I want to talk about fantasy and issues around consent. This blog touches on both of these things. Everything in it is consensual, but if discussions around this upset you or make you uncomfortable, you might prefer not to read it.

Consent is utterly fundamental when you’re having sex. It’s so fundamental, so important, that the vast majority of people wouldn’t even need to hear that stated: you just know. As you know it’s wrong to punch a stranger, sneak meat into vegetarian lasagne, or throw a kitten into a lake.

However, despite knowing these things are wrong, we’re more than happy for them to happen in fiction. We’ll cheer when the baddie gets punched in an action film, smile when Tom gets hit by Jerry, or laugh along when David Mitchell suggests that Robert Webb should kill and eat a cat. We’re perfectly capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality.

‘Bending’ by Greta Christina

I was recently sent a copy of ‘Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More’ by Greta Christina. It’s a thoughtful, sordid, delicious shock of a book. She and I clearly have some very similar fantasies, and when I read it I was frequently torn between shouting “OH JESUS YES” and sneaking off the train for a quick wank in the toilets. They’re mostly BDSM-focused, and an excellent demonstration of just how much variety there is in even that one tiny slice of the sexual spectrum. If you like my blog, and the sort of things I write about, I’d be gobsmacked if you didn’t like at least a few of the stories in this book.

However, some of the stories deal with fantasies that involve non-consent. One or more of the fictional participants is being cajoled, bullied or forced into doing something sexual. They describe sort of activities – like a cat being served up for dinner – that we wouldn’t want to see in real life. But does that stop them being hot? Does that make them unethical? I don’t think so. And although I could waffle on about this until my feline steak goes cold, I couldn’t put it better than Greta Christina herself.

Here is an extract from the book’s introduction that she’s kindly allowed me to publish as part of her blog tour:

These are not nice stories.

These are not “erotica” — except in the sense that “erotica” has become the term of art in publishing for “dirty stories with some vaguely serious literary intent.” These are not tender stories about couples in love making love. (Except for the one that is.) These are not sweet, gentle, happy stories about unicorns fucking rainbows. (Except for the one about the unicorn fucking the rainbow.)

A lot of fucked-up shit happens in a lot of these stories. Stuff happens here that is borderline consensual. Stuff happens that is not at all consensual. Stuff happens in which people manipulate other people into doing sexual things they don’t want to do. Stuff happens in which people do sexual things they’re ashamed of. Stuff happens in these stories that, if they happened in real life, I would be appalled and enraged by.

Stuff happens here that excites me to think about when I whack off.

I apparently have a very fucked-up sexual imagination.

But there is also love in these stories. Some of them, anyway. There is the love of long-term couples; there is the love of newly-discovered lovers; there is the love of friends. There is affection — between lovers, between colleagues, between strangers encountered on the street. There is respect: for love, for desire, for scars, for the complicated places where love and desire and scars overlap.

Above all, there is respect for sex itself. I think — I hope — that this respect underlies every story in this book. Beneath the excitement and the fear, the pain and the shame, the helplessness and the hunger, the danger and the love… there is always the idea that sex matters.

Since most of these stories are kinky, and since some people reading this may not be super-familiar with kink, I want to take a moment to talk about kinky porn.

Some of these stories are about consensual sadomasochism. They’re about negotiated SM scenes between consenting adults, with safewords and limits and attention to safety. There’s conflict in the stories, and mis-steps, and bad decisions… but fundamentally, what happens within those stories is consenting. They are attempts to express, in fiction, some of the things that consensual sadomasochists do.

And some of these stories aren’t. Some of these stories are about force, and violation, and abuse of power. They are attempts to describe, not what consensual sadomasochists do, but some of the things we think about. They are attempts to describe some of the images that come into our minds when we masturbate, or have sex, or engage in consensual SM. They are attempts to describe some of the activities that some of us consensually act out with each other. They are fantasies.

And every single story in this book is consensual.

They’re consensual because they’re fiction. They’re consensual because they’re made-up. I consented to write them; you’re consenting to read them. If you don’t want to read this kind of thing, this isn’t the book for you. I encourage you to put it down, and read something else.

It’s funny. When it comes to things that aren’t sex, people seem to understand this distinction. People get that enjoying spy novels doesn’t mean you want to join the CIA; that enjoying murder mysteries doesn’t mean you want to kill people; that enjoying heist thrillers doesn’t mean you want to break into Fort Knox. People understand that it’s fun and exciting to imagine things we wouldn’t actually want to do — even things we think are immoral.

