Author: Exhibit A

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a (hot) friend, which went something like this:

Hot Friend: “How’s the new job? Do try not to pork the payroll in your first week, darling”

Exhibit A: “All good so far, thanks! (And no comment re your helpful advice!)”

HF: “Ha, does that mean you already have? Fuck me…you work fast.”

EA: “That really would be impressive! But no, no I haven’t.”

HF: “I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time…”

EA: “Hmmm…well…hmmm…ok, no. But that was different. Obviously.”

HF: “Haha, I knew it – you’ve basically shagged your way through your CV, haven’t you?”

EA: “Hey hey hey…I’ve had 6 permanent jobs (including this one), and I’ve only shagged a colleague at 3 of them. Fine, 4 if you include shagging someone after I left the company. Which I don’t.”

HF: “Dirtbag.”

I think she meant that as a compliment.

I’m aware that sex in the workplace is something that conventional wisdom counsels against. ‘Don’t dip your pen in the company ink’, and all that. But then conventional wisdom is opposed to all sorts of stuff that I consider enjoyable and fulfilling (‘don’t go out boozing on a school night’, ‘leave yourself plenty of time to get to the airport, and arrive at least two hours before your flight’, ‘don’t drink caffeine after 6pm’, yada yada yada), so over the years I’ve learned largely to ignore its prim, pursed-lipped warnings and just get on with my life.

In fact, like a lot of things, fucking a colleague is fun in part because you’re not ‘meant’ to do it. You’re certainly not meant to do it in the office toilets in the middle of the day, or on the CEO’s desk late at night, or in the client’s car park just before an important sales pitch. I’m pretty sure conventional wisdom would frown on all three of those, and yet each was a heart-thumpingly thrilling experience.

For those of us doing a full-time office job and sleeping for seven hours a night, roughly 40% of our waking hours will be spent with work colleagues. That’s more than we generally spend with family, friends, or loved ones. It’s no wonder that sexual tension swirls and eddies around most offices, occasionally picking up speed and sweeping people off their feet, into the stationery cupboard, and out of their underwear. It’s natural, it’s entirely predictable, and for the most part I tend to think of it as a Good Thing.

Why ‘for the most part’? Because of course I’m writing from a ridiculously privileged position. Conventional wisdom actually misses the mark on this one: it’s not the pen-dippers who tend to suffer when workplace shagging goes wrong. As a man, I’m unlikely to be slut-shamed in the office kitchen if I end up in bed with the MD after a night out. Nor do I have to worry about accusations of sleeping my way to the top when it becomes known that I’m having a fling with one of the management team. My wardrobe choices aren’t immediately sexualised, or viewed and judged through the lens of the effect they might have on unsuspecting male colleagues.

More generally though, I have less to worry about than women in my position. I don’t have to fight for equal pay, or to break through a glass ceiling, or even just to be taken seriously in a corporate environment. I can fuck to my heart’s content, safe in the knowledge that even if things do go wrong, it’s probably not going to be used against me, or jumped on as an excuse to solidify an existing prejudice.

Not all offices harbour (or would tolerate) that kind of sexism, and even in the ones that do, there are plenty of women who don’t give a monkeys what other people say about their sex lives. Good for them, and with any luck this is a problem that will fade away over time, as the workforce becomes more modern and gender issues are gradually dealt with. However, for those of us men who enjoy mixing business with pleasure, it’s worth bearing in mind the potential professional (and personal) vulnerability of the female colleagues we chase. I’ve been guilty of ignoring (or just not considering) that in the past – I intend to take it more seriously in the future.

That said…I will always be a dirtbag…

EDIT: The feedback I’ve had from y’all on this has been really interesting. It’s worth clarifying that I don’t think it’s my role (or any man’s role) to police who/when/where/how women fuck, nor do I think that women are delicate flowers who need to be protected in the workplace. However, I do believe that as guys we have a responsibility to challenge the kind of slut-shaming and sexism that contribute to women who sleep around being viewed in a different way to men: that responsibility extends way beyond the office, but in that kind of environment, where people’s professional reputations can be at stake, it’s especially important.

