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that their musings are not just uninteresting but downright unimaginable to even the most extreme of porn merchants. Pictures of women fucking furniture? Stories about men getting blow jobs from their dogs? Please – I can see such things from my front window. No, I’m talking about a far more specialist need. I’m talking about … sex tips for smart ladies.

      Granted, just that phrase, ‘sex tips for smart ladies’, will not, in all probability, have you sighing with orgasmic pleasure. If anything, it will likely have you crossing your legs and covering your ears faster than if you heard your mother sighing with orgasmic pleasure.

      But this phrase will not be used in its usual manner, that is, as a euphemism for ‘getting unnecessarily gynaecological’, ‘making women sound like morons’ or for a genre of literature that appears to exist solely to reassure men who use prostitutes that, really, they’re doing those gagging-for-it ladies a favour (feminism, you can go home now: your work here is done).

      Part of the problem here is that while references to sex get more ubiquitous by the day, intelligent discussions about sex often feel as difficult to find as they were in the sixteenth century. Anything that claims to talk about female sexuality in a modern, smart and honest way is guaranteed to be brain-bleedingly obvious and crude (women masturbate! They have discharge! Tampon and penis traffic jams! Ha ha!), depressingly reductive and clichéd (men! They’re terrible at sex! Ha ha!) or will take an accepted truism and amp it up so that whatever nub of truth it once contained is now hidden beneath all the attention-seeking bells and whistles with which it has been decked. (‘Women love sex! Therefore, some women really love being paid for sex!’ as one recent trend in literature, which apparently existed solely to reassure men who use prostitutes that they’re doing women a favour, had it. Feminism, you can go home now, your work here is done.)

      The most skating glance at Cosmopolitan magazine shows not just how little progress there has been in the last few decades when it comes to talking about women and sex, but how any progress that has been made has been in reverse gear. Oh, how starry-eyed that magazine once was! When Helen Gurley Brown assumed editorship of Cosmopolitan in 1965, she aimed to verbalise female sexual liberation and, for a time, she did just that. Now this once zeitgeisty publication runs features that range – as articles for women about sex generally do – from the inane to the obvious, e.g., ‘50 Great Things to do with your Breasts’ (‘Cook Dinner Topless, Apply a Little Tomato Sauce to your Nipple – Make Sure it’s not too Hot – and ask your Man if it’s Spicy Enough’) and ‘How Do I Have Phone Sex?’ (spoiler alert: you don’t have sex with your phone). I did not make those examples up.¹¹

      This is the glossy magazine equivalent of the cinematic degeneration from Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant repartee to ‘romantic’ ‘comedies’ today that infantilise and humiliate women and star some actress who is down to her last couple of mill and so takes the pay cheque to present the most degrading portrayal possible of her gender, one that serves only to validate the assumptions of her male-dominated industry. Yes, it’s great that so many movies focus on women’s stories, and it’s great that magazines can talk about women’s sexuality so openly; unfortunately, many do so in such a manner that one wonders if the progress was a Trojan horse for misogyny.

      Yet while there is literally endless talk about sex and depictions of sex in popular culture, there is next to nothing that treats it in a manner that might be useful to a halfway sentient person, and by sentient I mean a person who not only doesn’t fancy dunking her nipples in a jar of spaghetti sauce but requires warning to test the temperature.

      Thus, it feels especially difficult to ask what would now be deemed a relatively basic-level sexual enquiry. How can one ask, at the age of twenty-seven, how to give a hand job when surely by that age you’ve had sex swinging from chandeliers, right? (A note about chandelier sex, by the way: watch out for the candles.)

      This has led to the ridiculous situation of there being sex experts in pretty much every mainstream newspaper and magazine but a near dearth of any useful or even realistic advice because just to publish a letter from a reader asking for hand job tips would make the newspaper look as anachronistic as if it were published on a stone tablet. Far better to publish one asking what to do when one fantasises about having sex with his mum.¹² That’s so much more au courant.

      Yet just because it feels like there are so few answers out there does not mean some women don’t still have questions. Which brings me to the night I went to a sex class.

      Not very long ago, I attended an evening class in the sex shop at the end of my road. It was, as Snoopy would say, a dark and stormy night (lawyer’s note: Snoopy never went to a sex class). A dark and stormy Monday night, in fact. I’ll call the sex shop the Cunning Linguist, because that is pretty much the level of ingenuity the owners applied when naming their shop. Apparently, poor punning skills are not generally seen as an ominous reflection of abilities in other areas because the class was packed with twenty- and thirty-something women, all sitting amid the store’s rails of dildos and strap-ons, notebooks primly on their laps, ready to take notes and draw diagrams. Despite or, yes, because of the ubiquity of sex talk in the world, a lot of women still feel incredibly insecure about certain aspects of sex, and when I say that the class’s name was Blow Jobs to Blow the Mind!, you’ll have an idea of what one of those things generally is.¹³

      Unfortunately, by the end of the two-hour class few questions were answered because the teacher and former porn actress, Madam Kim (‘You might have seen some of my work? No?’), was less interested in explaining the basics and a lot more interested in namedropping the extremely well-endowed porn stars she’d worked with (‘Dean Danners! Dean fucking Danners! None of you have heard of him? None?’), spinning theories about natural design (‘There’s a reason God made your arms long enough to reach the crotch. Think about it’) and describing in extraordinary detail a former colleague whose speciality was triple anal penetration, which seemed to me the complete opposite of what this class’s exclamation-marked name promised.

      In defence of Madam Kim, part of the problem might have been the subject. Perhaps there are only so many ways to skin a cat, so to speak. Bless her, she tried to zhoosh things up a bit, coining all sorts of terms such as ‘the taco hold’, ‘the clam’ and ‘the envelope’ that we all dutifully wrote down in our notebooks, but, even from my vantage point in the front row, they did all look exactly the same, even after I’d moved aside the giant pots of lube that had previously been partially blocking my view. Madam Kim appeared to concede the point when she told us the best thing for us to do was to come up with our own tricks, which is surely like telling someone who has come over to stay the night to go to the bathroom and masturbate and leave you in peace.

      At one point she paused, lost in wonderment at the memory of a former colleague’s ‘most beautiful asshole’, and one of my classmates took advantage of the moment to ask a question: ‘Um, when you’re giving a blow job, how do you stop yourself from feeling like you’re going to puke?’

      Judging from the chorus of relieved murmurs around her, this was the question the majority of the class had given up their Monday night to have resolved.

      Madam Kim looked like Frank Sinatra being asked to sing ‘My Way’ again, if Sinatra gave up crooning in his dotage and moved on to Italian opera.

      ‘Uh-huh, sure. Well, you just gotta keep telling yourself he loves it. That’s a real turn-on. HE LOVES IT. Thinking that really helps to open the throat,’ she replied, slipping over the surprisingly slender line that divides self-empowerment and self-abasement when it comes to discussion about female sexuality. And then she went back to talking about the time she gave Dean Danners’s twelve-inch cock a clam hold.

      Of course, why anyone would trust the wisdom of someone who labours under the occupation name of ‘sexpert’ is a reasonable point. Yet seeing as depictions and discussions of sex in pop culture have so roundly failed to keep pace with sexual liberation, it would be useful if someone out there could offer sensible advice. Someone, ideally, who does not speak in the dreaded newspaper sexpert tone which generally makes me want to vomit without anything at all in my mouth: palpably hushed with self-conscious solemnity and po-faced faux maturity, rather like a teacher reading out a note

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