Tag Archives: relationships
In defence of monogamy
Here is a can of worms. Please sit down, make yourself comfortable, and watch as I try to sort them into delicate piles without squishing any of them.
I’m in a monogamous relationship. For me, that means that my partner and I both lust desperately after other people, but we try not to do anything about it, save sighing and making the odd comment about how beautiful those other people are.
When I tell people this, often they’re surprised, and some of them make efforts to persuade me that I really should consider opening up my relationship. That it’d be healthier if my guy and I could see other people, or that polyamory is actually the best course of action for everybody in the human race. I like the sound of it: I do. I like the idea that there’s a hell of a lot of love in the world, and you get to share lots of different kinds of love with lots of different people.
Thing is, I’ve tried it, and it sucks for me. It really sucks. I get jealous, angry, upset, and anxious. I feel worthless. My rational brain tells me that he can fuck other people without it having any bearing on how he feels about me, and that if he goes for a drink with a girl he fancies with a view to potentially snogging her at the end of the evening, that act itself isn’t sapping any of the fun or love that he and I share together.
Unfortunately, my irrational brain is a tedious Iago – piping up and screeching “I like not that!”, and ruining everyone’s fun.
How to initiate sex with your partner
When I was young I thought sex was probably quite a rare occurrence. From what I’d seen on TV and in films, it looked like sex within a straight, long-term relationship involved a fair amount of rigmarole. You have to shave your legs, wash your hair, put on makeup and look seductive. If you’re a dude you’ll probably have to do a different kind of groundwork: snuggling in front of a film, and inching your arm along the back of the couch painstakingly slowly until it finally comes to rest on one of your partner’s breasts.
I’ve never seen a TV couple start fucking the way we usually do.
“Do you want to shag? We haven’t done it for a while.”
Or seduce each other with the kind of lines you can only get away with if you know the answer will be ‘why not?’
“Do you want to touch my freshly-shaven cunt?”
What happens when you combine sex and anxiety?
The hardest thing about using words to make a living is that they’re so pathetically small. The bigger the thing you’re trying to describe, the smaller the words feel when you select them. Describing sex is pretty easy, because it’s so intensely personal. While the word ‘dick’ might mean little to you, when combined with a few more everyday words to create the sentence ‘I spat on his dick‘ – to me it becomes intensely special and deeply arousing. Sex is easy.
Love on the other hand is much, much harder. While I profess to detest overly-sentimental, romantic shit there’s something to be said for a well-placed ‘wind beneath my wings’ or ‘sugar to my coffee’.
They don’t come close to describing the swelling, hair-pulling, scream-into-a-pillow magnitude of the sensation of being in love, but they exist to show us just how hard it is to adequately describe the feeling you have when you’d happily take a bullet for someone at the same time as calling them a ‘dickhead.’
Sex and anxiety
It’s four pm and I’m shaking with panic. A five pm deadline and two for first-thing tomorrow. For the first time ever, one deadline has whizzed past, and now it stares at me from two days ago whispering: “everything you love will crumble, and you, my friend, will fail.”
It cackles.
I sit at my desk ignoring the piles of washing, clutter of papers and an inbox that screams ME! PICK ME!
I breathe quickly and shake, as I stare at the mounting tower of ‘oh God where the hell do I start?’ and worry that I’ve fucked up my life.
So far, so desperately unsexy.
The truth is that much of my life isn’t sexy. I’m sure most of you realise that I don’t spend 90% of my time wanking, with only quick breaks to stock up on cheese sandwiches to give me the energy for my next angry fuck. There are clearly some with that misconception, though it’s mostly dudes who send me dick pics at 8:30 am on a weekday then a follow-up at lunchtime saying ‘r u wet yet?’
Most of the time I’m boring. A lot of the time I’m anxious. And some of the time I’m so busy twitching that I can’t even think about fucking.
My body says ‘you know what would really help you to calm down? A nice relaxing wank’, which sounds lovely but then my brain chips in with ‘but what about all these things? Look at them! Teetering in a huge pile that will one day collapse around you!’ So my body replies ‘OK you’ve got a really good point. Give me ten minutes to hyperventilate and curl in a ball on the floor while I consider this.’
