Corinne Sweet: The truth about older mothers

The media image is a Teflon-coated bitch who wants to buy a baby like a Marc Jacobs bag Published: 07 June 2007 I was "lucky" enough to have a baby after the age of 40 - albeit by Caesarian. So I can thoroughly understand the 40-plus women's desperate urge to surge towards fertility clinics for IVF treatment that has been reported this week. Although I didn't get as far as IVF, because I was fortunate enough to conceive "naturally", I can recognise the drive to put oneself through enormous expense and discomfort in the hope of "getting one in before closing time". The media image of the older mother is a Teflon-coated Apprentice-style bitch who wants it all on her own terms, and who would like to buy a baby like a Marc Jacobs handbag and then strap it into her Chelsea tractor and whoosh off to Harvey Nicks. In my experience, the women who try for babies late, and who go through the gruelling IVF hoops, are those who realise that their lives will probably feel incomplete if they don't at least try to have a baby. One woman I interviewed for my book on late motherhood had spent years doubled up with endometriosis. After being told that she would never conceive, her first and only round of IVF failed, leaving her broke and hopeless at 41. She'd married late and knew that having a baby was a distant dream. But the stimulation of her ovaries led to her conceiving naturally and having a healthy child at 42. Taking the risk totally turned her own, and her new husband's, life around. Let's get one thing straight: women over 40 don't "forget" to have children (as per the famous postcard "I can't believe I forgot to have children"); nor are they so career-obsessed that they blot babies out completely. The issues are more complex. Few women find the right parental partner straight away. Mr Right is as elusive as Bridget Jones in a thong. Most of us kiss a helluva lot of frogs only to find they fail to turn into princes. Late babies can often be the deliberate product of furtive one-night stands, sex with an ex, or a mercy shag with a willing friend. Also, as we've become more picky about partners, and as emotionally literate single men are as rare as purple pears, parenthood may well only be possible once an emotionally healthy relationship develops - after 40. The longed-for baby becomes the icing on the late wedding cake, perhaps with a partner who has children in tow from a first, even second, relationship. Or, as gay and lesbian marriages are now possible, it might be a baby is sought by a homosexual couple to seal their relationship. IVF might well replace the turkey baster for many lesbians who have, in the past, had to conceive furtively through the generosity of male friends. Delaying babies until later in life is psychologically sound for many of us who simply weren't "ready" before. We have a notion of being psychologically prepared for parenthood, by which we mean not as crazy or selfish as we were in our twenties, even thirties. Our parents and grandparents had kids as a matter of course. For us, it's a definite decision - maybe made after years on the couch. We ask ourselves: "Am I ready for parenthood?" It means, can I make the necessary emotional (and financial) sacrifices needed to have a child? Can I put them first? By 40, most of us are partied out. Not all, but most. Older parents make good parents. Research by Dr Julia Berryman of the University of Leicester Parenthood Research Group, and others, show that late parents are often more tolerant, patient, kind and, most important, loving. Simply, a late child is often a very, very wanted child. So how is it for the children? Are older parents an embarrassment? Or do children of late parents get a good deal? Again, research shows these children score well in comprehension and reading tests, and are generally more emotionally secure and confident. The early demise of late parents is not all bad, either, especially if a child of 40-plus parents has had a good 40 years of solid, loving input. Plus, they won't have to look after their own Aged Ps well into their own old age and should reap the benefits of any inheritance in their sprightly middle age. The notion that droves of career women are frivolously delaying pregnancy until 40 and then hoping to drain the NHS of vital resources for a designer baby is a misogynistic myth. Most women worth their Top Shop wedges know that leaving it late holds serious risks. After all, only around 2 per cent of first births are to women fortyplus. The biggest problem is the pernicious influence of the cult of celebrity which makes lesser mortals want to emulate the likes of Madonna or Angelina. These role models make young women think fame and money will buy anything - including children. However, for real women, with real lives, and real limits on budget, energy and resources, having a late baby via IVF is not simply a fashionistic whim. It's a calculated risk, taken under the din of the ruthless biological clock, usually after a great deal of life-planning, soul-searching - and a fatalistic sense of better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. Corinne Sweet is a writer, broadcaster and psychologist, and the author of 'Birth Begins at Forty'

Forget that handbag and set yourself free

 

 

Canny businesses tap ordinary people's insecurity. Women are image victims once again

by Yasmin Alibhai Brown

Published: 04 June 2007

Today I take you into the tricky world of handbags. Most men who arenot thieves fear the dark insides of our bags. Ask them to get keys orcoins and they go in as if an alert Black Widow spider is lurking atthe bottom. They can't understand why we need these adult satchels, andso suspect the worst. This week the poor things must have been evenmore baffled to witness the two estimable female candidates forLabour's deputy leadership duelling over handbags.
You just don't get it, chaps. This thing we carry is loaded withserious meaning. Mrs Thatcher held her bags tight on the inside of heriron elbow. The incident of his dog chewing on the £2,000 bag belongingto Kimberley Quinn encapsulated the foolishness of Blunkett's obsessiveaffair. It revealed the dynamics of class inequality, exposed themanipulative yet dim rich and the envious face of Blair's Labour partydesperately seeking brassy, toff playmates. In today's Britain,handbags have become potent symbols of politics, power, economics,social mobility, pre-feminist proclivities or post-feminist libertiesor the death of feminism, ethical living, advanced capitalism, the ebbof socialism and possibly the end of history.
Hazel Blears owns what I am told is an Orla Kiely handbag, costing£250. It is a designer name I don't recognise, not being an aficionado.I could imagine Ms Blears buying Swiss army knives and Rosa Klebbshoes, but not, to be honest, softly voluptuous gear. Harriet Harmanwho always looks nice, averred righteously that she would never buy anaccessory costing more than £50 and criticised our divided society'where some people struggle and others spend £10,000 on a handbag'.
Sharp ripostes were returned by the diminutive and unbending MsBlears. Politicians had no right to tell people how to spend theirmoney, she scolded, adding that the party should never again weartank-tops and flares and needs to give people a 'platform foropportunity not a cap on aspiration'. I know, I know, I am,caricaturing Blears. But I am a Harmanite on this war of the bags. Andmillions of other women voters are Blearsites.
Ruth from Buckinghamshire, for one, who writes with much convictionon the matter, in an exchange on the net: 'I work hard to earn my moneyso if I want to blow an entire months [sic] wages on a handbag thenthat's up to me. I have no problem spending £500 on a handbag, its make[sic] me feel good to walk down the street with it. If you want to becheap with your plastic then so be it.'
Thus spake an aspirational babe on the nirvana of choice. How do youblow an entire month's wages without borrowing beyond your means? Thesewomen walk more proud because they are holding exorbitantly pricedcarriers made from cow skins, a cheap and ubiquitous material turnedinto gold by canny businesses who know exactly how to tap into theinsecurities of ordinary people seeking affirmation and the over-richwho have to find endless ways to unload their piles.
One day great leather handbags cost between £35 and £60, thensuddenly even the cheapest high street shops had hiked up the prices.And the trade roared as the herds rushed to purchase carry-outself-esteem. Today there are bags on the market costing £80,000. Ifthis is aspiration, no thanks.
I do have some high-label clothes - bought cut-price in sales andoutlets. Most of my best clothes are inexpensive. We were invited byfriends to Glyndebourne this Saturday, the temple of couture as well asmusic. I wore a lacy skirt (£12), a beautiful, amber 18th-century-stylebodice (£14 in a sale), and an even cheaper bolero. Two grand ladiesadmired the bodice, and I was pleased to tell them the cost. Real stylenever slavishly succumbs to diktats. Post-feminism has made women imagevictims again, confident only when they have, not for what they are. Tofree yourself from the fashion hounds is to free yourself from others,too, who would control you. Like Ms Blears.
Harman's concern about inequality adds moral weight to the revulsionrising against designer-bag shopaholism. More money is swilling aroundin Britain than ever. Ours is well on the way to becoming a suspicious,uncaring and dysfunctional society. Our modern over-rich do not turninto philanthropists as many do in the United States. They buy, buy,buy bleeding handbags, never unzipped to bring out two pounds for a BigIssue.
Next month the fashion changes and more will rush to buy moreleather, ending in bag mountains to fill in the sites of socialdemocracy and political engagement. We can carry on with such bingeconsumption or step towards a saner, equitable future. The battle ofthe handbags is about that crucial decision.

