Communication: it’s bloody hard, right? You just never know what’s going to offend people and whether your words will be hurled back at you in a storm of rage and misery, leaving you cowering in a corner nursing your hurt feelings.

The above is only semi-tongue-in-cheek: I know that words – while they’re sometimes our friends, are often crude tools with which we dig ourselves a massive hole into which we accidentally spew things that we probably shouldn’t have said. Hence: communication’s important, but we all get it wrong sometimes.

It’s hard to give advice to people on the right things to say – although plenty of Pick-Up Artists will try, and tell you that there are specific rules and lines that are scientifically proven to impress strangers. However, usually the only thing anyone can advise is to try and be empathetic, listen to the other person, and for the love of God don’t say anything awful like this. To cover this last category, I’m handing over to the excellent @halfabear, who has some very strong and hilarious opinions on the questions people ask about her sex life.

Sexual questions

Since becoming paraplegic I’ve become very used to being asked questions about my health; friends asking how I’m getting on and if I’m in pain, strangers gently prying and trying to find out what’s wrong and how it happened. Nosey but innocuous questions that I generally don’t mind answering, providing that it’s not done insultingly and they understand I won’t answer if a line is crossed. I’ve been quite endeared over the years by the sensitivity that people have approached the subject with.

Well, most of the time.

There is one subject where it appears that all boundaries and sensitivity go out of the window in a heartbeat. Be it friend or stranger, it’s a subject which arouses such curiosity that no answer is simply not good enough, and there really is no way to tread carefully. Sex.

Read about awkward sexual questions, and the hilarious answers she gives people, over on her own blog…

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.

I don’t believe you’re real

You obviously believe I’m real enough to initiate a conversation with, so what is the point of this question? This is one of the most irritating dating site fails.
I’ve written the profile, I can write replies, but short of running round to your house and headbutting you in the crotch, there’s not much else I can do to prove it.

Wanna chat?

Why yes, yes I do. But in real life, please, not on some idiotic chat programme where we have stilted conversations about what we’re both doing, culminating in me being massively turned off by your excessive use of the term ‘lol.’

I always say in my profile that I hate IM. If you then insist on IMing me I’ll assume not only that you’re typing one-handed, but also that all that ‘one-handed typing’ has made you so blind you can’t read.

I expect you won’t reply…

Why, do I look like an arsehole?

In all seriousness I get a fair few messages, mainly because I mention sex on my profile and men these days have reasonably low standards. But I don’t get so many that it’d be impossible to reply to all of them – I reply to about one in five – the ones that don’t break these rules.

Wow your so hot

If you can’t spot what’s wrong with this then I wouldn’t reply to you either.

Do you have a pic of your body?

Or, to say what you actually mean: “are you fat?”

That’s what you’re asking, so why not come out and say it? Well, because it’s fucking rude, obviously.

I’m not going to tell you whether or not I’m fat, just as I’m not going to suck my stomach in and stand in front of a mirror just so I can send a picture of my body to someone so shallow I’d definitely not fuck him in the first place.