile Selassie.

Being an impressive-looking man, very tall, with pleasant manners, easy-going but sensible, he had no trouble getting a job almost at once in the British Government’s organisation concerned with race relations. He was just settling into it when we met at a party at which there were several old African hands of one sort and another. My partner at André Deutsch had kick-started a publishing firm in Nigeria during the 60s and we had some African writers on our list, so the newly independent countries, and race relations, were part of the landscape in which I existed at that time.

In addition to that, in the course of my relationship with Barry, which had by then lasted about eight years, I had come to feel more at home with black men than with white. Barry, having been educated by English schoolmasters at his Jamaican school and by English dons at Cambridge, used sometimes to say that his fellow Jamaicans saw him as “a small, square, brown Englishman”, but he was black enough to have received his share of insults from white men; and one can’t identify with someone of whom that is true without feeling more like him than like his insulters.

The first black person with whom I was ever in the same room was an African undergraduate at a party during my first term at Oxford in 1936. Dancing was going on, and I was deeply relieved at his not asking me for a dance. I knew that if he asked I would have to say yes, and I hadn’t the faintest idea why the prospect seemed so appalling. It was just something that would have appalled my parents, so it appalled me. But I am glad to say that when, a week later, a friend said, “I think I would be sick if a black man touched me” I was shocked. I don’t remember thinking about it in the intervening days, but somehow I had taken the first tiny step of seeing that my reaction to the idea of dancing with that man had been disgusting.

After that I must gradually have given the matter enough thought to get my head straight about it, because when I next came in touch with black people, which didn’t happen for some years, I was able to see them as individuals. The first time I was kissed by a black man - a friendly peck at the end of a taxi ride from one pub to another - I did note it as an occasion, because the fact that it was just like being kissed by anyone else proved me right in a satisfactory way: I was still feeling pleased with myself for not having racist feelings. But by the time I met Barry, although I had never had occasion to make love with a black man, I had met many black people and worked with some of them, so clicking with him at a party and soon afterwards going to bed with him didn’t seem particularly noteworthy except for being much more fun than the last such encounter I’d had, because this time we liked each other so well.

So when at our first meeting Sam made a stately swoop, I was pleased: it was both funny and revivifying to be seen as attractive by this agreeable and sexy person, just after concluding that my love-making days were over. Soon after that he moved into a flat near Putney Bridge, and for the next seven years I spent a night with him there about once a week. We rarely did anything together except make ourselves a pleasant little supper and go to bed, because we had very little in common apart from liking sex. Sam had an old-fashioned sense of what was proper, but I am sure it had never entered his head to think of sex in connection with guilt. As well as The Pickwick Papers, The Bab Ballads and several booklets about the Rosicrucians and the Christian Scientists, the Kama Sutra was among the books permanently entangled in his bedclothes. We also shared painful feet, which was almost as important as liking sex, because when you start feeling your age it is comforting to be with someone in the same condition. You recognise it in each other, but there is no need to go on about it. We never mentioned our feet, just kicked off our shoes as soon as we could.

To be more serious, the really important thing we had in common was that neither of us had any wish to fall in love or to become responsible for someone else’s peace of mind. We didn’t even need to see a great deal of each other. We knew that we would give each other no trouble. So what did we give each other? For Sam, the first, but not most enduring, attraction was that I was white and well bred. Sam had nothing against black women (except his wife, whom he saw as a burden imposed on him by his mother before he’d developed the sense to understand what a mistake it was); but since he had come to England at the end of the 30s all his most important women had been white.

He had been bettering himself ever since his mother urged him to work hard at school, and claiming a white woman for yourself would, alas, be recognised by most black men from his background, at that time, as part of that process. This was a fact that gave older and/or not particularly glamorous white women an edge with black men that they hadn’t got for white ones, which is evidently deplorable, although I can’t help being grateful for it.

Then it turned out that physically I was right for him, and that I could be good company. So I was satisfying as a status symbol, agreeable as a companion in so far as he wanted one, and was able and willing to play along with him in a way he enjoyed. He obviously felt he need look no further.

Sam’s chief attraction to me was that he wanted me: to be urgently wanted at a time when I no longer expected it cheered me up and brought me alive again - no small gift. Also, I am curious. His background and the whole course of his life, being so different from mine, seemed interesting even when he was being dull. Even when I was thinking, “What an old noodle!” I liked him, and what I liked best was the sense I picked up of the boy he used to be.

He had the calm self-confidence and general benevolence bestowed by a secure and happy childhood. Sam’s father owned the patch of land on which they lived, but it was a property too small to support a family, so he had to find work in Trinidad, and then in Venezuela. It was the mother who ran the home, and she gave her son unquestioned precedence over her two daughters.

“We didn’t know it,” Sam told me, “but the food we ate was just what everyone says nowadays is the healthiest: fish, fruit and vegetables, we were never short of those.” They lived right on the sea, so escaped the common West Indian overdependence on root vegetables. “And all that air and exercise. I thought nothing of running five miles to school and five miles back.” They rode, too. Most people kept a horse (this surprised me) and if a boy wanted to get somewhere in a hurry, he could jump on to some neighbour’s bare-backed nag without having to ask. And they swam as much as they ran.

A good-looking, even-tempered boy, good at all the local pastimes, crammed with healthy food and plunged by his fond mother into herb baths of which she knew the secrets, Sam was evidently secure among his friends as a leader. When he recalled those happy times, he seemed to bring glimpses of them into the room - a whiff of nutmeg-scented sea-breeze, very endearing.

His mother lost him, of course - that wife was her big mistake. He begot two children on her, then could stand it no longer, left for England and his mother never saw him again.

He did not consider himself a bad son, husband or father for having left. He had kept in touch, sent money, seen to it that his children were educated: he had done what was proper.And his wife… Thirty-five years after he left Grenada, he returned for the first time, for a three-week visit at the invitation of the prime minister. He didn’t let his wife know he was coming, but after the first week it occurred to him to drop in on her. “So what happened?” I asked. He shook his head, clicked his tongue, and said slowly and disapprovingly: “That’s a very cantankerous woman.” Our relationship ended gently, the gaps between our meetings becoming gradually longer. The last time we met, after an especially long one (so long that, without regret, I had thought it final), he was slower than usual and seemed abstracted and tired, but not ill. Although we had agreed already that our affair was over, he said, “What about coming to bed?” but I could see he was relieved when I said no. “The trouble with me,” I said, “is that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. My body has gone against it.” He didn’t say, “Mine, too”, he wouldn’t want to go as far as that, but he did say: “I know, the body does go against things. You can’t do anything about that.” And the next thing I heard about him, not very much later, was that he had died suddenly of a heart attack.

