Cheap. And cheerful.

I was delighted today to read the survey - published on World Aids Day - by the Terence Higgins Trust that suggests that sex is the most popular free activity, and that given the credit crunch people are doing it more and more.

You might think my delight is simply because I write books like the Joy of Sex and want people to buy them. But though yes, the thought did cross my mind that one man's credit crunch might mean my expanded royalty cheque, nevertheless that wasn't my main reason for celebration.

I celebrate because - given safe sex, which of course was the Terence Higgins Trust message - I see little else to beat the activity of getting and giving pleasure. More cholesterol reducing than food, less likely to cause vomiting than alcohol, and much less likely to cause death than smoking. And that's beside the fact that regular sex keeps you trim, boosts your immune system, helps beat depression and raises self esteem. What's not to like?

Maybe I'm naif, but when it comes to having a joyful time, I think sex should be top of everyone's Christmas list.

Lust to love - what next?

We like to think we live in an age where sex can be utterly casual, no strings, no commitment. But sex is a powerful bonding mechanism, and so very often - and this goes for the lads as well as for the girls - something that started as pure pleasure turns into something much more significant and much deeper. If you find yourself falling in love with someone with whom you've agreed to have a 'casual' relationship, what should you do?

• Be honest with yourself; don't keep on pretending you don't care when actually you do.
• Give it space. Take the time to think things over and find out what you really feel about your partner.
• Be honest. Tell your partner what you feel - it's only fair. If they back off, then they were a lost cause anyway.
• If your love isn't returned, don't wobble or pressure: there's no law to say that just because you have fallen in love, your partner should too.
• You can't make someone else love you - but you can save yourself from heartbreak. Set a time limit of - say - three months, then walk away.
• Don't rush into more casual sex - after rejection, you'll just be that much more vulnerable to falling in love again.
• If your love is returned, celebrate hugely. Lust that turns into love is a wonderful thing!
  

Fantasy - good idea or bad girl?

I was recently asked to write a few hundred words for a very lovely erotica magazine on the topic of sexual fantasy. Of course I obliged - writing not so much about my own mental exploits (yes, I admit it, I do...) but about the fact that my readers often confide anxiously in me about their fantasies. What they angst about, typically, is whether, in the grand scheme of things, fantasy is normal, whether fantasising is bad, and whether one should worry if one fantasises about someone other than one's partner.

To which the answers are, respectively, yes, no and maybe.

Let's take those answers one by one. Yes, fantasy is normal. Almost 100% of men and nearly the same number of women have had a sexual fantasy - so if you're out there and you are dreaming, you are not alone.

And no, fantasy does not mean you are bad - or mad, or sad. Contrary to the myths, it's those with a healthy sexual appetite and repertoire who do it, not the No-Mates. More, those who fantasise are likely to have more orgasms and a much better sex life than those who don't - so, everything to celebrate. Equally, fantasising about something doesn't mean you're going to action it. Typically we dream about things, places and people that are out of our reach, impractical or just plain unwise; we dream instead of doing not as a prelude to it. So, nothing to fret about.

My only caveat - and it's a tiny one - is about whether fantasising when you're partnered means there's something wrong with your partnership. And here, it all depends on exactly who you're dreaming of... the nearer to home the fantasy, the more you ought to be on full alert. So think of your favourite celeb sweeping you off your feet and there's no problem. Find yourself floating away on a dream of your partner's best friend - who, come to think of it, has hinted pretty strongly that they'd be up for some action - and you may want to stop and decide whether you want to go that route.

But otherwise, to my mind, fantasy is a total gift and allowing your mind to wander in a sensuous direction something to be done with eagerness, application - and absolutely no guilt.

When He Can't Get It Up...

I've done a lot of work around sexual problems - in fact, in May I will be speaking at the Primary Care Sexual Dysfunction conference. One of my particular areas of expertise is erectile difficulty, and I find this particularly rewarding work because so often, the problem's easily cured. Here are some guidelines for both sufferer and their partners.