After ten minutes of ball-curling and ragged breaths, just as I’m back in the zone of the functional, the phone will ring and the whole mess starts all over again.
If someone else told me this I’d offer to help them. But if someone offers to help me then my brain gives me more of its pesky chatter and I’m left spinning:
Don’t help me. Your help takes up time. I have no time. NO TIME. The time I am going to spend being helped by you is time taken away from the allocated time I have to do the things and there is NO TIME and one day I will have used up all the time and I’ll be dead and what help will you be then? Hmm?
This is all well and good when it’s my Mum on the phone but when it’s Amazon customer services the whole thing gets a bit awkward.
This long-winded build-up is here to show that when I say I’m stressed, I’m not talking about some mild worries or a couple of nagging concerns at the back of my mind. I mean full-blown, heart-hammering panic which prevents me from reading any text, email or tweet without a kind of swelling nausea because oh God I’ll have to say something now and what if what I say is hopelessly wrong?
It isn’t easily cast aside, overcome, or subject to the kind of help offered by well-meaning friends.
But it can be dampened, and it can – very occasionally – be swept to one side.
Like when he comes home from work and I’m ill and tired and my eyes are brim-full of desperate tears. He says ‘how was your day?’ and I shout ‘FINE!’ over my shoulder, because if I take my eyes off the screen then I’ll have failed and another deadline will fall by the wayside.
So he disappears. And then later, when I’m ragged and miserable and slouching with the weight of everything, he pops back in and says ‘how are you?’ And I say ‘fine’ like I’m not really sure if I am, and I stare at the piles of paper.
He doesn’t ask if he can help – he knows he can’t help any more than he can remove my head and stir around inside it to fix me. So he squeezes me with his massive arms, and lets me bury my face in his neck. It smells horny and masculine and all the things I want to fuck.
Sometimes it doesn’t work – the closeness makes me feel trapped and the idea of pausing even for a five-minute shag sets my heart back to hammering. But sometimes it works, and he strips off my knickers. And as he pulls them off – at just the right moment – I can rip off the terror and anxiety and throw myself into just… wanting.
Feeling the rush of arousal and wanting him to fuck me.
In the middle of a pile of paper. In a tangled ball on the floor. In a mishmash of trembling limbs across my messy desk. It’s a delicious and rare relief – to push out the worry about working and replace it with a desire for him to take me across his knee, belt hard sharp smacks across my arse until it’s glowing red, dip his fingers in my cunt and call me a dirty girl, then flip me over and fuck me while I cry with shaking desire.
It’s not need – it’s so much better than need. I ‘need’ food, and money. Without these things I’d struggle to survive, so reaching out to grab them is instinctive: like sneezing when something tickles your nose.
I don’t need him: I want him. And here’s where I bring it back to how inadequate words are. Just as they’re pitifully bad at conjuring the exact nature of a full-blown anxiety attack, so they limp pathetically across the page when I try to conjure the chest-aching love that I have for this man. Not because he stops me from panicking, but because he doesn’t try to. He doesn’t push or question or offer solutions: he just is. There. Solid and warm and patient and oh-so-deliciously ready to put his swollen cock in me at exactly the moment I want it the most.
It’s a want rather than a need because he doesn’t ‘fix’ me or ‘save’ me: I’d survive/cope/live/work without him. If he weren’t there the panic would still be around – washing over me one minute and fucking off suspiciously the next, leaving me worrying when it’d come back and contemplating whether it’d be all the stronger for having had a short break and… damn. There it is again. It’s been twenty minutes since I started writing this and where does the fucking time go? I didn’t even get to tell you how he… never mind. I’ve got shit to be getting on with.
Here’s the obligatory link to Mind.org, which you have to include on anything that references mental health. And if you think you might have anxiety problems, and you’re thinking ‘ah but I’m just a naturally stressy person though and I’m just so busy and shit’ then here’s a thing I wrote for The Cocktail Hour which might be useful. Or might not. I don’t know. Oh God sorry I’m such a twat. And here’s a thing by Dean Burnett in the Guardian about social anxiety, which is sparked by slightly different things but no less tremblingly awful.