You can’t miss someone grievously if you haven’t seen them or wanted to see them for several months and they had touched only a comparatively small corner of your life, but after his death Sam became more vivid in my mind than many of my more important dead. I saw him with photographic clarity - still can. His gestures, his expressions, the way he walked and sat, his clothes. The seven years of him played through my head with the immediacy of a newsreel: all we said, all we did; perhaps the pattern of our meetings was so repetitive that I couldn’t help learning him by heart. I particularly remember the feel of him. His skin was smooth and always seemed to be cool and dry, a pleasant, healthy skin, and his smell was pleasant and healthy. I feel him lying beside me after making love, both of us on our backs, hands linked, arms and legs touching in a friendly way. His physical presence is so clear, even now, that it is almost like a haunt (an amiable one).

Perhaps because he carried into the beginning of my old age something belonging to younger days, he is still alive in my head, and I am glad of it. Dear Sam.

· This is an edited extract from Somewhere Towards The End, by Diana Athill, to be published next month by Granta at £12.99.

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Number One-Hundred-Seventy-Two

A middle-aged sex maniac
Suzanne Portnoy is a well-off, middle-aged mother. She’s also a brazen sexual adventurer with a steamy bestseller under her suspender belt
By Lesley White, The London Times (February 2008)

Deviant lifestyles in fragrant surroundings are always a bit of a shock. One afternoon I knock on the door of a Victorian semi in a desirable street in north London, average house price £700,000, all period features and private schools. A middle-aged sex maniac answers the door; she is the author of graphic, no-holes-barred (sorry) erotic memoirs and she looks frankly disappointing. Not a love bite or a stocking top in sight. Instead a long, flowing skirt, subtle make-up, curly blonde hair strictly tamed, and covered for our pictures with a dark wig. The only giveaway (but not really) is a low-cut top from which breasts – for which she receives the gratitude of many – threaten to spill. Does she have a parking voucher, please?

I wonder if “Dr Donny”, the tall, dark, handsome stranger who arrived on this very doorstep one morning, interrupted the flow of their shared fantasy to satisfy local parking regulations. Probably not. The wardens are hot in these parts, but not as hot as the sex. Their assignation was arranged via a chatroom and telephone call: she opened the door and ran upstairs, while the “doctor”, actually a fund manager with a stethoscope and an unusual bedside manner, followed on. He could have left her robbed and battered – though rape would have been a pretty impossible charge to uphold – but instead he left his calling card and asked to come again. This is the woman men have always believed exists, the saucy nympho who beckons from her door with a smile and a negligee, the one their wives insist is a figment of their fetid imaginations. This woman is a reward for their unfailing hopefulness. She is also their worst nightmare: a merciless judge of male members.

Portnoy has written two books, in the tradition of Anaïs Nin and Catherine Millet, though thankfully she has none of the latter’s literary pretensions. The first book, The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker, was published two years ago to a gratifyingly outraged response (the Daily Mail painted her as tragic, which, for a self-appointed iconoclast, is pretty much the Oscar). It sold 30,000 copies in three languages, very decent figures for her genre. As far as she can tell, her readers are fortysomething women whose partners read the books rather than buy them.

She is in successful company: titles such as Jane Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman and Abby Lee’s Girl with a One Track Mind have turned erotic memoirs into breakthrough blockbusters. Portnoy’s follow-up, The Not So Invisible Woman, is published this month, not so much a sequel as more of the same. (Her editor at Virgin Books said not to worry; more of the same would be fine.) She also runs a blog, which she launched to market the books, with a podcast dispensing master classes in bedroom events.

She is rather like Delia waxing about the variations on a classic victoria sponge, full of helpful hints on technique and tips for foolproof results. Isn’t she embarrassed? She laughs, putting her head on one side, all cutesy. “Aw, no, I like it too much.” Her books are a rampant picaresque through naturist saunas, swingers’ clubs, fetish joints and online chat rooms where chat is the last thing on the agenda; pornographic and crude, the smells and emissions of copulation are their obsession. If you took away the dirty stuff, no narrative would be left; if you took away the internet, there would be no Portnoy persona at all. Cybersex and its global confluence of niche peccadilloes rescued her life – or ruined it, if you are a moralist – from the sexless invisibility of the middle-aged woman, described and sometimes welcomed by feminist writers such as Germaine Greer, but not by a gal who wants to make trousers strain at the seams.

We have spoken before, Suzanne Portnoy and I. In her straight life, using her real name, she is an entertainment PR with whom I once tried to set up a story. It didn’t work out, but she offered me tickets to a family show she thought my little son might enjoy: friendly, professional, to the point. This is clearly how she runs her sex life. As I walk into her kitchen, she points out the hot tub in her small back garden, first stop for the conquests she brings home (second stop: kitchen table); it is overlooked by an entire block of neighbours, which amuses the new heroine of clit-lit.

Portnoy, 46, is straight-talking, shameless. She laughs all the time, a big, brash, pearly toothed laugh, which is her weapon and her armour; she acts brazen, but actually she is trying to stop you getting to know her. When you have sacrificed your sexual privacy, you guard your domestic trivia, the only secret left, like a rottweiler.

Having read her books, you know more than you could ever want to know about a divorced mother who doesn’t wear knickers: you know what she keeps in her bedside cabinets – and it’s not Vicks Sinex nasal spray like me. Her ideal weekend, when her two sons stay with their father, is as a single woman on the swingers’ scene.

Portnoy was married to a handsome executive in the entertainment industry for a decade. It was a rocky marriage, latterly celibate, which set her on the road to sexual nirvana. “Suzy housewife” was overweight, frustrated, subsumed in home-making and motherhood. The sex, which had never been explosive, became a distant memory. “I suggested to my husband that if he wanted to kick-start our relationship he should buy some porn. He just said, ‘You’re sick.’ My kids were always wrapped around me. I couldn’t bear anyone else to touch me.”

