If I had a quid for every time I’ve taken a pregnancy test even though I’m 99% sure I couldn’t possibly be pregnant, I’d have enough money to babyproof my house.

This week’s guest blogger is Liz, and she’s going to talk to you about her feelings on sexual health. Or, more accurately, what she’s nicknamed ‘sexual hypochondria’: the line between sensible worry and terrible panic, and the fact that when you’re worried about your sexual health it can be hard to tell the difference. If you like her writing do go and check out her Tumblr – Beaux Bisous.

As with any blog about health, I would be a total arse if I didn’t point out up front that I am not a doctor. Neither is Liz. Therefore this isn’t a blog about how to treat STIs, the best ways to test for STIs, or even the best way to avoid STIs. For all those you need to visit your actual doctor. But for a post that evokes the panic of not knowing, and the relief when you find out you’re clean? Well, I’ll hand you over to Liz…

Sexual Hypochondria

I think most people have slight hypochondriac tendencies, even without realising. Feeling crap, remembering an odd-tasting glass of water the evening before, and subsequently spending the rest of the day entertaining the possibility of having contracted cholera is probably a fairly normal tangent for the human mind. But what is, in my opinion, even more normal, is sexual hypochondria. Anxiety to keep our bodies healthy is one thing, but genitalia is definitely a whole different ball game (no pun intended). With more and more contraceptive products and statistics to differentiate between, and seemingly endless consequences to not having immaculately safe sex, it’s no wonder that we get easily worried.

Or is it? As Mean Girls’ Coach Carr helpfully pointed out: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.” Ignoring the fact that dying is a fact of life, and thanks to the miracle of pregnancy you’re actually reading this, there’s actually a fairly sound point in that sentence. The only way to guarantee lifelong perfect sexual health is just to avoid sex altogether – sorry, where’s the fun in that? Fun and risks go hand in hand. And if you’re never going to prevent occasional sexual health issues, then the fear of what’s going to happen and when is a normal occurrence. It’s akin to praying that you don’t suddenly end up with the flu in your busiest week of work. I’m not trying to make a poorly disguised attack on services like the NHS, because I do believe there is by far enough information out there. I suppose the point of this post is to remind people that being hyperconscious of sexual health is definitely better than having no awareness whatsoever.

I certainly fall into the hyperconscious camp. Despite the fact that I’ve now been on the pill for six months, the only sexual partner I’ve had in that time is my current boyfriend, and the whole concept of not using condoms was a new experience for me. So in the two months we’ve been together, that hasn’t stopped me googling horror stories of the negligible percentage who have managed to get pregnant, and despite the fact that we’re both clean of STDs, I found myself ordering a pregnancy test and an STD self-test kit just for peace of mind.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve taken the morning after pill a few times, got myself antibiotics for a UTI with the explanation of “I think my vagina’s on fire”, and sternly watched one guy reapply four condoms before we were both satisfied that he’d put it on properly. Sexy? I think not. I’ve definitely improved, minus the cautious tests, to the point where I’ve even managed to ignore various websites’ warnings of warts (ugh) and tearing (please, no) and actually engage in anal sex.

Whatever kind of sex you’re having – genital, oral, anal – you don’t need me to tell you that there are risks. But the kind of relief that comes with regularly checking, depending on your sex life, is not one to pass up. I reckon the amusing fixation with sexual health is definitely more critical than general health because it is our livelihood. And what’s more, people like me can order as many self-test kits as they like, but if I’m clean, I’m clean. That’s not going to do anything to the rising number of STDs and unwanted pregnancies, much as I wish I could single-handedly change the actions of numerous people. Feel free to laugh at me, I do. But the point of sharing my slightly ridiculous means of maintaining good sexual health is to normalise this sexual hypochondria that we all have. All it takes is a free test kit through the post, a cheap pregnancy test from your local pharmacy, or an appointment with your doctor to reassure or solve your worries.

I may be inwardly dancing with glee at having written about a topic that even GOTN “cringed” about, and I do realise that even the title itself could seem far less interesting than posts on bondage, feminism and erotica, but this is something very real. Go forth and enact your own erotica, but please, leave pubic lice out of it.

Sincerely, Little Miss Safety

If you’d like to read more of Liz’s stuff, head to her Tumblr blog. She writes some beautiful and touching personal posts, and I’m delighted to have her here.

If you have the same tendencies as Liz (and I) when it comes to sexual health, and you want to learn more, then you know exactly who to visit.

 

Ah, guest bloggers. You make me laugh, cry, masturbate furiously, and want to hug myself with sheer delight that there are so many horny pervs out there who are just like me. This week’s guest blogger, Walter, has done exactly that. He’s captured the sense of delicious and electric arousal that comes from a seriously horny memory. Those fucks you know will never leave your head. The sex you return to over and over again when you need relief.

