Category: Sex

I’ve always done my best not to shy away from tackling sensitive subjects and taboo issues on this blog. I’ve written about getting an accidental hand job from a masseuse. I’ve written about period sex, and angry sex, and sex when I don’t come. I’ve written about strap-ons, because I like them, and about blowjobs, because I don’t didn’t.

However, until today I avoided confronting perhaps the most sensitive subject – the most taboo issue – of them all…

…yes, I’m talking about men who keep their socks on during sex.

Even Ella Dawson – one of the most sex-positive people I know – blanched at the notion of hopping into bed with a chap who declined to bare his toes before getting down to business.

“For me it comes down to the fact that socks are goofy,” she wrote. “When I see the guy I’m fucking is still wearing his socks, I immediately laugh.”

And it’s hard to argue with that response, especially when it seems to reflect conventional wisdom on the subject. Socks are not sexy, and men who wear them in bed – well, they’re even less so. Socks are smelly and sweaty. They draw attention to the feet – not a strong selling-point for most guys. With very few exceptions they look either boring or ridiculous; and as a society we seem to have decided that, by association, the same must be true of any man who can’t bring himself to remove them pre-shag.

I should add at this point that I have no vested interest in the topic, beyond a general desire to debunk ridiculous sexual myths and stereotypes; because even bearing in mind what I wrote in the last paragraph, sock-wearing feels to me like an example of finding the idea of something unsexy, rather than the something itself. We mock it because we think it says something about the guys who do it, not because socks look any more inherently unattractive on men than they do on women.

Does that matter though? Or rather, are the things it says about those guys actually true? When I first started thinking about this yesterday afternoon, I was struck by the fact that – in my head at least – the one type of sex where socks on men are both common and accepted is the type that takes place on camera. When I think about male porn stars, I picture dubious facial hair, enormous dicks…and yes, little white ankle socks. A bit of research confirmed that I wasn’t imagining things: of a random sample of 10 Youporn clips (I know, the sacrifices I make…), six of them featured men whose footwear remained in place for the duration of the scene.

At the time, I thought that was going to be the perfect rebuttal to a tired old cliché. If we watch porn to get off, and if the men in porn generally wear socks, doesn’t it follow that socks must, at the very least, be no great barrier to arousal?

It was only this morning that I realised my mistake. Most mainstream porn (straight and gay) is made by men for men – if it turns women on too, that’s really just a happy accident. As a result, those ankle socks aren’t there because women find them arousing; they’re there because the men can’t be bothered to take them off, and because they don’t intend to stick around after shooting their load. The socks symbolise the fleeting, transactional nature of the sexual encounter, and if that’s true in porn, maybe it’s true in life as well.

My conversation with Ella brought that idea into sharper focus.

“I know other women who think socks are symbolic,” she said. “If a man leaves his socks on it means he has one foot out the door.”

Then there’s the late Kirsty MacColl. ‘Don’t come the cowboy with me, Sonny Jim,’ she implores, and why? Take it away, Kirsty…

‘Some boys with warm beds and cold, cold hearts
Can make you feel nothing at all
They’ll never remember and they’ll never mind
If you’re counting the cracks in the wall
They’re quick and they’re greedy
They never feel guilty
They don’t know the meaning of hurt
The boots just go back on
The socks that had stayed on
The next time they see you
They treat you like dirt
The next time they treat you like dirt’

Socks are dull and boring. Socks are goofy and ridiculous. So far, so blah. What I hadn’t considered is that for some people, socks symbolise impermanence. Lack of intimacy. ‘One foot out the door.’ Or that if a guy can’t be bothered to take them off, maybe there are other things he can’t be bothered to do either, like give head, or prioritise her orgasm, or stick around and cuddle afterwards.

Do I occasionally leave my socks on when I fuck? Sure. Sometimes it’s because I don’t want to break off to remove them. Like putting on a condom, it’s possible to do it in a sexy way, but it can also feel fumbling and awkward, jarring you both out of the moment, however briefly – unlike putting on a condom, it’s never essential to the whole process, so why not skip it every now and then?

