Most people living in the UK will have noticed that the sun came out this weekend. I mean, even if you haven’t opened the curtains or you live in a basement you’ll have noticed that the sun’s been out, because everyone with a social media account has been commenting on the joy of being able to go outside without wrapping yourself in waterproof plastic and holding a charm to ward off floods.

Back in October, I wrote about why Autumn is sexy. Although, as a wool-wrapped goth, I’m mainly a winter person, I thought that given the mood of general sun-worship I’d do the same for summer. Here are all the hot things I’m looking forward to during that one week in mid-August when we get something resembling a warm season.

Five reasons why summer is hot

Guys get their upper arms out

That’s right, gents, your upper arms and shoulders are to me what sugar is to a five year old. The muscle definition (which most of you have even if you aren’t bulked-up gym bunnies, by the way) is temptingly squeezable. I used to have a friend who’d roll up the sleeves of his t-shirt in the summer to ensure he didn’t get a tan line halfway down his biceps. Practical and sensible, sure, but it left me melting in an oozing puddle of knicker-moistening lust.

I’m not a fan of topless guys in very public places, though. I suspect this is a by-product of living in Japan for a few years, where people frowned on public semi-nakedness in the same way as they’d frown on public defecation. Taking off your entire shirt when you’re walking down the street feels a bit aggressive to me, so I shy away from looking at men who have got everything above the waist on display.

But your shoulders? Your biceps? Those big strong arms that I imagine squeezing me around the waist or neck? I cannot get enough of them.

Playing sports in the park

Men doing things. Men doing hot things. Men running around energetically while I sit under the cool shade of a nearby tree imagining what would happen if I snuck into their changing room and held up a sign that said “I am your post-match refreshment: FEAST UPON ME!”

The physicality of park sport combined with the playful friendliness of it (I’ve rarely seen groups of hooligans chanting when there are jumpers for goalposts) makes for a deeply erotic tableau.

And just so you know, it doesn’t have to be football. In my area of London the park sport of choice is cricket. Now cricket, despite being second only to golf as the most tedious non-sport known to mankind, at least has the benefit that the players use their hands. Sexy, sexy hands.

Speedos

Do you hate Speedos? Do you disparagingly refer to them as ‘banana hammocks’ or something equally crass? Well, when I am a millionaire with my own private pool you won’t be invited to the party.

I won’t give you any bullshit about the atmosphere they evoke, or the peripheral hotness of seeing a man in these tightest of tight swimming trunks. Speedos are hot because I can see your cock: end of.

Swimming shorts are hot too, because they drape so nicely over your manly hips and arse, and look excitingly like the weight of the water could drag them down your legs at any moment. Oh, and when they get wet, guess what? I can probably see your cock.

Holiday fucking

Whether I’m stuck in a hostel, trying to have awkward sex up against a bunkbed before some backpacking strangers get back from the bar, or holed up in a cheap Spanish apartment, tipsy on sangria and lazily wanking you off before we head out for late-night tapas, holiday sex is the ultimate in ‘couldn’t give a fuck’ fun.

When I’m on holiday I don’t care in the slightest that I’m sweaty, bedraggled, blotchy, burned, or have half the Sahara and a good portion of camel hair lodged in my arse crack. Unless you’re infinitely better than I am at picking up strangers over buckets of vodka in Ibiza, holiday sex is usually sex you have with someone you’ve known for ages. Someone who is just as relaxed and de-mob happy as you are, and has more than enough time to fuck your brains out.

If you feel the same about the hotness of holiday sex and you have a spare pile of money, let me know – I’ve got an awesome idea for a travel guide listing streets, restaurants and tourist attractions in which you can surreptitiously fuck. It’s basically The Lonely Planet, but for perverts.

Delicious salty man sweat

Need I say more about this, the ultimate in filthy summer delights? Well, I can’t. Because I am too busy licking it from your neck.

Wise people are discussing sex addiction at the moment. And by ‘wise people’ I mean mostly Brooke Magnanti, who’s written some interesting stuff about it in the Telegraph as well as her excellent book ‘The Sex Myth‘. I’m nervous about applying the label ‘addiction’, particularly to something I enjoy immensely and crave absolutely, but that also – despite my occasional fuck-ups – significantly improves my life. Brooke nails many of my concerns about the sex addiction industry, and rest assured that no matter what you think your problem with sex is, you can guarantee there’ll be someone happy to take your money for a ‘cure’.

