Upfront

I MET STEPHEN FRY once. It was in a house on North Great George's Street in Dublin, around the time he starred in Oscar Wilde. I am a fan. I used to watch him in A Bit of Fry and Lauriebefore either Fry or Hugh Laurie were as wildly famous as they are now. Back then they were just two posh blokes on TV having their wicked way with the English language.

Myself and a friend used to quote the sketches all the time. Somewhere in my house there is a homemade video of one series that my friend loaned me. It’s part of our friendship folklore that he is never getting that tape back, even though he has asked me about it at least twice a year for the past 15 years.

When I met Stephen Fry it wouldn't have done just to say hello and tell him how much I admired his work. Instead I quoted a line from A Bit of Fry and Laurie. "Stephen Fry!" I said when I got close to him, in the voice Laurie used in one of their funniest sketches about two hyper-enthusiastic sales people. "Stephen Fry! As I live and close a sale!" Fry looked at me, puzzled, mildly irritated, then turned his back and continued talking to his acquaintance. It was a perfect Fry and Lauriemoment; my friend and I have laughed about it for years.

Fry was one of the reasons I signed up to The Twitter. I have yet to actually tweet, but my mother told me his tweets were the funniest in the whole of the world, funnier even than Paris Hilton’s, so I started to follow him. Last Christmas I gave my mother a talking Stephen Fry alarm clock. It wakes you up with gentle Jeeves and Woosterisms voiced by Fry: “Good morning, madam. Let me draw the curtains and pour your tea. Here are two little croissants from your special supplier which have no calories whatsoever. In the pots is a special sort of jam that consumes more calories than it produces. Eating it actually makes you thin.”

Anyway, poor Stephen Fry, you know as in poor lamb, rather than in the fiscally challenged sense. Poor Stephen Fry because he’s gone off in a snot and abandoned Twitter for the second time because, as he put it, “some f**king paper misquotes a humorous interview I gave, which itself misquoted me and now I’m the Antichrist. I give up.” His next tweet suggested he was abandoning his almost two million followers: “Bye bye.”

This time Fry, who has been open about his depression in the past, is upset because of the reaction to something he said in Attitudemagazine about female sexuality.

Here are the quotes: “If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: ‘God, I’ve got to get my f**king rocks off’, or they’d go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush . . .”

He continued: “I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want,” he said. “Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, ‘Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!’ But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?”

All good feminists are supposed to be shocked and outraged by this but I think what he said is more obvious than offensive. It’s patently true that women don’t like sex in the same way men do. We are women and we like sex the way women do. That is not necessarily, although I speak only for myself here, sex in chilly graveyards or sex behind bushes in the Phoenix Park.

“Straight cruising areas” exist. They are called nightclubs but they don’t work in the same way as gay cruising areas, for the very reasons Fry suggests. I was in one on Harcourt Street in Dublin for the first time in a zillion years recently. I watched all night as men cruised unreceptive women, lunging at them with ever more urgency as closing time drew near.

Of course women like sex, but if they liked it in the same way as men, they wouldn’t mind that the men who walked up to them didn’t even want to know their name before exchanging bodily fluids. But most of them, including the woman I was with who was being pawed at every turn, seemed to mind very much, even if they were philosophical about the fact that these advances are part of the choreography of a night out.

Fry was being a bit mischievous and he was exaggerating but he was also stating the obvious. People who are ranting about him should relax. I hope he comes back to The Twitter. It’s a duller place without him.

THIS WEEKEND:Róisín will be celebrating Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, by trying to make her first Indian curry from scratch