As this is my 100th post on this site, I thought I’d answer some questions from the people who read it. Great (if rather self-indulgent) idea in theory, terrible headache in practice: brevity is not one of my strengths at the best of times, and as quite a few of the questions were interesting enough that they probably warranted a full blog post in response, you’ll understand why I found this exercise a little tricky.

There were 23 questions in total. Thank you to all the people who took the time to send me one. If you sent me a question and I’ve missed it off the list, then a) I blame the Gmail/Twitter gremlins for deleting it from my inbox, b) if you believe that, you’ll believe anything, and c) please re-send it and I’ll make sure it’s added somewhere below.

(Note: I’m going to post these in two batches – 12 now, 11 later.)

Why the circumcision, and do you have feelings about it one way or the other?

Let’s start with something nice and cheerful, shall we? I was circumcised shortly before my 5^th or 6^th birthday, though you’ll forgive me if I haven’t made a point of remembering exactly which one. The time of year is hard to forget, as I opened my presents at my birthday party wearing nothing but one of my Dad’s t-shirts – turns out that having a piece of your cock lopped off leads to a reasonable amount of post-op pain.

Anyway, that wasn’t your question. My parents had me circumcised on medical advice after I suffered through a couple of bouts of cystitis. Interestingly, the NHS still lists UTIs as a reason to circumcise boys, though they do now add that it’s ‘usually only recommended if a boy has a risk factor that increases the likelihood of repeated UTIs.’ From what I understand, they were a bit more cavalier in the mid-80s.

I must admit, I don’t really have any strong feelings about it as an adult. As a child, I did – I distinctly remember being too embarrassed to take my trunks off in front of the other boys after primary school swimming lessons, because I was different to them ‘down there’ – but since puberty it’s never really bothered me.

It probably does have an impact on my sex life, especially living in the UK. Studies show that around 15% of British men aged 16-44 are walking around without a foreskin, compared to 70-80% of American men, 92.5% of Filipino men, and 95% of Ghanaian men: it makes sense, therefore, that American, Filipino and Ghanaian women, for example, know their way around a circumcised dick better than their British counterparts.

For anyone reading this who has only handled uncut cocks before, and wants to know the difference, I’ve got two words for you:

1. Lubrication
2. Pressure

With no foreskin, there’s no natural lubrication to help with handjobs; and because the head of a circumcised cock is exposed the whole time, it tends to be less sensitive than one that spends most of its life under wraps, which means a firmer grip is generally required. Just not too firm. Yeah. Ow.

In your post ‘On My Sexuality, Part 2’ you talk about your first threesome. Is that your only threesome? If you’ve had others were they MFM or FMF or MMM? Want to tell us about it?

350 words per answer is probably not sustainable, so I’m going to rattle through a few quick ones, in the hope of creating some momentum. ‘Pithy’, that’s what I need to aim for.

Sadly, at time of writing, that’s the only threesome I’ve been a part of. It would be nice to change that at some point, and having only really been interested in MFM in the past, I find myself increasingly turned-on by the idea of FMF these days too. Really, either would be gravy. MMM? Probably not right now, but never say never.

You come home after a really stressful day at work, how do you de-stress? Does this change if you have a partner?

Here’s the thing – I don’t really wank to relax. I wank because I’m horny, and if I’m really stressed, I’m probably not going to be in the mood to rub one out. It’s different if I have a partner, especially if we’re close enough for her to recognise when I need someone to help get me out of my own head. Sex is great for that, though it usually takes someone else to initiate it.

When I’m on my own, I de-stress sometimes just by lying down in a dark room and having a nap. Naps always help. Otherwise I try to go into zombie mode. I plonk myself in front of the TV, or go for a run, or open a bottle of wine. I rarely pick up the phone and seek out a friendly voice: I’m not good at talking to other people about my problems.

Tell me your favourite song, the one that picks you up no matter how low you are.

Ok, but no. Can’t do that. Can anyone do that? How do they isolate one song among the gazillions they’ve listened to, and call it their ‘favourite’?? I suppose you’ve added one helpful criterion, but actually even that prompts more questions than it answers. Why am I low? What sort of a low is it? Am I at home on my own, listening to the radio in the car, or in a pub with a bunch of other people? Context matters.

