The vast, vast majority of the time, I am a loser. A lank-haired, jeans-wearing, slouching drunken loser. With a cider in my hand, a chip on my shoulder and a face like a bulldog chewing a whole hive of wasps.

I say this only to counter what’s coming next: right now I am hot.

I’m hot because I’ve had my hair cut – it swishes in that shiny way that some people achieve daily, but for me comes round only twice a year when I go for my biannual hack. I’m hot because I’ve spent the last week doing more exercise than I normally would and – although there’s no immediate visual difference – I feel stronger and livelier and readier to bounce around like a puppy on MDMA. I’m hot because I’m wearing knickers that cup my arse comfortably, and because I’ve been doing DIY in hot pants and getting dirty and sweaty and wet.

We need to deal with your high self-esteem issues

I’m British, of course, so writing the above paragraph was torture – it took me a good ten minutes to bash out just a few sentences without tagging something self-deprecating on to the end. I’ve been trained, through years of TV, magazines and friendly banter, that to talk about the things you actually like about yourself is a social crime. Like eating steak with the fish fork or passing a joint to the right.

Most of the time this makes sense. After all, we’d all be excruciating and insufferable if our conversations started not with “how are you?” but “how hot am I!?” We’d barely get beyond introductions before we were hurling into buckets at the appalling displays of self-love.

No, instead we must only ever speak of the bad stuff, while desperately hoping that other people notice the good. We’re trained to make the best of ourselves, so we spend hours primping and preening and picking out just the right kind of shoe only to shit on all that effort later on by replying “no, really, I look awful” when someone says something nice. It’s a reflex gesture, and one which makes sense most of the time. When the hard-earned compliments come, we bat them away with great force, because self-hate is a much more attractive quality than arrogance.

Start fancying yourself

I’ve got nothing wrong with light self-deprecation, and on an ordinary day I’m far more likely to make a tedious aside about my weight than to bounce into a room and shout “Look! Aren’t my tits brilliant?!”

But not today. Because, fuck it, I don’t always feel good. And on the rare occasions that I do, I want to start making the most of it. In fifty years time I’ll be yearning for the chance to wear this arse again, to sit in hot pants on a stepladder sugar-soaping walls and enjoying not just being me but looking like me too.

You should do it too – go on, do it. Fancy yourself a bit. There are bound to be bits of yourself that you’re not a fan of. But isn’t it bizarre that it’s these disliked bits that get all the attention? Hours in the gym toning a stomach that you hate. Days in front of the mirror shaping eyebrows or facial hair in some sort of damage limitation exercise. Weeks spent traipsing around shops that make clothes for people who always seem to be a different shape to you. All that time spent rectifying or changing or enhancing – how much time do you actually spend appreciating?

You don’t have to take pictures of yourself in sexy poses and pin them on the fridge, or give yourself cringeingly awkward motivational pep-talks about how beautiful you are. Just give yourself a bit of time to appreciate the things you fancy. The things that your partners will go primal for. Stand in front of a mirror if you like, touch yourself if you want to, put on or take off the clothes that make you feel best, and just revel in a bit of self-lust.

Because no one else can love you like you can.

This week I walked in on a boy wanking. Late at night, I woke up to go to the loo, spotted the light on in the living room, and thought I’d pop in to casually grope him before sleepily wandering off to bed. You know how I love watching boys crack one out – there’s a beautiful desperation about the urge to come, and I relish seeing that on his face. But of course, the most beautiful wanks of them all are Schroedinger’s Wanks – the ones I would change just by observing them. The wanks I am destined never to see…

(more…)

Autumn is one of the best seasons. Keats wrote of autumn as a season of harvests and fruits and whatnot, but to most people autumn’s delights fall mainly into the ‘Halloween’ or ‘nearly Christmas’ camps.

However, autumn is my favourite season. Partly because I spend most of the summer being uncomfortable in my clothes and yearning for the time when I can wear jeans and a massive hoodie without people staring in the street. But mostly because there are some things about autumn that I find desperately sexy. Here are three of them:

Wet men

I see wet women fetishised all the time – whether it’s the ubiquitous wet T-shirt competition, or that bit in Spiderman where Kirsten Dunst gets a sexy rainy snog in a see-through dress. But when it comes to wet men the only iconic hotness I can think of is that bit in Pride and Prejudice where Mr Darcy emerges glistening from a lake (now available as a statue!).

In short: wet men are underrated. There are not enough pictures of wet men. But now that autumn’s here, the rains cometh. And with the rains come the tousled shaggy locks of scruffy hipster boys, the raindrops glistening on the heads of hot bald guys, the clinging t-shirts on the men who got caught in the rain.

And best of all, the drips of water running in rivulets down their faces and onto their necks, eventually trickling below the collar line and making me want to lick them.

Men in jumpers

This is probably not even sexual. I just fucking love a good jumper. Not a tacky ‘look how ironic I am’ Christmas jumper, but a big, shaggy bury-your-face-in-my-chest jumper. I’d never dictate to a man what clothing he should wear, but I can reveal that despite my aversion to hugs from strangers, I am far more likely to want to press myself up against you if I can guarantee that the hug will feel like falling into bed.

