There it was – sitting in the corner, quiet but luminous. I tried to ignore it, but my eyes were repeatedly drawn to it. It was the first time I’d been to Andrew’s place. He’d offered to make me dinner, but food wasn’t uppermost on my mind, especially not with his hardhat distracting me.

“Put it on,” I suggested.
He looked at me quizzically; something in my tone of voice must have given him pause for thought.
“I want to see how you look,” I said as innocently as I could manage.
He put the hat on and I wandered over to kiss him.
“Nice, but it’s clashing with your shirt.”
He laughed and took it off.
“Do you have a tool belt?” I asked.
“God, you’re such a cliché!” he said.
This incident took place a good few years ago. At the time, Andrew’s hardhat had appealed to me in a way I could hardly understand. Nothing about it, or him, fitted into my preconceived notions of what qualified as ‘sexy’. At that stage of my life, I preferred skinny intellectual types – the kind of man who might suffer repetitive strain injury slaving over his keyboard perfecting a poem – but Andrew worked on a building site. It was a sexual holiday of sorts, a break from the norm – and there was just something about him I found irresistible. He looked like a man’s man. With muscles. And calluses. The idea of him, hard in a hardhat, was a surprisingly strong turn on.
I suppose I was reacting to thousands of years worth of evolution. A woman might aspire to a man with sensitivity, culture and well-groomed fingernails, but when the chips are down most of us find the alpha male pretty hard to resist – particularly if it’s for the short term, a little something for the weekend.
A 2006 study carried out by universities in California and Chicago found that women prefer traditionally masculine men for flings or one-night stands. We may want to marry the nice guys – the ones who’ll respect us and help out with the night-time feeds – but we wanted to shag the men with testosterone to burn.
It’s nice to have these things confirmed by science, but a cursory trawl of the internet would have told the researchers pretty much the same thing. Compare what most women say they want – a caring, sensitive, intelligent, man who has a good sense of humour – with the most common female sexual fantasies and an interesting disparity emerges. A woman’s ideal life partner might be Mr Nice Guy but, chances are, her fantasy man is an über-masculine one.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the most popular erotic costumes for men. Police officer, fireman and pilot: women, it seems – or a lot of them at least! – love a man in a uniform, and now and again, we quite fancy a warrior, a barbarian, a dandy highwayman or a builder. It’s not very evolved is it? These costumes evoke the most slavishly traditional aspects of masculinity – the protector, the fighter, the ravisher, the provider – suggesting that underneath it all, what most women want is a stereotypical masculine man who takes charge of the situation, at least in the bedroom.
I became aware of this when I was dating Thomas. He was an interesting contradiction of a man. Off duty he was sweet, considerate and happy to help – your typical beta male. At work it was a different story. As soon as he slipped out of his jeans and into his suit, Thomas, like mild-mannered Clarke Kent, became a different man, one his colleagues had nicknamed ‘The Enforcer’. I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t help it – I liked the fact he was a Big Swinging Dick, Mondays to Fridays, office hours only, and fancied the suit pants off him whenever he told me tales of corporate shenanigans.
When it comes to sex, most women love a walking cliché, but men are certainly no better. As a general rule men, no matter how enlightened, modern or metrosexual, prefer their women to be feminine. When was the last time you saw a ‘successful, financially-independent businesswoman’ outfit in Ann Summers or any high street sex shop? Exactly – it’s a minority interest. Women admire strong, successful, tough cookies. Men do as well, but rarely in the bedroom. There they prefer something a little less bossy – the French maid, the nurse, and the naughty schoolgirl – submissive roles every one of them.
Ever since Sarah Palin was announced as John McCain’s running mate, the blogosphere has been buzzing about her ‘sexy secretary’ look – the bun, the glasses, the pencil skirts all play into one of the most hackneyed of sexual fantasies. The woman might be a gun-toting, moose-hunting, fundamentalist Christian, as well as the governor of Alaska, but this ‘sexy secretary’ look makes Palin seem a whole lot less threatening – the kind of woman who’d be happy to fetch your coffee. Seen through the prism of a stereotype, Palin is no longer a real person, who in real life is ambitious and ruthless enough to hustle her teenage daughter into marriage for political expediency; instead, she’s a bit of a joke, a cardboard cut-out, and as far as some voters are concerned, all the more likeable because of it.
If a lot of this sounds like old-fashioned chauvinism, that’s because it is. Is it nature or nurture? I don’t know. It might be biology, or just generations of social conditioning, but the fact is when it comes to sex, great numbers of us prefer not to stray too far beyond the stereotypes. We live in a modern, supposedly egalitarian society, but our sexual appetites have yet to catch up.
Gender stereotypes shouldn’t have any place in politics, nor in the boardroom, but there’s no denying they can be fun in the bedroom. As long as that’s where they stay, they’re harmless. If you enjoying dressing up and giving life to these fantasies, what harm? And if you enjoy dressing up and subverting stereotypes, well, that’s even better.