Chore wars: the washing up is a feminist issue
Are you the sort of person who emails me every now and then saying ‘stick to filth, stop with the feminist rants’? Look away now.
Are you a guy who claims he is a feminist but makes self-deprecatory jokes about how if he did the washing up he’d only do it badly so there’s really no point? Are you the kind of person who says ‘ah, men are just useless at housework though, aren’t they?’ This one’s for you.
Chore wars: housework and feminism
First thing’s first: men are not shit at housework. When my partner forgets to do the washing up, or the washing, or the tidying or the bathroom or any one of the million things that humans need to do in order to keep a household in working order, I do not roll my eyes. I do not tut and say ‘oh, baby, you’re such a man.’ That would be sexist.
When I complain to a friend that I’m sick and fucking tired of picking socks off the floor and changing bedsheets and the fact that I am always – always – the one who spots that the fridge needs cleaning before it grows a new species, I do not expect my friend to roll her eyes either: sexist.
Housework is a feminist issue. As I feel compelled to point out, it’s not the most important one. But it matters. It matters, precisely because it doesn’t always feel like it matters.
‘Oh, it’s only the washing up.’
‘It’s just a bit of vacuuming.’
‘It takes two seconds, so why make such a fuss?’
Thing is, as many people have pointed out: it’s unpaid work, so it’s not ‘just’ anything. Sure, it only takes a few minutes to run round the house picking up clothes and chucking them in the washing machine. Half a minute to put the powder in, choose the right setting, and set it off. Only ten minutes at the end to take the washing out, hang it up, and fold away the stuff I’ve negligently left drying there since halfway through last week. But it’s ten minutes of my time, and my time is precious.
When all the household chores are added together, I spend roughly ten hours a week cooking, cleaning, tidying, sorting, and screaming silent screams into my pillow because holy Christ this is not what I want to do with my life. Then, when I have finished with the screaming and I get onto a bit of a moan, people (mostly men, but often women too) tell me that it isn’t important. That, in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter that I’ve had to clean the hob again because ha ha jokes when it comes to housework men are just not programmed to notice what needs doing.
A rock, a dishcloth and a hard place
This rant’s been sitting in my drafts for a while, as I pluck up the courage to spew it onto the internet and have people go ‘oh GOTN you’re so clichéd with your old-fashioned caring about domestic labour’, but this week BBC Woman’s Hour launched the ‘chore wars’ calculator, so I thought it was a good opportunity to let rip. Chore Wars is a bit of a cutesy, not massively accurate way to calculate who does the most chores in the household, and whether the split is fair.
This is not a feminist issue just because traditionally housework was seen as a ‘woman’s domain’ – it’s an issue because polling shows that much of the unpaid household work still falls to women, even in households where the amount of paid work is relatively even. It’s also a big issue because of how we still talk, think and write about it. When it comes to household chores, my male partner has two options:
- help out, and receive praise for being an amazing human
- not help out, and get some mild tuts and eye-rolls and a pat on his simple, masculine head
Ah, shit – in these options I have automatically used the phrase ‘help out’, as if he is stepping down from on high to swoop in and help this damsel in marigolds rather than performing a task that, ethically, is his to own. God, I hate me. And I also hate the fact that even on International Women’s Day this year, in relation to a press release about the uneven split of unpaid domestic work, Reuters’ headline smugly pronounced that Norwegian men are ‘most helpful’ with housework. Helpful. Not ‘contributing a fairer share’, but ‘helpful’. Thanks.
Talking of thanks, where’s my fucking pat on the head? Whenever my partner manages to do one load of washing or tidy the lounge, I have been conditioned to actually tell him ‘thank you’, like he is a particularly well-trained puppy doing clever tricks for biscuits. I myself am perpetuating the myth that household tasks are mine to own and his to deign to help with, by rewarding him just for getting off his arse. He hasn’t been conditioned to praise me for scrubbing a frying pan because I’m a woman, so apparently it’s just my goddamn job.