However, the fact that there are dubious diagnoses of ‘porn addiction’ and much hand-wringing about ‘sex-addicted’ celebrities, that doesn’t negate the very real problems that some people have with sex – if something is negatively affecting your life, then making the decision to take control of it is probably a wise one. This week’s guest post, which I found hilarious as well as touching, comes from a guy who is as filthy as I am (and most likely even filthier) but for whom sex isn’t the magical wonderland he really wants. In his own excellent (and anonymous) words, I’ll let him explain…

Giving up on filthy sex

It’s funny how things turn out. One minute you’re married, living the Guardian colour supplement dream, and the next you’re listening to the fire alarm go off at 11am when you’re in the middle of your first all male threesome. While your febrile imagination runs through the many and varied ways in which your immediate future can best humiliate you, the voice in your head is simply saying, ‘what the fuck? How the hell did I end up living in a bachelor pad having two cocks in my mouth for elevenses?’ Then you remember that it’s Thursday, fire alarm test day. The looks of horror subside, and hungry mouths get to work once more …

That’s right, I am a man-whore, a slut; call me what you will. Over the past year, for example, I think I fucked as many women as I did in the twenty years following the greatly anticlimactic event that was the mislaying of my virginity. I’ve had sex with several men: both the sensual and louche kind and the on your knees from the moment the front door is shut to the moment they cum in your mouth kind. I’ve had threesomes, foursomes and fivesomes, been to orgies, parties and swinging-friendly amenities. I’ve licked my partner’s pussy while another guy squirted his cum down her throat, watched her get fucked by two men, fucked her while a guy wanked into my open mouth, letting the cum drip into hers, fucked a guy while he was fucking her … Sometimes I think back and almost shock myself, and yet it started with a kiss.

To be brutally honest, I love it. I love to see the naked greed in a girl’s eyes, to see the look in a guy’s as my partner takes his cock in her mouth, I love it all. Which makes it all the more strange that I’m giving it up.

Why give up on filthy sex?

Not long after the kiss, I found myself putting a collar on the actual girl next door in a B&BDSM in the sticks. The next week I was at a party. I was introduced to a Dr Jones, simply because we were the only two Drs there. After about ten minutes I said, simply, ‘shall we fuck?’ The only query was her place or mine. It was a while before I realised that I had been caught in a perfect sexual storm.

I was single, clever, charming, handsome, fit, with a disposable income and a newly acquired (non-transmittable) disease which had two neatly intersecting outcomes – a carpe diem mentality and a pharmaceutically-induced sexual compulsion. I was suddenly devastatingly successful, to the point that when I found a properly filthy girl, the kind who would make me fuck her before she went to work and would then spend the day sending me texts such as ‘In a meeting. Can feel you leaking out of my cunt. Hot’, I simply carried on. I cultivated a rolling harem of between four and eight girls on top (sometimes literally) of my partner. Now I’m living the dream, right?

Did I just say I was going straight? It amazes me, too. I’ve had two proper play partners, both sexy and both filthy. The first was a proper partner. I fucked that up because I couldn’t control my compulsion. The second was achingly sexy, fabulously filthy, but I just didn’t care, so while it was great fun, the whole game started to lose its appeal. We still had outrageously good sex, but came to need others. We’d arrange meets and people wouldn’t show. Fakers and dreamers, most of them. And then we’d have one of those meets when it seemed like everyone was climbing over me to get at her. Naturally, our open relationship was extremely one-sided – I got all the action.

The compulsion meant that when the hunger hit, it was like a drug, I simply had to get something, anything. Sport fucking is what I once heard it called. It became mechanical. I started counting.

This is what compulsion does to you. You acquire, you collect: you never connect.

In the middle of the craziness I connected with someone who couldn’t cope with the sharing. She tried, taking some guy home after a party I wasn’t at, but regretted it. Strangely, I found myself a little jealous. So I decided to try, to see whether the finest vanilla can trump the kid in a candy store draw of tutti frutti. To see whether the taste of perversion, once experienced, is craved forevermore.

Wish me luck.

If you enjoyed that post, check out some more guest contributions, and let the author know what you think in the comments!

So, here’s an odd statement, which the guy who emailed me was kind enough to allow me to publish:

I sometimes want to try things out – I have zero or little experience and I worry about that. Would be wrong to use a girl as just like to practise on and improve?

The word ‘practice’ bothers me, and not just because of its context-dependent spelling of ‘s’ or ‘c’. This gentleman was asking, after my article on virginity, whether it was OK to find someone to practise sexual things with (kissing, oral, and other delicious non-penis-focused activity) without having to have actual sex.

