I am becoming a little bit uncomfortable with my apparent lack of sexual accessories.

There are some things you can’t really do without the equipment: pegging is tricky without the strap-on, you’d either end up humping lacklustrely at a rather bored gentleman or doing him an injury with something homemade and as unsexy as it is unsafe. But the vast majority of filth can be improvised – why spend £100 on a hand-cut leather tawse when you could just beat your loved-one with a flip-flop? You can buy them from the pound shop, and the sound is eminently more satisfying.

What’s more (and I feel I might have to hand in my sex blogger membership card at this point) the toys I do have spend far more time at the back of a cupboard than up against my cervix.

Reviewing sex toys

I’ve held off on doing it for this long, and every time a company approaches me asking me to review something or put an affiliate link on my site I’ve said no. Not because I’m a snob (if you can make money by slapping ads on your blog then you have my blessing and a fair bit of my envy as well) but because I can’t work out how to do it in a way that would be even vaguely entertaining for either my readers or, quite frankly, myself.

First someone has to send me a sex toy (which requires me to either give them my address or have a designated friend who is willing to accept daily dildos through the post), then I have to put it in my cunt, then I have to write approximately 600 words about it. No matter how skilled I am, I’m not sure I could muster 600 words about what is essentially just a wank. Most of my sex toy reviews would end up something along these lines:

“I put it in my cunt for a bit and it made me come. Would have been better if it wasn’t pink. 6/10”

Alternatively, I have to persuade a boy that rather than pull my knickers down and fuck me up against the mirror in the hallway, he instead has to ravish me with something provided by a friendly PR company, and dissect the whole experience ten minutes later. There might be giggly fun involved if it’s a particularly crap review, but I think the very act of reviewing something would give it a disadvantage: just as jokes stop being funny when they’re explained, being fucked with a ten-inch dildo would be far less sexy if you have to take mental notes.

What’s in your sex toy cupboard?

But when people ask me what my favourite sex toy is, or the sort of sex toys I’m drawn to, I have to admit to feeling a bit ashamed. A bit inadequate. Like I’m not a proper pervert because I don’t have drawers full of the things just waiting to be jizzed on at a moment’s notice.

I have a fairly decent box of tricks: buttplugs, sheaths, a couple of vibrators, a few hitting things, a strap-on, an amazing pair of nipple clamps with a heavy chain running between the two, an assortment of tools such as pliers that I leave in my toy drawer purely to scare the shit out of people. But the fact that I own these things proves nothing other than that at some point I bought them. I’m far less likely to use even my favourite toys than I am to just sit on a guy’s dick.

And yet people ask – how many do you have? Or ‘what do you have?’ Or ‘why don’t you do reviews?’ and I feel embarrassed. Like I’m not a real pervert unless my letterbox is clogged with suspiciously-shaped parcels. Some perverts like the parcels. Some people are more excited by a shag when they can use their kit and experiment with new ways to beat, whip, shock or fuck someone. And that is both admirable and hot. It’s just not me.

A tiny cynical part of my brain wonders if one of the driving forces behind the fact that we’re becoming more open about sex (which I think we are, hooray!) is that there are now far more ways to make money out of it. From making and selling sex toys to writing a dirty book or throwing wild parties which, for the bargain price of fifty quid, you can attend dressed only in your pants.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Making money is good, sex is good, giving people a way to make money by providing things people can insert into themselves is good. But it, like everything else sexual, isn’t universal. For every toy-hungry pervert with a drawer full of wonders there’s someone like me looking blankly at my pitiful collection of underused dildos and wondering just what, exactly, I’m doing wrong.

So for those of you who are like me, who haven’t got a great collection and don’t crave the latest things, here’s the answer: you’re doing nothing wrong. You’re just doing something differently.

All the sexy firemen, stripping police officers and naughty nurses leave me cold. I understand why uniforms are hot, but the idea that someone who has one of these jobs is necessarily hot just because they wear a uniform that is in some way vaguely similar to something you can buy in Ann Summers is frustrating and bizarre.

Some nurses are hot. Some firemen are hot. But the qualities of the sexiest jobs have, in my opinion, very little to do with the uniform. I say this because I fancy computer programmers – boys whose ‘uniform’ consists mostly of scrubby jeans and a coffee-stained hoodie. I cannot get enough of them.

