Men: they’re fucking everywhere, aren’t they? God, I had almost forgotten they existed. I used to walk down streets past men every day and barely give them a second glance, but suddenly now I am starting to notice them. Men. Everywhere. This is a post written loosely off the back of a pep talk I gave to a friend, in which I urged her: shoot your shot. (hat tip to @Oloni for introducing me to that excellent phrase)
I never thought I’d be one of those weird people who didn’t fancy others when I was in a relationship, but it turns out I genuinely was. Sure, I’d often have public transport sex fantasies about men I spotted on the tube, or occasional crushes on hot friends who’d steal my cigarettes in a domly manner, but the actual reality of trying to fuck someone else never really entered my one-dick mind. I had eyes for him, and fantasies for him, and I only really entertained thoughts of shagging other people in situations where he was there to cheer me on.
Now, though? Now? Men are fucking everywhere and I have started to notice them. What began as a trickle of snapshots – a hot guy at the counter in Co-op or a cute dude cycling in front of me along the canal – has turned into a deluge. An avalanche.
Men! Everywhere!
The guys who go running up in the park nearby, who stop to do crunches in the middle of the field. Could I fuck one of them?
The men who saunter slowly back from Tesco carrying bags full of snacks, loping casually as if they have nowhere specific to be. If I banged one of them, would he share his snacks afterwards?
The ones on dating sites with their comedy hats and polyamorous girlfriends, who state up front that they’re looking for ‘connection’ but not monogamy. Could I enlist one of these guys as the kind of casual fuckbuddy my empty cunt craves?
The answers, incidentally, are: no, no and probably.
Online dating
I’m crap at chatting people up in real life. Online, though, I know how to get to work. My online dating success is absolutely nothing to do with skill, it’s just based on the numbers and the willingness to accept that I will get a lot of ‘no’s. I’m applying the confidence of a woman who could not give a single flying fuck if she’s met with silence. So a guy doesn’t reply, or says ‘no’ – so what? I’m not going to die because a stranger didn’t reply to a simple message. And I’m not going to get laid if I don’t say ‘yes’ to a few myself, or send witty remarks to people on the off-chance they might think I’m cool. I have nothing whatsoever to lose in these interactions, because I don’t define ‘losing’ as ‘failing to get replies’ but ‘failing to approach any men in the first place.’
While we’re on the subject of ‘success’ at online dating, it’d be remiss of me not to point out that there are a number of reasons I don’t like using ‘number of replies/dates’ as a measure of success. Not least because – as a good friend pointed out to me recently – this kind of success on a dating site can be influenced by many factors, not least white privilege. Despite many dating sites ditching their ‘filter by ethnicity’ options, many people do still decide based on ethnicity, because people are fucking racist. I’d say ‘note to racists: stop doing yourself out of fun dates’ but honestly if you do this you don’t deserve any fucking dates, as you don’t deserve a date if you’ve automatically clicked ‘no’ on the question ‘would you date a transgender person?’ Needless to say, sites which involve people picking a partner are always going to be rife with those who have ‘preferences’ that could better be labelled ‘prejudice’ – a ‘preference’ for people who are white, or not disabled, or thin, or tall, or cisgender – and this paragraph is here mainly to remind me to write about it later, and to acknowledge that I am not unaware of the ways in which my privilege plays into this pep-talky rant. I shoot my shot on easy mode, made super easy because of white (cisgender, able-bodied, etc) privilege.
Giving people the opportunity to reject you
Recently, a good friend of mine lamented the fact that she was lacking in fuck, and confessed that she was shy about putting herself out there to get some. She was worried about a ‘no’, and had convinced herself that ‘no’ was so mighty it would hammer her into the ground – crush her confidence and scupper any chance of her shooting for a ‘yes’ in the future. She felt unattractive, unappealing, uncool. So worried was she about this that she hadn’t even given men the opportunity to reject her: the rejection itself scared her so much that the guys who might have said ‘yes’ were languishing on that dating site – un-asked, un-shot-for, unfucked.
