The vast, vast majority of the time, I am a loser. A lank-haired, jeans-wearing, slouching drunken loser. With a cider in my hand, a chip on my shoulder and a face like a bulldog chewing a whole hive of wasps.

I say this only to counter what’s coming next: right now I am hot.

I’m hot because I’ve had my hair cut – it swishes in that shiny way that some people achieve daily, but for me comes round only twice a year when I go for my biannual hack. I’m hot because I’ve spent the last week doing more exercise than I normally would and – although there’s no immediate visual difference – I feel stronger and livelier and readier to bounce around like a puppy on MDMA. I’m hot because I’m wearing knickers that cup my arse comfortably, and because I’ve been doing DIY in hot pants and getting dirty and sweaty and wet.

We need to deal with your high self-esteem issues

I’m British, of course, so writing the above paragraph was torture – it took me a good ten minutes to bash out just a few sentences without tagging something self-deprecating on to the end. I’ve been trained, through years of TV, magazines and friendly banter, that to talk about the things you actually like about yourself is a social crime. Like eating steak with the fish fork or passing a joint to the right.

Most of the time this makes sense. After all, we’d all be excruciating and insufferable if our conversations started not with “how are you?” but “how hot am I!?” We’d barely get beyond introductions before we were hurling into buckets at the appalling displays of self-love.

No, instead we must only ever speak of the bad stuff, while desperately hoping that other people notice the good. We’re trained to make the best of ourselves, so we spend hours primping and preening and picking out just the right kind of shoe only to shit on all that effort later on by replying “no, really, I look awful” when someone says something nice. It’s a reflex gesture, and one which makes sense most of the time. When the hard-earned compliments come, we bat them away with great force, because self-hate is a much more attractive quality than arrogance.

Start fancying yourself

I’ve got nothing wrong with light self-deprecation, and on an ordinary day I’m far more likely to make a tedious aside about my weight than to bounce into a room and shout “Look! Aren’t my tits brilliant?!”

But not today. Because, fuck it, I don’t always feel good. And on the rare occasions that I do, I want to start making the most of it. In fifty years time I’ll be yearning for the chance to wear this arse again, to sit in hot pants on a stepladder sugar-soaping walls and enjoying not just being me but looking like me too.

You should do it too – go on, do it. Fancy yourself a bit. There are bound to be bits of yourself that you’re not a fan of. But isn’t it bizarre that it’s these disliked bits that get all the attention? Hours in the gym toning a stomach that you hate. Days in front of the mirror shaping eyebrows or facial hair in some sort of damage limitation exercise. Weeks spent traipsing around shops that make clothes for people who always seem to be a different shape to you. All that time spent rectifying or changing or enhancing – how much time do you actually spend appreciating?

You don’t have to take pictures of yourself in sexy poses and pin them on the fridge, or give yourself cringeingly awkward motivational pep-talks about how beautiful you are. Just give yourself a bit of time to appreciate the things you fancy. The things that your partners will go primal for. Stand in front of a mirror if you like, touch yourself if you want to, put on or take off the clothes that make you feel best, and just revel in a bit of self-lust.

Because no one else can love you like you can.

Well done, humanity, you have done me proud. When The Guardian printed this problem page question from a lady who fantasises about being passed around a group of old, obese men who struggle to get erections, I expected the comments section to be a sulphur-stinking pit of hellish mockery.

Because that’s generally what happens when someone admits to a fantasy that doesn’t fit with one of our traditional stories. I was going to say ‘an uncommon fantasy’ but to be honest, given the horror this woman feels about admitting to her fantasy I’d have to go out on a limb and say this dream may be far more common than we think.

To my surprise, though, the comments were mostly sensible.

“Why on earth would you feel guilty? And why do you think of yourself as ‘sick’? Those are strong statements. Your sex life is fine and If you don’t want to share your fantasy with your fiancė then don’t.”

“Of all the fantasies I’ve ever heard, this has got to be one the of the most easily realizable.”

Hot fantasy about old obese men

One of my favourite wank fantasies involves a pair of older guys. Ideally (because I love my backstory) in a position of power or authority over me. Traditional scenes begin in an office, where I play up to patriarchal stereotypes by wearing an incredibly short skirt and bringing coffee into the business meeting being held by these two men.

One of them is usually relatively young – thirty or forty – and he’s staring at my arse like he wants to bite it. The other guy is older, perhaps fifty or sixty, calls me ‘sweetheart’ and leers inappropriately through the stretched fabric of my tight shirt as I bend down to put the coffee tray on the table. One of them, inevitably, slaps my arse.

The older guy (my boss) remarks on how obedient I am, and asks me to show his friend just how willing I am to please. He leans back in his chair, unzips his flies, and pulls out a thick, twitching, semi-flaccid cock. I drop to my knees in front of him, and as he croons ‘that’s it’, I slip his dick into my mouth.

He’s big and looks bigger – looming over me with his paunch and his jowls and his filthy, smug grin. He knows I feel obliged to do this to him, and that’s part of the turn on. The other part being, of course, the ability to show off his toy to his friend.

As I suck him harder, he pulls my head down so that my lips are around the base of his cock, his thick head pushing hard up against the back of my throat. Occasionally he makes small grunts to show just how much he’s enjoying it, or mutters ‘good girl, just like that’ through gritted teeth. But in between these interjections he keeps talking to his friend.

“Good, isn’t she?”

“Absolutely. I should get one for my office.”

“You can… ungh… you can have a turn when I’m done if you like. She’d be only too happy to oblige.”

The friend sits there watching, stroking at the erection that’s pressing against the crotch of his suit trousers. But I don’t fuck the friend – I never get a chance. Because as I picture the thick, desperate hardness of the older guy’s dick pushing solidly against the back of my throat, and imagine the strangled grunting sounds he makes as he comes, and conjure up the feeling of his thick, hot spunk gushing down the back of my throat… that’s usually the moment when I come.

The younger guy rarely needs to fuck me in order to complete the fantasy.

Being ashamed of fantasies

So, to all the Guardian readers who refrained from making comments along the lines of ‘ewww’, when someone confessed to fantasies of obese older men, I salute and thank you. I guarantee you that this particular fantasy isn’t limited to one individual, and that there are many more people who like that sort of thing.

To the woman who wrote the letter in the first place: don’t be upset. Most people have at least one thing that gets them horny in secret but that they wouldn’t want to shout from the rooftops. There’s no need to be ashamed of if you get off on something unusual. You’re not hurting anyone by doing it, you’re just pushing the specific set of buttons that happen to have been wired in your brain that way.

As one of the Guardian commenters so excellently put it:

“There is nothing wrong in a fantasy, like emotions, they are not good or bad. they just are. We can’t control them but they do no harm to others (it is our actions that may hurt others, not the thoughts in our heads), so whatever they are they are nothing to be ashamed of.”

This week I walked in on a boy wanking. Late at night, I woke up to go to the loo, spotted the light on in the living room, and thought I’d pop in to casually grope him before sleepily wandering off to bed. You know how I love watching boys crack one out – there’s a beautiful desperation about the urge to come, and I relish seeing that on his face. But of course, the most beautiful wanks of them all are Schroedinger’s Wanks – the ones I would change just by observing them. The wanks I am destined never to see…

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