“Of course I don’t have a ‘type’,” I lie. “I’ve fancied so many different people that the idea I’d only go for one type of guy is laughable.” I tell this to people I know and love, and I tell it to myself. And it’s bollocks.

Much as I’d love to not have a type, I do. Oh how I do.

There’s a certain kind of man that gives me a certain kind of feeling. Not pitiful butterflies in my stomach or shivers down my spine or any of that saccharine crap: these dudes make my cunt wet and my eyes water and they send my heart into an angry, drum-beat overdrive of panic. They make me afraid.

These men with their lithe, casual hotness. Slightly (or incredibly) nerdy, playing nervously with glasses on the bar, or with cigarettes in their hands. Men with wet eyes and eager smiles, and the tiniest hint of a late-lost virginity that gives them extra enthusiasm for fucking. Men who wank creatively: with buttplugs and lube and grotesquely unconscionable fantasies.

There are two or three in my head right now (get out get out get out). There are a couple in my back catalogue who – if I walked down the street and bumped into them – would wonder why I was physically staggering with shock, or shaking in an effort to hold back the urge to kiss them. Not kiss them, sorry, that’s wrong: bury my face in their neck and just… fucking… bite them.

I don’t want to have a type, but I do. It’s these guys: the ones who hold back dark secrets and stutter through chat ups and joke that ‘oh of COURSE you won’t fancy me but on the off-chance you did I’m quite into choke-fucking if that’s your thing?’ Men who call me ‘mate’ and who smell so filthy and good when they hug me. Whose cocks press tight against the inside of scruffy jeans. I can’t see but oh sweet Lord how I can imagine.

They make me cold with fear.

I’m terrified of these guys because they are the ones with whom my self-control goes out of the window. Making me wonder – and quite rightly – whether I can claim to have any self-control at all if it disappears in a spray of jizz when the right kind of temptation sidles into view.

What’s your sexual type?

I’m not telling you what my exact sexual type is in case you either:

a) are it, in which case things will become awkward at parties or

b) are not it, in which case if we’ve ever fucked, or ever might fuck, you’ll mistakenly assume that because you don’t ‘match’ I won’t enjoy it. I still will.

I’m reading a book by Marian Keyes at the moment in which she describes heart vibrations – how two people can be perfect for each other because their souls give off the same rhythmic vibe. That’s obvious twaddle, of course, but it made me think of the feeling when I meet a guy who’s ‘my type’ – a similar gutpunch of obvious attraction, similar vibrations. Except it’s not my heart that’s quivering.

I want to fuck all these bad men

I’ve met some ‘types’ recently and it’s all I can do to bite my lip and smile and say ‘nice to meet you.’ I chit-chat with them and laugh at their jokes and pray to Christ they laugh at mine. I introduce myself to their girlfriends, and say goodnight at the end of the evening. Just ‘goodnight’! When what I really want to say is ‘oh please please please fuck me. Fuck me so hard it makes me cry. Please put your hands on me – anywhere – and just squeeze and rub and slap and punch me and make me feel better about feeling like this when I shouldn’t. Take away the misery of unrequited lust, and tell me I’m a bad bad bad fucking person for wanting you.’

It’s not their fault, of course: it’s mine. To paint these guys as tempting architects of my failure at monogamy would be to pretend that I have no agency: no morals.  But although they can’t help striking exactly the chord that has me throbbing with need, I have to avoid them, and come across as either rude or awkward. I can’t help it.

While one of my types is nearby my mind will do bad things: flash images and scenes of him fucking me against a wall. Or pulling my jeans down to below the crack of my arse and rubbing a trembling hand between my legs. Slowly and deliberately opening one button on my shirt, and grinning as he reaches in to put cold fingers on my nipples. Wrapping a belt round my throat and choking me with it while he fucks me – while he whispers ‘you shouldn’t be doing this and you fucking know it’, pauses for a beat… two beats… lets me take a breath… then slaps my face as he pushes his cock harder inside.

Do you have a type?

I hope some of you know what I mean. Some of you conjured an image of a particular type of person – that person who sets you on a course of lustful flashes, and for whom your attraction feels almost dangerous. I feel like this about certain guys regardless of anything else that might be going on: whether I’m currently with someone who is also my ‘type’, for instance. And I laugh and point out hot men and go ‘that one there – he’s pretty’, and I point out interesting men and go ‘him: I’d go for him’ and all the while I’m thinking ‘yeah, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? I’d go for anyone with a good sense of humour and a pair of hands to grab my arse with. My type is something stronger, and utterly intangible.’

