On Friday night I did a bad thing. In case you’re expecting domination, sadism and sexy pain, I should warn you right now that this isn’t going to be that sort of blog.

In the pub on Friday, around five or six pints into an eight pint night, a funny conversation I was having with a friend was interrupted by a reasonably attractive, smiley gentleman. He cut in, with a cute, ‘can I get to know you’, response to something I’d been saying. He was sweet, and friendly, and nice, and making an honest attempt to chat me up.

And I shot him down.

Not just a ‘not right now’ shoot down, or an ‘I have a boyfriend’ shoot down. I didn’t even crack out the cold stare that I’ve seen others give to this kind of approach when they’re not in the mood to be spoken to. I shot him down with a cruel, cruel comeback. Something that both my drunken mind and my drunken friend agreed was hilarious and witty, but which my sober mind wants to suck straight back into my evil, rude, insulting face.

Chatting people up is hard

I’m obviously not going to shag every passing drunk who says ‘hello’, but I’ve always sworn that if someone approached me politely they’d get politeness back.

Why? Well, it takes a fuck of a lot of courage to approach someone you don’t know. A guy who talks to me in a pub is not so much wearing his heart on his sleeve as offering his dick up on a platter: ‘do you want this? Is this good enough for you? Do I gain your acceptance and approval?’

I come out in shivers of nervousness and terror just remembering times when I’ve done the same.

And I have, by the way – done the same. I’m no fan of being the chatter-up rather than the chattee, but I’ll do it when I really fancy someone, because I don’t want to be reliant on them making the first move. Girl friends of mine have told me that I should refrain from stamping up to men reeking of vodka and slurring “You’re brilliant. Can I buy you a drink?” and wait instead for them to approach me. But bollocks to that.

I don’t want to hang shyly in a corner of a pub, batting my eyelashes and clutching my outdated gender stereotypes while the man of my dreams sits fucklessly by the bar. I also know that the sort of men I like (shy, nerdy ones) are often unwilling to approach me because they’ve seen their more confident friends on the receiving end of unnecessarily harsh rejections.

Bottom line: I understand why people are terrified of chatting someone up, because I am also terrified. But I do it to avoid being stuck in a sexless limbo. Horrible though approaching is, asking someone if they fancy a shag and receiving a ‘no’ is still marginally better than going home alone to crywank under the duvet.

I don’t want to fuck an arsehole

But ultimately, the most important reason why politeness should always win out in chat-up scenarios is because being rude makes you wholly unfuckable.

Even if the person chatting you up isn’t necessarily one you fancy, someone you do fancy could well be nearby. And I don’t know many people who’d want to sleep with the sort of shitbag arrogant cunt who would immediately dismiss someone.

Moreover, that hot stranger standing nearby might be thinking about talking to you. He or she might be preparing a line, working up the courage, eagerly anticipating the chance to talk to you. If they hear you telling someone else to utterly and unequivocally fuck off, they’re unlikely to leap eagerly into the conversation and offer their own dignity up for you to shred.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry

And so my penance for doing this – for being just the sort of cold-hearted arrogant twat that I despise – is to relive the moment as I write this blog entry, and cringe in miserable shame. I can’t make things better, but I can apologise, so if you’re reading this, sweet 20-something blond boy in the long grey jacket: I’m so fucking sorry.

I’m sorry I was cruel. I’m sorry I’m a shit. And I’m sorry that you might just think twice before you talk to a girl again. I didn’t just break my chat-up rules, I broke the only rule that ever really matters: whatever life throws at you, try not to be a dick.

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.

Girlonthenet: Being an emotionless wreck, you’d be forgiven for thinking that my heart is never touched. You’d be wrong – only slightly wrong, but wrong nonetheless.

This week the lovely Jon, of ‘Things I have done to impress women‘ fame, sent me a guest post that made me both laugh and also pity him – and all men – who have a tendency to put cute women on pedestals and subsequently become terrified of talking to them.

It’s pretty, it’s poetic, it’s funny, and it’s warm. In short – it is everything that I am usually not, which is why I adore it. Over to him:

Crushing it

The thing is, you never know when it’s going to hit you. Sometimes, you’ll just be thirsty. It’s a cold, crisp October morning, and you just want a hot drink. So you’ll go into the nearest corporate coffee emporium and order the silliest sounding hot drink. While pondering whether you want one of those little caramel biscuit things, you realise that the barista is asking you a question. You’re just in the middle of saying “large” when you look up and meet her eyes. Christ. They have a piercing quality that burns through your skull. You manage to say something that sounds like “laaaarr-g-g-le”. She smiles slightly, and brushes her dark hair from her eyes.

“Do you mean grande?” she asks, and you notice that there’s a slight tang of European accent there. You go into a conversational tailspin, trying to ask about the differences between grande and large, while worrying that all this size paranoia is somehow conveying that you have a small penis.

“And how will you be paying?” Shit. Do you give her a handful of change, or your debit card that’s been sellotaped together like a torn up love letter. She laughs at your card, while you make a feeble joke about hobo credit cards. She laughs, properly. You bask in the sunshine, and then, her headlamps turn onto her next victim, and suddenly you’re cast from the garden.

You do the dead man’s walk to the delivery table, cursing your inability to order a new credit card and not make jokes about the size of your cock. After a few minutes of mentally abusing yourself, and thinking about how absolutely ridiculous it would be for a girl like that to fancy you (I bet you think lap dancers are really into you too, right?), you realise they’re calling your order. You grab the coffee and walk out of the shop.