When it comes to the housework I have two options as well, but mine aren’t quite as tempting: I get to choose between being a servant or a nag.
Housework and sex
This is a sex blog primarily, and that’s because the vast majority of things in my life are actually linked to sex in some way. I am a horny, angry, feisty slag, and even something as simple as housework is linked to sex in my mind. I don’t find it enjoyably filthy to sashay around the house, naked but for a small cotton apron, and bend over to scrub the floors while boys wank in a corner (although that might be hot in the right context), but I do draw a strong mental link between sex and housework.
Housework is not sexy. Standing up to my elbows in a sinkful of grease is not sexy. Selecting the right washing cycle to remove jizz from the bedsheets is not sexy. It’s not even sexy when I strip to my knickers and scrub round the edge of the bath.
And so, when I do all the housework, I have less sex. I’m not on ‘sex strike’ until a guy swoops in to do it – why would I deliberately forego something I love just because I’m angry? It’s not a conscious and deliberate choice, it’s a byproduct of emotional and physical exhaustion.
If I’ve spent all day doing housework I’ve had no time to think about what I might like to do to him. No time to walk, or cycle, or do sit ups, or any of the things I do that make me feel sexy in a sweaty/musky/messy way. No time to remember the filthy fuck we had last week that I haven’t got round to blogging yet. The mental narrative running through my head on a good day involves any number of ‘mmm’s, ‘unnngh’s and ‘oh God I want him to bend me over the coffee table’s. Post-housework, my brain says ‘fuck this shit forever’ and hides in a hermit cave of boiling, passive-aggressive rage.
Bottom line: if I’ve spent ages hoovering the living room, I’m unlikely to want to fuck on the carpet.
Is this blog post sexist?
This isn’t a blog post in which I berate the male half of the species for not picking up a fucking duster. There are millions of men who are not only capable of doing this stuff, but who just get the hell on with it each and every day. Men who – day in, day out – consider the housework to be part and parcel of their role as a significant half of an equal partnership. Or – if they are poly or living in a flatshare – a significant contributing member of a group. Or even just on their own.
These are the men who don’t refer to spending time with their children as ‘babysitting’, or who declare with puffed-up pride that they’re ‘treating’ their girlfriend by cooking dinner, thus taking away perhaps 10% of the unpaid work that she does without thanks every day.
On the other side, there are women who do nothing around the house and drive their partners up the wall. These people are – unless there are genuinely good reasons such as issues with illness or a drastically different split in out-of-home paid work – equally selfish of course. But when their partners complain they’re unlikely to be met by well-meaning friends who roll their eyes and tut ‘women, eh? What can you do?’
Feminist men do the cooking
I’m not writing this just because I hate housework – most of us hate housework: it’s a thankless, miserable task. This isn’t about individual items to tick off a household ‘to do’ list: it’s about hypocrisy.
Because I’ve met men who go on marches and pickets. Who sign petitions and have angry rants and show solidarity to women on all manner of feminist issues, then go home and expect to be worshipped as a God because they spent two hours cooking dinner on Sunday.
If this isn’t you: well done. If this is you, have a little think about why you’re willing to write off unpaid labour as ‘not really my problem/not my area of expertise/something that magically happens when I’m not looking.’
Then put down your ‘awesome feminist’ badge, and pick up a fucking dishcloth.
Questions and comments
I love a good ruck as much as the next opinionated blogger. But here are some questions/comments that I anticipate I might receive as a result of this post, and what my response will be if you give them to me.
I’m a man, and I do exactly half of the housework. I am OUTRAGED by your rant.
Well done. If you do exactly half of the housework and you never moan about it or expect unnecessary thanks, then you are good. But not ‘good’ in the sense that ‘you get to sit on a moral high horse and shout at women who are frustrated by the traditionally unequal split of household chores’, just ‘good’ in the sense that ‘you meet the minimum standards of human decency.’
I am a man, and I do more housework than my female partner. I am OUTRAGED by your rant.