So when you ask me if I have a ‘type’ that’s the reason I’ll lie. I’d rather say ‘no of course not’ than give someone the full, disgusting truth. I do have a type when it comes to sex, and it’s undiscerning, perverted, and arational. It doesn’t matter in the slightest if these guys are bastards, if they’re already attached or totally disinterested. My cunt doesn’t care whether they’re the kind of people I could live with forever or the ones I’d throttle after 10 minutes. It doesn’t care how many of them there are: there is always room for one more.

I say I don’t have a type, because with enough love and enough interest I’ll have this passion for anyone. But these guys… these guys… these insta-lust ‘types’ that my brain hates but my body needs like sunlight: when I’m on my death bed and watching the guilty replays of my life’s mistakes, it’ll be these guys who play the starring roles.

My nerdy, horny, depraved and desperate men. My weaknesses.

My types.

I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but we have a big problem with sex and morality. If something is sexual, we seem to want to attribute a moral action to it even when one is not necessary.

There are some acts which, by whatever standards of morality you hold, most of us can accept are inherently ‘good’ – helping people who are vulnerable or suffering, for instance, or sharing resources when you’ve got more than you need. There are some we can label ‘bad’ fairly easily: hurting a person deliberately and without any reason, etc etc.

However, with sex we seem to want to label things ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when – at best – they’re morally neutral. Masturbation, for example. It can be good for your health (mental and physical) but is it morally good per se? Not really: it’s just a wank. Some sex acts are morally bad, but they’re morally bad because they have other characteristics which are ‘bad’ – they exploit or hurt people.

All this is to say that I don’t think ‘sex’ is inherently good or bad. Like eating, sex is just something we do. It can be good (a delicious doughnut to sate you after a hard day’s shagging) or bad (eating the flesh of an animal you’ve just tortured for fun). But food is a good example, because we frequently apply moral actions to eating, as we do to sex. You’ll have a ‘naughty’ slice of cake. Or ‘be bad’ and eat a second biscuit. Realistically, there’s no moral quality to these acts, as there’s little moral quality to the inherent act of sex: it’s just a fuck. The context is what gives it moral weight.

On that general foundation rests my default position whenever ‘sex things’ come up in the news. I’d always rather be extra careful when making moral judgments about sexual things, because of this tendency we have to leap towards ‘that sounds icky to me therefore it must be immoral.’

Brooks Newmark and the nude pictures

And so, the story that prompted this blog: Tory MP Brooks Newmark has resigned because he sent some nude pictures to someone who was not his wife. The pics went to an anonymous reporter who had explicitly requested the pictures, so there isn’t an issue of consent there. He did a sexual thing that someone had asked him to do.

I do not think that was morally wrong.

However, what was morally wrong is that he (from the sounds of it) did something that was not acceptable within his relationship. He and his wife did not have an agreement that naked sexting was OK. So that’s pretty crappy.

But I don’t think he should have resigned. I don’t think he should have been fired. And I certainly don’t think that his inability to resist the urge to send naked pictures of himself to someone who asked for them means he is incapable of being a politician. If we held politicians to high standards of morality in their private as well as their public life, based on the decisions of an angry mob/press, then the number of us who’d be qualified to be politicians would be vanishingly small. But it’s not just practical reasons that make me a bit uncomfortable with the torches and pitchforks that come out whenever there’s some sort of sex scandal.

It’s the fact that this argument is so often thrown out:

It’s about integrity!

Well, sure. We want politicians (and other people who work in roles that affect us) to have integrity. My doctor, for instance, should have great integrity. I expect her to be honest with me, to choose the right treatments, and not to sell out to Big Pharma for a fiver if she knows the better remedy is cheaper. Integrity is vital. But there’s a massive and overwhelming difference between saying to someone: “You are in an important job, and we need to trust you to perform your role with integrity” and saying “by the way this includes everything you do from now on even when you’re not on the clock.”

I’m sorry, but bollocks to that.

