Category: Sex

Depending on your perspective, I’m either lucky or tragic enough to have lived alone for the last three years, and to have been without a ‘serious’ partner for the vast majority of that time. That’s partly down to circumstance, but is also the product of conscious choices that I’ve made, some of which I may explore in more depth in a future post. It affects my day-to-day life in all sorts of ways, of course – some good, some bad – but in a blogging sense it means that, for the most part, the photos that I post for memes like Sinful Sunday, or to accompany my writing, are ones I’ve taken myself, using a combination of the timer on my mobile phone, various bits of furniture, and stacks of books to adjust the height or angle of the shot.

It can be a bit fiddly and time-consuming, but overall I enjoy the challenge of setting up photos like that, especially on sleepy Sunday afternoons when I don’t feel like leaving the apartment. However, as well as both limiting the range of photos I can take, and reducing the quality of the finished product, it will also never be as much of a turn-on as having someone else train a camera lens on my naked body.

Perhaps it’s just that I’m an exhibitionist by nature – or an attention-seeker, if you’re feeling less charitable – but being photographed in such an intimate way always makes me incredibly horny. It doesn’t matter whether the camera is a silent observer, snapping away as I masturbate or just lounge around naked; or whether it’s in the hands of someone who wants to direct the action, or who has specific shots in mind; either way, I get a real thrill from the act of laying myself bare like that, and giving another person unfettered photographic access to my body.

I don’t know that I’m so unusual in that respect. I do know that my feelings about being naked in front of the camera are linked in a pretty direct way to one of my earliest sexual experiences. It came in February 2003: I was 21, still a virgin, and sufficiently scarred by the fairly disastrous attempts at sex with my first girlfriend three years earlier that I hadn’t dated anyone – been naked with anyone – in the time since then. Thanks to Karolina, a silly bet, and a Polaroid camera, that was all set to change.

—

I knew Karolina from university and we were good mates, although there’d always been a slight edge to our time together. She was curvy, flirty, a demon on the pool table, and very openly sexual. I viewed the last of those qualities with a mixture of fascination and outright terror. Late one night during my last year at Oxford, she appeared in my room after a boozy LGBT Soc dinner, stripped down to her underwear and dragged me into my bed with her. She was so drunk that she fell asleep shortly afterwards (I discovered that night that carrying a woman down four flights of stairs and up another two is harder than firemen make it look), but it’s fair to say that I wasn’t the only one who thought there might be some kind of spark between us, even if I was too clueless to know how to act on it at the time.

Karolina knew how shy and inexperienced I was, and although she was merciless in the way she exploited that information, she also encouraged me to come out of my shell a bit and to be more confident about my body. A few months after I graduated, and with a view to doing something about the second of those issues, she asked me how I felt about the idea of posing naked for her.

I’d been curious about having ‘candid’ photos taken for a while – I wanted to know what I looked like through someone else’s eyes  – so to have someone I knew and trusted offer to hold the camera felt like serendipity at work. She invited me over to her college room the following weekend. I dressed smartly, and stopped on my way to buy a Polaroid camera; these were the days before point-and-click digital devices were widely available, so Polaroid felt like the perfect format for what we had in mind that day. I was nervous, but excited; it was a completely new experience, and one that I instinctively knew would turn me on in some way.

Her room was small but airy, and looked out over the meadows. We stood for a long time staring out of the window and chatting, neither of us quite sure how to proceed. To my surprise, when she finally took the lead and told me to strip off, I found it easy to do so, draping my clothes over a desk chair until I was left standing in only my boxers. She wanted to take a photo of me like that, but I stopped her; we only had ten exposures and I didn’t want to waste any. She smiled and told me that in that case, I should probably get rid of the underwear too.

There was the briefest moment of hesitation, of self-doubt, then I did it, sliding them down over my thighs and letting them fall to the floor. She was sitting in the chair next to me, her eyes level with my cock; I could feel them on me, studying my body, and I looked down to see my cock begin to harden, slowly rising in front of her face until it stood fully erect.

Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been awkward enough. However, a few weeks earlier we’d been together to the cinema to see 40 Days & 40 Nights, a deeply mediocre film about a guy who’s challenged to go that long without an orgasm. Karolina had never been one to pass up an opportunity like that, and it took her less than 24 hours to goad me into attempting the same feat.

By the time I faced her on that Sunday afternoon, naked and hard, I’d abstained for 23 days; it had been agonising, a nightmare of seemingly permanent erections, made worse by the endless teasing she’d inflicted upon me by email. She reminded me of how long it had been as she placed a cool hand on my hip and guided me towards the bed. I relaxed a little as I lay down and made myself comfortable on top of the soft duvet; music played quietly in the background and I tried to concentrate on it, on anything that would get rid of the insistent desire to come.