I take it back: it probably is a sexual thing.

Sex to warm up

You know how it is: October rain, a chill breeze blowing through the house. You can either turn the heating on and line the pockets of BigEnergy Co, ensuring fatcat profits for their shareholders and a slightly crapper Christmas present for your Mum this year… or you can fuck to stay warm like the cavemen used to.

I prefer the second option.

Cold hands running over my clothes, feeling almost painfully intrusive when they eventually reach my goosepimpled skin, then the gradual warm up as your hands get hotter and are allowed further down my body. Running my own hands inside your big sexy jumper to feel the heat of your back, your chest, your stomach, and then the moment when they finally get warm enough that I can place them on your dick without you yelping.

The ultimate beauty of autumn sex is that while you’re pounding and I’m straining and gasping and gripping you tight with my legs, neither of us notices the cold. It’s only afterwards that we realise, as you lie panting and hot beside me, and I can feel the droplets of your sweat cool far too quickly on my chest.

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…

According to some people who give way too much of a shit, Jeremy Paxman has grown a beard.

Think what you like about it, but by God you have to think something. Today the internet has been bubbling with chatter: are you for or against the beard? Does it look good? Does it look scary, because for some reason someone once decided that all bearded men are Harold Shipman? Has your attitude towards Paxman’s hard-hitting interview questions changed because he happens to have some hair on his face? Let’s do a sodding online poll about it, shall we?

Anyway. Because I’m fucking contrary and annoyed, I’m going to weigh in to the beard debate with the definitive answer as to Whether Beards Are Good. Ready? Here goes:

Growing a beard is good

I’m a fan of beards – they’re often a pretty sexy way of framing and defining a man’s face. I’ve been with a few guys who have had some sort of facial hair, and with one guy who found facial hair so amusing he would regularly grow a beard just so that when he shaved it off he could experiment with various comedy styles.

They’re occasionally a bit scratchy when you’re kissing someone, and might irritate you if you’ve got sensitive skin, but the same can be said of a particularly coarse jumper fabric.

I love running my hands over a guy’s beard, feeling the scratchy texture of the hair on my palms. I love watching him trim the edges, that ‘I’m so grown-up’ feeling I get when I think about him doing something so adult. I enjoy the way it frames his face, and the variety – the different stages of beautiful he looks as it gets longer, shaggier, and eventually gets tidied up.

But the best thing, I think, about men who have beards is that they are clearly capable of making independent decisions about what to do with their own face.

Not growing a beard is also good

I also, though, like clean-shaven dudes. There’s a certain elegance and beauty about a really smooth shave. Again, I like to watch men do it, particularly the bit where they tip their head back to get at the hairs on their neck. I love the slight scratch of stubble as it starts to push through in the evening. I utterly adore the smell of a freshly-shaved guy when he rubs his face up next to mine.

But again, the best thing about a clean-shaven gentleman is that he is capable of making independent decisions about what to do with his own face.

Growing a beard is your own decision

I’m surprised at the number of people who would respond to the ‘should women shave their legs?’ question with a loud and decisive ‘it’s none of your fucking business’, yet are happy to pass judgment on a TV presenter just because he has chosen not to shave. I wouldn’t bother writing about this issue if it were just Jeremy Paxman – I appreciate that people are having a bit of fun and Paxo isn’t going to be sobbing into his autocue because some people on Twitter said his beard was shit. But the beard vs no-beard debate leaks awkwardly into a lot of our sexual discussion in a way that is pretty offensive to men, and this seems like an appropriate time to tackle it.

People say things like:

“I just couldn’t kiss a man with a beard”

“Men with beards just look untrustworthy”

Or even, in a move designed to hit not one but two of my ‘rage’ buttons: “The only thing worse than a beard is a ginger beard”

I’m not making these up, incidentally, these are all things people have said to me – the latter prompted a bollocking in the form of a tedious drunken lecture. Mumbled apologies ensued. Awkwardness happened. Lessons were probably not learned.

Preference vs pressure

I understand that people have personal preferences: some gentlemen really do prefer blondes, and some people really can’t get aroused unless their partner is clean shaven. Fair enough – passions like these are hard to control, and there’s no rule that says we must bestow equal lust on men no matter what their facial hair situation. However, there certainly is a rule that states we must avoid pressuring people to do certain things to their bodies just for our aesthetic pleasure. It’s the ‘don’t be a total arsehole’ rule.

Most adult men, in their natural state (and most women, come to that) will grow some hair on their faces. It might be dark, light, thick, coarse, downy or patchy, but ultimately most people will grow some hair on their faces. Having some hair on your face is the natural default for the majority of the adult population. The decision to remove it is one that can only be made by the owner of that face, and making them feel bad about their decision based purely on your aesthetic opinion about beards makes you a total arsehole.

So, just as it’s none of anyone’s business whether I shave my legs, wear make-up at work or wax my pubes into the shape of a lightning bolt, likewise it’s not for us to decide what hair Jeremy Paxman should or shouldn’t remove from his face.