Women – you’re bloody lucky, you know. OK, you might have to deal with a bit of sexual harassment in the workplace, or people making mad assumptions about the way you dress and carry yourself, but it’s all OK because you can have sex any time you like.

You hear me? Any time you like. If you fancy a shag, all you need to do is walk down the street, find the nearest available man, and invite him back to your house. He will leap at the opportunity, drop all his current plans, and run over to hump you senseless before you can say “hooray for sexual stereotypes!”

Men aren’t only after one thing

Of course, it would be a lovely world for me if that were the case, but sadly it isn’t. Prepare yourselves for a horrifying shock because it turns out that men – brace yourselves – aren’t just after one thing.

I read an article recently in which a man gave his (future) daughter some advice on dating. This included the immortal (and depressingly common) advice to “Just assume that every man you meet from now until you’re, I don’t know, 53(?) would sleep with you if given the opportunity.”

Women get rejected too

Being a triumphant slag, I often ask men to fuck me. As a general rule, if I fancy someone and they seem reasonably interested, I will at some point ask if they’re up for some sex. And do you know what? Sometimes they say no.

They say no for a variety of reasons – they’re busy doing something else, they’re too drunk to pull it off competently, they don’t want to cheat on a girlfriend/wife, etc. But by far the most common reason is that they just don’t fancy me.

Which leads me to the phenomenal and groundbreaking conclusion that your average man cares about something other than just a comfortable place to stick his cock.

Boyfriends turn sex down too

Perhaps the even more surprising news is that even if a guy fancies you he might still turn you down.

Sometimes men are just too busy for sex. Sometimes they’re not horny. Sometimes they quite fancy a wank but would prefer you not to sit dribbling next to them on the sofa while they’re doing it. I’ve had boyfriends turn me down for no more significant reason that that they simply don’t feel like it.

Whatever their stated reason, the point is that there are reasons – hundreds of them – why a man won’t always be hard and willing just because you’ve dropped your knickers.

Why this is so important

I am more passionate about this than almost anything else I write about. Why? Because I’ve spent miserably lonely nights awake and horny, listening to the snores of men who have recently rejected my advances.

Seventeen-year-old me used to cry herself to sleep when her boyfriend turned her down. Because I’d been told that men always wanted sex. Cosmo, FHM, films, TV and books all told me that guys were permanently on the edge of arousal and desperate to stick their cocks into whichever woman looked most willing to let them.

So when I’d dress up in lingerie, touch my boy, whisper filthy things in his ear and then get rejected, it hurt. It hurt a lot. And I felt like a miserable, pathetic, ugly, nymphomaniac freak.

I’m a grown-up now, so I know these lies for what they are. And I can shrug off a rejection, safe in the knowledge that it isn’t a significant condemnation of my own sexuality but simply a reflection of our weird portrayal of other people’s. But it’s still important to challenge ‘men are only after one thing’ when people say it, because publicly recognising that it is definitely not true helps both women and men feel a bit more normal.

So in conclusion: don’t assume that all men are ‘only after one thing.’ Don’t tell women they can have whatever sex they want whenever they want it. And above all don’t you dare tell your daughter that all men want to fuck her – you might as well tell her the grass isn’t green, or that all the roads in Disneyland are paved with free cake. If young women grow up thinking that all men want to sleep with them, we’re not giving them the gift of insight, we’re telling them an outright lie. A lie that will lead to humiliating disappointment for our daughters, and give our sons a reputation that they could never possibly live up to.