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Gay News: Stephen Fry does a U-turn on his comments on female sexuality
By: Nigel Robinson
Stephen Fry: comments were "ill judged"
Stephen Fry: comments were "ill judged"
Stephen Fry: Women do enjoy sex, after all
5 November 2010
Following an interview in which he claimed that women only go to bed with men because sex is the price to pay for a relationship, actor and author Stephen Fry has now said that women do, in fact, enjoy sex after all.
Fry printed the retraction as a 3,000 word post on his blog, after a wave of negative press criticism which persuaded him to withdraw temporarily from Twitter where he has two million followers.
On his blog Fry said that his comments made to gay magazine, Attitude were “offensive, ignorant, arrogant… God knows what else. Ill judged it most certainly was.”
He said that his keenest disappointment over the whole affair, or “weirdness”, was that some people actually believed that he thought women did not enjoy sex, and that he was “dense, dotty and suicidally deluded enough to make a public declaration of such a crazed belief.”
He went on to say: “Much as you may wish to think me a compound of the most misogynistic, ignorant, sexist and antediluvian pig who ever trod the planet, I can truly report that I know and love enough women to be quite assured of the fact that women do indeed enjoy sex.”
“I would have to ignore evolution, precedent, personal experience and the empirical observation of vibrator sales and teenage pregnancies and all kinds of obvious and unavoidable facts in between to believe anything else.”
Fry claimed that his profile in Attitude, which he described as a “small gay glossy” was given “out of kindness” and that his interview with one of the magazine’s reporters was a “conversation”.
He said that, when the conversation turned to gay sexuality, he repeated “the old canard about how men, unlike women, were cursed with their uniquely pressing and annoying libidos.
“Straight men I have known have often (of course mostly in a kind of bitter jest) said how much they envied gay people the simplicity of their erotic lifestyles (cottaging and cruising and so on) and I vamped for a while on that theme.
“I do not believe it as some kind of eternal gender truth. I was simply taking a thought for a walk.”
