Author: Exhibit A

“And I’d give up forever to touch you

‘Cause I know that you feel me somehow

You’re the closest to heaven that I’ll ever be

And I don’t wanna go home right now”

On our second date she drove me to a country pub, a few miles from her parents’ house. We ate dinner in the sunshine, then, after it got dark, we found a quiet place to park the car, and had sex on the front passenger seat.

We’d tried to have sex after our first date, on a grassy verge lit up by the moon, but I was anxious and clumsy, and couldn’t stay hard for long enough to put on the condom. I worried about it for days afterwards, certain that she wouldn’t call. Worried as she pulled out of the pub car park after dinner. Worried when she unbuttoned my jeans and pressed her lips against my cock.

Stopped worrying after that.

It was a warm, clear night, and there were no other cars on the road, so we stayed there for a couple of hours. We stared up at the sky and listened to the cassettes she had piled up in the glove compartment. At some point we had sex again, on the back seat this time, and after another break we finally abandoned the car altogether to fuck on the grass, under the stars.

“And all I can taste is this moment

And all I can breathe is your life

When sooner or later it’s over

I just don’t wanna miss you tonight”

It was well past midnight by the time we pulled out onto the narrow, bumpy lane and drove back to her place. Neither of us spoke, because there was nothing that needed to be said. I closed my eyes and allowed my body to unfold into the seat, the memory of being pinned to it by her body still gloriously fresh. The stereo was just loud enough to be heard over the car engine, and I listened to her sing along to what was playing. Her voice was soft, and just a little off-key, but at that moment I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard anything more beautiful.

I left her house just as the sun was coming up. Her parents were sleeping and the stairs creaked, so we’d had to improvise. The living room floor. The dining table. Outside again, one last time, aching and spent on the soft pillow of her front lawn, her face slowly coming into focus above me in the creeping daylight.

It was a 50-minute drive back to my hometown, which I did in 40. I felt giddy and cum-drunk as I flew along the country roads, my senses heightened by physical exhaustion. Her scent was on my skin, in my hair. I could taste her kisses each time I drew breath. I didn’t turn on the radio, because I didn’t need it. In my head, I could still hear her voice, singing to no-one but the night.

“And I don’t want the world to see me

‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand

When everything’s made to be broken

I just want you to know who I am”

~

Singing is one of those things that I love, regardless of how badly I suck. That list is pretty short: like most people, I get frustrated when I can’t do something well, and generally choose not to do it as a result. Singing is different though – dancing too – and I enjoy the activity itself so much that the output is irrelevant.

It wasn’t always that way. I have two very musical siblings, who as children could pick up just about any instrument and make it sound good. They played the piano and the violin. They sang in the church choir. They joined the country orchestra.

I am less musical. After three years of wrestling with the cello I had yet to be put forward for my Grade 1 exam, and was finally persuaded to pursue other hobbies. I tried to join my primary school choir, but was one of only three pupils to actually fail the audition. When I sang at home, my parents covered their ears in mock-horror – which turned to actual horror once my voice started to break and a degree of unpredictability was added to my previously consistent mediocrity.

For a long time, I found it hard to sing in front of other people, unless I felt completely comfortable around them. Or not hard – I just didn’t feel like doing it. Even now, singing is enjoyable precisely because it’s such a liberating, unguarded activity. If I’m not relaxed, I don’t want to sing – the guard stays in place.

Rightly or wrongly, I assume the same is true for other people. When I listen to a partner singing along to the car stereo, or to the music playing in her head as she showers, or just in those quiet moments at home, when the silence is broken by a murmured snatch of song, I feel a warmth and happiness that I can never really articulate. It’s an intimacy small and simple enough to feel completely spontaneous; a way of signifying physical comfort without even touching me. Of letting me know that she feels good.

I really love those moments. I cling to them afterwards, greedy for the flush of contented satisfaction they press onto my heart. The tender ache that blooms and bruises, and never really fades.