Allow me to clarify for those of you who’ll think I’m excusing any kind of immorality outside the workplace: I’m not. I’ll happily join in a bit of chit-chat calling someone a bastard if they cheat on their partner (and I’ll put my hand up and call myself a bastard too, for I have made myriad mistakes and cock-ups in my life) but there’s a big difference between saying ‘I don’t like that’ and extending it as far as ‘you’re fired.’

Here’s the thing: it’s the easy answer. I get that it’s far simpler and more satisfying to say ‘this guy sounds like scum, so he doesn’t deserve a job.’ But I’m suspicious of easy answers, particularly around sex, because I think with anything sexual we’re so desperate to assign morality to every single act that we forget what I said above: sex isn’t inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – it’s something for which the moral consequences must be weighed up depending on the context.

Simple answers sound awesome, which is why they are often the best way to deprive people of freedoms. Saying ‘if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear’ is a nice, simple, memorable way to get people to agree to quite drastic infringement of their liberties. Likewise saying ‘well, if you’re in a position of trust you need to be held to higher ethical standards’ may well be a great way to curb politicians who do things we find icky.

But ‘a position of trust’ is easily interpreted to include headteachers, teachers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, carers, anyone who leads a team of more than two people…. etc etc ad infinitum. We all have responsibilities, and we all need to have integrity in order to perform particular tasks in life. The issue I have is with treating people as if they cannot possibly distinguish between different areas. That if they’re dishonest in one area – that has nothing to do with their job – they will naturally be dishonest elsewhere. That if they spank people in their spare time they’ll be a sex pest in the office. People aren’t that misguided, and even if they were I can think of far better institutions to police it than their employers.

In conclusion, then: I don’t think we should sack people for doing sexual things outside of work. There are plenty of immoral acts for which I’d want a politician to be fired. Sexual harassment, for instance, is not only immoral but has genuine and serious ramifications for how that person performs their job (it implies a deep lack of respect, and often actual harassment, of people they are working with) – it’s also illegal. But unless a politician is going to make a cast-iron pact with their colleagues or the electorate to never send nude pictures of themself to another consenting adult, then holding them to account for a private promise they’ve made to their loved one makes no more sense than firing them for getting divorced.

I appreciate some of you might disagree vehemently with me on this, and please do feel free to: I’m particularly interested to explore the grey areas of this to see if my gut instincts hold up to scrutiny. So disagree, tell me I’m wrong, and get all angry in the comments if you like: just please don’t have me fired.

Wankers unite! There is a revolution upon us and it’s important that you’re part of it. Wipe up the jizz, pull up your trousers, and join your brethren in the march for acceptance.

A while ago I wrote about male sex toys, and a desperately judgmental article at Jezebel that described the guys who used them as ‘lonely fucks.’ But it’s not just Jezebel – I’m frequently coming across examples of the double-standards we have around what men and women do to get off. The overall narrative goes a little something like this:

Men masturbate loads as a matter of necessity, and hence their wanking is something filthy and sordid that should be done behind closed doors, like defecation or voting UKIP. Women don’t really need to wank, because they don’t need sex, so female masturbation is empowering, yet also gentle and feminine and pink. 

From this narrative, a lot of bullshit flows, of which the following is just a tiny snippet:

• Female sex toys must be pink and sparkly and ‘unintimidating’ and should mainly be used to ‘enhance’ a woman’s sex life with a partner.
• Male sex toys are a bit shameful and dirty, and must be hidden in a drawer so no one ever finds out.
• Porn for women is basically a romance novel with a bit of shagging in it. Which men will never read.

All these things are bullshit, but it can be hard to discern that they’re bullshit because so much of our culture plays along to this tune. But even the most basic of research (and I cannot stress enough just how basic my ‘research’ is) shows that sexuality – male, female, or not-easily-forced-into-a-gender-binary – is clearly far more interesting than that.

Male and female sex toys

How many times have you read a mainstream sex advice article that recommends straight guys include vibrators during sex to please their partner? Loads, right? And now count up the number of sex advice articles that recommend women use a masturbator when they give hand jobs because holy Jesus they’re amazing and they make it way more fun? I bet you could count those articles on one hand, and at least two were written by me.

Similarly, guys using toys during solo masturbation is only just beginning to get talked about – traditionally our culture told the dude buying sex dolls and wanking sheaths that he was a lonely, desperate perv. So what’s the deal – are male sex toys only bought by lonely dudes? Or are they, in fact, bought by a significant number of people?