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Too embarrassed to protest

As an awkward 17-year-old, Esther Freud felt unable to say no to an acquaintance's sexual advances. After writing about a similar incident in her new novel, she has come to realise how common this experience is Esther Freud Wednesday May 30, 2007 Guardian I see them every day - the teenage girls at the gates of the sixth-form college, at bus stops, walking home in pairs. They look so confident in their low-cut jeans and grungy T-shirts, their flat shoes - Converse or Vans - chatting into their mobile phones. But are they more confident than we were? Those of us who grew up in the late 1970s and were caught between punk and stilettos, without even an answering machine, let alone a mobile, to keep track of our movements. When I was 17, and for some years before and after, I was far from confident. In fact, I was in a permanent state of indecision and embarrassment. I was embarrassed by my lack of knowledge, experience, beauty and talent. I was embarrassed by my spots, my clothes, my dreams. I was proud, too, and that was a disastrous combination. It meant I couldn't tell anyone I was embarrassed, or ask for any help, so I drifted around with a worldly wise expression on my face, getting myself into awkward and sometimes dangerous situations and hoping, more than anything, that no one would notice, or ever know. It was around this time that I fell in love, not for the first time, but maybe for the first time with someone who also seemed to like me, and this only made things worse. My greatest fear was that anyone would know how I felt, especially the person I was in love with, and so I blundered on, sinking into a secret mine-filled world of my own making. I had met this boy, Tom, on holiday and, unclear when he would be back in London, I had spent day after day sitting by the phone, hoping that he would call. Finally, he did. We arranged to meet up that night in a pub. I was feverish with excitement. I imagined it would be just us - we would sit holding hands in a corner, talking through every moment of the time that had elapsed before taking a night bus home to where I lived, and spending the night in each other's arms. In fact, there were four or five other people at the pub too, all a little older than us, drinking, smoking and talking about things I didn't really understand. I hadn't seen Tom for two weeks and in that time there were jokes I had missed, people who had become his new best friends, new drinks and drugs he'd tested. I grinned and attempted to join in, sipping at my Pernod and black, wondering whether our affair stood any chance. Finally, last orders were rung. "Where to now?" We stood about, and, not daring to suggest we leave the others and head to where I lived on the other side of London, I waited to see what would happen. There was one man, Derrick, who seemed to be in charge. He was a grown-up. Twenty-five at least, with a marriage and two children already behind him. "This way." He ushered us through dark streets, across busy roads, through closed-off squares until eventually - the others having disappeared - he invited me and Tom through the front door of a tall, dark house. We trudged upstairs and into a flat, where a girl, half asleep, appeared with smudged makeup and a T-shirt showing one plump shoulder. When she saw us, she retreated into her room. "Tamara, wait." Derrick took Tom's arm and he pushed my boyfriend into her room. He pulled me after him into another room which turned out to be his. "You can sleep in here." I stood there frowning. A hundred options flitted through my head, but not one of them seemed viable. And surely, anyway, after a few minutes, Tom would realise the mistake and come and find me. But Tom didn't appear. I listened, but I heard nothing from the next room. Maybe he had just fallen asleep. He was drunk - we all were - but as I lay down on the very edge of Derrick's bed, I felt horribly sober, afraid of what would happen next. I have written about a similar scenario in my new book, Love Falls, with more devastating consequences than those I suffered, and I've had two very different reactions. The first, mostly from men, is frustration, anger: "Why didn't she do something?" The second, from women: "That chapter, that was just so very familiar." These reactions have inevitably led to a discussion about the embarrassment of being a teenage girl. How hard it is to call out, to make a scene, to risk looking ridiculous, even if you are being abused. I have one friend who was assaulted in a toilet when she was 15. She was at a party, when, to the envy of her friends, an older boy picked her out and, without a word spoken, led her into the toilet and pushed her up against the wall. She was a virgin. And someone was banging on the door, but even so he wouldn't let her go, kissing her hard on the mouth when she tried to call out. "Although I didn't call out much," she admits. "I was too shocked. And too embarrassed." Afterwards her friends looked at her with admiration, and, instead of disillusioning them, she closed herself off from them and her family. She put on weight and developed a rash of cold sores around her mouth. It was only years later that she understood it had been rape, and also, where she had caught the cold sores. At the time she just blamed herself for being, well, 15. Another friend got into a row with an older man she'd been seeing for six weeks. She stood up to him, asked him to take back something offensive he had said. After he had, he turned to her and smashed his fists down on her ribs. She crawled out of the bed, dressed and went home, but although it was Christmas and everyone she knew and loved best was all in one room, nothing in the world would have made her tell them what had happened. She felt too ashamed, and when, even after two weeks, her ribs were still hurting, she didn't admit to it and see a doctor. In a recent NSPCC survey of girls in their mid-teens, it turned out that 45% had had unwanted sexual experiences, and at least half of these were made to feel guilty for saying no. Fifty-six per cent of these experiences happened before the girls were 14. One in three kept quiet. I didn't mention to anyone what happened that night with Derrick. I was too embarrassed to protest when he stripped down to his underpants and got into bed beside me. My heart was thumping. "What should I do? What was Tom doing? Did he want to spend the night with that other girl, Tamara, and, if not, then why didn't he come and find me?" Derrick was restless. He kept brushing his leg against mine. I turned away and then his hands were on my shoulders. "Relax," he urged. "At least take off your skirt." When I did, under the covers, wrapping the sheet tight round me, he suggested I was tense and offered to give me a massage. "No, I don't want a massage," I protested and he put his finger to his lips and told me to shush. "If you let me give you a massage I'll leave you alone, I promise." So I lay there with his hands on my back, and then later I had to listen to him laugh, when he said he had had his fingers crossed all along. And that was how the night went on. Hour after hour, an awkward, clumsy battle, his hands groping me, mine forcefully, politely, pushing him away, until the light started to show in the sky and eventually he gave up and went to sleep. I didn't want to tell anyone what had happened because they would think I was a fool. Why didn't I shout? Get up and leave? Find a phone box and call home? I didn't even say anything to Tom when we were finally reunited the next morning. Maybe he was embarrassed, too, because he didn't say anything either. And in case he had enjoyed the experience, had planned it, God knows, had wanted it, I kept quiet. Years later, in my mid-20s, I bumped into Derrick. I was with a friend who stopped to talk to him. I hoped he wouldn't recognise me, but after a moment he turned to me. "Why so quiet, stranger?" And, to my amazement, my embarrassment finally gone, I told him: "That night, you trapped me in that room!" I felt my face grow red. Maybe he wouldn't even remember. But he did. "It was only meant as a joke," he said, and for the first time I was able to look at him. "It wasn't funny," I told him, and, as I walked away he called: "I'm sorry. I was a mess back then." I turned and, in spite of myself, I smiled. I felt oddly lighthearted. So it wasn't my fault. Was that it? And I realised that for all those years the worst thing about that night was that I had blamed myself for being too embarrassed to protest. · Esther Freud's Love Falls is published by Bloomsbury at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

Women in the boardroom

With prejudice

Companieswith senior women perform better, yet only 12 executive directors inthe FTSE 100 are female. An executive coach and author of a book onwomen in the boardroom tells Penny Wark why, and what we can do about it