To him:

1: Relax. Often one occurrence of ED scares the life out of a sufferer - and then performance anxiety kicks in and there's no way forward. If ED has happened after a one-off occurrence, then take the pressure off by concentrating on foreplay for a few weeks. Once you aren't under stress, the problem often resolves itself.

2: If it doesn't resolve itself, don't delay getting help. The average man with ED waits years before consulting a doctor, but that's unwise, if only because ED can be a marker of medical problems such as heart disease or diabetes. See your GP right away; he's seen it all before and won't be embarrassed.

3: Be hopeful. Often it takes only a few minutes' consultation to get a diagnosis and effective treatment. Current medications - yes, the little blue pill and its brothers - can be the answer of choice and if not, then more exploration can often come up with alternative solutions.

To her:

1: Don't add more pressure by blaming yourself or the relationship. ED is rarely caused by partnership problems or infidelity that isn't already clear. Sure, if you are rowing daily then his ED may be a sign that you need to sort things out. But ED in a good relationship is almost always a sign that medical intervention's needed.

2: Offer support not challenge. A man who can't get it up is feeling bad about himself to start with. If you wobble, or do him down, this won't help. Instead explain - he may not know - that most ED is down to a physical problem which can be easily sorted.

3: Suggest he get help. You can give your partner permission and encouragement to go to the doctor, when he may be hesitating. You can also suggest he logs on to SortED in 10 for extra guidance.

Exciting news!

I've hinted more than broadly in this blog on several occasions that I've been working on a new and significant publishing project concerning sexuality. Sadly, I still can't spill the beans too publicly - the publisher concerned has issued a total embargo on coverage until the summer, when books will be available and the publicity campaign can begin in earnest.

But that doesn't mean to say I can't tell you about - make that crow about - all the work that I and my team have been doing to prepare for that campaign. Since our first publicity meeting six weeks ago, we've actually been working flat out.

Laura has been putting together list after list of names that the publishers can approach for coverage, comment and endorsement. Not just contacts in print, radio and television. Not just other agony aunts, media medics and columnists. But academics who might want to put it on their reading lists, academic journals who might want to review it, and counselling organisations who might want to invite me to speak at their conferences. (I"m already speaking about the project in Rome in a few weeks' time, but more about that later.)

In the meantime, Joy has been doing 'projects'. Commissioning a special postcard to be handed out to all and sundry... talking to bookshops and venues to arrange a Cambridge launch... liaising with certain Universities to organise debates on the topic... briefing the publisher's Special Sales department on whom they could approach to get tie ins or merchandising.

My role - along with working on the next stage of the project - has been quite simply to gather as many contacts as I can. If I speak to a journalist, I ask them if they want to be including on the mailing list. If I do a show, I ask the presenter if I can let him know nearer the time. When I talk to anybody and everybody who might have a professional interest, I tell them the bare bones and ask if they want to be kept informed. They all do.

If you're reading this as a journalist, academic or columnist who might be interested in covering the story - without yet, of course, knowing exactly what the story is :) - let me know. I shall put you on the mailing list and, nearer the time, the publishers will send you a press release and, if relevant, a review copy.

Sorry, talking about sex again...

As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm currently working hard down the salt mines rewriting a Classic Sex Book. My friends, tolerant as they are, have for the past few months accepted my heavy workload - but have never been able to resist responding to my alibi for not coming out to play with comments like "working on the sex book - is that theory, or practice???".

I know such comments are always underpinned by great good humour - but I'm also aware that even in our current society, it's a source of such humour to suggest that anyone over the age of 25 is actually doing more than just dreaming of sex. Passion, the media tells and shows us, is reserved for the young and beautiful. Which is why, a few weeks ago, one of my blog posts highlighted recent research showing that a high proportion of over 70s are still swinging from the chandeliers.

