HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: '9 reasons women have never been hornier.'

This article first appeared on Holly Wainwright's Substack, Holly Out Loud. Sign up here.

So I found myself rubbing baby oil on a male stripper's chest.

In a sticky-floored, damp-smelling dressing-room behind the spangled stage of a theatre packed with tipsy women.

I was a baby journalist, then. Writing a feature about an Australian male dance troupe who were exciting London. They may or may not have included Jamie Durie, and I may or may not have been out drinking with them the night before because #gonzo.

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Until the baby-oil incident, my enthusiasm for the dancers had been largely ironic. I was a Mancunian, after all, bred on skinny guitar boys, and so hairless, muscle-bound pretty dudes were not in my realm of erotic experience.

But the squeals and giggles and yes, perhaps the panting anticipation from the auditorium, were all seeping backstage. With the scent of toxic orange spray-tan in the air and surrounded by giant men priming their pecs with last-minute push-ups, it was impossible not to catch it. These were beautiful boys, and the women here wanted them.

I took my seat as women — uninhibited by glugs of savvy-b — lost their minds around me, screaming and tearing at their own clothes, baying to be chosen for the stage dances, shouting the names of their favourites in ecstatic, hoarse voices. A look or a wink would send them into shrieking chaos. They laughed, they hugged, they called for more.

I left the theatre that night, baby oil long wiped from my palm, with a changed view of female lust. I was intimately familiar with it, of course. But publicly? As a shared experience? As performance? I have to tell you, I think it frightened me, a little. And so I told myself it was sad.

I was reminded of that night when the images from Vanity Fair's Hollywood edition dropped, with the headline 'Let's Hear It For The Boys!' This issue is a tradition, and the annual chance for stars to compete for the 'honour' of being chosen, even now.

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This year, editors savvily chose to theme the cover around 'hot dudes' and the Internet lost its mind over every under-40s man in Hollywood from Glen Powell to Michael B Jordan to Callum Turner looking ridiculously handsome in dinner jackets and ocean waves. The memes were sensational, the panting was almost as loud as in that London theatre.

Female heterosexual lust is having a moment. And what has shifted, it seems, is that there's nothing sad about it.

Allow me to present a short cultural list of evidence that right now, female horn is owning the culture, from the serious to the silly:

1.The kerfuffle over the VF 'boys' was an echo of the enduring enthusiasm for this year's People's Sexiest Man Alive — Johnathan Bailey (also on the Hollywood issue, of course, he's in Wicked, after all). These magazine traditions are decades old, kind of ick, and yet a generation who would struggle to pick Clooney out of a line-up lost it over that choice. "No notes!" they cried over the first openly-gay SMA. We just really, really like to look.

2.Need I say it? 'Romantasy', aka 'Fairy Smut' is the literary genre holding the publishing world's head above the water. It's approaching crime as the single best-selling genre of book across the world, is mostly read by women and girls, aged 13-34 and in the US alone, last year romantasy titles sold $610million worth of books, and took out four of the top 10 best-selling titles. Any fan will tell you there's a lot more going on that lust in these books, and that the sex is far from straight, but horny is the word.

3.For the more… grown-up women, let's not forget the divisive literary sensation of Miranda July's All Fours — with its tiny, kinky, intellectual fantasies that involve interior decorating and too many toilets. Now live on Out Loud's Summer Book Club, friends.

4.Um, this year, Taylor Swift released a song about her boyfriend's penis.

5.A lengthy New York Times feature about a woman whose 'female viagra' business is finally booming after years of barriers and gatekeeping. "We played the long game," Cindy Eckert says. "Culture finally caught up."

6.Here in Australia, the number of midlife women seeking treatments for a midlife libido loss is rising fast. A significant Australian study of women aged 40-69 found almost 50% experience "poor sexual wellbeing", and that it caused them "distress".

7.Porn. It's a Pandora's box and we could be here all day. But the complete saturation of online pornography has seen "female friendly" and "porn for women" content boom by thousands of percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile on more conventional platforms…

8.We're five years into Bridgerton. Six from Fleabag's "hot priest". A decade on from Outlander. "Female gaze" sexy-schlocky TV is respectably mainstream. Which brings us to:

9.Sabrina Carpenter singing — for women — about decent men who call her back making tears run down her thighs. The poppiest of stars is horny as hell — for a good man. Oh, which maybe leads us to: Robert Irwin.

I could go on. I won't.

Back to the auditorium. Twenty-two-year-old me, embedded with Manpower, understood so little about what women want. The baby oil turning my head is such an innocent moment from a pre-pornified world, it makes me smile.

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As does how unsettled I was by those women desiring, so loudly, so freely. Bless little me, who clearly thought that only men were energised, motivated, thrilled, by such blatant wanting.

I think the era of the Internet Boyfriend, which holds the same sort of at-arm's length safety, would have thrilled her.

It still does.

This article first appeared on Holly Wainwright's Substack, Holly Out Loud. Sign up here.

Feature image: Getty.