But for some reason, porn often gets held to a different standard. Depicting a fantasy of a sex act is often assumed to be an endorsement of that act. So let me spell it out: I do not endorse sexual force, abuse of power, rape, or any form of violation of sexual consent. I am vehemently opposed to them.

I am, however, unapologetic about the fact that I like to fantasize about them. If we have any freedom at all, it’s the freedom between our ears: the freedom to think about whatever we like. And that includes sex.

If this has intrigued you, do check out the book – available on Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, and eventually print and audiobook too.

And if this has enraged you, I’d genuinely love to know why. What makes sex different? I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t separate fantasy from reality. That means not just comedy, cartoons, and action films but sex as well.

Someone on Twitter has pointed out that this blog is quite disturbing/triggering, because there is an element of non-consent/coercion. Please be aware of this before you start reading. If you’d like any reassurance, know that I am absolutely fine, and this swingers’ club trip happened a long time ago – both me and the guy I went with discussed it afterwards in detail, and established some of our own rules of engagement to go along with the standard swingers club rules, so we could both have a sexier time. 

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Despite giving the impression that I go through life humping men on an almost hourly basis, the time when I’m most likely to have sex is just before bed. Not particularly surprising when you consider that I, like most people, have to work during the day, somewhere far enough from the nearest willing boy that I can’t nip out at lunchtime for a post-sandwich quickie.

Sex before bedtime feels like the natural thing to do – you’ve just taken your clothes off, you’re lying next to each other enjoying the skin-on-skin contact and the post-workday sweat as you bury your face in his armpit: of course a lot of sex happens at bedtime.

But do you want to know what’s even better? Sex after bedtime.

Wake me up

I have a rock-solid and trembling desire for guys who wake me up for a fuck. I love the feeling of being stroked and dragged awake at two, three, four o’clock in the morning by a guy with a raging erection and a desperate need to be inside me.

In fact, so acute is my desire for a guy with a hard-on in the middle of the night that I often don’t even need him to fuck me. Just knowing that he’s almost whimperingly desperate has me flooded with lust, and struggling to pretend to keep my eyes closed.

The other night I woke up lying on my stomach. I could feel him running his hand tightly over my arse, smoothing the silk of my knickers into the crack, and sliding his fingers down my crotch through the fabric. The bed was shaking slightly as he rubbed his cock with his other hand.

After a couple of minutes, he pulled my knickers to one side, dipping his fingers into my cunt. When he felt how wet I was, he moaned, and started rubbing himself harder. I lay as still as I could, breath catching occasionally despite my attempts to maintain the illusion of sleep. I wanted him to fuck me.

Sleep sex

He’s done it before – fucked me in my sleep, I mean. Despite my having issued an open challenge (£50 if you can finish without waking me up) he’s never quite got to the end without me moaning and giving away that I’ve been wide awake for a while. But still. The fact that one day he might makes me quiver with desire, and when I twitch into consciousness to find him touching me I can’t help but tense up, and start throbbing, and hope that he’ll roll on top of me and slide his cock inside.

This isn’t one of those creepy ‘I’ll fuck her while she’s asleep just because I fancy it’ things. He doesn’t fuck me in my sleep because he thinks he can get away with it – he does it because I have emphatically and enthusiastically begged him to.

Because the feeling of waking up, woozy and confused and wet and aching at just the moment he slides his dick inside me is so hot it makes me crosseyed.

Tonight I’ll dream of him fucking me in my sleep

But sometimes there’s no release for me at all – and this was one of those times. There was no need for me to battle a sigh of relief as he pulled my knickers to one side and slipped into me, no feeling of satisfaction as he grunted and thrust.

As his hand reached my knickers he just sped up, rubbing his dick harder and faster – holding his breath to avoid making tell-tale noises in the back of his throat as he got closer to coming.

When he was near, he gripped me harder – fingers digging my knickers into the slit of my cunt, feeling the flooding wetness soak through the silk. And then, just as he was about to come, he pulled at the waistband so that they were bunched at the bottom of my buttocks, exposing me just enough as he rolled over, pushed the tip of his cock up against me, and squirted sticky rounds of jizz directly against my skin.

Having finished, with a gentle grunt and a sigh of satisfaction, he absently rubbed it in – covering me in stickiness with quick, solid movements. He pulled up my knickers and gently patted my arse.