The answer to this question is a wholehearted ‘yes’, but also a wholehearted ‘no’, because of the way it was phrased.

Not having sex is totally fine

If you meet someone and want to do sexy things but without having what you’d class as ‘full sex’ (i.e. train goes in tunnel) then that is not only fine but, if the other person you’re with is a fan of kissing, oral, frotting, etc, utterly delightful. There’s a deep and gutwrenching joy in having things that aren’t ‘full sex’, and although I am personally a bit of a penetration fetishist (I find it hard to get off if I’m not being pounded, or at least under promise of being pounded in the very near future), there are hundreds of other things that are fun.

However, the word ‘practice’, makes me shudder with discomfort, because it implies some things that make me sceptical of how you actually feel about your partner.

There is no sex Olympics

The key question, really, is what are you practising for? Is there some sex competition that I didn’t know you could enter? Are there skills and techniques you need to know in order to pass a shagging exam? Is this hard work going to pay off ten years down the line when you meet someone who refuses to sleep with you unless she can see your Doctorate in lovemaking? No? Then what you’re doing isn’t practice.

It’s an uncomfortable word because usually we practise on something that isn’t the real thing. We learn to drive with supervision, in cars that have a spare set of pedals so our instructor can slam the brakes on when we almost power headlong into a roundabout (and Colin, if you’re reading this, I’m really bloody sorry). We practise exam questions on past test papers. Above all, the results of our ‘practice’ don’t really matter, because the marks aren’t real or final.

But in bed, the person you’re with is real. They have real nerve endings, real emotions and desires. To reduce them to a GCSE test paper, in which the marks (i.e. their feelings) don’t really matter sounds deeply disrespectful. This, coupled with the word ‘use’ was what gave me shudders in this guy’s email.

There’s nothing wrong with having consensual sex fun with someone that doesn’t involve penetration, but there is definitely something wrong with viewing any individual sexual partner as just a stepping stone towards the amazing sex that you’ll eventually have with someone else. Heavily implied there is ‘better’. You practice on the not-quite-real person, then have better sex with someone… well… better.

Eww.

Sex practice doesn’t make perfect

Most importantly, the idea of practice implies that if you do enough of it you’ll eventually become ‘good’. This is one of those bullshit beliefs we hold because so many advice columns, sex books, and articles about ‘Ten Ways To Blow Her Mind In Bed’ insist on peddling the myth that everyone likes the same thing. That you can be, objectively, a ‘good shag’. This – and I cannot stress this enough – is bollocks.

Sometimes you’ll have sex with someone for the first time, and loads of your trademark moves will genuinely blow their mind. They’ll sigh, and writhe, and moan in delight as you rub, lick, suck, and fuck them into a glorious and delicious climax. But this is rare. Most of the time you’ll do some things they like, some things they love, and many things that make them want to say ‘left a bit’, ‘a bit softer’, ‘no, wait, a bit harder’ until you do something exactly the way they like it.

I’ve slept with a fair few guys as well as a few girls. Each and every one of them was slightly different, with some of them doing things in ways I’d never have anticipated but turned out to love. Others did things that worked well for their previous partners but turned me right off. I’m sure the same is true of what they thought of me, and generally with those people I was with for longer, we got better at pleasing the other one and knowing what they wanted. No amount of practice can prepare you as well as the knowledge that everyone’s different. So practice doesn’t make perfect – it doesn’t even make ‘good’ – the best revision you can do is to talk to the person you’re with, and listen when they tell you what they like.

Don’t ‘use’ anyone

You don’t owe it to any hypothetical future partner to be the best you can be in bed. It’s not the case that you can pick people who don’t matter to help you perfect your techniques so that you can wow the love of your life at some point. Firstly because the love of your life may well want something completely different, secondly because whoever you’re practicing with may turn out to be the love of your life, and finally because it’s just a shitty thing to do. If I had wild and sticky sex with someone and subsequently found out that they were just ‘using’ me for ‘practice’, I’d kick them out of bed before you could say ‘I am not an unfeeling shag-robot.’

I don’t think this guy is deliberately being mean, or callous. After a few emails back and forth I think he’s just under the impression that he needs to be the best he can be. But you can be at your best not by learning techniques or practising your cunnilingus skills, but by being empathetic, caring and considerate of what your partner needs and wants. Not a hypothetical future partner – the one you’re with in exactly that moment.