That ‘you’, in the title? It refers to everyone, including women.

This week a minor row kicked off between DickGraceless and Katy_Red – two people who write a funny and occasionally offensive blog over at Honey and Cream. The row began when Dick said women who insist that men pay for dates are prostitutes. Anger occurred, responses happened, and Katy_Red then outlined why she thought that – on a straight date – the man should pay, at least on first dates, special occasions, and if he’s asked the girl out.

I don’t intend this to be a personal attack on Katy_Red – she writes funny blogs and seems nice, and no one ever deserves the full brunt of my rage. But there are a number of women (and men) who believe that men should pay for dates – an idea which I find horribly offensive. So take cover, because this one might be a little bit angry.

What women want

Are you on this date because you fancy this person? Because you think you’ll have a nice time? Then cough up – pay half of the bill. Get your fucking round in. Because otherwise you’re perpetuating the ridiculous idea that men have money and women don’t. That men want women and women want free stuff.

You’re on the date – you wanted to be there, you attended because you thought you’d have a good time. So chip the fuck in.

Katy_Red says that she doesn’t find the idea of splitting the bill all that sexy. It’s not supposed to be sexy. That bit is not the key element of the date. The sexy elements come elsewhere – long sultry glances across dinner, talking about the filthy things you want to do, squeezing his dick under the table. In fact, the sexiest thing about a date is knowing that the other person really wants to be there – that of all the things they could have done tonight they chose to spend it in your company. So congratulations – by insisting that your date buys dinner in exchange for your time you have just killed the sexiest fucking bit of the evening.

What exactly do you want out of this date? Do you want to have a relationship, or sex with this person, or do you just want free stuff?

Everyone has different needs and desires, but I’ll tell you what I want – I want to find men I like and then fuck them. I want to go out with interesting, funny, nerdy guys who’ll share a pint with me, take the piss out of my stupid bits and compliment my good bits, and I want them to take me home at the end of the evening and present me with a nice, hard dick. If you fancy me and I fancy you then what I want from you is sex – not dinner. If you gave me the choice between an expensive meal out and a hand job I’d be cancelling reservations and pulling my knickers down quicker than you can say ‘manual relief, please.’

Are these women prostitutes?

No. Absolutely and conclusively not. When you fuck a prostitute it’s pretty straightforward – you agree a price for certain services, he or she performs those services, and you hand over your cash. A professional, honest transaction.

Insisting that someone buy you dinner on the potential promise that at some point you might have sex with them is not a straightforward and honest transaction, so it doesn’t make you a prostitute. It makes you an arsehole.

In her blog on the topic Katy_Red asserts that men are more likely to get a snog, or a blow-job if they’ve ‘flashed the brass a bit.’ Apparently men are just sexier if they’ve poured expensive wine into your face.

Forgive me if my opinions on this fall beyond the line of acceptability, but I don’t find men more attractive if they have money. Money is, in fact, something that any man could potentially acquire – it doesn’t turn them all into Colin fucking Firth. A rich Joe Bloggs is the same as a poor Joe Bloggs, just with more accessories. Money does not maketh the man – being funny, hot, and willing to fuck me till I cry maketh the man. No matter how much cash you’ve got you can still be unshaggable or unattractive in other ways – I mean, Christian Grey had a private helicopter and he was still a gigantic bellend.

Exceptions to the rule

As with all good rules there are exceptions. I’ll pay for the whole meal if, say, it’s someone’s birthday or if they’re broke. I’ll let them pay if they’re taking me somewhere really posh that I’ve told them I can’t afford, or if they just feel like treating me. But these are the exceptions, and that’s as it should be. Buying dinner should be a nice thing that you do for someone, not an expectation based on weird ideas we have about which gender should be the ‘giver’ and which the ‘receiver.’

Men – stop fucking doing it

I’ve been on dates before where men have not just offered to pay, but insisted on paying. Taken the bill, refused to show it to me, even handed my credit card back when I’ve placed it down on the saucer with the mints. People wonder why I’m offended, and I’m even more offended that the answer isn’t fucking obvious – is there any better way to belittle me? To show me that you’re the powerful one?

Gentlemen – in hiding the bill for me you’re forcing yourself into the role of my provider. And, in a situation where I offer to pay and you refuse to let me, I don’t hear ‘I’m great boyfriend material because I am generous and have loads of money’ I hear ‘there there, sweetheart – don’t trouble your pretty little head about cash – I have plenty for both of us.’ Well bully for you, but fuck off.

I trouble my pretty little head about cash every day – when I pay my mortgage, when I pay my bills, when I buy my food, when I splurge ridiculous sums of money on nights out that end in miserable hangovers and – listen carefully – when I decide whether I can afford to go out on a date.