It is a familiar lament: why are there so few women in the boardrooms of major companies? At the last count there were 12 female executive directors in the FTSE 100, a miserable 10 per cent that takes no account of demographics. Given that half of the population are women, it might be a good idea to understand at first hand how their minds work if you want to engage with them.
Mercifully, the boardroom debate has long moved on from feminism and now revolves around the growing belief that companies that employ senior women are better financial performers. As evidence for this emerges, it should provide the wake-up call that the more Jurassic employers need. In the meantime, the key to women breaking through the glass ceiling lies in understanding the factors that stop them rising through it. Once you know that, you can develop strategies to get women on to boards.
This is precisely what Peninah Thomson has done. A partner of Praesta Partners LLP, an executive coaching firm, she co-founded the FTSE 100 cross-company mentoring programme with Jacey Graham, a partner and co-founder of Brook Graham LLP, and together they have written A Woman's Place in the Boardroom, a study of senior women. By talking to FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 chairmen, chief executives, women directors and headhunters, Thomson and Graham have identified the reasons why women fail to reach senior positions, and formulated an agenda that they believe will enable many more of them to fulfil their professional potential.
Some reasons are historical: if you don't have many female role models at senior levels, it is hard for other women to see themselves in those positions. Some stem from the nature of organisations, perhaps a predominantly male culture and a reluctance by older male senior executives to be more flexible. Some relate to deep-rooted differences in the male and female mind: women tend to sabotage themselves by underselling their strengths and acknowledging their limitations, men commonly oversell themselves and rarely acknowledge weakness. And some stem from the obvious fact that it is women who bear children and who are still more likely to carry out the majority of child-rearing and domestic responsibilities.
Graham is optimistic. Mentoring schemes, female networking groups and coaching can all help women to move into senior jobs, as will the changing business culture, she believes. "The growth in the understanding of emotional intelligence is going to mean that people who have high levels of EI are going to be in demand," she says. "Organisations are no longer going to be competing simply on cost reduction and products. Building long-term meaningful relationships with suppliers and customers is essential, and that absolutely plays to women's strengths."
But isn't there an argument that many women choose not to work at senior levels? Graham acknowledges that, irrespective of gender, reaching board level involves sacrifice, but points out that companies will have more choice in their appointments – and diversity is an important word in 21st-century business – if they allow their senior executives to lead balanced lives.
"It's great that there are so many entrepreneurial women setting up their own businesses, but it's a cause for concern because if women leave senior positions, then nothing's going to change," she says. "So it's important that women are encouraged by their organisations to stay in there, which means that companies need to make the sacrifices for both men and women as bearable as possible.
"There will always be those driven individuals of both sexes who become out of balance and make every sacrifice to be at the top and stay there, but I would like to think that this is being challenged. We don't want lopsided human beings running things – decision-making isn't good when it's made by people who are obsessive. We want greater diversity, not less."
A Woman's Place is in the Boardroom, by Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham, Palgrave Macmillan, £25
How to get there
1. Confidence
Problem: A major reason why women don't reach senior levels is because, as individuals, they don't think that they're good enough. They also tend to assume that by doing a good job and working hard, recognition will follow. This does not happen, and is not helped by women's awkwardness in discussing their own merits, especially as men excel at telling the world how great they are. Worse, women are also inclined to broadcast their limitations.
Solution: Talk about your achievements calmly and quietly, and don't be apologetic.
2. Visibility
Problem: Most women focus on doing the tasks for which they're accountable. In corporate life this is a given, it isn't enough, and it's essential that you're recognisable.
Solution: Be visible both at work and outside, put yourself about, be present at events, have something to say and say it in forums that are not necessarily tied to your specialist area. This demonstrates that you can play to the whole spectrum of the board. You will also make connections.
3. Behaviour in meetings
Problem: Women who are new to boards are sometimes surprised to discover that meetings can rubber-stamp decisions that have already been made informally in corridors, or by people popping their heads round doors. This isn't necessarily plotting.
Solution: Recognise that a lot of business is done subtly, and engage with it. Seize opportunities for a chat, a quick lunch. Then when you get to the meeting people will see that you understand the unspoken rules of the game, and you won't be excluded.
4. Lack of female role models
Problem: Young men learn from senior male executives, but it is harder for women because there are fewer female role models. Without them, women don't have as many opportunities as men for informal apprenticeships, and this makes them more tentative.
Solution: Find a mentor, male or female.
5. The Queen Bee syndrome
Problem: This relates to the senior women who, having themselves achieved, pull up the ladder behind them and do nothing to encourage other women to follow. They may be rare, but they do exist.
Solution: The best people aren't afraid to hire talent. With time all women at this level will become more confident.
6. Risk taking
Problem: Women are less likely than men to take risks.
Solution: Take some. They needn't be big ones. Speak at a meeting, don't worry about honing the perfect response and miss the opportunity to make your intervention. Don't remain silent.
7. Competition
Problem:Women like to be seen to support each other because they see themselves as allies, they're empathetic, good at building consensus and less egotistical than men.
Solution: Competition may be a word you don't like (you probably prefer words such as collaboration and partnership) but you are in competition with your peers. This doesn't mean that you have to be nasty.
8. Career planning
Problem: Men are more inclined to plan their careers, women are more inclined to let them happen.
Solution: Think about the outcome you want, understand that you can make things happen, have a sense of purpose and seize opportunities.
9. Discrimination
Problem: It's illegal and no one will own up to it, but it still happens, and it's often subtle.
Solution: It's not part of the Zeitgeist– challenge it.
10. Ambition
Problem: Another word that makes women uncomfortable as they think that it implies ruthlessness. Women are perceived to be less ambitious than men. This doesn't mean that they are, but the impression comes about because they don't sell themselves as hard or as consistently as men do.
Solution: Use the word aspiration instead. Companies need to use language that doesn't turn women off, that encourages them to stay in the corporate world.
11. Politics
Problem: Women are more reluctant than men to engage in political games. Women also think that they're no good at them.
Solution:There's no choice; you need to understand how your organisation works, you need to be involved inits dynamics. Women can do this in their own way – they don't have to copy men.
12. Networks
Problem: Men have long--established networks that they can tap in to, women don't, which means that women don't have the contacts they need and have to try harder to reach senior levels.
Solution: As women's networks continue to emerge, the process of getting the big jobs is being demystified. But you do have to engage with the networks.
13. Supply and demand
Problem: Men in major corporations sometimes comment that they don't know where to find senior women to appoint, that there don't seem to be enough of them.
Solution: Enable women to cut their teeth by taking up positions on FTSE 250 boards, in the public sector and on charity boards.
14. Children
Problem: The demands of working at a senior level in a big corporation are incompatible with having and raising children. Most women want to put their children to bed themselves.
Solution: To retain senior women, companies need to create more flexible working options. BT, for example, has decided that what matters is that work gets done – where or at what time it gets done doesn't matter. Some companies allow employees to compress their working week into four long days.
15. Detail
Problem: Women often think that they can rely on instinct. This, however, doesn't impress men, who are more fact-orientated.
Solution: Women must be rigorous on detail, too, and support conclusions with data and analysis. Only when you have moved from being an expert in your field to an authority will people accept your conclusions without supporting data or analysis.
16. Mobility
Problem: Working mothers are less inclined than men to relocate or to take foreign postings. This means that they don't get the experience boards seek.
Solution: Organisations need to look at their expectations with a critical eye. Unless they make top positions attractive to women, their boards will remain male.
17. Research
Problem: Most leadership research is done by men and based on men. This perpetuates male models of leadership.
Solution: Include women in the data.
18. Culture
Problem: In companies where the working culture revolves around male – and even macho – interests and concerns, women feel unwelcome and as though they don't belong.
Solution: Companies need to be aware of this, and junior women are well placed to point it out. Companies should enable them to do so.
19. Look the part
Problem: Some professional women think that denim and cleavage are acceptable in a work environment. If you aspire to the boardroom, they aren't, ever, not even when the invitation says smart casual.
Solution: Understand that there is a difference between smart casual at a social occasion with friends and smart casual at an event where you are mixing with business associates. Your male peers will be wearing chinos and shirts, not cut-offs and trainers. Dress to the next level, not the one that you've already reached. Understand, too, that dress codes for women are set by senior women – don't threaten them.
20. Avoid ghettos
Problem: Women are often held back because they have restricted themselves to traditional female areas, such as HR and marketing. These positions rarely lead to a place on the board.
Solution: Make sure that you get involved with parts of the business that are involved
We made it, so can you: what the top women executives say...
MOIRA BENIGSON
Moira Benigson Executive Search
Women don't want to be on the boards in some ways because it's made too difficult for them. They have to juggle their home lives and work lives and it's a struggle. Women spend their time focusing on the job in hand. They do not spend time building their profiles internally or externally. They like to be good at what they do, do a good job and go home.
MOIRA ELMS
First female board member, PricewaterhouseCoopers
There is a tendency by some senior people to recruit those who demonstrate the same patterns of behaviour as they do, and this may deter some women with great potential. It also often comes down to the little things in the day-to-day working environment that subtly reinforce and sustain existing patterns of behaviour – and these take a long time to break down.
JAN BABIAK
Managing partner, Ernst & Young
With many organisations, having a single woman on the board is seen as enough and somehow that box has been ticked. More women are far less comfortable than men at selling themselves internally; too often women expect that their boss will automatically notice their achievements, while men are much more likely to showcase themselves. When a women displays strong leadership she is scary; when a man does so he is commercial. Scary tends to result in recommendations for personal development courses, commercial in promotions.
JENNIFER HARRIS
Founder of JRBH Strategy & Management
Men are naturally more clubbable than women. From the golf club to the old boys, men are good at building strong mutual networks. Women perhaps don't leverage sorority in the same way so they miss out on a potentially invaluable tug up the ladder.
LYNDA GRATTON
Professor of management practice and director of the Lehman Centre for Women in Business, London Business School
As board size shrinks, most boards have only three to five executive seats, including chief executive and chief financial officer. The path to CEO tends to have included managing a very large business unit; in traditional FTSE 100 companies, especially engineering and technology firms, such positions have not yet been generally open to women. There is still a hostile environment at the top of many organisations that leads to women saying: "Enough is enough; I don't have to do this." Because women are less tied up with salary and status, valuing these as indicators of their contribution rather than as enhancing their power, it is easier for them to walk away.
DR VAL SINGH
Deputy director, International Centre for Women Business Leaders, Cranfield School of Management
Where there are fewer than 30 per cent senior executive women, companies are incapable of creating the critical mass that will encourage younger women and help to pull them up through the pipeline.
MARIE-LOUISE CLAYTON
Finance director, Venture Production
Women tend to approach business in a different way from men. They get some things done more quickly but are sometimes inclined to talk more lengthily about the human angle to things. Although their approach can be useful, if women aren't prepared to compromise, their approach can put people off. Women are easy targets. Decisions at the top inevitably involve a certain amount of conflict, and sometimes issues dress themselves up as sexist when they're about something different.
Interviews by MICHELLE HENERY
...and the top men?
DAVID WOLFSON
Former chairman, GUS
There actually aren't any obstacles left but women assume that the old prejudices still exist and have less confidence as a result.
PAUL MYNERS
Chairman, Land Securities
The worst thing women can do is to encourage tokenism. There's no substitute for being good at what you do.
ANDY STREET
Managing director, John Lewis
Like attracts like and people still recruit in their own image. Once more women do the recruiting the process will speed up.
DAVID THOMLINSON
UK managing director, Accenture
There aren't enough female role models and it's hard for women to know the right way to act. Sometimes they think they have to be pushy when actually all they need is to be very good at what they do.
ERIC DANIELS
Chief executive, Lloyds TSB
Women are just as capable as men but maternity leave makes it harder to reach senior positions in some companies. If people take a few years off it's very hard for them to get back in the game.
Interviews by FRANCESCA STEELE
Women tend not to put their heads above the parapet
For those who aspire to the boardroom, executive coaching can help people to see their blind spots. For women the emphasis often revolves around giving them confidence in their own style, says Mairi Eastwood, the managing partner of Praesta Partners LLP.
"The lack of senior role models for women means that they often feel quite lonely," she says. "They feel on the edge, on the outside. They'll say, 'I've seen this guy doing this but I couldn't imagine integrating that style into my personality'. People who are successful are authentic, they use the style that works for them. So there can be more work with women helping them to find their own style and not feel that they've got to copy an overly masculine approach.
"It's about coaching people to make sure that their contribution is listened to and noticed when it's delivered in a way that's less assertive, less aggressive. Women may be more consensual and they need to make sure that although their style doesn't fit the pattern of the boardroom, it's equally effective."
Eastwood, who was one of Ernst & Young's first women partners in the mid1980s, is able to use her own experience of having climbed through a male hierarchy. "There are often lots of micro inequalities that stop women feeling confident," she says. "So having a coach who recognises their potential, believes in it and encourages it helps to counteract that abrasion. If you've got someone unsympathetic above you and you're feeling downtrodden, sometimes the answer is to move.
"Women don't tend to put their head above the parapet as much as men, so we encourage them to take risks, to have a go. There's often as much self-doubt in a man but it's not shown to the same degree."
Interview by PENNY WARK
I never felt held back
LORRAINE HEGGESSEY, the chief executive of talkback Thames, was coached by Peninah Thomson when she ran the BBC children's department
Thirteen or so years ago I was an executive producer in the BBC's science department, responsible for such series as QED, Animal Hospital and The Human Body. So I was leading quite big teams and at that stage very much of the opinion that I never would take a senior management role. I didn't think that I would enjoy it or that I would fit into the mould. A lot of the people running the BBC then were big Oxbridge men, and I wasn't any of those.
Then I met Peninah Thomson, and once I got my first senior management role that became a regular coaching relationship. I didn't have a particular aim but what I did get out of it was more confidence in my own abilities. I said: "I'll never fit in, I'll never stay at the BBC, there's no point, I'll go freelance", and Peninah said: "What makes you think that they won't appreciate you for what you bring to the table rather than expecting you to be like everybody else?"
I was always offered opportunities by the BBC, I never felt held back as a woman; it was all about my own feeling that I wouldn't climb the career ladder there. I didn't think I was good enough. What coaching made me realise was that I was as good as anybody else. One reason women don't get on is their own limited self-belief. At that time the senior jobs didn't seem that attractive to me. I was a hands-on programme-maker and that was what I enjoyed. Particularly once you've got children you tend to focus on getting your day job done and don't necessarily play the games that some of your male colleagues might in terms of making sure that you do get advancement and get noticed. A lot of women keep their heads down and assume that they will get noticed because they're doing a good job. What my coach identified in me was leadership potential.
Having sworn that I did not want to run a department, I loved running the BBC children's department and I loved running BBC One, and it was male colleagues who asked me to go for those jobs. I've developed a theory that women tend to go for jobs two years after they're ready and men two years before they're ready. You think "I haven't quite done this or that", but in the end, get on with it.
When I first began sitting on BBC boards that was incredibly intimidating. The BBC's board of management, which John Birt ran, was very formal and procedural. Peninah taught me a lot about how to prepare for the meetings, to ensure that I made a valuable contribution and to make sure that contribution got heard. Also not to witter on: whereas other women quite like that, it irritates men. Learning how to be effective at those meetings is important.
Now I love the range of a big job, I like motivating and enabling people. I like the responsibility, I like jobs that occupy all my head space. I like to be challenged, I like the people-management side and I like working out how you should position your organisation, the strategic side. What I don't like is bureaucracy, and endless meetings that don't achieve anything. A lot of men recognise how much better an organisation functions when you have a mixture of male and female people at the top. You want diversity in its broadest sense. The key thing is not to blame anybody. Most men I know just want to appoint the best person for the job, but it is about equipping women, and women equipping themselves, to take on more senior roles. Interview by PENNY WARK
 

