Somewhere in the world there exists a blurry night-shot video of me sucking a guy’s dick. Don’t hit google, you’ll never find it. The guy who filmed it, whose dick starred in it, is not an arsehole. I’ve had odd moments of panic when I wonder if his computer ever got stolen, or if the tape from the camera was mislaid and picked up later by a curious friend, but I know with utter conviction that he’d never have deliberately shown it to anyone without my consent.

Kate Middleton’s tits

This week some tawdry celeb mags have published pictures of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless.

The pictures (for I have seen them – they are on the internet) are nothing special. They are exactly what you’d expect them to be. They are not newsworthy, or shocking – they’re unnecessary, and the taking of them was hurtful and intrusive and offensive. The buying of them equally so.

And yet I looked. I looked because I was curious. Everyone’s talking about these pictures. I wanted to confirm my suspicions that the fuss was about nothing, and that publishing them was something I could easily condemn.

“Oh, how awful. They invaded this poor woman’s privacy for nothing. How disgusting they are. I’m so horrified I’ll shut this web page in a minute.”

I fucking disgust myself.

Because so rarely in life do I do things that I think are genuinely wrong. I’m happy batting away the judgment of other people when they call me a pervert or a slut, because I have the moral high ground. I usually have enough ethical awareness to avoid doing the things that – although tempting – are actually morally wrong.

And yet I looked at Kate Middleton’s tits.

Prince Harry’s bollocks

A similar dilemma arose during the recent ‘Prince Harry gets naked in Vegas’ shock. It turns out that a young, attractive man got naked in his hotel room with some people.

The resulting storm that brewed was both disgusting and weird. While Clarence House played whack-a-mole with the images that had popped up online, individuals were loudly asserting their right to see the pictures. “It’s a public interest issue,” they said “We pay for him,” they continued. And then, flailing vaguely around the issue of just why, exactly, someone they pay for should be compelled to let you see his bollocks they added “it’s a security issue.”

Well, no. It’s not, is it? Perhaps there are security issues associated with what happened, but the pictures themselves are not a security issue. No one is more or less likely to assassinate Harry on the basis that there is photographic evidence that he has testicles. The fact that the pictures were taken might form the basis of a story about security surrounding the prince, but the actual pictures themselves add nothing to that debate.

Nevertheless, a debate was had. Justifications were made, counterarguments swept under the table, and the prince’s own assertion that – you know – he’d rather we didn’t all cop a look at him in the nude went unheeded. The Sun knocked the whole thing out of the park with a grand announcement that it would publish the pictures because it was the ‘right thing’ to do.

Hooray for press freedom! Hooray for the Sun! Hooray for them posting naked pictures of someone without his consent! What larks, eh? Who wouldn’t shell out 20-odd pence to have a quick glimpse of the prince’s privates?

Well, I guess nice people. People nicer than me.

I’m going to put aside the spurious debate about press freedom for a moment and talk about ethics. Because hey – I’m not a fan of banning people from doing things if at all possible. If I were ruler of the world, I wouldn’t want to have to issue a diktat saying ‘newspapers cannot print pictures of members of the Royal Family in the nude.’

So let’s instead talk in more general terms: is there ever a compelling reason for a national newspaper to publish naked pictures or videos of someone without their consent?

I don’t think there is. Moreover, I don’t think there’s an honest justification for anyone to publish naked pictures of someone without their consent.

Tulisa’s blow job

A few months ago a video was released of FHM’s sexiest woman – Tulisa – giving an ex-boyfriend a blow job. Blogs were ringing with the sound of gleeful dudes rubbing one out, frowning moralists calling Tulisa ‘loose’, and bitchy women criticising her blow-job technique. Someone suggested to me that I jump on the bandwagon, grab myself some cheap SEO traffic, and review the video.

As you can probably tell, I didn’t. The idea of pointing and laughing at someone doing something that they clearly believed was private gives me the shivers. With the certainty that comes from knowing I never want my blurry night-shot blow job video to go online, I know that posting sexual pictures of someone without their consent is unethical and wrong.

Whatever you think of some of the more controversial things I’ve written, I have very strong views on consent, and ultimately I don’t want to be part of anything that tramples all over it. So even if you’re saying that Tulisa’s sexy, Kate’s an English Rose, even if you’re saluting Prince Harry and calling him a ‘top lad’ for playing naked games in his hotel room, the fact remains that he’s made it pretty clear he doesn’t want those pictures published. So we shouldn’t publish them.

But I looked

Here’s the tricky part. How do we ethically justify the fact that, although we’re disgusted by the idea of releasing hot blow job videos, or tit shots, or blurry mobile-phone snaps of a prince frolicking in a hotel room, some of us are happy to watch those things when they appear? The answer is we don’t – we can’t. There’s no need for me ever to see this stuff – it will add nothing of value to my life.

The people who publish this shit are hideous. The people who either take photos without consent or release photos without consent are doubly hideous. But if we’re completely honest with ourselves we’re not much better.

