Stephen Fry is an idiot. Colour me surprised.

Why? Why would you like this man?

Update: Fry has been tweeting his anger at the way he was quoted in both Attitude and The Observer, saying that comments he made in jest have been taken in all seriousness. While the hilarity of what he said escapes me, I suppose it is possible that he was attempting to be satirical – if that is the case further explanation than a 140 character outburst may be warranted. Having said that, Fry speaks in such a way that anything he says could be claimed as just a joke should it backfire at some time in the future. Then again, it is possible that wires were crossed and where the interviewer believed he was conducting a serious interview, Fry thought the complete opposite. To really get to the bottom of it we’d need a recording of the original interview, which I doubt will ever be available. My jury is still out on this one. What do you all think?

I realise I should be outraged by comments made by Stephen Fry in an interview in the upcoming November issue of Attitude magazine, but really it just leaves me with a powerful feeling of relief that I already dislike the man and all his pompously false posturing and attempts to inherit the crown of the infinitely more talented Oscar Wilde intensely. I dislike him almost as much, in fact, as the bizarre media consensus that has developed that he is some kind of “national treasure” for whom we are obliged to coo over every dull and inconsequential comment that comes out of his mouth or spews forth on Twitter. Granted I dislike him in the sort of way that your Grandmother might develop a sudden and irrational dislike for Eamonn Holmes far out of proportion to any crimes against humanity he has actually committed, but that doesn’t make the dislike any less real to me. I therefore don’t have to deal with the accompanying and crushing disappointment I always experience when people I respect come out with similarly stupid and misogynistic comments. Well, I say that. I may not be outraged, but I am pretty pissed off – if for no other reason that it annoys me that he is considered an authority on anything at all beyond “how to fake being a 21st century 19th century wit when you have nothing of any great significance to say about anything by doing nothing more than speaking in a particular tone of voice at all times and widening your eyes in a charmingly arch way.”

For those that don’t know, Fry has claimed that “The only reason women will have sex with (straight men) is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want.”

I admit, it’s hard to argue with his logic. Really, who wasn’t told by our mothers growing up that “yes, obviously men are disgusting and the very thought of being anywhere near their putrid flesh makes us want to vomit on our baking aprons, but if you want a husband for some reason other than that you fancy them, since that is obviously impossible, you better just bite your lip and get on with it, because it’s damn certain they don’t want you for anything else.”

And let’s just ignore the fact that many of us, like most teenage boys, discovered the joys of masturbation the moment we hit puberty and realised it was a wonderfully distracting way to avoid doing homework or tidying our rooms. Let’s forget the fact that the reason any of us didn’t do this is because the notion of female masturbation is still something regarded as fundamentally gross, pathetic and embarrassing and is rarely portrayed with the sort of satirical affection you see in films like American Pie with regard to the male equivalent. A lot of my girl friends have told me that they didn’t actually know that female masturbation existed until they reached adulthood, by which time they felt too embarrassed to try.

Let’s also ignore the booming trade in erotic fiction designed to cater to women’s various, apparently non-existent, sexual fantasies, in which women are tended to by men of all shapes and sizes, though of course Fry tells us women are disgusted by the lot of them, in locations from exotic beaches to the workplace, and yes, even in parks, although granted women never, ever go to them.

But really, I’m being unfair. Fry, with his undeniably vast experience of having sex and relationships with women, has obviously considered all these factors and dismissed them as irrelevant in the face of his own overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And that evidence is that…*drumroll*…

Women don’t go cottaging on Hampstead Heath.

No, really, that’s his logic. He can’t understand why, if women like sex as much as gay men, and in fact men in general, do, they don’t hang around in the freezing cold looking for a stranger to pick up in the dark unless they’re a prostitute desperate for their next heroin fix and are willing to blast through their complete lack of sexual desire and revulsion towards men in order to stave off cold turkey for another despair-filled night.

Rosie Boycott has reasonably suggested that “Cottaging on Hampstead Heath is presumably a hangover from the days when, sadly, [homosexuality] was illegal”, but really, I would have thought that the reason women don’t head out to an unlit park in the middle of the night to get laid would be obvious. I would never do it because I would be terrified of being violently raped. And, of course, if I tried to report it to the police, being told I was “asking for it” for being there in the first place. Women’s sexuality plays out in an environment with men who are physically stronger than us, and where several of them have little regard for our wishes or dignity; in a society where our sexuality is seen as dirty and ridiculous, where to go out independently looking for sex makes us sluts who deserve every bit of mistreatment and disrespect we receive. If we went out to a park at night looking for sex, we would not stand on an equal footing with the men we encountered. In status terms, they may well feel more entitled than us to what they want, and physically they are generally in a position to get it. You would have to be mad (or at least horny to the point of insanity), extremely brave, or fully trained in martial arts and possibly armed to even consider it.

Is it worth me really getting cross and arguing the whys and wherefores of Fry’s comments? Well, I believe in sexual liberation. To me this means that people who want to have a lot of sex should be free to do so with any consenting partners they choose, and people who don’t want to have a lot of sex shouldn’t feel there is any expectation on them to do so. Fry’s comments rejects both of these positions when it comes to women. The fundamental message is that women are asexual shrews who use sex as a tool to reel men in and get them to do what they want. It should be considered outdated, except apparently a lot of modern men still cling on to it with everything they have.

I admit it’s clear he hadn’t really thought hard about what he was saying, but then perhaps that’s the point. Lots of men make statements like this. Straight men make jokes about women witholding sex as a punishment. It’s a staple of every gag-based US sitcom of the last 15 years – as if we can use our total absence of desire as a weapon to beat men with whenever we feel like it. The fact that he hasn’t given his comments a lot of thought only expose a latent and complacent sexism that is both depressing and infuriating.

To be clear, I have heard people say, people that I generally respect, that gay men hate women. I don’t believe that is true. True, I have heard a gay, male friend of mine say with glittering insight that he thinks lesbians are pointless, but then I’ve heard a lot of straight men say far worse about gay women. What I do think is that gay men, unlike straight men, are often in a position to isolate themselves from the emotional and personal concerns of women, and so may find it easier to cling on to the deep-set prejudices that exist in all of our society. Several gay male friends of mine tell me that they find the very idea of a woman’s genitals revolting. Naturally, I found the fact that they felt they could tell me this openly and cheerfully incredibly insulting and it bothers me that they believe that being gay gives them free reign to come out with such a gob-smackingly mean statement, but I also think that it is a symptom of a society that is still very uncomfortable with the notion of female sexuality – I know of several straight men who still cannot bring themselves to perform oral sex on women. Personally, I knew what a blow job was by the time I left primary school having had it described to me in gleeful and unecessary detail by my male classmates. Needless to say it was many years before I heard tell that the female equivalent even existed. Equally, gay men I know who have given even the slightest consideration to this issue speak just as intelligently as any straight, feminist, man or any feminist woman may do, and describe with distaste the comments made to them about women by some of the other men they know.

I suppose that the point that I am rather nervously heading towards is that, while Stephen Fry does not put himself forward (thank God) as any kind of representative of the gay community, I do feel that his comments should provoke some kind of dialogue about some of the easy misogyny that exists among many gay men today – and how that may be a distillation of the general and sometimes extreme distaste and disbelief that still exists among many men regarding women’s sexual desires. Well, it’s what I’d like, anyway. God knows I can’t untangle all the threads and roots of it myself. Frankly, I wish someone else would just bloody do it for me so I can go and have a shag in peace.