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Nikki Gemmell

The power of non

Nikki Gemmell

AND what of those women who give up on sex - and declare it, openly?

Sophie Fontanel, a writer for French Elle, shocked her country by announcing that she'd turned her back on the national sport. Chic, middle-aged, Left Bank-dwelling women such as her, in our highly sexualised world, aren't meant to utter such blasphemy. The outrage caused by her book, Desire, was splashed across the front pages of French newspapers yet all she was doing was telling it like it is - talking honestly about the waxing and waning of a woman's sexual drive. The sin of it! Yet to me, the honesty.

"I've been called a latent lesbian and a neurotic, frigid man-hater," Fontanel said. But she "could no longer bear being taken and shaken", and so had retreated into the world of her imagination. She described porn as "terribly effective" (she imagines an actor making love to her and it works; I've a friend who's into gay porn because of the beautiful bodies on display - it also works). Fontanel declared: "I started my sexual life, like a lot of adolescents, with a mad desire to make love... It was disappointing." She added: "I ended up feeling as though I'd been conned." So she turned her back on "sexual banality" indefinitely - and became a national sensation. "They say... I didn't have a choice because nobody wanted to make love with me, or that I hate men. But expecting beautiful rather than mediocre things from men is the opposite of hating them."

It's not that women want no sex - just better sex. Transcendent sex. The way we want it. And if we can't get it, why bother, when we're older especially. Why persist with something that can be, er, deflating, hurting, monotonous, clumsy? Some of us do. Especially when we're younger, when we haven't found a voice to say, "Actually, I didn't like that." Or "It did nothing for me." Fontanel's cri de coeur was for French men to lift their game, which is why it was greeted with such outrage. Imagine if more women went on strike, so to speak, because what they were getting wasn't transporting enough?

Yet in this post-Fifty Shades era we're flooded, of course, with a brazen new openness. Everyone's seemingly doing it - in increasingly bold ways. In London the young royals and A-list celebs are regularly papped emerging from The Box, a Soho burlesque bar of ebullient sexual explicitness. Where does it all go from here? The clipped and Brazilianed ladies of many book clubs across the nation have all read Fifty Shades and now discuss bondage and belts when once it was Picoult and Proulx. The voracious devouring of these texts feels revolutionary in terms of women's reading; the dawn of a new age of ... what? Could it possibly be that this new decadence, effulgence, represents a tipping point? What on earth follows? A flinch into extreme conservatism, perhaps, a vast reining back; or a return to a more natural way, with how our bodies look and what we do with them? It remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, there's the real shock of a Sophie Fontanel. (And I still remember the astonishment of Ita Buttrose declaring herself a radical celibate all those years ago.) Good on them for their audacious honesty. They've dared to be "other", openly. To coexist boldly with difference takes enormous courage - whether that's with being celibate, or openly religious, gay, or whatever. Often being out and proud about your difference just means being more honest with yourself, and living a more grounded life because of it. I salute that. The courage of honesty outrages, repels, fascinates; but most of all, connects. There's a power to it. Yes, Sophie Fontanel insulted, but she resonated with a lot of people too - they just weren't so noisy about it.

nikki.theaustralian@gmail.com

Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/the-power-of-non/news-story/e037f234a7ea8ea84327b1b842aae8d0