At other times, I leave them on because we’re both so desperately, pantingly horny that every extraneous action gets forgotten: all that matters is getting down and dirty, even if that means we forget about a pair of socks here, or a bra there.

For the most part though, when I think about leaving my socks on during sex, I think about serious relationships, and about the sort of easy comfort where neither of us has to worry about the impression we’re giving – because we know each other well enough to look beyond and inside that.

I didn’t expect to come to this conclusion yesterday afternoon, but maybe when that deep, intimate connection doesn’t exist – and when it’s not clear from the start that it’s just a casual hook-up – there are good reasons for men to make a bit of an effort and leave their socks on the bedroom floor, where they belong.

Scene One (6 hours)

She is en route from Boston to Tehran and has a layover in Amsterdam.

“I could come and see you,” I say.
“You’re crazy,” she says. “I’ll be in England in a week!”
“I could come and see you…”

I leave West Oxfordshire in my car at 10pm, snatch 45 minutes of sleep on the ferry, and rock up to the airport at 10.30 the next morning, punch-drunk and aching with tiredness. Seeing her energises me in a way that a thousand Red Bulls never could. We have our Kodak moment: I spot her just as she drops her bag at her sister’s feet and runs towards me; she leaps into my open arms and lets me spin her around and around, our lips glued together like neither of us can quite believe that we’re here.

We fuck. Of course.

It nearly doesn’t happen. We’re both new to Amsterdam – we don’t know its quiet corners and secret places – and neither of us can afford to check into a hotel. Instead, we ditch her sister and go exploring. An invisible clock ticks above our heads. Five hours till she has to be back at the airport…then four…then three…

We walk through the red light district and eat pizza from a hole in the wall. We huddle and shiver together in a doorway as the grim, grey October weather beats away at our euphoria, one icy raindrop at a time. We stand firm though, even when I give in to fatigue and fall asleep on a bench in De Bijenkorf: she covers me tenderly with her coat and takes photos to stick inside my Christmas card, but when I wake up 20 minutes later, panicky and confused, she’s there to plaster me with kisses and bury her head in my shoulder.

We spot it on our way out. She grabs something – anything – off the shelf and tugs me towards it.

“Help me try this on?”
“It would be my pleasure!”

It’s more of a pod than a proper changing room. Pill-shaped, with two small, curtained-off spaces separated by a central wall, it sits in the middle of the sales floor, metres away from one of the checkout desks. Still, it’s our best shot and we both know it.

She hurries inside and I duck in after her, two hangers clutched convincingly in my hand. She closes the curtain behind me and I toss the clothes to one side – this has to be quick, but after six weeks apart we both know that won’t be a problem. I hike up her suede skirt as she yanks at my belt. She never wears knickers when she flies to see me – we both value easy access in those first, frantic minutes on the bus, or in a dark corner of the airport car park – so I win that race. My fingers find her cunt straight away and I push two of them inside her, knowing how wet she’ll be.

She finally frees my cock, the clink-clank of my belt buckle echoing loudly as my jeans slither down my thighs. A giggling fit bubbles up dangerously close to the surface. This is madness – wonderful, glorious madness – but there’s no time to think about that, not when her mouth is already on my cock and…oh…no, not like that, stop, stop!

I pull her up and spin her round till she’s facing the mirror, one arm braced against it as she teases her clit. I nudge her legs further apart, and she thinks I’m teasing, thinks I’m holding back, but I’m not and I can’t and I wouldn’t. I take her like that, both of us hoping the cheery, piped pop music will prevent the people outside from hearing our gasps and moans. I look at her face in the mirror – cheeks flushed, lips parted, eyes open wide – and she stares right back at me.

We come together. We’ve learnt to do that by then, though this time it’s happy, serendipitous accident, rather than any sort of design.

“I should buy some underwear,” she says, as we rearrange our clothing. “Can’t turn up in Tehran with my thighs still sticky from your cum.”

