It’s late, you’re tired and horny, but home is a long way away and the alleys are riddled with CCTV cameras and drunk revellers, giving one no privacy in which to administer a suck-job to an equally horny friend. At these times, the UK is ill-equipped to cater to your deviant lusts, unless you’re willing to pay a week’s rent for one night in a scummy hotel.

When it comes to impulsive sex spaces, other countries do it far better.

Korean DVD bangs

In Korea, there exist special rooms called ‘DVD bangs’. At least, there used to. It’s been a while since I was there, and they’ve probably now been replaced with ‘video streaming bangs’ or ‘Angry Birds bangs’ or whatever the kids prefer these days.

In Korean, ‘bang’ means ‘room’, and so DVD bangs were essentially just places where you’d go to hire a DVD and watch it on a big telly – the kind you either couldn’t afford to have at home or would reject because its gigantic size made it impractical for anything other than a dividing wall. You enter the complex, pick a DVD, thumb through your phrase book to work out how to say ‘how much?’ in Korean, then the person behind the counter takes your money and directs you to a room with a number on the door.

We picked something appalling and shit – I cannot remember what. Some bullshit early-90s movie that we’d seen a million times before. We weren’t there for the DVD so much as the ‘bang’, and the idea of being able to hire a private room for a couple of hours for less than the cost of a vodka and tonic was just about perfect. The room itself was small – dark and dingy and furnished with just the aforementioned TV, a sticky leather sofa and – we took this as proof that it wasn’t just for watching – a roll of toilet paper.

Japanese Love Hotels

When you mention quick fucks in paid privacy, lots of people will leap up and shout “ooh, do you know in Japan they have kitsch hotels designed just for fucking, with pictures of Hello Kitty in bondage ropes on the walls?”

To which I reply, “yeah, except there’s usually more bondage than Hello Kitty if you pick the right ones.”

As he emerged from the Subway exit I went a bit weak at the knees. This guy had swept into my life on a wave of filth and heat and the fear that our time would be short. We didn’t touch in public, but at the entrance to the station I turned him east and pointed out my favourite love hotel. A beaten-up, garish building which featured a room I’d wanted to use for a long time.

It had chains all over the bed – cuffs and collars and even some medieval stocks – positioned right at the end of the bed so you could either get in doggy with your head through the hole and be fucked in a way that wouldn’t kill your knees, or standing up on the floor, with your partner gripping your hips as you choked happy fuck noises in the other direction.

They say Japan’s got it nailed when it comes to quickie shags. To be fair, the sweaty, desperate, let’s-try-it-all-before-time-runs-out shag I had with that guy certainly put it on the leader board. But as far as I’m concerned, if you’re wandering the streets late at night with a horny partner, there’s one place that hits the perfect spot.

Amsterdam sex booths

It stinks in here: sweat and spunk and sorrow. A thousand lonely wanks by a thousand lonely people crouched in this wipe-clean booth. We bundle in, hoping we snuck past the guy on the front desk without him realising there were two of us. We huddle together on the damp bench, push the door closed. There’s a mirror on the door and a TV behind the bench – an awkward way to get round the problem of space.

When you put a Euro in the slot something filthy starts playing, and you watch the reflection in the back of the door while you wank yourself to a climax.

Unless you’re us. If you’re us you smoosh as close as you can together, pushing fingers and hands inside each other’s clothes. Rubbing, kissing, crushing forearms against mouths to prevent any noise. You pause – one beat, two beats – hearing tinny music from outside and the oh-so-dirty shuffling from the booth next door. The rhythmic shuffling of a guy on his own.

I press a button, flip the porn, browsing the five or six available channels to find one that isn’t awful. Two women. Three women. A gaping ass. A gang bang. Mascara-streaked, sobbing, guilt-inducing shit. Ah, better: a fuck. All we really want.

I drop to my knees and start sucking him – the smell of his shower gel mingling with the musky post-jerk-off spunky scent of others. It’s like being in that sex cinema all over again – the ghosts of wankers past linger through the fluids they left behind. He pushes my head down onto his cock, puts another Euro in the slot. Reclines.

