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.

I’m a freakish weirdo when it comes to foreplay, I think. I’ve spoken before about how I don’t really like getting head. A good fingering is nice every now and again, but I’m a bit impatient. Just as I’m the first in the pub at 5 pm on Friday, itching to start the weekend, when the chance for a shag comes around I’m the one speeding things up in anticipation of what I see as the ‘main’ event, pulling down my knickers and mumbling “just put it in me – now – please.”

But recently I spoke to the rather lovely @EasilyTempted on Twitter, who talked so lovingly about foreplay (or rather – those myriad aspects of sex that don’t involve putting a dick into a vagina) that it might have tempted me to spend a bit more time doing it.

Here’s what she said:

EasilyTempted – on foreplay

This week my husband and I had a beautiful and lengthy 69. I came on his face, more than once, and he came in my mouth. And then I fucked about on Twitter, while he cooked me scrambled eggs. Possibly a perfect evening.

But.

‘Officially’ we didn’t have even have sex. It got me thinking about the word ‘foreplay’ and how misleading and flawed it is as a concept. Foreplay traditionally describes something which is the precursor to sex. But what is sex?

Personally I think of sex in terms of sexual satisfaction with a partner (or partners ~ I’ve read this blog). In this model I would see it as something that involves an orgasm. But what if you can be sexually satisfied without an orgasm? (I have heard such people exist). And do both people have to have an orgasm or just one?

I have no answers.

Given access to each other, my husband and I probably have sex around five times a week and we have been fucking for 12 years. This adds up to a fair amount of sex. But actual penetration – classic penis in vagina stuff – plenty of what we do involves or concludes that way and a great deal doesn’t.

I don’t orgasm from penetration alone, so perhaps that is why fucking is an element of my sex life but not the focus. My husband is also not interested in isolated penetration – if we have limited time he will almost certainly choose abstinence over a simple fuck. So in that sense foreplay is everything to us, which is why I don’t like the implications that it is ‘just’ the starter.

We are both oral-centric. Kissing, licking, sucking – we live in a grown up sexy lollipop shop.

If he kisses and bites me all over for so long that when he puts his fingers on my clitoris I come immediately, is that foreplay?

If I fuck him with my strap-on, is that foreplay?

If he straps me down, spanks me, and fucks my arse with a dildo, is that foreplay?

These are all things we have done this week, and yet we only had penetrative sex once. Include the 69 and that is only one in four.

Blowjobs seem to be in the middle of the Venn Sex Diagram for a lot of people. You have penetration on one side and foreplay on the other but for a lot of people a blowjob means both – this is all down to Bill Clinton, everyone had that discussion.

But somehow, the feminist in me rails against the idea that if just the man has an orgasm it’s sex but if just the woman has an orgasm it is foreplay. Because this would mean the male orgasm trumps the female.

What I don’t like about the expression is that it gives virgins, new lovers, or even bad lovers the idea that anything before the penetration is merely a waiting room for the main event.

There is a lot more to sex than in and out.

If you don’t already follow @EasilyTempted, you definitely should. She also has an incredibly sexy Tumblr where she collects pictures of people doing the good stuff.

Gentlemen, start your engines, because it’s your turn now. Pull down your trousers, hold your dicks aloft, and start wiping them with special cock-cleansing wipes.

That’s right – worry no more. Having ridiculous expectations about your body is now no longer confined to women. And in case you were wondering, there’s also a product for your balls.

Femfresh social media fail

Last week I wrote about Femfresh – that delightful ‘feminine hygiene’ product that purported to ‘woo hoo your froo froo’ with ‘PH-balanced’ wipes, cleansers and sprays. Lovely.

Since then they’ve had something of a PR nightmare, as the Femfresh facebook page has suffered an onslaught of mockery dished out by a human race which, thanks to this, I now have a lot more faith in. Ladies and gentlemen of facebook: I salute you.

If they’ve taken it down, the Wallblog has screenshots.

What’s the point of shouting?

I feel a bit sorry for Femfresh now – yes, they’re peddling a hatefully unnecessary product. But then, so are Tampax – they sell scented tampons. So are Vagisil and Carefree. And yes, so are Freshballs and Fellaswipes.

While it’s great that one of these companies has taken a bit of a battering over a product that is designed to make us feel shameful about the natural genital smells humans produce, the reporting has been a bit confused on the issue.

The lead story (on blogs like The Wall and HuffPo) has been ‘Women start a backlash because a marketing company called their fanny a ‘la-la.” And that’s not strictly the case.

Firstly, it’s not just women. Men are offended by this shit as well – and why wouldn’t they be? Men no more call it a ‘la-la’ than they’d call their dick a ‘dinkle.’ Just because the childish words used in Femfresh’s campaign are about vaginas, that doesn’t mean that you need to have a vagina to recognise how ridiculous the campaign is. There were plenty of men on their facebook page too.

Secondly, people aren’t just angry because a company referred to vaginas as ‘la-la’s. Or ‘nooni’s or ‘kitty’s, for that matter. This language is offensive and patronising, sure, but most of the comments on the page seem to be surrounding the product itself. The misery of discovering that there was yet another thing we were expected to do to our bodies to sanitize them and prettify them before we’d be allowed out in society.

The bright side of Femfresh

I am disgusted by these products – vaginal sprays, dick wipes, scented tampons – and I am disgusted that we live in a world where people are paid to persuade us that they’re necessary.

But I’m actually pretty happy that this happened. We could have watched the next few weeks go by, occasionally making angry comments about the ads plastered on phone boxes or facebook updates about being ‘proud of your pom-pom’, but we didn’t. A huge bunch of people stepped in and gave what Femfresh – in their characteristically euphemistic way – calls ‘feedback.’ They started a massive, angry, stamping kickoff, and told them that we don’t need their bullshit.

So whether you’re male or female, the next time you see an ad or a website for ‘intimate hygiene products’ that tries to persuade you your body is disgusting and unnatural, remember that you’re fine as you are. Not only do you not stink, but the people who think you do just got utterly owned on facebook.

God bless the internet.