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The prospect of all-female conception

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Published: 13 April 2007

Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.
Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman's bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.
The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.
But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons. The latest research brings the prospect of female-only conception a step closer.
"Theoretically is it possible," Professor Nayernia said. "The problem is whether the sperm cells are functional or not. I don't think there is an ethical barrier, so long as it's safe. We are in the process of applying for ethical approval. We are preparing now to apply to use the existing bone marrow stem cell bank here in Newcastle. We need permission from the patient who supplied the bone marrow, the ethics committee and the hospital itself."
If sperm cells can be developed from female bone-marrow tissue they will be matured in the laboratory and tested for their ability to penetrate the outer "shell" of a hamster's egg - a standard fertility test for sperm.
"We want to test the functionality of any male and female sperm that is made by this way," Professor Nayernia said. But he said there was no intention at this stage to produce female sperm that would be used to fertilise a human egg, a move that would require the approval of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
The immediate aim is to see if female bone marrow can be lured into developing into the stem cells that can make sperm cells. The ultimate aim is to discover if these secondary stem cells can then be made into other useful tissues of the body, he said.
The latest findings, published in the journal Reproduction: Gamete Biology, show that male bone marrow can be used to make the early "spermatagonial" stem cells that normally mature into fully developed sperm cells.
"Our next goal is to see if we can get the spermatagonial stem cells to progress to mature sperm in the laboratory and this should take around three to five years of experiments," Professor Nayernia said.
Last year, Professor Nayernia led scientists at the University of Gottingen in Germany who became the first to produce viable artificial sperm from mouse embryonic stem cells, which were used to produce seven live offspring.
His latest work on stem cells derived from human bone marrow suggests that it could be possible to develop the techniques to help men who cannot produce their own sperm naturally.
"We're very excited about this discovery, particularly as our earlier work in mice suggests that we could develop this work even further," Professor Nayernia said.
Whether the scientists will ever be able to develop the techniques to help real patients - male or female - will depend on future legislation that the Government is preparing as a replacement to the existing Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act.
A White Paper on genetics suggested that artificial gametes produced from the ordinary "somatic" tissue of the body may be banned from being used to fertilise human eggs by in vitro fertilisation.
Making babies without men - a literary view
LYSISTRATA
Aristophanes (c. 411BC)
After 21 years of war, the women of Athens, led by Lysistrata, take matters into their own hands. Lysistrata suggests every wife and mistress should refuse all sexual favours until peacetime. Before long it proves effective, peace is concluded and the play ends with festivities.
HERLAND
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1914)
On the eve of the First World War, an isolated society entirely comprising Aryan women is discovered by three male explorers. The women reproduce asexually and live in an ideal society without war and domination. This feminist utopia is a 20th-century vehicle for Gilman's then-unconventional views of male and female behaviour, motherhood, individuality, and sexuality. It is said to be based on Gilman's version of utopia through Aryan separatism.
DISAPPEARANCE
Philip Wylie (1978)
At four minutes and 52 seconds past four one afternoon, the world shatters into two parallel universes as men vanish from women and women from men. With families and loved ones separated from one another, life continues very differently as an explosion of violence sweeps one world while stability and peace break down in the other.
THE CLEFT
Doris Lessing (2007)
In her novel, which has made this year's International Man Booker shortlist, Lessing portrays a group of near-amphibious women who have no need of men, known as Squirts, as they are impregnated by the wind, wave or moon. But this is no feminist utopia: the women behave brutally, mutilating male babies before placing them on a rock for eagles to devour. The eagles turn out to be the men's allies, transporting the babies to the forest where they are suckled by does. Lessing reveals she was inspired by a scientific claim that "the primal human stock was probably female, and that males came along later, as a kind of cosmic afterthought".

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I'd Rather Eat Chocolate?

 Why God lies and sex objects object to sex
By Spengler

According to tradition across all cultures, the female sex drive vastly exceeds that of men. The Greek seer Tiresias, who had been both male and female, told the Roman gods (in Ovid's Metamorphoses) that women enjoy sex far more than men. [1] In The Arabian Nights, the Persian Shah Shahryar observes his new bride comporting with a whole troop of slaves. Giovanni Boccaccio famously stated in The Decameron, "While farmers generally allow one rooster for 10 hens, 10 men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman." [2] The matriarch Sarah's first reaction to the  angelic annunciation of the birth of Isaac was, "After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?"

Across ages and cultures, women universally are said to be more libidinous than men. I can find no report to the contrary. Women get most of the pain in the propagation of the species, so they should get most of the pleasure. With the plunging birth rate in the industrial world, one suspects that something has changed in this equation.

A case in point is Joan Sewell's book I'd Rather Eat Chocolate, a middle-aged woman's account of sexual ennui. It is customary to find salacious material on the best-seller lists, but this to my knowledge is the first time that the absence of desire has attracted mass attention. Think of it as a companion volume to Sex in the City. American women are purchasing Sewell's volume, perhaps to leave as a hint on their husband's pillow.

Mrs Sewell "slathers her husband, Kip, in chocolate frosting", reports Sandra Tsing Loh, who interviewed the authoress in the Atlantic Monthly. "She whispers naughty nothings in his ear. She lights candles, dons a bustier and fishnets, and massages him with scented oil. Ho-hum. She would still prefer a brownie, a book - anything to sex. And she says most women, unless they're fooling themselves, consider the deed a chore."

No wonder. Mrs Sewell dresses like a prostitute with her husband. Sex is a chore rather than a pleasure for prostitutes, and it is fair to assume that the same is true for women who act like prostitutes. Women do not like to be sex objects. Yet Mrs Sewell's complaint is epidemic among American women. The supposed sexual freedom of modern secular culture objectifies women, and eventually disgusts them. Nothing is more likely to kill desire than the life depicted in Sex and the City. In another location, I argued that sexual objectification makes women paranoid. [3] It also makes them squeamish.