You’re not my provider – I am. The only thing I want in exchange for my company is good company in return, and someone who respects the fact that I am an autonomous individual capable of making my own decisions. If you insist on paying even after I’ve vehemently protested, you’re not being generous, you’re being controlling. You’ve stripped me of the responsibility I have over the money that I work fucking hard to earn.

Sex in exchange for dinner

The absolute bottom line, of course, is that dates and relationships are never transactions. A girl doesn’t ‘have’ to fuck you because you’ve taken her somewhere with a Michelin star. Nor do you ‘have’ to buy her presents because she gives you head. No matter how much you spend on a date, a girl is never compelled to fuck you – it’s her decision. So why are we still pretending that you have to open your wallet before she’ll open her legs?

I want to live in a world where I fuck people because I want to, not just because they’ve bought me presents or dinner. So – men, women, everybody – please stop perpetuating the idea that the relationships we have with each other are some sort of weird exchange of unequal commodities. I’ll give you sex in exchange for sex. I’ll get my round in if you do. And if I want fucking dinner I can buy it myself.

Girlonthenet: Being an emotionless wreck, you’d be forgiven for thinking that my heart is never touched. You’d be wrong – only slightly wrong, but wrong nonetheless.

This week the lovely Jon, of ‘Things I have done to impress women‘ fame, sent me a guest post that made me both laugh and also pity him – and all men – who have a tendency to put cute women on pedestals and subsequently become terrified of talking to them.

It’s pretty, it’s poetic, it’s funny, and it’s warm. In short – it is everything that I am usually not, which is why I adore it. Over to him:

Crushing it

The thing is, you never know when it’s going to hit you. Sometimes, you’ll just be thirsty. It’s a cold, crisp October morning, and you just want a hot drink. So you’ll go into the nearest corporate coffee emporium and order the silliest sounding hot drink. While pondering whether you want one of those little caramel biscuit things, you realise that the barista is asking you a question. You’re just in the middle of saying “large” when you look up and meet her eyes. Christ. They have a piercing quality that burns through your skull. You manage to say something that sounds like “laaaarr-g-g-le”. She smiles slightly, and brushes her dark hair from her eyes.

“Do you mean grande?” she asks, and you notice that there’s a slight tang of European accent there. You go into a conversational tailspin, trying to ask about the differences between grande and large, while worrying that all this size paranoia is somehow conveying that you have a small penis.

“And how will you be paying?” Shit. Do you give her a handful of change, or your debit card that’s been sellotaped together like a torn up love letter. She laughs at your card, while you make a feeble joke about hobo credit cards. She laughs, properly. You bask in the sunshine, and then, her headlamps turn onto her next victim, and suddenly you’re cast from the garden.

You do the dead man’s walk to the delivery table, cursing your inability to order a new credit card and not make jokes about the size of your cock. After a few minutes of mentally abusing yourself, and thinking about how absolutely ridiculous it would be for a girl like that to fancy you (I bet you think lap dancers are really into you too, right?), you realise they’re calling your order. You grab the coffee and walk out of the shop.

As you sit on the park bench sipping the molten hot java, you realise that there’s something written on the side in pen. Next to the ‘Grande’ tick box, she’d written “…But it’s what you do with it that counts! ;)”

For a guy, especially a lonely guy, sometimes it doesn’t take much to ignite the crush protocol. A kind word, a wink, a nice gesture across the office photocopier, and it’s fucking on like Donkey Kong.

Some crushes burn slowly, like incense, gradually filling your mind until you’re incapable of smelling anything but their honeyed fragrance, and you can’t look at a fucking lamp without thinking about what it would look like being knocked onto the floor when you sit them up on the desk and rip their knickers off.

Others hit you so hard and fast, you can’t even duplicate a report without thinking about laying her down on the glass plate and making 100 paper copies of your thrusting. You might even contemplate stapling all the pages together to make a flipbook, so you can replay your fucking in stop-motion.

You can’t talk to her on the phone without putting your hand down your pants and thinking about her on top of you, her hair falling in her face as she smiles and smiles while she rocks up and down on your steel hard cock, while she traces a finger down your perspiring chest. You rub your thighs and laugh as your cock has all it’s birthdays at the same time.

Sometimes, you can’t even buy a coffee without wanting to leap over the counter and offer her extra cream for once.

In some ways, whether it’s with someone you’ve hardly met or a friend that you shouldn’t really fancy, the crush is the perfect relationship. They’ll never disappoint you, they’ll never leave you – hell, they’ll always be the same age they were when you met them, frozen in the amber of your memory. They’ll always be wearing that outfit that made you shoot boners out of your eyes. It’ll always be that night when they drunkenly looked into your eyes for just a second too long. The sex will always be mind blowing, the kisses tender and the touches desperate and fumbling. It’s really the most perfect relationship you’ll ever have. And the only way you can ever fuck it up, is by trying to make it real. So as long as you can live in the bubble of imagination indefinitely, as long as you can deal with the constant gnawing feeling of incompleteness, the tangible taste of the unknown forever on your lips, you’ll always have a grande old time.

