He has been called the cleverest man in Britain, but even Fry’s fans must feel there are limits to his expertise.

And as one of the UK's most famous homosexuals, female sexuality is unlikely to be one of his specialist topics.

Yet 53-year-old Fry has raised eyebrows by claiming that women are unenthusiastic about sex, and see it only as "the price they are willing to pay for a relationship."
Most straight men, he added, fear that "they disgust women" and "find it difficult to believe that women are as interested in sex as they are."

Feminist writer Susie Orbach suggested the remarks said more about Fry than they do about women, and ground-breaking female journalist Rosie Boycott said he was talking "rubbish."
Fry told gay magazine Attitude that men feared that women were less interested in sex than them "for good reason."
"If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas," he said.
"Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking, 'God, I’ve got to get my ******* rocks off”, or they’d go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to s**g behind a bush.

"It doesn’t happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it."
Fry, who hosts BBC quiz QI, added: "I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want.

"Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

Feminist journalist Boycott said the claims were "rubbish", adding: "Women are just as capable as men are of enjoying sex. We don’t go cruising or cottaging on Hampstead Heath because we don’t need to.
"Women have other ways to get our thrills, and we can go and get them in bars or clubs."
Psychotherapist and writer Orbach said: "I’m really intrigued by his notion that men’s sexuality is disgusting in some way. Why would he believe that women could be so disgusted by men? Does he think there is something disgusting about sex?"

Fry has often spoken out for gay rights. He played Oscar Wilde in the 1997 movie Wilde, and a gay man dying of Aids in 1992 film Peter’s Friends.

But he has also said he was celibate from 1979 to 1995. And in his autobiography this year he said he was only "90 per cent gay" and had once been attracted to Rowan Atkinson’s wife Sunetra Sastry and his Cambridge University contemporary Caroline Oulton, now a novelist.
Nothing happened with either woman.

Fry is currently understood to be in a relationship with actor Steven Webb, 25.
Meanwhile, Fry has been scolded by the producers of the new Harry Potter movie after he posted pictures of the film set on Twitter.

Fry was shooting scenes for a sequel to Sherlock Holmes at Leavesden studios in Hertfordshire next to the set of the upcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows film when he took the photographs and posted them on the site.

One image showed the set of Harry's Hogwarts school in ruins after it is destroyed in the battle between Harry Potter and his enemy Lord Voldemort, The (London) Daily Telegraph reported.
The images disappeared from Fry's Twitter page not long after he had shared them with his 1.9 million followers, tweeting: "Oops. I've been sent to the naughty step…"

The following day he tweeted: "Shall be a good boy on set today. *Sticks gaffer-tape over camera lens* Heigh ho."
Producers of the final installment of the Harry Potter franchise have been tight-lipped about the movie since filming began in February 2009.

J.K. Rowling's seventh and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has been split into two films. The first is due out on November 19 and the second is due for release in July next year.