There’s a rather excellent exchange in Queer as Folk that goes something like this:

Alexander: “When you have a wank, do you think about him?”
Vince: “What sort of question’s that?”
Alexander: “Do you think about him?”
Vince: “No.”
Alexander: “Congratulations, he’s your boyfriend.”

By this definition, this boy is definitely not my boyfriend. I’m a bit more than in love with him – I am obsessed by him in a way that cannot be healthy. He takes my waking thoughts and as much of my spare time as I can find between work and writing and drinking and sleep. What’s worse – he takes up the fantasies that were previously reserved for the faceless strangers who’d play out scenes of angry fucking behind my closed eyelids.

In short: when I have a wank, I think about him.

I think about him bracing himself, restraining me, fucking me in the ass. I think about his whispered words and his hard kisses and the far-too-infrequent slaps he sometimes gives me. I think about the quick, sharp, angry strokes with which he fucks me.

Get out of my head

This boy commands my attention in a way that others don’t. I joke with him that it’s because of his dick. His dick which is wonderful, thick, almost permanently solid – straining at his jeans as he grips my arse, or slips an idle hand down my top. And I joke about it because the truth is worse – it’s not just his dick: it’s him.

He’s warm, he’s kind, he’s funny. He’s beautiful. He has big arms and hands that envelop me like I’m tiny. He says utterly ridiculous things in an accent that makes me drool. He wraps me in big sweaters and brings me coffee, like this kind of calm happiness is the most normal thing in the world. He swings quickly from gentle to passionate, and every time he does it takes me by lustful surprise. And when I get angry or unreasonable he nods, and listens, and tells me I’m not mad, then holds my big, mad head in his gentle hands and makes me feel like a normal person again.

It’s a trap

Rather ridiculously, I am more terrified of writing this than I am any of the other stuff. I can talk to you about group-gropes in a sex cinema, my excessive love of spunk, or the fun I’ve had with piss-play. But telling you that despite my lust for any guy with a nerdy charm and a solid dick, right now I’m just not in the mood for group sex and spanking circles, is pretty fucking tricky indeed.

The fact that writing this entry is a bit like pulling teeth lays bare all of my own prejudices about love. That love is a pathetic shadow of the independent lust on which most of my recent relationships have been based. I feel like, having mastered the art of being happy on my own, and withdrawing from boys who have too much emotional control over me, I’ve failed if I ever think too much of them. I’ve failed if I love them, or miss them. Above all, I’ve failed if I can’t put them out of my mind for long enough to have a wank about someone else.

I’m just going to smash everything

It’s not that I haven’t been in love before – I have. But I’ve never loved healthily – I don’t know how to be in love casually. I want to be able to do this to just the right degree.

On a night out drinking there’s that brilliant moment when I’m merrily drunk, having fun dancing and flirting and chatting and smoking endless cigarettes, and I think the night’s perfect. Then one more drink and I’m grumpy and spinning and weak and desperate to go home to bed. Love is the same.

I can like guys, I can lust guys, I can fuck them with a desperate, panting enthusiasm yet still remain healthy and in control. But then just a bit more – a few more nights spent sleeping beside them, a few more hugs that don’t end in a fuck, a few more secrets exposed and intimate discussions and suddenly it’s all too much. I can’t sleep, I can’t think, and worst of all I can’t come without thinking about him fucking me into submission. And I can’t be in love this hard without overdoing it.

So I fuck men and I play with men and I flirt with men and I follow them from pub to bed to pub to strip club to pub to bed and back again. And I hope that they’re just friends, and I tell them that they’re just friends, and I break up with them when they’re more than friends, because I don’t ever want them to become precious.

If I can’t fuck or wank without thinking of a specific someone, then that someone has become precious to me. He’s special enough that most of the time I don’t want to fuck anyone else – I barely even think about anyone else when I’m lying horny on the sofa thinking about what I might wank to. I know what I’m going to wank to – the same fucking guy who’s in my head even after he’s left my bedroom.

I’ve accidentally become monogamous. And worse, I’ve accidentally created a relationship so precious that I’m in danger of smashing it. I’m at the merry stage of drunk and reaching for another pint and smiling because the night can only get better and I’m so happy and I’m dancing and I’m horny and I want more oh please let me have more and just another pint and another dance and I just want to stay here a bit longer and I’m definitely not going to be sick. I promise.