I turn around, face squashed against the door of the tiny booth, barely room to move. Yet somehow I manage to get my knickers down just far enough that I can sit on it. Squish. Slick. He lets out a muffled cry and I bite my lip. At least one of us has to remain quiet. Quickly, silently, I fuck him with hard strokes, trying not to touch the walls too much, struggling to keep time as my legs start to tremble with arousal. I slip.

It’s easier on the floor. Squatting in front of the bench I can grip his thighs for balance, feeling the wet lust dripping into my knickers and the twitching of his arousal in my mouth. He puts in another Euro and whispers “please. Please. I’m going to come.” So I suck him harder, I push my head as far down on his cock as it will go so I get to feel the pressure as the jet of spunk hits the back of my throat.

His legs tense up, and he presses the button – flicking quickly through all the channels. Two girls. Three girls. Gaping ass. Gang bang. A montage of porn that he’s no longer really watching, just a visual collage to hammer home the seedy, desperate nature of the booth itself. As he comes in the back of my mouth I close my throat, collecting his spunk there while I breathe in through my nose.

Sweat. Come. Guilt. Sadness. Lust.

All for just three Euros.

I hate spiders. They terrify me to the point of irrationality. I’ve barged people out of the way to escape them, reflex-kicked my bare feet at walls, and fallen off beds when I suspect there’s one near the headboard. This fear pisses me off, but it’s so guttural and instinctive I doubt I can do much about it. I live with it, because it’s not like I’ll get rid of all the spiders any time soon, and besides – they’re relatively easy to avoid if I have kind friends ready with a glass and a square of paper to hand.

Fear is easy to live with if you rarely have to confront it. But every now and then it ends up confronting me, and I realise that I wasn’t being a big brave girl all along, I was just avoiding something that was so enormous and terrifying I didn’t dare to face it.

I fear being naked.

Body-image and irrational terror

That might sound like a weird confession coming from a sex blogger: I have loads of sex, and I’m frequently naked. But despite getting my kit off on a regular basis, I haven’t combated the fear, I’ve just been finding cunning ways to avoid it. Like the time when I put a mug over a huge spider and left it on my kitchen floor for a week – I’ve dealt with the immediate problem, but the problem still festered away.

When I was carefree and fucking lots of different guys, I’d spend long hours shaving legs and armpits and crotch, plucking stray hairs from random places on my body, sucking my stomach in and avoiding cake. It didn’t make me fear nakedness any less, it just gave me a temporary stay on the hatred I felt for my body. Being naked with guys was vital to my happiness, and being attractive seemed like an impossible goal, but one I should strive for nonetheless. I could be… not gorgeous or stunning exactly just… prettier. Better.

Since I got into a relationship, my fear and hatred of my own body has been dulled. He loves it, so I try to ignore the whispering voice in the back of my head that says it’s just not good enough. Again, though, this isn’t really dealing with the problem any more than putting a mug over a spider will magically send it outside.

Getting my tits out in public

It was hot on the beach. Not the kind of wet-picnic, blue-lipped misery you’d get in Britain, but glorious, blue-sea hot like you get in those glossy holiday brochures. It was also one of those beaches where most people are topless. I was fascinated. These were alien creatures with a philosophy I could barely comprehend – people for whom the fear of tan lines was far greater than the fear of getting their tits out. In fact, looking at the way some of them were strolling around with ice creams, I had a sneaking suspicion that these people weren’t scared of nakedness at all. Imagine. Watching women walk around nearly nude in public gives me similar cowardly envy as watching the playful kids at school pick up daddy-long-legs with their bare hands.

I took my top off in the sea.

Not properly off – it was wrapped around my wrist, tightly like a security blanket. Just in case the tide should suddenly rush out and I was left standing there in half a bikini and an invisible blanket of shame.

“You look awesome,” he said. And “I want to touch you.” And, oh, a million variations on this: you’re beautiful, sexy, hot. I love you. I love the way you are. I love your body. Professing his desire for something that I’ve only ever felt disdain for.

And I wanted to say ‘thanks.’ I’d have loved to do what my mother taught me, and accept a compliment with grace. But I couldn’t do better than a choking, angry “fuck off.” Because he can’t love my body, of course – it’s awful. Horrible. Monstrously wrong and different and bad and appalling.  Just as no one can ever really want a pet tarantula – they just get them to show other people how brave they are. How cool. How unusual. My irrational, fearful self knows this with the blind conviction of someone who is almost certainly wrong.