I cattle-prodded my family into doing a Desert Island Discs thing last Christmas, because I enjoy it when they all hate me just a little bit. Of the eight songs on my list, I suppose the first five would qualify as ‘favourites’, while the other three were all picked for purely sentimental reasons. Make of it what you will:

1. Let Down (Radiohead)
2. Poses (Rufus Wainwright)
3. Country Feedback (REM)
4. The Boxer (Simon & Garfunkel)
5. Design For Life (Manics)
6. Letter From America (The Proclaimers)
7. Suavemente (Elvis Crespo)
8. Nessun Dorma (Pavarotti)

And yes, I fucking love The Proclaimers. Sue me.

Summer storms…..sexy or scary? Have any stories about summer storms?

Definitely not scary. Sometimes sexy, sometimes just ohmyfuckinggodhowamazingisthat. I actually have more happy memories of going running in summer storms than I do of fucking in them – the adrenaline shot I get from rain like that always makes me go faster for longer. Suppose that works for sex too…

And no, no stories, I’m afraid.

If you had to choose between watching porn or reading erotica for the rest of your life, which would you pick? And why?

Erotica, hands-down. Actually, I’m just going to cheat here and link to the article I co-wrote with Em for her Any Girl Friday blog last month, about my feelings on porn. I would get bored of porn long before I got bored of erotica.

Did you actually measure the volume of your penis when you took that Sinful Sunday photo? If not, how about just giving us the length and girth instead?

I’m afraid I did not measure the volume, and despite a couple of ‘generous’ offers to help me recreate the experiment, I don’t think I’ll be calculating it any time soon. However, show me a man who’s never taken a ruler, wedged it against his dick, and hoped for the best, and I’ll show you a man with no hands… So yes, I can give you the other dimensions.

Except, except…erections are slippery bastards. I don’t know about other guys, but mine vary a fair amount in size, depending on how horny I am, how recently I’ve come, what someone’s doing to me, whether there’s a Y in the month, and even what time of day it is. Broadly speaking though, they range from about 5.7”-6.2” in length, 5.3”-5.7” in circumference (at the thickest point), and, if we’re coming over all Pythagorean, 1.7”-1.8” in width. However, while my penis is elliptical, it’s not perfectly circular, so I guess it’s more like 1.8”-1.9” at the widest point. Broadly speaking, I’m happy to be average. In other news, geometry is awesome.

How many sexual experiences have you had with men? Would you identify as bisexual?  And added to that, do you think that fidelity would be challenging for you because you swing that way? (Basically, are you a big gay sub in denial?)

Yes, thanks for that one. If you don’t count looking at other guys’ dicks in the shower and coming over all funny inside, then I’ve only really had one sexual experience with another man. I identify as straight, but with the caveat that I consider it to be a bit of an umbrella of a label, covering lots of different feeling that all happen to have at their core the belief that you’re only interested in a ‘romantic’ relationship with someone of the opposite sex.

Fidelity is challenging for me for various reasons, but I don’t think an attraction to other guys is one of them. The ‘sub’ bit is more relevant, I guess. In order to be happy in a monogamous, committed relationship, I would certainly need to find either a partner who was comfortable switching roles in the bedroom, or at the very least, a partner who understood that side of me and was willing to help explore other outlets for it.

You have mentioned you’re not a huge fan of blow jobs. What is your favourite thing for someone to do to/for/with you?

Honestly? Make me a decent cup of tea. Everything else varies according to the person and situation, but anyone who knows how to make a proper cuppa is golden in my book. Back massages are great too – after all, I can stroke my own cock any time I like, but when I have a sore back, reaching round to try and rub it only makes things worse.

If you could be anywhere right now, where would you go?

Right now? I’d go to Brazil and stay there for the entire World Cup, especially if you’re willing to chuck in tickets to a few of the matches as well.

What book changed your perspective on life?

This is a bit like the music question above, in the sense that I can’t really give just one answer to it. Lots of books have changed my perspective on life, because that’s one of the things that really good books should do. Sometimes the change has been radical, more often it’s been very subtle, but either way there are few things better than getting to the end of a book and realising that you’ve started thinking about something in a different way. All of which is a roundabout way of saying ‘I don’t know’. Or ‘lots of them’. The last book to really challenge my thinking about a particular topic or issue was Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder.

