Antisex beds at the Olympics? Here are some really antisex things

Hot on the heels of news that record numbers of condoms have been issued to the athletes competing at the Paris Olympics we have the crisis of the antisex cardboard beds in the Olympic village. Are they the latest word in sustainability? Are they the future of beds in the city of love (because they’re always having sex — this is Paris, haw he haw)? Or are they flimsy, narrow and deliberately designed to discourage after-games pole vaulting?

Tom Daley has been springboard bouncing on his to test its stamina. Others have been giving it their best flips and bombs, with varied results. The general consensus, however, is that the beds are antisex, and looking at them from a distance you would have to agree that they’re emphatically “single”, and not in any way luxed-up or made to look like a cosy place for a tryst.

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If you were to check into even a low-budget hotel in Paris for a dirty weekend (do we still call them that?) and you were shown to your room, given the tour of the light switches and AC and then, ta-dah, the classic Olympic village bed — built for athletes, made to endure — you would surely demand to be shown a room with a double bed, minimum. Unless, that is, you were in the early stages of your relationship, in which case you’d probably give each other a quick look, usher the helpful porter out of the room and get to it.

Because we all know, painful though it is to admit it, that if you want to have sex you will have it, and perfectly successfully while balanced on a travelling ironing board if necessary. You merely need to be keen. Not old with back issues helps. And if you can support yourself on one hand while spinning on the pommel of a gymnastics horse then (just guessing) a bed, antisex or otherwise, is merely a bonus resting zone between bouts.

Not to get into too much personal detail, but if you came of age during the Seventies you were in heaven if you got the lumpy bottom bunk bed when everyone was out, and otherwise you made do with the garden shed or behind the tree. No one, all the way through university and well beyond, had sex in a double bed, never mind a king-size or a super-king, partly because the bedrooms only just fitted a single if you took off the wardrobe door, and because bed size and condition were not the deciders of good, bad or no sex.

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It was never an issue. Very unwashed sheets, maybe. No sheets at all, possibly. Some Dutch tourists on the other side of a wall made out of actual paper, conceivably, but probably not in the end. When you start to care about sleep, that’s when you need a nicely sprung, big enough bed, and then you may have better sex in it but you probably won’t.

As a matter of fact, the more perfectly adapted your environment is to sex the less of it you’ll have, in my experience. Hotel in the Maldives with a muslin-curtained four-poster, lovely of course, but this may create sexy holiday angst. It’s not exactly pressure, more a sort of bolshiness that comes over you when you’re in a supposedly perfectly pitched honeymoon environment. You feel a bit like a mare being ushered into an expensive mounting pen.

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Then there’s the sexy cocktails (too many). The lashings of sexy food (oof, can’t move). The expectations all round (should be slimmer, and wearing nice earrings. And why is he not ordering wine knowledgeably?). Too much heavily curated romance makes you lazy too. You want a noisy evening with friends; you want dancing, showing off, flirting, competing, achieving something together — even if that’s sorting out the drama with the fly invasion or having a really successful dump run. Not a euphemism.

I’ll tell you what else is antisex: extreme tidiness. The remarkable Dr Ruth, who died this month, hit the nail on the head and may have got to the bottom of the declining interest in sex among the younger generation when she said: “Would you want to have sex with someone who needed to fold their towels so carefully? Terrific sex is messy not neat.”

That message — the big one — seems to have got lost in the rush for toned, depilated bodies treated with endless unguents, acids and lasers, not to mention showers. You sometimes look at a very clean young man in the street with his shiny lacquered girlfriend and wonder if they have to put down plastic sheeting first.

At the end of a blood-pumping, cortisol-raising day, smell of sweat in the air, view of Paris (optional), those athletes will get it together in their antisex beds, no worries.

Big breasts don’t intimidate me

If you are to believe new research, women with bigger breasts are threatening to women with smaller ones and they’re regularly victimised as a result. As a practically flat-chested woman I should presumably be in the most likely to be intimidated group, but I’m not sure I notice the size of women’s breasts — with the exception of my friend Sara’s, when she was pregnant and we all took turns wearing her bra as a hat (funnier than it sounds).

So I’m not threatened by other women’s breasts, but I am a bit by the following: women who appear not to be cooking but are somehow rustling up supper for ten, women who can drive alone from here to Italy with two screaming children, women who can put up shelves (also known as money-saving women), women who say, Oh don’t worry, we’ll just camp in the garden. That lot can make you see red.
Carol Midgley is away