I hate spiders. They terrify me to the point of irrationality. I’ve barged people out of the way to escape them, reflex-kicked my bare feet at walls, and fallen off beds when I suspect there’s one near the headboard. This fear pisses me off, but it’s so guttural and instinctive I doubt I can do much about it. I live with it, because it’s not like I’ll get rid of all the spiders any time soon, and besides – they’re relatively easy to avoid if I have kind friends ready with a glass and a square of paper to hand.

Fear is easy to live with if you rarely have to confront it. But every now and then it ends up confronting me, and I realise that I wasn’t being a big brave girl all along, I was just avoiding something that was so enormous and terrifying I didn’t dare to face it.

I fear being naked.

Body-image and irrational terror

That might sound like a weird confession coming from a sex blogger: I have loads of sex, and I’m frequently naked. But despite getting my kit off on a regular basis, I haven’t combated the fear, I’ve just been finding cunning ways to avoid it. Like the time when I put a mug over a huge spider and left it on my kitchen floor for a week – I’ve dealt with the immediate problem, but the problem still festered away.

When I was carefree and fucking lots of different guys, I’d spend long hours shaving legs and armpits and crotch, plucking stray hairs from random places on my body, sucking my stomach in and avoiding cake. It didn’t make me fear nakedness any less, it just gave me a temporary stay on the hatred I felt for my body. Being naked with guys was vital to my happiness, and being attractive seemed like an impossible goal, but one I should strive for nonetheless. I could be… not gorgeous or stunning exactly just… prettier. Better.

Since I got into a relationship, my fear and hatred of my own body has been dulled. He loves it, so I try to ignore the whispering voice in the back of my head that says it’s just not good enough. Again, though, this isn’t really dealing with the problem any more than putting a mug over a spider will magically send it outside.

Getting my tits out in public

It was hot on the beach. Not the kind of wet-picnic, blue-lipped misery you’d get in Britain, but glorious, blue-sea hot like you get in those glossy holiday brochures. It was also one of those beaches where most people are topless. I was fascinated. These were alien creatures with a philosophy I could barely comprehend – people for whom the fear of tan lines was far greater than the fear of getting their tits out. In fact, looking at the way some of them were strolling around with ice creams, I had a sneaking suspicion that these people weren’t scared of nakedness at all. Imagine. Watching women walk around nearly nude in public gives me similar cowardly envy as watching the playful kids at school pick up daddy-long-legs with their bare hands.

I took my top off in the sea.

Not properly off – it was wrapped around my wrist, tightly like a security blanket. Just in case the tide should suddenly rush out and I was left standing there in half a bikini and an invisible blanket of shame.

“You look awesome,” he said. And “I want to touch you.” And, oh, a million variations on this: you’re beautiful, sexy, hot. I love you. I love the way you are. I love your body. Professing his desire for something that I’ve only ever felt disdain for.

And I wanted to say ‘thanks.’ I’d have loved to do what my mother taught me, and accept a compliment with grace. But I couldn’t do better than a choking, angry “fuck off.” Because he can’t love my body, of course – it’s awful. Horrible. Monstrously wrong and different and bad and appalling.  Just as no one can ever really want a pet tarantula – they just get them to show other people how brave they are. How cool. How unusual. My irrational, fearful self knows this with the blind conviction of someone who is almost certainly wrong.

“We should go to a nudist beach.”

“Hell no.”

“We don’t have to. It’s just… well… it might be fun.” He grinned. “I know you’re nervous, but what if we did it together?”

So we did it together. Shaking with fear and sweating under the flimsy layers of cotton summer clothes, I followed him to a place where it wasn’t just OK to be naked, it was expected. Embraced. The whole thing seemed absurd to me – the idea that people would enjoy being naked more than they liked being clothed. This wasn’t just a practical response to tan lines, it was a genuine love of something that made me nauseous with dread. It wasn’t a fear of being judged – how could I possibly pass judgment on a stranger when the hollow ache of my own terror is rendering me insensible? And how could they possibly pass judgment on me when I couldn’t imagine them having anything other than the same ridiculous worries?

I didn’t fear these people. I feared myself. I feared my body.

Just get over it

This week, the amazing @ArchedEyebrowBR blogged on Summertime body shaming. She highlighted the ludicrous simplicity of the idea that in order to get a bikini body you just have to ‘get a bikini and put it on your body’. Of course it’s not that easy. It’s definitely not that easy for me. Because although my rational mind wants to stamp out all the body-shaming, all the self-loathing and misery, it’s not just a case of ‘forgetting about it’ or ‘getting over it.’

