Bucket Lists

Imagine the scene. It’s early morning and you’ve just left the house of the person you spent the whole night fucking. They chatted you up in a local bar, then took you back to their place. The chemistry between you was electric, but you also seemed to have loads in common. You clicked. You got each other. Still, they seemed awfully keen to get rid of you this morning, and when you wrote down your number so they could call you for a proper date, there was an awkward silence before they took the slip of paper from you. They didn’t offer their number in return.

That’s when the penny drops. You’ve been used for sex. Some smooth talker made your head spin and your pants drop, just because they fancied a fuck. You were gobbled up with practiced efficiency, then spat out the next day – the click of their door closing was the last you’ll hear from them, and you didn’t even get a leisurely breakfast together to enjoy the afterglow.

How do you feel about that? About being used by someone who wanted a warm body in their bed that night? If it hadn’t been you, maybe it would’ve been the next suitable target who walked into the pub. Your actual identity – who you are as a person – was largely irrelevant. All you did was tick the right box somehow, even if you don’t know what that box was or how you ticked it.

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For years now, I’ve really wanted to go to Lebanon. Why? Because I want to sit outside a cafe on a bustling Beirut street, eating mezze and drinking the excellent local wine. I want to visit Crusader castles, Mamluk mosques, and Ottoman hammams. I want to hike and ski in the mountains, then head back down to one of the sandy Mediterranean beaches and relax with a cocktail or two. Lebanon is the perfect mix of everything I want in an overseas trip: history, culture, tradition, great food, great wine, a diverse landscape, big cities, wide open spaces, and the opportunity to swim in the sea. Having studied Middle Eastern politics for both my BA and my MA, I’ve always wanted to visit the region and see it for myself, and where better to start than a country that’s been at the heart of so much change and struggle over the centuries.

Where else do I really want to go? Well there’s Argentina (Patagonia! Iguazu Falls! Steak! Wine!), and various other parts of South America. Iran would be awesome, though I’m not sure I could tell my Mum about that one. The Maldives, because despite all evidence to the contrary, I still like to think I’m the kind of person who could enjoy sitting on the beach for a week, and because huts like these ones look amazing. Northern Scandinavia – don’t care which country, just somewhere cold and dark/light enough to make me feel like I’m on a different planet. Nepal. Japan. Tanzania. Vietnam. Etc. Etc.

We only have one lifetime though, and most of us are limited by time, resources, or our own basic laziness. We have to make choices – to prioritise. Fuck it, what I really need is a travel bucket list. There are plenty of places I could go if I wanted help compiling one, but I’m already not short of things to put on mine. Lebanon, Argentina and Iran: yeah, that sounds like a good start. I can work with that.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote this piece for the Brit Babes, about the awesomeness of fucking older women. It got a pretty good reception overall, but there were a couple of dissenting voices, and I was unsurprised to find that those voices came from women in or around the age bracket I was writing about. Packing people together into groups, assigning that group a label, and then generalising about the characteristics and behaviour of the individuals within it is always going to be a mug’s game: for every person who recognises herself in what you say, there will be two more who find your observations trite, shallow or insulting.

So yes, I was prepared for the fact that what I wrote would piss people off. The following day, I got involved in a really interesting conversation on Twitter with the lovely @Juniper3Glasgow, who happens to be one of my favourite bloggers on sex and relationships. She said that she dislikes the assumptions that younger men make about her; the idea that just because she’s in her mid-30s, she must be insatiable in bed. She explained that their attention often feels indiscriminate. They don’t want to fuck her, they want to fuck what she represents. As she put it: “I just don’t want to feel like an item on a bucket list.”

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I really want to go to Lebanon, Argentina and Iran. I also really want to have a threesome with two women, get fucked up the arse by a guy with a big cock, and have sex on a train. I’m very happy to refer to that first set of desires as my travel bucket list. I would be much less happy talking about my ‘sexual bucket list’.

Read Juniper’s comment again. “I don’t want to feel like an item on a bucket list.” An item. An object. If I say that I’d love to visit an Inca temple some day, I’m effectively taking a group of unique structures, each with its own history, quirks and design features, and giving them one label; not only that, I’m then saying that I want to visit the generic ‘temple’. And that’s fine, for the most part.

It’s actually the same with the examples I used earlier. If I want to go to Lebanon, it’s because I have an (incomplete) idea in my head of what Lebanon is like. However, that idea is really just a collection of different things people have told me, stuff I’ve read, and my own desires and beliefs. I have created a Lebanon-ideal in my head, and decided that I want to visit it. The details around that desire – who I go with, what conversations we have, who we meet along the way – are irrelevant at this stage, as is the accuracy of the Lebanon-ideal in my head. The actual experience can be filled in later.