We walk out of the store looking tired and triumphant: just-fucked, thank you very much. I drive them both back to the airport. Her sister is bored, and impatient to get on with the journey.

“Where did you guys go?”
“Oh, here and there.”

I drop them at Departures and we kiss goodbye. I don’t get out of the car. An hour later I stop for petrol and check my phone. One text.

‘On second thoughts, who needs underwear? Can’t wait till next week…x’

Scene Two (22 hours)

Three years have gone by. We’re older and sadder; we carry around the pain we’ve caused each other and the bitter aftertaste of something that used to be so sweet. She no longer comes to England with her suede skirt and absent knickers. I no longer drive all night just to see her. There are no more Kodak moments.

Still, when it’s time to visit Iran again, she gives me a call.

“Are you seeing anyone at the moment? I have another layover in Amsterdam next month. I thought…”

I book my flight that afternoon. A hotel too, because I want to do things properly this time. It’s just sex – we both know that – but it’s sex with someone whose body I know even better than my own. Sex that feels like slipping into a hot bath at the end of a long day.

I arrive at 9pm, eight hours before she’s due in. I get the hotel shuttle and kill time at the bar. I drink, because I know I won’t sleep unless I’m at least a little buzzed, and I listen to another British guy tell me about his food services business, while keeping a close eye on the group of Scandinavian air hostesses in the corner.

Back in the room, I prepare for her arrival. I shower, and trim my beard. Condoms get scattered all over the nightstand; lube too, because she wants me to fuck her arse again (“I can’t find anyone else who will!”). I’ve brought some of the food she likes, and this goes under the bed, hidden away, to be produced with a flourish whenever she gets hungry.

I set the alarm and try to sleep. I wake at 2, and at 3, and again at 5, when she’s due to land. The text comes half an hour later. She’s just missed a shuttle, and I shower again, too distracted to read or sleep, but in need of something to pass the time.

I meet her downstairs at 6.15. Just under six hours till we have to check out. We fall on each other in the lift, and against the wall outside my door. I disentangle one hand for long enough to swipe the keycard, then kick the door shut behind us.

We exchange very few words in that hotel room. We fuck and we sleep: once, twice, three times. She knows how to get me hard again, even groggy and jetlagged from the redeye out of Boston, and I devour her body like it’s the first and last time I’ll ever feel it against mine. For one morning, nothing in our lives has changed. There’s no sadness, no pain: it’s sweet and tender, filthy and familiar, in a way that neither of us has found with anyone else, and as noon approaches I try to push that thought deep down inside me, so I don’t choke on it when we say our goodbyes.

I go with her to the airport, but my flight isn’t until 7, so I wave her off at the security gates, and she waves back with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. I catch the train into town. I was so sleepy the last time I walked through the streets that I barely remember them: a building here, a church there, but nothing to grab onto and anchor myself against.

I do the Anne Frank House and the red light district – dreadfully incongruous, but I’m too distracted to care about that. I revisit De Bijenkorf, but our changing room has gone, and I don’t need new underwear that day. I eat a wonderful meal on my own, with a good book, and I begin to feel myself again. I realise that I want to stay, at least for the evening, to see what Amsterdam is really like. I send a text for her to read when she lands.

‘We should do this again some time! Maybe make a weekend of it…’

I pay the bill and get the train back to the airport. This is not yet a city that makes sense without her.

Scene Three (2 hours)

I’ve broken a promise to myself, and bought an indirect flight when a direct one was available. I check my watch and Google transport options. Yes, it should just be possible. I hustle from the gate through Schiphol’s vast hallways, and out into Arrivals. God bless Schengen!

I buy a ticket for one of the big continental express trains. It takes 15 minutes to hurtle through the suburbs and into Amsterdam Centraal. The air is cold, but I am warm, relaxed and content. This feels like a palate cleanser. I buy chips from a stall outside De Bijenkorf – I don’t need to go in this time – and I sit on a bench by the canal to eat them. I make eye contact with a hooker in one of the windows above the street. It’s lunchtime and business is clearly slow, because she smiles at me and points at my chips, then rubs her belly in mock satisfaction. I smile back, but when she pushes her tits towards me I shake my head apologetically. I’ve had some great sex in Amsterdam, but these two hours are not about that. They’re about seeing something else in this city, and about knowing that I’ll be back one day to enjoy it properly.

