I panic about everything, regardless of whether it’s actually worth panicking about. Good friends, acquaintances and even my own Mum: all these people are in the dark about the terror I have when I hit ‘send’ on an email to them and then immediately imagine everything collapsing around me, when they interpret a casual joke as a genuine insult. Don’t get me started on the times I have to assert myself or the things that actually matter…

Because of my permanent ‘red alert’ anxiety levels, when this week’s guest blogger got in touch with an idea about getting nervous before a BDSM scene, I leapt on it.

January Chopin is here to give you a gorgeously personal, amazingly hot, tinglingly nervewracking account of a BDSM scene. And I think a lot of people will see themselves in it…

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When I introduce myself to people, I use a different name. I have quite a few – I like them. One of them I wear so often it feels more comfortable than my ‘real’ name – I wrap it round me like a blanket, and it makes me feel safe.

Unfortunately, one of the questions I’m asked most frequently is: “is that your real name, though?” Like somewhere deep in my heart there’s a secret and special name, and the people I’m speaking to will be elevated above the status of mere acquaintance and into, I don’t know, God, if they can determine what the deep and immutable truth is. Problem is, knowing my real name doesn’t give anyone special powers, it just gives them a fact. And hand-in-hand with that fact comes a fairly big problem for both of us.

When I first started blogging I decided that anonymity was the best way to go – for a whole host of reasons, but primarily employment. We still live in a world where talking about buttsex on the internet and holding down a job at a company that gives a shit about your social media life is, if not impossible, at least tricky. As time wore on, there were more reasons, and then more. Recently, Kilted Wookie wrote a post about anonymity on his sex blog and it got me thinking about a lot of stuff. The primary thing was that there are far more reasons to be anonymous than I’d considered when I first began.

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Billy was an ordinary boy. He lived in an ordinary house, in an ordinary street, and every day he’d go out and play with his ordinary friends. Billy had a happy life.

But one day, as Billy’s friends took it in turns to swap brags about how cool their houses were and which level they’d reached on the latest Xbox game, Billy was struck by a bolt of lightning. Turning him from an ordinary, everyday boy into…

I-Call-Bullshit Man!

Now, in his superhero guise, Billy wanders the twisting corridors of the internet, shedding what he thinks is light into anything he perceives to be darkness. In comments and on Twitter he pops up, shouting that oft-heard phrase:

“I call bullshit!”

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A couple of weeks ago I put up the first instalment of a 2-part sex story involving a bondage kit, and the sexy anticipation of the build-up to getting something hot delivered to your door. In it, the main character falls for Zoe – a dominant with a penchant for spanking and bondage. Click the link above to read part one, which is filled with sexy shivers of anticipation, then read below for the climax, so to speak. It’s by the brilliant @waitingirl13, and I think it’s a gorgeous way to round off the tale…

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If you’re not British, you might not be familiar with Marmite. It is either:

• a delicious brown substance created during the brewing process, which you spread on toast with butter before having a mouthgasm OR
• diarrhoea brewed in the anus of Beelzebub.

For me it’s the former, for others it’s the latter. I pick Marmite because not only is it a great example of something that has divided a nation (their literal slogan is ‘you either love it or you hate it’) but also because there is no moral value in either liking or disliking Marmite: you’re not a better person if you choose to try it. However, you are a bit of a dick if you try to sneak it into someone’s breakfast without them noticing.

Pretty much all sex acts are like Marmite. Oral sex? Some love it, some don’t. Probably a larger group of the former than the latter, but whatever. Likewise hand jobs, using sex toys, doing anal, bondage: any act that two or more people can take part in.

Here’s where sex acts diverge from Marmite: sometimes you really want your partner to try something. No one really cares if I like Marmite or not. It won’t break my heart if Jon Hamm announces, on our wedding day, that he won’t be eating any of the brown stuff. Sex, on the other hand, is something you can enjoy with your partner, and so if you have a particular kink and your partner’s not keen, that can be pretty gutting. If Jon Hamm tell me that he really hates spanking, I’ll be very upset (as well as surprised, tbh, given how much he loves spanking in all those dreams of mine he’s shown up in).

Anyway, given the Marmite nature of various sex acts, I can see why people often ask me the following question:

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