One night when she was drunk and her husband away on business, she meandered online to a contact website, insisting that all she wanted was a male pen pal with whom to discuss her life. Instead she met a New York lawyer with whom she shared a sexual epiphany. She flew to see him for sex, at first lying to her seemingly unconcerned husband, once – and this is where I can’t help disapproving – even taking her young kids to stay in his flat while his own family were away. “We were catalysts for each other’s sort of sexual journey,” she recalls in her twangy hybrid transatlantic accent. “He wanted to explore sexual experiences. And I felt as if I was going back to my twenties and reinventing myself.

It was very exciting and scary. There was a lot of fantasy. I love fantasy.” But with Portnoy it doesn’t remain fantasy for long. The only thing he wanted that she couldn’t provide was to be told how much she hated him. Her fellow travellers, you see, are not just hedonistic pioneers: the damaged are present in numbers. The self-destructive are happy to be selling themselves cheap; the addicts are seeking oblivion. Curiously, however, none of this is the case with Portnoy.

The daughter of conventional and happily married parents in a close-knit Jewish family, she was a bookish girl, growing up in London and America. They gave her little to rebel against, if that’s what we were assuming; a liberalism she has bestowed on her own sons, aged 13 and 16. “My children are so straight that it’s funny. My youngest son said to me once, ‘You tell us we can do anything, we can talk to you about anything, but because you’ve done it all, we don’t want to.’” She warns her older son, but gently. “I say, if you are gonna have sex, please be safe. If you’re gonna take drugs, don’t take a lot of them.”

Is Portnoy safe herself? In seven years of wild sex with strangers she can only recall one incident that looked as if it might turn nasty. Paradoxically for a secret life, she sticks to public places; she is regularly tested for diseases she has never caught; she uses condoms. Even when blindfolded in a sex club, the only thing she demands is that male members be properly dressed.

She lost her virginity at 17, was sexually adventurous at university, was made miserable by unrequited crushes in her twenties. She has more than made up for that in middle age by casting a smaller net and turning an ocean of unavailable men into a pond of appreciative specialists. In the real world she might find it hard to hook a handsome banker; she’s too old, too curvaceous and, as she herself says, “hardly Cindy Crawford”, probably too loud and scary to boot. Being single at swingers’ parties, however, makes her hot property; being adventurous makes her a catch; truly enjoying sex makes it all easy for her.

But not as easy as the internet makes it. With a ready-made infrastructure of infidelity, women can advertise for NSA (no strings attached) encounters. No longer needing to brave bars and clubs to meet men, straight or swinging women access hook-up sites such as meet2cheat.co.uk or illicitencounters.co.uk, along with texts, webcams, hidden e-mail accounts. Portnoy’s favourite, Swinging Heaven, boasts over 800,000 members, mostly men; but look out, boys, she says, the women are coming. Memoirs like hers are the glossy brochures for a libidinous minibreak: the books are leading the curious to experiment, the sex is producing the books, and growing the market. Her editor at Virgin Books, Adam Nevill, talks of a “sexual revolution… not dissimilar to what happened in the Sixties in terms of changing attitudes to sexual lifestyles”.

The writing started while she was living with a boyfriend, Daniel. She sent his unpublished novel and her cheeky blog, detailing her life as a London PR, to a publisher, who asked her to turn it into a book. Tragically, Daniel died of liver cancer. I’ve never read a more perfunctory description of the death of a lover; but then she keeps the stuff that makes her cry to herself – she will open her legs to a roomful of men, but she won’t open her heart. Though she no longer loved him, she tried to score some Viagra so that she could make his last weeks more tolerable. His doctor was appalled, but you can’t help admiring her courage in making the request. By the time she got the prescription, he was too sick for sex.

His death in 2005 was the launch pad for her dive into sexual adventure, as if every day were her last. While he had been dying at home she had found solace by logging onto a swinging site. The day he passed away she went to Rio’s, a unisex naturist club in Kentish Town, where brushing a thigh in the sauna or a fumble in the Jacuzzi (whose waters you’d think twice about sampling) can soon spark a mini-orgy in a specially allocated room. (The place is mentioned so often, its owners should sponsor her website.)

“I thought, I really am going to have a good time now. I’m gonna go for it in a major, major way. And a friend of mine who had suffered the death of both parents in a short period of time told me she’d have shagged a tree on the day her mum died. I felt like that. It’s like sex is an answer to death, grief and everything. You just feel like, ‘Give me something that makes me feel alive.’ “

In the middle of this maelstrom, she met 50-year-old Greg, her long-time swinging partner and sexual mentor, with whom she now shares a cosy if unusual Memory Lane. A year or so after Daniel’s death, with six boyfriends on the go, she started to write her adventures, unencumbered by modesty, euphemism or guilt.

Is there something wrong with this woman? In the past her friends have worried about her, begged her to get help for sex addiction. And a Freudian analyst could have a field day with her insatiable need to be “filled up”; what is it that makes her feel so empty? Her lifestyle has lost her friends: judgmental women, mainly, those scared she would steal their men, and, I imagine, those who just thought it was all too seedy. In general, women need their friends to affirm their own life choices. Portnoy’s are too outré for comfort, too strident to be challenged, begging too many questions she can’t or won’t address.

We are roughly the same vintage, mothers of boys, writers, I am married, monogamous (sexually comatose compared to Portnoy). We have much and nothing in common. The longer I spend with Madam Sin discussing the etiquette of sauna sex, as sweet children gaze from framed school photographs on the shelf behind the sofa, the more I become aware that my life would horrify her, just as hers terrifies me. Liberation?

I cannot imagine anything worse than texting around London for men willing to stage a gangbang. To be honest, even the idea of maintaining an ever-ready bikini line is too much. Actually, to be really honest, the late nights would make it a deal-breaker. Is she a bad woman as well as a very naughty girl? I don’t think so. There is nothing wilfully cruel, or negligent, in how she treats others, but grading men according to the size of their penises seems a pointless reversal of the old sexism we all marched and shouted about a lifetime ago.