I’ve had a couple of conversations over the last few days that made me think it was time to write this post. The first of them started with a question:

“So what is it that turns you on about being dominated by a woman?”

It’s something that I suspect male switches (and submissives) get asked more frequently than their female counterparts. Aided in no small measure by FSOG, female submission is seen as a profoundly ‘natural’ urge, and one that requires explanation only in terms of how it’s expressed; a woman who voices her desire to be dominated by a man may face challenges and questions around its more extreme manifestations, but is likely to have fewer people trying to understand the root cause of the desire itself.

That is in itself problematic. The assumption that women are sexually submissive by nature is lazy and sexist, and feeds into all sorts of other unpleasant notions about gender roles in the bedroom. However, it also means that when people find out that as well as taking charge, I really enjoy being controlled and dominated in bed, their first question – rather than ‘how?’ – is generally ‘why?’

I’ve written quite a lot about the how. I’ve written about orgasm denial, and how hot it is when someone tells me not to come. I’ve written about strap-on play, and how much I love being bent over and fucked by a woman who wants to use my arse. I’ve written about being restrained, and about face-sitting, and about women who want me to strip for them while they watch: all things that turn me into a whimpering puddle of lust whenever I allow myself to spend time thinking about them.

I’ve also written about how that submissive streak ties in with other areas of my sexuality (the subject of this week’s second conversation). How when I think about being with other guys, it’s always within the context of female pleasure and control: I’m not just sucking someone’s cock, I’m sucking it because she tells me to, or because it gets her wet to watch me do it. When I fantasise about threesomes, and about being fucked, I’m never the one directing events. Instead, I’m spread out on all fours with his big dick in my arse, while she holds my face between her legs; or while she looks me in the eye and touches herself, aroused by the sight of me taking it like that – taking it for her.

What I’ve never really stopped to explain here is why those things turn me on. I think that’s generally a good thing: the reason why I don’t feel the need to analyse or scrutinise the submissive side of my sexual personality is that it’s something with which I’m both happy and comfortable. I don’t worry about it, and I certainly don’t feel ashamed of having those tendencies: if anything, I’m frustrated that I don’t get more opportunities to explore and enjoy them.

Still, when I was asked that question the other day (and not for the first time this year), I forced myself to think about it in a bit more depth. What does turn me on about submission? What do all of those ‘hows’ have in common? Is there a way to join the dots that can explain why I like to be tied up, and teased, and used, and – yes – maybe humiliated just a little bit?

The answer is that of course there is, because when it comes right down to it, male submission is no more complex or special or out there than its female equivalent. I submit because it brings me an inner peace and calm that empties my mind and allows me to truly experience the things that I’m doing…or that are being done to me. I’m not a masochist – actually, anything beyond mild pain is an active turn-off – but I am a man who enjoys surrendering control to someone I know will not only wield it responsibly and imaginatively, but will derive genuine pleasure from using that power. The last thing I want to do when I submit is to top from the bottom; I want to set limits and discuss turn-ons in advance, then to trust the person I’m with to guide our play, rather than prompting or pushing them to do things a certain way.

I always shy away from describing myself as a control freak, but it’s certainly fair to say that in most situations I like to have at least some influence over what goes on in and around my life. I don’t enjoy feeling helpless, or at the mercy of things that are demonstrably outside my control. It’s an exhausting – and often confusing – way to engage with the world, especially on the occasions when I’m reminded just how flimsy and insubstantial my grip on events can be.