If it were that easy I’d have done it already. I’d have embraced the fact that – in truth – my body isn’t monstrous or horrible or any kind of enemy: it’s actually fine. Sometimes fatter, sometimes thinner, sometimes hairier or paler or bruised for no apparent reason. That would be the rational thing to think, and I know right now that it is the truth in the same way as I know right now that spiders are more scared of me than I am of them, and it’s not like we live in Australia or anything where the little fuckers can kill you with a single bite.

But self-loathing isn’t rational, or easily brushed aside.

With the sun shining, my boy whispering words of kind encouragement, I got ready to do it. I set my brain to work overdrive in ‘rational’ mode, telling me that my body was gorgeous and my concerns were unnecessary, that no one was looking and no one cared and those that did look would probably be smiling. Finally, eventually, I took off my bikini. Hooray for me! Well done! I overcame my fear of being naked! What a happy ending!

Once it was off, I lay naked for ten minutes sobbing face-down into a beach towel.

I’m not saying I’ll always be like this, or even that I’m guaranteed to be like this – on a good day with a fair wind and a happy outlook I’ll probably be less tearful and more strident. Nor am I saying that anyone else should be like this, or should feel obliged to get over it if they are. All I’m saying is that it’s hard. It’s harder than I make out sometimes, when I write rational, angry blogs about what is not wrong with you. It’s harder than just ‘getting confident’ or ‘ignoring your worries’ or ‘facing your fears’. I’m saying that I’ve stamped on a few, but there are still a million spiders. Sometimes I worry that there always will be.

This week a rather lovely and polite person from a TV agency asked me to promote a casting call for a new sex programme. It sounds like exactly the sort of sex-based reality TV that I enjoy watching, although the jury is out on whether it will be an enjoyable watch or a troubling one. Anyone who’s played Bad Sex Media Bingo with documentaries on porn will know that the media doesn’t always deal with sex in a sensible way.

Still, some do, and I have no issue in principle with posting a casting call, just in case any of you perverts would like to get on telly for a bit. However, I do have an issue with this one in particular. Can you spot why?

Sex at different ages

If you said ‘the age limit’ then you’d be absolutely correct. Of course, as a show that is about sex, the range has to begin at 18. But why have an upper age limit of 35?

Full disclosure: I’m 30. I have no personal experience of sex over the age of 35. For all I know it might be the case that, upon hitting that magical birthday, I suddenly lose all interest in any kind of sexual activity. Wanking goes out of the window, oral gets ousted, and fucking fucks utterly and irretrievably off. Maybe the instant rejection of all things sex at the age of 35 was the driving force behind Kirstie Allsopp’s recent comments that women should have babies much earlier in life. Maybe there is a whole new genre of life that I had previously not imagined: the Dry Years. After fucking oneself raw as a youngster, the more mature adult puts sex to one side, and begins filling their time with visits to garden centres and discussion on house prices instead.

I fucking doubt it though.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the idea that older people cannot have and enjoy sex is bollocks. What’s more, the idea that the sexual cutoff point would be as ridiculously low as thirty-fucking-five is phenomenal. Your genitals don’t fall off when you hit 36, and nor do you suddenly change your attitude towards something that fundamental.

Older people in sex programmes on TV

I asked the person who contacted me what possible reason there could be for such a low cut-off point (or, indeed, why there was a need to have any upper age limit at all). She didn’t know, and to be fair I am guessing it wasn’t her decision to limit things, so I said I’d post the call (see above – voila!) but also that I’d call attention to the fact that the age limit on this was incredibly restrictive.

Look: I know that TV companies often equate youth with beauty and sexiness. The idea of deliberately seeking out older people to be on a TV programme about sex probably has producers screeching with terror. But older people do have sex. Older people can be sexual. As someone for whom the vast majority of my crushes are on men who are well over the age of forty, and as a woman who is constantly reminded that to wrinkle is to fail, I utterly despair at the thought of a programme about sex being artificially limited to exclude a huge proportion of the sexually active population.

TV sex programmes that don’t limit based on age

I have also had contact recently from the company that makes ‘Sex sent me to the ER’. Their casting call is below.