In my apartment yesterday afternoon, I heard the first few bars of Iris float out of my laptop speakers. Immediately I closed my eyes and remembered that drive back to my parents’ house, 12 summers ago, when I was 22 and in love – even if I didn’t know it yet. When the road blurred and swam in front of me, and all I had to keep me going was the sound of her voice in my head. I listened to the whole song, and then I went back and listened to it again. The second time I sang too.

In the last two years I’ve posted here a little over 200 times. I’ve posted stories, essays, photos, interviews, and contests. I’ve posted stuff that people have loved, stuff they’ve hated, and stuff they’ve barely noticed at all. I’ve challenged and even scared myself with some of the things I’ve put up here, but I’ve also learned so much about writing, about sexuality, and most importantly of all, about myself.

Among the things I’ve written that seems to have resonated the most was this post, from all the way back in September 2013, on why I don’t like blow jobs. I wrote it at a time when blogging felt a little like keeping a diary: I had very few readers, and certainly didn’t feel part of any sort of sex-writing community. More than anything, I was trying to work through my ambivalent response to receiving oral, and to confront my inability to discuss that ambivalence openly with partners. A useful exercise for me personally, an interesting read for anyone stumbling across it, but really, I kind of thought that would be that.

To my surprise, however, the viewpoint I expressed back then continues to come up regularly in conversation, especially when I enthuse about oral sex to a new partner who’s read my blog, and even from time-to-time when I build a piece of erotica around sucking cock.

“But you’re the guy who doesn’t enjoy blow jobs,” people will say. “I read that thing you wrote. You don’t like receiving head.”

And while I think my perspective was a little more nuanced than that, they do kind of have a point. After all, this is how I concluded that post:

As a stand-alone act, I think I’ll always feel slightly ambivalent about the blow job, and will continue to suffer – with new partners at least – a level of performance anxiety that I’m mercifully spared in all other aspects of my sex life. That makes me a little sad, especially as I know it’s almost exclusively a result of my own failure to readjust and articulate my view of the role it plays in my sexual enjoyment [. . .] Maybe that’ll happen more in the future. Maybe this is one hang-up that will just melt away completely. Until then, I’ll continue to feel just a little bit shy about admitting that when it comes to giving head, I’d much rather be the one on my knees.

Here’s the thing though: sometimes people change.

I’ve alluded a couple of times since that first post to a shift in my attitude to having my cock sucked. I even wrote about the woman who, in the course of one incredible blow job, had me coming harder and faster than I have at just about any point either before or since. Still, for all my dancing around the subject, what I haven’t done is come right out and say it…so here goes…

…I fucking love blow jobs.

That doesn’t mean for one second that I’ve done a complete 180 on everything I said two years ago. I still don’t come often or easily from oral alone. I still (just about) prefer giving to receiving. I will still always get more physical and emotional pleasure from intercourse than I will from being sucked off. However, what I’ve learned since then – what I think I realised just through the process of writing that post, in fact – is that none of those things really matter.

Convincing yourself of that is the key to beating just about any hang-up – and of course, it’s much easier with some things than with others. Worried that your dick is too small? That your tits are too big? That your teeth are wonky or you have hair in a ‘weird’ place? Worried that you can’t come from penetration alone – or that you can only come from it? None. Of. Those. Things. Really. Matter. If you can embrace that notion – that realisation – it will become gloriously self-fulfilling; the more you believe it, the more true it will be.

As amazing as she was, Florence the cock-sucking machine did not make me fall in love with receiving oral. In fact, one of the reasons why she was able to suck me off with such terrifying speed and intensity is that by then I’d already started the process of getting over that mental hump. When I wrote that post, and especially when I put it out into the world, I forced myself to confront my fear, my anxiety, more directly and honestly than I’d ever previously done.

