How many lovers in a lifetime is too many?
Susan Daly finds that today's world is not as sexually liberated as we think it is
If you thought the dreadful Sex and the City 2 had hammered the final nail into that particular coffin, think again. For Christina Saunders, the SATC-inspired empowerment has only just begun now that she has reached her target of sleeping with 1,000 men in tribute to man-eating character Samantha Jones. Well, everyone should have a hobby, right?
The problem is that Ms Saunders, from Hertfordshire, England, now worries that future lovers might be put off by her 'reputation'. She said: "Good friends stuck by me but others accused me of being a slut . . . Now all I want to do is settle down. I just hope I haven't put men off."
At the other end of the spectrum last month -- the 'sextrum' if you will -- Girls Aloud singer Kimberley Walsh was reported to have had just two lovers in her life and was proud of it. Now Ms Walsh has hit back at these reports to clarify that she had said she had only ever had two serious relationships.
"I never said anything about how many people I'd slept with! It's a very personal thing," she said.
""Sex should be with someon you really love, so I refused to be forced by peer pressure," she told more! magazine.
What are we to take from these tales? That it is possible to have too many lovers?
It is presumed that in modern society sexuality has been liberated from the shackles of marriage or, indeed, that sexual mores have never been slacker.
Certainly the most comprehensive global study of sexual attitudes (in 2006) said Irish people were among the most promiscuous in the world. The average Irish person has -- brace yourself, Bridget -- 11 sexual partners in a lifetime. Eleven. Is that really a high figure? (Notwithstanding that anything under 100 looks practically virginal compared to Ms Saunders's exploits.)
Psychology professor David Buss wrote a book on the history of desire and he says that there is "no reason to think that we do more now than in the past, although we are certainly more frank about it".
Religious and social constraints may well have limited the number of sexual partners the Irish had for most of the 20th Century but, historically, the Celts were pretty free and easy with monogamy.
Under Brehon Law, Celtic women had the power to move on to another lover once they walked out of their marriages on February 1. This is an interesting contrast to today's society in which Christina Saunders felt herself judged a "slut", while swordsman Warren Beatty is viewed with a certain awe.
By the 1500s, sex was an important part of Irish festive occasions and wakes often descended into group orgies as a sort of resurrection motif.
There are no shortage of sexually voracious female characters in Irish historical annals and literature.
Pirate queen Grace O'Malley seized castles for her property portfolio and the lords who lived in them for her bedchamber; 18th-Century Irish poem The Midnight Court describes how a middle-aged bachelor is punished by a fairy queen for failing to bring fulfilment to young Irish women; Molly Bloom's romps through James Joyce's Ulysses are deemed to promote "a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity".
By these standards, modern lovers are merely getting to first base. What's more, the fact that we talk more about about who is doing what and how often they are doing it, we might be fooled into thinking everyone else but us is at it.
Christina Saunders, for example, was wrongheaded in thinking that sleeping with 1,000 men would emulate her TV heroine Samantha Jones. Across the six seasons of Sex and The City, Jones actually 'only' had sex with 41 men, and one woman.
As for the sex surveys, those cannot be entirely trusted either. Most surveys in the US, the UK and abroad have found that men report two to four times as many sexual partners as women do.
Statisicians -- and anyone with a grasp of simple maths -- say that can't be true. Presuming the men aren't counting incidents of self-love, both genders must average out at the same number of lovers.
Psychologists at the University of Michigan think that the discrepancy is a result of the very different methods men and women use to make estimates. Women are more likely to rely on enumeration. "This is a strategy that typically leads to underestimation," says psychologist Norman R Brown.
"Men are twice as likely to use rough approximation to answer and that typically leads to over-estimation."
It may be that celebrity womanisers like Warren Beatty or Mickey Rourke are neither lovers nor liars after all. They are just bad at counting on their fingers.
Irish Independent
