The Man Diet: One woman’s quest to end bad romance

What happened next …

Lo and behold, the next day Lucy rang Karen to talk about Bob, who had not made much effort to show he liked Lucy either in the bar or after sex. Lucy knew he wasn’t a candidate – he was good looking but a typical sports-car-owning chump and none too bright. She knew she wasn’t supposed to have had any expectations, or to have developed any. And, like a ‘good’ girl, she’d made it clear to him the night before that it was a one-off. All the same, like a ‘bad’ girl, she’d developed expectations since they’d shagged. And now she felt rejected, angry with herself for doing this again, used and a tiny bit abused. What for? Because she was horny and it would be fun, she’d thought, but since he hadn’t been that into her, the sex hadn’t been warm or nice or horn-satisfying; it had been alienating and detached instead. She’d felt compelled to do it even though she knew it would be like that, she confessed to Karen.

What does ‘no strings’ sex really mean?

Technically, it means both parties walk away from the sack unfettered by commitment and, supposedly, any desire to commit. It means that you can sleep with lots of people at once. It means you don’t have to be burdened. In reality, it means that guys don’t have to do anything boring like call the girl or seem interested in dating her (or date her) after sex. As a woman, it means that you’d better not show attachment, need or expectation after sex – if you do, you’ve broken the rules and you have to go to your room for punishment. Bad girl. Above all, it’s a term that goes hand in hand with ‘fuck-buddy’ and ‘friends with benefits’, and that often doesn’t bear much relationship to reality – at least, reality as it is for women. Who are, of course, half the heterosexual sexual equation.

Why it’s a hoax

The drive to undersell our needs in love and in bed is amazingly strong. Recently a friendship of mine with a suddenly single man turned flirty. I suggested, as did he, that some sex could be fun, but refused to guarantee I would do it without feelings. ‘If we do it, it’ll have to be on my terms,’ he said. ‘What are they?’ I asked hopefully – rather relishing the prospect of something as-yet unnamed with him. ‘No strings,’ he replied curtly, accessing with instinctive ease that cold, sibilant rule that enables men (and women) to forbid the natural by-product of sex and one of its great joys – actual intimacy – to come anywhere near the act. Great for men, perhaps, to whom ridiculous amounts of research has attributed a desire for quantity over quality in sex, as well as a lower amount of oxytocin, the post-sex attachment hormone. But not great for me; or for most women. Post-Man Diet, I refused to recant this rule, and we didn’t end up doing anything. But there have been many times when my mind has returned to his offer. Even though I know I’d have hated it when, after we’d slept together, he’d inevitably have boasted about other conquests in front of me, and that I’d have to present this chipper, tough facade so that he didn’t think, God forbid, I’d felt a string of attachment.

The audacious Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), rages wonderfully against the injustice of a slightly different type of sexual servitude in 1792. Lambasting her infuriating contemporary, she writes:

‘Rousseau declares that a woman should […] be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself.’

She’s right: being ready to indulge male predilections for NSA sex, for fear of not being wanted at all, makes willing slaves of us. The Man Diet should ignite a resistance to being available for whenever a man ‘chooses to relax himself’ (for all intents and purposes).

Put those feelings away: why NSA is worse for women

The ‘no strings’ proclamation before sex is far more evil than it might sound. It slams the door not just on the here and now – as in, this sex will be about bodies only, so don’t you even think about enjoying it too much in your head or heart – but on the whole question of possibility and potential. It says: ‘You will only ever be about sex, because I don’t fancy you enough to think about anything else, and I will never fancy you enough to think about anything else.’ This is an immensely bitter pill to swallow for women (and perhaps some men), and yet so many of us – myself included – have swallowed it numerous times.

That a lot of no-strings sex is bad for women is widely acknowledged by the psychological community. Dr Cecilia d’Felice, clinical psychologist, says: ‘In studies we have found what you might expect: that if you offer men opportunistic sex, most of the time they’ll take it. If you offer women opportunistic sex, most of the time they won’t. There’s a huge difference in the programming of risk-taking between men and women. Women are biologically more risk averse for obvious reasons.’

Relationships therapist Val Sampson says women are hardwired to be quite choosy about who we have sex with. ‘So even if women say they’re fine with no-strings sex, it’s not necessarily the case. If you become just a vessel a lot of men have sex in, you’re going against the grain. Whereas men can compartmentalise sex more easily, women feel a sense of being let down. All that potential they could use in a sexual act isn’t being used – it’s actually being rejected and this triggers a feeling of “What am I worth?” She may end up feeling like a hooker but get no money at the end of it.’