Americans seem to suffer disproportionately from this problem, but they are not the only ones. A new survey by Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare concludes that two out of five married couples in Japan do not have sexual relations. Unfortunately the survey did not ask couples why this should be the case - I do not think it is because Japanese women dislike sex - so we shall have to wait for additional information before evaluating this report.

"What do women want?" asked Sigmund Freud, reinforcing my suspicion that the man was a moron (see Put a stake through Freud's heart, May 9, 2006). Women in the modern world want what everyone wants, to be recognized as an individual unique upon the Earth. One does not have to accept the religious view that God made every soul uniquely and for a unique purpose. Individuality is the marketing pitch of modern shopping-mall culture. Women wander through a labyrinth of chain stores that sell the same products in a thousand locations, to pay them to bolster their sense of individuality, which is to say, to become a better sex object.

Prior to our epoch of sexual liberation, men had to court women to mate with them. The desired woman was a princess, the sovereign of the man's heart: that was the point of the ritual of kneeling and presenting a ring, a holdover of feudal obligation and etiquette. Women want to be loved for themselves, that is, for their unique and individual souls. Sexual objectification diminishes their interest in sex.

There is a story about a rabbi who is asked whether sex on the Sabbath is pleasure or work. "If it were work," the rabbi responds, "my wife would have the maid do it." Being a sexual object is work, not pleasure; it is not something one does for oneself, but for someone else, and it must become tedious. Women expect men to love them uniquely and in isolation from the rest of their gender, and want a man who actually and in fact loves her because there is something about her uniquely created soul that fulfills him.

Love and libido, according to the latest research, affect different parts of the brain. Professor Helen Fisher of Rutgers University suspects that low sex drive in women is due to the absence of love. She told the New York Times:

Lust is associated primarily with testosterone in both men and women ... Romantic love is linked with the natural stimulant dopamine and perhaps norepinephrine and serotonin. And feelings of attachment are produced primarily by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, which at elevated levels can actually suppress the circuits for lust. I'm not so sure that sex drive diminishes when most people believe it does. Show me a middle-aged woman who says she's lost her sex drive, and I'll bet if she got a new partner, who excited her, her neurochemical levels for lust and romantic love would shoot back up. [4]

Every human being wants to be completed by another person, like Aristophanes' four-legged creatures in Plato's Symposium. The trouble is that if everyone waited around to be quite certain that they were marrying the one individual on Earth whom God had apportioned to them, the species would die out rather quickly.

We do not have time to find our one true love among the other 6 billion inhabitants of the planet, but we (and women especially) need to believe that we are close to the mark. That is why God lies to us or, rather, induces us to lie to ourselves. That particular lie is the euphoria associated with falling in love. We cannot be sure that the person with whom we fall in love is uniquely apportioned to us by destiny or divine decree, yet that is the way it seems to us when love takes hold of us.

I say that "God lies" because of an extraordinary precedent in Genesis 18, the annunciation of the forthcoming miraculous birth of Isaac. Three angels appear at Abraham's tent and inform the centenarian that his elderly wife Sarah will bear him a son and heir. As noted, Sarah bursts out laughing at the idea that her elderly husband might give her pleasure, and God lies to Abraham to protect his feelings. The text reads:

9 And [the angels] said unto [Abraham], Where is Sarah thy wife? And he said, Behold, in the tent.

10 And he said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah heard it in the tent door, which was behind him.

11 Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.

12 Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?

13 And the LORD said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old?

14 Is any thing too hard for the LORD? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son.

15 Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not; for she was afraid. And he said, Nay; but thou didst laugh.

Perhaps Abraham did not quite believe God's explanation, for he growls at Sarah in verse 15, "What are you laughing at?" Or perhaps we are to understand that Abraham's outburst at Sarah preceded God's explanation in verse 13. In either case, the medieval Jewish commentators observed that God lied to Abraham to preserve domestic harmony.

This remarkable fact I learn from the newsletter of the Orthodox Community at Brandeis University, whose motto is "Truth even unto its innermost parts" - excepting one, evidently, namely relations between men and women. An article by Adena Frazer titled "God's white lie" observes, "The Talmud explains that God edited Sarah's statement for the sake of peace (Bava Metzia 87a). Apparently, he felt that repeating Sarah's original comment would detract from the couple's domestic tranquility." [5]

It is not always the case that the truth shall set you free. Sometimes the truth will make you crazy. That applies in the case of decisions we must make on Earth that affect our sense of immortality. The choice of marital partner and parent to our children is the most important an intimate of these, and its implications are too sensitive to let truth get in the way.

Of course, woman discover in time that Prince Charming is neither a prince nor particularly charming, and men discover that the woman who once seemed to distill the energies of the universe into a single draft are not much different from a range of other women. Even God cannot keep the truth from us forever. If things work out, of course, by the time we come to our senses, it is time to fall in love once again, with our children.

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'Born-Again Virginity' in the Age of Girls Gone Wild

'Born-Again Virginity' in the Age of Girls Gone Wild

By Amy DePaul, AlterNet
Posted on March 20, 2007, Printed on March 21, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/49318/

Oh Ashley... it's been three weeks, am I a virgin again? Ramona
Born-again virgins, usually young people with a sexual past pledging to start fresh and commit to abstinence, take endless abuse on MySpace. Here, in Web pages filled with youthful accounts of hook-ups, parties and daily minutiae, writers muse over what constitutes born-again virginity, tongue planted firmly in cheek. Is it a year without sex, or as Ramona (above) might suggest, something more short term?
"I used to have a roommate who was a 'born-again virgin'," one Myspace user asserts in a typical posting, " -- what a crock of shit that was." Popular depictions of born-again virgins do little to add credibility. For example, Luanne from the animated sitcom "King of the Hill" vowed in a church ceremony never again to have premarital sex. A later episode depicted her pregnant, however.
Further reinforcing doubts are provocative musical treatments like singer Noa Tylo's 2001 album, "Born Again Virgin," which one reviewer called "a dark and broody dance-music exploration of sexual intensity." Hardly monastic!
Meanwhile, singer-songwriter Cindy Alexander's song "Born Again Virgin" begins, "Hey it's nice to meet you/I'm a born-again virgin" and later proposes, none too coyly, that "maybe we could touch." (Blame it on Madonna's 1984 hit, "Like a Virgin.")
Rooted in Evangelical dogma, born-again virginity has become easy to mock. But, for a large number of teens, abstinence supporters -- and, surprisingly, a cadre of mature single women - born-again virginity is no laughing matter. What, then, is the appeal of born-again virginity, and does it work?
AKA 'secondary virginity'
Born-again virginity originated from chastity campaigns organized by Evangelical Christians in the early 1990s. Currently groups such as Silver Ring Thing (www. silverringthing. com) and Worth the Wait (www. iamworththewait. org) promote teen abstinence on a massive scale, encouraging young people to take virginity pledges and seal the deal with wallet pledge cards and purity rings.
Does pledging work? In the short term, yes. But not in the long term, which is where born-again virginity comes into play. Abstinence pledges are successful with young and mid-adolescents, often delaying sex by 18 months, according to a 2001 study by sociologists Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner. Still, a follow-up study by the same authors showed that 88 percent of pledge-takers eventually had premarital sex.
"Secondary" or "renewed" virginity, then, may be a key retention strategy of the abstinence movement because it allows fallen pledge-takers back into the fold.
Virginity pledgers who break their vows are welcomed home with the proviso that they stop having sex and re-commit to abstinence: "If you have already had sex," it says on the Worth the Wait Web site, "don't throw in the towel just yet. You CAN start over and take a vow of renewed abstinence." Silver Ring Thing offers a similar message: "We recognize the fact that many students who attend the SRT are or have been sexually active, and they need to know if it is possible to begin again. The answer is YES, YOU CAN START OVER and, in fact, for this reason many students attend our program."
In this way, pledge groups touting secondary virginity operate in much the same way as Alcoholics Anonymous, which positions itself as a support system for all problem drinkers -- whether they are on, or off, the wagon.
Seriously, born-again virginity
There is a strong argument to be made on behalf of women -- Christian or not -- taking control of their bodies and making choices that are right for them.
This is essentially the approach that author Wendy Keller took in her 1999 book The Cult of the Born-Again Virgin. Keller had been working as a successful literary agent and stumbled onto born-again virginity in a social circle where you might least expect it: among 30- and 40-something high-powered career women. Rather than emulating Sex and the City's Samantha Jones, who uses her sexual prowess to dominate men and feel powerful, the women depicted in Keller's book had decided that taking themselves off the dating treadmill would empower them, and it did.
"I was at a cocktail party in Philly with a client at a friend's house," Keller recalls. "A woman was there who was dynamic and vivacious and successful and pretty. I asked if she was dating anybody and she said, 'No, I'm a born-again virgin and believe in being celibate until I find the right guy.'" Keller's first thought was to avoid the woman but when she heard the term again at a brunch in New York City and then later in Malibu, she knew she was on to something. She began researching born-again virginity and developed a self-help book advocating it.
Her book encourages women to stop using the pursuit of men as an excuse to avoid confronting their own problems. After it was published, Keller recalls, "There was a nuclear explosion." She appeared on hundreds of radio shows and garnered an overwhelming response: "I had everything from teenagers calling me on the radio crying because they'd had sex with nine boys and needed to make better choices to husbands saying, 'My wife has decided to become a born-again virgin.'"
Keller found herself under attack from different camps: Playboy and Maxim chided her for her supposed prudishness because she advised sexual restraint. Meanwhile, Christian broadcasters were incensed that she would not advocate premarital abstinence.
"I got a lot of heat from the Christian community because I would not say it's a good idea to be celibate until married. It [premarital abstinence] was a bad choice for me. There were people who had made that choice and paid a high price for it," Keller says. "The way I see it, the born-again virginity movement is temporary celibacy, and it's about not waiting for a man to fix every aspect of your life. The point is to get your life working."
Sex, lies and born-again virginity
Recent research raises troubling conclusions about the way teens practice secondary virginity. Janet Rosenbaum, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, last June published findings in the American Journal of Public Health that adolescents are prone to recanting virginity and secondary virginity pledges. She found that those who take pledges are likely to recant their sexual histories.
By documenting the extent to which young people lie about their sexual experiences, her findings raise concern over whether teens might take their virginity renewal literally, believing that if they stop having sex they can conceal their past from a spouse or doctor and, in so doing, spread or ignore STDs.
Perhaps this concern highlights a need to reinvent born-again virginity so that it does a better job meeting the needs of the people who choose it. First, teens need to know that born-again virginity doesn't mean they can pretend they never had sex and leave diseases undetected and untreated. Second, born-again virginity should be a feminist-inspired route to autonomy of mind and body: a recourse for adolescent girls seduced by exploitative and ultimately fraudulent media depictions of youth sexuality. In this era of porn on-demand and girls-gone-wild, it's easy for girls to believe that early promiscuity will make them powerful, when it is more likely to lead to unplanned pregnancy and STDs, if not shattered self-esteem.
Third, every young woman deserves candid conversations -- not about purity for the sake of her future husband -- but about desire, responsibility, self-respect and self-determination. For herself.
Amy DePaul is a writer and college instructor who lives in Irvine, Calif. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post and many other newspapers.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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Caring but not sharing