When you complain about her general slovenliness, are you greeted by people saying ‘well, you have to expect it really – women are so shit at this’? I suspect not. But well done for doing loads of housework, and if you’re frustrated I suggest you send your partner a link to this blog.
In my relationship, we have come to the arrangement that one of us earns the money and the other keeps house.
Congratulations. If you have both agreed to this and find it fair, then good luck to you both.
There are certain household tasks that I cannot do because I have a medical condition/have to work much longer hours than my partner.
There are many reasons why household tasks might not be evenly split. That’s obviously not what I’m talking about here though.
Have you tried training/teaching your partner to do better?
He is not a fucking dog. He is an adult who knows how to do this shit. Besides, this rant does not just come because he – a flawed individual like the rest of us – pisses me off sometimes by failing to do his fair share. This rant has come because he is not the only one by a long shot, and because I hate other people’s ‘men are useless’ excuses for this crap even more than I hate scrubbing pans and folding laundry. For the record, though, my partner is much better than many other dudes I’ve known, and he does what decent humans do, which is recognise where he falls down and try to get better at doing stuff. Sadly he doesn’t have a blog in which he can rant about my failings, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that I fail too, in equally important ways.
Isn’t it just that women have higher standards than men and men are more happy to live in filth?
This question is a BONUS one added after a Twitter comment. This one’s thrown at me a lot, so worth tackling. Different individuals have different tolerances for mess: this is normal because we are human. But, unless you are asserting that ‘men’ as a homogenous mass, are all happy to eat off food-soiled plates, wear clothes that have never been washed, allow their bathrooms to smell of piss and mould, and never eat food that has had more than a five-minute blast in the microwave, then this is a massive red herring. As a lazy, slobby, twat who is generally happy to have dirty clothes carpeting my bedroom, I can assure you it’s not about differing standards: it’s about the time spent on work, and who holds responsibility.
This isn’t like you, GOTN, to rant about what ‘all men’ are like.
I’m not. Not ‘all men’ are like this. There are men who do their fair share, who thank their partners for doing theirs, and who never refer to caring for their children as ‘babysitting’. I’m not saying ‘all men are shit at housework’, I am saying that if you are a man and you are shit at housework then that’s a fucking problem. Moreover if you let a female partner do most of the household chores, you sure as shit don’t get to call yourself a feminist.
Time travel sex – what would you do?
I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief to enjoy a good TV show. I’ll ignore loud explosions in deep space, grin and bear anachronisms in historical dramas, and even nod through a paradox or two. But one thing I refuse to believe is that at no point in his long long life has Doctor Who gone back in time to fuck himself.
I mean COME ON. He used to look like DAVID TENNANT, for crying out loud! And Matt Smith: all gangly limbs and twinking nerdery. You would, wouldn’t you?
One of the things I enjoyed most about the book The Time Traveler’s Wife (if you haven’t read it then it’s about a dude who accidentally time travels) is that in it, when his teenage self meets another teenage self, they wank each other off. It’s not described in detail, but it’s straightforward enough that it made me go ‘omg realistic portrayals of identical-selves masturbating is exactly what has been missing from all time travel.’
So, in that spirit, here are a few of the sexual encounters that would happen if I had a time machine.
Time-travel threesomes
I don’t really want to have sex with myself, if only because I don’t tend to fancy women that often, and I suspect I am exactly the kind of person who would annoy myself by being obnoxiously loud and eating all the nice crisps at parties. So I don’t think me and me would make a good couple. However what we WOULD make is an excellent threesome double-team.
In the past I’ve turned down amazing sexual opportunities because I’m too jealous of the other girl involved, or because I’m scared that the guy I’m with will enjoy the other person more and be permanently disappointed with my own mediocre vagina. However, with a time-travel threesome, I wouldn’t need to worry about that, because I am basically the same person.
I’d pick and choose some of the less exciting fucks I’ve had in the past, and spice them up by introducing my future-self halfway through and watching the guy’s eyes widen with delight as he realised all the tingling possibilities. I’d join an ex or two in some double-penetration, strapping one on so I could fuck me while I was being fucked. I’d head to the first time I used a strap-on at all, and sit heavily on that guy’s dick at just the moment his prostate pushed hard squirts of spunk out of him. I could pop back to last night, when I ground heavily onto my partner’s dick while he wanked me off with a Doxy. Past-me could still do that: I wouldn’t want to ruin her fun. But while she was doing it I could be biting his nipples or letting him suck mine.
