Q & Exhibit A (3)

As promised(/threatened) last week, I’m celebrating my 300th blog post in the same way I did my 100th in 2014: with a big, self-indulgent Q&A, using all the questions people have sent me over the last few days (21 at the last count). Once again, I’m going to answer them in batches, which will mean adding stuff on to the bottom of this post and – when it all gets too unwieldy – spilling over into another one, so do keep checking back if you’re at all interested in what I have to say.

If you have (further) questions to add to the list, pop them in the comments section below or hit me up via email or DM!

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As a poly person do you experience jealousy?

Ok, right in at the deep end. I’ve been asked variations on this question several times over the last few months, and have read with interest as other bloggers have shared their thoughts on it. I realise that jealousy is something a lot of people struggle with – in both monogamous and polyamorous relationships – and it’s natural to assume that it would be one of the biggest barriers to making poly work in the long term.

When I was younger, I often felt jealous of other men, especially if my girlfriend clearly found them attractive. I worried about being cheated on, and worried even more about being left for a better-looking guy. I allowed my own insecurities to distort the way I saw my relationships, and invariably they suffered as a result.

I don’t know this for certain, but I suspect the virtual disappearance of my own jealousy over the last few years is linked directly to my greater comfort and happiness in my own skin. I know my own worth, essentially, and I no longer believe that a partner’s attraction to another man says anything at all about how they see me – or how I should see myself.

Conflating jealousy and envy for a moment, problems in that whole area are usually prompted by one of two related fears: either that something is being taken from you, or that it’s being given to someone else. The former is based on the widespread perception that sexual and emotional intimacy are zero-sum – that actually, in giving them to one person, you’re necessarily taking them away from another in equal measure. If you buy into that, jealousy is pretty much inevitable, because every time your partner plays around with someone else it means they’re depriving you in some way.

I tend to take a different view, which happily is shared by the people close to me. I know how I feel about my partners and I know how I want them to feel about me; I don’t believe either of those has to be materially affected by what we do with other people, and if it is, the problem is almost certainly with our relationship, rather than the external activity. If I thought someone loved me less than I wanted them to – or that they loved another partner more – I would be sad, and maybe even heartbroken, but I wouldn’t be jealous.

As for the latter fear – of love/sex being given to someone else – I don’t resent the other people my partners fuck, in the same way I don’t resent the friends they meet for dinner or the colleagues they drink with on a Friday night. If I’m dating someone, her body is no more my property than her mind or her time, and she is equally free to share all three with other men/women.

In that sense I don’t regard sex as special or sacrosanct; we’ve moved past the notion that you should only ever give yourself to one person sexually full-stop, and I guess I just don’t buy the argument for insisting that we should only give ourselves to one person at a time either.

My happiness in a relationship is linked to the connection I have with my partner, the quality of the time we spend together, and the sexual chemistry between us. Those are the things I care about, and which I want to preserve – what my partner does with other people is far, far less important to me, and matters only if it starts to have a direct impact on the two of us.

What three words do you hope or wish people would use to describe you, and what three words do you fear they use/hope they don’t use?

Not to overcomplicate things, but the answer to that first question depends quite a lot on the people concerned! The three words I’d want my family to use wouldn’t be the same three I’d want to hear from friends, or lovers, or colleagues, for example. That said, I think that either kind or caring would be on all of those wishlists, and I imagine I’d be happy if entertaining or charismatic featured too. It’s hard, because a lot of the words I’d use to describe myself – independent, introspective, stubborn, calm, rational, curious, creative, competitive – don’t naturally feel like qualities I’d want other people to focus on. When they’re putting me in the ground one day, I’d like it if the eulogies kicked off with something other than “ooh, he was dead rational, wasn’t he?”

It’s actually easier to think of words I hope they don’t use. The two big ones there are boring and arrogant. When I was 11, my best friend Steve moved from Oxfordshire to North London. We kept in touch, and visited each other regularly over the next few years. On one of those visits, I was leafing through a pile of whichever magazine he subscribed to (the name escapes me now). I picked up an issue from a couple of months before he left, and when I reached the advice column was stunned to find a letter from Steve, asking what he should do about his “boring best mate”, who he felt was holding him back and preventing him from making new friends.

Since then, boring has hurt me like no other word, and I think it will continue to do so for a long, long time. Arrogant doesn’t have quite the same sting to it – it’s more that I’m conscious of coming across that way in certain situations, when the reality is often very different. It can take the form of arrogant-aloof or arrogant-smug, but regardless it’s typically a device to mask something else, whether that’s discomfort with a particular social situation or just slightly Tiggerish enthusiasm for whatever it is that I’m doing/discussing.