“We should go to a nudist beach.”

“Hell no.”

“We don’t have to. It’s just… well… it might be fun.” He grinned. “I know you’re nervous, but what if we did it together?”

So we did it together. Shaking with fear and sweating under the flimsy layers of cotton summer clothes, I followed him to a place where it wasn’t just OK to be naked, it was expected. Embraced. The whole thing seemed absurd to me – the idea that people would enjoy being naked more than they liked being clothed. This wasn’t just a practical response to tan lines, it was a genuine love of something that made me nauseous with dread. It wasn’t a fear of being judged – how could I possibly pass judgment on a stranger when the hollow ache of my own terror is rendering me insensible? And how could they possibly pass judgment on me when I couldn’t imagine them having anything other than the same ridiculous worries?

I didn’t fear these people. I feared myself. I feared my body.

Just get over it

This week, the amazing @ArchedEyebrowBR blogged on Summertime body shaming. She highlighted the ludicrous simplicity of the idea that in order to get a bikini body you just have to ‘get a bikini and put it on your body’. Of course it’s not that easy. It’s definitely not that easy for me. Because although my rational mind wants to stamp out all the body-shaming, all the self-loathing and misery, it’s not just a case of ‘forgetting about it’ or ‘getting over it.’

If it were that easy I’d have done it already. I’d have embraced the fact that – in truth – my body isn’t monstrous or horrible or any kind of enemy: it’s actually fine. Sometimes fatter, sometimes thinner, sometimes hairier or paler or bruised for no apparent reason. That would be the rational thing to think, and I know right now that it is the truth in the same way as I know right now that spiders are more scared of me than I am of them, and it’s not like we live in Australia or anything where the little fuckers can kill you with a single bite.

But self-loathing isn’t rational, or easily brushed aside.

With the sun shining, my boy whispering words of kind encouragement, I got ready to do it. I set my brain to work overdrive in ‘rational’ mode, telling me that my body was gorgeous and my concerns were unnecessary, that no one was looking and no one cared and those that did look would probably be smiling. Finally, eventually, I took off my bikini. Hooray for me! Well done! I overcame my fear of being naked! What a happy ending!

Once it was off, I lay naked for ten minutes sobbing face-down into a beach towel.

I’m not saying I’ll always be like this, or even that I’m guaranteed to be like this – on a good day with a fair wind and a happy outlook I’ll probably be less tearful and more strident. Nor am I saying that anyone else should be like this, or should feel obliged to get over it if they are. All I’m saying is that it’s hard. It’s harder than I make out sometimes, when I write rational, angry blogs about what is not wrong with you. It’s harder than just ‘getting confident’ or ‘ignoring your worries’ or ‘facing your fears’. I’m saying that I’ve stamped on a few, but there are still a million spiders. Sometimes I worry that there always will be.

I am a sucker for colloquialisms, particularly when they’re to do with sex. One of the first things I learn when I go to other countries is find out their dirty sex words. Get me drunk enough and I’ll share with you some of my favourite words and phrases. To be honest, even in a sober state I’ll happily explain to you how the Japanese word for ‘cunt’ is but two tiny dots away from the word for ‘mango’, and how this got me out of a fair bit of trouble when I was practising my letters.

But some of the best colloquialisms come from Ireland. It’s not just that I read them while imagining a gorgeously lilting Irish accent, it’s the fact that the words themselves sound so much more playful than their boring London equivalents.

Lad. Mickey. Ride.

Awesome.

Today’s guest blogger has some super-hot things to say about words. What’s more, she gives us an overview of these pretty, playful Irish colloquialisms. She’s brand new to sex blogging, so if you love her words then please do check out her blog – Abbi Rode. You can also follow her on Twitter at @OCDcrankypants.

Words I love, words I hate

Everyone calls their parts different things, at different times with different people. I know most girls don’t like the words I like but I’m not speaking for most girls, I’m speaking for me.

My favourite two words for my holiest of holies are pussy and cunt. There is no way to mistake the sexual in those two, it oozes from them. And if I’m talking about sex then I want powerful sex words to use.