It’s not a fetish in the strictest sense of the word (I have successfully orgasmed with men who wouldn’t know their YAML from their ‘oh no seriously now I’m going to have to Google YAML so I don’t look stupid.’), but it’s certainly a bit more than an itch that occasionally requires scratching.

What’s so sexy about programmers? Well, their quick fingers, for one – typing frantically into the mysterious Matrix-like black box with the same intense focus as a boy playing a particularly tricky Xbox game.

Then there’s the mystery itself: I have no sodding clue what they’re doing. The brackets and squiggles and dots mean about as much to me as the Chinese alphabet, and they are all the sexier for it.

Finally, there’s the brains. Ah, brains. The most desirable thing about a human, not just according to zombies but to other humans too. Not everyone has them but the majority of people like them, don’t they? I’ve never heard someone saying, of a potential squeeze: “Well, he’s lovely, but he’d be lovelier if he was as dumb as a bag of bricks.” Or “she’s hot, I just wish she didn’t know her 13 times table.”

Universal hotness

I think you might agree with me on at least one of the above points. You might not get wet at the thought of male programmers (and even if you did you’d have to step back and sit on your hands because I think you’ll find they’re all mine), but the hands-mystery-brains trilogy is surely common in many people’s lusts.

To experiment (like they do in science, only involving far less peer-review and a hell of a lot more cider) I asked the good folk of Twitter what they thought were the sexiest jobs. Here is but a tiny selection of their answers:

Hands-related jobs

Bass players and guitarists were the most popular, which explains why they get so many groupies and dribbling, wide-eyed fans. Lots of people suggested something along these lines, or other jobs that involved strong or dextrous hands – clearly from the ‘quick fingers’ school of arousal, and I cannot possibly argue.

@girlonthenet Bass guitar player, no question.

— Innocent Loverboy (@innocentlb) March 18, 2013

 

@girlonthenet something meaning they work with their hands – rough calloused hands…. *sigh*….

— Charlie (@The_Lady_Sybil) March 18, 2013

Mystery-related jobs

Onto mystery, and despite the diverse offerings here, I maintain that much of what’s sexy in this stuff is the mysterious nature of it. I find all of the following occupations hot, not because they are sexy per se, but because I know nothing about them, and so the idea of having a guy teach me how to do them, with gentle patience and occasional discipline, slicks my knickers like butter in the microwave.

@girlonthenet mathematician. Or chef.

— Katherine Stephen (@katobell) March 18, 2013

 

@girlonthenet Jobs that involve speaking more than one language.

— Suze(@SuzeMarsupial) March 18, 2013

Brains-related jobs

Quite a few people gave very brains/ideas-focused offerings.

@girlonthenet Doctors. Because, doctors.

— Kate (@ginandting) March 18, 2013

I particularly liked the lady who was so into brains, and also in such a kickass-brainy job that she aroused even herself:

@girlonthenet the sexiest job to have is being a barrister. I am strangely drawn to myself. :)

— Emma Dixon (@EmmaDixon_Green) March 18, 2013

I wish this could happen to me. Sadly all of my self-arousal relies on ‘quick-fingers’ style hotness.

Anyway, I reckon my hands-mystery-brains trilogy covers off pretty much all of the things for which I could gain an immediate and shallow attraction to someone, and it has the added bonus that I think most people would identify with at least one of those things.

Even if you don’t fancy musicians, if you like the quick-hands of coders you can probably appreciate why someone else would want to lick a cellist. Even if barristers aren’t your thing, your penchant for brains might make you moon over a mathematician. And as for the mystery, well – who doesn’t fancy fucking Batman?

Hands. Mystery. Brains. Did I forget anything?

Oh yeah, one more, which was actually more popular than any of the categories my rubbish brain came up with on its own: passion.

@girlonthenet Musician. Someone who does it because it is who they are, it’s not just a job & they commit to every note. ->

— Sally R (@arthurstodgyn) March 18, 2013

Why do women cheat? Well, that’s a bit like asking why they learn to drive – there are lots of different reasons for doing it, and some women prefer not to do it at all.