When I was in grade school, a classmate informed us all that his father told him sex with a woman was like sticking your penis into a hot oven. We were all slightly horrified and titillated at this. As an adult, I find “hot oven” to be an unsatisfactory description. Please elaborate.

Firstly, I’d say that if that boy’s father experienced a burning sensation in his penis on a regular basis, he should probably have consulted his GP.

You’re right though, that’s disturbing and wrong. The terrible thing is, while I can think of a million better ways to describe the sensation, I can’t think of one that really captures what it’s like. Oh, oh, except you know the scene in Flash Gordon, where that guy has to stick his arm down inside a dark, damp, gnarled old tree stump, only it turns out there’s a poisonous Wood Beast lying in wait, and the Wood Beast bites him, and then Timothy Dalton has to stab him in the chest with a sword to stop him going insane? Yeah…it’s nothing like that.

To be continued…

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.

—

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.

—

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.”

—

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.

—

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.

—

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.

(Even if you think this post is shit, please skip to the end for an important announcement)

Last September I wrote about why I don’t like blowjobs. I stand by most of the points I made in that post (even if my overall position has shifted slightly…), but I could really have boiled the whole thing down to one key issue: when someone’s sucking my cock, it’s often very hard for me to get out of my own head.

I was trying to explain this to someone recently. When I’m having sex, and when the sex is good, for the most part I’m too busy – too horny – for conscious thought. Depending on the position, my hands, lips, tongue, legs, and arse are all likely to be involved in some way, and if we’re face-to-face there will also be eye contact to draw in all of my focus. Sex is kinetic: lots of moving parts. When a woman has my cock in her mouth, that’s often not the case. Everything can suddenly feel very still. Distant, detached and remote. The area around my head and torso can start to get very isolated, and as soon as that happens my brain gets twitchy. It wants to think.

—

Like most people, I think about sex a lot. I think about it when I wake up in the morning, and I think about it when I go to bed at night. I think about it in the shower, on the toilet, and while I’m making a cup of tea. I think about it on trains, in cars, and every time I’m flying somewhere. I think about it when I go out running, and I think about it when I’m in the pub with a glass of wine. I think about it while I’m writing, Tweeting, chatting, texting, and on the phone to my Mum.

You get the idea.

However, when I’m actually having sex, the last thing I want to do is think about it. I don’t want to think about anything, in fact. I want to sweep every last little thought out of my brain, then wrap it carefully in cotton wool and tuck it away at the back of a cupboard.

—

Bear with me on this, but sex falls into the same category as driving, falling asleep, exams, job interviews, golf, flying, and a bunch of other stuff. Rely on some combination of experience, instinct, natural ability, training and preparation, and you’ll be just fine. Get out of your own head for a bit, relax, make it kinetic, and the body is generally able to do the rest by itself. As soon as you start actively thinking about the mechanics of what you’re doing, things go wrong.

What happens when I fail to turn off my brain during sex? Hmm, let’s see…

Things I sometimes think during sex*

1. Uh oh
2. Get back in your cupboard, brain
3. I’m about to get cramp in my foot
4. Jesus, now I have cramp in my foot
5. I just know my face is a really unattractive shade of red right now
6. Is this deep/hard/gentle/fast/slow enough for her?
7. Why isn’t she making any noise?
8. Those loud noises she’s making sound really fake – shit, is she faking it?
9. She thinks my cock is too small
10. I bet the last guy she fucked was way bigger
11. What if I come too quickly?
12. What if I can’t come at all?
13. From that angle, she can see right up my nose
14. I’m about to burp/fart/hiccough – stupid body
15. Shut up shut up shut up shut up SHUT UP

And I promise you, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Why do I think those things? Because like 95% of people, I’m a complete basket case. I have a whole bunch of hang-ups and insecurities, and while I agree with Malin James that you increase your control over those as you get older, there are still moments when I have to fight hard to keep a lid on the crazy.

The silver lining is that the crazy is only ever directed inwards. For example…

Things I never think during sex

1. Woah, look at that cellulite
2. Her orgasm face is weird
3. I wish she had more clothes on
4. She’s too fat
5. She’s too thin
6. What is with that hair?
7. I’ve never seen nipples like those before
8. Why does her arse wobble each time I thrust inside her?
9. Etc etc

If we’ve made it as far as the bedroom, it’s safe to say that I find you hot, and will be largely blind to whatever you consider to be your physical flaws. I won’t notice that spot on your chin, or the hair you found on one of your breasts last night and have been obsessing about ever since. Even if my eyes see them, my brain won’t care. That’s not because I’m superficial (though I’m pretty sure I am): it’s because when we’re fucking, what I’ll notice is the stuff that made me want to get into your pants in the first place.