Can you see an age limit there? I can’t. Although in the email exchange the casting producer told me they were looking for couples ‘aged 20-50’, on the ad itself there are no limits. You know what that means? It means they may well get applications from people aged over 50, and I suspect that if their story is interesting then the number of birthdays they’ve had will be deemed irrelevant. As it should be in these situations.

When I am old…

I understand that as we age we change – we might be less interested in sex, just as we might be less interested in clubbing. Moreover there will be some people under the age of thirty five who are wholly disinterested in doing things with their genitals, and have much more fun doing other things. But none of this is necessarily the case for all couples. There are plenty of older people (and yet again I smash my head onto the keyboard at having to include people in their late thirties as ‘older people’) who are sexually active. Personally, in five years time I plan on being one of them. When I am an old woman I shall wear purple thigh-high socks and a black velvet strap-on belt. I will tie my partner to the bed by the ankles and ride his dick with just as much joie de vivre as I did last night. I shall wank on the sofa in the lounge and lick my fingers afterwards.

What’s more, it may well be the case that there are people who feel uncomfortable about older sex, or disgusted by it, who wouldn’t be so if so much of the media didn’t insist on painting older people right out of the picture as soon as sex comes into play. So much of our view on sex is dictated by what society tells us is and isn’t OK. What is and isn’t erotic. What is and isn’t beautiful. Those who portray sex on TV – especially on reality shows – have an opportunity to make things as ‘real’ as possible.

I’m sad that in this case they haven’t taken it.

Women: what will you do first – have that glittering career you’ve always dreamed of, or get babies quick-sharp before your maternal need reaches a shrieking climax and you’re left yearning for the children that will make your life complete?

Kirstie Allsopp has been in some pretty hot water today over comments she made about life choices. She pointed out (quite rightly) that if you have a womb and ovaries, your chances of using those to make a baby drop sharply after a certain age. That’s obviously common sense. Unfortunately, she then used that to say that if she had a daughter she’d advise her not to go to University early in life (i.e. shortly after 18) and instead focus on having a family and saving studying and a career for later.

She’s taken a lot of crap for saying this, and has taken a lot of agreement, too: from people who did have children young, or those who wish they had.

Here’s the problem: Kirstie gave what is essentially some good advice. If you want kids in a certain way (and if you’re able to have them in that way), you have to plan relatively early. Unfortunately, this good advice was presented in a way that rested on a huge number of assumptions. It’s not the advice that’s bad, it’s what it rests on.

She has, in no particular order, assumed that:

– All women want the same things (career and babies).

– All women are biologically capable of having children and will want to have biological offspring.

– A career is always a choice, as opposed to something many people do because they need to put food on the table.

– Women shoulder the responsibility for the propagation of the human race.

Can women ‘have it all’?

I’d be less angry about comments on careers and children if it weren’t for the fact that it is always presented as a choice that women – and only women – need to make. Incidentally, as I stand up loudly and proudly and state that ‘not all women’ want to have babies, to correct this incredibly common assumption, I look forward to the men who recently commented on my ‘sex entitlement’ blog to join in with me, correcting those gender assumptions they so hated when they believed them to be directed at dudes.

Sarcastic asides over, men are never asked ‘hey, are you sure you want to have this career now? Shouldn’t you have kids first?’ Of course no one ever asks men this, because society has an inherent aversion to male child-rearing, and feels that kids are the sole preserve of women. This puts massive undue responsibility on women, and leaves men standing on the sidelines being patronised by strangers when they take over the duty of ‘babysitting’ their own children. Not to mention it makes women like me really bloody angry when they keep having to answer the same tickbox list of questions.

Conversations about my potential future offspring fall into two broad categories:

a) relevant and interesting conversations (these are the ones I have with my partner, where we discuss our thoughts on The Future)

b) totally unnecessary, irrelevant and intrusive conversations (the ones I have with every other twat who thinks they know better than me what I think)

The latter type usually consists of a friend or family member telling me in syrupy tones that one day I’ll just wake up and – BAM – suddenly I will want a baby so hard I will be unsure how I can ever have wanted anything else in my life. They tell me that having children is the best thing that ever happened to them and that, ergo, it would be the best thing to ever happen to me. It might be, I don’t know. I’m not a fucking psychic. All I know is that right now – right this instant – I don’t want one. And you nagging me about it is unlikely to make me start ovulating. So, if you’re one of those people who likes to tell people to have kids, pay attention.