If she is impressed with the equipment, its owner might be admitted into her stable of studs, her rotating “dating portfolios”. Sexy Suze travels like a surveyor with a tape measure. Numbers present more of a problem than size: she can’t tell you how many men there have been because she stopped counting at 100. And for all her claims about being “in control”, isn’t she turning herself into a commodity to be used? Her answer is: as long as she’s enjoying it, so what? The censorious voices of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin might say that her voraciousness is feeding an industry in which women are base material, the pole dancers and strippers, the hostesses and lap-grinders, who are economically if not physically abused. The UK cyberporn market, to which she subscribes, was the fastest-growing in the world in 2006, its profits soaring into billions, many of its addicted victims trailing broken relationships behind them.

Why doesn’t she have a boyfriend? After her divorce she dated with a view to finding a replacement, but she stopped on realising that she already had one – or, rather, several. She looks at men practically: can they outwit her boredom threshold, match her schedule? “People say that love can conquer all. That’s rubbish. When you’re 47 you’re sorted, you’ve got your life. I meet twentysomething girls who think they’re sexually liberated, but the bottom line is that they’re trapped in a Cinderella fantasy, desperate to meet Mr Right, and thinking that the baby is gonna make it all perfect. It’s a generation thing. I was just the same.”

She calls herself a polyamorist, and is still looking for the primary relationship around which her more casual affairs – all long-term and ongoing – would cluster. Her psychic advises that she stop dismissing men as boyfriends for their tiny flaws; she has just got rid of one because she couldn’t deal with his teeth. What did for the New York lawyer was his dingy apartment (she’s a design snob) and the fact that he served her pasta on paper plates.

What are the logistics of running a double life? Actually, despite the pseudonym, disguised photographs and the avoidance of television, her cover is so flimsy it has been blown (or given away) many times. Her pen name (also a reference to the sexually ground-breaking Philip Roth novel) is less of a disguise than it would be if she really cared about anonymity. Her PR clients are apparently unperturbed. “To be honest, it’s pretty common knowledge who I am,” she says. “A lot of my clients know. In the area I work in, people are taking drugs and doing all sorts of shit. I sleep with a few people – so what? I’m not a police woman or a teacher.” Yet she appeals to you to be careful in protecting her identity, and clearly frets about it, which must be exhausting. She describes her life as “compartmentalised”, but the danger of crossover is constant; actually, she is trapped between proving that she is not ashamed of her sex life, and wanting to protect her sons. “They’re at an age where their friends might, you know, tease them.” Tease them? She works in the media, which employs many of their schoolfriends’ parents, and if her indiscretions ever reached the playground, it would be a case of torturing them rather than teasing them.

At first she seems to be saying that she hides her exploits from them. But the family computer is her cybersex club. And haven’t they found copies of her books lying around? “Oh, sure,” she laughs (and the laugh is definitely strategic), “but they’re not interested in my writing. It’s a bit like reading your mum’s diary.” Yes, I agree, and I would have ploughed through my own mother’s secret garden in two minutes, amazed and appalled. She shrugs. “They say, ‘We don’t want to know. Just as long as we don’t come home and you’re in an embarrassing situation.’” While we are talking her older son returns; tall, polite, saying hello and dashing upstairs, aware that I am “the journalist”. Why has his mum shared her predilections with a prurient or disapproving world? Not just for the money (her advance for her first book was “a couple of thousand”, though for her second the figure shot up to £20,000). She is an attention-seeker for sure, but it’s mainly because she sees her behaviour as meaningful.

“I can be a figurehead for a new kind of female sexuality,” she says seriously. She tells her kids that people are comforted (of all reactions to her prose, that must be the most unlikely) by her work. “My readers are relieved to hear that being sexual in your forties doesn’t make you a freak.”

If her sons asked her to stop, would she? She hesitates. “I think that… that’s a difficult… I don’t know. Obviously I want to protect them, but the bottom line is that somebody has to do this, and I’m the one who’s been chosen. It’s really important to me. They know that.”

I wonder what private conversations her parents might have about their beloved daughter’s antics, and their concerns for their grandchildren. I don’t imagine Portnoy gives it a moment’s thought. There is a selfishness to her quest, maybe partly the righteous urge to liberate a generation, but essentially focused on sating a mighty libido and bolstering an ego that is not as robust as we might assume.

Portnoy is an evangelist. She recommends her lifestyle to all. If most couples’ sex lives wither for want of communication, her scene is all about instant honesty. “It’s like the first-date conversation is, ‘Okay, if you could do anything, what would you do?’” When she reads those surveys about women preferring chocolate or shoes to sex, she assumes they must be having bad sex. You can see that it works for her. I don’t suspect her of exaggerating her exploits, or of lying about how happy they make her. Here is one menopause-bound woman at least who doesn’t grimace every time she passes a mirror, who may have found the alternative to HRT and acupuncture: so much sex that her serotonin levels keep her zinging as the oestrogen plummets, so many compliments that she is enviably convinced of her gorgeousness. “I’m constantly validated, so that’s how I see myself.” Will she be too old one day? A friend in her mid-fifties has suggested stopping at 85, and Portnoy seems satisfied with that.

Recently the action has slowed. After a course on tantric sex, she was counselled by her instructor to stop chasing orgasms and re-engage with the intimacy of sex. “I’d gone so much into fantasy and role-playing and swinging that I couldn’t just be with somebody and enjoy that.”

She has a handful of regulars, a “breakfast thing”, once every six weeks. She wants to make her Portnoy persona a full-time job, with a late-night-radio agony-aunt slot, a cross between Dr Ruth and Linda Lovelace, part of her qualification for which is that she loves men. “I never think of them as bastards,” she says benignly, but then she never allows herself to be let down by them. A producer friend of hers is chasing the film rights to her books, though quite how you’d make them more than a porno flick is hard to see. Being a published author has made her a celebrity at her old haunts and garnered a fan base (and some hate mail too). She admits that she could have her pick of her fans, but actually doesn’t take the opportunity. Her female correspondents seek advice on initiation into more and better sex; 80% of her letters are from men wanting it with her. She may fear intrusion, but I think she loves the power over men, normally only accorded to the super-beautiful, the youthful, the alluringly and unavailably sexy. When a fan asked her to lunch recently, she agreed on condition that he bring a gift of her favourite lingerie in her size; reading between the lines, she felt his disappointment that, despite her careful grooming and twice-a-week personal trainer, she didn’t look more like a fantasy creature. Tough. She doesn’t dwell on the knocks.