It didn’t work. She looked down and asked me whether I was ready to begin, saying that she wanted a picture of my cock while it was so hard. I blushed then and nodded, lifting myself up onto my elbows and looking into the camera as it flashed for the first time. I can remember how my dick actually jumped a little when she took the photo and how my balls seemed to tighten against my body. She took two of me like that, prostrate on the bed, then asked me to stand up so she could take a couple more. Each photo got me hornier, and the sight of her nipples stiffening inside her top didn’t make it any easier to retain control.

I knelt on her bed as we took a break and she rummaged around in a cupboard. When I looked up I saw her walking back towards the bed, grinning and holding out a set of cuffs, two for the wrists, two for the ankles, attached to each other by long chains. She’d told me about those, about how she liked to bind men hand and foot, then suck their cocks while they lay helpless, and I knew then that she wanted to hogtie me in a similar manner. I let her pull my arms behind my back and firmly strap the cuffs to my wrists, then felt her hands on my ankles, holding them in place until I was forced to bend back far enough to be fully restrained. As she moved away, she gave my arse a gentle slap and let her eyes linger on my cock, now sticking out obscenely in front of me.

She took her time over the photo, teasing me, letting me suffer. After she’d taken it, she left me chained up and started to talk; she told me that she’d recently fully shaved her pubic hair for the first time, and wanted a second opinion on what it looked like. She was wearing a skirt and lifted it around her waist, exposing her naked cunt to me as I kneeled, unable to move. I’d never seen one so openly flaunted like that, not in the flesh anyway. She stepped closer and I looked at it, the lips full and glistening, her clit visible to my hungry eyes.

The skirt was slowly lowered again, but the image lingered, and as she untied me I felt the blood return slowly to my hands and feet while continuing to pump through my cock. I was desperate to touch it by that point, but aware of how easily I could lose control if I did so. I sat on the edge of the bed and rested my fingers along the shaft, then curled them round it, unable to stop myself. She nodded approvingly, telling me that she’d wanted to take a photo of me masturbating. I didn’t dare move my hand up and down; instead I just held it there, gently squeezing my dick until she was satisfied. While the slide developed, she looked up over the camera, locked her eyes on mine, and asked me how badly I wanted to come. I found it hard to answer, stumbling over my words but admitting that it was torture not to do so.

For the final photo, she sat me in an armchair and told me to spread my legs. A desk lamp shone over the chair and she handed me a bottle of massage oil; I rubbed it into my chest and stomach, then along my arms until they gleamed in the yellow light. “You missed a bit”, she said, and took the bottle from me, pouring oil onto her hand then smearing it over the head of my cock. When I felt her touch me, I almost came all over her fingers, but they danced away just in time. She told me to finish coating my cock, noting dispassionately that she could see the pre-cum oozing out of the tip. It mixed with the oil as I applied it carefully, taking deep breaths and massaging it in as lightly as I could. I felt like I could lose it at any moment, with no way of stopping myself; as if the decision had ceased to become one for me to make.

In that particular photograph I’m staring straight into the camera, one hand on the arm of the chair, the other resting on the inside of my thigh and the base of my cock. It’s a decent enough shot, but what it can never show is the impossible tension that seeped into every muscle in my body, as I willed myself not to come when the shutter clicked. We exhaled together afterwards, and somehow the moment seemed to pass. I dressed a bit shakily and we sat down to look at the photos, as the daylight faded.

I left with a faint sense of regret that things between us hadn’t gone further, but also with a much stronger feeling of satisfaction at having managed to do it. Three years without a girlfriend had left me awkward and self-conscious where my body was concerned, and I felt like I’d passed some sort of test by posing for those photos. Late that night, while fast asleep, I dreamt of Karolina standing naked in front of me, and woke to find my stomach and sheets soaked with 23 days worth of cum. It was the first wet dream I’d had for years.

Some of the photos remain buried in a drawer somewhere. A few were scanned into an old laptop and subsequently deleted. One or two may still reside with an ex-girlfriend: I’d leave them between pages of her favourite books, for her to find unexpectedly when I was away. They look very dated now, blurry, faded, stiffly-posed images that compare unfavourably to the clarity and fluidity which digital cameras afford. Nevertheless, they were an incredibly important part of my sexual development, and retain a clear and enduring impact on the sorts of things that turn me on today.

Every so often, a person – invariably a brilliant person – will say something that makes me want to hug them in sheer delight. That happened earlier this evening, when a good friend casually reminded me of the pure, unadulterated hotness that is library sex.