Specifically, I realised that my hang-up persisted because I was clinging onto unrealistic, externally-imposed expectations of how a blow job should be enjoyed; as a result, I often felt unable to communicate my own desires and preferences to my partners, in a way that would help them to give me an experience that I would enjoy. If I was frustrated, it was because I never just relaxed and allowed myself to enjoy what was going on – instead I lay there and worried about why I couldn’t come, or whether I was making the ‘right’ noises, or a million-and-one other crazy, crazy things like that.

99% of us are better at giving advice than we are at taking it. If a friend of mine had come to me and presented all the ‘symptoms’ I described in that blog post, I think I’d have found it very easy to set him on the right track. Relax, I’d have said. It doesn’t matter whether you come. It doesn’t matter what noises you make. There is no predetermined outcome to oral sex. Enjoy it for what it is, rather than what you think it should be, and don’t take it all so seriously! Above all, have a little faith in your partner. Don’t assume that she’s going to be hurt if you actually tell her what you want – I bet you really like a bit of direction when you’re going down on someone, don’t you? Communicate, don’t stress, and everything will be just fine.

Writing about my oral hang-up turned out to be the equivalent of giving myself that pep talk. Once it was all down on paper, I was forced to confront how silly and self-defeating I was being. How unfair both to my partners and to myself. That realisation – even more than Florence – was the first big step towards getting over it.

So yes, these days I’m not only a fully paid-up member of Team Blow Job, I’m basically the Head Cheerleader too.  I’ve come far more from oral over the last 18 months than in the previous 10 years combined; even on the many occasions when it doesn’t lead to orgasm, I now feel happy and confident enough to really enjoy having my partner’s mouth on my cock, and to make it a more natural, sexy, intimate experience for both of us.

I love it when something I write has a positive impact on the people who read it, but like most people I know, I started blogging about sex because I wanted to better understand myself and my own sexuality; when I look back and realise how posts like that one have enabled me to change and improve such a fundamental aspect of my sex life, and to become materially happier in the process, I know for a fact that this has all been worthwhile.

 

So this afternoon I spent a very pleasant hour or so at the Wellcome Collection’s Institute of Sexology. The exhibition is fairly small, but they’ve managed to gather all sorts of fascinating items and documents, from ancient phallic icons through to video footage of the work done by Masters and Johnson in the 1960s/70s.

I really loved the table of sexual partners meticulously compiled by one woman (whose name I forgot to note down) in the early 1970s. She noted the duration of each relationship, and catalogued the nationality, penis size, profession, proclivities, passions, and performance of each of the men she slept with; if they managed to bring her to orgasm orally or penetrate her anally, that was also recorded. It was all very thorough.

However, the most interesting bit of the whole project is definitely the sex survey. Even just watching other people fill it in was something I could have sat and done all afternoon, regardless of the fact that I couldn’t see their answers. Their body language; the way they interacted with their friends or partners as they scribbled; the time they spent agonising over individual answers, their pencils pressed against the paper; all revealed something about our complex responses to some of these big, sex-related questions.

The answers are aggregated on an ongoing basis by the Institute, and will ultimately generate both a robust analysis of our current thinking on sex, and a huge archive of our individual sexual attitudes and experiences.

On my way out, I nabbed a blank copy of the questionnaire. You’ll find photos of its 8 pages – and the 25 questions it (currently*) contains – below the jump. Just click/zoom to enlarge.

At the Institute, all surveys are submitted anonymously, but if you fancy answering some (or all) of it in the comments section, I’d love to read what you have to say, and to get people’s thoughts generally on the way the questionnaire has been constructed, and the value of this as a social experiment. Either way, if you live in London make sure you get yourself along to the Wellcome Collection before the exhibition closes on September 20th, to check it out properly!

At Eroticon 2014, Molly Moore and Stella Ottewill (then Harper Eliot) ran a session on labels, and on the positive value attached to finding specific ways to describe ourselves sexually. After explaining their thinking, Molly and Stella invited us to share some of the labels we might choose to apply to ourselves; without giving it more than a second or two of thought, I stuck my hand up, and went with ‘magpie’. Why? Because when I see something shiny, I invariably want to pick it up and play with it.