Please welcome Walter, who has a filthy hot story to tell about nostalgia wanks.

Nostalgia wanks

The initial spark can be small; an arousing image, a few words that make me go: “Mmm, that’s hot”, sometimes a mere suggestion of a particularly sexy activity, and there it is: a familiar twitch between my legs tells me that for the next couple of minutes my thoughts will be preoccupied with one thing. What can I say? I’m young and my sex life is less intense than I would like it to be. What I need to start wanking is more of an excuse than a reason.

But once I get started, things change. As I give myself a tentative stroke, as I feel the blood rushing, my cock swelling, as I finally reach down and squeeze it, enjoying the feeling of bare skin in my hand – that initial impulse is no longer enough. It’s too late to put on porn (it’s hard to type with one hand), so I search in my mind for something that will make me harder and desperate for release. I try to create an other: a mate, a partner, a fucktoy or a mistress that will make me shoot spunk all over myself and possibly my surroundings.

But imagined people don’t do it for me. They’re blurry and abstract, more a collection of body parts – a pair of tits, a cunt, a tongue, an arse – than a person. I need someone tangible. Someone with a voice, a smile, a personality. Someone real.

Quite often, I settle on ex-lovers, resulting in what I call “nostalgia wanks.” One reason is that I know them fairly well. I can remember what made them unique: the way they kissed, how their cunt hair felt on my face, how one of them used to say “Come” while gently pulling me deeper in just the way that made me squirt-come inside her in a matter of seconds.

Of course, it’s not just their bodies that become so arousing. It’s the emotions as well. In my mind, I go back to the beginnings of Us – the nervousness of our first dates, the excitement of first being naked together; the first time she took me in her mouth, and the first time I heard her come.

I also go back to the ending: the sullen fucks after a fight, with me biting her shoulder and roughly fondling her tits, reaching down to grope her cunt and see if she’s wet yet, her reaching behind and yanking on my cock. I imagine all that was, all that could have been, and sometimes I make up scenarios improbable or downright impossible…

I imagine our meeting, a little awkward at first, after all this time. We sit in a café, talking about our lives now, catching up. She seems happy and confident. She smiles a lot and throws me long looks, which I’d have no trouble interpreting if it wasn’t for our mutual history. Surely she wouldn’t want…?

“How about,” she says, moving closer, “we go to your place?”

A nod is about all I can manage.

I’m still hesitant when we arrive, but she kisses me just as the door closes behind us. One of my hands rests on her back, the other instantly finds the familiar curve of her hip. I pull her closer, our bodies touching. I’m hard and I think she can feel it, too.

“Do you want it?” she asks, stopping for a moment.

“Yes,” I gasp, and she reaches towards my belt.

We move into my tiny flat, pulling shirts over our heads, not bothering to turn on the light. All I see are glimpses of her body, brought out by the street lights from outside: her pointy breasts, high cheekbones. I kiss her neck, immersing myself in the familiar, intoxicating smell. A part of me wants to savour the moment, but I’m too hungry for her, to desperate to lose myself in her. I hear her sigh and I nearly come, pressing my cock to her stomach.

But she has other ideas.

She pushes me onto the bed, then reaches down to pull her pants from underneath her skirt. She straddles my face; I can smell her cunt, want to dive right into it. I grab her arse, try to push her a bit lower…

“Don’t be so impatient,” she says mockingly, and I obey, give in to her completely.

I hear her breathe once, twice, then something wet falls on my face, something warm and salty.

I start to protest, but it turns me on too much. I strain my neck upwards, lap her piss straight from her cunt. I grab my cock and start pumping.

“Do you like that?” she asks.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you want to fuck me?”

A vigorous nod.

“Well,”she says, as the stream of piss stops. “Bad luck.”

She gives me a kiss on the cheek gets up, picking her shirt from the floor. I want to say something, but I’m too close to release, so I keep moving my hand faster. As the door closes behind her I come, hard, with a choked gasp.

I open my eyes and come back to reality, feeling wonderfully empty and calm.

Are you the sort of person who emails me every now and then saying ‘stick to filth, stop with the feminist rants’? Look away now.

Are you a guy who claims he is a feminist but makes self-deprecatory jokes about how if he did the washing up he’d only do it badly so there’s really no point? Are you the kind of person who says ‘ah, men are just useless at housework though, aren’t they?’ This one’s for you.

Chore wars: housework and feminism

First thing’s first: men are not shit at housework. When my partner forgets to do the washing up, or the washing, or the tidying or the bathroom or any one of the million things that humans need to do in order to keep a household in working order, I do not roll my eyes. I do not tut and say ‘oh, baby, you’re such a man.’ That would be sexist.

