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A young friend told me this week she thought I needed to raise my ‘freak flag’ higher.

This followed her initiation of a discussion on my Facebook wall about the sex appeal of men in women’s underwear. Her view: “Seriously, what is not totally lust-worthy about boys in girls’ clothes?” My perspective: “Nope, 'fraid I can't say men in heels and women's clothes really ‘do it’ for me”. I agreed to visualise a swoon-worthy guy in a pair of lacy 'panties' to challenge my prudishness but it was to no avail. “Experiment undertaken; results in. And, nope, still not ‘doing it’ for me. More a dampener than a tingle-inducer for moi, I'm afraid!” I wrote on my FB wall.

The sexual bravado of some of my young female friends and students regularly makes me blush. Their frank and pragmatic approach to sex and their eagerness to discuss their experimentation with one another does make me feel like an inexperienced prude at times.

Their openness may be a product of the Sex and the City generation or a sign that women have begun to appropriate the casual attitude to sex they long criticised men for possessing. I’ve admired their confidence but also wondered what regrets may flow from such rampant sexual activity largely disconnected, they argue, from emotional involvement.

But perhaps this isn’t a new phenomenon. Hey, I come from a long line of sexually repressed women! My mother is deeply religious and conservative (some may call her a bona fide prude but I wouldn’t because she may actually one day figure out how to connect to the internet and find this blog :). Her mother is Presbyterian. Read for: we didn’t discuss politics or religion at the dinner table and nobody ever mentioned sex…ever!

Case in point: my grandmother recently argued with me about a little sexual innuendo I playfully accused her of. She said of Colin Firth, with a cheeky smile on her face, “He can put his shoes under my bed any day!” “Ooh Granny” I said, “Did you just intimate you wanted to sleep with Mr Darcy?” (Confession: I’m a big fan of Firth in sodden white shirts and riding breeches… swoon!). She was shocked – “No of course not, I just meant that he’d be welcome to put his shoes under my bed”, she said emphatically. “But that’s what that saying means, Granny – why else would he be taking his shoes off and putting them under your bed?” I asked. Her retort signalled the conversation was over: “Well not in my day it didn’t!” Her day is in the distant past. She’s 89.

She certainly would be embarrassed by her granddaughter’s recent behaviour. In the grip of an uncharacteristic man-hating moment, inspired by the misogynistic backlash against my Crikey story on the up-skirting of Maxine McKew, I drove into a city shopping car park with Lucinda Williams’ song ‘Come On’ blaring on my car stereo. I was in full voice: “You think you're in hot demand but you don't know where to put your hand. Let me tell you where you stand, you didn't even make me, come on!” Then, without thinking or altering the volume, I lowered the window to collect the parking ticket. As I pressed the button to deliver the ticket, an elderly couple walked right past my window with their shopping trolley and Lucinda screeched “All you do is talk the talk. You can't back it up with your walk. You can't light my fire so f**k offfff”. My frantic efforts to mute the sound failed and the look of shock on their faces made me worry about the state of their cardiac health as the song continued “…You didn't even make me, come on!”

But my inner prude was in play again today. I went grocery shopping on my way home from work and decided to buy some condoms while in the pharmaceuticals aisle. I don’t know if I’ve ever shopped alone for condoms before…I’ve been married for a really long time! But my current desire to avoid pregnancy in the aftermath of a recent miscarriage has made me determined to take every precaution. So, there I was, competing with teenage couples and male shoppers for access to the plastic-wrapped boxes and I have to confess I was overwhelmed with embarrassment. I felt like people were judging me… “She’s clearly not adventurous enough for the pink, flavoured ones (gag) or the ones with the accompanying pyrotechnics display (whiz bang)”, I imagined them thinking.

When I got to the checkout, I found myself burying the condom boxes (yes, that’s plural folks. I couldn’t decide which ones to buy – too much pressure!) beneath the cereal and meat. This was a mistake. When the shy young Pakistani man on the checkout excavated the boxes there was genuine shock on his face. He was totally unprepared for what he found and clearly very embarrassed. He stared at the boxes for a few seconds, presumably trying to decide whether or not to pick them up. I’d been feigning nonchalance up until that point but the humour of the situation finally broke through the embarrassment and I laughed out loud. He continued to swipe items like nothing had happened.

Part of my recent personal revival has been a sexual re-awakening – learning (again) to appreciate my sensuality and appeal after so many years of feeling undesirable. So, it was surprising to be confronted with my embarrassment about something as straight forward as buying condoms. But this once demure woman is comin’ out of her shell. I’ve been re-reading Anais Nin and I’m even writing about sex…at the dining table – shock, horror!

I also posted a rather alluring (if I do say so myself) Facebook photo this week eliciting this wall post from the young friend who couldn’t fathom my lack of attraction to men in heels and women’s undies: “You saucy bint - look at that new profile picture!” I think my freak flag must be on the rise - ever so slightly ;)

Postscript: I've been thinking some more about these issues and their interaction with Third Wave Feminism since posting last night and I read an article which neatly illustrates some of the underlying themes. The author, Deborah Siegel writes:

"What is liberating to one generation is oppressive to the next. This year, modesty champion Wendy Shalit, author of the new book Girls Gone Mild, blames the “third-wave feminist establishment” for carrying their sexual revolution too far. Shalit maintains that third-wave feminists, among other forces, have conditioned young women to become sluts.

Many of the self-described third- wave writers and leaders I interviewed for my book, Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, take issue with the notion that free love and a stripping pole in every living room were all they set out to achieve. Third-wave feminists have been hard at work. In the United States, for instance, they have founded organisations and launched projects such as the Young Women’s Project, the Third Wave Foundation, the Younger Women’s Task Force and the Real Hot 100. In the United Kingdom they have created alternative media -- six new feminist publications launched in the past 18 months.

Feminists are blogging about the same searing questions that women have been asking for years: are women equal? If not, why not? And feminism’s daughters are asking a new question, too -- what does it mean for women to be powerful? For an unimaginative few, power meant sexual power and stopped there. But for the majority of feminism’s young reinventors, sex is not the only issue, and power continues to mean parity across political, economic, social and domestic realms. They are third wavers. Hear them roar." Read the full article here.    [read more]