“I’ve been awake for a while, you know.”
“I know. You were pretending to be asleep, weren’t you?”
“I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Good girl.”

I got almost no sleep of my own that night.

Update 2018: this post is now available as audio porn (click ‘listen now’ above and see more audio porn here). I wanted to add, as I was revisiting it to turn it into audio porn, that this should never ever be taken to mean that any individual might enjoy this like I do. I can only do it, as explained above, because my partner and I have discussed this in a lot of detail and carefully negotiated how we want to do this consensually. 

You don’t need pictures to get horny. When both I and the internet were young, I was a big fan of chatrooms. A chatroom, in case you’re too young to have ever needed them, is a place you can go on the internet to talk to complete strangers. You just log in, pick a generic name, and join in the discussion. Like Menshn, yeah?

I haven’t been in a chatroom for years, but when I was young (14, 15 ish) I thought they were the best thing about the internet. I’d log onto the main room, chat to people for a while (always with a name that made it clear I was a girl, but perhaps did not make it clear quite how young I was) and wait for the private chat boxes to pop up.

a/s/l?
19/f/uk
wanna cyber?

I was just old enough to know what ‘cybering’ was, and just young enough to think the very idea hilarious.

no, I don’t wanna cyber, but what’s ur name?

[For some reason I believed that correct use of spelling and grammar would see me hurled from the internet]

Short chats with lonely guys turned into longer ones. Some just wanted to talk, some wanted to do sexy chat, most of them were keen to know exactly what I looked like. I spent a fair bit of time listening to their woes, some time trying to describe – in explicit detail – nicely developed pairs of tits that definitely weren’t mine. But it was fun. You could log on, reach out, and within minutes be surrounded by words from horny guys, lonely guys, guys who wanted nothing more than to talk to you.

At the time I thought it was the best way to get off – kids these days won’t understand, but in the competition between jpegs of celebrity nipple-slips that loaded line-by-line over a shitty dial-up connection and chat rooms where perviness was almost instantly guaranteed, there was no contest.

Besides – I was talking to real men! Actual men! The joy of teenaged discovery doesn’t come better than knowing that even though you can’t get a boyfriend at school, there are thousands of men on the internet willing to pretend to be a half-hearted version of one for twenty minutes or so.

But naturally there has to be a moral to this story, because as an adult I look back on my teenaged self prickteasing horny guys in chatrooms, and I think: well, you were a fucking arsehole, weren’t you? Moreover, at no point do I want kids to read this blog and think that fucking about in chatrooms is anything more than a dangerous waste of time.

So here goes.

One day I gave a man my phone number. See? I was an idiot as well as an arsehole.

He seemed nice, though. I was young and stupid, and I thought I was in line for a 17 year old boyfriend. 17! Practically a grown-up! And he seemed… well … quite sweet. He wasn’t scarily pervy, just a lonely guy with a modem and some time on his hands.

When I turned off the internet (that’s right, kids, back in the day one had to do that) the phone rang straight away. My Mum asked why someone was calling this late at night, and I pretended I knew him.

She left me alone and I spoke to him. And it was at this point that I got a bit scared. Because despite my horny teenaged chatting, and my confidence that no guy could hurt me, I suddenly came to the terrifying realisation that this guy had actually phoned me. He’d called my bluff. And if he wanted to he could call me again, at any time, even if I told him to sod off.

As it turns out, there was no need to be scared – this guy was perfectly nice, and realised within about 10 minutes of our phonecall that I was not, as I had stated in my username, 19, but closer to 13. He said goodbye and hung up.

There are two morals here: number one – don’t give your fucking phone number to men you meet in chatrooms, because they will probably use it to call you. Most people know this, I didn’t.

Moral number two – teenagers will find porn on the internet no matter how and where you hide it. If it weren’t chatrooms it’d be pictures, or erotic words, or sexual health websites with stark and unerotic pictures of male genitals.

As an adult, porn usually consists of a high-quality video of two people going at it hammer and tongs, or six people lustily writhing together in a bucket of something that resembles lube or mucus. As a teenager, porn can be anything – when I was a teenager I would become aroused reading a certain section of the (kid’s book) Heidi, because there’s a moment when she gets spanked by her schoolteacher. Absent any other porn, I could probably crack one off looking at erotic book covers on Amazon.com. And I could certainly – certainly – find somewhere on the internet to hook up with lonely, horny guys.

Kids will find porn. There’s no reason we should make it easy for them, but we’ll never stop them finding it. The scamps.