I kissed a girl, and I liked it.

Or more truthfully: I kissed a girl and it was sort of OK but the main reason I kissed her is because there was a dude that we both fancied who we knew would be pretty aroused by the whole scenario.

It’s not quite as catchy, but it is something that happens a fair bit. Ever since I first saw girls kiss in nightclubs I’ve heard whispers about ‘lipstick lesbians’ – usually accompanied by judgmental frowning. I’ve heard people moan about it and damn these girls. They’re stupid, they’re pathetic, they’re attention-grabbing and – perhaps most damning of all – they’re not even really into it. How dare they?

I read an article today by Julie Birchill, in which she discusses these girl-on-girl kisses. Girls who like girls for boys, girls who like girls for attention, and – her example being the famous Madonna/Britney snog – girls who like girls for money.

Sometimes I kiss girls for boys

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there’s nothing wrong in principle with people pulling others for the arousal of a third party. After all, many fantastic threesomes have begun that way. Some of my fantastic threesomes have begun that way. And I’d be a miserable hypocrite if I didn’t admit that two boys kissing to try and turn me on would… well… turn me on. Finally I suppose I should also admit that kissing girls to give boys erections is something that I do quite frequently – it is, perhaps, one of the tamest things I have done in my unending quest to give guys erections.

Likewise, people do shit for money all the time. Money is not an illegitimate reason to do something – it’s the reason most of us haul ourselves out of bed at godforsaken hours of the morning five days a week to go and do boring things when, given the choice, we’d rather be at home eating crisps and wanking. If you’re a pop starlet who thinks she’ll make more money by kissing a girl, I can see you making a legitimate choice to kiss a girl rather than – say – do something headline-grabbing for charity or get strategically semi-naked in your next music video.

Finally – attention. We all want attention, don’t we? Short of hermits, nuns and wanted criminals, everyone likes having a few pairs of eyes on them. If we burned people at the stake for attention-grabbing, they’d come for the bloggers first but the rest of humanity wouldn’t be far behind.

We’re all just people, making decisions. And the decision to place your tongue inside someone’s mouth and move it around a bit can, like any other decision in our lives, be made because we want money, attention or sex. There’s nothing obviously crass about doing something for these reasons, and yet girls who kiss girls are often met with contempt because they dared to do something that wasn’t purely motivated by a desire for the kiss itself.

The ethics of snogging someone you don’t really fancy

I suspect what people hate most about girls pulling other girls in clubs – and why ‘lipstick lesbian’ is (in my albeit limited experience) a phrase frequently spat with disgust and horror – is the lies. No reasonable person could have a problem with two women who fancy each other pulling in a nightclub – the problem people seem to have with this scenario is that there isn’t always desire. We’re used to kissed being motivated by this, so any other motivation both looks and feels like a lie.

People aren’t angry about what your motivations are (money, attention, or arousing other people), they’re angry because of what they’re not. You’re not motivated by lust, therefore you’re lying.

But my issue with this is that although I hate lies as much as the next person, I don’t feel like this really is a lie – it’s a game. You’re play-acting like you fancy someone in the same way as you might play-act a naughty schoolgirl, or an angry sargeant major, or a runaway My Little Pony. There’s nothing wrong with games as long as all participants know the rules.

The only time this falls down is if one of the participants doesn’t know the rules. If I pull you because we both fancy a guy and want to watch him get an erection in the pub, and if that guy knows that we’re doing that for him, then a good time will be had by all. But if one person doesn’t have that knowledge, and thinks the kiss is the start of something beautiful, then their legitimate and honest desire has been turned into something tawdry and crass.

Imagine someone you’d fancied for years finally getting up the courage to ask you for a snog, which you gleefully do, only to find out straight afterwards that they were doing it on a nudge and a wink from their partner. Horrible, heartbreaking, cruel, and immoral.

That’s what we should be disgusted by. Not the kiss itself, but the way it’s done. Kissing is, like all sex acts, intrinsically dependent on the enthusiasm of the other parties involved.

The person who is kissing you out of genuine love or lust has the right to be offended and upset if you’re being dishonest, and knowingly misleading them, but the people who scowl and whisper ‘lipstick lesbian’ have no such rights. They can guess at your motivations, but they can’t know what rules you’ve established with the other people involved. All they will ever see is two girls kissing – it’s up to those girls to decide whether they’re happy with that.