But it’ll cost you a fucking fortune in Cinnamon Dolce Lattes.

See? See?! Awesome. If you love it as much as I do you should read more of what he writes. And tell me about your own crushes in the comments, so I can pity and love you too.

Note this post was written in 2012 so it’s very cisnormative, I wouldn’t write it the same way today if I had another crack. 

Heartbreaking though it is, I don’t have a penis. I’d love one, because there are so many things I’d like to be able to do with it: find out what wanking’s like for boys, spurt jizz out of it into someone’s mouth, and – of course – piss in great powerful jets while I’m standing up.

(more…)

It’s easy to get caught up in the good qualities – when arbitrarily judging a hot boy, I’d always prefer to focus on the things that make me want to tear his pants off than tear his face off. But someone asked me to write about the negative things and so – slavishly devoted to the whims of people off of Twitter – I thought I’d have a crack. Here are my top 5 turn-offs.

1. Preening

This manifests in a number of different physical forms. As a general rule I don’t like people who are too muscular, clean-cut or well-dressed. It’s not that a solid six-pack isn’t a lovely thing to behold, or that guys in suits aren’t jaw-droppingly sexy – they are – but if you look too preened it demonstrates a commitment to That Sort Of Thing that I just can’t hope to match.

Your muscles don’t make me think ‘oooh, he works out’, but ‘shit, he’ll expect me to work out.’

2. Narrow-mindedness

This includes the obvious (racists, homophobes) as well as the not-quite-so-obvious – people who’d laugh at a friend who confessed to a foot fetish, or make their partner feel guilty about a particularly spicy sexual past. Understandably I never end up fancying these people. If your instant reaction to something different or new is to either ban it, mock it, or kill it with sticks, then we’re probably not going to get on.

3. Excessive confidence

I don’t mean someone who is just confident in their actions and their looks – these people are super-hot. I mean someone so confident they aren’t interested in other people at all.

People who act like what comes out of your mouth is just a tedious compulsory interlude between the end of their last sentence and the beginning of their next. People who say “That’s nice, now about me…” People who actively yawn if you tell an anecdote that doesn’t involve them. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve fucked my fair share of them – but I’ve now resolved not to shag anyone who’s more likely to get hard looking into a mirror than at me.

4. Excessive shyness

Socially awkward nerds, unite – shyness is not necessarily a barrier to getting laid. There’s something deeply sexy about taking a guy who is nervous and awkward and coaxing him out of his shell until he’s tying my ankles to a bedpost and calling me ‘bitch’ when he fucks me. Shyness itself is not a turn-off.

However, if you are too shy it becomes a barrier beyond which it is impossible to see. It’s not that I don’t fancy guys who are excessively shy, it’s that I am unable to tell whether I fancy them or not. If you won’t speak to me, tell me about yourself, make a stupid joke or confess to an embarrassing story, I will never know whether you’re the sort of guy I want to ride off into the sunset.

5. Nagging/neediness

“But I really want to see you tonight.”

“I notice you haven’t replied to my last email.”

“Can’t you just stay with me this weekend?”

Cards on the table, here – I’m a cold-hearted cunt. If you act casual and treat me like an overly-sexual best friend, chances are we can stay together for as long as you decide it’s fun. But if you act as if I’m the solution to all your emotional needs I’ll grow bemused and then very quickly irritated.

I love it when you want me, but I cannot bear you to need me. The bottom line is that the puppy-dog keenness that might go down well with an actual girlfriend just fills me with guilt and – occasionally, though I shudder to admit it – disgust. By nagging me to see you, email you, love you, you fool me into thinking that these are things I didn’t want to do in the first place. You stop being a person that I want to spend time with and become a task to cross off my to-do list.

In conclusion

You might have noticed that (barring elements of the first item) this isn’t just an exhaustive list of physical characteristics, like a judgmental dating site profile. The reason is probably obvious to those of you who are regular readers. Although I have a definite physical ‘type’ when it comes to men (would that dangerously hot guy from My Chemical Romance please stand up) looks aren’t that high on my ‘do I want to fuck this dude?’ checklist. It’s nice if you’re pretty, fit might be a bonus, melty dark eyes are a tasty cherry on top, but ultimately the most important things about you are the things that I can’t see.

I don’t want a pretty fuck, I want a pretty good fuck, and you don’t get to be one of those just by going to the gym and waxing your chest hair.

