What do the following things have in common?

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

“I’m not really a ‘books’ sort of person.”

“Haha – your boyfriend’s a shortarse.”

Any guesses? Here’s the answer: they’re all things guys I’ve slept with have said to me shortly after I’ve met them.

How to chat up a woman

I’d be gobsmacked if anyone who writes about sex hasn’t been asked the question “So, how do I go about getting laid?” or something similar. I’ve been asked a fair few times, most recently I’ve been asked what someone should say to make girls like him. The generic ‘how to chat up a woman’ request. I’d love to be insightful and wise bout this, but unfortunately all I have is some very generic advice:

• if you want to sleep with women, talk to them
• listen to them, and try to establish whether you’ve got anything in common
• make the most of the opportunities afforded by the internet
• don’t be a dick

I think what the people who ask these questions are looking for is something more specific than this: some magic words or a few good conversation starters that will have the average lady slipping off her chair with arousal halfway through the first round of drinks.

I can’t do this, I’m afraid. And anyone who tells you they can is either incredibly deluded or having you on.

I’m rubbish at chatting people up. My technique runs from the obvious (send them a flattering message on OKCupid then hope that when we meet in person I am drunk/brave enough to suggest a shag) to the arduous (develop a friendship over the course of many years, cross fingers that one day they’ll fancy sleeping with the girl who’s been hanging around like a bad smell) to the direct (“Fancy a shag?”). The benefit of being appallingly bad at chatting people up is that I fully understand how difficult it is, and sympathise with anyone who has spent two hours staring at a stranger across a crowded bar trying to pluck up the courage to offer them a drink.

Redefining success

I don’t think anyone’s bad for asking – naturally anyone who’s had crap luck when approaching people they fancy would be keen to see if there’s a way to minimise any failures in future. So often I write about what people shouldn’t do, it might seem logical that there’d be something we should do to improve the odds. Unfortunately this is one of those issues where although there are standard things you should avoid when you’re trying to look attractive (being rude, for instance, or accidentally being sick on their shoes), there’s no guaranteed ‘hit’ technique.

As the original ‘lines’ in this blog demonstrate – you can say something either mundane or cringingly foot-in-mouth but still end up in bed with the person you approached. Likewise, you can wow someone with your charm and charisma and still end up going home for a lonely wank.

But (and I appreciate it might not seem like it when you’re lonely and keen to find someone) the fact that there are no magic words is a good thing.

If I were a charlatan, I’d tell you there are techniques that’ll have anyone eating out of the palm of your hand. But if that were true, the world would be an awkward and horrible place: one where we ended up getting together with people purely on the basis that we fancied them for five minutes. If you had a magic ability that meant anyone you liked would be persuaded to shag you, you’d end up shagging a hell of a lot of unsuitable people.

Can you think of anyone you fancied on first site but then ended up disliking? Because I sure as hell can. I fancy most liberal-sounding, scruffy-looking, slightly-nerdy guys I meet purely on the basis that I’ve had pretty decent luck with these guys in the past, and most of them have turned out to be both fun and hot. But that doesn’t mean they’ll all be. If I had Abracadabra’d all of them into bed, there’d have been plenty of awkward mornings in my life when both of us woke up and realised that we weren’t suited to each other at all.

So: chatting up. It’s never going to be 100% successful, and I can’t give you any advice that will make it so. Because your aim when introducing yourself to a stranger should never be as simple and boring as just ‘getting that stranger into bed’. Your aim, in my honest and unskilled opinion, should be finding out whether you both actually want to go to bed together.

We’ve all got things that we fantasise about which, were they to happen in real life, would disgust or annoy us. Things that might get our genitals throbbing but which cause the moral part of our brains to rebel, and give us a post-fantasy stern talking to.

My most embarrassing fantasy isn’t sexual – it isn’t even exciting. But it’s the one I have spent the most time on in the last week. I close my eyes, block out all the things I should be thinking about, and spend a few minutes on my idle dream.

What’s my most embarrassing fantasy?

