I am becoming a little bit uncomfortable with my apparent lack of sexual accessories.

There are some things you can’t really do without the equipment: pegging is tricky without the strap-on, you’d either end up humping lacklustrely at a rather bored gentleman or doing him an injury with something homemade and as unsexy as it is unsafe. But the vast majority of filth can be improvised – why spend £100 on a hand-cut leather tawse when you could just beat your loved-one with a flip-flop? You can buy them from the pound shop, and the sound is eminently more satisfying.

What’s more (and I feel I might have to hand in my sex blogger membership card at this point) the toys I do have spend far more time at the back of a cupboard than up against my cervix.

Reviewing sex toys

I’ve held off on doing it for this long, and every time a company approaches me asking me to review something or put an affiliate link on my site I’ve said no. Not because I’m a snob (if you can make money by slapping ads on your blog then you have my blessing and a fair bit of my envy as well) but because I can’t work out how to do it in a way that would be even vaguely entertaining for either my readers or, quite frankly, myself.

First someone has to send me a sex toy (which requires me to either give them my address or have a designated friend who is willing to accept daily dildos through the post), then I have to put it in my cunt, then I have to write approximately 600 words about it. No matter how skilled I am, I’m not sure I could muster 600 words about what is essentially just a wank. Most of my sex toy reviews would end up something along these lines:

“I put it in my cunt for a bit and it made me come. Would have been better if it wasn’t pink. 6/10”

Alternatively, I have to persuade a boy that rather than pull my knickers down and fuck me up against the mirror in the hallway, he instead has to ravish me with something provided by a friendly PR company, and dissect the whole experience ten minutes later. There might be giggly fun involved if it’s a particularly crap review, but I think the very act of reviewing something would give it a disadvantage: just as jokes stop being funny when they’re explained, being fucked with a ten-inch dildo would be far less sexy if you have to take mental notes.

What’s in your sex toy cupboard?

But when people ask me what my favourite sex toy is, or the sort of sex toys I’m drawn to, I have to admit to feeling a bit ashamed. A bit inadequate. Like I’m not a proper pervert because I don’t have drawers full of the things just waiting to be jizzed on at a moment’s notice.

I have a fairly decent box of tricks: buttplugs, sheaths, a couple of vibrators, a few hitting things, a strap-on, an amazing pair of nipple clamps with a heavy chain running between the two, an assortment of tools such as pliers that I leave in my toy drawer purely to scare the shit out of people. But the fact that I own these things proves nothing other than that at some point I bought them. I’m far less likely to use even my favourite toys than I am to just sit on a guy’s dick.

And yet people ask – how many do you have? Or ‘what do you have?’ Or ‘why don’t you do reviews?’ and I feel embarrassed. Like I’m not a real pervert unless my letterbox is clogged with suspiciously-shaped parcels. Some perverts like the parcels. Some people are more excited by a shag when they can use their kit and experiment with new ways to beat, whip, shock or fuck someone. And that is both admirable and hot. It’s just not me.

A tiny cynical part of my brain wonders if one of the driving forces behind the fact that we’re becoming more open about sex (which I think we are, hooray!) is that there are now far more ways to make money out of it. From making and selling sex toys to writing a dirty book or throwing wild parties which, for the bargain price of fifty quid, you can attend dressed only in your pants.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Making money is good, sex is good, giving people a way to make money by providing things people can insert into themselves is good. But it, like everything else sexual, isn’t universal. For every toy-hungry pervert with a drawer full of wonders there’s someone like me looking blankly at my pitiful collection of underused dildos and wondering just what, exactly, I’m doing wrong.

So for those of you who are like me, who haven’t got a great collection and don’t crave the latest things, here’s the answer: you’re doing nothing wrong. You’re just doing something differently.

I’ve written a book.

