Four conceited stories

Here are the attitudes of four middle-class, English women to casual sex:

Jo Day: "It's a myth that women can't enjoy a brief encounter as much as a man ... I have slept with 30 men. The vast majority of those were one-night stands ..." Well-educated and intelligent ... she insists that her approach is reasoned and rational. That's as may be, but any talk of the long-term legacy in emotional or even physical terms is pushed to one side, or dismissed as irrelevant.

Jessica McConnell: "It's all about sexual confidence ... I think that women actually call the shots more than men now. Most of my friends are quite happy to approach a man and be upfront about sleeping with them. There's no hanging around waiting for them to call the next day. You can just have sex, and then move on ... We are perhaps the first generation of women to absolutely have our own financial independence, because we have good careers - and we work hard and like to have fun."

Jackie Robson: "Our icons were women who are sexually confident and free, such as Madonna, and I think Sex and the City had a big impact on my generation. For the first time it was OK to talk to your girlfriends openly about sex ... Women are just more honest about their sexuality now. If they want just sex without a relationship, why not? No one gets hurt as along as you are honest about what you want.

"Our parents were very quick to get married, but we don't have that pressure ... I may be 40 before I think about getting married and having kids. Women now have as much right as men to make sexual decisions ..."

Georgia B: "I think that being in long-term relationships with men often holds you back in life - so I am much happier at the moment to have short-term relationships or the odd one-night stand. At the moment, my career is more important to me than anything else. I don't want to get married and have children until I am in my mid-30s. Most of my friends are like me - quite headstrong - and we feel no one - especially men - can tell us what to do."

It's clear what these women want us to believe. They want us to believe that they are pioneers of female sexual liberation; that they suffer no loss from engaging in casual sex; that casual sex marks their freedom and independence; that they are proving themselves superior to men in their sexual confidence; and that marriage and motherhood should be deferred until some vague time in their mid to late 30s.

It's a conceit. They are not pioneers. The same attitude was adopted by "progressive" women from the early 1900s onward. I observed it personally amongst the university educated women of the mid 1980s to early 1990s.

Nor is it credible that these women suffer no emotional loss. It's more reasonable to expect that they will become jaded and hardened to some degree.

So why would our four well-educated women speak the way they do about casual sex? One reason is that they are following the political orthodoxy of their times - rather than truly asserting an independent mind of their own.

The political orthodoxy states that personal autonomy is the key good. Men are thought to be the privileged class in society who have taken autonomy for themselves at the expense of women. Therefore, a liberated woman is supposed to prove that she can assert autonomy and independence equal to, or even greater than, a man.

If a woman is taught to seek autonomy and independence, in competition with men, then it's not surprising that she would value career and casual relationships, rather than serious commitments like marriage and motherhood.

But there are all kinds of problems associated with doing so. It's not wise to deliberately defer marriage and motherhood to the very last moment. We've just had a generation of middle-class women who have struggled to successfully partner and have children late in life. You would think that younger women would learn the lesson - but it seems that the force of political orthodoxy is too strong for some.

Here's another major problem. Men respond well to feminine women who are on their side. The orthodoxy, though, encourages something like the opposite: women who believe that they ought to behave more like men, and that men have withheld the key goods in life from them, and that they are in competition with men to outperform men at their own game - a game you win by remaining separate, invulnerable, self-assertive and unfeeling.

It's not a recipe for happy relationships. I can still remember the atmosphere on campus in the early 1990s. The casual attitude to sex did not lead to some kind of sexual utopia. It was more like a big chill, with very few signs of romantic affection between the sexes.

There are other distortions. If numbers of women begin to defer marriage and motherhood to some distant point in the future, then it becomes more difficult for men to justify launching into a career and other adult responsibilities. When women begin to aim for merely casual relationships, then it makes sense for them to choose unsuitable men - which further discourages men from developing stronger, adult qualities.

It is likely, too, that men will respond to a female individualism with an individualism of their own. They might, for instance, choose a permanent bachelorhood, or learn to play the field.

So what happens when our four English women hit their 30s and begin to take marriage and motherhood more seriously? They are likely to find it much more difficult than they imagined to meet the right kind of guy, having discouraged such men all too successfully over the previous decade.

Finally, I don't mean to suggest that all Western women have been influenced to the same degree by a liberal orthodoxy. There are still large numbers of women who are oriented to love, and who do wish to marry and have children in their 20s. I do encourage men to remain active in looking for someone; to be a bit thick-skinned when they encounter modernist distortions; and to work in the longer-term to overturn the modernist politics which makes relationships and family formation much more difficult than is necessary.