I’m not saying that the sex is never bad. Every now and then the sex is terrible, and because I’m not a saint I’ll sometimes blame the other person for that. They just lie there with their eyes shut, or they can’t kiss, or when they stroke my cock it’s like that time in Year 9 Woodwork, when Wayne O’Brien got his sleeve caught in the sanding machine and ripped half the skin off the back of his hand. But when those things happen, I say something. Not in a nasty way – I’m not that guy – but these days I will speak up if it’s not working for me, and I’ll try to find a way to fix the problem.

—

I’ve got much better at telling my brain to shut up. First during sex, then, over the last 12 months, during oral. I’ll never have perfect control over it though. There will always be the odd night when I feel insecure, or when the right switch doesn’t get tripped and the lights in my head are just too bright. When that happens, I have to take a deep breath and step back for a minute. I have to breathe. Some people understand that. They understand, and they know: it’s really not you…it’s me.

—

*There’s a difference here between thought and fantasy – between words and pictures. I have all sorts of hot/kinky/dirty/illicit images that I’ll occasionally scroll through in my head during sex, especially if I need something to push me over the edge. My friend. My sister’s friend. My mate’s wife. My mate’s husband. That office right next to the boardroom where everyone can hear us if we make any noise. The lift with the glass walls, and your tits squished against one of them as I fuck you in full view of the city below. Every now and then I’ll use those images to get me off, but it’s like loading a DVD, or a porn clip I bookmarked last week. It’s like engaging auto-pilot – not staring down over the nose of the plane at the ground below.

—

P.S. This is my 97^th post. #98 will be about bucket lists, and #99 will be an image for Sinful Sunday. That means #100 will probably be up early next week.

This blog started off as a random collection of fairly boring dick pics. Since I moved to Poland, it’s been a mix of fiction, commentary, autobiography, and hopefully slightly better dick pics. For my 100^th post though, I’d like to do something a little different.

As a white, male, heterosexual(ish) sex blogger, two things are undeniably true:

1. I write from a position of privilege
2. I’m in the minority when it comes to what I write

I don’t think those are mutually exclusive, and I try to bear both in mind when I post stuff, even if I don’t always succeed.

For my 100^th post, I’m going to shamelessly rip off something Girl on the Net did a couple of months ago, and do a Q&A. Or a ‘Q & Exhibit A’, if you will. If the last few months on Twitter are anything to go by, lots of you have questions. There are a few that I won’t answer – my full name, for example – but for the most part I’m happy to satisfy that curiosity, whether it relates to me as a person, or to the male view in general.

Send me your questions by email, by DM, or in the comments section here, and if there are enough of them by next week, that will be my 100^th post. You people are the reason I continue to blog, so it only seems right that you should all be part of this particular milestone.

For the first time in quite a while, I found myself on a train this morning with no book, no mobile battery, and no filthy friend to stroke and suck my cock as the miles flew by. It was only as I was getting ready to lean my head against the window and doze off for a bit that I remembered my laptop, fully-charged and in my man-bag, complete with the Kindle software I downloaded a few months ago for exactly this sort of emergency.

Ok, that’s not quite true: I downloaded the software because a bunch of my favourite erotica writers have hot, dirty stories that they haven’t published in print form, and if I want to wank to their stuff, I have to download an electronic copy first. Still, two birds, one stone. I was horny, and the train wasn’t that busy, so I slipped my hand down inside my jeans and started to rub my cock, while flicking through my library in search of something I knew would get me off.

This isn’t a story about that though. Train wanks are fun, but unless someone catches you in the act, and either calls the police or drags you into the toilet and begs you to fuck them, they’re not generally much to write home about. At some point during the journey – you can decide for yourself whether you think it was pre-, post- or mid-wank – I read the chapter from Girl on the Net’s book about losing her virginity, and about the joys of teenage sex. Apart from being beautifully written, it made me realise that I’ve never written about my own ‘first time’, or about my early sexual experiences. This, then, is a story about those.

