By Julia Molony
Sunday Jun 7 2009

We wanted to know what Irish women really want, so we decided to ask Claire Tully. With the body of a glamour model and the brains of a PhD, Claire is the thinking Irishman's crumpet. But, she tells Julia Molony, she's finding it hard to nab a good man.

And, guys, if you want to fill the slot, you need to be an alpha male with muscles, a job and your own car. And you need to be brave enough to introduce mammy to a topless model.

Gentlemen, take up blood sports and renounce vegetarianism. It's high time for a revival of the alpha male. For a while now, the cultural recalibration, prompted by the women's movement, has left many of you bewildered and, well, a little bit soft. You've shown an admirable willingness to adjust and we're grateful, but perhaps we're all ready to call time on this enthusiastic passivity. With the wholesale adoption of the modern orthodoxies of emotional sensitivity and cleanse, tone and moisturise, it's getting harder to tell who the boys are.

It's true that for well over a century women have campaigned to get you to put aside your brutish chauvinism and to recognise our intellectual clout and our equal contribution to society. But many average Joes seem to believe this shows modern women have contempt for raw masculinity, and this could not be further from the truth.

Let us be clear, most sensible women would never dream of revoking the victories of feminism, and there remain important aspects of parity to be won. But in getting you to see us as equals, we never intended to knock the swagger out of your stride. Because the bare fact of it is, omega men just aren't sexy.

If you don't believe me, take it from Claire Tully. Ireland's ultimate object of desire makes no bones about it. She's hot and she's smart, so, what does she go for in a man? Well, she has confidence, success and muscles on her shopping list. Oh, and she wouldn't date a man who doesn't have a car.

This is not, Claire insists, because she is being a princess. Indeed, she has her own car and gets around in it very nicely indeed, thank you. Rather, she regards the car as a symbol of her independence and resourcefulness, and she would expect the same qualities any prospective date.

"It's not that I expect to be driven around or anything like that, but it's what it stands for," Claire says bluntly. "I'm in my mid-20s now, and I'm going to be looking at somebody who is in their late 20s, possibly early 30s. So I'm thinking, 'What have you been doing with your life if you haven't got a car yet?'"

Claire's instinct tells her, she says, that the absence of a car suggests the man would not be able to fulfil a basic need: "He can't provide for himself, so he's not going to be able to provide for me, or for any children."

Claire sees all this very much in atavistic, biological terms. But then she would -- as an academic and a scientist, she's trained to think that anthropology trumps ideology, that if you put aside the politics, then the fundamentals of attraction, romance and all that are a deeper biological imperative. And that in sex, our choices are governed by our caveman selves.

For Claire, in no uncertain terms, that boils down to expecting a man to prove his hunter-warrior credentials, even in the current economic climate.

"It is terrible, but what respect would you have for a man you just met -- and would you date him -- if he has just been unemployed?" she asks boldly. It's a rhetorical question because clearly, in her case, the answer is, 'not enough'. She's keen to stress that this is not because she is a gold-digger, but rather that, in a man, his degree of professional capability is a measure not only of his character, but also of his suitability as a partner.

She's not worried that he wouldn't be able to buy her dinner. Instead, Claire says, the point is that "in the back of my head, I'm thinking, 'Well, if he's just lost his job, and he's not doing too much to get another one, and he's just sponging off me, then he's not a good provider.'

"When you start to doubt them like that and you start to think, 'We are not on a par', you lose respect for them. And once you lose that in a relationship, that's when it has to go."

Not only that, she likes to see a bit of fire in a fella. In common with many women, the man of Claire's dreams is a decidedly alpha, dominant sort of a man. "I tend to go for bigger guys," she says. "I like a guy to be taller than me. I see that as a protective quality."

If there's one thing Claire really can't accept, it's a man who can't stand up for himself. During her time at Trinity College, she found that a lot of academic men "are not confrontational at all."

"They they are more refined, educated. They might argue, have a little debate or a little kerfuffle," she says, but Claire likes a man to "be confrontational and be a man".

Could she mean physically? I have an image of some Desperate Dan-type punching his way through a crowd of men before reaching for Claire and swinging her over his shoulder.

"I don't mean that somebody should be out brawling in bars, because then you've really gone down on an intelligence level," she points out.