Portnoy is bold, self-assertive, but maybe a little disingenuous about what she wants from men. It is not quite as simple as just sex, nor as complicated as true love. She wants to be treated, pampered, showered with the perks enjoyed by wives and mistresses; she wants top trips, dinners – all the tokens of romantic esteem. Of course she “dates” penniless super-studs, but those who can’t perform for their supper might be expected to buy hers. That doesn’t mean she’s grasping, but that running her own cabaret is tiring, and even the feistiest impresarios need to feel looked-after sometimes. One problem is that, when what you love best about a man is his penis, he’ll probably end up resenting you for the compliment. Especially if you’re keen on rival specimens too. I’ll never read her books again – not my thing – but I’ll always wonder if her lust will see her into a cheerfully ribald old age or leave her stranded.

For all her saucy fan mail, Portnoy wants to be a poster girl more than a mature pin-up, a walking advertisement for unleashed female sexuality. She smashes taboos like glasses at a Jewish wedding (though I can’t see one of those on the horizon) and has tapped into a publishing market churning out the evidence – a sort of frontline sexual reportage, complete with casualties – that no-strings sex is the way forward. For a single woman whose main emotional attachment is to her children, it might provide short-term answers, but how many are there with this one’s industrial appetites and nonchalance about disapproval?

What makes her tick would make many women – even bold, curious, frustrated ones – feel unanchored and confused, ultimately lonely. Recently she met a woman at a party who told Portnoy her book had changed her life: she had begun an affair. Since infidelity is the most commonly cited reason for divorce, maybe she shouldn’t be so quick to congratulate herself on liberating the drearily married.

And what of her own future? She can stave off the loneliness of the empty nest with sex, keep her contacts updated, her publishers supplied with salacious manuscripts, but it might someday become a chore. As the chill wind of mortality rushes up her geriatric miniskirt, wouldn’t she rather be at home with a nice mug of cocoa, a faithful husband, even a cosy pair of knickers?

The Not So Invisible Woman (Virgin Books, £7.99) by Suzanne Portnoy is out this week

Memoirs of sex-seeking women

Frontline sexual reportage is a bestselling genre: 300,000 copies of books like these are bought every year.

Melissa Panarello’s One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, based on her own diaries, is the tale of a teenager’s multifarious sex life. Its frankness scandalised Italy; it has sold 2m copies worldwide.

Chick-lit gets ruder in this book by a London-based sex writer who calls herself “part slut, part hopeless romantic”. She sets off on her quest for a soul mate — who must also be a sex god — with comical results.

Catherine Millet, a French art critic and editor, gained instant notoriety with this graphic memoir of gang-bangs and orgies wrapped up in philosophy. Despite its pretensions, it has sold almost 1m copies in Europe.

An opera-loving teacher of English, Juska placed this ad in the New York Review of Books: “Before I turn 67 next March, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like”. What ensued became a bestselling memoir.

Women and sex: facts and figures

A number of surveys reveal how important sex is to the British woman, especially if she is over 40

Half of British women are not satisfied with their sex lives

59% of British wives say they would leave their marriage if they could afford to

One in nine British women regards sex as “like any other household chore”

British women are twice as likely to be unfaithful as their French counterparts

40% of women over the age of 40 admit to being unfaithful to their partner

In a survey of fortysomething women, 70% said their sex lives were better than ever before;

82% said sex was as important as it was in their twenties; 45% wanted more sex than ever before; 69% felt more adventurous in bed; 66% felt more confident about their bodies

Almost two out of three British women have logged onto a personals website

Nearly 50,000 women visited the Erotica lifestyle show in west London last year

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Number One-Hundred-Seventy

The Infidelity Files Day 3: ‘Adultery isn’t the end - it’s a wake-up call’
by Angela Levin, the London Telegraph (Jan 2008), Part 3

In the final part of her investigation into Britain’s infidelity epidemic, Angela Levin reveals how wronged partners deal with being cheated on - and how the crisis can improve their relationship

‘Sex is really important. It’s the glue in any relationship, and if you’ve been together for a long time you’ve got to make more effort to keep it interesting.”

It’s the sort of remark that not so long ago would almost certainly have been made by a man.

But, in fact, it was spoken by Rebecca, a thirtysomething married woman with two children - and it is further proof that in today’s world, women are calling the sexual shots as much as men.

She speaks from experience. Five years ago, she became so fed up with her husband’s lack of interest in her that she decided to do something practical about it and take a lover.

“My husband stopped fancying me when I had our first child,” she said. “We used to have a great sexual relationship, but now he keeps making excuses.

I don’t want him to see me just as a mother to his children. I found myself in a situation I’d never envisaged, but I decided it was better to have an affair than to separate.” The irony is that while sex in its many different guises is all around us, it’s often lacking in the one place it should be: the marital bed.

‘Adultery isn’t the end – it’s a wake-up call’

Men, too, don’t want to suffer in silence. “My wife and I have a great marriage and I love my three kids,” explained John, 49, “but I don’t have anywhere near as much sex as I’d like.

My wife is always too tired, and when I bring up the subject it starts an argument. There must be lots of other men like me, who pretend to the world that everything’s OK but who are far from happy.”

The happiness is relative. The partner who chooses to have a fling has to live a life of subterfuge and always be on the alert in case he or she is found out. They also have to deal with their conscience.

Even if they manage to reason with themselves that what they get up to has a positive effect on their core relationship, the truth is that most people don’t rely on their brain to tell them it’s OK to play away.

As well as the obvious health hazards, what you gain from an affair is small compared to what you risk losing - except perhaps if an affair is used as a deliberate exit strategy from the marriage.

It also only takes a second’s carelessness for your infidelity to be discovered. In the five months I spent researching infidelity in the UK and interviewing middle-class adulterers, I came across countless stories where one of the partners, usually the woman, finds an incriminating text on her partner’s mobile.

The straying partner often explains that he was only having sex with someone else because he loves you and is trying to keep the marriage together - but such comments are rarely reassuring.

