THREE IS AN ODD NUMBER
Sophie Lancaster

How many of you out there have had a threesome? No, I don’t really want to know. OK: I’m not uninterested. What I really want to know (and forgive me that I’m talking in this case to women who have sex with men) is with whom you have had your threesomes. No, not their names! I mean: was it with a man and a woman, or with two men?

I was out with the current squeeze at a music festival the other weekend. Let’s call him Peter. The rock of cocaine on which Jesus built his church. He was not rock-like at all that day. We lost each other on the way in after Peter attracted the attention of Shelley, an English springer spaniel currently employed by the London Met. It is perilous to work for a style magazine if you don’t believe in washing denim. As a result of the ensuing strip search, we spent much of the festival apart, and when we found each other we were both with new friends, who happened to be very tall members of the opposite sex.

Released without charge, somehow, Peter didn’t seem angry when he found me in the arms of his temporary replacement. Our tall people took something of a shine to each other, so everything felt serendipitous and Midsummer Night’s Dreamy. Peter and I are generous enough to allow each other the right to be a bit selfish, to enjoy a little freedom. But are we equally generous, equally selfish, equally free?

At an afterparty at Peter’s boss’s house, my beau found himself helping the tall woman’s friend be sick into a bin bag for a long time. Very compassionate of him, but I wasn’t needed, or wanted, and nor was he, really, as the tall woman was also helping out.

Which left the tall man unattended again, and we got talking, sitting on the bed of the spare room, and etc., with the bedroom door shut, until we were interrupted by Peter looking for me. He left in a hurry, knowing I’d chase him, and of course I did.

‘Why don’t you come back?’ I asked him. The party was fun and I couldn’t see why we’d want to leave so early. And I know too that he would have been very much up for it if I had proposed we lie around together on a bed with a woman he’d been kissing all day. He admitted as much when I challenged him on this.

Peter certainly puts on the appearance of being an open-minded boy, but in principle is not the same as in practice. Women friends of mine who have had threesomes – all of them with two women and one man – have had similar scruples, but they’ve pushed past them. I don’t blame Peter for having scruples. I don’t want him to do anything he doesn’t want to. No one has the right to do that to anyone, and the fact that it is us women being pressured most of the time doesn’t give us permission to act like the men who pressure women to do things we don’t want to. But isn’t it telling how much more willing we are to go along with men’s fantasies, and how less willing they are to go along with ours? How much of this is the way we have been conditioned by the patriarchy to be obedient and compliant? Are we just much sexier than men, less vanilla, is it just easier to find each other attractive, to want to cooperate? Or have men tricked us into believing this for their own selfish interest?

I think this last question was running through my mind when I told him I didn’t mind if he left but I was going to stay. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’m going.’ He took a long time to go, standing at the door of the flat and looking at me. Then he changed his mind and came back. For a little bit. A very small amount of time. Then he left, and we haven’t spoken since.