That friend? Molly Fucking Moore.
Molly Moore! Sex blogger, queen of fuck, enticing temptress par excellence. Funny, filthy, fuckworthy femme and Goddess of Sinful Sunday.
Molly.
Fucking.
Moore.
I mention it only because our conversation happened at around the same time I started thinking about joining a dating site, and realising men are everywhere. I say this not to devalue men – I love you loads and want to fuck most of you – but there are absolutely shitloads of you, aren’t there? The fear I used to get when wandering up to a guy in a bar to mumble compliments about his shirt have vanished into the breeze now online dating exists. The terror of asking a boy out at the school disco crumbles into nothing when you realise that there isn’t an army of popular kids gleefully watching you shoot your shot and itching to see your rejection. You are just you, alone, unobserved, fishing in a sea that is absolutely teeming with life.
Shoot your shot: men are everywhere
Men are everywhere. In shops, parks, cafes, restaurants. On the tables outside pubs in the garden. Those ones are ‘hard mode’ though, the ‘easy mode’ men are all in my phone – on Twitter and dating sites and WhatsApp and email. With their lovely hands and their wry smiles and the way they fav my thirsty tweets as if to say ‘I would definitely fuck you again if I lived nearby.’ Sometimes they’re there with impenetrable politeness which can’t really be read either way: are they humouring me, or hinting that they would? Who knows? Who cares? Why not just ask? A ‘no’ from a guy is a genuine gift – he’s saved me the hassle of waiting and wondering, and allowed me to move efficiently on to the next possibility.
I’ll tell you now what I said to my good friend Molly: men are everywhere, so shoot your shot. If you message someone and say ‘hey! I like you and I’m horny! Get in my cunt!’*, then what will happen is:
a) you’ll probably delight some men and
b) you may well get some ‘no’s because not all men are available/possible, and their consent matters but
c) you won’t give a flying fuck about ‘b’ because ‘a’ will also be happening, and even if ‘a’ hasn’t happened yet, when you’ve had enough ‘b’ you realise it was never going to destroy you – it’s like a vaccine for your fear.
*I do not actually recommend ‘I’m horny, get in my cunt’ as a chat-up line. But maybe that works on Fetlife, I don’t know. Bear with me, I’m incredibly out of practice.
Low expectations, high on life
Perhaps it’s easier for me because I do not want a boyfriend. My standards are not ‘find someone with whom I can share my heart and life and collection of NSFW coffee mugs.’ I am not looking for a lifelong companion or intimate connection or love. In the sudden, aching, monstrous gap that opened when the break-up happened, I see nothing but the horrifying absence of the future I thought we once had, and the miserable baffling loneliness of life without him. I am not looking to replace that guy, as I wasn’t looking at him to replace the one before.
The people who advise me to take my time and avoid rushing into something new are working under false assumptions. Firstly they forget that I’m Girl on the fucking Net – I don’t fuck because I need it for content, I write this content because I love to fuck. The fucking came first, and it’ll live on long after these pages go dark. More importantly, the people who say ‘isn’t it a bit quick to go fucking other people?’ think I am looking for something significant. They see me running out into the world with my broken heart exposed and raw and painful, waiting to shove it into the pocket of the first eager gentleman who turns up. But I’m not.
I’m looking for fun, and distraction, and men. I need company, laughter, and innuendoes-over-drinks. I don’t want a boyfriend, I want men. Cute men, funny men, weird men, nerdy men, men who don’t know me yet but who reckon they like me anyway. Men who ask me how my day was and genuinely care about the answer. Men who try to hold my hand or grab my arse or tempt me to come back to their place. Men whose ‘no’s don’t stab me in the heart, just make me shrug my shoulders and move on.
I could sit on the sidelines of life, wistfully staring at the men I have started to notice, passing time in nervous daydreams the way I did when I was young. But life is short, gang. It’s so fucking short. And who knows whether the next relationship I end up in will last another nine years? Nine more years of being so fixated on one man that I forget about the others – the men who are absolutely everywhere.
