On Competition

This is my first post for Smutathon 2018! Eight of us are spending 12 hours today furiously writing erotica, blogging about sex, taking filthy photos, and generally producing smut in all its glorious forms, to raise money for the Abortion Support Network. To find out more, to enter our sex toy raffle, and most importantly to donate to an excellent cause, click here!

When I was 14, I had a huge crush on a girl at school. I had the same huge crush on that same girl at 16 and 17 too, by which time we were also very close friends. Vanessa was that teen-nerd kryptonite blend of attractive, approachable, smart, cool, and kind; the more time we spent together, the higher the pedestal I mentally placed her upon.

It’s one of the core features of most people’s teenage experience to moon (and lust) after someone who feels tantalisingly out-of-reach. We’re still finding ourselves at that point in life; our bodies and feelings aren’t always aligned, as one leaps in front of the other and waits patiently for it to catch up. Many of us have to learn to love ourselves, which is doubly disconcerting when you’ve spent your entire childhood doing that unthinkingly. Feeling like you’re good enough at that point to catch the eye of someone you’ve already decided is a vision sent from some far-off heaven is…challenging.

Still, I persevered. By which I mean I continued to be friends with her, say absolutely nothing about my feelings, and hope that by some miracle she might one day notice me. I don’t feel like I’m spoiling anything if I say here that – one brief and confusing period in our mid-20s aside – she did not.

So we spent most of our 6^th Form years drinking tea at her kitchen table, walking in the park, and dreaming about the future – a future we knew even then would take us to very different places in life. It was all great. Friendships acquire a rhythm over time, and ours was pretty chilled. We simply enjoyed each other’s company, which meant that we could spend time together without any real tension or edge to proceedings.

With one exception.

Most people who follow me here will know that I play hockey in winter. What I’ve written about less is the 15-year period I spent playing competitive badminton in my teens and 20s. I was good without being really good; a strong enough shot-maker to play at a decent level in the Oxfordshire leagues, to hang around the fringes of the county junior squad, and to make the university 2^nd team, but not quick or technical enough to progress any further. I loved the sport without apology or equivocation, and it annoys me to this day when people paint badminton as a silly beach game or something suitable only for children, old people and slightly effete toffs.

Vanessa was a runner – school 100m champion and a regular participant in county-level competition – and one of those people who just likes getting involved in anything fun and active. She was keen to join the weekly social badminton games I played with a group of friends, and asked me to give her some coaching to get up to speed.

Neither of us really thought about what that might do to the comfortable dynamic between us, because why would we? At that age, we were both inexperienced enough that the concept of power shifts and the concurrent impact on attraction or chemistry within a relationship wouldn’t even have crossed our radars. We took to the court each week knowing only that one of us wanted to be pushed – hard – and the other was determined to extract a certain level of performance by the time the hour was up. Everything else took a little while to really click into place.

1-1 coaching of any kind places demands on your ability to focus, encourage and communicate – but it also fosters a weird form of intimacy. To know how to get the best out of someone, you have to think hard about how they learn, and what works best for them. Vanessa and I already knew each other really well, but putting her through her paces on the badminton court made me think about her in completely different ways. It also changed how she responded to me.

For one hour each week, I stood in the middle of the court and Vanessa ran. Side to side, backwards and forwards, I sent her to every corner in search of the shuttlecock. “Don’t go easy on me,” she said at the start of our first session, so I picked on her weakest shots and slowly built them up one at a time, forcing her to hit backhand after backhand, or drop shot after drop shot, till they’d reached an acceptable level.

Nervous at first about offering anything other than friendly encouragement, I quickly figured out that Vanessa needed less carrot and a lot more stick to really get her going. Applauding her good shots only earned an angry glare – instead she wanted to be cajoled and nagged, to be pushed out of her comfort zone and often to the point of exhaustion before being allowed to stop. As the weeks went by, I found myself getting more sarcastic, more biting in my criticism of her efforts, and more demanding in the tasks I set her. I drilled her hard, and she responded. Whenever our time was up, she’d stalk off to the changing rooms bathed in sweat, cheeks flushed and angry, and I’d wait nervously in reception till she emerged, a smile back on her face.

As the weeks passed, Vanessa got better and better, which forced me to find new ways of pushing her. Nothing else changed between us off the court, but an incremental shift took place in how I thought of my feelings for her. They became more overtly sexual, but more rounded too. I quietly pulled her down from the pedestal I’d built and started to see her as a living, breathing person, rather than some sort of romantic ideal.

Years later – during that brief, confusing period when we teetered on the edge of something more than friendship – we talked about those coaching sessions and the way they’d made us both feel. Even though I knew myself much better by that point, and could look back on the arousal I felt during and after our time on court with a greater level of understanding, it still surprised me to learn that Vanessa had experienced it in a similar way.

“Honestly, it was so hot when you bossed me around like that. You were so fucking smug with it – part of me hated you each time we played, but mainly I just wanted to win, even if I didn’t really know what that involved.”

Writing this now, I can see that my response to her admission – “well I wish I’d bloody known that at the time!” – was overly optimistic. Even if I had known, I wouldn’t have had the first idea what to do with that information. It was too complex, too far removed from my teenage understanding of how two people could interact in a sexual way, that I’m pretty sure I’d have run a mile – or taken that sophisticated set of inputs and boiled them down into the sort of clumsy, romcom-conventional response that wouldn’t have taken us anywhere.

Ever since then though, I’ve understood just how much sexual potential there is in competition, even the kind that doesn’t technically start out that way. Whether it’s a friendly Scrabble game that turns deadly serious, a team activity where you’re driving towards the same goal and spurring each other on as you do so, or just something much more primal – a fierce, sweaty struggle to the death between two people who just want to beat each other.

Competition gets the blood pumping, but that’s only part of its appeal. It also brings out of us qualities and behaviours that typically lie dormant in other, less charged environments, for better or worse. When other people notice that – or when we notice it in other people – it can’t help subtly changing often long-held perceptions of what makes someone tick. We look at each other in new ways, occasionally with very interesting consequences.

Sex and competition go hand-in-hand in all sorts of obvious ways. “I’m going to hold this vibrator here and you can come in the next two minutes – or not at all,” is an inherently competitive challenge, for example. Likewise “hold still while he fucks you – I want to see how much of his cock you can actually take.” But it’s the less obvious ways that really interest me, especially when I look back at those Saturday morning badminton sessions, and at all the other times in my life since then, when competitive tension has bred an unexpected sexual connection, or changed an existing power dynamic with someone I already knew I fancied. It’s one of my favourite moments in any relationship, and I think it always will be.