It sounds so simple when I write it down like that, but it’s actually taken a bloody long time, because I kept having to break away from writing it to fuck the people who are in it, and masturbate vigorously while thinking about them. I am incredibly excited about this, and I really hope that some of you are too.

It’s not just a random collection of blog entries, or a fictional depiction of my most torrid and disgusting fantasies: it’s a memoir.

I wrote it for the same reason I started this blog: because despite pioneering work by countless women, we’re still a bit weird about sex. We still refer to ‘female masturbation’ in hushed tones, as if it’s something unusual and rare. We hear that men think about sex every six seconds while women will feign headaches to get out of it. I see men being portrayed as one-dimensional sex-driven automatons and women as the grudging servants of their sexual desires. I don’t recognise these women, or these men, and I never have.

Everyone’s unique, and has a different take on sex. This book’s about my take on it, and it’s written for people like you, who have unique takes on it too. I’m wrong a lot of the time. I’m ranty, irritating, occasionally amoral and I use the word ‘fuck’ far too often, but I’m honest.

I wrote this book because since I started writing my blog people have emailed me and said “I wish I could be so open” or sent me filthy fantasies of their own. I wrote it because I didn’t just want to tell people what I’d done, but to explain why I’m glad to have done it. Why I’m not cowering in a corner regretting the number of guys I’ve done and the variety of things I’ve done with them. Why I’m not ashamed.

So if you fancy reading a ranty, sexy memoir, please do buy my book when it’s out. All of the pertinent info is below, and I’ll update you soon with links to where you can buy it when it’s released. I just wanted you to be the first to know.

Girl on the Net: My not so shameful sex secrets

It’ll be out around the end of May, published by Carina UK – the new digital imprint from Harlequin UK.

If you’d like to get an alert when it’s available, please subscribe via the box at the top right of the blog. If you’re a blogger and you’d like a preview to review, just drop me an email with the subject heading “I’d like to review your book, GOTN” (or something similar) and a link to your blog, and I’ll send a list of people on to my publisher.

Thank you, you are all amazing

Finally, a massive thank you – when I first started this blog (back in September 2011, for those who like history) I was worried about a number of things. Would people be mean to me? Would they out me? Would they ignore the blog on the grounds that I am a tedious pervert?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised on all counts, and bowled over by how kind you’ve all been – reading the blog, sharing it around, leaving thoughtful and interesting comments, emailing me your thoughts, stories and cock pictures, and above all not telling me to sod off. Thank you so much to everyone who has ever left a comment, liked a post, retweeted something, or just told your friends to read it. It genuinely means a hell of a lot.

Please keep doing it, because without you I am not a successful sex blogger: I’m just a girl, sitting at a laptop in her pants, masturbating over stories I tell for my own amusement.

I’ve been called some crappy things in my time, and I’ve hurled a good few insults myself. But there’s one word that, when I hear it, makes me boil with rage.

That word is ‘psycho.’

As in:

“When I dumped her, I realised she was a proper psycho.”
“He’s got a psycho ex girlfriend.”
“She’s been stalking him on facebook like a psycho.”

Why you’re not a ‘psycho’

Let’s begin by stating that applying the word ‘psycho’ to anyone is pretty offensive. Remember Hitchcock’s classic shower scene? That’s what you’re alluding to when you use this word. Whether you’re using it to belittle your ex or to try and humiliate people with mental health problems, it’s a nasty word to use in anger.

What’s more, it’s frequently used as a weapon to make women (and ex-girlfriends in particular) feel small. Not when they’ve done things that are dangerous or troubling – I’ve seen the word ‘psycho’ applied to people because they’ve done something as innocuous as:

• asking an ex to talk to them about the reasons for a break up
• crying in a public place because they were upset about a break up
• texting someone when drunk to tell them they love them
• looking at someone’s profile on Twitter or facebook

Compare these to the ‘shower scene’ – are they really ‘psychotic’ actions? Or are they, more realistically, natural things to do if you’re in a state of emotional turmoil?

