BOOK REVIEW / When no means never: 'Women, Celibacy and Passion' - Sally Cline: Deutsch, 16.99 pounds

AS A recent convert to gardening, I was alarmed to read in Sally Cline's book the story of Geoff and Margaret, a married couple who have given up sex. 'New things are delighting us,' says Margaret. 'I go on spiritual retreats to the country with women friends while Geoffrey is involved in his piano practice and gardening.'

Margaret is worryingly firm on the incompatibility of sex and these hobbies, insisting that: 'I should never have had the time or energy to find any of this out if we had continued in the old way.' Sally Cline concurs, listing gardening among the passions which loom larger in her life when she is celibate.

Either there is a non-sequitur here, or I shall have to hang up my secateurs pretty smartly. Fortunately for those of us who would like to be green-fingered and sexually active, Sally Cline's book is a salutary reminder that feminism, like any other system of ideas, is as capable of turning out batty texts as brilliant ones. Following Naomi Wolf's lead in discovering the 'beauty myth', Sally Cline has uncovered a 'genital myth' which forces women to go on having sex when they would rather listen to opera or Joan Armatrading. The myth is policed by a group of people variously known as 'genital mythmasters' and the sinisterly capitalised 'Genital Geniuses'.

Cline's rhetoric is wearyingly familiar and not particularly effective: 'The female body is merely something to be objectified. Used. Exploited. Objectified ornately. Used Stylishly. Exploited elegantly. Inside the magazine's glossy pages or up there on the silver screen.' She shares with Wolf a cavalier attitude to statistics, citing a Spare Rib questionnaire answered by 200 readers and a survey in True Romance magazine as evidence that 'women need affection, desire intimacy, but have little regard for genital penetration'.

The problem with this kind of writing is that it lumps women into a homogenous group, underestimating the intelligence of its readers. Is it really true that we live in a society of 'mandatory sexual consumption' and 'obligatory orgasm', that it is 'revolutionary' to suggest that women might want to abstain from sex? There are women who are celibate by choice; there are also women who have celibacy forced upon them by the ending of a relationship. I do not think either group is passively receptive to the machinations of Cline's 'genital mythmasters'.

Yet for the purposes of a book like this one, whose central idea is neither complex nor strikingly original, hyperbole is an essential tool. Building up the opposition, identifying powerful (and usually untamed) enemies within the medical profession and the media, lends a glow of dissidence to commonplace and badly expressed ideas. Cline's writing style is sociological, arch and anecdotal by turns. She has a fatal tendency to name-drop, casually mentioning 'my-oldest-friend-in-the-world, Hollywood film-maker Davina Belling' and the fact that she once discussed celibacy with Angela Carter on a train.

In order to turn the simple notion that some women might prefer celibacy into a grand theory, Cline stands the definition of the word on its head. Women who are reluctantly celibate are not really celibate at all, while one of the categories she identifies, the Sensual Celibate, is permitted to have sex as long as it happens infrequently. Her Ascetic Celibates, on the other hand, do not have sex with other people but are allowed to masturbate. One of them, a woman named Sue, apparently practises a form of coitus interruptus with herself which involves removing the stimulus at the point of orgasm. While this might appear overly self-denying to the rest of us, Sue insists it is a form of 'tantra yoga' which helps her achieve 'my goal of a circled space'.

The sad thing about Women, Celibacy and Passion is that it is so clearly well meant. Sally Cline is an ardent feminist and some of the issues she identifies are real problems for women - the pressure to be part of a couple, for example. But that is not enough to save a book whose effect on this reader, at least, was to create a longing for a feminist Joy of Sex.