A quick question: just how hard can tweets such as the following fuck off out of my Twitter timeline for good?

“There are far scarier things on the loose in Essex than the escaped lion. We ran in terror from these beasts last night http://t.co/A86Tz3Hw“

The answer, I hope, is ‘very fucking hard indeed.’

There is (or, more realistically, there probably isn’t) a lion on the loose in Essex right now. The police are on the hunt and Twitter’s crawling with jokes about lions. I can cope with wardrobes and circuses and puns about ‘lion around’, but what I’m not particularly pleased with are the numerous jokes about how all Essex women are fake, ugly, desperate slags.

Haterz gotta hate

I know there are some shockingly awful people on the internet – one of the fantastic things about certain parts of it (Twitter for instance) is that you can pick and choose whether to follow them. I choose not to – I try and select people who are liberal, interesting and funny. In short: I follow people who aren’t cunts.

But unfortunately these people who aren’t cunts have massively let me down. In the last 24 hours or so I’ve seen numerous retweets of jokes like the one above. Hilarious descriptions of ‘beasts’ wandering nightclubs sprayed orange or side-splitting gags telling the police not to ‘vajazzle the pussy.’

These have been tweeted and retweeted by people I like. People who think they’re liberal. People who think they’re unjudgmental. People who sip lattes and worry about human rights and wonder what kind of political activism will have the biggest impact. Most pertinently, they’ve been retweeted by the sort of people who respect a woman’s right to bodily autonomy – to wear dungarees and a cardigan covered in soup stains if she feels like it, her right to not shave her armpits or have plastic surgery.

My problem is not with the jokes themselves – they’re annoying and cunty, sure. I’m the sort of girl who’ll twitch if people in pubs make reference to ‘2am slags’ or ‘the hot girl’s fat mate’, but I realise there’s not much point in tackling the arseholes who believe they’re mining a rich seam of comedy gold. My worry is that these jokes aren’t being made by arseholes I’m overhearing in a Wetherspoons, they’re being made by people I admire. People I usually think are funny. People who would previously have retweeted blogs I’ve written about self-confidence and body image.

Seriously, liberal people – feminists FFS – how fucking dare you do this now?

Vajazzle the fuck out of your cunt

I don’t want a vajazzle. I don’t want a spray tan. I don’t want extensions. I expect – because I am not a fucking idiot – that not all the women in Essex want these things either. But some of them do. And you don’t have to be from Essex either – quite a few women want to strut the streets wearing skimpy clothes and fake tan and padded bras and false eyelashes and a fuck of a lot of other stuff that liberal hipsters like me wouldn’t be seen dead in. And good on them.

If you want to agree with me that a woman has every right to not shave her fucking armpits, then you need to be consistent. You can’t support a woman’s right to physical autonomy if you subsequently mock and spit upon those who pick a look that you find unarousing or gross.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about ‘Snog, Marry, Avoid’, and why it was such a hateful programme. She pointed out that although they occasionally let goths and punk girls off the hook (because, apparently, they have a ‘unique style’) fortunately they do sort out the women who ‘just look like an awful mess.’ Because black lipstick and ripped fishnets is a ‘style’ but fake tan and hair extensions is ‘a mess.’

Sorry, but you don’t get to do that. You just don’t. If you’re going to champion women’s right to pick a ‘style’ and select clothes that they feel comfortable in – clothes that make them feel good and that they enjoy wearing – you can’t subsequently declare certain styles to be out of bounds.

Pick your sides, people. 

I’m standing here in my scruffy jeans, with legs I haven’t shaved for a week and piercings you wouldn’t wear to a job interview, next to hot muscular girls in dungarees and boxer shorts, and all the other types of women there are. Some are wearing floral summer dresses and subtle, how-does-she-achieve-that-look makeup. There are punks and goths and hipsters and – yes – there are scantily-clad bleach-blonde women dolled up to go to a nightclub. I don’t care who you fancy, or who you identify with, because it’s not about that. It’s about having respect for people’s choices, even when those choices don’t fit your personal worldview.

You’re either with us or against us, but you can’t just be with some of us.

Update: The police have now called off the search for the lion. World reacts with a total lack of surprise.