I'm delighted today to report some qualitative anecdotes to add to that quantitative evidence. A new book - Over the Hill and Betwen the Sheets: Sex, Love and Lust in Middle Age - is a collection of personal stories edited by Gail Belsky. And the book is a gem of tales both passionate and moving, not only of how lust was rediscovered through new relationships in midlife, but how it was regained in established couples for whom time, children and the daily grind had all but extinguished desire.

I deeply believe - through personal experience as well as professional expertise - that sex can both last and improve over time; but it's nice to see other accounts confirm thatin print. All the more ammunition for when my rewrite of The Sex Book is published and I find myself defending the right not only of twenty-somethings but also ninety-somethings to have a fulfilling and adventurous love life.

Shopping better than sex? I don't think so...

No, it's a long way from academic research. But the latest 'reader survey' from a woman's magazine - in this case, First - still interests me.

Because it blows out of the water many of the more doom-laden ideas we currently have about relationships, and presents a much more optimistic view. Ninety-four per cent of wives said they were happily married, 72% of all women still fancied their partners, and only half said that their love lives had diminished after having children. For a Pollyanna like me, that's a nice result.

Where the survey wasn't so encouraging, however, was when it came to sex. Four in ten would rather go shopping than make love, and over a third said they would be happy in a sexless marriage. Which - while it gives the lie to the proposition that we are all sex-mad, and also supports the idea that love rather than passion is the key to a happy life - also seems rather sad to me. Sex is so wonderful that surely we should want it - and be putting energy into having it - throughout our lives.

No, sex is not compulsory and if a relationship doesn't include it, that doesn't mean that love is on the rocks. But sex is very wonderful - and absent it, we may well be missing out on a host of other benefits: affection, cuddles, physical proximity, eye contact and simply shared pleasure. If partners don't make love and don't want to, no problem; if they don't make love and want to, there is plenty of help available and actually, it works.

I don't usually include an advertising slot in this blog - but if you're reading this and your sex life is not what it could be, contact Relate right now... www.relate.org.uk.

Age shall not wither....

At last statistics have proved what I've known professionally for decades and am increasingly coming to know on a personal level... sexual desire does not fade with age. The myth that sex stops at 40, or with the twentieth wrinkle, whichever comes sooner, is just that - a myth.

A survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and covered in almost all the national newspapers today with varying degrees of seriousness, shows that older people still want, need and love sex - and most of them, despite the occasional erectile or lubricative glitch, are still getting it. The majority of those under 74 are making love regularly and happily.

The flipside - for sadly, there is a flipside - is that they may well be making love unsafely. For after all, these nasty STDs don't affect anyone but the young, do they? (Of course they do, one of the biggest rises in infection occurs among the older cohort, who think that anyone they sleep with has been celibate or at least faithful for the past several decades. Dream on.)

But safe sex warnings apart, I'm delighted that at last those of us in our middle years are finally being appreciated for who we are. We are not ony warm blooded and passionate, - but also knowledgeable about our own bodies, about how to turn a partner on, about how to make sex not only loving but also lustful. What's not to like?

Making the world a happy bunny

No, I admit it, not my headline but the current hook for the latest in neat campaigns to sell sex toys.

As you probably know, new recycling regs mean that all electrical equipment must be disposed of at a "designated electrical waste collection centre". Which is fine if your throw-out is a toaster, a cooker or a hairdryer. But not so good if what you're taking to the tip is a collection of vibrators.

Bad enough to see the smirk on the face of the Customs official as they rifle through your carry on-luggage and find a rampant rabbit (who, me, talking from personal experience... nooooo!) But to have to produce and then dispose of said sex toys at your local disposal centre? Not a good idea.

Now sex toy website Love Honey has launched an "amnesty" campaign to make the whole thing easier. You send them your vibrator. They recycle it. They donate £1 to charity. They send you a new vibrator for half price.

I'm not on Love Honey's payroll, but I do approve. Good idea, well marketed, subtly pushes the safe sex message and very green. What's not to like?

But what do you actually dooooo?