—

I can remember exactly how old I was when I lost my virginity. I was 21 years, 7 months, 5 days, and, if we’re being pedantic, probably about 1 hour. But don’t hold me to that. I know all of this because it happened on Valentine’s Day 2003, at the end of a spectacularly successful – and alcohol-fuelled – blind date.

We went to one of Oxford’s classier restaurants, ate food that neither of us could really afford, drank our body weight in wine, and moved on to a terrible bar, which that night was full of middle-aged couples swaying unsteadily to a succession of cheesy classics. We had the decency to collapse into a corner booth before jumping on each other, but that level of restraint didn’t last long. By the time she guided my hand under her skirt and told me to push my fingers inside her cunt, we were hovering on the edge of the dance floor, visible to anyone who happened to look our way.

Katy was far more experienced than I was, but even then we were apparently equal in our disregard for public decency. I suppose there must have been a moment when we looked at each other and paused, aware of where we were and the fact that we’d only just met, but if so, I don’t remember it. What I do remember is the DJ, who’d spotted us by that point. He was exactly the kind of DJ you’d expect to find in that kind of bar: too keen on the sound of his own voice, and desperately unimaginative in his choice of music. He clearly got a kick out of drawing attention to us, and people were watching more closely by then. When he shouted ‘is it in yet?’, we began to consider our options, and by the time he advised me to ‘take her home and fuck her properly’, she’d decided that I should do just that.

I’d already told her that I was a virgin. I’d assumed it would be a huge turn-off, but instead Katy seemed to get off on taking charge. She pointed us in the direction of her place and we walked through the cold – and suddenly very quiet – streets arm-in-arm, adrenaline still flowing from the bar. We kissed as we walked – I think I needed to keep touching her, to avoid giving myself too much thinking time – and when we reached the rather dilapidated student house she shared with her friends, we were ready to fall through the door and into each other. I was ready, anyway. Katy wanted to take things slowly. At first I thought she was trying to inject a bit of romance into what had otherwise been a pretty sloppy, frenetic encounter, but as she took my hand and led me into the bathroom, she told me that as it was my first time, she wanted to make it special. Special meant taking a bath together. Katy and I defined special in very different ways.

Actually, I have nothing against baths, and nothing against a long seduction. It’s just that slow, lingering foreplay is generally much easier and far more pleasurable when you’re not shaking with nerves. A quick, clumsy, fumbling fuck would’ve done just nicely at that point. The truth is, I was starting to panic a bit, and the longer we sat in the bath, kissing and touching each other, the worse I felt. It took me out of the moment and into the past: back to a time I definitely didn’t want to be thinking about just before trying to have sex.

—

There’s a Sliding Doors moment somewhere in the second chapter of GOTN’s book. It involves tits. She has them; I don’t. Until her tits entered the picture, I recognised a lot of my own slightly depressing teenage existence. Take this paragraph, for example:

‘I wasn’t particularly popular at school. I was the geeky kid, the one who did well in exams but badly with the boys. The ‘good’ one, for whom detentions were so unthinkable that the one time I did get one my mum reacted as if there’d been a terrible miscarriage of justice’

I could have written that. Seriously. In fact, there’s every chance I have written that at some point. You can substitute GOTN’s ‘thick glasses and depressingly lank hair’ for my terrible skin, diminutive stature…and depressingly lank hair, but otherwise I was the same awkward little ball of teenage lust, who shone academically and flunked pretty much every class on the social front. What I lacked was a certain pair of silver bullets. Over to you again, GOTN:

‘The problem with adult men is that they just don’t touch my tits enough. I’ve never met a straight man who says he doesn’t like tits. And yet as grown men they miss out on a million opportunities to touch them up. I can think of no occasion when I’ve been relaxing with a guy on the sofa that wouldn’t have been immeasurably improved if he’d had one hand idly exploring the inside of my shirt. Teenage boys were fantastic, for countless different reasons, but the most fantastic thing of all was their obsession— their pure and complete satisfaction— with touching my tits.’