No-strings sex and its spirit of female denial and stagnation is lambasted deliciously by Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch in 1970. In her forward to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition, she lists all the sexual freedoms women can now enjoy since the book was first published. ‘What else could women want?’ she asks dangerously. ‘Freedom, that’s what … Freedom from self-consciousness. Freedom from the duty of sexual stimulation of jaded male appetite, for which no breast ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever long enough … The argument in The Female Eunuch is still valid, for it holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality, which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances.’

Just say no … but why is it so hard?

For one, agreeing to no-strings sex is easy. All the terminology is laid out and ready to go: ‘fuck-buddy’, ‘friends with benefits’ and so on. And, as I said in the introduction, it masquerades as empowerment for women, whereby shagging like a man is what we do now because we can and, as ‘feminists’, we should.

But on a personal level, a deep fear of seeming needy has taken hold of women – the stereotype of the woman who encumbers her man and everyone around her with a bottomless pit of wanting and needing and insecurity has reached epic proportions, and floats tyrannously through our minds as we conduct ourselves sexually and romantically. Dr Janet Reibstein, Visiting Professor in Psychology at the University of Exeter and the author of a book reporting on what makes couples happy, observes: ‘It’s seen as somewhat shameful to say “I want to settle down.” The shame comes from admitting prioritising relationship over independence. If a woman says, “I don’t want to have sex with you because I want a relationship,” a man may respond with alarm: “uh-oh, she’s trying to capture me!”.’ Reibstein also thinks there’s a political accent to the NSA idea: ‘Settling down is not part of the feminist heritage. It was a mistake of the feminists of the 1970s, of which I was one, not to stress how important relationships are.’

After the escapade with Bob, I asked Lucy what motivates her to offer herself no-strings, when inevitably she’ll want strings. ‘Feelings are NOT ALLOWED,’ she told me over sushi. ‘Even though we wish they were. But since they’re not allowed, we don’t go with them. But we have them. And so we’re confused. And fragmented.’

Of Bob, she explained: ‘That was casual sex but it was fine because I didn’t have any expectations. The worst is when you take a guy home and have expectations. With this guy I didn’t cry. So that was a win. So I say empowered, but what I mean is that it just wasn’t a disaster.’

The rise of the NSA creed has its roots in a culture that has turned sex into an anecdotal accessory, a must-have store of experience, and a branded display of power, as determined by the status of the person you’ve shagged or the quantity of ‘shagees’. Sex is the social currency (it’s what people talk about most), sexualisation is the social and entertainment aesthetic (advertising, magazines, posters, cereal boxes, newspapers are a jamboree of limbs and post-baby, pre-summer, post-break-up bikini bodies), porn is the private backdrop (‘A Billion Wicked Thoughts’, as per the name of the recent massive study of internet porn by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam), and choice of prospective sexual partners is almost infinite, thanks to the internet. As usual, women’s bodies, preferably naked or near enough, are at the centre of this highly visual culture of hypersexuality.

Women and the rise of the one-night stand

Modern female one-night-standers are riding the wave started by the feminists of the 1970s, who wanted us to have sexual freedom and a chance to explore our sexual natures beyond the strictures and servitude of mid-century wifehood. But those feminists split into warring factions: crudely divided into the ‘sex-positive’ (those in favour of porn as a slice of the sexual freedom cake) and the ‘sex-negative’ (those who saw porn as degrading to women). For various reasons, such as having the extremely rich Hugh Hefner on side, the sex-positive, pro-porn group won out, and their influence evolved into what many girls and women today call feminism – i.e., stripping, shagging, ‘choosing’ to use their own bodies for public or pornographic enjoyment. This is a deeply simplistic account, but I think it’s essential to note that the NSA norm originated – however perversely or ironically – from the brains and hearts of some of the 20th century’s noblest feminists.

Unsurprisingly, one-night stands have risen sharply. According to the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, in 1990, 53 per cent of men and 79 per cent of women considered one-night stands to be wrong. Ten years later only a third of men and half of women held that view.

Teenagers – tomorrow’s adults – are leading the charge. Teen specialist Raychelle Lohmann notes in Psychology Today that high school relationships are being replaced by a hook-up culture, where no-strings pulling rules. They are to become the women for whom Natasha Walter says, ‘having many sexual partners without much emotional commitment is often seen as the most authentic way to behave’.

It’s not that this kind of sex has been digested wholly by society – Hollywood, for one, is not comfortable with it. That doesn’t mean it’s not obsessed with it. Consider three recent films whose protagonists begin with a seeming paradise of strings-free sex but end up choosing monogamy: No Strings Attached has Natalie Portman’s character coming round from a booty call mentality to a relationship; Hall Pass has Owen Wilson’s totty-ogling husband given free rein by his wife to go off with other women for a week, and Friends with Benefits stars Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake using each other for sex.