Sex, on the other hand, is a safe space for me in that respect. I can give up all of that control, all of that power, and know that I’m not going to be hurt or damaged as a result. It’s an incredibly relaxing, satisfying experience, and one that leaves me feeling healthier mentally. Even if it only lasts for an afternoon, or a night, the inner calm associated with sexual submission is a cleansing force: a five-star holiday for my body and my brain.

Submission both forces me and gives me license to be silent; to be still. That then becomes the foundation for everything else it enables. I don’t have to think about what I’m doing: I can give myself up to physical pleasure, both mine and that of the person I’m with. I can allow that person to guide me through my own desire, and to shape and sharpen my focus on hers, in whatever form that might take. It cuts through the chaos and makes life suddenly, tremendously simple. There are instructions that I have to follow. There are things that will be done to – or by – me, over which I have no control. Whatever I want at that time, whether it’s my own orgasm or something else, will depend not on my choices, but on the agenda and desire of my partner; regardless of how much I crave it, or beg for it, I won’t be the one who decides when (or even if) it happens.

I have neither the discipline nor the desire to be a ‘lifestyle sub’. I’m a switch, whose submission will always be situational and, at times, opportunistic. I need it less often than I need to have that sexual control, and certainly less often than I need sex generally. I still need it though. I need it in the same way I need to escape London sometimes and go walking in the hills; the way I need a weekend at my parents, or to completely lose myself in a good book. It strips everything in life down to the basics, and for that I will always value what it gives me.

—

For those who are curious, I took the title for this post from a scene in She’s All That, for reasons that should be fairly clear to anyone who’s watched the film. I wear my love of cheesy Hollywood teen movies on my sleeve, and make no apology for it!

There’s probably not a huge amount left to say about our idiotic new porn laws. Over the last 10 days they’ve been skewered – eviscerated – by everyone from Girl on the Net to Stavvers, Malin James to Myles Jackman, and I don’t disagree with a single word that any of them have penned on the subject. The amendment to the 2003 Communications Act is, at best, tragically and damagingly naive; and at worst another shining example of the kind of regressive, ignorant, and sexist legislation that this government has imposed upon us.

So what can I add to what’s already been written?

11 months ago, around the time I started blogging in earnest, I wrote a post about the lack of male nudity in mainstream media. It’s a subject about which I feel pretty strongly: partly out of solidarity, but also because, as I said in the post, men themselves will benefit if we ‘normalize the idea of male nudity, and…remove the lingering stigma from the idea of straight dudes looking at other dudes’ genitals.’

When I read through the list of activities that the BBFC will no longer deem acceptable, I experienced a similar wave of frustration and sadness. In a direct sense, it’s largely women who are the victims of these new regulations, but again, a big part of that unavoidably lies in the way that men will be prevented from learning about, enjoying, and engaging with activities that reference or prioritise female pleasure.

Sex education in the UK is so woefully deficient that most teenagers rely on porn to fill the gaps – to show sex as it really is. As we get older and more curious, porn provides an introduction to kink, and reassures us that the things we fantasise about, the things we want to do, are safe and normal. That we’re normal for wanting them.

If the new law means that young men will no longer get to explore their nascent desire for face-sitting, fisting, and female ejaculation, all of us will suffer. Female pleasure will be sidelined and marginalised, as will the men who get off on it, or who want to make it a central – a normal – part of their sexual experience. We become better than we are by educating ourselves, and through exposure to that to which we ought to aspire – in other words, if we want men to prioritise their partners’ sexual agency, it’s fucking stupid to consistently feed them the message that the ways in which that agency is expressed are dirty, dangerous, or wrong.

For those of us who are no longer quite so impressionable, the regulations are less pernicious and, at the same time, equally offensive. I fucking love it when someone sits on my face, whether it’s a loving and tender act, or a forceful and dominant one. I want to see it on screen, and to be trusted not to equate consensual D/S play with dangerous, reckless violence. I want to be able to watch a guy come on a woman’s face, but I also want to see a woman squirting uncontrollably all over her partner; hell, I want to be that partner, so of course I want to see it, and I’m not willing to accept anyone shaming me for finding it hot.

