I am not a weak person. I am a loud, angry, Siberian tiger of a woman who will tear you into a thousand rhetorical pieces if you even think of implying that I am incapable.

But people have power over me: men have power over me. Most of the time the power of men is used for good – men I love make me tremble and cry and beg with passion. Unfortunately, some men have the power to make me weak with fear by simply saying hello.

Men – do you know you have this power? I suspect a lot of you don’t. I suspect this because I have good friends, who would never knowingly terrify someone, who occasionally do things that they shouldn’t: loudly chat up girls at bus stops at 2 am. Push things a bit too far in a pub, and speak loudly and crudely to women who are shying away. Insist on hugs from women they barely know, who wince at the touch of an over-familiar stranger.

The other day a man said ‘hello darling’ to me on a night bus, and it became apparent that I am not the sabre-toothed bitch that I’d like to believe. The rational part of my brain was telling me that he was a perfectly nice, friendly guy. He didn’t mean me any harm. He was just being sociable, and I should be flattered by his attention. Then he got off the bus at my stop, and my heart beat faster. I put on my cold face and picked up the pace. He didn’t follow me – he’d never intended to. He wasn’t a rapist or a bastard – he was just a friendly guy who did not understand that by approaching me in the middle of the night he was wielding a certain power.

A long time ago…

When I was 16 I had a job at a corner shop. I’d spend Saturday evenings selling lottery tickets to drunk men, sweets to children, and cigarettes to any teenager with enough swagger to persuade me they didn’t need ID. At 8:30 we’d shut up shop and I’d head to the bus stop, and home.

The bus left at 8:55, but it didn’t usually feel like a long wait. In the winter it was cold and dark, but I was never afraid – I’d sit huddled in my denim jacket reading books and watching people go by. Occasionally, drunk youths would run past, taunting each other and shattering cheap bottles of alcopops on the pavement.

But I was never afraid.

One night a man came to join me at the bus stop. He was old – perhaps 40, perhaps 50, I’m not sure – all grown-ups seem ancient to a teenager. He sat at the opposite end of the bus stop bench and said hello. It was 8:35.

I said ‘hi’, and went back to reading my book. At around 8:40 he tried again. ‘So, what are you doing here by yourself?’

‘I’ve just finished work.’

‘You seem too young to be working.’

‘It’s just a part time job, in that newsagents on the high street.’

‘Oh, that’s good. Do you enjoy it?’

We chatted. It was fine. He was a friendly, lonely guy making conversation at the bus stop. I was polite. I put my book away so as not to seem rude, and we continued chatting. I checked my watch and it was 8:45. I wasn’t afraid.

I asked him where he was off to and he said he was visiting his son. His son had just had a baby, and he was going to see it. He paused. He shuffled a bit closer to me on the bench.

‘You’re very pretty.’

And all it took was that one short sentence, those three words, and suddenly I was afraid. I didn’t want this man to think I was pretty, I didn’t want him to talk to me like that. I didn’t want him to say things that I couldn’t respond to politely. I didn’t know how to not respond politely. So I said ‘thanks.’

At that, he shuffled further along the bench, so he was sat within about a foot of me. He slid his hand along the plastic seat and he touched my hand with his little finger. Just a slight touch, then a stroke. He was smiling. It was 8:50.

‘You’re very pretty to be on your own.’

In time honoured tradition, I told him I was off to my boyfriend’s house. He slid his hand on top of mine, and kept stroking. My hand itched and burned and I wanted to pull it away. I wanted him to stop touching me, but I didn’t want to be rude. I told myself it didn’t matter – it was only my hand, for crying out loud: not my tits or my arse. He hadn’t said anything sexual.

Maybe he was just confused, maybe he was just friendly.

Maybe I should just let him keep stroking my hand and then the bus would come and everything would be OK and he wouldn’t touch me anywhere else and oh God I was wearing shorts and I didn’t want him to touch my legs and I just wanted the bus to come.

It was 8:55.

‘The bus will be here soon.’ I choked a bit on the sentence and shifted away from him slightly – like I was making myself comfortable – I didn’t want him to think I was being rude. Above all – more than the fear of being touched – I didn’t want him to know that I was disgusted by him. He moved a bit closer – the side of his hand touched my thigh and I leapt up from the bench.

Never in my life have I been so pleased to see a bus.

I paid for my ticket and got on, sitting near the front in the well-lit section by the driver. The bus was my sanctuary and my safety, the driver had mirrors to look out for me behind him, and nothing bad could happen to me now that the bus was here. I breathed a ragged sigh of relief in that moment – I thought I was safe.