No matter what our reasons for looking, we are still disgusting. What makes me angry is that not only do these situations demonstrate how pathetic I am as an individual, but how pathetic we are as a species. We cannot bear to admit that we googled the pictures out of cheap curiosity or lust. Instead we cite press freedom, security concerns, or the hazards of celebrity.

But the very fact that we want an excuse shows we know deep down that seeking out these pictures might not be our most glorious moment – that we’re crossing a moral line. So let’s drop the excuses altogether, shall we? We can admit that we want to look whilst trying to avoid looking, and while this internal battle rages we can stop lying to ourselves and everyone else.

Let’s not invent bullshit excuses to try and wriggle out of guilt. Accept the guilt. You’re not looking at Prince Harry’s bollocks because you’re a freedom fighter. You’re looking because you’re disgusting. We’re disgusting.

I am disgusting.

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.

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.

I’m not sure I could drink a whole pint of it, but I do like spunk. It’s hot and salty and indicative of sexual satisfaction in a way that orange juice just isn’t. But that’s not to say it’s compulsory to swallow it – it’s not even one of your five a day.

A story’s been whizzing round the press in the last week that spunk ‘can cure morning sickness’, and I’m a bit frustrated at the way people are talking about it. The narrative goes like this:

A scientist (ooh, authoritative person) has discovered that spunk (tee hee) could help to cure morning sickness. The scientist (male – wonder why he’s recommending this, eh?) said that ingesting it could help relieve women (ooh, they’ll be pissed off about this, they bloody hate jizz, right?) from the symptoms of sickness during pregnancy.

Did you get that? Spunk for women is like medicine which, although disgusting, they have to swallow every now and again. Men across the world will rejoice at finally having an excuse to make their girlfriends ingest their lukewarm ejaculate.

With ‘eugghs’ and ‘blerghs’, women are being told that perhaps they’ll have to just – quite literally – suck it up, despite the fact that women bloody hate jizz, and will do anything in their power to avoid it. The naughty girls.

Read all about it

Metro reported it as the “‘cure’ that might be hard to swallow”

The Daily Mail, (I don’t want to link to it, because it’s a pathetic crusty bedsock of a rag, but I’m sure you can find it if you care hard enough) noted in their traditional nudge-nudge wink-wink manner, that ‘It is unknown whether or not Dr Gallup is caring for a pregnant wife himself.’ The implication being that he might have made it up, because his wife will naturally be repulsed by spunk and he is therefore so driven by a desire to splurt it down her aesophagus that he’d dedicate years of his life coming up with a plausible excuse to do so.

It’s not just the papers – people have been tweeting about this story with comments like ‘eugh, as if morning sickness wasn’t bad enough’ and ‘don’t let your man read it LOL’.

The truth about spunk

Are these articles true? Yes, Dr Gallup has made these claims. Are the claims in the research true? I don’t know. I haven’t been able to find detail that would suggest he isn’t presenting his results in good faith, although I’m now so used to a bombardment of media stories about science that turn out to be woefully poorly reported that I don’t want to endorse it. Ultimately, whether it’s true or not can be left to the science bloggers.

But I take exception not to the research itself, but to the attitudes which accompany the reporting of it. Namely that:

a) women don’t like eating jizz

b) although women don’t like eating jizz, they have to every now and again to keep their man happy

Both of these things are fictional and damaging.

I like jizz – I know other women who like jizz. It’s not for everyone, and in fact I’d compare it to Marmite – some people don’t want it anywhere near their mouths, but others think that a small amount spread thinly on toast is the best way to start the day. You’re not abnormal if you like it, and nor are you abnormal if you don’t. To pretend that all women think alike is to believe that we are a species of indistinguishable automatons.

Moreover, if you don’t like eating jizz, then the idea that you should fucking have to just to keep your partner happy is insane and ridiculous and should fuck off back to the 1950s.

No sex act is ever obligatory

Blow jobs are (in my opinion) a bloody lovely way to spend an idle moment, and a fucking awesome way to end a fuck. The taste of jizz gets me off, and the feeling of it hitting the back of my throat makes me want to cry a little bit at the sheer joy that can be had from sex. But for others, spunk is about as arousing – not to mention as appetising – as a bowl of tinned spam and custard.

Sometimes we do things because our partners want us to – because we know they’d be aroused or pleased. And some people might be able to swallow their mild distaste so that they can subsequently swallow a teaspoon of cockdroplets.

But if some people are as thoroughly repulsed by spunk as these cheeky ‘sexy science’ articles make out, then we’re fucking arseholes for smirking at the idea that they’d feel obliged to eat it.

Those who despise the taste of prickliquid should not be compelled to eat it, and no one should make them feel like they are. Not their partners, not the journalists, and certainly not some semi-literate arsehole on Twitter urging women to take one for the team.

It’s not medicine you have to swallow or a chore you have to perform to keep your man happy. It’s either a mutually enjoyable part of your sex life or it isn’t a part of your sex life at all.