All these films want to show us that no-strings sex is not a good idea – unless it’s leading to love. It’s a nice sentiment, but by showing repeatedly that shagging for shagging’s sake is one way into a happy, romantic ending (after all, who wouldn’t want to steal the heart of Ashton Kutcher?), Hollywood is, as it’s always done, giving us a fairy tale that has very, very little to do with reality. (Unless, of course, you look like Mila Kunis or Natalie Portman.)

NSA sex: the reality

Inevitably, raunch culture has taken a toll on the way women see themselves in relation to sex. We are voracious seekers of answers to the question ‘Am I hot?’, and tend to seek validation externally rather than internally. I know that when I go out hunting down a man, or hoping to be hunted, I’m looking for the thrill of a compliment – not of my brains, but of my beauty, or more specifically, my sexual allure, as much as for intimacy.

So for many women (although certainly not all), that quaint old duo of sex and love has been decoupled, leaving us performing sex for sex’s sake in a mechanical vacuum with our inner sexual impressions, feelings and needs somewhere tucked under the carpet, away from the public and the male eye. Putting the two back on the same track, if not the same train, feels much better when your self-esteem has been worn down by a single spell. It also helps with raising the quality (i.e., human element), rather than the quantity of sexual contact.

The sense of numbness and dissatisfaction that women experience in casual encounters is palpable and ruinous. Lillian, 28, told me she actually weeps during casual sex, such is her feeling of disconnect.

‘The amount of times I’ve had sex and cried and the person hasn’t noticed … I’m so detached it’s bananas. I’ll cry, waiting for him to notice. The callousness and detachment you feel is astounding. Sometimes I feel that I have no other option to express myself.’

What NSA sex does is just that: clamps down on your options to express yourself. Things got so bad that Lillian had started on a sort of Man Diet of her own. When I had a coffee with her a few weeks after the crying confession, she said she was now asking herself, ‘Why should I sleep with someone?’ rather than ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ I shared the Man Diet’s ‘say no to NSA sex’ rule, suggesting that she should not be embarrassed to send NSA wannabes packing. And that if she chose only to have sex with men that were offering her what she clearly needed emotionally (i.e., some degree of familiarity and affection), she’d feel infinitely better overall. Nor would she be missing out on anything apart from the odd bout of cystitis. Whereas previously she’d been having sad sex to prove something – that she is desirable – she found that not having sex (for the moment) was the thing that actually made her feel desirable. After giving the Man Diet a go (she did ‘Refuse to Have NSA Sex alongside ‘Do Something Lofty’ and ‘Dwell on Your Sense of Self’), I’m proud to report that her days of sobbing mid-sex are over. She still hooks up with men she’s not attached to and vice-versa, but having recognised that for her there is something uniquely alienating in intercourse, she stops at your trusty old foreplay. She now seems so much more relaxed and happy. Go Man Diet!

Just as Lillian did, many women feel numb or detached during non-intimate sex. But luckily, her story shows that you can work on it and improve your emotional experience of sexual contact pretty quickly.

Like Lillian, Lisa, 31, is in dire need of the Man Diet. I include her story because it so perfectly – and woefully – captures that detachment the modern sexual woman needs to combat. Lisa told me that she has sex with her eyes closed because not being face to face with an actual person helps her remain thoroughly detached and tough throughout. The one time she did open her eyes – with a boyfriend – she saw him looking everywhere but at her, and promptly closed them again.

Wham bam

Lisa’s a lovely girl, very warm, clearly sensitive, and open. And yet, she says defiantly, as though having subconsciously taken on the male preference for ‘wham bam’ sex: ‘I’m not a big cuddler – especially if I don’t like the guy.’ Also she says she ‘loves’ rough sex. ‘Doggy style is my favourite position,’ she says, obedient again to male preferences. Why does she close her eyes, why doesn’t she like to cuddle? ‘Because it’s all about me. It’s my moment.’ If that was the case, you’d think she’d at least be getting some serious ‘me-time’ pleasure out of it, but Lisa has never orgasmed with a man. ‘The truth is, we’re playing the men’s game,’ she says. ‘They’ve got all the rules set up to suit them. We can fight it or match it – so I match it. I’m a postmodern feminist – I don’t think we need to be like men, we’re good as we are etc etc, but … with sex it’s different.’ And clearly, as women like Lisa and Lillian make abundantly clear, the man’s game of strings-free sex isn’t exactly a non-stop jig of healthy fun.

