Sometimes when I am having an argument with a complete twat about consent, they argue that consent is difficult and the fluid nature of it means that life is so hard for people that they might as well just NOT HAVE SEX AT ALL because they’ll never be sure if their partner likes it. At this point I smash my face repeatedly into whatever firm objects there are to hand, and explain to them that before throwing all their toys out of the pram they might like to instead try communicating with their partner, and watching/listening for those sexy clues (verbal, non-verbal, a combination of the two) that someone gives you when they’re keen.

At some point in the conversation, aforementioned twat might say this:

“Oh, I suppose you want me to get them to SIGN A CONTRACT or something saying ‘I declare that I consent to this sex’ before I even lean in to KISS THEM?!”

And it is at this point that my head explodes, spraying passers-by with the messy detritus of the by-product of their twattery. Because there’s a mistake here. A massive and fundamental one.

Good2Go app and consent

This week yet another shiny new sex app was launched. The aim of it was to get people thinking about consent, and the app itself does… well… some things that sort of miss the point. There’s a Slate article here that explains what the app does, but in essence the idea is that you and your partner both use the app to record the fact that you are ‘Good2Go’ (i.e. have sex, although there’s little detail about specifics) and then you have sex. And then… what? Magically everything you do is consensual and nothing can ever go wrong?

The app does flag that consent can be withdrawn at any time, which is useful, but not massively so, because fundamentally the app is based on exactly the same misconception as the idea of a consent ‘contract’: that consent is a tickbox. Once ticked it can be unticked, but it’s a firm and decisive ‘OK.’

How I like to get sexual consent

Perhaps the reason the contract idea sounds so tempting to twats is that it sounds a bit legal – a bit ‘official’. Of course the sex you’re having is official and totally A-OK: someone has consented to it. They have rubber-stamped your sex plans, signed their name on a dotted line at the end of a piece of paper, ticked a box, pressed a button on an app. You’re ‘good to go.’

Unfortunately, this is not the kind of consent I want when I’m fucking: it’s the kind of consent I want when I’m selling someone insurance.

“Do you understand the risks, sir? Have you read the small print?”

“Why yes I do, and I have.”

“OK, please sign the dotted line then prepare for the sexing to begin.”

It is the least sexy thing in the entire fucking world, and sexual relationships just don’t fucking happen like that. If they do, you are either a fetishist with a really niche role-play fantasy, or you’re doing sex wrong. If I want to fuck, here’s the kind of consent I’m after:

“Touch me. There. Oh fuck, yeah that’s it. Bit higher. Mmm. Bite my nipples. That’s good. Oh please put my cock in your mouth. Like that. Bit more gently. Aaah, perfect. Fuck. Fuck that’s good.”

Or, if you’re less chatty during sex itself, here’s the kind of consent I’m after:

“I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to get shagged with a strapon.”

“Sweet. Want me to show you?”

“Umm… would it hurt?”

“Maybe. Tell you what – I’ll use tonnes of lube, and we’ll start slowly and take it from there, what do you reckon?”

Note that he hasn’t explicitly offered a safeword or asked me if I’ll stop if he tells me to because for me that goes without saying. If it doesn’t go without saying for you, then say it. Anyone who thinks you’re a dick for saying it is not worth fucking.

Other forms of consent include guys begging me to fuck them, guys staring at me with sexy, sexy eyes, then raising eyebrows as if to say ‘do you want this?’ as they reach round to touch my arse. They include me telling a guy a story about a particular fantasy in which I struggle a bit against him while he fucks me, and that guy fucking me in that way, but stopping if I say ‘ooh, fuck, ouch, your elbow’s on my hair’ or ‘OK that was hot but can we switch round now?’ They include all of these things and more.

Crucially, consent in all of these situations is individual to me, and to the person I’m with: it’s personal. If any single one of you points at this blog post and uses it as an excuse to raise your eyebrow and grab the arse of a person you fancy, then scream at them “BUT GOTN SAID THAT WAS CONSENT!” you have utterly and completely missed the point.

But what is consent, exactly?

Consent may be hard to explain, because it’s individual, but that doesn’t mean it is hard to do. You communicate with your partners about what they want, what they need and what they are absolutely dripping hot for, and you keep listening. As you kiss them, touch them, fuck them, and cuddle afterwards. And yes, I am fully aware that this blog post is in no way helpful to someone who is stuck in the ‘contract’ mindset: someone who wants a blogger to give them a list of words and body language signals and phrases that they can tick off and feel comfortable that they definitely did all the right things and established consent.

But that’s deliberate. I haven’t done it for the same reason I haven’t told you how to have the perfect conversation or work out whether this person you’ve approached in a bar definitely fancies you: sometimes things just don’t work like that. I need to stress wholeheartedly that I am not an expert in this. I am an expert when it comes to negotiating the kind of sex I want from my own partners, but I am not an expert in what you should do with yours. If you want some more considered, expert advice on this, do what I do and learn from Bish.

What I do feel qualified to tell you, though, is what consent is not: it is not a simple rubber-stamp ‘OK.’ Saying ‘should I have a contract?’ or ‘should I have an app?’ is based on the fundamental misunderstanding that because we have a legal definition of ‘consent’, that gaining it should be done in the same way as you’d go about gaining planning permission, or something equally tedious.

Do not ask your partner whether they’re ‘Good2Go’, like you’re a dodgy car salesperson trying to get them to sign off on a ropey deal. You’re not looking to get them to agree to something, you’re looking to find out if this is something they actually want. Ask them: is this fun? Do you want this? What’s great and what’s not working? Ask with your eyes, your hands, your mouth, and every tool you have to communicate. And keep asking.

That’s not just how you get consent, it’s how you get good sex.

“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.