However, in a valiant step towards reducing all female sexual desire to some bizarre medical condition, a dude called Robert Weiss (who incidentally works at a place that aims to treat people who have a sex addiction – we’ll come onto this later), wrote an article entitled ‘5 reasons for female infidelity.’

That sounds fairly innocuous – I mean, if we’re just talking about 5 general reasons for female infidelity, then we could essentially list any reason whatsoever and as long as one woman is willing to cite that as the primary cause for cheating, it could make our list. But no. As he explains later in the article, these are the ‘most common’ reasons women cheat.

Why I cheated

I’ve cheated on boys before – I’ll leave the sordid details for something a bit more in-depth, where I’ll have a chance to make pathetic and inadequate excuses for all those hearts that I’ve broken. But right at the top of my ‘why I cheated’ list was this:

I was horny.

In the interests of full disclosure, there was another reason pretty high up on that list:

I was drunk.

There were other factors at work as well, depending on the particular cheating episode (and there have been more than a few, because of my aforementioned bastardry) – sometimes I wanted the challenge of sleeping with someone I never thought I’d get. Sometimes I was simply curious about how a particular guy would be. Other times I was planning on ditching my boyfriend but wanted to make sure I’d secured a nice back-up relationship to spring into afterwards. But ultimately my primary motivating factor was physical rather than emotional: lust.

Laying aside for a minute the fact that I am an amoral shit, there was a hell of a lot more sexual motivation going on here than in the list constructed by Weiss, who instead highlights reasons such as ‘women have intimacy disorders’ or ‘feel neglected’. Well, shit a brick. It turns out that rather than just being a horny slag with the willpower of a smack addict at a poppy farm, I am instead a damaged, blameless individual who requires either treatment or a cuddle.

Male vs female infidelity

Look, I’m not saying that women never cheat because they feel insecure – I am 100% sure that they do. I’m not saying that some people don’t have genuine troubles that mean they could do with the help of a relationship counsellor or sex therapist. As mentioned above, there are myriad reasons why women might stray from a relationship, and I expect Robert Weiss has correctly pinpointed some of them. But are these really the most common? Is it really more likely that you have an intimacy disorder than that you like having sex?

And more importantly, where is the research that actually backs up these ‘5 reasons for female infidelity’? Because as far as I can see, none of the links in the article go anywhere more substantial than a blog that’s over a year old which includes a slightly longer but no less speculative list, and a journalistic puff piece advertising a website for married people to have affairs. I cannot stress enough how much I want you to click those links: please do – see just how tenuous the cited ‘evidence’ is.

Is there a similar article in which Weiss dissects the 5 reasons for male infidelity? If it’s based on the same level of research, and skewed just as heavily to reflect society’s bias about gender and sexual drive, I suspect men would be asked to choose between statements such as  ‘my wife didn’t suck me off enough’, ‘I was horny’ and ‘she had really lovely tits. Wahey.’

What’s my motivation?

We all have different needs and desires, and consequently we all do different things for different reasons.

I, for instance, am writing this article because I am a sex blogger, opinionated arsehole, and all-round horny wench. I like having sex and I feel the need to challenge lazy, tired assumptions that women don’t enjoy sex for sex’s sake. Robert Weiss might have his own reasons for writing the original article, like perhaps the fact that he runs a sex addiction clinic. The women he has encountered (who have come to him for what they hope will be a cure) will probably be more likely to put a medical slant on their reasons for cheating. Or, and do stop me if this sounds a bit far-fetched, perhaps it’s because Mr Weiss has a vested interest in encouraging people to medicalise any instance of sexual activity that could be considered ‘excess’, so that they end up visiting his clinic.

You know, I’m just speculating.

But here’s the problem – if the ‘research’ in the article is anything to go by, the author is just speculating too. Weiss’s speculation, which presents women as feeble creatures incapable of having sexual desires that aren’t motivated by a deeper emotional need, is being presented as ‘fact’, when he’s presented no evidence to back that up.

This is exactly the sort of thing we have editors for: to identify facts, and sort them from self-interested waffle. Self-interested waffle: I’ve cheated on partners before but I don’t want you to think I’m an awful person. Facts: women get horny, grass is green, and the Huffington Post can utterly fuck off.