I’ve experimented with women – sex with girls can be more intense…I’ve dated some narcissistic men, says Lisa Snowdon
STRICTLY star Lisa Snowdon has revealed how she has had sexual experiences with women – and says they can be “more sensual, more gentle, more intense and more giving”.
The former top model, who has dated George Clooney, TV joker David Walliams, model Paul Sculfor and ex-England footballer Jay Bothroyd, has opened up about her sex life in a powerful new book to help other women.
Lisa, who also starred in I’m A Celeb and won Celebrity MasterChef, reveals: “I was never into one-night stands — or at least, not too many — but I certainly enjoyed myself.
“I love the physicality of it, the contact and the animal attraction.
“I was, of course, deeply attracted to the opposite sex, and sometimes to the same sex, and I would be lying if I said I hadn’t experimented a little — that was fun and I certainly have no regrets.
“A friend told me that a lot of women in the menopause who are attracted to women are acting on it, as they feel they no longer need men. And I kind of understand it.
“Sleeping with women can be a much more sensual, more gentle, more intense and more giving experience.”
Lisa, who has now finally found happiness with her fiancé George Smart, shot to fame at 19 after being spotted pole-dancing in a London club.
At times she earned £100,000 a day, graced the cover of Vogue magazine and repeatedly featured in FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women.
She then turned to TV presenting, with jobs on MTV and Britain’s Next Top Model, before becoming one of the country’s most successful radio hosts, pulling in a million viewers on Capital London’s Breakfast show for seven years.
‘Ugly experiences’
Now she presents on This Morning and campaigns about the stigma of the menopause.
But while her career has been on the up, Lisa admits her personal life was often turbulent, with troubled relationships and “ugly experiences” where she felt “pressured into” sex.
Her revelations come in her book Just Getting Started, which tells how she struggled emotionally and physically for more than a decade after starting the menopause in her early forties.
With no subject off-limits, she bravely tells how, when she looked back on her time, she realised her sex life was largely unsatisfying.
She writes: “For so many years sex for me was about validation. I never really experienced much satisfaction in my late teens or my twenties.
“If the person I was with was enjoying it, that for me was enough.
“For an awfully long time, I was a people-pleaser — a role we women easily fall into.
“It is so sad to have realised this only recently, in the last ten or so years — or maybe I have always known but been too scared to admit it or do something about changing it. Looking back, I definitely had sex when I didn’t really want it, when I felt pressured into it.
“I have also had some ugly experiences with men and, on reflection, was taken advantage of in a way that I should have been more aware of.
“I hope to confront the people concerned one day and tell them how they made me feel.”
Lisa says she did not sleep around with “any Tom, Dick or Harry” but had many long-term relationships with “narcissistic, insecure, arrogant men” who loved themselves more than her. She writes: “I never felt they cared for me.
“The sex was average at best — very wham-bam, thank-you-ma’am, with little consideration of what I wanted and most certainly no tenderness or that key ingredient, love.
“I was there simply to accommodate their desires. They could have been bashing a hole in the wall as far as I was concerned.
“I didn’t know any different. You don’t when you are younger, espec-ially if your first few years of having sex are without compassion or care, either from the person you’re sleeping with or from yourself.”
Lisa says the pattern began with her “lovely first” boyfriend — who “seemed normal” until he cheated on her and broke her heart.
She then lost her virginity to the school stud.
‘No self-worth’
Lisa said: “I was desperate for the cool boy to like me, and to no longer be a virgin at 16, and sadly that set the precedent for my life.
“I used sex to feel connected, loved, needed and appreciated, and it was always the men who seemed to enjoy it much more than I did.”
She writes: “Being deeply insecure, with no self-worth, is a red flag to a narcissistic bull. They can sniff it a mile away. It has taken me so many years to figure all this out — to find my sense of self-worth, to figure out what I deserve and what I want from a partner, not just in the bedroom but in life.”
Lisa now hopes her book can help other women come to the same realisation before it’s too late.
It took a dating detox for her to finally find her self-worth.
She went to a counsellor in 2015, who suggested she take a year off men to connect with what she really hoped for from a relationship.
Lisa writes: “I had absolutely no dates, doing a dating detox to understand what I truly wanted from life and from a partner.
“I had mostly jumped into relationships far too quickly without listening to my intuition on whether they were good for me.”
She listened to wellbeing guru Deepak Chopra and manifested what she wanted in a partner.
Lisa writes: “Each evening, I would lie in bed and write an imaginary list on the ceiling of what I wanted — kind, loving, good work ethic, handsome, tall, a beautiful relationship with his mum, funny, sense of adventure.”
Eight months later, a friend recommended a guy — former music TV host George Smart, who she had a fling with years ago.
She writes: “I didn’t realise I had manifested George to come back into my life, at a time when I was ready and clear he was the man I had been searching for. He was the guy on my invisible ceiling list. He is a man I’d met almost 15 years before, in our MTV days.
“He is seven years younger than me. Back then it ended as soon as it started and we went our separate ways. The rest is beautiful, romantic history — he called me and we arranged a date.”
In 2016 the 43-year-old proposed and, although Lisa admits she was terrified of getting hurt, struggled to completely trust and did not feel worthy of love, this time George is “for keeps”.
She says: “We’ve been through ups and downs, and he has stood by me, and I him. He is everything I manifested on my list.”
‘Pause for thought
LISA decided to tell her story after struggling for more than a decade through the menopause.
She says: “My journey started earlier than ‘normal’ and certainly earlier than I would have liked or expected, but the show must go on.
“When I got my diagnosis, I felt lost, alone and very confused. I knew something had changed – I didn’t feel like myself any more and, worse still, it was as if I was losing a big part of my identity.
“But for me, in that moment, there was no one to turn to.”
She decided to resolve unresolved negativity, suppressed emotions and unprocessed trauma so she could move on without “being afraid of the future”.
Now she wants women to talk freely about it, writing: “Menopause is not the end – far from it; it is the beginning of something truly wonderful.”
- Just Getting Started: Lessons In Life, Love And Menopause, by Lisa Snowdon, is published by HarperCollins on May 25 priced £16.99.