I dream of being saved. Not in a knight-in-shining-armour way: it’s far more tedious and practical than that.

I retreat to this shameful fantasy when I’ve had a bad week and everything seems to be going wrong. When I end every day miserable and exhausted and knowing that the next day will be the same. When I sit at my laptop, babbling nervously into a to-do list and panicking about all the things yet to be crossed off, I dream that – corny as it sounds – my prince will come.

He won’t marry me and whisk me away to a suburban idyll, he’ll just come to hold me, let me sob dramatically and unnecessarily on his shoulder, before making a few phone calls that melt all my troubles away.

When I’m down, and sad, I dream of a man who can do all the things I just don’t want to do. Ringing insurance companies, rewriting my CV, replying to emails that have languished unhappily at the bottom of my inbox. My prince: the pragmatic multi-tasker.

Because of all the things someone could ever give me – money, power, a nice thick cock and a regular eye-rolling fuck, the most valuable thing they could ever give me is time.

Why is this an embarrassing fantasy?

I am a capable, reasonable, competent human being. Honestly. Last year my boiler packed up and I managed to get a replacement without either

a) getting ripped off

b) leaving it so long I had to shower in freezing water or

c) sobbing wildly on my kitchen floor shouting “why won’t you just WORK you dogshit arsewipe pile of metal bollocks?!”

OK, maybe I did a teeny bit of c).

I’ve made it twenty nine years so far with only the occasional need of outside help – someone to show me where the stopcock is, the odd spider that I just can’t handle, that sort of thing. And yet despite my pathetic pride and determination to do nearly everything myself, I occasionally let my mind wander off into dreams of men who’ll do these things for me. Bleed radiators, clean kitchen cupboards, instruct solicitors and other such tedious bullshit.

I feel dirty and wrong for this, not because it’s sick or unusual in the way that many of my fantasies are. Not because it’s demeaning or degrading, but because I feel like this makes me a bad feminist. I mean, it’s not very independent, is it? The Suffragettes didn’t go through hell just so I could get a man to deal with my paperwork when I get too flustered. It goes against principles that mean a lot to me, and much of what I’ve worked for.

But still. When things get tricky, and I find myself wading through the mountain of DIY, admin and “please hold for an operator who can explain to you why we’ve suddenly doubled your gas bill” I’m not wishing for more internal strength, but for someone who’ll be strong on my behalf.

Fantasy vs reality

I’ve voiced this fantasy a few times – usually over a pint or two of gin and one of those terrifying crying attacks where your friends either cuddle you so no one can see the state you’re in or push you into the toilets to ‘get it out of your system.’

And occasionally, when I confess my fantasies of being saved, people have commented on the fact that it’s at direct odds with what I actually want in life. That if a guy came through for me on this kind of fantasy – if he cleared up my messes and cleaned my to-do list and took hold of the reins of my life, I would scream blue murder and banish him forever.

To which my reply is: of course. Of course. It’s a fantasy. Just as I don’t really want guys to beat me – I want them to spank me in a very specific way, with a very specific degree of pain, to the point where it’s hot and sexual but no further – I also want them to support me to just the right degree without ever taking away my own agency.

The most enjoyable thing about many fantasies is that if you really wanted to, you could make them come true: as with this one. But I haven’t made it come true – I just like to wallow in it. I like to sit and think and dream of my practical prince, while eschewing any kind of assistance that might make me look less than competent. So by thinking this I get to find out what my little heart actually desires – the difference between what I actually want and what I think I want.

He can still do the washing up though. There’s no shame in letting him do that.

Communication: it’s bloody hard, right? You just never know what’s going to offend people and whether your words will be hurled back at you in a storm of rage and misery, leaving you cowering in a corner nursing your hurt feelings.

The above is only semi-tongue-in-cheek: I know that words – while they’re sometimes our friends, are often crude tools with which we dig ourselves a massive hole into which we accidentally spew things that we probably shouldn’t have said. Hence: communication’s important, but we all get it wrong sometimes.

