Paul Thomas: Sex jibe lands Fry in the feminist pan

Stephen Fry is in hot water for his comments about women's sexuality. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Stephen Fry is funny. He's proved it in print and on stage and screen.

His portrayal of the clinically brain-dead World War I general, Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett VC, in Blackadder is surely one of the great comic turns of our time.

But Fry isn't just a comedian. He has been voted the most intelligent man on British television and rated the second most influential gay person in the United Kingdom.

His range of talents and prodigious output place him in the tradition of English polymaths and all-rounders such as Peter Ustinov, Anthony Burgess and C.B. Fry.

He claims - perhaps in jest - to be related to the phenomenal C.B, who represented England at soccer and cricket (his 1901 feat of scoring six consecutive first-class centuries has never been bettered), played first-class rugby and equalled the world long jump record.

A politician, academic, publisher and diplomat, C.B. was offered the throne of Albania and made a sincere but fruitless effort to persuade Nazi Germany to take up cricket.

Unfortunately he also had mental health issues which, among other things, caused him to run naked on Brighton beach.

As it happens, Fry himself suffers from bipolar disorder and once fled to Belgium on a ferry rather than continue with a West End play.

Typically though, he turned the experience into an award-winning documentary: The Secret Life of the Manic-Depressive.

But Fry's status as a national treasure adored for his wit and self-deprecating charm, a sort of Oscar Wilde without the narcissism, is at risk because of some strange remarks he has made about women and sex.

In an interview in last week's Observer magazine, Fry was quoted as saying women only sleep with men "because sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship".

If women really loved sex, he said, they'd be coupling with strangers in parks, like gay men do.

Not surprisingly, some people wondered what suddenly made Fry an expert on female sexuality.

At first blush it seems as incongruous as Mel Gibson starring in a movie called What Women Want.

As we now know, Gibson thinks women just want to have babies, do what they're told and be given a hiding. But when you think about it, the notion that gay men might have some insight into what makes women tick isn't all that outlandish.

The profits generated by the fashion and beauty industries suggest that at least some gay men have a pretty good handle on what makes women tick.

If gay men can't possibly know what makes women tick because they don't have sex with them, it would therefore seem to follow that men who do have sex with women do know what makes them tick.

Whole sections of libraries are devoted to feminist works belabouring the point that while men may know their way around the female body - in itself debatable - they don't have much idea what's going on in women's heads and are oblivious to the relationship between their hearts, minds and erogenous zones.

Perhaps the least contentious proposition in this vexed area is that gay men don't have much basis for claiming to understand straight men, and vice versa.

Fry claimed he was misquoted - which the Observer denies - and insists he was being humorous. A careful reading of his remarks suggests he was actually having a go at straight men by recycling the old gay jibe: we get laid more than you do.

Asserting that gay men have better sex lives than straight men is a high-risk exercise, because you can't do it without somehow finding fault with women.

I also suspect that it didn't occur to Fry that feminists would take offence at the suggestion that women can't be just as promiscuous as gay men. (Or, as the Guardian put it, can't have "unemotional, uncommitted sex as an empowered lifestyle choice".)

Another Guardian woman drew this sombre conclusion: "Instead of solidarity in the face of the heteronormative patriarchy that oppresses us all, there remains a chasm of suspicion and misunderstanding that obstructs genuine solidarity between women and gay men."

She could have added that some heteronormative patriarchs are probably having a good laugh over the spectacle of Fry setting out to bait straight men by extolling the delights of the anonymous quickie, but only succeeding in bringing the wrath of the sisterhood down on his artfully tousled head.