I am enormously proud to tell you I’m responsible for the word “erection” being said for the first time on Sky News. It was during Mamamia Live last week (we weren’t on this week due to The Budget where tragically, they did not discuss erections of any kind) and I was discussing the female libido fairy with sex therapist and author Bettina Arndt, author and journo Caroline Overington and Minister for Childcare, Employment Participation and the Status of Women, Kate Ellis.
You have to watch Kate’s face as she wonders how the hell she can crawl under the desk and quietly die…..
When Bettina’s book, The Sex Diaries was released in 2009, one of the key (and least surprising) revelations was that men were not getting as much sex as they wanted. Did anybody not know this? In fact I wrote about the fragility of the Female Libido Fairy here just recently. But what was surprisingly poignant about the men Bettina interviewed and who kept diaries for her, was how upset it made them. They described feelings of worthlessness, loneliness, low self-esteem and rejection when their partners refused their requests for sex (also known as The-Hand-Under-The-Doona).
Which led to the controversial part. To try and bridge the gap between the male and female sex drive, Bettina suggested women sometimes just ‘throw the canoe in the water and start paddling’.
She wrote about it in the Canberra Times: