Liberals are a funny bunch. We can be powerfully and passionately political, but get so bogged down in earnest discussion that we forget the very basics. I am guilty of this sometimes – I overthink the linguistic implications of trying to ‘reclaim’ the word ‘slut’, and miss out on some fun-sounding slutwalks.

But we should never forget why the basics are important. Last night I had a timely reminder, when I met a friendly, liberal guy in a pub who argued against equal marriage:

“If we let gay people get married then we legitimise the institution of marriage. And aren’t there more important things to do, like fix the economy? Oh, and if gay people can get married then what’s to stop polygamous groups asking for multiple marriages?”

Put on your hard hats, people: I’m about to throw some rocks.

We shouldn’t ‘let’ gay people get married

It is not a question of ‘letting’ anyone do anything – you’re not giving gay people your permission to get married – you are obliged to give them the same rights and freedoms as you’d give anyone else.

If someone is released from prison because they’re found innocent you’re not ‘letting them leave’ you are obliged to give them their freedom back.

There’s a beautiful picture doing the rounds on the internet showing some idiotic right-wingers from 40 years ago protesting against mixed race marriage. It’s contrasted with a contemporary picture of people protesting gay marriage with the slogan “Imagine how stupid you’ll look in 40 years”

Fuck whether you’ll look stupid in 40 years – you look stupid right now. You’re failing to recognise that, regardless of who someone loves, shags and visits Ikea with, they are still fundamentally a person.

So it’s not a question of ‘letting’ gay people do the same as straight people. We are morally obliged to give all people the same basic freedoms. So let’s get on with it.

There are more important things than gay marriage

Yes, there are many things more important than the human rights of those in the western world who are already blessed with rights aplenty. If you’re worried about that then be my guest – pick a charity and open your fucking wallet.

But in the meantime it’s so rare – so heartbreakingly rare – that we have the opportunity to make such a monumental difference. It’s a teeny tiny legislative change, and it’s simple. Compared to dismantling the NHS or reviving a sluggish economy, it’s as simple as breathing in and out.

You could wake up one morning and find yourself in a society that is fundamentally fairer than the one in which you went to bed. That is an opportunity so fantastic that not seizing it seems wilfully destructive. So get on with it.

We’re opening the door to polygamy!

Leaving aside the question of whether we should actually legalise multiple marriages, this is a huge, ridiculous, stinking red herring. Why? Well, legislating for multiple marriages is infinitely more complex and ethically challenging than simply removing the gender specifications from a current marriage law.

It’s not a ‘slippery slope’ – it’s a completely different mountain. We can discuss polygamy another time, but right now we’re talking about legalising gay marriage. Let’s get on with it.

Gay people shouldn’t legitimise the institution of marriage

I am unlikely to ever get married. The party appeals but the rest leaves me cold with horror. I won’t get married – I think marriage is shit. But if some people have the legal right to eat that shit then I don’t see why anyone else shouldn’t have the same goddamn right to chow down on it too.

If you think that marriage is so bad that gay people shouldn’t do it, and you’re waving banners calling for an end to all marriage – gay and straight – then good on you. I won’t march along on your protest but I’ll respect your slightly odd opinion.

But you’re not, are you? You’re not. You’re saying ‘marriage is shit, leave it to the straights’. Which sails so far and fast past the point that the point itself is but a tiny dot on the horizon.

Here, I think, is the key – we should legalise gay marriage even if gay people don’t want it. Because I am straight, I can make a stand against the institution of marriage by choosing not to get married. At the moment some people don’t even have that choice – they can’t actively reject an institution that they were forbidden from joining anyway.

So even if every single gay person in the whole world decides that marriage isn’t for them, they should have the same right as I do to say ‘I don’t’. The act of marriage isn’t as important as the choice itself – a choice which should be offered to all people equally. So let’s get on and offer it.

Being gay is fundamentally wrong

I’m not going to get into this. If your religion or your personal ethics are so viscerally anti-gay marriage then you’re not going to change your mind after reading a rant from a sex blogger. You probably clicked off the page a long time ago, so this post isn’t for you.

It’s for the liberals who argue that there are more important things, for the lefties who say that gay people should boycott marriage because the institution itself is flawed. It’s for the people who say ‘we’ve got civil partnerships, that’s close enough’. It’s for those who aren’t interested one way or another because they know that gay marriage will become legal eventually, so what’s all the fuss about?

This post is for you. At the moment the UK government is holding a consultation on marriage equality. And although I love a good pub debate, I don’t want to sit arguing about the nuanced implications of our individual viewpoints while one of the best opportunities to advance equality slips through our fingertips.

So we can fight about the detail over a pint, or we can recognise that no matter what our liberal quibbles, all people should be treated equally. Let’s just get on with it, shall we?

This might sound callous, but I don’t care if you break up with me by text message. Same goes for email. Sod it – text the ‘letters’ section of the Metro for all I care. If you’re going to dump me, just dump me.

Yes, I’ll be sad. But I’ll be no more sad than if you – quite literally – made a meal of it. Took me out for dinner, had a long discussion prompted by occasional irritating sighs, ending with The Chat: ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t fancy you any more/we have nothing in common/I’ve met someone infinitely more likeable.’

It hasn’t been emotional

People say that the reason they wouldn’t break up via text is because it’s cold-hearted. But the problem is that few of the relationships I get into are emotional enough to require a drawn-out conclusion. Most of the ‘break-ups’ I have been involved in recently have happened either because

• he’s found a girlfriend who’d rather he didn’t fuck anyone else
• he lives outside Zone 3 and so I am far too lazy to see him regularly

And so in this context, a break-up text will do just as well as a long conversation. If he’s a boy I’m shagging he’s a boy worth shagging, so naturally I’ll be sad that I can’t fuck him any more. But I’m not going to cry my face off over a tub of Häagen Dazs – we were probably never that close.

More importantly, it takes me just five minutes to read an email, less than one minute to read a text, but it takes an entire evening to have the break up chat. A whole evening. Think of all the things I could do in an evening! While I’m listening to you tortuously apologise for ending something that was inevitably going to end anyway I could instead be dying my hair, writing another blog, livetweeting The Apprentice or – crucially – finding someone else to fuck.

There is nothing more valuable to me than time. And giving me more of it, even if it means swallowing your natural desire to project emotion onto sex, is a wonderful thing to do.

Just tell me

But the main reason I think text break-ups are fine is because very occasionally, because of the way I meet and interact with guys, I end up in a weird limbo where I’m not entirely sure if someone is still with me. In the last year I have had three guys who have broken up with me by just ceasing all communication.

Two guys stopped fucking me after a few lovely evenings which I’m reasonably sure they enjoyed. One guy stopped fucking me shortly before we were due to go away together for a weekend.

This isn’t a rant about getting dumped. I’ve been in many ‘things’ that have ended, so I don’t get particularly upset about the endings themselves.

But what I am emotional about is not knowing. Because I like to plan. I like to know. Just as I like to know how you like your blow jobs and whether you’re into spanking, I also like to know exactly where you stand on the issue of whether you are or aren’t willing to put your dick into me.

It’s not you, it’s me

And it honestly is. I think I’m alone in this, because I’ve told other people about my preference for rapid-fire, heartless relationship comms and had them weeping over my cracked and battered soul. But a text or email at least has an immediacy and honesty that I wholeheartedly respect.

You might wait for weeks for the right moment to have ‘that’ conversation and (in the case of some of my past boys) end up never having it at all. So if your mind’s truly made up, and you really really mean it, what better way to tell me than to bleep it to my phone?

Not only will you have furnished me with useful information, you’ve also saved me time. I’ll be able to read it, digest it, mourn and move on in less time than we’d have spent on pre-dinner drinks.

The problem with human interaction is that it’s so fucking nuanced. I mean, why can’t people just be obviously good or evil? It would be much easier to decide whether we should give someone a knighthood or throw them to the wolves.

There’s been a trend recently that I find utterly disturbing, of people being hauled over the coals for misjudged (and sometimes utterly prickish) comments that they have made on the internet, and I’d like to take a bit of time to lay down some ill-thought-out rules and opinions. If you want to skip the waffle, go straight to my 3-step guide to not being a prick on the internet.

In the meantime, here’s why I don’t think you should be fired from your job for being rude on the internet.

Representing your company

You, as an individual, are representative of your company, right? Wrong. I feel quite strongly about this, and it is my duty as an anonymous sex blogger to point out that nothing I write on the internet in any way relates to my job. If it did, my job would be far more interesting.

Yes, if you’re tweeting from a company account, you should conduct yourself as if you were on company business – no gratuitous swearing or trollery. This should be fairly common sense. But just as I wouldn’t expect to conduct a pub chat as if I were chairing a meeting, likewise I will say things on my personal Twitter feed that I would never say at work.

But when people who tweet personally are then linked to their job, the waters get a bit muddy. This week Grace Dent received what I can only describe as a tawdry, prickish insult on Twitter. Rather than ignoring or blocking the offending person, she clicked through to his biog, where he had a link to his personal website that had a link to the company where he worked. A company that happened to represent Grace Dent.

This man was an idiot. By his own admission he shouldn’t have posted it. Were I his boss I’d be having a serious chat with him about the nature of social media, and insisting that he remove all links to his workplace from his profile. But I categorically do not think that he should be fired.