They’re actually the only two I like. I’m sure it started with Don Draper (not the actual, but a guy who was like him, all confidence). He only had to look at me and talk to me to get me wet. One time he had me laid out on the bed, utterly exposed he was kneeling at the edge of the bed, he had my legs wrapped around him. But he was entirely in control. He wouldn’t even let me sit up. He looked directly at me and told me to be quiet. This immediately got me breathing fast, then he licked his thumb, and rubbed it up the lips, then put his thumb in his mouth, leaned down and whispered “I love this cunt.” I gasped, he again told me to be quiet or he’d stop. With his wet thumb he rubbed it again up the lips and I started to buck at this point, he held me still with one arm. Looked me directly in the eye and smelled his thumb and said “This is the best smelling cunt in the world, and I own it. I’m going to do exactly what I want to it.” It was him, how he was, the way he looked at my pussy and the way he got me so excited with the power of one word. That was it, I loved it ever since. But only said like that, only in the context of sex. I don’t even think he knew what he did that day. I don’t think he even cared, he was just doing what he wanted and I was almost incidental to that. He was in control, worshipping it getting the reactions he wanted.

From then on all he had to do was whisper in my ear, anywhere that we were, that he wanted my cunt, that he loved the smell of my cunt… anything with that word and it brought me straight back. So I love that word, I think more people should be aware of how sexy it is and get the pleasure from it, it’s the last really taboo word.

Pussy is another one that girls seem to hate. I know many feminists, who would be OK with cunt, still don’t like this one. But I do. It seems so guttural, so common, so… well… dirty and obvious. I just like it. I think it’s powerful and it can’t really be used in any other context than sex. You’re not going to the doctor to talk about your pussy, are you? And it’s a little tamer than cunt. You need descriptions for different excitement levels and these serve the purpose.

I don’t think I mind vagina, I just think it’s terribly unsexy. Again that’s what I’d say in a clinic. Even if discussing with my partner after the fact and he said “Is your vagina ok, I think I was a little rough”. Nope, don’t care for that at all. I did like that one guy used to refer to it as my ‘va-jean’. It was cute and it worked. Obviously not during sex, but general enquiries into its well-being “So, you got waxed yesterday, how’s your ‘va-jean’, ready for action?” Perfect.

Fanny – I’m not mad on this. It’s a word from childhood and the American understanding for it as ‘bum’ has it ruined for me. Either way, it’s not one I choose to use or hear used referring to me.

Now box, I hate. Just because I can’t understand how anyone thought it was a good description for something so warm, soft, inviting and categorically not angular. It makes no sense and my very rational mind is both confused and insulted by the term. It baffles me.

I can never settle on a word for my rack that I’m entirely comfortable with. I’m OK with tits, boobs, breasts. But each seems weird in the wrong context. I know that I do hate boobies, seems too childish, the same with titties. I may have to investigate this further?

While we’re on that I don’t think I ever say mickey either, it just seems the wrong end of comical. I think if I was insulting someone I might say it:

“Big swinging mickey, I’ve had better.”

Dick and cock are my equivalent to pussy and cunt, respectively. I love cock – read that however you want to. It’s meant every way. It’s my favourite word for my favourite part of a man. I do like dick every now and then, I need variety. And I don’t think I’ve come across anyone that’s taken umbrage to their member being called either of those things.

I don’t think I ever use the word lad, again unless in a somewhat comical way “And I walked in the kitchen and there he was with his lad out.”

And tool is only for insults, really isn’t it?

I have been known to refer to a particularly big penis as a weapon, I can’t take credit for this, I robbed it from a friend who used it when recommending someone.

This list could be endless.

Thanks Abbi, now I have to go and cold-shower away all these mental images of hot dudes getting their ‘lads’ out, and filthy men whispering dark somethings about my cunt. If you enjoyed the above, do check out AbbiRode.com, and let Abbi know about your own favourite sex words in the comments. Personally, I’ll swap you a Japanese word that means ‘the sound of wanking’ if you can give me ‘cunt’ in any other language.

And if you’re a sex blogger, particularly if you’re just starting out and want to build some traffic, I’d love to hear from you – check out my guest blog page and get in touch if you’d like to write something.