I don’t believe in completely unconstrained freedom of expression. There are images to which we ought to be denied access, and there is ‘pornography’ that should be criminalised, stigmatised and suppressed. One of the many reasons why this law is desperately ill-judged is that it dilutes our view of what falls into that category. If we start to treat complex and psychologically-driven scenarios involving consenting adults in the same way we treat images and videos that involve actual abuse, we will make it harder to take effective action against the genuinely harmful stuff out there.

Effective pornography legislation focuses on the production, not on the audience. It starts by preventing the exploitation of children and women; and in the long run it ensures that performers are physically safe, fairly compensated, and respected for what they do. If that involves missionary sex by candlelight, that’s great. If it involves watersports, or fisting, or weapon play, or any one of a dozen other things that I’m really not into, then that should be fine too. I can watch Daniel Craig be tortured in a Bond film, without wanting to strap my next-door neighbour to a chair and lay into him with a knotted rope – why can’t I watch a responsibly-shot spanking scene and be trusted not to attack my partner with a paddle or cane immediately thereafter?

There are millions of ways in which we can offer women better protection from sexual violence and mistreatment. The amendment to the Communications Act not only fails to meet that standard, it actively restricts and inhibits the expression of female pleasure and agency, thereby contributing to a culture in which men think of women as second-class sexual citizens.

Porn should not replace sex education. However, it would be stupid to pretend that it doesn’t play a formative role in the way that many young men view sex and sexuality. Instead of drawing arbitrary, hamfisted red lines around specific acts, we should be encouraging guys to seek out porn that emphasises consent, equality, and female pleasure, while clamping down on the material that’s genuinely abusive.

As a man, I want to see the full spectrum of female desire represented in the porn I watch, because that’s what turns me on. As an adult, I want my government to treat ‘extreme’ sexual content in the same way it does violent movies or video games, with an emphasis on safety, production standards and age restrictions, rather than crude, blanket censorship. On both counts, the new law is a resounding failure.

I tweeted today about a recent conversation I had with a friend. Earlier that week, her flatmate had jettisoned a particularly boring and unworthy fuckbuddy, largely at my friend’s behest. The discussion had gone something like this:

Friend: Why are you still with this guy? He’s so dull.

Flatmate: I know he’s dull, but he’s got a great dick.

Friend: Dick is cheap in London – even great dick.

Flatmate: …

And the thing is, it’s true. Maybe not everywhere, but certainly in London and, I’d wager, in most towns of a decent size, dick is exceptionally cheap; and because we live in a shamelessly capitalist economy, that essentially equates to a lack of any real worth. ‘Penis is abundant and low in value’, as one of my followers succinctly put it.

For those of us who happen to own a low-value penis, this should come as both good and bad news. Before diving into that though, it’s worth noting that this situation is entirely self-inflicted. We’ve spent centuries attempting to commoditise cock, and since the rise of the internet and (crucially) the smartphone, our chickens have not only come home to roost, they’ve done an IKEA run and installed central heating.

Familiarity does not breed contempt, exactly, but it certainly creates the sort of market conditions that cease to reward the status quo. Women now have access to dick on demand, and like any ‘on demand’ service, it acts a bit like a rising tide…except the ‘all’ that it lifts refers not to boats, but to female expectations.

Think about it. When you had to trek down to Blockbuster to choose a VHS, or when you were forced to pick between four TV channels on a Saturday evening, your patience levels with substandard entertainment were probably fairly high. If a movie sucked, well, you’d walked for 20 minutes and paid three quid to rent the damn thing, and anyway, the video store was already closed, so what else were you going to do but slog your way through it. At the very least, you’d give it a good half-hour before deciding it was too bad to watch in full. Now? Fuck that. If it doesn’t hook you in the first ten minutes – or provide a compelling reason to believe that it might at some point later on – you’re tossing it in the electronic trash can and streaming something else instead.

