There is a forlorn generation of US singles in their 30s who "can't commit", in the parlance of Friends. Unable to leave the stage of adolescent self-absorption that they entered at the age of 13, these men and women are too arrogant in their splendid isolation to take the leap of faith required to fall in love. It's just too much fun having total control over your perfectly ordered life to give it up for another human being, unless their appearance, clothing, car, intelligence and background are as impeccable as your own.
These singles will readily admit to being choosy, but what they won't admit is the truth, which is that nobody's good enough for them and that they are so protective of their independence, that they cannot conceive of giving up their autonomy for love. So they engage in laissez-faire free sex and serial monogamy, always leaping out of the train when the tunnel of marriage and reproduction looms.
Some are so vain and self-centred that they prefer sex with themselves to having to scale the mountain of another human being's frailty and vulnerability. Addiction to masturbation has become such a problem that in the US people are forming support groups. What this is really about, is the loss of the ability to be intimate with another human being. Emotional connections are just too messy. The newly-appointed poster girl for this generation of sad, adult-adolescents is sexpert Courtney Weaver, the American "Bridget Jones". Her new book, a kind of autobiographical, amateur Kinsey report, is called Unzipped: The Extraordinary Sex Lives of Ordinary People. Weaver is a voyeur, describing herself as liking to watch other people's sex lives the way some drivers like to see other people's car accidents, "slowing down to see the blood". A one-time correspondent for the BBC in Northern Ireland and a committed Anglophile, Weaver returned to her hometown of San Francisco and wove her prurient interests into a column, "Unzipped" for the on-line magazine Salon. As you might expect of a selfabsorbed single, Courtney blames her single state on her feminist mother and on weak men, who she terms "Contemporary Man Cripples".
Unzipped - the book (the film, the TV series and the T-shirt couldn't be far behind) is peopled by Weaver's longsuffering Irish ex-boyfriend Aidan, and by Weaver's female friends. There's Jemma, a British "submissive" who likes to be tied up and tortured in public sex clubs by a dominant male she calls "Sir", while Weaver watches from the audience. There's Marie, a hairdresser and new mother of a three-month old who has gone off sex and told her husband of 10 years to have an affair, only to suffer shock when he actually does it. Then there's Harriet, a New Yorker who has set out to bag a husband by following The Rules (ie, never give too much away, never ring him back, never accept a Saturday night date if he doesn't ring by Wednesday, don't sleep with him until the 172nd date).
What all these women have in common, is that they have engaged in "free sex" to the extent that nothing moves them anymore. Weaver congratulates herself on her ability to compartmentalise sex and leave the emotions out, "just like a man". She cannot have intimacy, because there is nothing left for her to be intimate about. There are no emotional boundaries to cross or secrets to share, because everything has been exposed already.
Sexuality for her has been diminished to the realm of orgasm, and she is happy only with men who are willing to learn her "special technique" of "swirl, swirl, nibble, nibble, suck, suck". "It had been fun teaching Aidan the special technique, although, initially, I felt like a live model in a first-year gynaecological exam in med school," she writes. Poor Aidan.
Weaver has kept having "great" sex with Aidan, despite their break-up, because she cannot be bothered to teach anyone else the technique. But Aidan the whole man - the soulful human being that inhabits the body who performs the textbook sex - isn't good enough for Weaver. Why? Being Irish, Aidan is the world's last example of the unreconstructed male, in her view. He comes from Artane, where the naive Irish bumpkins marry and reproduce by the age of 30 because the Catholic Church and Irish society in general tell them to. Oh yeah? Let's just say that Weaver could have done a little more research.
Aidan's problem is that Weaver wants him to do as he is told to do in bed, but at the same time she despises him for being too passive, which makes him a Contemporary Man Cripple. The "man cripple" - an awful phrase - is a male who has been so beaten down by feminism and political correctness that he has as much backbone as an amphibian. He cannot give a woman what she really wants - which is to be dominated, Weaver suggests. The fact that she does so against a background of Jemma being whipped on a nightly basis shows just how confused Weaver is.
Weaver's friend, Harriet complains that her boyfriend "Just Jerry", would be content to live in a separate apartment and sleep with her three or four nights a week until they were both 80. "I want him to want me," she says. "I want him to be a man. I want him to pick movies. I want him to decide where we're going to eat. And I want him to propose to me."
You can't have it both ways, girls. You cannot demand equality and still have men telling you what to do. You cannot remain emotionally inviolate and still commit yourself to a partner. No woman in her right mind would want to go back to an age where men were the unchallenged authority figures, so perhaps it's time for Courtney to stop moaning about the lack of cavemen.
This post-feminist pickle that we've got ourselves into is not men's fault and the sooner we stop blaming them the better. If a man was to write about women, the way Weaver writes about men, calling them "Female Cripples", he wouldn't be published. Weaver's book is an example of the double standard of the PC-culture, which is that you have to watch your tongue when talking about any minority group, while white men are fair game.
Already, men have become redundant to women who can afford to beat the biological clock by reproducing outside of long-term relationships. At one extreme, you get independent and wealthy media figures like Mia Farrow, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jodi Foster becoming single mothers courtesy of adoption or sperm donations, thereby jettisoning reliance on a male relationship for reproduction. Madonna used a throw-away father, allowing her personal trainer impregnate her, before banishing him. At a more accessible level, you see one-in-four Irish babies being born to single mothers, some of whom - if truth were told - prefer to live independently of men.
Perhaps we are entering a new phase where male-female relationships will be less intimate and more practical. We will form more tenuous attachments, so that the father of your son is one man, the father of your daughter another, and your lover a different man entirely. Relationships will last as long as the sexual buzz lasts. Already, we see teenagers "shifting" each other as though it was a competitive spectator sport, with no feeling involved. They sense that the vulnerability of falling in love is rapidly becoming something to be despised and feared in our culture. The only true love, in the future, may be self-love. Sexual expression may be reduced to the emotional safety of voyeurism and no-strings-attached encounters. If that is so, then Courtney Weaver is in the vanguard. Let's hope she's wrong.