Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. For the true ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never got to know the man very well. The lights are coming on in Soho. The crowds are queuing up for Mamma Mia, and the smile of early evening hangs over Old Compton Street.
Inside, the bar is quiet, populated by a few early cocktail-drinkers, and a handful of pinafored staff chopping up lime wedges behind the bar. He is sitting in the corner. Denim jacket, chinos, trainers, nervous fingertips gripping a cold pint of lager tops. He is, as he had promised, six feet tall, medium- built with dark hair. I wish now that I hadn't believed him. I don't know his name, and he doesn't know mine. We sit together on the sofa while he tells me about his job for an unidentified greeting cards company and his schooldays in a faraway, unspecified town.
We discuss film, music, the fact that he is engaged to be married. This evening's drink is all that comes of a rather timid advert I had placed on the casual encounters section of Craig's List, one of several online community websites. I suggested a little no-strings-attached fooling around on a weekday afternoon.
My posting looked positively chaste alongside the other ads. Nevertheless, around replies arrived in my inbox. Misspelled suggestiveness, photos of burly men sitting in nondescript houses full of Ikea furniture. There were blurred snaps of erect gentlemanly bits, explicit accounts of precisely what they would like to do this very afternoon, with an eye for practicalities "you would slip off your panties at the table," wrote one, before adding "or if this is too difficult, you can take them off in the loo, then return to the table with them in your pocket.
The phenomenal response to my lame little posting is hardly surprising. Far fewer women post ads than men, though the numbers are not insignificant. But what makes a woman want to post an appeal for casual sex in the first place? And what did women do before these sites existed? Did they dial a pizza and hope they got lucky with the delivery boy? Or is this a new development, thanks in part to the shenanigans of the Sex and the City gang? Have we reached a point in our sexual liberation where we have shaken off the stigma associated with casual sex, finally untethering it from the weight of Mills and Boon-style romance?
