Desperately seeking satisfaction

Twenty-three men . . . none of them “gave” me an orgasm, except one – possibly. I wanted it to happen so badly, I think I believed my own faking.

There are three whose surnames I can’t remember, including one whose name eludes me entirely.

Ten were proper boyfriends. I slept with nine of them only once; five of those were people I already had crushes on; one was dressed as a woman.

One was Korean-American. One was Italian. One was Jewish.

Two were married. Two were brothers. One gave me scabies. Two were significantly older than me. One of them was good in bed, two of them were terrible in bed and two felt faint after sex.

One had to have the radio on all night, and one kept up a tormenting monologue during sex.

There are five who I came to dislike intensely, three who I’d sleep with again if I had the chance.

I really regretted having sex with six of them. One had an unusually large penis and two had unusually small ones.

One is now dead. I loved three of them. I was engaged to three of them (not the same three) and married one of them.

Of course, the men I didn’t get to sleep with are just as important.

Somewhere, carefully hidden, I’ve got a small notebook where I have written down the names of all the men I’ve ever slept with, in the order I slept with them. There’s a little coded dot beside each name for “serious relationship”, “someone I really liked but didn’t last long”, or “one-night stand”. When I married, it seemed important to put that book out of reach, although I never felt I should destroy it. In any case, when I slipped on the magic gold band I seemed to become invisible, and it seemed unlikely I would be making any new additions to the list. There were just a couple of dozen names, but, with the notebook now lost, I find I’m no longer sure of the precise order in which they followed each other.

The length and complexity of my involvements varied wildly, before slowing into a sequence of stately quasi-marriages and, finally, marriage. At 16, there was Mark Sykes: the One (or so I believed), a romance nearly rekindled many years later through Friends Reunited. At 19, Alain, the French soldier I lost my virginity to in a field, who eventually dismissed me as a “cock-tease”.

During my time at university, the merry-go-round twirled ever more giddily: there was so little engagement, no talking about what felt good. I just remember the cold lino under my feet and the misery of not being able to clean my teeth if I stayed the night in someone else’s room. None of them really stood out sexually. Above all, what came back to me was the sheer perfunctoriness of the sex. I remember how I lusted after Phil, who was funny and clever. He was, I think, just as hung up as I was, but expressed his sexual anxiety in a way that came as a horrible shock. Sex with Phil was an encounter with a crazy lizard.

Muttering and laughing to himself, thrashing and jerking his body, nipping and biting, he was truly scary. Staring at the ceiling afterwards, too spooked to sleep, I wondered what on earth I was doing, exposing myself physically and emotionally to other humans whom I barely knew. Without question, it was the worst sex I’ve ever had, and I wonder now why I didn’t just call a halt to the horror. In fact, I remember smiling at him, thinking not that I must “keep him sweet” but, much worse, that I must maintain the pretence of delight at being treated to the privilege.

As the years have accumulated, there have been one or two other episodes when I’ve edged closer to the kind of sex that is not plain vanilla flavour. Once, a boyfriend who was much older than me took me to Amsterdam and to a live sex show, where a sailor volunteered to perform sex in public. My only sex in my final year at Cambridge was a dreadful episode with a super-arrogant medic who couldn’t stop laughing at the ease with which he barked me into bed, and, in the course of one bitterly regrettable weekend, I let him take photographs of me in the nude. And once, in a quiet corner of Green Park, a married man and I had sex. As he moved inside me, I saw the brown punched-leather brogues and tweed turn-ups of a gentleman passer-by. I saw his feet hesitate, but I didn’t care.

It is always tempting to search for reasons why my relationships failed: one man had a very small penis, but when a later boyfriend revealed an enormous one, it, too, turned out to have its downside. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed writing up all my stories and sieving them out from the slurry of regret, a kind of Frigid Jones’s Diary. In giving expression to the desires I’ve hidden and the frigidity that has so often afflicted me, I feel I’m maybe staking out some ground that other women will now claim as common, too, counterbalancing all the phoney stuff about girls and women that so often gets promoted as “the truth”, all the trite rubbish that is sold under the banner of chick lit. I hate the way clichés about sex and love are repeated and repeated. I have had to come out and admit that, well, I wore big pants, but I didn’t get the guy.

Cutting up Playgirl by Carrie Jones (Old Street £11.99) is published on February 15.