Aside from doing adult men a bit of a disservice (believe me, we love touching your tits), that hits the nail on the head. As a teenage boy, I wanted nothing more than to play with a pair of tits. For a long time, my ambitions didn’t really stretch any further: I knew what was involved in sex, and I knew it would probably be pretty cool when I got round to it, but it felt like it could wait a little longer. Tits though – they couldn’t wait. They were the Holy Grail, and the more they remained just out of reach, the more frustrated and confused and unattractive I felt. I didn’t have anything of my own to offer in return – that was the fundamental problem – and I didn’t know how to go from helping a girl with her homework, or talking to her about the fantasy novel I was reading, to getting my hands on whatever she had under her school jumper. If I’d ever managed to square that circle, maybe the rest of my sexual education would’ve taken place a lot earlier.

—

Eventually, at the age of 18, I fell into a relationship with one of my best friends. I was just about to go to Oxford, she was taking a gap year before heading to Cambridge, and in the eight months we were together, we had most of our ‘first times’ together. First kiss. First grope (at last – tits!!). First “I love you”. First fingering. First hand job. First time either of us had been naked with another person…

…and that’s where we stalled. She wasn’t ready for more. She would come and stay in my tiny single bed, in my shabby college room, and we’d lie wrapped up in each other’s arms all night, my cock throbbing hard against her stomach till she decided it was time to jerk me off. That went on all autumn, then right the way up to the weekend before she flew to Hungary in January, to teach English till the summer. On the night before she left, we got up to my room and as I shut the door behind us she turned to me and, with an excited flourish, whipped a pair of condoms out of her handbag. It was time.

You’re clever people, so I’m sure you can guess what happened next. Or rather, what didn’t happen. We got naked, we kissed, I put my hand between her legs and felt how wet she was, but each time I tried to put the condom on, my erection disappeared. She tried to help, which only really made things worse, and I retreated several times to the bathroom to swear at my flagging cock and curse whichever cruel God didn’t want me to get laid that night.

I don’t often wish that I could go back and talk to my younger self, but I make an exception for that night, and for the months that followed. There was the month I dutifully flew to Hungary to visit my first love, only to get dumped. Then there was the month two of my friends got back from Budapest, and told the rest of us how they’d had to stuff pillows over their head in the youth hostel at night to drown out of the sound of my first love being fucked hard by her new boyfriend, who was presumably in possession of a fully-functional penis. Finally, there was the month she got back to the UK, and I was so nervous about seeing her at my best mate’s party that I vomited in the bathroom sink, drank all his parents’ booze, and snogged the object of his affections outside his kitchen window. That one took some explaining.

I wish I could go back and tell 18-year-old me that it wasn’t his fault. That it happens, and that just because it happens once, doesn’t mean it’ll happen again. He was a pretty rational kid, but he knew fuck all about actual sex, and I like to think he’d listen to older, wiser me. If he did, he’d have a much happier time of it at university.

—

He would also have been much more relaxed in the bath that night, with sweet, eager Katy running her hand down his stomach and over his cock.

Luckily, this is a story with a happy ending. Katy took me into her bedroom, which I can picture vividly even now, despite having been in it no more than half a dozen times. She invited me onto the bed and pushed my face between her legs, wanting my tongue there. When her mouth found my cock a little while later, I realised that this time would be different. Her mouth got me harder, not softer. The more she sucked, the more I squeezed my eyes shut and willed her to do it now. When she did finally sit up and roll a condom down onto my rigid cock, I was so relieved that I actually laughed. As she straddled my body and sank all the way down, a knot of fear unravelled inside me – the same fear that had lived inside me since that fumbling, awkward night three years earlier.

The sex itself, I would later learn, was nothing special, but to me that night was everything, and I still remember it with a tingle of excitement. I left the next morning feeling a foot taller, and far more confident in who I was, not just in bed but as a person. I carried it round with me like GOTN’s teenage tits – part weapon, part validation, and a memory guaranteed to put a spring in my step whenever I scrolled back over it.

Katy and I saw each other for a couple of months after that, and ticked off a few more of my first times together. First proper blowjob. First time fucking in a car. First time I made a woman come with my cock. In the end she ditched me for the guy she’d later marry, but there were no hard feelings. She gave me a gift so precious that even now I don’t know how I’d go about repaying her. This isn’t a story about Katy, but she’s definitely the heroine – my knight in shining armour. My happy beginning.