Sexual betrayal can feel like an emotional juggernaut crashing into your heart, stomach and brain. It’s naïve to expect anyone to shake it off as if it is merely the equivalent of the person you love finding a new tennis partner. And it can take months or years for the emotional swingometer to settle back to anywhere near normal.

So what should the wronged partner do (if indeed there really is a wronged partner)? Affairs are often the result of something wrong in the marriage, rather than just the cause.

A consensual view is to do nothing in a hurry. Both women and men who rage and shout and tell their loved one to pack their bags and leave often live to regret it.

Jill, a 42-year-old accountant and mother of three, is one. She split from her husband two years ago because he had a fling and now thinks she acted precipitately. “I threw him out, despite his plea that he loved me,” she said. “I really miss him.

I thought we were happy and my pride was wounded, but I should have waited until I had cooled down a little. I have been very lonely and we have begun to meet again to see if there is anything left between us. I don’t know what will happen.”

Male partners can be just as crushed. It’s something Ben, 32, who has recently got married, worries about. “I would feel trashed and humiliated if my wife went with someone else. And would no doubt take revenge by finding someone for me. I would also retreat into my shell, but in the end I wouldn’t leave her.”

If the wronged party can hang on, science is on their side. Infatuation has a chemical base as well as an emotional one. When two people’s eyes meet across a crowded room, their pulses quicken and their hearts race.

As they are drawn irrevocably together, certain changes will take place in the body’s chemistry. Three chemicals - phenylethylamine, dopamine and noradrenaline - are released and together produce that amazing euphoria of passionate love.

The chemical combination can last in the body for between six months and two years. As levels drop, it is replaced by oxytocin, the so-called “cuddle hormone” which induces nesting behaviour. Most affairs end around this time.

A recent London university survey gives further grounds for hope by revealing that when unfaithful husbands leave their wives, only three per cent end up marrying their mistresses. When they do, these marriages have a 75 to 90 per cent failure rate.

It confirms the prophetic words of the late Sir James Goldsmith that: “When a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy.”

The unpalatable truth is that an extra-marital affair can be a wake-up call to a dull and predictable marriage. It’s harsh and cruel, but can be effective. If the innocent partner can go through the pain barrier, cope with the loss of pride, rise above the humiliation and talk, a relationship can be rebuilt.

“My wife didn’t understand how much sex meant to me until she found out that I had had a brief fling,” said 48-year-old Edward, who works for a marketing company. “It took months of conversation, but she gradually began taking more care of herself than she had done, lost weight and showed more interest in sex.”

Mary, who has had two affairs during her 18-year marriage, is more hard-headed and thinks that both sexes have to move with the times. “I don’t believe that having an affair should lead to divorce,” she insists.

“The whole structure and nature of society has changed. Any couple who have been together for any length of time should try to understand the circumstances they find themselves in and give their best shot at working it out.”

David Miller, who runs a discreet dating agency for married couples, believes that adultery - from which he earns his living - is deeply misunderstood. “No one walks down the aisle thinking: ‘Now I’m married, I can be an adulterer’.

People go into marriage thinking that it’s a lifetime commitment and most of them are deeply upset when it goes wrong. If a woman doesn’t want it to happen to her, she shouldn’t shrink away from talking about sex and then giving her man what he wants and needs.

“If a man doesn’t want it to happen to him, he should not think of her just as a wife and mother. He should make enough time for her, take her seriously, touch her and be romantic.

“From my experience, it is profound unhappiness that drives most men and women into the arms of someone else. Many women have thought about it for years before they are unfaithful. And although men don’t think about it for as long before they act, many feel quite isolated.

They take their partner’s rejection of sex as a rejection of them as people. Many come to see me more in sorrow than in anger.”

It is, of course, unrealistic to expect that the sexual feelings you have for someone you have lived with for years can stay at the level of passion you experienced when you first met.

The daily grind of life acts like a fire-blanket to passion, familiarity breeds apathy, and the “spark” is often the first casualty of marriage, especially when children come along. But you don’t have to let it happen to you and your marriage.

Of course, if an individual wants to have an affair, it’s not easy to know how to prevent it - but there are measures.

Most women and many men will be infuriated by the advice that I have compiled, but it is based on what I have learned from interviewees during my five months of research. Some suggestions may seem maddeningly obvious, but they just might put a tired marriage back on track.

Ten ways to keep your marriage alive

1 Try not to take your partner for granted: remember, no relationship comes with a guarantee.

2 Watch your weight, but don’t go on and on about your diet.

3 Don’t pick your nose or fart if your loved one is around.

4 Don’t slop around in baggy old clothes more than is absolutely necessary.

5 Don’t wear slippers.

6 Keep trying: the slippery slope starts when you feel complacent.

7 Try not to be too predictable - in anything.

8 Make a special time when you talk positively about each other. Avoid talking about nappies, arrangements, anything domestic, unfairness at the office, or, unless you are both sporty, the latest football crisis.

9 Make time for sex. Try to have a night away. Block out a lunch time in your diary when your children are at school. It’s important to keep practising.

10 Think of sex as a skill as well as an expression of love.

If you discover your partner is having an affair:

1 List the good points in your relationship.

2 Write down three things you could improve about yourself.

3 Be brave and ask your partner for three things he or she would like you to change.

4 Ask yourself if you laugh enough together.

5 What is your life really going to be like if you split up - worse or better?

6 Look at the whole relationship, not just at what you feel about him or her after the discovery.

How to stop your wife having an affair

1 Arrange surprises for her.

2 Treat her as a mistress rather than as a mother or a wife.

3 Be romantic, take her out on dates, let her feel that she’s a woman and desirable.

4 Buy her a negligée rather than a vacuum cleaner as a birthday or Christmas present.

5 Constantly show her that you find her attractive, interesting, exciting and romantic.

6 Don’t go to bed with your T-shirt tucked into your Y-fronts.

7 Don’t turn on the television as soon as you come home.

8 Listen to her.

9 Take her seriously.

10 Respect what she does in the home and in her job.

How to stop your husband having an affair

1 Be sexual and adventurous, even if you are tired.

2 Let him feel that he’s sexually exciting, and more than just an equity lawyer or headmaster.

3 Let him know that you fancy him.

4 Let him know you feel you’re lucky to have him.

5 Keep polishing his ego.

6 Don’t go to bed with a layer of moisturiser on your face.

7 Don’t dye your hair or shave your legs in front of him.

8 Don’t lose your own self-respect.

9 Be interested in his life, but don’t live only through him.

10 Don’t talk about the children in bed. HAve your Say

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Monday, January 21, 2008

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Nine

Infidelity : ‘Being unfaithful keeps me happy’
by Angela Levin, the London Telegraph (Jan 2008), Part 2

Continuing her investigation into Britain’s adultery epidemic, Angela Levin talks to professional women who have affairs to bolster their marriages - and revitalise flagging sex lives

Sylvia, 43, has a highly paid job in the City. Her husband is supportive and they have two children. She entertains at weekends, enjoys luxury holidays twice a year and has time for her friends.


