OPINION: ‘Women aren’t capable of casual sex’

OPINION: WOMEN should be able to swing from the rafters with a different bloke every night, but the reality is very few are genuinely capable of it.

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OPINION

ON Q&A, this week, the quote du jour was from journalist Laurie Penny who suggested women should be able to embrace casual sex. And, while I wholeheartedly agree, I have yet to meet a woman who’s been genuinely capable of it.

Before those of you swinging from the rafters with a different bloke every night label me a judgmental prude, let me say I know there are always exceptions to any rule.

But, in my experience, even girlfriends who’ve approached sex with a nonchalance I’ve envied have eventually gotten to a point where they’ve craved a deeper connection.

And while people always talk about the stigma associated with being a woman who likes casual sex, I think there’s a stigma on the other side too.

Laurie Penny, on Q&A, said it was wrong to think casual sex was bad for women.

In my 20s, I’d see women throwing caution to the sexual wind and I remember thinking ‘I wish I could be more like that’. I felt that if you didn’t want to sleep with someone ‘just for fun’ you were perceived as needy, clingy and not an independent woman in control of your sexuality.

But, try as I might, I just couldn’t make myself sexually interested in someone if I knew I was just a number. Conversely, no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t make them just a number either. That didn’t mean I wanted to marry every bloke I met but if I got even a whiff that I meant nothing to someone then everything south of the border would shut down.

And instead of feeling proud of myself for that I remember feeling like it made me less of an adult.

I used to look at my female friends who embraced the ‘sex like a man’ way of life and wish I had their sexual confidence but eventually, whether it was three years or three months down the track, every single one of them admitted to wanting more than just the physical.

The problem was, the guys they were dating thought they’d hit the jackpot. Here were women who claimed to attach as little emotion to sex as they did, so understandably they treated the relationships accordingly.

They weren’t disrespectful, they were just acting within the parameters established not realising that each one of these women, while having a good time, left each encounter disappointed the guy didn’t want more. They wouldn’t admit this at the time but later they told me it was always on their mind.

Rachel was probably more Charlotte than Samantha, when it came to the sexual escapades of the Sex and the City characters.

Again this is just my experience and for women who truly see sex as something to be enjoyed without any emotional attachment, I salute you. I spent years wondering why I wasn’t built that way. I watched Sex And The City’s Samantha lay waste to half the blokes in NYC and prayed for her sexual confidence. But after years of feeling like I wasn’t grown up enough because I needed an emotional connection, I realised my sexual confidence came from being across from someone who genuinely cared about who I was and that was just fine.

So while we’re always talking about not ‘slut shaming’ women, let’s make sure we’re not ‘sensitive shaming’ them either. Because there’s nothing wrong with being turned on by someone who’s attracted to who you are.

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