It’s hard to give advice to people on the right things to say – although plenty of Pick-Up Artists will try, and tell you that there are specific rules and lines that are scientifically proven to impress strangers. However, usually the only thing anyone can advise is to try and be empathetic, listen to the other person, and for the love of God don’t say anything awful like this. To cover this last category, I’m handing over to the excellent @halfabear, who has some very strong and hilarious opinions on the questions people ask about her sex life.

Sexual questions

Since becoming paraplegic I’ve become very used to being asked questions about my health; friends asking how I’m getting on and if I’m in pain, strangers gently prying and trying to find out what’s wrong and how it happened. Nosey but innocuous questions that I generally don’t mind answering, providing that it’s not done insultingly and they understand I won’t answer if a line is crossed. I’ve been quite endeared over the years by the sensitivity that people have approached the subject with.

Well, most of the time.

There is one subject where it appears that all boundaries and sensitivity go out of the window in a heartbeat. Be it friend or stranger, it’s a subject which arouses such curiosity that no answer is simply not good enough, and there really is no way to tread carefully. Sex.

Read about awkward sexual questions, and the hilarious answers she gives people, over on her own blog…

As I might have already explained, I’m deeply impatient. So impatient, in fact, that if foreplay lasts longer than ten minutes I am liable to cry. I was once mocked by a guy, who was far keener on build-up than I was, because apparently the only thing I ever said in bed was “pleasepleasepleaseplease.” I don’t know what he was upset about – it’s certainly better than “mehmehmehmeh.”

Anyway, because I love guest blogs, and particularly guest blogs from people who have a different perspective to me, the following excellent post by Helz captures perfectly her delight in making someone wait. And wait. And then…

Antici….pation

Okay, yes, I did steal this title from a Rocky Horror lyric. Shoot me. It’s very apt though.

What is almost better than a conquest is the magnetism, the frission, leading up to it. It’s something organic between two people that can’t be forced, you both have to want to rip the clothes off and melt into each other so badly and you both know it. No one has made the first move yet and all you have is heavily layered conversation where you can barely focus on the words because even talking to each other makes you wet, and you’re zoned in on her mouth, her lips…her skin and her eyes, boring into yours and you both know that you’re going to see a lot more than each other’s eyes later on… but not yet. That anticipation, that mutual magnetism, is pretty rare yet so delicious. The excitement, and the wonder that you might be mistaken, that she might not want you and it’s all in your head and the electricity that zaps right down through you at the thought of her is what makes the whole exchange magical.

I like to, whilst making out with someone, draw back. Make them wait for our lips to meet and shrink away from their touch. Soften my gaze and my body, make it look completely touchable, mutely draw them in with my eyes, then refuse them. When your lips are centimeters away from mine and you can actually feel my warmth, but you’re unable to touch me because I keep drawing away… I know that you really want me. I like making you want me. The frantic, hot, hard kisses and touches you give me after that after being denied for so long show how much you crave this, crave me…

Before I eat out a girl I like to make her anticipate it for a very long time. I love the downy inner thigh which leads up to your cunt, and I love to linger on it for as long as I possibly can, giving your butterfly butterfly kisses and softly kissing, licking and stroking your thighs, occasionally giving your lower lips some very, very light touches or kisses, and I do this until I know that you are biting your lip to mask your croaks and moans, so hard that it could draw blood, until you’re dripping with ladyjuice and until you’re rolling your eyes upwards, as if you’re praying to some Sapphic goddess. I know you’re tingling with desire all over and I kiss your lower self harder and harder and slloooowwwly work my way to your cunt and start very gently, just when you think you’ll get some form of release I stop and kiss your pelvis and your stomach, then work my way down again until you quiver and your knees buck…

You like the anticipation, sometimes, more than you like the actual sex act, and the fact that you want it, me, so much makes me horny as hell and gives me almost as much satisfaction as if you were giving it to me.

Then it’s my turn.

According to some people who give way too much of a shit, Jeremy Paxman has grown a beard.