~

At this year’s Eroticon, I sat in Remittance Girl’s brilliant session on jouissance, and thought about the magpie label again. I also thought about the end of Mad Men, platonic dates, and the woman I kissed in an East London park the previous week. I’ll get to those later.

I don’t take many notes at conferences. That’s either arrogance or laziness, or maybe a mixture of the two, but it also stems from a desire to focus on the whole message, and on the speakers themselves, rather than dutifully jotting down each individual point they make. What I do like to record is the nuggets: the little gems that somehow perfectly capture a thought or an idea – or which just express it better than I ever could.

In RG’s lecture (for that is a more appropriate way to describe it), I found myself scribbling (and tweeting) those nuggets, those gems, every couple of minutes. For example:

“People who like edge (play) are really seeking jouissance: they’re almost frightened to orgasm, because it will curtail that fantasy of the beyond-pleasure.”

Or:

“The problem with fantasy is that it’s so perfect – we never construct imperfect fantasies – so consequently phallic jouissance is never perfect. It’s always lacking, because while it’s good, it’s never quite right. You may think ‘oh that’s disappointing, that’s so depressing’, but no! Because if you ever got it exactly right, you’d never seek it again!”

And honestly, I wrestle with this whole area a lot.

I took a first stab at explaining it to someone in the bar on Sunday evening.

“I have this friend, right? And she’s really hot. We go on dates every now and then. We flirt. I want to fuck her, but at the same time I don’t. It’s like the end of Mad Men…you understand what I’m getting at?”

The wary look on her face said very clearly that I needed to find a more coherent way of framing it. As I tried to do that in my head on the train home, I kept coming back to the whole magpie thing, and to the more general impact of curiosity on who and how I fuck.

~

At some stage, I’ve thought about having sex with each one of my female friends. With a lot of my female colleagues (and a fair few of the male ones too). With just about every woman I’ve spoken to for more than about a half hour, in fact.

That doesn’t mean I’ve sat there picturing them naked, or dreaming up detailed scenarios and fantasies. It’s usually just an idle thought at the back of my mind. The mental equivalent of cocking your head and looking at someone in a different way, just for a moment. “Huh,” my brain says. “I wonder what that would be like.”

I don’t imagine I’m unusual in that respect. Sexual curiosity is just one dimension of our general desire to know people. We want to turn them over in our hands and find out what makes them tick, or to feel like we’ve pushed past the face they show the world and teased from them something real or profound. We want them to open up to us, in whatever way – we want to be invited in.

If I find someone interesting, I want that connection. I’m not sure intimacy is the right word, because it’s often so fleeting – more like a glimpse of what intimacy would look like. Either way, I find that it often naturally takes a sexual form. I’m just as likely to find myself getting curious about how someone tastes or what sounds they make as they’re being fucked, as I am about the music they listen to or the things they’re afraid of. All of it – each little detail – goes into shaping who a person really is.

Of course the opportunity to satisfy that curiosity rarely presents itself. For one thing we’re socially conditioned to frown on (what’s presented as) promiscuity, even now, and that can make it hard to initiate those sorts of conversation. Asking someone whether we can go down on them is also just not the same as asking to see their Spotify playlist – and maybe that’s a good thing. As Remittance Girl also alluded to, if we entirely remove the transgressive element from sex, we risk stripping away much of the excitement – to some extent, I want to feel like there’s something riding on it when I ask that question. I want to feel my stomach knot, just a little bit, while waiting for the answer.

And sometimes I want the answer to be ‘no’. Not because I only want what I can’t have, or bullshit like that – but because sometimes it’s better not to find out. Reality can disappoint; even when it doesn’t – even when it’s fucking fantastic – it can rob you of the curiosity that proved compelling enough to risk asking the question in the first place.