But then the man came and sat next to me.

He’d obviously misunderstood the point of the bus – for him it wasn’t a sanctuary, but an escalation – an opportunity for him to sit even closer. He touched my legs, he stroked the exposed upper part of my arms. He whispered in my ear that I was beautiful, and he kissed my shoulder. I, in the seat between him and the window, trapped in silence by my own misguided sense of politeness and shock that no one on the bus realised this was wrong, cried.

I sat there, mute. I let him touch me and kiss me and I cried.

You’ve got the power

Why did I write this? This blog is supposed to be sexy, ranty, and occasionally vaguely amusing, not an outlet for ancient, emotional stories that I should have got out of my system years ago.

But I wrote it because it’s clearly not out of my system. As I said at the beginning, a man said ‘hi’ to me on a night bus recently. Friendly, smilingly, he asked me how I was and where I was off to. And when I said ‘home’ he said ‘where’s that?’ and my stomach froze inside.

I’m old enough now to have learnt how to brush someone off, or where to run to if someone follows me. Most importantly I’m old enough to know men – I’ve known hundreds, I’ve fucked a fair few, and I’ve loved a couple too. And I know that the vast majority of them are good, and kind, and sweet. No man I know would ever deliberately give anyone that fear.

But the world isn’t divided into good men and bastards. There are the good guys, the bad guys, and then all of the real people somewhere in between. And as surely as I know that the original bus guy was a bastard – not just a bastard, a criminal – I know that there are men who say ‘hi’ on the night bus and mean no more than that.

I’m confident that the man the other night meant no harm – he was drunk, and keen, and friendly, and when I brushed him off he backed away. He got off the bus at my stop not because he was stalking me but because that was where he lived. He walked in the opposite direction, not knowing that I was looking over my shoulder every ten seconds to make sure he wasn’t on my tail.

Don’t be that guy

I don’t want to shame all the men in the world for the mistakes of the many and the evil of the few. I refuse to believe that a significant number of people are sexual predators – deliberately and carefully setting out to make women feel the way I felt on that bus.

But I have known men who, despite wanting to place themselves firmly at the ‘good guy’ end of the spectrum have, unthinkingly, done similar things. Pushed things a bit too far, approached women when it was late at night or when they were vulnerable. Insisted on a touch when they’re too pissed to notice that the girl is grimacing.

You have a certain kind of power, and you need to be aware of what that means for you: if you don’t listen, if you don’t look, if you don’t try to understand how the person you’re approaching feels, you have the power to turn into that guy. That creepy one.

It’s hard for me to admit that people have this power over me. If you corner me in the pub and ask whether I’d put up with being groped on a bus I’d laugh and tell you I can handle myself – I’d scream, or fight, or call the police. I’d invoke a tidal wave of righteous anger to sweep away any man who fucked with me.

But in reality I don’t know if I could. Because whenever men say hello to me on a night bus it’s 8:55 on Saturday and I’m sixteen again. I’m sitting stock-still under fluorescent lights while a man kisses my shoulder. I’m cold and alone and scared and mute, shuddering with silent sobs and waiting for someone to save me.

I don’t want you to hug me in the office. In fact, unless we’re pretty damned close, I don’t want you to hug me at all.

I’ve been called ‘standoffish’ because I’m not the sort of person who responds well to being hugged. I dread that bit at the end of parties, where everyone’s just pissed enough to think they’re better friends than they actually are, and some person I’ve spent about twenty minutes chatting to screeches “Byeeee darling, it was amaaazing to meet you” before forcing me into an awkward cuddle.

Maybe this makes me odd, but I don’t actually care. Whether my aversion to being grabbed by random acquaintances is odd or not, you need to respect that. And I mean respect it properly, not just acknowledge and then ignore it. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said to me:

“I know you don’t like hugs so I’ll just do it really quickly.” or even “Hey, come on, it’s only me. Gizza hug.”

I don’t want to. I’ll do it if you make me, but I’ll hate it, and I’ll resent you for thinking that our acquaintance counts for nothing if I’m not willing to awkwardly squash my chest against you at the end of a night out.

Back to the office.

The rules about touching your coworkers

You don’t need to be told not to rock up late for an interview to know that being late for an interview is a bad thing. Likewise, you don’t need to be told that stroking a colleague’s thigh, patting them on the arse, or putting your arms around them might make them a tad uncomfortable.