Update 2017: this is one of those blog posts that I really regret writing – at least regret writing in this way. Bear in mind it is a very old one, and the views in it may well be shit. I don’t write these ‘beware’ intros for many posts, because I figure you can see the date stamp and realise I may have been ignorant years ago. But this one is insensitive to people of a variety of different religions, and as an atheist it’s probably not my place to get all publicly pervy on stuff like this.  

It’s not always the obvious things that get you off. Unless you hadn’t realised it already, I’m an atheist. Organised religion alternately bemuses and horrifies me. I find the suppression of sexuality (which seems to come packaged with most major religions) terrifying. The idea of taking a large group of people and forbidding them to act on their sexual instincts seems to me a recipe for misery and trouble.

Yes, we should exercise some sexual restraint. We are, after all, highly evolved enough that we don’t need to go around rutting on street corners and killing each other over who gets the biggest share of antelope. But by cutting people off completely and telling them that their sexual desires are not only sins but some of the worst sins we can commit, we end up with groups of people who have a warped and not entirely healthy attitude towards the perfectly natural contents of their pants.

That’s the tedious moralising over and done with, let’s get onto the sexy stuff. Alongside my worry that sexual repression causes untold misery and heartache, is my genuine conviction that religious paraphenalia can not only be sexualised but that religious fetishes can be deeply, cunt-wettingly hot.

It’s obscene in one of the truest senses, because some of the things that I masturbate over are things that I have a genuine moral objection to. Take this as your disclaimer for this entry – some of the things I am about to describe are horrible.

My secret shame – I don’t love God, but in the degraded fantasy playworld inside my own head, I love some of the things he makes people do.

Mormon underwear

Did you know that Mormons are required to wear what are called ‘the garments’? Long underwear beneath their clothes, with special stitching and markings to remind them of their duties to God?

Well, I only know this because I also know that there are a number of websites dedicated to explicit shots of Mormons in these garments.

Why is it hot? Well, boys in their underwear are especially sexy anyway, but with the Mormon garments there’s the added thrill that they’re not supposed to be thinking of sexual things. The garments themselves are ones of purity and chastity. And there’s nothing quite like a garment of purity and chastity stretched to almost splitting point by a nice thick dripping erection.

Christian spanking

Oh yes. There’s a group of people who believe that the man’s role in the house is to maintain order and discipline by physically chastising his wife. My initial reaction on discovering this was one of disgust – is it domestic violence? In some cases perhaps it is, and that’s horrific – something that is less likely to arouse than to terrify me.

However, having come across quite a few of blogs, forums and discussions about it, it seems that it’s mostly a front for Christian couples who really like a bit of corporal punishment play. And men spanking women who deliberately play up because they want to be spanked? Couples that do it feeling so guilty that they need to invent special reasons to justify it to their imaginary god? That is hot.

Many of the women’s posts read like the posts on BDSM forums – anticipation, delight, the joy of submission. One woman even asked “does God think it is wrong that I am sexually aroused when my husband spanks me?” the resounding answer from the boards: no. God loves that you’re in a loving relationship, and as long as you don’t disobey your husband just to get a spanking, God’s pretty happy with the whole situation. No doubt he gets an excellent view of your nice pink arse from his throne somewhere up in the sky.

Inappropriately cut burkhas

I once had a 4 hour stopover at an airport in Hong Kong, at the same time as a large group of people who were obviously travelling to or from a strongly Muslim country – burkhas everywhere. Usually the burkha is a sign of oppression – women are forced to wear them so that men don’t see any of their good bits. Or, in fact, any of them at all.

But on this occasion I saw a burkha-clad lady who shattered all of the rules. Her burkha was a light beige in colour, and slinky as fuck. Cut from beautiful silky material that skimmed her slim hips and showed a waist Cosmo would hold up as a shining example of womanhood, she sashayed down one of the airport walkways in 4 inch heels like she was on her way to fuck a superstar. Her husband, a suave, rich-looking gent, couldn’t help but hold the smuggest grin in the entire world.

I got wet just looking at them and imagining the filth they’d get up to as soon as that burkha was off.

The silver ring

The ultimate. The final. The key ingredient in all religious pervery – the silver ring. The ring represents a pledge someone has made to Jesus – a pledge not to fuck before marriage. Some young ring-bearing couples take it even further – to avoid temptation they don’t give handjobs, they don’t kiss, they only cuddle from the side (to avoid that awkward moment when the guy pops a boner because he can feel his lady’s tits smooshing against his chest).

These are hot because they represent a challenge. They represent the desperate, trembling need of young twenty-something virgins to fuck and be fucked. They represent the beauty and joy of instant ejaculation on first touch. To Christians they might look like symbols of chastity and purity, but to me they look exactly the opposite. A silver ring says not ‘I love Jesus’ but ‘I am positively bursting with sexual anticipation. Touch it. Go on. Touch it. Pretty please.’

I won’t, of course, but I’ll have a good wank about it later.