Library sex is a fairly predictable trigger for me, and I would guess the same is true for a lot of people who enjoy reading and writing erotica. The school library was my sanctuary as a teenager; various university libraries the cause of Stockholm Syndrome as an undergraduate. Since finishing my Masters, I’ve frequented them much more sporadically, but they remain deeply evocative of a ten-year period in my life when I was at my most hormonal. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that you could get a decent understanding of my early sexual evolution just by looking at it in the context of libraries.

At secondary school, most of my break times were spent under the watchful eye of Mrs Potter, our head librarian. I read my way through every science fiction and fantasy title I could find on the shelves, followed by a sizeable chunk of the contemporary fiction and classics. As I got older, my interests shifted, and I became an expert at finding the hot sex scenes in otherwise respectable novels. I would read them standing up in the stacks, half-turned so that no-one could see my erection. They served as the inspiration for a lot of my earliest forays into masturbation, and sometimes I’d even squirrel the racier titles out of the library in my schoolbag, too embarrassed to take them up to the counter, but desperate to pore over them again in private.

By the time I reached university, my literary tastes had become a bit more adventurous. I discovered Literotica around that time, and through it a treasure trove of the filthiest reading material I could wish to put my hands on. Or to enjoy while putting my hands on my cock, anyway. I used to print out my favourite stories in the college computer room, and this time sneak them into the library, to be folded between the pages of a textbook and enjoyed while trying not to squirm too much on the thickly padded chairs.

And of course I would stare at the girls. It’s impossible not to at Oxford. The college and departmental libraries, and especially the Bodleian, form such an integral part of most undergraduates’ lives that complex social structures develop within them. As a result, they absolutely reek of sex. Take several thousand bright, curious, erudite, and incredibly horny students, coop them up for long periods in warm, stuffy reading rooms where silence is mandatory, and watch them find a thousand different ways to flirt with each other. The boys would try their best to look mysterious and soulful, all soft scarves and designer stubble; the girls would glance up at them under exquisitely-applied make-up, and show just enough skin to ensure that dozens of pairs of eyes followed them each time they got up to return a book to the counter.

Sometimes, I would find ways to masturbate in the library. That was easiest at my college, where I was usually able to hole up in a dusty, under-used corner and slide my hand down inside my jeans. I’d lick my fingers over and over again, then freeze in terror if they squelched too loudly and wetly over the head of my cock. I was usually sensible enough to bring tissue with me, but occasionally I’d be so desperate to come that even though I didn’t have any in my satchel, I wouldn’t want to break off to fetch some from the toilets; when that happened, I’d just pull my boxers and jeans over my dick at the last second and come inside them, or shoot all over my stomach and allow it to dry under my t-shirt, matted into the light fuzz that led down from my belly button.

It wasn’t until after I left Oxford that I started to do things with other people in libraries. The first time it happened was actually at my old college. I was doing a Masters somewhere else by then, but dating a second-year undergraduate, and we found ourselves alone in one of the reading rooms on a sleepy Sunday afternoon about halfway through term, the time when everyone’s work ethic is starting to waver. We were only about 30 metres away from her room, but she unzipped my trousers under the desk anyway, and bent down to take me in her mouth. I slid my hand up her skirt and just rested it on the inside of her thigh as she sucked me. Once or twice we heard what we thought were footsteps approaching, and she tensed herself to spring back up, but they never got too close, and after a few minutes I came down her throat. She held my cock in her mouth for a little while, as our heart rates slowly returned to normal; then we hurried back to her room and fucked like animals for the next couple of hours.

A few years later: same city, different girl, different library. We visited one of her friends, a PHD candidate living in Halls, and enjoyed a boozy evening in the college bar. At the end of it, we walked past the library, which was open 24 hours a day in the run-up to exams. Fired up by alcohol and never ones to miss an opportunity, we slipped inside and wandered between the high, wooden shelving units till we found an empty row. The carpet was thin and the floor underneath it cold and unforgiving, but I got down onto my knees anyway, pushed her back against the books, and licked her clit till she’d soaked my chin and her thighs. We fucked doggy-style: I pushed two fingers inside her mouth while I thrust inside her, so she could bite down on them instead of moaning out loud; when I felt her squeeze me hard, I pulled out and came tight against her arse crack, then pulled her knickers back up so she could feel that stickiness for the rest of the evening. I’m pretty sure at least one person saw us mid-shag, but we were rooted firmly and irrevocably in a haze of lust, booze, and horny memories of countless afternoons in the library spent fantasising about something like this.

Even if I never set foot in one again, the idea of having sex in a library will never seem less than thrilling. It might be driven by nostalgia, but when I think of how much time I’ve spent in them over the years, reading, thinking, learning and dreaming about sex, I feel very happy for some reason. When I think – as I did this evening – about the times I’ve made myself come in the library, and especially about the times someone else has done it for me, I’m a hot mess again within minutes. So thank you, brilliant friend, for messaging me from the library this evening: little did you know the thoughts you’d inspire!

