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It's safe to say Catherine Townsend didn't spend last night washing her hair. This morning it's unlikely she'll have woken up in her own bed. Which is probably just as well because, if you earn your living by writing in a newspaper about your sex life, staying in to watch television on a Saturday isn't an option.
There's not much I don't know about Catherine before we meet. She's had more sexual encounters than she can either accurately count or reliably remember. Recently, she introduced herself to a photographer and cheerfully chatted away for ages until he reminded her they'd got it together once upon a time. She'd clean forgotten.
As I climb the stairs to her tiny fourth-floor flat in West London, I'm fully up to speed on the fact that, in her relatively short sexual life so far (she's 29, lost her virginity at 15), she's had mind-blowingly fabulous sex, run-of-the-mill sex, tied-to-the-bedposts sex, loud sex, quiet sex, sex with women, sex with friends, sex with strangers, group sex, anal sex, sorbet sex (the kind that cleanses the palate between boyfriends).
The weirdest coupling was probably the evening she made out with a dwarf at a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory party. "Everyone was dressed as green Oompa Loompas and it sounds crazy", she will tell me later, "but they were gorgeous. One of them said to me: 'Look, I know you like tall men but it doesn't matter when you're horizontal.'" So they copped off in the coat cupboard.
Dressed in skinny jeans, grey T-shirt and court shoes, it's not immediately obvious why men fall at her feet. She is neither buxom nor blowsy. In fact she is skinny and tall. But she has lovely almond-shaped eyes and is amusing, which is always attractive and, as she says herself, super-confident, which helps too. Her thick, treacle-like vowel sounds - she was born in Arkansas - make everything sound somehow alluring in a Jerry Hall kind of way.
We sit on the sofa (her dates are never invited here: "I never bring guys back. You can never get rid of them") and get straight to it. The interview. So what are the perils of being a sex columnist? They are, she says, the mornings when she wakes up on the other side of town and must totter home through the early-bird commuters in fishnets and stilettos. The twice-yearly Aids tests because, despite using condoms, you can never be too careful. The emails from an Anglican priest lusting after no-strings-attached afternoons, Nigerian men with marriage proposals and outraged women who think shes a slut. "The critical ones used to upset me but I realise you cant make everyone happy. I chose to write about this; I didn't have it forced on me."
Then there are the guys. There are those who are too straight or too weird or too married. But it's the arrogant ones who deliberately target her because of her job who really freak her out. "You know, I may be a sexually active woman but I do have quality control. There was one guy recently who just expected it. I told him - I'm not the Domino's Pizza of sex. It isn't going to happen."
She tells her dates early on that theres every chance that they may end up in print. "At first, I thought it would be a problem but you have to be pretty confident to date me anyway, so most of them dont mind. I think I'm like Marmite - some guys are going to really like it and some guys just aren't. I always make sure they know that I'll protect their identities. I might not mind kissing and telling about myself, but it isn't fair to invade their privacy."
Her regular column in Britain's Independent is pretty tame in comparison to her new memoir Sleeping Around: Secrets of a Sexual Adventuress. Put it this way - when she was writing the book she took it as a good sign if she was turned on as she typed.
It begins with her being dumped via email by her UK boyfriend two days after arriving from the US to live in Britain, and ends with a bogus marriage so that she can stay in the country. In between, it's very Carrie Bradshaw: witty, bracing, packed with handy advice. I discover where my A-spot is (dont ask, it's complicated), that dildos are dishwasher-proof, how to camouflage carpet burn. But most memorably, it's full of the kind of very rude sex scenes that make it difficult to read on the bus.
She's not the first woman to write an intimate sexy memoir. The royal courtesan Harriette Wilson was writing about her conquests as long ago as the 19th century. But in the last five years "posh porn" - as some publishers call this genre - has moved from the edges to the mainstream. In an industry suffering a sales slump, it's a market that sells bucketloads. Sleeping Around is commercial, sexy, uncomplicated. And, although bookshops are teeming with explicit memoirs by ballsy women, Townsend's may stand out, partly because, unlike many sex books, she is laugh-out-loud funny, and also because she isn't anonymous.
Had she worried what her family would think when they found out? The book is, rather incongruously, dedicated to her mother, who is a part-time biology teacher (I don't think there's a link but it does point to a useful grounding in anatomy). "She's told herself it's all semi-fictionalised anyway. It isn't, but thats what she's telling herself." Her grandmother has Alzheimer's, "which makes things easier. She thinks it's an economics book."
She's more worried about her father, a retired property developer, who is conservative and not given to great displays of emotion. "I really don't want him to read the words 'anal vibrator'. It's not the kind of thing you want your father to know about you." She's decided she'll give him a copy with Post-it notes marking the bits he can read.
However, not counting family, the notion of hiding her identity was one she never considered. "I simply don't believe in pen names unless your life is in danger. I'm just having sex. There's nothing to be embarrassed about."
According to Matthew Firth, American writer and editor of an anthology about work and sex, modern sex fiction is very different from erotica or romance. "Sex fiction is not about embellishing sexual activity, about depicting sexual situations most of us can only dream of. Sex fiction is writing about sex by accurately portraying how people do it. The goal is authenticity." This sexual straight-talking seems to sum Townsend up. It's the way she talks to her female friends about sex and she doesn't see why she should be any different in print. She doesn't do coy (unless she is role-playing a naive Southern girl in some kind of S&M scenario, which is another matter entirely). "I guess I've always had a really high sex-drive from the time I was a teenager. We never saw anything wrong with it - it was just the way it was. My male friends have always told me about their one-night stands and never felt bad about it. Why can't women do the same thing? I'm smart, funny and reasonably attractive. So why is the fact that I can deep-throat an aubergine a hindrance?"