I’m writing this blog as a plea for common sense. Because since the ex-chief-exec of the Lib Dems has been accused of inappropriate workplace touching (an accusation which, for legal reasons, I shall point out he has denied) there’s been a lot of bullshit spoken about how difficult it is to know when a touch is inappropriate. A few guys have plaintively cried for guidance.

“But how do we know?” they say. “How can I possibly tell whether one of my work colleagues wants me to touch her, or whether she’ll be offended?”

The answer to this question is: you don’t, unless she expressly tells you. At no point during the working day can you be 100% certain that a female colleague wants you to touch her. Whether she’s in the middle of an email, chairing a strategy meeting or – like me – trying to inch her way closer to the biscuit plate during a particularly long PowerPoint presentation. It’s not like a green light goes off over her head if she fancies you and is up for a quick squeeze.

But, and I cannot possibly stress this enough, the fact that you don’t know is inconsequential. You hardly know anything, none of us do. The boundaries of our knowledge are tiny and the realm of the unknown is vast. Yet somehow most of us manage to get through every day without sexually harassing random members of the opposite sex. We’re not special, we don’t have knowledge that you don’t, and nor are we telepaths; we’re just not arseholes.

To use the ‘we can’t possibly know’ defence for any kind of inappropriate touching, whether inside or outside the workplace, is the largest pile of bullshit I have ever scrolled angrily past on the internet.

The impenetrable mysteries of how not to be a creep

We don’t go through life understanding exactly what other people want from us at all times. Sometimes we take risks, and do things that might get us into trouble, and other times we are cautious. The key thing is to assess whether a risk is worth taking – not just for you, but for the object of your affection as well.

That girl sitting at the bar might reject you, or burst into tears if you go and chat to her. But the risk of these things is minimal, and you’d be unlikely to offend or harm her by saying ‘hello.’ So you don’t grab her arse. You don’t call her ‘babes’. You don’t shout ‘OI OI!’ from the other side of the room. Because all of these things are high-risk, potentially high-harm situations. So you just say fucking ‘Hi.’

Likewise, you don’t offer to spank a woman on a first date. You try and ease the conversation round to spanking, in a non-threatening way, to see if she might be up for it. You don’t grab a girl’s arse on the tube. You talk to her, try to work out if she fancies you, talk to her some more, and then ask for her number if you get the right signals.

In any of these situations you might fuck up – go in for a kiss at the bar and watch as she leans away and says ‘I’m sorry, I’m not that into you.’ Bring up spanking and have her tell you you’re not her type. And this is fine – these mistakes, while embarrassing, don’t actually cause any harm.

Whereas if you just go up to a girl, grab her tits and then cry ‘how was I supposed to know?!’ when she runs for the hills, then you are a stupid, stupid cunt.

To err is human, but to pretend that women are so complex that you can’t even try to empathise? That’s pathetic.

Work is a non-contact sport

In my ideal world no one ever touches work colleagues. But that’s because I am ‘standoffish’, and would rather find my fun outside a building in which I’m supposed to act like a professional. I wouldn’t ban workplace touching, because I’ve witnessed office romances that have worked. At some point during the blossoming of that relationship someone laid a hand on someone else’s knee, or leant in for a kiss at a Christmas party, and took a small calculated risk.

But you know what? That successful person, who ended up marrying their office sweetheart and living happily ever after? That was almost certainly the person who held back, who waited, who had enough respect for their colleague not to gamble on a fumble before they could be sure the touch was wanted.

The successful person was patient, respectful and empathetic. He certainly wasn’t the kind of twat who’d jump on a woman in the stationery cupboard, get sacked, and then whine about how unfair life is, and how hard things are, and how he’ll never understand just what these fickle women want.

We’re all squeamish about certain things – some people hate the sight of blood, others can’t cope with injections, or the possibility of disease, or unclean kitchen worktops. There’s nothing wrong with a certain amount of squeamishness, but I’m surprised at the number of people I’ve met who are – to one degree or another – squeamish about sex.

Sex, by its nature, is quite messy. Even at the most basic level (quick missionary hump for the purposes of procreation) both of you have to emit certain juices and fluids: sweat, jizz, quim – even saliva, if you’re feeling particularly romantic.

And so, unless you have a lot of equipment and a shedload of wet wipes to hand, when you fuck you’ll get dirty.

Ultra-clean sex and a tip for Dommes

If you want to avoid all possible sexual juices, the only way I can think of is to cover your partner head-to toe in a plastic sheet (ensuring that he has a suitable mouth to breathe through but, crucially, maintains a safe distance so that you can’t kiss each other) then stick his cock through a carefully-cut hole in the middle (protip: cut hole before cock is anywhere nearby), slip a condom on him, and hump away. Not particularly sexy, but it essentially eliminates almost all skin-to-skin contact. Were I a dominant lady I would certainly consider using this during sub play – you can have this idea for free.