I’m not talking about genuine stalker behaviour here – none of us want our bunnies boiled. None of us want ex-partners turning up at our workplace and screaming wildly on the street “why don’t you love me?! What did I do?!” I think we can all agree that actually being stalked by an ex is a terrible, frightening thing.

But labelling someone a ‘psycho’ because they’re visibly upset about the breakup of a relationship, serves to trivialise the idea of ‘stalking’ by lumping all of this behaviour in together. If your ex is sending you threatening messages, harassing you, and making you uncomfortable, that’s a very serious thing. If they’re looking at your publicly-available information and shedding a few tears over the good times you had when you were going out, that’s quite another.

‘Psychotic’ men

I’ve rarely heard the word ‘psycho’ applied to men who do similar things. That’s not because they don’t do them – men can be just as emotional about breakups as women, it’s just that their emotions are less frequently used as a weapon with which to humiliate them. Ex-boyfriends of mine who have cried over our lost (or, more realistically, mutually abandoned) love affairs have never been skewered by my friends saying ‘oh, I knew he was a psycho’ or ‘he texted you again? What a mental.’

Guys are shamed in other ways for emotional behaviour – being expected to keep a stiff-upper-lip when they’re being torn apart inside, for one. Being told that ‘boys don’t cry’ and invited to shake off their upset by rebound-fucking their way around town, as if their emotions and their erections are just two sides of the same coin. But that’s a discussion for another day.

There’s an entire minefield of shit surrounding the way we discuss people’s more extreme emotions surrounding break ups – sobbing gentlemen are obnoxiously induced to ‘man up’, and female despair is painted as something oddly sinister. Her justifiable sense of grief is framed as dangerous instability. Guys might shed a few tears or get drunk to dull the pain, but you’d better watch out for these ker-ay-zee women – with their wailing and their texting and their unreasonable sense of sadness.

The worst thing you could do

There are those who handle breakups badly – the ones who cut up their ex’s clothes, send increasingly alarming and desperate emails, show up at their house at 2 in the morning and wake the neighbours by banging on the door and demanding to be let in. I’ll stress again for those who might have missed it – these things are unacceptable, and often downright scary.

But most of the time when the ‘p’ word is applied, it’s to behaviour that is perfectly understandable and normal: crying or mooning over your ex, or wanting some form of closure at the end of a relationship. These aren’t ‘psychotic’ things to do, in fact if you’ve broken up with someone you love, even if the break up was mutual, it would be abnormal not to be emotional about it.

The very nature of love is that it’s a powerful emotion, and when we mess with powerful emotions we do strange things. I’ve done things that would justify a fair few  insults – from getting crying-drunk at parties to mentioning a new partner in front of the ex I’m not quite over.

I’m ashamed of and angry at myself for doing these things, and if you were to call me a ‘bitch’ or a ‘hypocrite’ or a ‘cold-hearted bastard’ you’d be bang on the money. But the word ‘psycho’ says so much more than that.

It says ‘you’re not normal’ in a way that is coldly calculating. It says ‘you’re hysterical, you’re overreacting, your pain is not significant as you think it is.’

Above all, the thing that makes me shudder and cringe: it tells someone that their affection is not only unwanted but repulsive. That the most unacceptable, horrific thing this person has done is to love you.

All the sexy firemen, stripping police officers and naughty nurses leave me cold. I understand why uniforms are hot, but the idea that someone who has one of these jobs is necessarily hot just because they wear a uniform that is in some way vaguely similar to something you can buy in Ann Summers is frustrating and bizarre.

Some nurses are hot. Some firemen are hot. But the qualities of the sexiest jobs have, in my opinion, very little to do with the uniform. I say this because I fancy computer programmers – boys whose ‘uniform’ consists mostly of scrubby jeans and a coffee-stained hoodie. I cannot get enough of them.

