Stephen Fry returns to Twitter to say women do like sex

Stephen Fry, who angrily quit Twitter last week after being criticised for suggesting that women don’t like sex, has returned to the blogging site.

The broadcaster found himself in a storm of media attention after telling Attitude magazine that women only have sex because it is “the price they are willing to pay for a relationship”.

He said: “If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: ‘God, I’ve got to get my f**king rocks off’, or they’d go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush.”

After the article was published, he said he had been portrayed as the “antichrist” and posted a final Tweet of “bye bye”.

Fry initially claimed he was misquoted but in an almost 3,000 word blogpost yesterday, he said he had been “simply taking a thought for a walk” and did not realise that quotes from the interview would be republished.

He added: “I know that women enjoy sex. If women also say (and I’m in no position to agree or disagree with them) that they have as equally insistent and urgent libidos as men then I have no doubt that must be true also.

“It is perhaps sad to think that they are as pathetically in the grip of a base and humiliating need to get their rocks off as men are, but if that is the case then that is the case and god knows I’m no expert on the subject.”

The 53-year-old said he had broken his rule of not giving print interviews in order to support the gay magazine, and “only agreed out of kindness”.

He also claimed he had not read the published article, or any of the newspaper reports on it.

It’s not the first time the star has quit Twitter in a fit of pique. Last year, he briefly left the site after a fellow user called him “boring”.