However, although it’s excellent for people who have a fetish for sterile sex, it’s not great for those of us who revel in the smells and juices and general slipperiness of the whole scenario. To be honest, it’s not great for any of us if we don’t happen to have plastic sheeting in our sex toy drawer.

The point I’m trying to make is that we have to go to extremes to make sex un-messy, so any squeamishness we have about the exchange of particular fluids necessarily needs to be laid to one side if we want to really get on and enjoy things.

Let’s talk about menstruation

Number one (that number, for new readers, denotes the first guy I slept with) did not like shagging while I was ‘on.’ A couple of tentative attempts while I was bleeding lightly went OK, but an energetic, doggy-style hump during my heavier days proved disastrous.

Once he’d come, he pulled his dick out and made a slightly high-pitched squealing noise.

“What’s wrong with you? Are you OK? Oh Jesus, are you having a miscarriage?”
“I’m fine – what’s up?”
“You’re bleeding!”
“Of course I’m bleeding, I’m on my period.”
“But this is worse than that.”
“No it’s not.”
“It’s… it’s… it’s got chunks in.”

I calmed him down with tea, a cuddle, and a long explanation of the fact that yes, sometimes it has chunks in. We never did it again, and I spent a good few years avoiding sex during my period, worrying that the guys I shagged would react with similar horror upon discovery that menstruation isn’t just the occasional leaking of a thimbleful of blue water, but often a gushing onslaught of not just blood but genuine, honest-to-goodness gore.

It’s totally fine to be utterly disgusting

So what changed my mind? Because, of course, my mind has been changed: I’d no more refuse sex during my period these days than I’d give up wanking for lent. Period horny is the horniest type of horny. About halfway through my red week I’m jiggling my knee and rubbing my thighs together and picking the bumpiest seat on the bus. What changed my mind about relieving this urge the old-fashioned cock-based way (as opposed to the ‘frantic clit-rubbing under a duvet’ way) was a couple of other guys I met.

Poor number one was quite naïve about periods, and a few other things for that matter – he didn’t like the idea of kissing me after a blow job (unless I’d brushed my teeth) or even giving me head.  But his horror at the more slippery aspects of sex was by no means a benchmark for how every guy would feel. Although I have met guys since who aren’t keen on period sex, or oral, or indeed anything that might require a deep clean afterwards, I’ve met far more who could give less than an iota of a fuck.

In fact, for adult men, ‘on’ fucking has proved to be much the same as ‘off’ fucking, only with a towel put down to catch the drippiest bits. One guy went so far as to remove my tampon with his teeth during a particularly feisty session. I appreciate this. I don’t have a particular fetish for sex that’s blood-drenched – apart from anything else I simply don’t have the time or inclination to soak that many bedsheets. But I love the ‘I don’t give a fuck about your menstruation’ attitude that means I can stop panicking that the guy will get his dick covered and run out of the room squealing ‘why can’t you just be clean and sweet-smelling like the girls on telly?’

So if you’re squeamish, especially if you’re a teenage boy with limited knowledge of the mysterious workings of the female uterus – I understand. But I’d love it if you could lay a bit of your squeamishness to one side when you’re stripping down and getting naked with someone. What prompted me to write about this was a bit of browsing on ’embarrassing bodies’ forums, and other related sites. There are a hell of a lot of young girls and boys howling desperately into the online wilderness: ‘am I weird?’ ‘am I wrong?’ ‘am I grotesque and disgusting?’

The answer is almost certainly no, but it can be bloody hard to hear that answer sometimes. The sixteen year old version of me would have given anything to experience the genuine liberation that comes from realising that these juices I leaked and these noises I made and these weird spots that insisted on growing in seemingly random places on my body and subsequently leaking juices of their own: these things were pretty normal. Let’s embrace the leaking, juicy, weird bits of ourselves, love the leaking, juicy bits about other people, and commit to having some thoroughly messy sex.

Addendum, because I know I’ll get emails: if your period is especially painful, or you’re experiencing a significant change in blood loss and/or consistency, speak to a doctor.

Update 2020: this post was written long ago, before I understood how Julie Burchill’s views really fed into the toxic debate on trans rights. I would not write the same thing today. 

What causes hate? Loads of situational things, of course. You might hate someone because they slept with your partner, because they blew up your car or used up the last bit of milk in the fridge and failed to replace it.