I need a third one for this, don’t I? Hmm. Ugly, I guess. Because, reasons.

Can you share your marathon training plan/guidelines? What are your top tips for what you must or must not do?

Yes, I can! In fact, you’ll find it right here. And this is a screenshot of the super-nerdy Excel sheet I used to keep track of my progress.

I am not disciplined by nature, and certainly when I did the marathon in 2010 my training schedule was pretty ad hoc. For that reason, I decided last summer that I should force myself to stick to a proper programme, and was really glad that I did so. I haven’t yet decided whether I’ll vary it for Warsaw in September – my target time has changed, so I guess I probably should – but either way I’ll be using a 16-week plan of some description.

Most of the best and most useful marathon tips concern how to handle adversity, and having been tremendously lucky with injuries, illness etc in both 2010 and 2015, I’m probably not the right person to offer guidance. I would say that there’s huge value in making it a shared experience with your friends and family – in leaning on them for moral support, encouragement, cheerleading, or whatever. Training for a marathon feels very lonely at times, and whatever you can do to involve other people is probably going to help take the edge off that.

Have you been approached to have your work published more frequently? Is that a goal of yours?

No and eh, not really. I’ve been encouraged by a couple of people to write stuff for erotica anthologies, but since Chemical Sex in 2014 no-one has specifically asked me to write for them – or requested an existing story for their publication. And that’s fine. Seeing my name in print for the first time was lovely, but I don’t care about it enough to make it a priority, and there’s certainly no real money in erotica right now. If it happens, it happens – until then though, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

What was your worst sexual experience, and why?

I’m profoundly lucky that almost all of my bad sexual experiences a) happened a long time ago and b) were embarrassing rather than genuinely traumatic. I suppose if I had to pick one…

I’ve written before about losing my virginity (which was fine) and the failed attempts at doing so three years earlier. What I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned is the first time I had sex after Katy. It was a one-night stand at the end of a fairly tedious, drunken date. We spent a good couple of hours kissing and dry-humping through our clothes on her bed, which only served to intensify my fear of not being able to get it up and/or coming too quickly. I was too inexperienced to take the lead or to tell her what I wanted, so instead I just waited till, after a few experimental tugs, she pulled my cock out, rolled on a condom, and sat on top of me. I’d say I lasted maybe 20 seconds at best – pump-pump-squirt, as a friend recently put it – and 10 minutes later I fled her college room feeling confused, disheartened and utterly humiliated. Like I’d gone all the way back to square one, basically.

Oh! Actually no, that wasn’t the worst. Pretty fucking bad, yes, but I’ve just thought of something even more skin-crawlingly awkward. I was at a wedding a few years ago with my then-girlfriend, though by that point we were coming to the end of a protracted and unpleasant break-up. She’d only agreed to come to the wedding at the last minute, and we weren’t planning to sleep together that weekend, but shortly before dinner she led me up to our bedroom where we started having sex.

We’d been going at it for a few minutes when she locked her eyes on mine, stopped thrusting back up towards my cock, and said “I only want to keep fucking if you can look me in the eye and say that you love me.” At that moment I felt a genuine wave of nausea sweep through me, and I almost burst into tears. I rolled over, got dressed without a word, and left the room. She and I never had sex again.

Also, I once peed on someone by accident because I was really drunk and it felt like I was about to come. That was pretty bad too.

How was your Gene Kelly outfit received at the sex party? Can I fuck you senseless in your sailor boy get up?

These were actually two separate questions, but it makes sense to answer them together. I was super-happy with my costume, actually, not least because it was really cheap and simple to put together, and it seemed to go down pretty well with the other guests too. I was a bit worried that there would be loads of people in fetish-wear, and that I’d look a bit out of place in my sailor suit, but as with all of my other minor pre-party concerns, my fears on that front proved to be groundless.

Can you fuck me senseless in it? Well I am looking for more opportunities to get dressed up and stripped off, so never say never…

Language and words can be very sexy, but is there a word or phrase you’d remove from the filth vocabulary of your partners? Anything that kills the mood dead for you?

Pretty much anything that ends in ‘-ies’. Titties. Boobies. Willies. Willy too, actually, along with most other infantile, cutesy or ‘funny’ words for genitalia. I like hard words – fuck, cunt, cock – and I like people who don’t just use them but do so with aplomb. Panache, even. Dirty talk that sounds rehearsed, or like it came straight from a porno, just feels jarring, as does the sound of my own name (for the most part).

