On women who like to watch

Last week I had a drink in a London pub I’d last visited a couple of years ago, with a woman I was seeing at the time. Her name was Nathalie, and although the relationship was both short and fairly casual, sitting in that pub immediately brought her face to mind.

We ended up there after dinner one night, on what must have been about our fourth date. We’d certainly already slept together a couple of times, because halfway through a very good bottle of red wine, it was the sex that we started to discuss. Both times we’d fucked, Nathalie had asked me to stop just as I was about to come, then had got me to peel off the condom, lie on my back, and jerk off all over myself (“Pretend I’m not even here”) while she knelt next to me and watched. Just watched, mind: she hadn’t wanted to touch either herself or me, and each time I came she gave a contented little sigh and snuggled down next to me with her head on my shoulder.

As far as I was concerned that was all just fine – I have no problem with being watched – but I’m nosy by nature, especially when it comes to sex, so I felt compelled to ask her about it. She told me that it was something she asked all her boyfriends to do for her: not as a power trip, nor because she disliked the sensation of someone coming inside her – it was purely a visual thing. When she was younger and still a virgin, she’d watched a porn clip in which the camera had hovered over a guy as he lay supine, then pulled back to film him masturbating from the same position she’d occupied each time we’d re-enacted that scenario. I tried to get her to describe what made it so hot, but she shook her head and told me that although it was the source of her fetish, it was no longer the clip itself that turned her on; instead it served as a visual prompt for the various memories she had of watching lovers wank for her like that.

Watching a guy touch himself made her wetter than anything, she said. Her voice got softer and lower as she described the sense of anticipation she felt when she sat back on her heels, post-orgasm, next to her lover’s thigh. She watched because she wanted to see how he gripped his cock, and whether he stroked it slowly or with short, urgent jerks; but most of all, she wanted to listen to his grunts, and watch his hips pump upwards, pushing his cock through his curled fist. She liked the way most dicks seemed to twitch just before orgasm, and she said that when she knew for certain that a guy was about to come, she could never decide whether to watch the spunk shooting out over his stomach and chest, or whether just to stare at his face as he lost himself in the moment.

At the time, Nathalie’s description of her voyeuristic fetish turned me on so much that 20 minutes later we were back at her place, fucking on her kitchen table. When I thought about it again the other day, I realised that although Nathalie’s devotion to that one specific image may have represented an extreme, her general interest in watching was something she shared with most of my other partners.

The “men like pictures, women prefer words” nonsense has been beaten down with far bigger sticks than mine, but what my sexual experiences over the last few years have shown me is just how varied, and clearly defined, our visual preferences can be. Even with something as simple as watching me masturbate, every woman who’s asked to do that has wanted something different.

One liked me to straddle her chest, so she could look up and see everything above her, all the way up to the look on my face as I touched myself. Another preferred me to kneel on the floor and do it, while she sat on the bed and stroked my hair: she would pull me forward just as I was getting close, so the cum would always end up all over my thighs and the floor in front of me.

I have one ex who sometimes asked me to wear her knickers while I wanked. She used to get me to put them on about half an hour beforehand, then tease me till I was so hard that the material stretched painfully around my cock. Only then would she let me touch it, standing in front of her with the knickers pulled down just far enough for me to wrap my hand around the shaft.

More recently, I was in bed with a woman who asked me to show her how I masturbate when I’m on my own. I lay on my side and she spooned me, her breasts squished against my back and her chin resting on my shoulder, so she could watch it from my perspective.

Different angles, different positions. Different power dynamics too, because sometimes I’m the one in charge, taking my pleasure and using the sight of her body to get myself off, while she just lies there and watches. Different ways of getting started, and different ways of finishing – on me, on her, or, with one lover, in her mouth…she used to swoop in just as I was about to come, and that would be the only time our bodies touched during the whole process.

Porn has its issues, but one positive thing it’s done for the way we fuck is to expand the library of hot visual images that we carry round in our heads – images that we can feed into what we do with our partners. A lot has rightly been written about the negative impact of porn on sexual expectations among young men, but with the women I’ve dated or talked to about it (especially those without much sexual experience of their own to fall back on), porn has helped to crystallize and enhance the specific visual triggers for their arousal. That, in turn, has given them the confidence to ask for what they want, and the clarity to describe it in detail.

I’m not sure there’s a wider point to this post. I started off with the intention of framing it in the context of routines, and how even when we’re watching someone else do something, we all have particular details or scenarios that turn us on. It irritates me that ‘routine’ is a word often used in a negative way, because as great – as bloody amazing – as variety can be, the reality is that most of us find comfort and an easy satisfaction in our sexual bread-and-butter, whatever that happens to involve.

In the end though, it wasn’t routine I thought about as I typed. Instead I thought about each of the women who’ve asked me to wank for them, and about how hot it is to have a specific scenario described or requested. It’s hot because in asking for something in that much detail, the other person is not only showing that they’re confident and positive in their own sexuality (a real turn-on in itself), they’re also opening up a part of their brain – a really fucking sexy part of their brain – and letting me peek inside. I get to see exactly what she fantasizes about, and I get to know that when I masturbate with her eyes on me, I’m tapping directly into one of those fantasies – tapping into it, and creating more images for her to file away and use at some point in the future. It basically makes me think about her wanking, and desperate, frenzied girlwanking is a whole other level of hotness.