Actually chaps, we women would rather have ... GREAT SEX

WaRNING! What I am about to say might shock you: women like sex, too. Not shocked? Congratulations. You are either a woman or a man who is good in bed — an admirable achievement.

Since God granted both men and women orgasms, we should not be surprised by this. Yet the legacy of centuries of poems, plays and novels — and latterly popular culture film and television — is the belief that whereas men love sex, women can take it or leave it.

Men, it is felt, will do anything to get into bed, yet women need to be begged, bribed, blackmailed, cajoled, seduced or somehow persuaded. In my experience, that’s just not true.

The challenge was highlighted recently when denise Gough, an actress in the sexually-charged BBC2 drama Paula, said she was fed up with ‘ formulaic’ TV sex scenes in which men always take the lead and seduce women. Why can’t it be the other way around, she asked?

I couldn’t agree more. It is time women start writing sex scenes they want to read or see, rather than what men want, or what men think women want. Scenes that break tradition and stereotypes.

This is 2017! Women have had enough of being seduced. This is the age of ann Summers sex shops on every high street, the erotic new magazine, The amorist, and female-friendly YouPorn. We ladies are taking titillation into our own hands.

Some reading this will dismiss my argument as old hat. after all, it’s almost 20 years since Samantha Jones sashayed onto our screens in Sex and The City.

She was an early cougar, unashamedly sexual and unafraid to show it. She was still playing the field with vigour well into her 50s. But in many ways, she was a

caricature. Where are the women in film, literature or TV, who aren’t doormats or terrifying sexual predators?

Recently, we’ve seen the rise of socalled ‘mummy porn’, thanks to the erotic book and film Fifty Shades Of Grey. That, too, relies on the stereotype where the man is dominant and controlling.

In Fifty Shades, the lead character, Christian Grey, persuades Anastasia Steele, a shy virgin, to sign a contract agreeing to be his ‘Submissive’: ‘The Dominant shall take responsibility for the well-being and the proper training, guidance, and discipline of the Submissive.’

Yet again, it’s the sexually deviant/ control-freak man and the passive, whiter- than- white maiden. Has nothing changed?

There have been some attempts to remedy this. In the Scandinavian TV series, The Bridge, Sofia Helin, who played a police detective, was in a bar when a stranger offered to buy her a drink. She declined and the man walked away. Moments later she explained that while she wasn’t thirsty, she did want to leave with him and have sex — which they did in the next scene.

Throughout the series, Helin’s character was portrayed as oblivious to traditional social norms. Socially backwards yet sexually forward, a ‘normal’ woman, she most definitely was not.

Alvina, the heroine of my new novel, Mad, thinks nothing of making the first move.

I’ve been inspired by women such as Lena Dunham (who created the hit TV series, Girls) and British actress-writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge (whose show Fleabag is a dark comedy about a sex-obsessed woman), who over-share and tell us what women think and feel in their darkest hours.

THEY tell us how their private parts are doing and whether a man was good or useless in bed. They give us too many details about intimate emotional, physical and sexual matters.

It can be shocking but I believe it’s important for women to stop censoring themselves.

We need to see women on top, but not in a freakish, frightening way. It’s about normalising something that is normal. Telling the truth about sexual desire. Women have sex and want it, too. It doesn’t make them sluts.

Above all, I want a new kind of sex in fiction. I want to see women taking power, women in control.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m so open about sex. But it is only relatively recently that I’ve been able to open up and write more graphically myself.

When it comes to my own private life, I certainly went after what I wanted.

I met my Italian husband, Paolo, in a bar in Rome. He was drop-dead gorgeous, tall, dark and handsome — his accent was foreplay — my ideal man.

We had a ‘holiday romance’ but it was so good, we didn’t want it to end. We flew London-Rome or Rome-London every weekend for months — until Paolo tried to dump me on the phone.

He told me we lived in different countries and long-distance relationships never worked. I told him I was getting on the next plane to Rome and moving in. And I did.

That was ten years ago, and we haven’t looked back.

So why should women wait until February 29 if they want to propose, or hang around for years hoping their boyfriend pops the question?

Above all, why should women be bored or dissatisfied in bed? MAd, by Chloe Esposito, is out today, published by Penguin at £12.99.