None of those are dealbreakers, and I wouldn’t even say that they kill the mood dead, but given the choice I prefer language to be economical, down-to-earth, and maybe a little rough around the edges when we’re in bed (perhaps ironically, given how much I shit on about stuff here).

What is a good example of a non-sexual thing that a lover can do to turn you on?

Define non-sexual! I absolutely love having my back touched, whether you’re talking full-on massage or just gentle stroking, but both of those can be either overtly sexual or entirely innocent, depending on the context. The same applies to hugging, holding hands…really any kind of physical contact. I’m very tactile, so I like it when other people want to touch me too.

Flirting is another one – someone who can make it very clear that they want me without ever directly saying so will always turn me on, even if it never leads to anything.

Like Malin James, I also find prowess really desirable. That can take different forms. Show me that you’re wanted – that you can turn other people on – and you’ll get me hot under the collar at the same time. Alternatively, beating me at something, or just wanting to compete in some way, is really sexy, especially if there’s something tangible at stake.

It seems like most porn movies feature stereotypical big/fake-boobed women and so-so guys with huge dicks. Do you think most people prefer that? I find maybe that’s why I like erotica because I can imagine how they look. Care to elaborate on what you think people like, especially men?

As ever, I’ll add the disclaimer that I can’t speak for all men, but I’m certainly happy to elaborate on what I like. I’m actually with you on the broader question of erotica vs porn – I read far more than I watch, for very similar reasons. With erotica it’s easier to super-impose my own aesthetic preferences onto the basic structure the author has given me, and I find that enhances the whole experience. Incidentally, that’s also why I rarely draw my own characters in much (physical) detail – I feel like the lighter touch empowers the reader, and helps him/her to paint their own mental pictures. Most porn is much more in-yer-face, and finding something that works for me without any reservations can be difficult.

When I do watch porn, the pneumatic blonde look honestly does very little for me. I have no issue with women who opt for cosmetic surgery – as ever, your body, your choice – but I find it difficult to take (obviously) fake tits seriously, and I couldn’t be less bothered about size in that context. Cocks are different. They may not always be practical, but I find big cocks more visually appealing than small ones, and in that respect porn serves my needs very well indeed. It’s problematic in a wider sense – until I was about 19, I thought 8” = average length, and porn was almost entirely to blame for that, so the impact on male body image shouldn’t be underplayed – but for selfish reasons I can’t bring myself to get too worked-up about it.

As to what most people prefer, I’ll direct you towards this fascinating tweet (and the article it references) on the economics of porn. Put simply, there’s a vicious circle when it comes to the porn we choose to consume. Our searches are shaped by the way companies keyword their content, which is in turn reinforced by what we then find ourselves viewing. It’s weird and fucked-up, but that’s capitalism for you.

Your blog is anonymous, but you often post photos fairly close to the edge of recognizability, you’ve had some pretty publicly popular posts (the interview with Gaby Dunn, Rachel Kramer Bussel’s article in the Philly newspaper), and your Twitter and blog are both quite personal. How do you manage your nerves in regard to potential discovery? Or is that part of the thrill for you? Or part of the comfort?

This is such a good question, though maybe I’m saying that because it’s been on my mind quite a bit over the last few weeks. I’ve never really talked about this before, but my last attempt at sex-blogging back in 2005 ended rather abruptly when I was doxxed by an anonymous troll. They managed to find my real name and link my blog to other information about me online, which gave them enough to threaten me with public exposure.

I was 24 at the time, far less experienced than I am now, and also just much less comfortable in both my own sexuality and the ways in which I instinctively wanted to express it. The idea of someone exposing all of that to my family, or the guys I played hockey with, or whoever, properly terrified me, so without much of a fight I allowed myself to be silenced.

Things are very different now. I would still prefer to remain anonymous, at least to the people who knew me before I started blogging, but I’m also more relaxed these days about the various alternatives. I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve posted here, and I’m certainly not ashamed of my body – my friends and family might not need to see my cock, but if they do it’s probably not going to be the end of the world for either me or them. Once I realised that, I started to worry less about covering my tracks, which in turn opened up a few more options and enabled me to take some calculated risks with both scope and content.

Most importantly from my perspective, it also means I can never be put in that same horrible position again, of having to choose between my writing and my reputation – my private life and my public profile. Anonymity has value, but it’s very much a double-edged sword – it can hurt just as easily as it can protect. I’ve tried to neuter mine, or at least to ensure that it can’t be used to back me into that same corner in the future. When it comes down to it, if I do have to choose one day, I’d rather be out and proud than silent and defeated.