If you’re a film studio and you want to catch the attention of the discerning moviegoer, you have to be a lot smarter now than you did back before Amazon, and Netflix, and BitTorrent, and all the rest of it. Actually, more to the point, the market is maturing quickly enough that it’s not even really just the discerning moviegoer that you have to fool/incentivise. Expectations have shifted to the point that the wider consumer base expects flexible, customised service, and if you fail to provide that, you’re unlikely to survive in the modern entertainment industry.

For us guys, the first bit of good news is that dick hasn’t yet reached that level. Women like my friend are the equivalent of early tech adopters; they’re the pioneers who have cottoned on to the fact that they don’t have to put up with the old Ts & Cs, the outdated delivery mechanisms, in order to procure the sort of cock they’re looking for. Not only are there multiple vendors available, for the savvy consumer there’s also a level of product visibility that strips out most of the uncertainty from the process.

When that uncertainty disappears, so does the lazy fetishization of the penis. As guys, we got carried away by how easy new technology made it to immortalise our cocks on screen, and we sent those images out into the world until they were slowly drained of power or impact. Dick alone is not enough – not for the early adopters and, soon, not for the laggards or the Luddites either (if it ever was to begin with). Like the film industry, we’re slowly waking up to the fact that for most of us it’s not sufficient just to get our product out there – we have to package and sell it in the right way, and to deliver the sort of user experience that will get our target audience coming back for more.

When penis is abundant – when dick is cheap – we have to offer something beyond what we keep between our legs. Before Tinder, before Twitter, before the joyous (if incomplete) emergence of genuine female sexual agency, it was perhaps possible to act like a total cunt and rest secure in the knowledge that because the sex was great, you weren’t in danger of being ditched for the next cab off the rank. For one thing, there generally wasn’t any rank to speak of, and even when there was, how could she be sure the next guy would measure up?

Now? Forget about it. However great your dick – however much she loves it, and craves it, and wants it inside her every night – there are literally hundreds of equally appealing alternatives just a few clicks away. That’s always been the case, of course…but now she knows it. Not only that, she can source it, procure it, and consume it, in a way that will render your legacy product obsolete very quickly indeed.

That’s the bad news, right?

Wrong. In the end, that’s the best news of all, for dudes and chicks alike. As men, the availability of dick – even good dick – is no longer a differentiator. We can’t get lazy about that, because if we do, we’ll quickly find that the women we want in our lives will exit stage left, in search of something a bit less one-dimensional. It forces us to raise our game, both sexually and as human beings. Or rather, it presents us with a stark choice between raising our game on the one hand, and (d)evolving into little more than stunt cocks on the other. It’s fine to choose the latter, but in doing so we have to accept that we’re increasingly disposable; increasingly cheap.

Two weeks after dumping Mr Tedious, my friend’s flatmate is seeing three other guys, and getting all the dick she wants or needs. Penis – good penis – is abundant, and increasingly its value will be tied to the other products and services that are bundled with it. It’s hard not to see that as a good thing.

This isn’t the post I was going to write. The other day, I was looking longingly at my rather neglected bag of sex toys, and thinking about how long it’s been since someone properly fucked my arse. That led to a rather nostalgic fantasy about the first woman who took me that way, and I decided I’d blog about it when I got the chance.

That woman was called Nat, and she was a pint-sinking, rugby-playing, pierced-and-tattooed 19-year-old, who worked as a bank clerk in my home town. We were both fairly new to kink, and I was shy about exploring strap-on play with her, as she had been when discussing her own desire for anal with me. Pegging appealed to the domme in her though, and she was certainly strong enough to toss me around a bit once we’d both properly warmed up to the idea.

Both of us lived with parents at the time, so we mainly used to fuck in (or on) her car, out on one of the back roads near town, and I have a very vivid memory of a cold, clear, starry night – so cold that we kept the car heater on full blast throughout – and loud rock music drowning out my grunts and moans as she nailed me hard from behind on the back seat, the door open to give us more room.

That’s what I was going to write about. It was only when I started thinking about the details that I realised that Nat wasn’t just the first woman to fuck my arse: she was also the woman who introduced me to female ejaculation.