~

<Spoiler alert – next three paragraphs discuss the end of Mad Men>

My first response to the closing scene in Mad Men was to slam down my laptop screen in disgust. That’s it? That’s fucking it?? Seven seasons of emotional investment, and all we’re left with is Don Draper sitting in a field doing fucking yoga?! It didn’t feel like a resolution. All it did was leave questions unanswered. Questions about the past and the future; about who this man really was, and whether he could ever truly be happy.

I thought about all those things in the hours after the episode finished. I cursed Matthew Weiner for not playing to the crowd and giving us proper answers. I tried to piece it all together in my head, and construct the ’10 years later’ scene the episode never gave us. The more I did that – the more I obsessed about it – the more I was grudgingly forced to accept that maybe the whole thing had been pitch-perfect in its build-up and execution.

Weiner held his nerve and did one of the hardest things – he let his audience take over and paint their own pictures on the canvas he laid out. We could decide for ourselves whether Dick Whitman lived out the rest of his life in a hippy commune, or whether Don Draper went back to New York and made that Coke ad. By not having our curiosity satisfied, we were given the opportunity to indulge and enjoy it.

~

The point I was trying to make in the bar last Sunday is that there are times when I’d prefer to hang on to my curiosity. Meeting up for drinks with my friend’s sister every couple of weeks has turned into a sort of expanded version of edge play: we’ve taken a mutual attraction and stoked it over a series of ‘dates’, till it glows with an intensity that I’m almost afraid to burn off. Not because it can’t live up to expectations, but because by finding out I’d lose something that may be even more valuable.

Things don’t always reach that stage, of course – that’s what I mean when I say I wrestle with it. The magpie in me wants the shiny new adventures too, which is why the curiosity balloon usually gets popped before it can really start to soar. That’s rooted in a different fear – the fear of missing out on opportunities. When I kiss someone I’ve just met, I’m mainly doing it to find out what sort of reaction the chemistry between us will generate, but I’m also trying to make sure I don’t have cause to regret not kissing her. It doesn’t much matter whether that leads to something more or not – the experience itself makes the decision worthwhile.

In the case of the woman in the park the other week, a perfectly pleasant date had led us to the point where an experimental kiss felt like the natural next step. Or, more to the point, like a natural next step. Taking it was an active choice, but not one I made with any thought of what might follow the kiss. There was no weighing up of pros and cons – no wider context. I kissed her simply because I wanted to know what it would feel like to do so. That desire – and the tingly anticipation that precedes the kiss itself – is often why I go on dates like that in the first place.

Making that choice is not always the right thing to do. There are times when curiosity can hurt other people in your life, and times when the short-term rush of adrenaline can give way to other kinds of regret or remorse. Occasionally it’s just flat-out disappointing. I’ve got it wrong plenty of times, I know that much, and I’m sure I’ll get it wrong in the future too.

Those failures won’t stop me trying though. I agree that when it comes to the gap between fantasy and reality, we should celebrate imperfection rather than allow it to weigh us down. It’s what keeps us curious, and what gives us the impulse to go out and make connections with people.

~

The two Eroticon sessions, 18 months apart, helped me to frame and unpick a tension within myself. A tension between competing and contradictory impulses: the need to know (to touch, to taste, to kiss) and the fear of what that knowledge might cost me – of what I might lose in its acquisition.

Over the last few years I’ve learned to live with the (false) perception that I’m basically a massive slut who will jump into bed at the drop of a hat. I’m not ashamed of who I am, and will never apologise for wanting to indulge my curiosity, but after a lot of thought I’m no longer sure the magpie label is quite right.

I imagine I will always want to swoop down and pick up the shiny thing – it’s just that these days I also have a better (and calmer) appreciation of the value of staying in my tree. Not least because it’s only from there that I can watch the sun dance brilliantly over its surface, simultaneously hiding and illuminating what lies beneath.