Five things people need to stop telling me about children

1. You’ll change your mind one day.

I’ve been fairly open about the fact that I don’t really want children. I may well change my mind one day: I’m a human, and we have a habit of doing that. But you don’t get to tell me that unless you have actually lived inside my head. That’s not only impossible but undesirable – it’s a terribly sordid place.

2. It’s the only real purpose for us in life!

By ‘us’ do you mean ‘people’? Because sure, it is a purpose of the human race to survive. And we, as a species, need to make sure we don’t die out any time soon. But there’s a huge leap to be made between ‘survival of the species’ and ‘my individual choices.’ If I’m one of the last people on Earth this argument might hold weight, but given that there are around 6 billion of us, I don’t think my uterus is the vital pivot on which our survival depends.  I no more have a moral responsibility to breed than I have a moral responsibility not to die.

3. Your biological clock is ticking…

I’m getting older, if that’s what you mean, but I’m fascinated as to how you have such an in-depth insight into the state of my reproductive system. For all you know it might not work. For all you know I might not have one.

4. Oh, you must hate children then.

They’re OK, I suppose. They are like adults, only smaller and they say hilarious stupid things sometimes, and also if you have a child you have an excuse to do things like play with the Brio train sets in the Early Learning Centre without being asked to leave. I bloody love some kids (usually ones I am related to, or particularly well-behaved offspring of my friends) but there are many kids who are – let’s face it – twats.

I don’t ‘hate’ or ‘love’ kids. As with adults, I will form my opinion on them based on discussion with the individual in question, and possibly a Frozen singalong. Only then can you get the true measure of a person.

5. Don’t you think it’s a bit selfish to choose your work over children?

No. Nor is it selfish to choose travel, hobbies, or sitting on the sofa staring blankly into space for forty years. All of these things are legitimate life choices, no more or less selfish than the decision to have children. You know why? Because I haven’t had children yet. That’s the beauty of it! If I did have children then certainly I’d be pretty selfish if I ignored them in favour of writing angry blogs and eating ice-cream at 11 am on a Monday for no reason. Given that I don’t have them, my choices can only be selfish or unselfish in relation to how they affect the people I know: people who actually exist right now, as opposed to some possible future person who may never even come into being.

So there you go. Some thoughts on kids. If, like me, you are a 30-year-old cis woman and people are constantly nagging you about your biological clock, feel free to shout this in their face until they stop talking to you.

Kids: have ’em, don’t have ’em, dither over your decision for years before you make it – it’s none of my fucking business.

There are some things that you deserve in virtue of the fact that you fulfil a set of criteria: get all the answers right in this test, you deserve an A. Spend fifty quid at a nice restaurant, you deserve a decent meal in exchange for your money.

There are certain things that you deserve simply for being alive, and human: the right to liberty, equality before the law, a certain level of privacy, etc.

Into which of these categories does sex fit? Is it something you have a human right to, like justice, or is it something that you deserve if you have done certain things to earn it?

The right to sex

If you answered ‘neither’ then you are correct. The problem is that while on the surface most decent people can see why sex is not a human right – it’s blindingly obvious that you don’t ‘deserve’ sex just because you are a living human who wants it – there are many people who feel like it falls into the first category – that if you do X, Y and Z you somehow deserve to get laid. Someone withholding your justly earned sex is like a teacher withholding an A, even though you got all of the answers right.

Something awful happened recently that caused a few things to fall into place in my head. I’ve long had a sense of creeping dread about pick-up artists, Nice Guys, and a whole host of other things that I want to put under the blanket label ‘misogynist’. They make me uncomfortable, not just because they are misogynist, but because they have a skewed and unusual view on sex that I’ve struggled to put into words.

You’ll probably have seen the recent news that a young guy went on a shooting rampage after having pledged to punish women for not sleeping with him. Please read the story if you haven’t already, but here’s a quote from the shooter:

“College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure, but in those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness, it’s not fair … I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it.”

Yes, it’s misogynist. But there’s a very particular type of misogyny that this represents, and I feel like it is becoming  more common. There’s an old-school prudish misogyny that is often the preserve of darkly religious types: a fear of women with their soft bodies and their Eve-like temptation, who will compel men to sin because we’re wicked and evil and beautiful and charming. There are a million and one reasons why that type of misogyny is terrifying and awful. I think this type of misogyny is different, though. No less terrifying, but different. And I want to explain why.

First category misogyny

What makes the shooter – and many other pick-up artists/men’s rights type people – stand out from the old-school, ‘fear of women’ misogynists, is the fact that he doesn’t hate women because they might tempt him into sex, he hates women because he thinks he deserves to have sex with them.

