A sunny Sunday in a park in Paris, where I have been for over two weeks. Overhead the sky is blue, the light filtering through the trees is golden and on my phone are messages I have exchanged with a man whose name and face I do not know.

We matched on a French dating app, where his profile has no photo, just a silhouette and his age: 49, three years older than me.

After we match, he immediately messages to tell me he is open-minded, 6 ft 1 in and fit. He tells me about the hourly hotels in Paris, accessible via an app I’ve never heard of, which make rooms available during the afternoon between guest check-out and check‑in.

There are messages from other men simply wanting me to come over. To arrive without any underwear on. To be waiting naked on my bed, the front door left unlocked.

‘What if we aren’t attracted to one another?’ I say to these bolder requests. ‘There’s always that chance,’ one tells me, with a very French shrug I can almost feel through the screen.

‘Silhouette’, as I called this faceless man, was one of the first Frenchmen I encountered in what was a most erotic summer, a profoundly enjoyable time which left me feeling perhaps my most sexually confident ever. Now, I move through my life knowing that what I want is available to me whenever and however I want it; I need only articulate what I’m looking for.

I had come to Paris in August 2021 to visit friends after enduring 14 months of Covid restrictions alone in my New York apartment. Everyone was feral for connection. I had been single for a long time before Covid hit, so the sheer loneliness of lockdown left me with a profound hunger, a deep desire to be close to another person.

At one point, I felt so starved of touch I removed vintage fur coats from my closet and placed them across my bed or couch so I could lie across them, like Burt Reynolds as the Cosmopolitan centrefold, just to feel the sensation of another ‘creature’ on my skin. I’d forgotten what it was like to have my needs looked after. By anyone.

Glynnis MacNicol emerged from lockdown feeling profoundly lonely and with a deep desire to be close to another person

Glynnis MacNicol emerged from lockdown feeling profoundly lonely and with a deep desire to be close to another person  

There were many lessons I learned from the men I met in Paris that summer, one of the most pleasant being that they see giving a woman an orgasm as a priority. As my English friend Ellie, also dating in France, explained to me: ‘The French take female pleasure seriously. It makes them feel like men.’

As one early online dating match put it: ‘I’d like to help you enjoy yourself.’ To which I replied: ‘Wonderful, how so?’

‘I’d like to give you pleasure.’

‘What will you do, do you think?’ I then asked, before putting my phone down, unable to attach myself to the audacity of being so direct.

But then the responses came pouring in – and I found I liked it.

‘If you come to my home? I think I will kiss you and put my hand under your skirt. If you are agreed of course.’

‘What else?’ I type back, surprised at my ability to demand more. ‘After, it depends on your desires: do you want to be blindfolded?’

I found these missives appealing. Some element of consent wove its way through nearly every man’s message I received. Descriptions were almost always followed by the question: ‘Would I enjoy that?’

Also, there was the intense pleasure of asking someone not just to put thought into me, but go the extra distance to articulate it. Literally write it down, step by step.

So affected was I by conversations like these that, eventually, my tagline on the dating app I used became ‘mostly here to enjoy myself’.

And, let me tell you, I certainly did. When I first arrived in Paris, I discovered from female friends that the dating app of choice that summer was not Tinder, but the ludicrously titled Fruitz.

Divided into four fruit categories, you have to select the one you most identified with. Cherry is ‘to find your other half’. Grape ‘for a glass of wine with no trouble’. Watermelon is ‘no seeds attached’ – meaning no strings attached. Peach is ‘to meet people who are looking for the same kind of relationship you are’.

‘That’s straight hook-up,’ Ellie tells me. ‘It’s all straight hook-up, but the messages are more explicit if you’re a peach.’

I decide I’m a watermelon, register under my real age – and say I am open to an age range between 28 and 58. As I was still typing these details, my phone buzzed. It took me a minute to figure out why. Ah, my first message from someone on Fruitz. That was fast.

The first thing to catch my eye is the word ‘masseur’. I’m unsure what the rest says – the only other words I see are ‘très gentil’. They translate in my head as gentle stroking, which is correct in the spirit of things, if not the letter of translation.

I look at the photos – there is a feather, a velvet glove. Seemingly, whatever is being offered will involve a lot of touching. From that moment on, the messages just keep coming. And with them, ever more sexual revelations. Some say things like this message I get from a 26-year-old: ‘If you want pleasure with a good boy, I’m here.’

I find what I relish most about some of these encounters is the pleasure I take from observing others enjoying my body, writes Glynnis

It’s clear I am most definitely not in New York any more. Most notably because Frenchmen mean what they say. And they tend to say it immediately, and persistently.

Usually, this is an utterly foreign concept for any New Yorker or Englishwoman when it comes to dating.