On a more significant and terrifying level you might hate someone because they’re different: blacker, gayer, differently-gendered, or because there’s some other quality about them that you just can’t get your head around. They’re different, and they do things differently to you and they’re swanning around this world just refusing to even make an effort to be a little bit the same as you, to fit in. How dare they.

At the root of it I think the vast majority of this hatred is caused by a failure to understand – to actually try and put yourself in someone else’s shoes and empathise with their situation. We’re suffering a massive fuckoff crisis of empathy, and it’s causing us to rip each other to shreds.

Let’s talk about privilege

I’m pretty bloody privileged: I’m a white, middle-class British girl with a job and a flat and shoes and a fridge full of Cadbury’s Twirl bites and at least four real-life friends. I’ve grown up with a family who are fucking spectacular and supportive and I’m more than aware that the shelter of my background and upbringing means I’ll never fully understand the troubles that other people, who haven’t been born with all the breaks I have, go through.

But I can try, yeah? I can give it a fucking go. I can listen to people’s stories and experiences and I can frown at the people who shout them down and I can try – try – to empathise. I may not be able to fully comprehend, because of my privilege. But I can listen, and I can try.

Let’s talk about words

I once wrote a blog post about female urinals that included the line ‘women don’t have penises’. As soon as I tweeted it someone tweeted back saying ‘hey, how about you cut out the nasty transphobia in your second paragraph, yeah?’

My reaction was a stunned, gobsmacked, horrified ‘what the fuck?!’ I re-read the blog and I couldn’t see anything that would lead people to think that I was phobic or hateful towards transgendered people. So you know what I did? Rather than call her a prick, or tell her to fuck off and leave me alone, I asked what she meant.

She explained: ‘some women, you know, do have penises. Gender vs sex.’ That made sense, so I asked her what I should change it to and she suggested ‘most women don’t have penises.’ The change wasn’t exactly a fucking revolution, but it made this person, and potentially others, a bit more comfortable with what I was writing, and also made me a bit more careful about the language I used from then on. I’m not asking for a medal, by the way – this is quite literally the least I can do to not be a dick.

In return, though, when I’d changed the piece, the lady in question apologised. Not for asking me to change it, but for her initial comment that had made it sound like I did it deliberately. Saying (and I’m paraphrasing, because I don’t have the tweet to hand) ‘sorry, I just see this stuff all the time, appreciate you changing it and realise you didn’t do it on purpose.’

And, pathetic though I sound, that made my sodding day. Her recognition that I’m not deliberately a bastard, just a clumsy arse, meant a lot.

Let’s talk about Julie Burchill

Earlier this week Suzanne Moore wrote an article that included an insensitive comment about ‘Brazilian transsexuals.’ Then some people picked her up on it. Then some more people hounded her for it. She defended her comments. They asked her to apologise. She left Twitter. Then professional controversialist Julie Burchill waded in with something so hateful that it made me wonder why the fuck any of us even bothers getting out of bed in the morning.

There are failures of empathy going on all over the place here – Moore’s initial lack of empathy and understanding for trans women who, you know, have enough shit to deal with without being casually mocked in the New Statesman. When she was picked up on her comments by people who tried to engage, and explain exactly what was wrong with the original comment, she failed to understand why they might be justifiably angry. Later on, some more vocal tweeters joined in, then seemed surprised that Moore might be upset at having had quite terrifying abuse hurled at her. Finally, Julie Burchill rounded the whole episode off neatly by demonstrating where a complete lack of empathy ultimately leads: to hatred.

Let’s just fucking talk, OK?

Privileged or not, we all have the capacity to understand and to try and empathise. But we cannot do that if we cannot talk to each other, and listen to what others have to say.

Sometimes I’ll say things you disagree with. Sometimes I’ll use words you don’t like. Sometimes (and this may be one of those times) you’ll want to hurl your laptop out of the window in frustration at the way I have callously dismissed or ignored something that’s precious to you.

But I promise you this: I will never deliberately say hateful, horrible things that ignore my privilege and make life harder for you. I will always try to empathise and – if you correct me – I’ll try to clarify what I’m saying, or apologise if I’m wrong. If you tell me about my mistakes I can correct and clarify. If you call me a hateful psycho bitch-whore, I’ll never fucking learn.

I’m just a girl, standing in front of an angry internet, asking you all to be a bit more understanding. That goes for the writers as well as the commenters and all of the people who retweet us and keep us afloat. Because as soon as we lose that capacity to understand, to try and empathise with other people’s feelings and troubles and mistakes, we’ll all turn into Julie fucking Burchill.