Sex lives of Englishwomen: Oral history? That’s the least of it…

Wendy Jones has spent the last few years investigating what English women get up to between the sheets. Writing a book on it, she tells Kate Wills, was quite an education

(Rex)

She was in the checkout queue at her local supermarket when she realised she had to pounce. Wendy Jones had been looking for Muslim women to interview about their sex lives for her new book, and she knew that the young girl in a headscarf packing her vegetables would be perfect. “Of course I was mortified, but I only had a few minutes, so I just showed her the manuscript and blurted out something about it being anonymous and confidential. We got into an email exchange and I built up her trust over a period of months. I just knew that this lady was so full of beauty and spark and wisdom... and I was right.”

The resulting interview with Jannah, 19, from west London, is just one of the kaleidoscopic oral histories that make up The Sex Lives of English Women. All the women were given anonymity for taking part in the book, so all of the names mentioned are, of course, aliases. There’s Olive, 35, from Leeds, a Buddhist nun who watches porn and wants a threesome, and Jackie, 47, from Eastbourne, who at one point was sleeping with ten different men a day. We also hear from Mary, 94, from Norfolk, who as a Land Girl had a staggering amount of sex with strangers by the side of the road. We learn what it feels like to have your penis turned into a vagina, to feel like you have “fat labia”, and to be a gynaecological nurse who can’t have an orgasm.

Jones, 48, whose previous works include a collaborative (auto)biography of Grayson Perry, came up with the idea of convincing women to tell all about their sex lives seven years ago. “In the history of literature in English there aren’t many books by women and the vast majority of them are books telling women how to be women,” she tells me by phone from her home in north London. “From medieval mystic Margery Kempe to the wit of Caitlin Moran, via Germaine Greer and countless women’s magazines, every generation has been sold an idea of how to be, but no one has asked ‘Tell me what it’s really like for you to be a woman’.”

She focused on English women as a way of exploring the duality in our culture between the stiff upper lip and Carry On slapstick – neither of which rang true. “I remember thinking ‘Who are these women that I walk past on the street, stand next to in the playground, sit next to on the underground? What is their life really like?’ I wanted to know very deeply.”

Through word of mouth, social media, and sheer gumption (she even approached OAPs on a train), Jones tracked down 27 subjects of varying ages, races and religions and, armed with her tape recorder, simply asked them to tell her about their sexuality. “Often the women would say ‘This will be boring’ or ‘I’ve not got much to say’ and lo and behold, two hours later…!” The unedited transcripts came to half a million words – “the same length as War and Peace”, Jones adds proudly. Only I’m pretty sure War and Peace doesn’t feature bondage, vampire bites and a pornographic re-enactment of a Fry’s Turkish Delight advert.

Reading The Sex Lives of English Women is like eavesdropping on an intimate group of female friends having the kinds of conversations which only happen (in my experience) four or five wines in. Every few pages I found myself guffawing, wincing, or narrating particularly shocking passages out loud to my other half. Some stories are more successful than others – the burlesque dancer who opens the collection doesn’t reveal much (so to speak), the Girl Guide leader who refers to having “organisms” didn’t hold my attention – but more often than not it’s a peek into inner lives one would never normally get to hear about.

Writing the book was an eye-opening experience for Jones as well. “I was listening and digesting huge amounts of hope and pain and trauma and secrecy and abuse and vivacity and life,” she says. “They cried, I cried. We roared with laughter. Often the person was shocked that they had done this, and I was shocked too. There was a lot of ‘Oh my goodness, did you really?’ Sex is often very, very funny. It seems to me that everyone’s caught in flagrante sometimes.”

As Jones states in her introduction, “through our sexuality our humanity is revealed”; and, as with the best oral histories, the personal widens out to become the political (take the young Asian woman who fantasises about a white man admiring her bum “I think that’s something to do with my subconscious...colonialism of something”). It’s not surprising that Jones studied the great American statesmen of oral history, Studs Terkel, as part of her PhD and jokingly calls him “my homeboy”.

In the interests of equality, Jones is currently in the process of interviewing English men for a follow-up, and she points out how important it is, in the age of porn and sexting, to allow people the space to talk about the reality of sexual experience. And what a fascinating job it must be to hear it all. “My favourite line in the book comes from the Muslim lady who says ‘there were educations along the way’,” says Jones. “For me, writing this book, I’d have to agree.” As a reader I’d definitely second that.

‘The Sex Lives of English Women: Intimate Questions and Unexpected Answers’ by Wendy Jones (Serpent’s Tail, £9.99) is published today