Get some spice in you life: Many women turn to affairs to cope with a loveless marriage

To those in her circle, she seems to have an enviable life and to have mastered the difficult art of balancing work with home and family. What they don’t know is that she has a higher libido than her husband and regularly takes a lover.

Sylvia belongs to a small but growing group of alpha woman - financially independent, confident and uninhibited - who, like men, have developed a similar pro-active, almost cynical approach to sex.

For them, it is no big deal to seek sexual fulfilment outside marriage and they claim to be able to separate lust from love.

“I am one of those women who want it all,” she laughs. “My life is very hectic and I thrive on adrenaline. I really enjoy sex, but I don’t want any complications. So I am only interested in men, preferably married, who want the same.”

Just how many women today are having sex with men who are not their husband is hard to pin down, but some sex researchers are claiming it is as high as 60 per cent.

Whatever the numbers, much has changed since Emma Bovary decided she couldn’t take the humiliation of living life being branded an adulteress and committed suicide by taking arsenic.

The hard-nosed, predatory female of today is perhaps the evolutionary reality of a phrase originally coined by author Erica Jong in her taboo-busting 1973 bestseller, Fear of Flying.

She described a sexual encounter for its own sake, without emotional involvement or commitment and between two previously unacquainted persons, as a “zipless f***”; she also said it was “rarer than the unicorn”.

Nearly 35 years on, these encounters are available with a click of the mouse.

Over a five-month period, I talked to almost 100 middle-class professionals, both male and female, who confessed to being unfaithful.

What was remarkable was that not one of the women said they felt guilty. And those who believed they might get emotionally involved tried to work out hard-headed strategies of dealing with it.

Although it would seem that no-strings-attached sex is the emotional equivalent of McDonald’s - in that it can satisfy a certain hunger but is quickly forgotten and doesn’t do you much good - many of the women I spoke to saw it as a better option than having an affair with someone they work with, which could put their career at risk.

Nor did they want to get involved with a family friend.

Lynne, a 45-year-old married administrator, thinks the growing popularity among women of no-strings relationships is a result of their success in the workplace. “Now we are as successful as men at work and other areas of life, women like me think, ‘Why the hell not?’ My lover won’t jeopardise my work or family life. I am doing something that makes me happy, which, in turn, makes home happier, too.

“Women have come a long way in the last 20 or 30 years, so why should taking a lover without commitment be a male preserve? I just think, ‘Lucky me.’?”

Jenny, 48, who runs her own business, thinks the trend for uninvolved sex is part of today’s have-it-all society.

“In the past,” she says, “a wife would think, ‘I’ve got a decent husband and live in a presentable house, so I can’t expect too much.’ But now our expectations are much higher and we don’t want to compromise. I’ve done it and don’t feel guilty at all.

“I spend a lot of time caring for my husband and child and running my business, and I think of this as something for me. Women have always had sexual needs, but culturally we’ve not been encouraged to attend to them. Now we are more willing and able to make decisions about what happens to us. Some of us might choose to go to the cinema for a night out. Others might prefer to have sex.”

So while more men are in tune with their feelings and want more from an extra-marital relationship - emotional companionship as well as physical contact - some women want less. Less involvement, less friendship, and more sex.

But can women really be quite so matter-of-fact and unemotional about infidelity? Can evolution be gradually turning women, whose priority was once to build nests and care and be cared for, into hunter-gatherers?

Are Byron’s words: “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ‘tis woman’s whole existence” really no longer valid?

Possibly. Most women are sexually experienced before marriage. They are financially independent. Nor is there a stigma attached to the adulterous woman.

As recently as 1970, if a woman was found to have had an extra-marital affair, she not only forfeited her right to maintenance but also risked losing her children.

It was a penalty Diana, Princess of Wales’s mother, Frances, discovered to her cost. After years of an unhappy marriage to Earl Spencer, in the late 1960s she had an affair with wallpaper merchant Peter Shand Kydd.

She left her husband, taking their four children with her. He felt so humiliated by her adultery that although, at the time, women were routinely given custody of the children, he fought her in the courts and won.

The judge made much of branding her as an adulteress and seemed to take no account of her cross-petition on the grounds of cruelty. Now, when couples divorce, any sexual misdemeanours by the woman are considered on a par with a man’s.

We do not yet, however, have a no-fault-based divorce system like Spain or Canada.

Nor are women who have extra-marital relationships confined to a particular age group.

While today’s women of 40 and younger see having great sex as their right (some studies show that the more sexual partners a person has before marriage, the more likely she or he is to cheat on a spouse), many fifty- or even sixtysomething women, in common with their male counterparts, don’t want to be left out.

These are the generation of women whose children have left home. They are fitter and better looking than their predecessors, thanks to HRT, Botox and plastic surgery, and seek new challenges.

While some choose physical challenges, a recent report from Germany cited that one in three fiftysomething women are looking for a sexual adventure. Perhaps they are catching up on all they missed during those sleep-deprived times when their children were small.

Teresa, who is 52, is one example. She has been married 27 years and, when her youngest left home she decided she wanted more excitement in her life.

“I have a good husband, but I have spent my life lying on my back thinking of England when we have sex. He’s never been any good in the bedroom. He has a low libido and little interest. I knew that when I married him and he is a good man in every other respect.