As I've mentioned earlier, my working life has no clear pattern - any two days are usually utterly different. But Mondays and Thursdays have something in common - on both I write and submit agony columns. Today, it's my column for That's Life, a woman's weekly for whom I've written for over a decade now.

My postbag always moves me. A few sentences on lined paper torn from a notebook and hand-scribbled in a guy's coffee break. Several paragraphs inside a pink card with kittens on the front carefully printed by a fourteen-year-old, probably during a maths lesson. Fourteen pages of stream of consciousness, almost certainly written at the dead of night and downstairs, while the hated and feared spouse sleeps on upstairs.

How do I respond? Always from the gut. Yes of course I research around the problems presented, of course I refer on to an appropriate organisation. But the core of my answer is always instinctive, a reaching out to the letter writer, to make them feel understood and to give them a way forward.

I haven't got the answers. But what I can do - what my expertise and experience enables me to do - is to help my readers see their problems differently. The guy writing in his coffee break needs to realise that ending his affair will be hard but not impossible. The schoolgirl writing at her desk needs to realise that she doesn't need to sleep with the boy in order to get the love she craves. The spouse writing in the dead of night needs to realise that leaving the violent partner is the best thing for everyone.

Of course, I'm not just addressing those people. Yes, I originally write person-to-peson, but I'm published to an audience of millions, who buy the magazines and websites that run my columns. What I say needs to help them too see their problems differently - needs to give them permission to stay, to leave, to say yes, to say no.

Above all, my agony aunt columns need to give people the message that when times get tough, they're not alone - and that they deserve not to be alone. If not from friends and family, then from advisors, counsellors, therapists - and from agony aunts - people should feel able to reach out and get the help and support they need.

Eat your heart out, Corrie!

As well as covering "drugs, sex and rock and roll" for the mass media, I'm also heavily involved in the more academic side of things - most particularly sexual health. Yesterday, for example, I attended the quarterly meeting of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health, a cute little mag that belies its rather ponderous name to give coverage of a range of topics from menstruation to the menopause by way of contraception, sexually transmitted diseases and cervical cancer - anything to do with women's and men's bits, basically.

Of course it's a serious journal - the list of contributors always reads like a Who's Who of key world figures in sexual health. But what always amazes me during our meetings is the fact that in addition it's so much about real life, real stories of patients who have had to make difficult choices, real concerns of health professionals who have had to face difficult challenges. Granted, unless you have a medical interest in the topic, you won't keep a copy on your bedside table; but beneath the long Latin words and the carefully correlated statistics, there lie so many human stories - stories that frankly, I find much more interesting and inspiring than any TV soap.

Sex, drugs and rock n' roll!

I spent the weekend catching up on a backlog of work. It's never the same day twice. Yes there are regular commitments - Monday column for AOL, Tuesday phone-in for Heart Radio, Thursday page for That's Life. But otherwise... what do I do, what have you got?

This weekend it was a mixture of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Sex? I've been working for a while on a rewrite of a (rather famous) sex book, and we've just reached a new phase of firming up on what needs to be done: working through tens of thousands of words of research on such disparate topics as vibrators... orgasms... oral sex and pompoir (don't ask), I caught myself wondering happily how on earth I had, by some miracle, ended up doing as an enjoyable career what most people do just for enjoyment.

Drugs? I'm deeply involved - for personal as well as professional reasons - in cervical cancer campaigning; so on Saturday I spent some time looking over the news clips covering the latest vaccine. Lots of debate about whether 12-year-old girls should be injected, or whether the very act of vaccinating would make them more likely to have early sex. For me it's a no-brainer. If a 12-year-old girl is aware enough to be having the vaccine, then she's probably aware enough to know not to have sex for a while. It's the kids who don't have the vaccine that I worry about - they're much more likely to get caught not taught.

Rock and roll? Well, no, not really... but I did write a comment for a weekly glossy on the Spice Girls Reunion. I love serving up serious psychology that can teach people how to best live their lives... in the guise of a celeb news story. Sneaky, I know, but... such fun!