We’re pretty comfortable doing that with places. We’re less comfortable about doing it with people…or, perhaps, we’re less comfortable about people doing it with us. I would love to have a threesome with two women, but by putting it on a ‘bucket list’, I’m suggesting that the identity of the two women, and the context in which I fuck them, are irrelevant – all that matters is that they are women, that there are two of them, and that they’re in bed with me doing all the very bad things that I’ve grouped together under the heading ‘MFF threesome’. If I tell enough people about that desire, can I really blame any actual, real-life woman for being wary of helping me to fulfil it – or at least for thinking that I don’t want a threesome with her and another woman, I just want a threesome with two women, of which, at the time it takes place, she happens to be one. Not only that, but my desire exists because, in my head, I have a set of expectations for what a threesome with two women must be like – her job, presumably, is to live up to them.

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I can’t find it in my Twitter mentions, but Juniper’s comment was quickly followed by someone else saying that they would LOVE to be an item on a bucket list. That ‘someone else’ was male.

Go all the way back to the start of this post. I’m not suggesting that the reactions to that specific scenario will split neatly along gender lines – not in this constituency, at least – but I would be comfortable making certain generalisations about the way men and women respond to the idea of being ‘used for sex’.

As a man – and a white, educated, middle-class man, at that – I spend very little time worrying about being exploited, objectified or used. There is no glass ceiling for me at work. I don’t have to fight for equal pay, or equal treatment, or just to be taken seriously when I speak in meetings. People don’t link the clothes I wear with my sexual availability. I don’t carry a rape alarm, and I don’t keep a close eye on my drink in bars and clubs, in case it gets spiked. If I talk about my sex life on the bus, people might think I’m a bit of a dickhead, but it’s unlikely they’ll whisper ‘slut’ or ‘tart’ or ‘he’ll never find someone to marry him if he drops his pants that quickly.’ Even if they do, I have the luxury of not caring.

Being ‘used for sex’ is a novelty for me, rather than the latest manifestation of a challenge I face every single day. I can shrug it off easily enough – dismiss it as a blip, a one-off – and resume my normal position as a man in charge of his own sexual agency. A sexual agency, by the way, that I don’t have to fight tooth-and-nail to establish or to justify to those around me. The whole experience becomes a story to tell down the pub, maybe punctuated by a rueful shrug, or even a knowing grin – after all, if someone chose to take me home and fuck me all night, that must mean I’m pretty hot stuff, yeah? And who in their right mind is going to shame me for that?

We see it all the time in popular culture too. When men are used for sex in movies or on TV, it’s generally played for laughs. You see them high-fiving their mates afterwards, and at worst they might be on the receiving end of some good-natured teasing. The suggestion is always that not only were they were lucky to find a woman so sexually voracious that all she wants from a man is his body – they were lucky to be that body.

When it’s women who are used for sex, they’re presented as victims, or, worse, as cautionary tales. “Dress/behave/talk like that, and of course men will only want her for one thing – she basically brought it on herself.” It’s a less pernicious strain of the school of thought that blames rape victims rather than rapists.

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I’m aware that I’m in danger of over-analysing this.

We put things on ‘bucket lists’, because we think they must be so awesome that we absolutely have to see/visit/do/eat/try them before we die. We have to have that experience. By saying that, we acknowledge that we have a mental image of what that experience will be like. Of how we, as individuals, will experience it. It’s a very personal thing. A selfish thing.

With sex, all that plays in to various other issues around expectation, power, agency, and perception – issues which some of us have the privilege of not worrying about on a daily basis. To believe that someone wants to fuck us purely because ‘x has always been on my bucket list’ is to believe that they already have a set of expectations around what fucking us will be like. We are an ideal in their head, and if we don’t conform to that ideal – if we don’t give them the experience they’re looking for – we have failed in some way.

But there’s more than that: we’re also forced to confront the notion that they’re only fucking us in order to tick something off their list. We are being used as the means to an end, not enjoyed or valued as the end itself. We are the un-named travelling companion or, even worse, the airline that takes them to Lebanon, or Argentina, or wherever.

As a white, heterosexual man, none of that really crosses my mind when I think about why someone might be fucking me – or if it does, I don’t really care. It doesn’t reflect how I experience the world generally, and the issues it raises aren’t ones that I’ve been forced to confront by previous encounters with women. I have no problem being an item on someone’s bucket list, because fundamentally, for me, that’s all it is – there are no wider connotations to worry about.

I don’t have a sexual bucket list. I do have a mental list of things I think I’d really enjoy, and would love to try some day, provided I find the right person or people to try them with – and of course I have various expectations and beliefs, which have come together to help form that list. I could call it a bucket list if I wanted to – it’s close enough to our understanding of the concept – but language and perception matter, even more so with sex than with most other things. So I won’t. I’ll stick with this one instead:

• Lebanon
• Argentina
• Iran

That’s my bucket list.