When I complain to a friend that I’m sick and fucking tired of picking socks off the floor and changing bedsheets and the fact that I am always – always – the one who spots that the fridge needs cleaning before it grows a new species, I do not expect my friend to roll her eyes either: sexist.

Housework is a feminist issue. As I feel compelled to point out, it’s not the most important one. But it matters. It matters, precisely because it doesn’t always feel like it matters.

‘Oh, it’s only the washing up.’

‘It’s just a bit of vacuuming.’

‘It takes two seconds, so why make such a fuss?’

Thing is, as many people have pointed out: it’s unpaid work, so it’s not ‘just’ anything. Sure, it only takes a few minutes to run round the house picking up clothes and chucking them in the washing machine. Half a minute to put the powder in, choose the right setting, and set it off. Only ten minutes at the end to take the washing out, hang it up, and fold away the stuff I’ve negligently left drying there since halfway through last week. But it’s ten minutes of my time, and my time is precious.

When all the household chores are added together, I spend roughly ten hours a week cooking, cleaning, tidying, sorting, and screaming silent screams into my pillow because holy Christ this is not what I want to do with my life. Then, when I have finished with the screaming and I get onto a bit of a moan, people (mostly men, but often women too) tell me that it isn’t important. That, in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter that I’ve had to clean the hob again because ha ha jokes when it comes to housework men are just not programmed to notice what needs doing.

A rock, a dishcloth and a hard place

This rant’s been sitting in my drafts for a while, as I pluck up the courage to spew it onto the internet and have people go ‘oh GOTN you’re so clichéd with your old-fashioned caring about domestic labour’, but this week BBC Woman’s Hour launched the ‘chore wars’ calculator, so I thought it was a good opportunity to let rip. Chore Wars is a bit of a cutesy, not massively accurate way to calculate who does the most chores in the household, and whether the split is fair.

This is not a feminist issue just because traditionally housework was seen as a ‘woman’s domain’ – it’s an issue because polling shows that much of the unpaid household work still falls to women, even in households where the amount of paid work is relatively even. It’s also a big issue because of how we still talk, think and write about it. When it comes to household chores, my male partner has two options:

• help out, and receive praise for being an amazing human
• not help out, and get some mild tuts and eye-rolls and a pat on his simple, masculine head

Ah, shit – in these options I have automatically used the phrase ‘help out’, as if he is stepping down from on high to swoop in and help this damsel in marigolds rather than performing a task that, ethically, is his to own. God, I hate me. And I also hate the fact that even on International Women’s Day this year, in relation to a press release about the uneven split of unpaid domestic work, Reuters’ headline smugly pronounced that Norwegian men are ‘most helpful’ with housework. Helpful. Not ‘contributing a fairer share’, but ‘helpful’. Thanks.

Talking of thanks, where’s my fucking pat on the head? Whenever my partner manages to do one load of washing or tidy the lounge, I have been conditioned to actually tell him ‘thank you’, like he is a particularly well-trained puppy doing clever tricks for biscuits. I myself am perpetuating the myth that household tasks are mine to own and his to deign to help with, by rewarding him just for getting off his arse. He hasn’t been conditioned to praise me for scrubbing a frying pan because I’m a woman, so apparently it’s just my goddamn job.

When it comes to the housework I have two options as well, but mine aren’t quite as tempting: I get to choose between being a servant or a nag.

Housework and sex

This is a sex blog primarily, and that’s because the vast majority of things in my life are actually linked to sex in some way. I am a horny, angry, feisty slag, and even something as simple as housework is linked to sex in my mind. I don’t find it enjoyably filthy to sashay around the house, naked but for a small cotton apron, and bend over to scrub the floors while boys wank in a corner (although that might be hot in the right context), but I do draw a strong mental link between sex and housework.

Housework is not sexy. Standing up to my elbows in a sinkful of grease is not sexy. Selecting the right washing cycle to remove jizz from the bedsheets is not sexy. It’s not even sexy when I strip to my knickers and scrub round the edge of the bath.

And so, when I do all the housework, I have less sex. I’m not on ‘sex strike’ until a guy swoops in to do it – why would I deliberately forego something I love just because I’m angry? It’s not a conscious and deliberate choice, it’s a byproduct of emotional and physical exhaustion.

If I’ve spent all day doing housework I’ve had no time to think about what I might like to do to him. No time to walk, or cycle, or do sit ups, or any of the things I do that make me feel sexy in a sweaty/musky/messy way. No time to remember the filthy fuck we had last week that I haven’t got round to blogging yet. The mental narrative running through my head on a good day involves any number of ‘mmm’s, ‘unnngh’s and ‘oh God I want him to bend me over the coffee table’s. Post-housework, my brain says ‘fuck this shit forever’ and hides in a hermit cave of boiling, passive-aggressive rage.