Townsend says she's a feminist and epitomises an attitude she believes is more prevalent in this generation of 20-something women than it has ever been before: sex can be uninhibited, adventurous, experimental, joyful. The critical emails are a minority. Mostly, she receives letters which tell her, "Thank God, you're saying this. I'm not the only one who feels this way". In the bedroom, at least, there are no Bridget Jones neuroses. No big knickers or antsy introspection. Whenever she meets a man who doesn't perform in bed she buys him her own favourite book, She Comes First by Ian Kerner which, I gather, is to oral sex what the AA Driving Skills Manual is to motorway road signs.
I wonder what would be a sexual deal breaker with a man? She takes a sip of water and searches the ceiling for inspiration. "Someone narrow-minded who didnt want to try things. I mean there is a misconception that a guy has to be super-experienced, which isnt true, but a willingness to try new things is important." She ponders a little more. Skinny guys dont really do it for me. No gold chains. Other than that ... really small penis, really cant do. It doesnt have to be huge. But there is a minimum threshold."
Unlikely as it may sound, there is something quaintly sweet-natured about Catherine Townsend. She comes across as polite and eager to please. (Aha! Maybe that's why men like her.) In pride of place in the living room is a picture of her with Tony Blair. No funny business sadly. She introduced herself to the former Prime Minister at a drinks reception.
She learnt about sex by watching afternoon soap operas at home in Arkansas. "People would take their shirts off and get into bed and, for a while, thats what I thought you did." As a kid she was the geeky one, nicknamed Alien Girl because she was gangly and her eyes were wide apart. All this changed when her parents divorced when she was 13. Her father had run off with another woman. "I probably knew a lot more about their divorce than I should have done", she says.
It doesnt take Freud to work out that being abandoned by your father - as it might have seemed to her at the time - just at the point when you start to get all hot and bothered about sex could be significant. Catherine and her mother moved to Georgia and she resolved to be more assertive. "I realised that there's no one you can depend on as much as yourself. My mum had been left. My aunt had been left. I didn't want it to happen to me." She was in the Bible-belt where virginity pledges were as ubiquitous as large flying insects. But the teenage Catherine - "a slut with good grades" - decided to nurture her budding obsession with sex. "I was hungry for adventure. I would rather regret something I did than something I hadnt done."
She was 15 when she lost her virginity, but she didn't have her first orgasm until she was 19. Sex was exciting and fun and made her feel powerful - especially the affair with her maths teacher who insisted she called him Mr Murphy in bed - but maybe the orgasm bit was a media hoax, she thought. When she was a student at New York University, the college newspaper sent her to cover a lecture held by Betty Dodson, the sexpert who has spent her career giving masturbation workshops to frustrated women.
"I was shocked by what she said. But I thought to myself - 'You're a straight-A student, you can figure this out.'" So she went home to the Manhattan flat she shared with three other women and locked herself in her bedroom. After 45 minutes she worked out what she should be doing. And you could say that she's been doing it ever since.
"It wasnt some guy who did it. And that's still the case now. A lot of the times you have to tell the guy what to do. Or show him what to do. Or do it yourself. Oh my God, thats probably 80 per cent of how I come. Thats the way women are wired."
In her early 20s she worked as a gossip columnist and did the New York dating scene, which, she says, is hugely competitive. (Opening gambit: "So where do you see yourself in five years time?") When she arrived in Britain she took unpaid work on newspapers until she sold the column idea. Viagra, Japanese bondage classes, sex parties - there's little she hasn't done, partly for the sake of the copy and partly to quench her own curiosity.
I wonder if she's ever regretted any of her encounters? "Not in the big picture. I have definitely had times when I have woken up and thought, 'What happened there?' But ultimately I've learnt from everyone. I've never had a scary situation. Part of that is luck. But part of it is trusting my gut. If Im not happy, I leave."
Her longest monogamous relationship lasted six months. "I think we are in the middle of a real seismic shift. For the first time there are more single people than married people. It's more normal to be single than to be married. Women are waiting longer to get married and they're also getting pickier. I dont think that is such a bad thing." She's been in love twice, once with a Frenchman when she was a student and, more recently in London, with a man who was married. And still is. "I should have gotten out of the situation a little sooner but then again he should have been more honest with me. He could have said, 'Here's the deal'. I guess my attraction to men who don't love me back is part of the challenge."
And there lies the age-old problem. She says in the book she doesn't sleep around looking for love: "When I fall into bed with a man I'm looking for sex, pure and simple." But I'm not sure I believe her. For all her outspokenness about sex, I suspect she might be a little old-fashioned; rather than just having sex for the sake of it, she's still looking for The One. "In the last year I've realised that I shouldn't always be going for the super-creative alpha crazy guy. I am kind of nutty myself and maybe two crazy people in the mix isn't going to work." But the irony is that, if she ever did meet someone she liked, quiet nights in with the same bloke and a Chinese takeaway don't make great columns when you're a sex writer.
On the other hand, writing about relationships might be easier than having one. As she writes: "A tumble between the sheets is one thing, letting a man see my bare-faced, pre-coffee, at-home self? That's real intimacy. The idea of commitment is plainly terrifying. I'm afraid of attaching my hope and dreams to one person," she says. But she is only 29 and I can think of several 39-year-old women with the same misgivings.
So the search goes on. Tonight there's a party. Tomorrow she has a date. I leave her to pack her handbag. Condoms, lubricant, money, breath mints, spare pair of knickers. As I say, I know an awful lot about Catherine Townsend. The one thing I don't know is who she'll end up with.
* Sleeping Around: Secrets of a Sexual Adventuress (Hachette Livre, $27.99) is out next week.