Separate bedrooms are all the rage among American couples - so it can only be a matter of time before the fashion reaches Britain. But would that be a bad thing, asks Zoe Williams Zoe Williams Tuesday March 13, 2007 Guardian It is easy to think the worst of Americans. Perhaps you have just read that they are indulging a new trend, that of separate sleeping quarters for married people. Aha! you think. They are craven, status-driven warthogs, who simply wish to flaunt their wealth by the incredible amount of space they can take up, because their houses are so huge. Or maybe it is the snoring. They have to sleep separately, because they all snore. And they all snore because they eat too much. The research vice-president of that nation's National Association of Home Builders has said: "It started with the his-and-hers closet ... now the demand is for the his-and-hers bedroom. It's a market-driven demand that's going to continue." Naturally, you think: what else would it be but market-driven? What trend ever occurs in that bloated nation that isn't just the agglomerated me-me-me demands of a load of grabby warthogs? The truth is, of course, that if you have a spare room at all, which I do, then you could just as easily call this a his-and-hers bedroom arrangement, if you could just get your boyfriend to sleep in it, possibly by coaxing him up there with a trail of chocolate buttons. Or maybe I am getting it mixed up with how to get a cat to use a cat-flap. And if you snore, which I do, and so does your boyfriend, which he does, and so does your dog, who learned it off you, and so does your cat, probably, except with the least body mass she is the quietest, then there is no reason at all why separate sleeping shouldn't be a brilliant idea. I am America, in other words. Certainly to my dark psyche. All the America-hate is just self-hate with a geo-political spin. The first image that springs to mind is the 1950s film. "Like Doris Day," says Emma, my friend, when I mention it to her. She has conflated two concepts: "Hollywood classic" and "sexless marriage". Where these intersect is the area of separate bedrooms or at least twin beds. Because of the original filmic motivation - that a double bed signified sexual decadence, where twins signified propriety - one thinks of separate sleeping quarters, naturally enough, as sexless. Such a couple must be very prudish, and frigid, you think - if they were red-blooded, they would want to sleep together. Now, I don't want to depress young couples just starting out but I think most of us, being honest, would admit that double beds do not, within the context of a marriage, necessarily spell out "red-hot congress occurs here on a twice-nightly basis". Once you admit that, you can start to countenance the possibility that separate rooms, far from being the death knell of physical togetherness, might actually spice things up a bit, like that rabbi whose major sex tip is: "Try not to undress in front of one another." It's not so much the familiarity and the contempt stuff. Contempt can come from anywhere. Sometimes your husband might only just have come back from a very long business trip and still drive you up the wall. It is more about the formal structures that separate rooms would necessitate. On such occasions as it was called for, you would have to find some way of luring your other half into your room. Perhaps they had been yawning a lot all the way through West Wing; you would then know that special measures must be taken. You might have to leave a trail of chocolate buttons. Sorry - I am painting an inaccurate picture indeed of my actual boyfriend, who doesn't have a sweet tooth and wouldn't cross the street for less than a Quaver. But you see where I'm going - the more trappings there are surrounding the activity, the more scope for innovation. The more scope for innovation, the more likely you are to invent a new kind of light bulb while shagging and immeasurably improve the net profitability of your lovemaking. Of course, the other way separate rooms could enhance your love life is if you lived in the olden days, and were posh. Almost the entire genre known as "English country-house fiction" (all about sex, not to be confused with country-house poetry, which is all about houses), from The Shooting Party to Gosford Park, would be non-existent if it weren't for the fact that rich people never knew where their spouses were in the night, so never kicked up a fuss if they were having affairs. Without this feature, the aristocracy would have almost nothing to recommend it, apart from one or two recipes. That said, it will be long time before society as a whole comes naturally to associate separate beds with a healthy sex life. You only have to think of the umbrage you take when you get to a hotel room with twin beds in it. If they are apart, you think: Hmph! Rage! They can see we're a couple. What do they think - that we're having a holiday from all the enormously tiring nookie we have in our regular life? And if the twin beds are pushed together, you think: Hmph! Rage! They're not even the same height. Do they think we're not going to notice? Sometimes in an American hotel, they have two ginormous double beds in the one room, as a kind of warthog-twin-variant. It has been my eternal fear that whichsoever boyfriend I am with will decide, from a purely pragmatic perspective, that it might be fun to have one bed each, and I will be so totally hurt and insulted that our relationship will never recover. I pre-empt this possibility by booby-trapping the second double with prickly hairbrushes and knives. I stayed in a rather delightful place called the Sands family resort hotel once, me and my ex-ex; they gave us a room the size of a squash court, which had a double, two singles and a bunk bed in it. It was just confusing. One night we ended up sleeping on the beach. We were drunk, mind. But most of this stuff is about whether you are being promoted or demoted, isn't it? I mean, if your beloved suddenly wanted a separate room, that would clearly be a relationship downsize. I think you could confidently consider yourself downgraded from "life partner" to "periodical cohort". But if you started your relationship, say, in twin beds (and I really have started a relationship like this), then there is almost nowhere to go but up. Maybe these Americans with their his-and-hers suites all come from households with very great financial disparity, so that there's a constant struggle for territory, as one party holds all the cash-cards and the other tries to claw back power in other ways. Maybe in a circumstance like that, just being vested with more physical house-space is a win-win situation, and the ramifications for your sex life are secondary to the power balance. Or maybe it is just the snoring. One should never underestimate the power of the snore.