Being the first
Is this creepy? I think perhaps this is creepy. In my head it’s super-romantic, but I don’t think we need to worry about creepiness given that time travel is impossible, so if you’re thinking of writing angry letters, please save them for the day when we manage to break all the laws of physics and invent an actual Tardis.
It’s 2002, or thereabouts. A guy who – in 2002 – I’ve never met, is masturbating furiously and desperately wishing he could hurl away his virginity. Late one evening on his way home from a friend’s party, he runs into a woman. Old enough that he wouldn’t usually look twice, but young enough that he definitely would. She invites him into her Tardis, and because he is probably only 18 at this point, I will spare you the pervy details.
What’s important though is not necessarily what happens then, but what happens years later, when he runs into me for what he thinks is the first time.
“Wow. You… you look really familiar.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You look like this person I knew once, ages ago.”
“Oh really? What was she like?”
“It’s kind of a funny story actually. It’s how I lost my virginity…”
Fixing mistakes
Picture the scene: it’s three AM outside a shitty nightclub – in one of those vaguely Mediterranean ‘party towns’ that are magnets for young people who want to get drunk and sweat on each other. Two girls who are far too young to be there are sitting on the laps of two guys who can’t believe their luck. The guys are young too – not yet mature enough to realise that if you really want to get laid you need to avoid drinking twelve shots of AfterShock. They’re all snogging, and having a whale of a time.
One of these girls enjoys it so much that she tries to take the guy somewhere quieter to fuck.
“Give me a sec,” she whispers erotically, then runs to the bins and sprays rainbow-coloured vomit in a decorative arc over the pavement. She wipes her mouth.
“I’m done. Let’s go.” The guy nods, looking a little queasy himself, but clearly game. The girl leads him to what she thinks is a secluded spot. They snog again, briefly, before he backs away. It might be the taste of her sick-washed mouth, but our heroine decides it’s probably just because he’d rather do other things. She pushes his head down between her legs, pulls her knickers to one side, and he licks at her with eager enthusiasm – this is clearly a dude who’d rather taste cunt than cocktails.
In the faint distance she can see the nightclub lights illuminating her best friend and the other guy, snogging on a chair. Her cunt twitches with pleasure but she’s far too pissed to notice.
At this moment the sky splits, and a time machine appears. An older version of the girl leans her head out of the time machine and – in the manner of a Mum yelling at her kids to get inside for dinner – she shouts:
“You fucking idiot! Everyone can see what you’re doing! You’re not in a secluded spot at all, you’re in a field right next to a busy road! Go home and sober up or in ten years’ time you’ll have to write a blog post about how much you regret this whole sordid incident!”
Time travel sex – watching and wanking
Of course it wouldn’t just be about joining in or changing the path of history – that’d kind of imply that my sex Tardis would mostly be about regrets. I’d probably spend most of my time popping back to my favourite moments. That first ever threesome with two guys, which fulfilled a list of long-held sexual desires so spectacularly that I still remember it in a sleepy, dreamlike way. I’d watch as they kissed each other, and look out for the expression of shining delight on my face. I’d take mental photographs of every beautiful moment: as they fucked me, as they fucked each other, as we all tangled together in a huge pile of happy fucklust.
I’d visit a few fetish clubs to watch myself get beaten.
Head to old bedrooms in which I frotted tirelessly against exhausted ex-boyfriends.
Watch a few of the hottest boy snogs I’ve ever seen.
It would be like having a live-action replay of some of the best fucks, and the most beautiful people I’ve ever known. Hot and horny but also tinged with wistful nostalgia.
Maybe one of the best things I could do if I had a sex Tardis would be to leave little notes for myself on the morning of each hot encounter, saying:
“This one, tonight: this one’s special. Drink it in. It’ll never happen the same way again.”