—

Squirting was on my mind already. A couple of years ago, I hooked up with an American who had moved to London to do her PHD. Sadie had excellent East Coast liberal arts school/sex-positive feminist credentials, and was generally a pretty awesome fuck. We’d seen each other a few times, and had moved quickly from ‘let’s just have lots of sex because sex is great’ to ‘hmm, I have this thing I really love and what do you think about trying it with me?’ In her case, that thing was receiving incredibly energetic anal sex, while using a vibrator on herself.

“I don’t know why, but I just come so hard when someone properly goes to town on my arse. I don’t like asking for it though, because it makes me squirt everywhere, and most guys aren’t cool with that.”

(Wait…what? Seriously? Yeah, we’ll come back to that…)

Anyway, half an hour later, I flopped down onto the only dry bit of bed sheet, shiny with sweat, lube, and Sadie’s cum, which ran in streaks down the insides of my thighs. She’d gushed so much that it had soaked through to the mattress, and the middle of the sheet was translucent with her juices. I stared at it in something approaching awe, and knew instantly that I’d be wanking over that sight – that feeling – for months to come.

—

Longer than that, in fact, because when Sadie sent me a ‘hey, how are you doing?’ email last week, that puddle of cum was the first thing that came to mind. She’s in a very happy relationship with a lovely guy, so it’s not an experience I envisage repeating, but it’s certainly one I’m unlikely ever to forget.

With Nat, it was different. It came as a real shock to both of us, in fact, because it wasn’t something we’d realised was possible. One minute I was going down on her – three fingers in her cunt, one in her arse, and my tongue furiously working her clit – and the next I felt a warm jet of liquid shoot down my chin. She sat bolt upright and looked at me open-mouthed.

“Fuck, what was that?”

“No idea. Did you know you could do that??”

“Nope! Um…want to see if I can do it again?”

And that was that. Whenever we met up, and regardless of which one of us ended up getting fucked, I’d always go down on her first, my fingers and tongue probing together in a greedy attempt to find the magic formula that would unlock what she uncertainly referred to as her ‘squirt reflex’. To a very inexperienced 22-year-old guy, it felt like the ultimate validation. ‘Look, look’, I wanted to say. ‘Look what I can make this person do!’

It’s happened with a few women since then, most memorably Anna, who I wrote about here for the Brit Babes. As with Sadie, ‘squirting’ is an inadequate word to describe the river of girl-cum with which Anna would soak me, the bed, and anything else within a ten-mile radius of her cunt whenever we fucked. Her internal muscles were so strong that I would have to fight to keep my cock inside her when she came – she pushed down incredibly hard, and more often than not I’d pop out of her despite my best efforts, along with another stream of fluid.

Our sessions together were always really long, because I got addicted to feeling her squirt over my fingers and face; I used to get comfortable between her legs and just work her G-spot as she hurled obscenities at me, and stuffed a pillow over her face to keep from screaming, until arousal turned to exhaustion and she went limp under my hands, unable to endure further stimulation.

—

I spent a couple of days pondering whether to write this at all. I know that relatively few women can squirt, and in talking about how much I love those who do, it would be very easy to imply that sex with those who don’t is inferior in some way. It’s really, really not. Squirting is just one of a long list of things that ought to make us appreciate how awesome the human body is, and how varied our sexual experiences can be, if we’re open to challenging narrow definitions of ‘normal’.

In the end, I wrote this because I remembered what Sadie said. Maybe she was just pushing my buttons – “come on big boy, show me how right-on and sexually-liberated you are” – but I kind of doubt it; equally though, I find it hard to believe that ‘most guys’ have a problem with squirting. That suggests it belongs on the depressingly long list of things that women are taught (by society rather than experience) to believe are shameful or embarrassing about the female body. Stuff like that becomes self-fulfilling: you try to avoid doing it, which means you never get the positive reinforcement required to bust the myth that it’s weird and unnatural.

So consider this a small part of that positive reinforcement: squirting rocks.