As you sit on the park bench sipping the molten hot java, you realise that there’s something written on the side in pen. Next to the ‘Grande’ tick box, she’d written “…But it’s what you do with it that counts! ;)”

For a guy, especially a lonely guy, sometimes it doesn’t take much to ignite the crush protocol. A kind word, a wink, a nice gesture across the office photocopier, and it’s fucking on like Donkey Kong.

Some crushes burn slowly, like incense, gradually filling your mind until you’re incapable of smelling anything but their honeyed fragrance, and you can’t look at a fucking lamp without thinking about what it would look like being knocked onto the floor when you sit them up on the desk and rip their knickers off.

Others hit you so hard and fast, you can’t even duplicate a report without thinking about laying her down on the glass plate and making 100 paper copies of your thrusting. You might even contemplate stapling all the pages together to make a flipbook, so you can replay your fucking in stop-motion.

You can’t talk to her on the phone without putting your hand down your pants and thinking about her on top of you, her hair falling in her face as she smiles and smiles while she rocks up and down on your steel hard cock, while she traces a finger down your perspiring chest. You rub your thighs and laugh as your cock has all it’s birthdays at the same time.

Sometimes, you can’t even buy a coffee without wanting to leap over the counter and offer her extra cream for once.

In some ways, whether it’s with someone you’ve hardly met or a friend that you shouldn’t really fancy, the crush is the perfect relationship. They’ll never disappoint you, they’ll never leave you – hell, they’ll always be the same age they were when you met them, frozen in the amber of your memory. They’ll always be wearing that outfit that made you shoot boners out of your eyes. It’ll always be that night when they drunkenly looked into your eyes for just a second too long. The sex will always be mind blowing, the kisses tender and the touches desperate and fumbling. It’s really the most perfect relationship you’ll ever have. And the only way you can ever fuck it up, is by trying to make it real. So as long as you can live in the bubble of imagination indefinitely, as long as you can deal with the constant gnawing feeling of incompleteness, the tangible taste of the unknown forever on your lips, you’ll always have a grande old time.

But it’ll cost you a fucking fortune in Cinnamon Dolce Lattes.

See? See?! Awesome. If you love it as much as I do you should read more of what he writes. And tell me about your own crushes in the comments, so I can pity and love you too.

This doesn’t happen. It might happen to other people, but it never ever happens to me. Therefore it might as well be light-speed interstellar travel or a stint as Emperor of the Universe – it is an almost-impossible dream. Moreover it’s one which, frankly, I’m not sure I’d want to have anyway.

The typical night out clubbing involves meeting people in a pub or bar, getting just drunk enough that you feel at your most attractive, then heading to some odd-looking fashionable warehouse to flail madly while some preening dickhead presses play on a stereo and underpaid miserablists charge you £20 for a gin and tonic.

That does not make me feel very sexy. Let’s break it down:

Groups of friends

Few people go clubbing on their own – they go with friends. And in a group of friends it is much more difficult to make an initial approach. What if your friends see you and whisper behind their hands? What if they’re nudging you towards him/her like you’re nrvously asking for a snog at the school disco? What if all of his/her friends laugh as you approach, or loudly tell you that your chosen one is taken?

Loud music

I don’t want to sound like your moaning grandma, but I am about to do just that: why the living arsefuck (yes, in my head your gran talks just like this) do you want to go somewhere where you can’t hear what anyone’s saying? Why do the kids these days insist on placing themselves in rooms with noise so penetrating that you can’t think, let alone share a coherent and captivating sentence or two with your neighbour?

Heat

Nightclubs are hot. They are boiling, boiling hot. I would no more try to approach a stranger in a nightclub than I would insist on jogging to a first date.

Yes, my sweat is beautiful and arousing and gets your dick hard when we’re in bed together, but if the first time you meet me I’m humming like a tramps’ sauna, chances are you’ll be unlikely to want to dick me.

Dancing

No. Unless you’re stunningly good at it, nightclub dancing is a shockingly difficult way to get laid. It’s a very distant descendant of the partner dances our grandparents did together, but somehow all the beauty and sex has been stripped out of it until it’s just a repulsive husk of its former self – a rutting, gyrating dignity-killer that leaves us all looking like someone’s last choice.

Tea dancing, swing dancing, anything you do with a partner is fucking sexy. Beautiful. It’s closeness and warmth and the good, good scent of your partner and – if you’re lucky – the feeling of their growing erection pressing into your hips. It’s whispering into their ear that you want to squeeze it and making plans for later in the evening. Your grandparents did this – it’s why you are here.

What happened to that sort of dancing? What happened to chatting, and wooing, and subtle glances? Why do we now feel like we have to dance like we’re actually humping things in mid-air, or cavorting wildly with some invisible partner? I want men to sidle up to me, tap me on the shoulder, and take me by the hands. I want to get wetter and wetter as I feel their hands stray – ever so slowly – to my bottom. I don’t want to have to rub my crotch on them while they gurn over my shoulder and twist their hips around like they’ve got scorpions attacked to their bollocks.

It’s obscene.

I’m a massive fucking pervert – I love strip clubs and Beyoncé videos and all the rest of it – but even I have an issue with the idea that to pull someone you must first embarass yourself with undignified dancing until you’re dripping with a stinking sweat, eschew all forms of verbal communication then complete your advances by performing a borderline sexual assault on someone and hoping they don’t punch you in the face.

Sorry, that was a bit ranty, but it’s true. Even if you love clubbing, and live for the nights where you drop some pills and punch the sky in a delicious orgy of pleasure and music and people, I still don’t think you’d say the club is a sexy place to be.

Proof: If you pull someone at a pub, would you bother taking your fresh and eager loved one to a nightclub? No. You’d whisk them off to your house, slap on some Janis Joplin, and slow dance them until they’re utterly drenched in fuck.