I have light red hair and light blue eyes. My skin is pale and freckled. The hair on my arms and legs is fine and soft. I hail from good, solid, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stock, and it’s evident in every aspect of my appearance, from ginger tip to flour-white toe. My ancestors were sailors, dockers and fishermen; coal-miners, tin-miners and factory-workers. Between them, they ensured that I’m built for cold, biting winds, and the sort of rain that kisses you softly at the start of the day and tucks you into bed at the end of it, without leaving your side in-between.

My last serious relationship was with a Spaniard. We argued about all the usual things – religion, football, Gibraltar (mainly Gibraltar) – but the most heated and vicious rows always circled back to the same divisive issue: the weather. She would come to England in June and shiver as we walked down the street, bundled up in coat and scarf while I gave her side-eyes in my shorts and t-shirt. I would visit Madrid in October and sweat my way through the city centre, darting from one pool of shade to another. I slept with the windows open in December. She slept with them closed in July. Neither of us could imagine living in the other’s crazy country, with its crazy climate. An irreconcilable difference, in the end.

Because as far as I’m concerned, heat is not fun. Heat is certainly not sexy. The cold – the cold is sexy. The cold makes me feel sexy. I have skinny-dipped in a waterfall on Skye in October. I’ve stood naked in the snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains, my cock hard as iron while the rest of me burned with an icy, metallic fire. I’ve fucked in frost-flecked fields under clear, starry January skies, and I’ve fucked in dark alleyways at 2 in the morning with our breath billowing around us in big white clouds.

The cold is sexy because when the rest of the world feels stripped of heat, it’s still possible for another person to come along and set fire to your blood. Everyone knows that power is an aphrodisiac: well what could be more powerful than someone who can banish the bitter, howling wind with one touch of their finger or brush of their lips? Physical contact in the cold means something. Like penguins, we draw closer together as the temperature drops; we hug, kiss, and rub each other’s skin to encourage sluggish arteries and sleepy veins. We find the best ways to move our bodies, and to raise our heart rates. We draw heat from each other, and create it together, in whatever way we know will make us feel good.

It’s not that I don’t like the sun. Give me a warm August afternoon, an ice-cold beer, and the opportunity to doze off on a rug in the park, and I’ll be a very happy man. I just won’t want to fuck you. I’ll still be horny, so fine, maybe we can exchange lazy kisses for a few minutes, or you can sink down onto my cock and feel it twitch inside you. You’ll look beautiful in your summer dress, and I’ll shade my eyes against the sun so I can see your face glowing above me. It’ll be great – we just won’t fuck. Fucking is hot, sweaty, sticky business, and that’s absolutely fine by me, but when I’m already hot, sweaty and sticky, the last thing I want to do is make that worse. What I want is to eat an ice cream, or drink a glass of white wine, or have a nice lie-down in a cool room.

It’s been hot this week in Warsaw. High 20s (low 80s for those of you reading in ‘merica), with only a bit of a drop-off once the sun goes down. I’ve spent a lot of time on my balcony, reading, drinking, and generally taking in the view. It’s been glorious, in a quiet, soporific sort of way, but for the most part I’m glad I haven’t had to share it. When the weather’s like this, I want to be quiet and still. I want to avoid excessive movement – walking is fine, but anything more feels like a luxury. I want to sleep naked and alone, duvet thrown onto the floor and sweat-soaked pillows pushed to one side. I want to take cold showers, not because I’m frustrated, but because I’m fucking hot.

There are always things you can do to warm up in winter, and most of those things are very enjoyable. Running around. Sitting by the fire. Taking a bath. Drinking tea. Eating big meals. Holding someone close and kissing them. Getting into bed together and rolling the duvet around you, then feeling for each other in the darkness. Fucking. Fucking hard. Fucking often. Fucking to keep the heat in and the cold out, and damn everything and everyone else. You can’t do that in summer. Summer is more civilised. Summer is about keeping cool – literally and metaphorically. Summer isn’t sexy, which is a terrible irony given how amazing women look in their sundresses and beach clothes. Summer isn’t sexy…until the storm breaks.

When it comes to sex, I’m a Celt and a Saxon. I’m a Stark of Winterfell. Winter is coming? Fucking bring it on.