India's missing girls

Daughters aren't wanted in India. So many female foetuses are illegally aborted that baby boys now hugely outnumber baby girls, while a government minister has begged parents to abandon their children rather than kill them. What does this mean for the country's future, ask Raekha Prasad and Randeep Ramesh Raekha Prasad and Randeep Ramesh Wednesday February 28, 2007 Guardian Bhavia is sleeping swaddled in a woolly peach cardigan amid the wailing and flailing limbs of 20 other babies. Nurses in lilac saris and face masks scoop the bundles from rockers and jig them under the wintry Delhi sun. Two days ago, the baby girl became the newest arrival at Palna, an orphanage in the capital's Civil Lines district. But Bhavia is not an orphan. She is what used to be known as "a foundling", abandoned by her mother in a local hospital. When Bhavia came to Palna she was nameless, with no date of birth. What is certain, from a cursory glance at the line of babies, is that an orphanage is one of the few places in India where males are outnumbered. For every boy lying in the sunny courtyard, there are four girls. Some have been dumped outside police stations, some in railway toilets, crowded fairgrounds, or the dark corners of bus stations. Others were left outside the orphanage in a wicker cradle, in a specially built alcove by a busy road. The weight of a child here will set off an alarm, alerting Palna's staff to a new arrival. Almost always, it is girls who are left in the cradle. Healthy boys are only deserted in India if born to single mothers; boys left by a married couple are the disabled ones. Not all abandoned girls come from families too poor to feed them, however. Some have been found with a neatly packed bag containing a change of clothes, milk formula and disposable nappies. Girls such as Bhavia are survivors in an India where it has never been more dangerous to be conceived female. A preference for boys, who carry on the family bloodline and inherit wealth, has always existed in Indian society. But what has made being a girl so risky now, is the lethal cocktail of new money mixed with medical technology that makes it possible to tell the sex of a baby while it is still in the womb. Although gender-based abortion is illegal, parents are choosing to abort female foetuses in such large numbers that experts estimate India has lost 10 million girls in the past two decades. In the 12 years since selective abortion was outlawed, only one doctor has been convicted of carrying out the crime. This hidden tragedy surfaces not only in the statistics of skewed sex ratios, but also in the back yards of clinics that hoped to bury the evidence. Earlier this month police arrested two people after the discovery of 400 pieces of bones believed to be of female foetuses in the town of Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh. Last September, the remains of dozens of babies were exhumed from a pit outside an abortion clinic in Punjab. According to investigators, that clinic was run by an untrained, unqualified retired soldier and his wife. To dispose of the evidence, acid was use to melt the flesh and then the bones were hammered to smithereens. Last year, in a series of reports entitled Kokh Me Katl, or Murder in the Womb, two journalists working for India's Sahara Samay television channel found 100 doctors, in both private and government hospitals, who were prepared to perform illegal terminations of girl foetuses. In the grainy TV pictures, doctors from four states and 36 cities talked with chilling casualness about how to dump the remains. Many weren't bothered about the foetus's age, just that it was a girl that could be got rid off. The average cost of the procedure was a few thousand rupees (around £30). In Agra, one doctor told the reporters to get rid of the dead foetus in the Yamuna river, which curves past the Taj Mahal. "That is not a problem. Take a rickshaw and throw it in the river," he said. In Dholpur, a town in Rajasthan, a female medic said the fields were pitted with the unmarked graves of unborn girls. She told the undercover couple that if their foetus was too big to easily be disposed of, they should pay a street sweeper to get rid of the body. The latest estimate of India's sex ratio at birth (SRB) can be gleamed from a sample registration system that covers 1.3m households. For the two years up to 2004, India had just 882 girls per 1,000 boys. Only China is worse. Beijing's harsh, yet effective, family-planning policy limited urban couples to a single child -which was usually a boy. China's sex ratio stands at just 832:1,000. Sabu George, a Delhi-based researcher who has worked for two decades on female foeticide, describes the first few months in the womb as "the riskiest part of a woman's life cycle in India". The sex ratios in the country, he says, are getting worse "day by day". India, he says, now has 930,000 missing girls every year. "What we are talking about is a massive, hidden number of deaths." Although ministers in India have woken up to "a national crisis", the response has been to condone the abandonment of female babies. "lf you don't want a girl, leave her to us," Renuka Chowdhury, India's minister of state for women and child development, said recently. The government "will bring up your children. Don't kill them". The announcement was a desperate response to stem India's dramatic deficit of women. In the west, women outnumber men by at least 3%. India has almost 8% more men than women. The question for India is what sort of future it faces without enough women. One dystopian answer, given by academics Valerie M Hudson and Andrea den Boer, is that a generation of men unable to find wives has already emerged. In their book, Bare Branches, they write of men who will never marry and have children. It is these men, they say, who are already largely responsible for social unrest in those areas where women are in short supply. Indian scholars, they say, have noted a growing relationship between sex ratios and violent crime in Indian states. When potential wives are scarce, it is the least-skilled and educated men who are left on the shelf. Hudson and Den Boer put forward a scenario where large areas of India could be overrun by this under-class, with marauding groups of under-educated testosterone-high youths wreaking havoc. "It will mean a stronger masculine and macho culture," says Den Boer, co-author and lecturer in International Politics at the University of Kent. "Men do change their behaviour when they settle down. Those growing pools of men that don't are more likely to congregate to take part in stealing, gangs, bootlegging and terrorism." In villages across the flat plains of north India, two decades of widespread female foeticide is already felt by thousands of families who cannot find brides for their sons. One local leader in the state of Haryana likened the lack of marriageable women to the shortage of grain in a famine. It is an apt simile, given that the response to the catastrophe has seen women from poorer states being traded like a commodity by bride traffickers. As little as 10,000 rupees (£125) is paid to impoverished families in Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh for a daughter who will supposedly be found a job in a more prosperous part of India. The reality is that she will be sold into a forced marriage to a family in a richer state. So significant has the lack of brides become in Punjab and Haryana that the issue has seeped into its politics, engulfing local elections. Candidates standing for office pledge that they will "help provide girls" if elected. Village leaders are accosted by unmarried men and asked to find them brides. Meanwhile, activists say that trafficked girls - who are often underage - are treated as bonded labour and sex slaves once married. The groups supporting trafficked brides are overwhelmed by the extent of the problem. "We're losing the battle," says Ravi Kant, executive director of Shakti Vahini, an organisation working on the ramifications of female foeticide. "It is in every village. The police are saying these families are doing nothing wrong. There's collusion between the law and the politicians, and it's destroying the whole social fabric." India's paradox is that prosperity has not meant progress. Development has not erased traditional values: in fact, selective abortion has been accelerated in a globalising India. On the one hand there has been new money and an awareness of family planning - so family sizes get smaller. But wealthier - and better- educated - Indians still want sons. A recent survey revealed that female foeticide was highest among women with university degrees. The demographic consequences of mass female foeticide are most pronounced in the most developed parts of India. In Delhi, one of the richest cities in India, there are just 827 girls per 1,000 boys being born. Not far away, in the wealthy farming belt of Kurukshetra, there are only 770. At the heart of the matter lies the most sacred institution in Indian life: marriage. New money has raised the price of wedlock, a ritual still governed by the past. Not only do most Indians believe in arranged marriage, in which dowry payments are made; there is also a widespread acceptance of the inequality between bride-givers and bride-takers. The bride's side, according to convention, is supposed to give but never take from the groom's family. In today's India that translates into an evermore expensive gift list of consumer goods. Decades ago, a wealthy bride's father would have been expected to give gold bracelets. Today it is jewellery, fridges, cars and foreign holidays - and the bride's family may end up paying the bill for the rest of their lives. A son, by contrast, is an asset to his family. Even leaving aside the wealth his bride will bring, a boy will retain the family - and the caste - name. He will also inherit the property, and is seen as a way of securing parent-care in old age. Indians, therefore, have come to view the girl child as a burden, an investment without return. A favourite Hindi saying translates as: "Having a girl is to plant a seed in someone else's garden." One of the results is that women themselves face immense family pressure to get rid of the girl in their womb. Feminists in India argue that criminalising women who have done so is to ignore how fiercely patriarchal the value system is. As some see it, a woman who participates in the killing of her own child is actually denying her own self-value and should not be punished but be treated with concern. Some of India's traditional attitudes are changing, with women fighting to choose partners and different lifestyles. In some urban parts of the country, live-in relationships are tolerated. Parents accept boyfriends in a manner unthinkable even a decade ago. "There's no obvious sexual revolution, but things clearly are changing," says Mary E John, director for India's Centre for Women's Development Studies. But technology is spreading faster than such western values. Clinics spring up daily offering amniocentesis and ultrasound, scientific advances that are capable of predicting the sex of a foetus. The trickle down of cash means that even lower middle-class families can afford a few thousands rupees on the technology. Before sex-selective abortion was outlawed in 1994, clinics would advertise terminating girls as "spend 3,000 now and save 300,000 later". Multinational companies began to sense a huge market opportunity in the mid-90s in India. Every three years the market doubles, and sales of scanners are thought to be running at 10,000 a year. First American, then Korean and now Chinese companies have pitched up to make and sell scanners. Some campaigners claim that the American giant General Electric's early arrival in the market indirectly led to millions of aborted girls. Although there is a law forbidding sales of scanners to unregistered clinics and quack doctors, the campaigner Sabu George talks of a widespread "indifference of ethics". He says 16m illegal ultrasound scans have been conducted since India's law was introduced. "How many more millions of girls will have to disappear from India before companies such as GE will recognise their responsibility?" he adds. General Electric counters that such accusations are like blaming car manufacturers for road accidents. "We support efforts to strengthen protection against sex determination and misuse of diagnostic equipment," the company says in a statement. The diffusion of medical technology and India's traditions are not the only reason for the country's endangered daughters. India's medical profession, which works in one of the most privatised systems in the world, is certainly culpable. Some doctors, it seems, will do anything for a fee. Many of those caught on camera in the Murder in the Womb operation were open about using high-quality ultrasound machines to determine the sex of the foetus. Under Indian law, however, doctors who use "sonography" are forbidden to tell mothers the sex of the child. The penalty is prison and a fine of up to 100,000 rupees (£1,200). They were also undeterred by performing late abortions - in some cases happily willing to terminate pregnancies months after India's 20-week limit. Despite being caught red-handed and on tape, a year later just seven doctors have been suspended. Two dozen are under police investigation, but no charges have, so far, been brought. Many of the clinics continue to operate despite campaigners staging sit-ins in waiting rooms. The journalists have received death threats. "Doctors are millionaires in India. They are politically and socially well-connected. Powerful people can slow and stop investigations," says Shripal Shaktawat, one of the reporters who conducted the exposé. India's labyrinthine laws and its antiquated judicial system have also created mixed messages regarding abortion rights. The banning of selective abortion has led to many women thinking they no longer have a right to a legal abortion. Some feminists are concerned that the campaigns against female foeticide have inadvertently driven women to seek backstreet abortions. No one has any quick-fix answers to deeply held and pervasive prejudices against women. The question for India is whether girls like Bhavia, that abandoned and unwanted bundle lying in a Delhi orphanage, will have choices that her own mother never did.