And there we hit on the final crucial factor -- smarts. After all, a girl who was accepted to undertake a PhD at Oxford cannot live on brawn alone.

And there is something lame about the man who is too lazy to bother to use his mind. In fact, one of Claire's recent outings ended disastrously after she tried to draw her date into an ethical discussion about euthanasia, and was rewarded with a blank stare.

Needless to say he got the flick, without thought for the size of his pecs or the width of his wallet, Claire having reasoned that he "can't relate to me" because he was unable to have a discussion "about something that I would like to have a conversation about. That matters as much as looks to me, really."

"They have to be on an intellectual par with me to go out with me," she says of her ideal man. "I'm not saying that I would have to go out with a doctor or a lawyer, or that type of thing, but somebody who is sharp in their mind; somebody I can relate to and get on well with."

Looks are important, though. "There are physical traits that people are attracted to -- it's a biological thing," she says. "As a woman, you are looking for someone who will be able to protect you and make babies. It does go down to that primitive level."

As a bombshell with a body that has made her a celebrity, Claire's insistence on a man to match her in looks as well as intellect means eligible gentlemen are hard to find. After all, how many top-level academics with Michael Phelps's physique are wandering around out there?

The crux, Claire believes, is that people tend to be attracted to those who are similar to them.

"So, if you have two average-looking people, they tend to go together, and if you have two better-looking people, they tend to go together," she explains. "People of the same heights; with the same interests; from the same backgrounds." And as a glamour model, Claire says she gets "a huge amount of guys coming up to me that are just not my cup of tea at all.

"When I do personal appearances, men come up, drunk, just hanging out of you. They all want a picture, and it's sign this and sign that, but they are just hanging out of you," she says, with barely restrained disdain.

Just as bad, though, was the young buck -- and she claims she doesn't know his name -- who recently came up to her in a bar and introduced himself with the words, "Hey, I'm on the Leinster team."

"I was like, what am I going to say to that? 'Hi, I'm on Page Three -- how are you doing?'" she says, laughing.

Perhaps it's not so surprising, then, that Claire is currently single. She is also aware that seeming to be up for grabs is essential to how she earns a living. This is not to be confused with how genuinely available and accessible she really is to her audience.

"I would never date somebody who follows my career," she says. "because I would just think, 'Well, that's going to drive the sales down now'."

Claire's public image contains a mass of contradictions. She presents a compact package of the accessible and the unattainable, the cerebral and the carnal. And as a tabloid sex symbol, she occupies a peculiar space at the coalface of the gender divide.

As Ireland's foremost pin-up, she has accumulated a small legion of mostly male internet fans. For many of them, she's become more than just a sexy picture. She's the trophy woman who has put aside the aloof superiority that so many beautiful girls see as their birthright to make herself seem approachable to them. Her image promises a piece of her, or, as she says: "The illusion you sell is that when you are in the picture, you're thinking about having sex with them. That's what they want to think."

To the male instinct for conquest, Claire represents the ultimate quarry. But because she already takes her top off for them, she is, in a way, already on their side.

In among all those contradictions, however, is a uniquely post-feminist rub. The first time I met her, Claire explained her decision to do Page Three as a proud refutation of the idea of type. "People have a idea of what a Trinity student looks like, and an idea of what Page Three girls look like," she says, deliberately setting out to confound expectations. "Put the two together and they find it hard to reconcile."

A year into her new career, and Claire is starting to consider that the age-old, thorny double standard of sex and respectability may still apply. She's embraced the chauvinism of the business, repackaged it and made it her own. It's not exploitative, she argues, because she is always in complete control of her image. But there is a catch.

"When I look back, this is probably something my brothers or my dad were concerned about," she says. "Being a glamour model, a lot of men come on my website and it's as if they see you as someone they can relate to. But, at the same time, because they see you as this sexualised object or image, it means that you are never going to be the plain Jane they bring home to raise kids and introduce to the mother.

"They don't mind approaching you, they don't mind looking up to you, and they put you on a pedestal, but you are never the one they bring home," she adds.

Which sounds to me as if there is a golden opportunity out there for a modern, progressive gentleman who can prove he is also man enough to take on Claire Tully, and everything that goes with her.

So long as he has his own car.

- Julia Molony

Download our Free iPhone App Now