It’s the latter.

Thanks to sextoys.co.uk for giving me some info – here are the most viewed toys on their site.

• Mojo Vigor Cock Ring (does what it says on the tin – designed to go round the penis)
• PDX Big Cock Brad (sex doll in the shape of a dude)
• PDX Slutty Sisters 2 Life-Size Dolls (two sex dolls in the shape of ladies)
• Pulse by Hot Octopuss (amazing penis-masturbator thing, which I really really want to get and use on my dude)
• Loving Joy Real Feel Mr Big 10” suction cup dong (huge dildo with suction cup, could be used by anyone)

To be fair, they have recently been doing some research and surveys into sex doll use, so it’s possible that’s what’s bumped ‘Brad’ and the ‘sisters’ up the list, but of the three remaining one could be used by anyone, and two are specifically designed to be used on a penis. Taking a peek at the top five search terms…

• anal beads
• bullet
• strap on
• vibrator
• masturbator

See? The search terms are delightfully universal – some of these toys can be used no matter what configuration of genitals you have. And as for the top toys, most are aimed at people with dicks. I appreciate this doesn’t prove that every guy has a Fleshlight in the cupboard, but I think it shows that male sex toys are not – as the general narrative has us believe – things bought by the few to sate loneliness or desperation. Male sex toys are, in fact, exactly the same as female sex toys: fun, optional additions to your sex life, whether you’re with a partner or on your own.

Men reading erotica

If you’ve been reading my blog for more than a post or two then you have read erotica. I don’t call it erotica, though, I call it filth. And there’s a bloody good reason for that: as soon as you call writing ‘erotic’ people file it away in the ‘just for women’ bank. As if men can’t cope with porn that’s told via this mysterious medium of ‘words on a page.’

I’ve lost count of the number of times someone publishing-related (not my publisher though, natch) has told me ‘oh but men don’t buy books, and they definitely don’t buy erotica, so we make the covers to appeal to women.’ Can you see the flaw in this? Course you can – covers designed to appeal to women may well put men off, because men are human and therefore influenced by their peers: they’re less likely to buy a book with a cover they interpret as ‘female-friendly’ because someone has effectively painted a barrier around it saying ‘this isn’t for you. If you buy it you’ll be the odd one out.’

I’ve used Google stats for the following, and it’s worth noting that Google’s demographic info can never be 100% accurate (and it also forces people into a gender binary, which naturally is a flaw in and of itself). But anyway. Here are my gender demographics – blue is male, green is female:

Sexuality isn’t simple

The info above doesn’t conclusively prove anything, so don’t go showing it to a proper journalist or anything. But what it does show, I think, is that sexuality is far more complicated than we’re tricked into believing.

I frequently talk about how women like sex too, and that it isn’t just a currency with which we barter for money or love, despite the constant stream of depressing sex advice that seems to assume it is. I think that male sexuality falls victim to the same assumptions. This idea that men are sex-obsessed, and only after one thing, is one of the foundations on which the original bullshit story is built. If sex is such a grotesque necessity for men then everything they do with it must be disgusting: the porn they watch, the toys they use, the dirty things they get up to alone behind closed doors, etc.

But actually that’s just as crap as the claim that women lie back and think of England. Not only does it paint every single man into the same sexual corner, but it spectacularly fails to understand the vast differences between individual sexuality (not to mention those who don’t identify with one side or other of the gender binary). It also fucks with morality, assigning moral actions to things which are at best amoral (such as wanking) and painting men as creatures incapable of making moral choices when their sexual desires are involved.

This started as a light-hearted blog, aimed at showing men that they’re being short-changed by society’s views on how they should and shouldn’t wank. It’s turned into something much more depressing. But it doesn’t always have to be this way. As women have gradually changed society’s views on female sexuality (Women can wank too! And watch porn! And be the architects of our own sexual fulfilment!) I think we can change what people think about men as well.

We can start by not giggling when guys buy sex toys, or read erotic stories. When we’ve mastered that, perhaps we can move on to the idea that men – like women – are unique individuals, whose sexuality can’t be easily generalised about or packaged. Then comes the wankers’ revolution. If you don’t want to join in then please step aside: it might get a little bit sticky.