Many people have expressed a worry that he is looking on sex as something in category two – an absolute right. Equally you could read some of his chilling pronouncements on women and think he sees sex as a category one thing – something that, if he follows a certain set of rules, should be handed to him on a plate. Like an A grade. Like a decent meal. Like something he has earned.

The problem is, of course, that sex is not a right at all – earned or absolute. It isn’t like an A grade. No matter how hard you work, what rules you follow, or how desperately you want it, you are never entitled to sex.

The right to refuse

The obvious reason is clear: you never have a right  to sex (absolute or earned) because there’s a much more important human right that trumps it: the right to bodily autonomy. You would only be able to exercise any ‘right’ to sex if you removed someone else’s right to refuse it. That’s not going to happen, and naturally no decent person would ever want it to. Your rights can never come at the expense of someone else’s.

Hence why it’s obvious that sex never falls into category two – it’s not a human right.

Necessary versus sufficient

The slightly less obvious point, that seems to be made less frequently, is that sex cannot possibly fall into category one (earned rights), because there are no conditions you could ever fulfil that would be sufficient to ‘earn’ you some sex. We know that there are certain things that are necessary in order to have sex, but we often confuse the difference between ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’. Necessary conditions: things you absolutely have to do in order to put yourself in the running for something. Sufficient: something that – on its own – is enough to guarantee you that thing. The difference between ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’ conditions is vital, often confused, and frequently ignored.

Let’s go back to the A grade again. In order to get it you need to write all the correct answers. That’s a necessary condition. But it’s not sufficient – if you write down all of the correct answers but don’t hand your paper in on time, you no more deserve the A than you deserve to fly to the moon.

The problem with a lot of the discourse around sex is that many many people confuse necessary and sufficient conditions – they know that they should treat someone nicely if they want to have sex with them, then they make the erroneous leap of assuming that because they’ve been nice they have somehow earned the sex.

That’s the key difference between sex and an A grade: although there absolutely is a set of necessary conditions, you can fulfil every single one of them and it can still not be sufficient.

It’s not just the bad guys

The reason I’m writing this, rather than any other blog, today is because I wanted to pin down the problem beyond just my general rage and discomfort. I could talk about misogynist extremism, and how it’s wrong for men to think they are ‘entitled’ to sex. I could rage out about the prevalence of men who hate women and the easy excuses we try to give them when what they’re saying is awful and unforgivable. But the vast majority of men would respond with “so what? I don’t feel like I’m entitled to anything. I’m not like those other guys.”

And sure, most men aren’t going to shoot women because of an openly-held belief that they have a right to women’s bodies. But many people do make the mistake of assuming that – if you have fulfilled a certain set of necessary conditions, then that in itself is sufficient to have earned some sex. It’s incredibly apparent in so much of our discourse, and being able to formulate exactly why it’s wrong (beyond the statement ‘it’s hateful’) means we can apply it to broader scenarios, and explain to people exactly what it is about their attitude towards sex that needs to change. Most people don’t relate to the bad guys, but most people are influenced by these common mistaken beliefs.

Whether it’s problem pages that tell you how to ‘get’ your partner to fulfil your fantasies, pick-up artists (or agony aunts/uncles) that tell you a certain set of rules will guarantee you get laid, or telling someone that their partner is being unfair when they don’t do a particular thing: we talk like this a lot. And we need to stop.

If you think you have never been guilty of these assumptions, think again. While considering examples for this blog post, I came up with a fair few times when people I know and like have been guilty of this error one point or another. In fact, I am sure that I have – when sympathising with friends who have been recently rejected by someone they’ve tried really hard to impress, for instance. I’ve probably done it here occasionally too – while I will never tell you that you deserve sex from someone, I do sometimes offer advice on how to encourage someone to fulfil your fantasies without adding that extra caveat: ‘you can try this, but you might still fail, because no one is ever obliged to do what you want.’

So no, men aren’t all buying guns and getting ready to shoot women: but it’s not really helpful to state that as a response to this particular incident. A more complicated and urgent truth is that we often discuss sex as if it’s an earned right, that you achieve by fulfilling a set of conditions. And while you do need to fulfil certain conditions in order to have sex with someone, assuming these conditions are sufficient as well as necessary is incredibly dangerous.

We’re not all picking up guns, but many of us are discussing sex as if it’s a just reward for hard work. An earned right. An A grade.