It’s not a fetish in the strictest sense of the word (I have successfully orgasmed with men who wouldn’t know their YAML from their ‘oh no seriously now I’m going to have to Google YAML so I don’t look stupid.’), but it’s certainly a bit more than an itch that occasionally requires scratching.

What’s so sexy about programmers? Well, their quick fingers, for one – typing frantically into the mysterious Matrix-like black box with the same intense focus as a boy playing a particularly tricky Xbox game.

Then there’s the mystery itself: I have no sodding clue what they’re doing. The brackets and squiggles and dots mean about as much to me as the Chinese alphabet, and they are all the sexier for it.

Finally, there’s the brains. Ah, brains. The most desirable thing about a human, not just according to zombies but to other humans too. Not everyone has them but the majority of people like them, don’t they? I’ve never heard someone saying, of a potential squeeze: “Well, he’s lovely, but he’d be lovelier if he was as dumb as a bag of bricks.” Or “she’s hot, I just wish she didn’t know her 13 times table.”

Universal hotness

I think you might agree with me on at least one of the above points. You might not get wet at the thought of male programmers (and even if you did you’d have to step back and sit on your hands because I think you’ll find they’re all mine), but the hands-mystery-brains trilogy is surely common in many people’s lusts.

To experiment (like they do in science, only involving far less peer-review and a hell of a lot more cider) I asked the good folk of Twitter what they thought were the sexiest jobs. Here is but a tiny selection of their answers:

Hands-related jobs

Bass players and guitarists were the most popular, which explains why they get so many groupies and dribbling, wide-eyed fans. Lots of people suggested something along these lines, or other jobs that involved strong or dextrous hands – clearly from the ‘quick fingers’ school of arousal, and I cannot possibly argue.

@girlonthenet Bass guitar player, no question.

— Innocent Loverboy (@innocentlb) March 18, 2013

 

@girlonthenet something meaning they work with their hands – rough calloused hands…. *sigh*….

— Charlie (@The_Lady_Sybil) March 18, 2013

Mystery-related jobs

Onto mystery, and despite the diverse offerings here, I maintain that much of what’s sexy in this stuff is the mysterious nature of it. I find all of the following occupations hot, not because they are sexy per se, but because I know nothing about them, and so the idea of having a guy teach me how to do them, with gentle patience and occasional discipline, slicks my knickers like butter in the microwave.

@girlonthenet mathematician. Or chef.

— Katherine Stephen (@katobell) March 18, 2013

 

@girlonthenet Jobs that involve speaking more than one language.

— Suze(@SuzeMarsupial) March 18, 2013

Brains-related jobs

Quite a few people gave very brains/ideas-focused offerings.

@girlonthenet Doctors. Because, doctors.

— Kate (@ginandting) March 18, 2013

I particularly liked the lady who was so into brains, and also in such a kickass-brainy job that she aroused even herself:

@girlonthenet the sexiest job to have is being a barrister. I am strangely drawn to myself. :)

— Emma Dixon (@EmmaDixon_Green) March 18, 2013

I wish this could happen to me. Sadly all of my self-arousal relies on ‘quick-fingers’ style hotness.

Anyway, I reckon my hands-mystery-brains trilogy covers off pretty much all of the things for which I could gain an immediate and shallow attraction to someone, and it has the added bonus that I think most people would identify with at least one of those things.

Even if you don’t fancy musicians, if you like the quick-hands of coders you can probably appreciate why someone else would want to lick a cellist. Even if barristers aren’t your thing, your penchant for brains might make you moon over a mathematician. And as for the mystery, well – who doesn’t fancy fucking Batman?

Hands. Mystery. Brains. Did I forget anything?

Oh yeah, one more, which was actually more popular than any of the categories my rubbish brain came up with on its own: passion.

@girlonthenet Musician. Someone who does it because it is who they are, it’s not just a job & they commit to every note. ->

— Sally R (@arthurstodgyn) March 18, 2013