Want to know what an orgasm looks like? These are the entries in the ‘draw your orgasm’ comp so far, and I am beyond delighted with them. The rules state that you can enter anything visual – so photos, drawings, and anything else that you think might demonstrate what an orgasm feels like to you – one person even carved their orgasm into their Halloween pumpkin, a level of commitment and ingenuity that has bowled me over.

(more…)

Here is a can of worms. Please sit down, make yourself comfortable, and watch as I try to sort them into delicate piles without squishing any of them.

I’m in a monogamous relationship. For me, that means that my partner and I both lust desperately after other people, but we try not to do anything about it, save sighing and making the odd comment about how beautiful those other people are.

When I tell people this, often they’re surprised, and some of them make efforts to persuade me that I really should consider opening up my relationship. That it’d be healthier if my guy and I could see other people, or that polyamory is actually the best course of action for everybody in the human race. I like the sound of it: I do. I like the idea that there’s a hell of a lot of love in the world, and you get to share lots of different kinds of love with lots of different people.

Thing is, I’ve tried it, and it sucks for me. It really sucks. I get jealous, angry, upset, and anxious. I feel worthless. My rational brain tells me that he can fuck other people without it having any bearing on how he feels about me, and that if he goes for a drink with a girl he fancies with a view to potentially snogging her at the end of the evening, that act itself isn’t sapping any of the fun or love that he and I share together.

Unfortunately, my irrational brain is a tedious Iago – piping up and screeching “I like not that!”, and ruining everyone’s fun.

(more…)

A while ago I ran a competition to get people to describe their own orgasms. The results were arousing, amazing and delightfully varied. One of the most difficult things about sex is that it’s such a personal experience. What turns you on might make me run in horror, and vice versa. Likewise my own experience of hotness probably differs pretty greatly from yours – even if you’re into the same things as me and have the same configuration of genital equipment, I can never see inside your head when you’re coming. That’s probably lucky, because if I could I suspect you’d call the police.

Which is why I felt a bit harsh when, a while ago, I challenged Stuart – who provides the gorgeous illustrations for this blog – to ‘draw a picture of an orgasm.’ That intangible thing that you feel but never see.

He did a pretty bang-up job (see left), and lots of people got in touch to say ‘oooh, that’s evocative! I would like to see more!’

So with the help of SexToys.co.uk, and Bish, who runs an excellent sex ed website, I’m launching a competition to see how other people do.If you fancy having a go at drawing pictures of orgasms, I have some ace prizes up for grabs: £100 voucher to spend at sextoys.co.uk, a copy of Bish’s excellent book, and a print of Stuart’s fantastic orgasm picture. I was going to split them into ‘first, second, third’ prizes, but to be honest I’d rather give them all to the winner, because I’m crap at admin and I like the idea of showering gifts on someone: a bundle of orgasmic gifts.

The rules are:

• you can use any visual media as a means of showing what an orgasm looks like (so photos/graphics/crayon on the back of an envelope are all fine).
• it mustn’t be an actual picture of your genitals. Your genitals are probably lovely but seriously, you’ll get no marks for initiative.
• you have to be over 18.
• you can submit your picture from basically anywhere – post it on Twitter/FB/your own blog, and then just drop me an email with a link to where I can see it, or email me the pic directly [hellogirlonthenet at gmail dot com] if you’re shy. Mark your email ‘OMG orgasms’ so if it gets lost in my spam folder I can fish it out it, and let me know how you’d like to be credited when I publish the pic (by your name/blog name/pseudonym or just ‘anon’).
• on 11th November I’ll publish a shortlist of the entries on this blog along with a voting thing, so you can vote for the ones you like the best.
• on 21st November the judges (that’s Emma from SexToys, Stuart, Justin/Bish and I) will take the entries with the most votes, and pick an Ultimate Winner. The winner will be announced on November 24th.
• I’ve added this last bit for clarity – because I’ll publish the shortlist on the 11th, your entries need to be in by 10th November (UK time), and you need to be happy for me to share and publicise your entry, but obviously it can be marked anonymous if you’d like.

Sounds good? Of course it does. And the best thing is you don’t have to be amazing at drawing. I’m about as artistic as a donkey with a paintbrush in its arse, but the main criteria for winning should be that your pic is interesting and evocative. If we look at it and go ‘ooh, that’s a nice way to represent an orgasm’ then whether you can draw or not, you’re in with a chance. To give you some inspiration, here are a couple of excellent pictures: one shows the tingling waves of orgasm as they run through someone’s body, and the other’s a visual image produced by the sound waves recorded as he came.

Amazing.