A Chaste View

Casual sex is a con: women just aren't like men. Former groupie Dawn Eden explains how she realised morality made more sense for women than free love The Sixties generation thought everything should be free. But only a few decades later the hippies were selling water at rock festivals for $5 a bottle. But for me the price of “free love” was even higher. I sacrificed what should have been the best years of my life for the black lie of free love. All the sex I ever had — and I had more than my fair share — far from bringing me the lasting relationship I sought, only made marriage a more distant prospect. And I am not alone. Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead. I am 37, and like millions of other girls, was born into a world which encouraged young women to explore their sexuality. It was almost presented to us as a feminist act. In the 1960s the future Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown famously asked: Can a woman have sex like a man? Yes, she answered because “like a man, [a woman] is a sexual creature”. Her insight launched a million “100 new sex tricks” features in women’s magazines. And then that sex-loving feminist icon Germaine Greer enthused that “groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren’t possessive about their conquests”. As a historian of pop music and daughter of the sexual revolution I embraced Greer’s call to (men’s) arms. My job was to write the sleeve notes to 1960s pop CDs and I gained a reputation for having an encyclopedic knowledge base, interviewing the original artists and recording personnel. It was all a joy for me, as I was obsessed with the sounds of the era. I would have paid just to meet artists such as Petula Clark, Del Shannon, Brian Wilson, Harry Nilsson, Alan Price, and the Hollies — and instead I was getting paid to tell their stories. I became the top woman in my (overwhelmingly male) profession. The opportunities for shenanigans were endless. Rock journalism had an extra bonus for me because I was deeply attracted to musicians — all kinds, though drummers, unused to being appreciated for their minds, were easy marks. While I was unaware of Greer’s injunction to make love freely, I read the supergroupie memoir, I’m With the Band by Pamela Des Barres, envying her ability to drink in everything that was desirable about rockers — their good looks, wit, creativity and fame — without seeming to lose any part of herself in her (extraordinarily numerous) dalliances with them. I tried to emulate her and I suppose to a large extent succeeded. In some ways, the touring rock musician was my ideal sexual partner. By bedding them I could enjoy a temporary sort of fairy-tale bond; knowing it was bound to be fleeting as we would both move on meant that I never had to confront my own vulnerability about properly making a connection with someone. I could establish a transient intimacy and never have to deal with the real thing — and the real rejection that might entail. Of course the rejection would come as the latest lover moved on to the next town and the next woman — but somehow, being able to see it coming made me feel more in control. I was choosing, I thought, the lesser pain. But in all that casual sex, there was one moment I learnt to dread more than any other. I dreaded it not out of fear that the sex would be bad, but out of fear that it would be good. If the sex was good, then, even if I knew in my heart that the relationship wouldn’t work, I would still feel as though the act had bonded me with my sex partner in a deeper way than we had been bonded before. It’s in the nature of sex to awaken deep emotions within us, emotions that are unwelcome when one is trying to keep it light. On such nights the worst moment was when it was all over. Suddenly I was jarred back to earth. Then I’d lie back and feel bereft. He would still be there, and if I was really lucky, he’d lie down next to me. Yet, I couldn’t help feeling like the spell had been broken. We could nuzzle or giggle or we could fall asleep in each other’s arms but I knew it was play acting and so did he. We weren’t really intimate — it had just been a game. The circus had left town. Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies. It took me a long time to realise this. My earliest attitudes about sex were shaped from what I saw in the lives of my older sister and my mother — especially my mother, a free spirit who was desperately trying to make up missing out on the hippie era. My parents split up when I was five; a few years later Dad moved across the country, so I was raised by my mother. While my schoolmates’ mothers were teaching them how to bake cookies, mine was letting her goateed boyfriend teach me, aged eight, the complex mechanics behind his water bong for smoking pot. (He thoughtfully stopped short of letting me take a drag on the weed.) My father held traditional values, but he didn’t want to seem prudish and was clearly uncomfortable setting down rules for a daughter he rarely saw. He almost never talked to me about sex. It was simply understood that I would have sex when I was ready — whether married or not. I learnt from my sister and my mother that a woman can be intelligent and beautiful and yet have a difficult time meeting a responsible, gentlemanly man who wishes to be married for life. This was the 1970s and early 1980s, the age of the Sensitive New Age Guy or aptly named “snag”. My mother attracted them because she was new age herself, doing kundalini yoga and attending lectures by various gurus. The snags treated her with what passed for respect in that world but they never gave much of themselves and didn’t appreciate Mom in the way I did — I wondered if there were any men capable of valuing inner beauty. In both her search for a husband and her quest for a fulfilling spirituality, Mom was, in my eyes, fuelled by a longing to fill the empty space. As I hit my teens, I felt the vacuum too and longed for male companionship. But I was determined not to get hurt the way I had seen my mother hurt. Having premarital sex seemed like a surefire way to get burnt. So I decided early on that I would not have sex until . . . marriage? That would be great. However, I didn’t think I could wait until then. Instead, I resolved that I would wait to have sex until I was really “in love” — whatever that meant. That all may sound simple enough but, growing up, I had little concept of the meaning of sex and marriage. I thought sex was something one did for recreation and also if one wanted to have a baby. (Well, I was on the right track with that last one.) Marriage, I believed, meant that one had a societal sanction to have sex with a particular person. Sex was better when one was in love, I imagined. Married people should have sex only with each other because — well, because it wasn’t nice to cheat, plus cheating could lead to divorce, which I knew meant lots of pain. As a teenager with no moral foundation for my resolution to save my virginity for Mr Right — other than a fear of being hurt by Mr Wrong — I felt free to push the envelope. No, more than free. I became one of those mythical virgins who does “everything but”. The name Lewinsky was not yet a verb, but if it were, I imagine men would often have whispered it to one another behind my back. When, at age 23, I finally got tired of waiting and “officially” lost my virginity to a man I didn’t love, it was a big deal to me at the time, but in retrospect it wasn’t really so significant. True, my dalliances became less complicated. When I did “everything but”, I used to dread having to explain why I didn’t want to go all the way; once I started having sex, that was no longer necessary. But in a wider sense, losing my virginity, far from being the demarcation between past and future, was just a blip on the continuum of my sexual degradation. The decline had begun when I first sought sexual pleasure for its own sake. Our culture — both in the media via programmes such as Sex and the City and in everyday interactions — relentlessly puts forth the idea that lust is a way station on the road to love. It isn’t. It left me with a brittle facade incapable of real intimacy. Occasionally a man would tell me I appeared hard, which surprised me as I thought I was so vulnerable. In truth, underneath my attempts to appear bubbly, I was hard — it was the only way I could cope with what I was doing to my self and my body. The misguided, hedonistic philosophy which urges young women into this kind of behaviour harms both men and women; but it is particularly damaging to women, as it pressures them to subvert their deepest emotional desires. The champions of the sexual revolution are cynical. They know in their tin hearts that casual sex doesn’t make women happy. That’s why they feel the need continually to promote it. These days I live a very different kind of life. I still touch base with old musician pals now and again, but I’m more likely to hang out with members of church choirs. I am chaste. My decision to resist casual sex was, once again, influenced by my mother — though not in the way she initially hoped. Although she was Jewish, she gave up her new age beliefs for Christianity when I was a teenager. I myself had no such plans at the time. For one thing, I didn’t have faith. I had grown up up in a liberal, Reform Jewish household; but, after being a bat mitzvah at 13, I fell into agnosticism and it seemed like nothing could pull me out. As far as I could see, Christians were a dull, faceless mass who ruled the world. My mission in life, as I saw it, was to be different; creative, liberal, rebellious. Then one day in December 1995, I was doing a phone interview with Ben Eshbach, leader of a Los Angeles rock band called the Sugarplastic, and asked him what he was reading. His answer was The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton. I picked it up out of curiosity and was captivated. Soon I was picking up everything by Chesterton that I could get my hands on, starting with his book Orthodoxy, his attempt to explain why he believed in the Christian faith. That was the first time it struck me that there was something exciting about Christianity. I kept reading Chesterton even as I continued my dissipated lifestyle, and then one night in October 1999 I had a hypnagogic experience — the sort in which you’re not sure if you are asleep or awake. I heard a woman’s voice saying: “Some things are not meant to be known. Some things are meant to be understood.” I got on my knees and prayed — and eventually entered the Catholic church. One night last year I had dinner with a male friend, a charming English journalist I would have dated if he shared my faith (he didn’t) and if he were interested in getting married (ditto). He peppered me with questions about chastity, even going so far as to suggest that maybe, given that I’d been looking for so long, I might not find the man I was looking for. “That’s not true,” I responded. “My chances are better now than they’ve ever been, because before I was chaste, I was looking for love in all the wrong places. It’s only now that I’m truly ready for marriage and have a clear vision of the kind of man I want. “I may be 37,” I concluded, “but in husband-seeking years, I’m only 22.” The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On, by Dawn Eden, was published by W Publishing Group/ Thomas Nelson last month