If he’d threatened her, yes. If he’d been bigoted, or obviously inciting hatred, maybe. But he made a stupid joke about her looks. The problem is that this is a level of reasonably inane and harmless cuntery compared to hate-speech and threats, and we find it hard to come up with a solution that deals with the nuance. Grace Dent has decided that she would like him to be fired.

I have a lot of respect for Grace Dent, who is the epitome of everything I admire – someone who gets paid to write funny stuff on the internet. But in this case I think she’s desperately wrong.

Pic and Mix rules

If you accept that what you say on Twitter is subject to scrutiny by your workplace, you have to accept that your workplace could skip over the insults you’ve written and instead concentrate on the more personal/political things that you say.

It’s then more than possible to end up with situations where someone will be censored not because what they’re saying is offensive, but because it isn’t in line with company policy.

You could tweet about a political figure on whose good side your company would like to stay. You could say something negative about an organisation that your own company is about to partner with. In the case that inspired this post, you could say something rude about a client of your company. Or finally, in a sudden and sledgehammer admission of my own personal interests in this tale, you could tweet about piss play and get fired for being a pervert.

I’m not saying people should say and do what they like and damn the consequences. It’s of the utmost importance that people at least try to conduct themselves with courtesy and respect, because otherwise society will fall to bits and you’ll end up sitting at a laptop in the middle of a nuclear armageddon typing “OMG u r a troll you fat slag lolz” while the remnants of civilisation crumble to dust around you.

All I’m saying is that we should be careful what we wish for – accept that a man gets fired for being catty about a client and we have to accept a certain degree of company interference in tweets that we post on our personal stream. And that way lies unemployment for political bloggers, interestingly opinionated tweeps and – most importantly – me.

 

Final thoughts:

To prove I’m not advocating total anarchic trollery, and for those unsure of how to conduct themselves online, I have compiled a handy 3-step guide to not being a prick on the internet. Please print out, affix to your screen, and have a glance every once in a while before you post rude things about powerful journalists.

Three-step guide to not being a prick on the internet

1. Got a criticism that is threatening, illegal or hate-filled? Don’t post it.
2. Got a criticism that doesn’t fall into category 1 but would be hurtful to the person on the receiving end? Don’t @ them in it.
3. Got a criticism that is thoughtful, interesting and genuinely contributes to the discussion? @ the author, reblog, talk about it, or spaff your wisdom intelligently in the comments.

Recently I received a text message that contained this gem:

“you’re waiting, bent over the desk, chemise immodesty parted…”

Now, sexy though that may be (for the record, it is), it is not something that I want to have bleeped to my pocket. Texts have a disturbing immediacy that emails don’t. An email says ‘I have something to tell you, and I have taken the trouble of sitting down and composing it.’ An email elevates you to a status of importance. It usually contains more information, some gossip and, if you’re lucky, a link to something that you might like. An email respects you, it lets you know that you can take your time in replying, mull over your response, and consider carefully before you commit to anything in writing. I love email.

A text, on the other hand, is a conversation killer. You could be halfway through a gripping novel, a relationship crisis or a cheese soufflé and your mobile leaps up; blaring, buzzing and all but hitting you in the face screaming ‘pay me attention! I’m important! Feed me words, you fucker!’

I don’t like texts. My friends complain that most of their texts go unanswered, but that’s because most of their texts come when I’m in the middle of something that I think is more important. I frequently experience irrational bursts of hatred towards my nearest and dearest because they text me inanities while I’m at work, inanities to which I feel duty-bound to reply.

And if you (get ready to shudder) “sext” me at work, chances are it will enrage me even further. Lovely though it is to imagine you bending me over something solid then humping me frantically like a bonobo with an audience, it won’t help me get this strategy document written.

Here’s where I backtrack so you don’t think I’m a giant bitch

I’m not always a terrifying harridan – I think some texts are great. There is nothing I love more than a good old romantic text, particularly one that doesn’t invite an immediate response. A well timed:

“It might be the whiskey talking, but the whiskey says I miss you every day.”

can be the best thing that’s happened to me all week. A romantic text is always welcome. And on the few occasions when I am in the mood for conversation or sexy chat I’ll leap to my phone like an excited teenager, cradling it in my arms and soaking up the misspelled words and predictive-text fuck-ups contained therein.

But these moments are few and far between. The fact remains that, on the rare occasions when people do text me with sexy content, there is an 80% chance it will make me want to punch them.

Sexy emails? Great. I’m sitting at my computer so would probably have been planning a wank anyway. Sexy texts? It’s like a double glazing salesman ringing your doorbell during dinner and then slapping you in the face with a semi-flaccid dick.

Don’t even get me started on phone calls.