What they show, too, is how far women have internalised masculine sexual stereotypes, making them their own with a flick of the pseudo-feminist whip (and then, in the case of the more emotionally tuned-in, feeling lousy about it). As Germaine Greer puts it so well in The Female Eunuch: ‘Love-making has become another male skill, of which women are the judges.’

Natasha Walter’s excellent survey of contemporary female sexual culture, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, takes a searing look at women’s sexual mores and their context. One group of well-off, late-teen female students she interviewed spoke in hostile, competitive, mercenary and utterly soulless ways about sex:

‘I’m much more attracted to the guys who don’t give a shit,’

‘We were saying that one week we should go out and try to notch up as many lovers as we can, with the most variety possible – age, gender, jobs, backgrounds …’

They go on to cite their feeling of solidarity with Miranda in Sex and the City when she has to call her long list of past lovers after contracting an STD; they also admire Belle de Jour, the call girl, and other sex diarists as glamorous examples of non-committal, pornographically adventurous sex. Walter concludes: ‘Because they had so successfully subtracted emotion from their sex lives, these young women were perfectly in tune with the culture around them.’

These girls are probably a good deal younger than you and me – after all, they’re not even 20 yet. Perhaps their aggressive ‘I’m a shagger’ standpoint stems from the fact they’re not yet worried about settling down. But equally, I think it’s even more poignant that while they could be starry eyed and dreaming of ‘the one’, they’re setting themselves up as sexually liberated toughs for whom ‘no strings’ sex is the only sex. They’re the women of tomorrow.

The wrong kind of fun

The sex-mad, attachment-loathing students in Walter’s book seem more directly influenced by sexual imagery and sexual pressure than most of the professional women between 23 and 35 that I know (including myself). All the same, I have felt very driven by a particular notion of ‘fun’ attributed to and expected of the single woman. In fact, the word fun crops up a hell of a lot in relation to the no-strings sex single women are meant to be having lots and lots of. I remember in the early days of my current single spell somewhat shakily telling my friend Carol about an alcohol-drenched encounter with someone wholly inappropriate, and her replying: ‘Ah well, it’s just fun.’ Says Wendy, 31: ‘All my friends are pairing up so I do want to meet someone special. In the meantime … why not have fun?’ Or, as Ruth says: ‘People will constantly ask: “Why are you single?” You’re supposed to say: “I enjoy being single. I enjoy having unencumbered sex with strangers.”’

But all that pressure to have fun stops being fun and becomes more like an exhausting task. ‘[Sexual encounters with men] feel very achievement based,’ says my friend Molly, 27. Almost every woman I interviewed for this book used the words ‘tiring’ or ‘exhausting’ in relation to fun – whether it was in dating to the max, going out non-stop, or making the effort to appear fancy-free. ‘It’s exhausting being empowered,’ as my friend Michelle, 27, put it.

Bringing home the bacon

That mercenary, bedpost notch approach to men isn’t healthy and it doesn’t make most women particularly happy. But neither do a lot of things that seem (or are) fun at the time. Which is why, despite its seemingly obvious badness, I can relate perfectly well to the urge to ‘get the numbers up’. There’s something that seems empowering about it, like you’ve gone out hunting and have brought in several good pheasants that you can cook and share with your friends (what else is the post-shag narrative breakdown with your mates if not a triumphal communal meal, hosted by you?). There’s also the vague sense that you’re delivering one in the eye to those guys that think women always get all attached, needy and psychotic after sex. Needless to say, that’s a terrible reason to do something, not least because the only eye that’s getting something in it is yours, when you’ve slept with someone rubbish and he doesn’t even call. Delving deeper, I think some of us think that the more men you sleep with, the more attractive you must be. Enjoying the intense but often false intimacy that a sexual encounter provides is also a reason for accepting loads of NSA sex.

Note the bragging, bravado twang to the way I used to refer to hook-ups, before the Man Diet put me off that notchy approach: ‘bringing home the bacon’. It was tongue-in-cheek, but telling. With or without pork metaphors, friends often congratulate each other on numbers of men shagged or bagged. The presence of an alien pair of male shoes outside a flatmate’s bedroom door elicits back slapping the next day. A good friend of mine used to check in with me: ‘What’s your number [of sexual partners to date]?’ Still another would say: ‘I want to get to 35 before Christmas.’

I’m not just moaning here, or being holier than thou. This attitude towards sex was making me feel fragmented, anxious and doubtful about my worth. I’ve seen it have the same effect on other women. And because something as simple as swearing off no-strings sex made me feel about a thousand times better – even though I’ve slipped once or twice – I’m hoping it’ll do the same for you, via the Man Diet.

Sex and the single girl