I used to have a fairly regular nightmare that went a little something like this:

Guy meets girl, guy starts shagging girl, girl and guy tangle together, sexily. Their limbs slide over each other, their hands grip flesh. His fingers dig hard into the crack of her arse, the way he does so gorgeously with me. They see me approach but they don’t care.

I’d dream about this quite frequently – a side-effect of an intensely jealous feeling. Part paranoia, part justified worry. He’d never actually do this, of course – not to the same degree. But in the dream it wasn’t the sex that bothered me so much as the openness of it. The fact that, when I approached the tangled, tousled couple, giggling and snogging and touching and worse – as I watched my fucking boyfriend fucking hard with someone else, he’d shrug and brush it off like his betrayal was nothing.

“Oh, didn’t you know? I’m with her now.”

They’d carry on, as I stood stunned and watching. Stuck in the moment, unable to escape until the second I woke up.

(more…)

I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but we have a big problem with sex and morality. If something is sexual, we seem to want to attribute a moral action to it even when one is not necessary.

There are some acts which, by whatever standards of morality you hold, most of us can accept are inherently ‘good’ – helping people who are vulnerable or suffering, for instance, or sharing resources when you’ve got more than you need. There are some we can label ‘bad’ fairly easily: hurting a person deliberately and without any reason, etc etc.

However, with sex we seem to want to label things ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when – at best – they’re morally neutral. Masturbation, for example. It can be good for your health (mental and physical) but is it morally good per se? Not really: it’s just a wank. Some sex acts are morally bad, but they’re morally bad because they have other characteristics which are ‘bad’ – they exploit or hurt people.

All this is to say that I don’t think ‘sex’ is inherently good or bad. Like eating, sex is just something we do. It can be good (a delicious doughnut to sate you after a hard day’s shagging) or bad (eating the flesh of an animal you’ve just tortured for fun). But food is a good example, because we frequently apply moral actions to eating, as we do to sex. You’ll have a ‘naughty’ slice of cake. Or ‘be bad’ and eat a second biscuit. Realistically, there’s no moral quality to these acts, as there’s little moral quality to the inherent act of sex: it’s just a fuck. The context is what gives it moral weight.

On that general foundation rests my default position whenever ‘sex things’ come up in the news. I’d always rather be extra careful when making moral judgments about sexual things, because of this tendency we have to leap towards ‘that sounds icky to me therefore it must be immoral.’

Brooks Newmark and the nude pictures

And so, the story that prompted this blog: Tory MP Brooks Newmark has resigned because he sent some nude pictures to someone who was not his wife. The pics went to an anonymous reporter who had explicitly requested the pictures, so there isn’t an issue of consent there. He did a sexual thing that someone had asked him to do.

I do not think that was morally wrong.

However, what was morally wrong is that he (from the sounds of it) did something that was not acceptable within his relationship. He and his wife did not have an agreement that naked sexting was OK. So that’s pretty crappy.

But I don’t think he should have resigned. I don’t think he should have been fired. And I certainly don’t think that his inability to resist the urge to send naked pictures of himself to someone who asked for them means he is incapable of being a politician. If we held politicians to high standards of morality in their private as well as their public life, based on the decisions of an angry mob/press, then the number of us who’d be qualified to be politicians would be vanishingly small. But it’s not just practical reasons that make me a bit uncomfortable with the torches and pitchforks that come out whenever there’s some sort of sex scandal.

It’s the fact that this argument is so often thrown out:

It’s about integrity!

Well, sure. We want politicians (and other people who work in roles that affect us) to have integrity. My doctor, for instance, should have great integrity. I expect her to be honest with me, to choose the right treatments, and not to sell out to Big Pharma for a fiver if she knows the better remedy is cheaper. Integrity is vital. But there’s a massive and overwhelming difference between saying to someone: “You are in an important job, and we need to trust you to perform your role with integrity” and saying “by the way this includes everything you do from now on even when you’re not on the clock.”

I’m sorry, but bollocks to that.

Allow me to clarify for those of you who’ll think I’m excusing any kind of immorality outside the workplace: I’m not. I’ll happily join in a bit of chit-chat calling someone a bastard if they cheat on their partner (and I’ll put my hand up and call myself a bastard too, for I have made myriad mistakes and cock-ups in my life) but there’s a big difference between saying ‘I don’t like that’ and extending it as far as ‘you’re fired.’

Here’s the thing: it’s the easy answer. I get that it’s far simpler and more satisfying to say ‘this guy sounds like scum, so he doesn’t deserve a job.’ But I’m suspicious of easy answers, particularly around sex, because I think with anything sexual we’re so desperate to assign morality to every single act that we forget what I said above: sex isn’t inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – it’s something for which the moral consequences must be weighed up depending on the context.

Simple answers sound awesome, which is why they are often the best way to deprive people of freedoms. Saying ‘if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear’ is a nice, simple, memorable way to get people to agree to quite drastic infringement of their liberties. Likewise saying ‘well, if you’re in a position of trust you need to be held to higher ethical standards’ may well be a great way to curb politicians who do things we find icky.

But ‘a position of trust’ is easily interpreted to include headteachers, teachers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, carers, anyone who leads a team of more than two people…. etc etc ad infinitum. We all have responsibilities, and we all need to have integrity in order to perform particular tasks in life. The issue I have is with treating people as if they cannot possibly distinguish between different areas. That if they’re dishonest in one area – that has nothing to do with their job – they will naturally be dishonest elsewhere. That if they spank people in their spare time they’ll be a sex pest in the office. People aren’t that misguided, and even if they were I can think of far better institutions to police it than their employers.

In conclusion, then: I don’t think we should sack people for doing sexual things outside of work. There are plenty of immoral acts for which I’d want a politician to be fired. Sexual harassment, for instance, is not only immoral but has genuine and serious ramifications for how that person performs their job (it implies a deep lack of respect, and often actual harassment, of people they are working with) – it’s also illegal. But unless a politician is going to make a cast-iron pact with their colleagues or the electorate to never send nude pictures of themself to another consenting adult, then holding them to account for a private promise they’ve made to their loved one makes no more sense than firing them for getting divorced.

I appreciate some of you might disagree vehemently with me on this, and please do feel free to: I’m particularly interested to explore the grey areas of this to see if my gut instincts hold up to scrutiny. So disagree, tell me I’m wrong, and get all angry in the comments if you like: just please don’t have me fired.

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.