Feel free to link me back to this post in a few months’ time once I have stopped manically swimming on the surface of my inner turmoil and sunk thoroughly into the depths of my own misery. You can tell me ‘I told you so!’, and we’ll have a lot of fun.
13 Comments
Life is short. And at the moment the world is shit.
So you need to take every chance, embrace each no as it’s just the gateway to the next yes.
And even a no can be content 🙂
And…some of those men are having exactly the same worries, so you never know 🙂
Haha YES! My perspective on this is relentlessly ‘straight girl hooks up with guys’ but yeah, I reckon most of us inside are just awkward teenagers nervous about asking someone to dance at the school disco.
Oh god…….don’t bring DANCING into it, I’m like one of those flapping balloon things you see outside shops.
I would rather ask out a pub full of people than dance.
Personally speaking – while I can’t pretend I’m any good at it either, I find dancing way less scary than actually asking someone out :)
This is so excellent! I’m thrilled with this content topic. I’ve always adored your writings, and on some level they have always been brave. So, I’m glad your bravery shines through. You always go deep and I’m convinced that is part of your well deserrved wide popularity.
If the fortunate fellow were to say no, it would be a rare occasion with a real reason that he would tell you all about for at least an hour. He would then give you a rain check and assure you that the sun would be shining upon your second meeting. Upon the second coming he would offer you some of the snacks which he carries in a five pound sack. He believes in ‘variety’ in snacks and in variety in all things good and righteous. He tries out new snacks all the time with you in mind and you will never become bored with any of them. None of these snacks cause weight gain.
Ha! I would absolutely LOVE that on the snacks front, and frankly be delighted if they caused weight gain – I keep losing weight at the moment and I can’t afford any new clothes, so my clothes hang off me and it’s annoying. So yeah: snacks that helped me put a bit back on would be excellent. I like the sound of this gentleman.
Also, incidentally: “If the fortunate fellow were to say no, it would be a rare occasion” – honestly, not really. Dudes turn me down or ignore me a lot, it’s cool. I am OK with it =)
I told my friend, whom I have wanted since the first moment I saw her, that men were always getting told no. I said that no matter how many times it happened, that it never got better and always hurt. She said that she didn’t fully realize that it was that traumatizing until I told her. She looked worried. I bet she told a lot of guys “No!”. I then went on to tell her something else that she never thought a lot about or maybe any about. That would be ME. I told her that the ball was in her court as now she knew that if she ask me that I would always say yes. So far she hasn’t ask. There are good reasons she hasn’t, but maybe someday the garden path may be swept clean of all those things that one can trip over AND I WILL SAY YES! ❤️
Just be careful. Sometimes you’re looking for a fuckbuddy or two and end up falling in love with someone who enjoys it immensely when others join the two of you in bed and wants to help you achieve all your sluttiest dreams.
I tell him regularly that this is NOT what I planned, and then realize how lucky I am that the plan failed.
This is a good article but I don’t understand why you had to put ethnicity and “white privilege” in there. I guess I’m not hip to what all this white privilege means but I am white so it offends me it just a little bit. You would be better off not bringing politics into your conversations . There’s enough of that going around now, peace out🥂
Why are you offended if you don’t know what it means? =) White privilege isn’t an insult, it’s just a fact – white people (like me, like you) are often treated differently based on our skin colour, and refusing to acknowledge it makes it much harder to understand the world and therefore live our lives. It’d be like trying to navigate the world without acknowledging that people born into money have likely had a better start than those who haven’t. It’s just facts, it’s not offensive.
As to there being ‘enough’ politics right now – you’re in Arizona and so you’re due an election very soon. This election is your opportunity to try and halt the fascism that’s taking hold in your country. Politics is going to determine your future and the future of people around you, please don’t close your eyes to it.
Well said GOTN.
‘i don’t do politics’ is a political stance – it means you’re happy for the powerful to keep having it their way.