“For years, I kept wondering what it would be like to meet someone who was really exciting in bed. Then about nine months ago I placed an ad on the internet just for the fun of it. I was inundated with replies, but mostly from losers. There was only one man who stood out. We met and there was instant chemistry between us. We met again on an occasional basis, but then I realised that psychologically I wasn’t the type to be unfaithful. I would hate my husband to find out, so I stopped. But I don’t regret it.”

Julie, 49, who is married with one son and has a senior position in a health authority, knew she wanted more out of an extra-marital relationship than just sex.

“My husband and I haven’t had sex for years,” she explained. “He is 15 years older than me and although it wasn’t a problem when we first got married 20 years ago, his approach to life now is that of an old man. We sleep in separate bedrooms and I don’t think he sees me when he looks at me.

“For much of our marriage, I put my needs to one side and concentrated on my work and looking after my family. But about five years ago, I began to feel increasingly unhappy and unsettled. I wanted to do something about it, but didn’t know how to go about it. The only men I met were my husband’s colleagues or fathers of my children’s friends. So I contacted a dating agency for married people. I was a little nervous of the interview, so I took along a close girlfriend.

“I only wanted to meet married men who wanted to stay married. I want to be happier, but not wreck my marriage. Although I’m not in love with my husband any more, he’s becoming elderly and I wouldn’t want him to be a lonely old man. I wanted to take a lover to keep me happy.

“I was offered a choice of three men. I contacted each one, we met for a drink, and I then spent about five months getting to know the man I most liked. It was important for me to develop a friendship and trust before we had sex. If I had just wanted sex, I could have tried to pick up someone in the local pub.”

The relationship wasn’t, however, as manageable as she hoped. “I broke off with him after a year because I found myself getting too emotionally involved and realised I would get more so if I continued. Although my partner, who is also married, enjoyed being with me very much, he didn’t feel involved with me in the same way.”

Other women, like Mary, 55, claim to have affairs to help them stay with their husbands until the children leave home. “I know that eventually I will leave my husband, but I don’t want to while our children are still at home,” she explained.

“I have a lover, our relationship has lasted two years, and I hope I don’t have to have another one. Although it has made me slightly distant with my husband, I am also less irritable and if something happens in the relationship I don’t like, I tell myself that I have different pleasures.”

Others, like Anne, who is 54, chose to have an affair because she wanted to be indulged and spoilt. “I entered into a relationship because I wanted to be adored, desired and given lots of attention - all things I don’t get at home. And that is what I have found.

“I meet my lover every two or three weeks in a hotel. He always pays and nearly every time buys me presents - nothing that would be awkward to explain, but perfume, chocolates and flowers. Of course, I can never take the flowers home and after our couple of hours together they end up in the bin in the hotel room, but he understands that.”

Getting caught is not a pressing worry. “I hope I don’t live to regret this,” she continued. “But I honestly don’t think it would occur to my husband that anything could be going on. If he did discover I’ve been unfaithful, he would probably be crushed. It makes me feel uncomfortable but not guilty. Guilt is a pointless feeling. Nor do I feel guilty about my lover’s wife. His relationship with her is quite poor. He hadn’t had sex with her for years, not just for a month or two.

“My daughter is a different kettle of fish. A short while ago, she commented that I seemed much happier than I had been. I fobbed it off. She once picked up my mobile and started playing with it. It gave me a fright as my lover regularly sends me sexy texts. I’ve since changed the pin number. I would hate to go down in her estimation.”

She admits she doesn’t always practise safe sex. “At the beginning of our relationship, I made sure he used a condom but when it looked as if it would work out, we both went to a clinic and got ourselves checked, showed each other the results, and then stopped using protection.”

Several women, including Mary, mentioned how much they enjoyed the feel-good factor that comes from a fulfilling sexual relationship. “I’ve relearnt how to be a sexually confident woman, which is a good thing,” she said. “I also take much more care of my appearance.”

If a woman starts to feel vulnerable, Anne, 45, believes in handling it rationally. “Women are naturally more emotionally vulnerable than men,” she conceded, “so we have to exercise self-discipline. Everything in life has its disadvantages and we have to learn to cope. It is easy to get too involved but we just have to stop ourselves and know where to draw the line.

“There’s no reason why a multitasking woman can’t handle extra-marital relationships in a similar way to a man. I multitask to an astonishing degree in my business life, and all I am doing is taking that ability into my personal life. It isn’t a big deal.

“The point is, I don’t believe one person, man or woman, can meet all your needs for the duration of your life. And having a discreet affair is one way of handling that.”

TOMORROW
How to cope if your partner has been cheating on you

Note: Names and some personal details have been changed

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Eight

The Erotic Print Society presents . . . .

F**k Fashion
by Ben Westwood

In his iconoclastic Fuck Fashion (we use the asterisk treatment for nervous media folk and bookshop managers), Ben Westwood lets rip. Frustrated by the censorship imposed by publishers on his previous books, he wanted his explicit images to be available to the public as well. Much to our delight he approached us with a portfolio of his, shall we say, less inhibited work, and a new book was born. The results are fabulous. In this collection of over 200 provocative images, the work is split into roughly three groups: Pinup, Porno-chic and Bondage. The colours are bold, electric, saturated; the models are stunningly sexy and pretty (and occasionally rather forward with one another). The lingerie is carefully chosen and in some cases designed by Ben himself; the shoes are often by Vivienne Westwood, no mean fashion iconoclast herself. Ben has a unique flair and style which is sassy and streetwise; in this instance the genre will appeal to girls as much as boys; as one-time production manager to his mother, Vivienne Westwood, he gained essential experience which he uses to great effect in the mise-en-scène of his photographs. Here is an extraordinary and sophisticated visual talent, which is only now beginning to be recognised. Fuck Fashion comes with an introductory essay by author and journalist Stephen Bayley, one of Britain’s best-known cultural commentators.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Three

From Quiver Books . . . .

The Art of the Quickie
Fast Sex, Fast Orgasm, Anytime, Anywhere
by Joel D. Block, Ph.D.

It’s unrealistic to expect to engage in full-on sex all the time, which is why “quickies” are not optional, they’re damn necessary. The Art of the Quickie is a book that will coach readers how to have quick, but rewarding sex. Quickies can be even more fulfilling than those long sessions because the thrill involved in having sex unexpectedly and/or in forbidden locations adds a potent element of excitement.