What do women really want? Many have wondered, and now, finally, thanks to Wendy Jones’s collection of “intimate interviews” we have some answers. One wants to swim in a pool with no edges filled with molten chocolate; another wants to re-enact a porno version of a 1970s Fry’s turkish delight advert; another to have a sexual encounter while participating in Question Time. Some women want to have sex every day; some don’t want to have it at all. Some like whipping, others like vampires. The shocking news seems to be that women are individuals, with desires and fantasies peculiar to themselves.
If there are any more general conclusions to be drawn from what was originally half a million words of material, Jones isn’t telling, which makes one wonder what the point of her project was. “When I began, I had no agenda,” she writes in her introduction. “I wanted to listen to women, to give women space to speak.” She found her subjects seemingly at random, through sitting next to them on the train, through friends, or on social media. “Every woman has a unique sexuality and a unique story to tell about her sexuality,” she writes – and yet she also seems to want these individuals to tell us a bigger story. Each of the 24 interviewees is given her own chapter with a bossy, generalising label – “Muslim”, “Mother”, “Lesbian”, “Nun”, “Feminist”, and so on – as though each woman were not simply herself but representative of a whole demographic. Sometimes the interviewee obligingly conforms to expectations (“Muslim” tells us that “society is too sexualised” and that the main thing is to ask “how do I please the Lord?”, while “Mother” describes sex as her “marital duty”), and other times she comically doesn’t (“Nun” wants a threesome). Either way, what Jones’s subjects say is coloured by her one-word characterisation.
She never explains why she pigeonholes her subjects in this way, just as she never explains how the interviews were conducted. There is no description of the subjects beyond a (presumably false) name, an age and a location; each one tells her story in the first person, in one long uninterrupted stream, as though she were not responding to an interviewer at all. As a result, you never quite know where you are: a chapter will start with a tale of a pervy ex-boyfriend, then touch on horrific childhood sexual abuse, and end with a silly fantasy about chocolate. Funnily enough, it’s quite difficult for anybody to communicate the essence of their sexuality in 2,000 words. Although these women are talking about the most bodily of subjects, they never come across as living, breathing people. Their most intimate secrets are being filtered through a writer who is pretending she isn’t there.
This self-effacing technique may have worked well for Jones’s best-known project, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, a collaborative (auto-)biography she wrote with Grayson Perry. But in that case she had an entire book to develop one compelling character through his own words, and besides, Perry is uncannily insightful about himself and others. That is not the case for the women featured here, many of whom seem not to have thought about their sexual lives much at all prior to the interview. “Maybe I could act a bit of my fantasies out,” giggles “Upright”. “I don’t know. Oh my God!” What they need is someone clever and psychologically minded – someone like Perry, perhaps – to interpret their stories, to step in and join the dots. What aren’t they telling us? What do their faces say that their words don’t? Perhaps Jones was so wary of seeming judgmental that she opted out altogether.
That is not to say that the book doesn’t yield the occasional treasure. My personal favourite is Jackie, 47, from Eastbourne (inexplicably labelled “Explode”), who at one point owned a pub fitted with a special bondage room, complete with chains and manacles. She would seduce the customers and take them to the bondage room to have sex while her boyfriend, Gary, was chained up beside them. Everyone was happy with this arrangement until one night Gary pushed things too far. “I came up from the bar and he was dressed as a woman and wanted to have a curry. That wasn’t my fantasy. That was just weird. I was like, ‘That’s just weird, Gary,’ and he was like, ‘OK.’ ... I don’t want to eat a curry with you in a skirt. It looks like it’s from C&A.” Also good for a giggle is the chirpy “Guide Leader” who, at the age of 68, talks enthusiastically of having “organisms”, and the 94-year-old who describes the genuinely jawdropping amounts of casual sex she had by the side of the road when she was a land girl.
More seriously, the many stories of sexual abuse show how profoundly an early negative experience can affect a woman for the rest of her life. And not only in the extreme cases, such as that of Deborah, 41, who was abused by her father throughout her teenage years and has latterly become “asexual”. Other abuses were equally formative: one of the quietest and saddest stories is that of a woman who was touched by a male babysitter as a child and later found that her sexuality was “a bud that never opened”. But there are positive stories, too, about people who have recovered from early trauma or, in the case of “Healer” Gwyn, 49, from London, helped others to recover through massage.
As long as you’re not after any kind of higher purpose, there is no lack of colour in this book; let’s face it, eavesdropping on other people talking openly about sex is never going to be boring.
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