Bottom line: if I’ve spent ages hoovering the living room, I’m unlikely to want to fuck on the carpet.

Is this blog post sexist?

This isn’t a blog post in which I berate the male half of the species for not picking up a fucking duster. There are millions of men who are not only capable of doing this stuff, but who just get the hell on with it each and every day. Men who – day in, day out – consider the housework to be part and parcel of their role as a significant half of an equal partnership. Or – if they are poly or living in a flatshare – a significant contributing member of a group. Or even just on their own.

These are the men who don’t refer to spending time with their children as ‘babysitting’, or who declare with puffed-up pride that they’re ‘treating’ their girlfriend by cooking dinner, thus taking away perhaps 10% of the unpaid work that she does without thanks every day.

On the other side, there are women who do nothing around the house and drive their partners up the wall. These people are – unless there are genuinely good reasons such as issues with illness or a drastically different split in out-of-home paid work – equally selfish of course. But when their partners complain they’re unlikely to be met by well-meaning friends who roll their eyes and tut ‘women, eh? What can you do?’

Feminist men do the cooking

I’m not writing this just because I hate housework – most of us hate housework: it’s a thankless, miserable task. This isn’t about individual items to tick off a household ‘to do’ list: it’s about hypocrisy.

Because I’ve met men who go on marches and pickets. Who sign petitions and have angry rants and show solidarity to women on all manner of feminist issues, then go home and expect to be worshipped as a God because they spent two hours cooking dinner on Sunday.

If this isn’t you: well done. If this is you, have a little think about why you’re willing to write off unpaid labour as ‘not really my problem/not my area of expertise/something that magically happens when I’m not looking.’

Then put down your ‘awesome feminist’ badge, and pick up a fucking dishcloth.

Questions and comments

I love a good ruck as much as the next opinionated blogger. But here are some questions/comments that I anticipate I might receive as a result of this post, and what my response will be if you give them to me.

I’m a man, and I do exactly half of the housework. I am OUTRAGED by your rant. 

Well done. If you do exactly half of the housework and you never moan about it or expect unnecessary thanks, then you are good. But not ‘good’ in the sense that ‘you get to sit on a moral high horse and shout at women who are frustrated by the traditionally unequal split of household chores’, just ‘good’ in the sense that ‘you meet the minimum standards of human decency.’

I am a man, and I do more housework than my female partner. I am OUTRAGED by your rant. 

When you complain about her general slovenliness, are you greeted by people saying ‘well, you have to expect it really – women are so shit at this’? I suspect not. But well done for doing loads of housework, and if you’re frustrated I suggest you send your partner a link to this blog.

In my relationship, we have come to the arrangement that one of us earns the money and the other keeps house. 

Congratulations. If you have both agreed to this and find it fair, then good luck to you both.

There are certain household tasks that I cannot do because I have a medical condition/have to work much longer hours than my partner. 

There are many reasons why household tasks might not be evenly split. That’s obviously not what I’m talking about here though.

Have you tried training/teaching your partner to do better?

He is not a fucking dog. He is an adult who knows how to do this shit. Besides, this rant does not just come because he – a flawed individual like the rest of us – pisses me off sometimes by failing to do his fair share. This rant has come because he is not the only one by a long shot, and because I hate other people’s ‘men are useless’ excuses for this crap even more than I hate scrubbing pans and folding laundry. For the record, though, my partner is much better than many other dudes I’ve known, and he does what decent humans do, which is recognise where he falls down and try to get better at doing stuff. Sadly he doesn’t have a blog in which he can rant about my failings, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that I fail too, in equally important ways.

Isn’t it just that women have higher standards than men and men are more happy to live in filth?

This question is a BONUS one added after a Twitter comment. This one’s thrown at me a lot, so worth tackling. Different individuals have different tolerances for mess: this is normal because we are human. But, unless you are asserting that ‘men’ as a homogenous mass, are all happy to eat off food-soiled plates, wear clothes that have never been washed, allow their bathrooms to smell of piss and mould, and never eat food that has had more than a five-minute blast in the microwave, then this is a massive red herring. As a lazy, slobby, twat who is generally happy to have dirty clothes carpeting my bedroom, I can assure you it’s not about differing standards: it’s about the time spent on work, and who holds responsibility.

This isn’t like you, GOTN, to rant about what ‘all men’ are like.

I’m not. Not ‘all men’ are like this. There are men who do their fair share, who thank their partners for doing theirs, and who never refer to caring for their children as ‘babysitting’. I’m not saying ‘all men are shit at housework’, I am saying that if you are a man and you are shit at housework then that’s a fucking problem. Moreover if you let a female partner do most of the household chores, you sure as shit don’t get to call yourself a feminist.