Who wants to spend the night with Gwyneth?

The English male is witty, romantic and, if you catch him on a good night, a pistol between the sheets

Living, as I do, on the edge of a field in a caravan, I have little time to worry about how much sexual satisfaction foreign women are deriving from English men. I have the plaintive call of the kingfisher to listen out for, meteor showers to watch at night. Frankly, life is busy enough without my becoming embroiled in yet another legover controversy.

On the other hand, the alleged hopelessness of the English male is becoming one of the most urgent debates of the moment. Claims that could at first have been put down to the combined effects of the sun and the erotic restlessness that afflicts so many women at this time of year are now in danger of being taken seriously. Questions of national pride and gender solidarity are involved.

A couple of weeks ago, a Canadian journalist called Leah McLaren wrote a tearful account of how she had been unable to get her end away in London. Englishmen were gauche, their dating techniques clumsy; she had been taken out by eight men and not one of them had put the moves on her. They were probably all victims of public school and repressed homosexuals.

It was a clever story that not only covered two subjects, sex and Englishness, that appeal to idle minds and features editors but also reinforced a cliché. The old lie about the English being bad lovers has frequently been peddled over the past 50 years, usually by male American writers made jealous and insecure by our sophistication and success in these matters. "She had a gift," Norman Mailer wrote in a hilariously self-important passage from An American Dream. "She was giving a short lecture with her tongue on the habits of the Germans, the French, the English (one sorry bite indeed), the Italians, the Spanish, she must have had an Arab or two."

One sorry bite was more than Leah McLaren managed and now, alarmingly, Gwyneth Paltrow has joined the chorus of complaint. While staying in England, she claims, she could not for the life of her get a date. In America, she said, "someone will come up to you and ask you for dinner and you'll say 'sure'. It is no big deal and no weight should attach to it. It's only dinner, for God's sake". Here, according to Gwyneth, "if someone asks you out, they're really going out on a limb".

The story of these two disappointed blondes casts light on why the English male – witty, romantic and, if you catch him on a good night, a pistol between the sheets – is now so wary of foreign visitors. Paltrow's no-big-deal approach is simply irritating. It may be acceptable among the notoriously undersexed Americans to ask someone like Gwyneth Paltrow out to dinner without any thoughts beyond food and conversation, but here it would be regarded as bad manners and rather odd.

But then, even those who play the dating game in the way that Gwyneth Paltrow proposes are in danger of being berated for their politeness by a quarrelsome Canadian. The men who decided, at the end of an evening with Miss McLaren, that "it's only dinner, for God's sake" were publicly accused of being repressed homosexuals. No wonder that most English males prefer to devote their very considerable libidinal energies to English women, who are far too sensible to play these silly little dating games.

Clearly, and it is difficult to put this in a way that will not seem ungallant, those who went out with Leah McLaren finally decided that, for all her merits as a journalist, she was simply not a person they wanted to wake up with, that she was trouble – and her subsequent behaviour proved them right.

Extraordinary as it may seem, a similar thought process may have deterred Gwyneth Paltrow's dinner dates. She has announced that she only likes what she calls "toffs" – already a bad sign. According to a recent profile, she is obsessed with staying thin, adheres to a strict macrobiotic diet and is accompanied on her travels by her own personal chefs. The actress Sara Stewart, who shared a dressing-room with her during the run of Proof at the Donmar Warehouse, has revealed that "each morning there she would be, legs wrapped round her head, walking on her hands, or doing a handstand."

This is no one's idea of a perfect date, and it is enormously to the credit of the English that they have looked past her superficial good looks to the person within, sparing her and themselves the embarrassment of a disastrous evening.

Relaxed and exuding sexual self-confidence, the English male will happily leave Gwyneth to do her handstands with obedient New Yorkers and Leah to find joy with Canadian men. He might wonder why no one ever considers writing about women as hopeless lovers, or speculates as to whether they are all really repressed lesbians, but then he is far too polite and grown-up to ask such questions out loud.

terblacker@aol.com