We would assume men don’t mean a single thing they say, and never say what they mean. Frenchmen, in my experience, are all-in almost immediately. (It’s this male French persistence that often gets American and English women in trouble. They mistake the immediacy for longevity – only to find out all too soon that their great love has discovered another great love.) Under such a wonderful sexual bombardment, I started to feel my body was even more alive.

Every morning I took a shower, and then slathered cream over every inch of me, followed by fragrant oils and then more oils.

I became aware of the sensation of air on the backs of my knees, my belly, even the skin between my toes. The expectation of others seeing my body led me to see it anew. To enjoy it anew.

One night, my friends and I end up at a party by the Seine. We drink, and I dance with a beautiful 30-year-old, kissing him passionately before we exchange numbers. When I get home, dizzy with wine, I decide I should message my dance partner. I open WhatsApp and type: ‘Come over?’ The response is immediate. ‘Où es-tu?’

I send the address before my brain has a chance to re-emerge. I know what I want.

‘En route. Dix minutes.’

‘Bien,’ I type, enjoying the sensation of being wanted immediately. But then I worry. Should I be concerned? Get under the covers first? Try to angle myself so the fact that one breast points in the wrong direction thanks to last year’s biopsy (that thankfully turned out to be benign) is less noticeable? So that the dimples down the backs of my thighs can only be felt instead of seen?

But when he is in my room, none of this matters. I look up to see him staring at me and I catch that look on his face, the kind of look we are told is reserved only for those who have applied the toners and face serums in the correct order. Lifted the right amount of weights. Done enough cardio. Excluded the right amount of sugar or fats or meats. Remained young.

What I see is the look of a man gazing upon a naked female body they have been invited to partake of. A mix of lust, excitement, gratitude and relief. He steps back for a moment, dropping my bra on to the couch and removing his shirt. He takes another long look at me. Ah, the enjoyment of being enjoyed. ‘Amazing,’ he says with a grin before coming closer. And I think, ‘Yes. You are fortunate my clothes are off. It is amazing.’

All I want is more skin, more everything. And for the next five hours that is exactly what I get.

After this encounter, the switch has been flipped, as though I am constructed of a million tiny bulbs. One evening, not long after my night of dancing, when I have no other plans, I message one of my first matches, the one who had suggested I could be blindfolded. Would he come over? Twenty minutes later he tells me he will be there in half an hour.

‘Is this your first time doing this sort of thing?’ he asks when he arrives.

By ‘this sort of thing’ I assume he means summoning a stranger to my home for the very specific, one-sided experience of my pleasure. I shrug. ‘Perhaps?’

He smiles. ‘Why don’t you take your clothes off?’ I do. My enjoyment is the priority, not his. It is great – and so strange. My hunger is satiated. Twice.

From here I move on – there is an unabashedly energetic 27-year-old Italian with flowing hair and beard who is about to leave Paris but wants to re-route his trip to the airport to come to see me. It’s noon. His flight is in five hours. I tell him to come over.

He arrives and I can tell part of the thrill of me to him is his own willingness to risk coming here.

He begins whispering in what I assume is Italian, but really does not need translation. The me, now naked, that emerges in the face of all this energy and excitement is calm. Confident. I hear myself say what I want without having to think about how to articulate it. No hand-holding. This, I imagine, is what is attractive.

I consider how, when I was his age, my sense of pleasure was entirely centred on making sure the other person experienced it. I did not know what I liked. How could I have? What do young women do now, with so much more knowledge available to them about how bodies work and what women like better? Do they wield it or are they destroyed by it?

I find what I relish most about some of these encounters is the pleasure I take from observing others enjoying my body. No one has told me that, in my mid-40s, this kind of gratification would be such an easily accessible enjoyment, and that my body should be enjoyed.

After I describe another encounter to a new acquaintance, she says: ‘They are only interested because they know you don’t want to get married and are too old to have children.’

She says this in a way that is intended as a jolt of protective reality in this mildly hedonistic tour I have set myself on. She is trying to be a good friend.

‘Exactly!’ I clap my hands together to emphasise. ‘This is precisely the entire point. I don’t want those things either.’

Indeed, after the summer ended and I returned to New York, I came to realise my sexual escapades weren’t just about the mechanical pleasure of two bodies coming together. The pleasure I have taken from the memory, a pleasure that increases instead of fading away, is what comes from the knowledge that I summoned what I wanted, and it came.

It is the pleasure of being powerful, mind and body. And to have that power emerge while in a position, literally, of almost complete vulnerability. It was a truly beautiful thing.

Adapted from I’m Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol (Leap, £10.99), to be published July 3. © Glynnis MacNicol 2025. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid until July 10; UK P&P free on orders over £25), go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

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