Think what you like about it, but by God you have to think something. Today the internet has been bubbling with chatter: are you for or against the beard? Does it look good? Does it look scary, because for some reason someone once decided that all bearded men are Harold Shipman? Has your attitude towards Paxman’s hard-hitting interview questions changed because he happens to have some hair on his face? Let’s do a sodding online poll about it, shall we?

Anyway. Because I’m fucking contrary and annoyed, I’m going to weigh in to the beard debate with the definitive answer as to Whether Beards Are Good. Ready? Here goes:

Growing a beard is good

I’m a fan of beards – they’re often a pretty sexy way of framing and defining a man’s face. I’ve been with a few guys who have had some sort of facial hair, and with one guy who found facial hair so amusing he would regularly grow a beard just so that when he shaved it off he could experiment with various comedy styles.

They’re occasionally a bit scratchy when you’re kissing someone, and might irritate you if you’ve got sensitive skin, but the same can be said of a particularly coarse jumper fabric.

I love running my hands over a guy’s beard, feeling the scratchy texture of the hair on my palms. I love watching him trim the edges, that ‘I’m so grown-up’ feeling I get when I think about him doing something so adult. I enjoy the way it frames his face, and the variety – the different stages of beautiful he looks as it gets longer, shaggier, and eventually gets tidied up.

But the best thing, I think, about men who have beards is that they are clearly capable of making independent decisions about what to do with their own face.

Not growing a beard is also good

I also, though, like clean-shaven dudes. There’s a certain elegance and beauty about a really smooth shave. Again, I like to watch men do it, particularly the bit where they tip their head back to get at the hairs on their neck. I love the slight scratch of stubble as it starts to push through in the evening. I utterly adore the smell of a freshly-shaved guy when he rubs his face up next to mine.

But again, the best thing about a clean-shaven gentleman is that he is capable of making independent decisions about what to do with his own face.

Growing a beard is your own decision

I’m surprised at the number of people who would respond to the ‘should women shave their legs?’ question with a loud and decisive ‘it’s none of your fucking business’, yet are happy to pass judgment on a TV presenter just because he has chosen not to shave. I wouldn’t bother writing about this issue if it were just Jeremy Paxman – I appreciate that people are having a bit of fun and Paxo isn’t going to be sobbing into his autocue because some people on Twitter said his beard was shit. But the beard vs no-beard debate leaks awkwardly into a lot of our sexual discussion in a way that is pretty offensive to men, and this seems like an appropriate time to tackle it.

People say things like:

“I just couldn’t kiss a man with a beard”

“Men with beards just look untrustworthy”

Or even, in a move designed to hit not one but two of my ‘rage’ buttons: “The only thing worse than a beard is a ginger beard”

I’m not making these up, incidentally, these are all things people have said to me – the latter prompted a bollocking in the form of a tedious drunken lecture. Mumbled apologies ensued. Awkwardness happened. Lessons were probably not learned.

Preference vs pressure

I understand that people have personal preferences: some gentlemen really do prefer blondes, and some people really can’t get aroused unless their partner is clean shaven. Fair enough – passions like these are hard to control, and there’s no rule that says we must bestow equal lust on men no matter what their facial hair situation. However, there certainly is a rule that states we must avoid pressuring people to do certain things to their bodies just for our aesthetic pleasure. It’s the ‘don’t be a total arsehole’ rule.

Most adult men, in their natural state (and most women, come to that) will grow some hair on their faces. It might be dark, light, thick, coarse, downy or patchy, but ultimately most people will grow some hair on their faces. Having some hair on your face is the natural default for the majority of the adult population. The decision to remove it is one that can only be made by the owner of that face, and making them feel bad about their decision based purely on your aesthetic opinion about beards makes you a total arsehole.

So, just as it’s none of anyone’s business whether I shave my legs, wear make-up at work or wax my pubes into the shape of a lightning bolt, likewise it’s not for us to decide what hair Jeremy Paxman should or shouldn’t remove from his face.