Click here for part two and here for part three.

There are a few questions I regularly get asked by lovers (or even friends) who know about some of my kinkier interests. Of those, the one that’s pretty much guaranteed to come up fairly early on is some variation of the following:

“So…um…guys? You’re kind of into them as well, right? Tell me more about that”

And so generally I do. The subject popped its head up last night, during a conversation with a friend on Twitter, not least because this time the questions were a bit more specific:

“When did that start?”

“How into guys are you?”

“Have you ever done anything about it?”

“What would you like to do about it?”

By the end of the conversation, helped perhaps by the bottle of wine I’d just finished, I’d gone from calm and measured to fidgety, sweaty, tingly, and incredibly hard, purely as a result of talking through some of the answers to those. For that reason it seemed like a great topic for a blog post, albeit one that might require several breaks before I’m done writing it…

The first time I realised there was something I wanted sexually from other men was actually not all that long ago. In the mid-2000s, I was sharing a house with three guys. Two had their bedrooms on the ground floor, and the other two of us were up at the top of the house, in adjacent attic rooms. I knew one of the two down below before we moved in, but the guy who became my next-door neighbour was a stranger. And he was hot. Maybe not to everyone, but he had that whole Ewan McGregor vibe going on, and to my surprise I kinda noticed that.

As time went by, I noticed other things too. Because we were an all-male household, there was a relaxed approach to nudity. No-one walked round bollock-naked, but we were all pretty comfortable hanging round the living room in boxers or PJs, and inevitably we all ended up revealing more than we intended to at various points. With ‘Ewan’, the Eureka moment came one summer afternoon when I was working from home. My room was a freezer in winter and a furnace in summer, so every time I finished a piece of work, or got bored with Facebook, I escaped out onto the landing and stuck my face out of the window, desperate for fresh air. Some time after lunch, I went out there to find the bathroom door shut. I hung around for a couple of minutes, letting the breeze cool me down, and as I turned to head back into my room, the lock snapped and the door opened. Ewan did shift work, and came in and out at all hours of the day and night, so I wasn’t surprised to find him home now, taking a shower; he, on the other hand, was clearly very surprised that I wasn’t at work, as he walked out of the bathroom completely naked.

Maybe it was the way the towel framed his body, or the angle from which I was looking at him, or the fact I’d never seen it before – or maybe our eyes are just drawn to what we don’t consciously know we want – but as he padded over the carpet to his room, I couldn’t stop staring at his cock. It was semi-erect, like maybe he’d just been playing with himself in the shower, and it was totally different to mine: uncut, slightly curved and much longer, with balls that hung low between his legs. The foreskin was pulled back enough that I could see most of the head pushing through, and I felt a lurch in my stomach as I realised how much I wanted to take it in my mouth, right then and there.

For a while after that, it was all I could think about. I would lie in bed and make myself come most evenings at the thought of sucking him off out on the landing, him shower-fresh and huge in my mouth, working his cock in and out, then shooting down my throat. Gradually the fantasies became more and more explicit. Back then I had my (desktop) PC on a table beside the window. I used to daydream about him knocking on my door one day and just coming into my room, to find me watching porn on the computer, my cock already hard and in my hand. I’d have headphones on, so I wouldn’t hear him walk in – wouldn’t notice he was there till he’d seen what I was watching, and realised it involved two (three…four….) guys. I’d only notice him when he was standing next to me, his cock bulging through his PJs, next to my face. He’d take off the headphones, grab my hair, and hold me there, making me just look at it. I’d pull it out and suck him, probably only able to get half his length in my mouth, until he’d get really turned on and bend me over either the desk or the bed (the fantasy varied), spread my legs, and take me hard and deep from behind.

None of that actually happened, of course. As far as I could tell, Ewan was 100% straight, and although I found the idea of being fucked like that really hot, I didn’t know whether it was something I wanted to take any further. Not at that point, anyway.

(I’m going to call this Part One – the rest will follow in a separate post. If you’ve got any thoughts on this, or anything you’d like me to address in Part Two, please leave a comment below or get in touch via email/Twitter)

After I wrote about underwear last week, I had some excellent feedback on the piece from a friend, who, as well as making several good points about length and structure, pointed out that I keep writing about things I don’t enjoy, and that it feels like I’m apologizing for not enjoying them – not very sex-positive of me. She ended the email with this:

“Can you write something about sex and periods next?! I’d like to see your thoughts on that…”

Yes ma’am, I most certainly can. For starters, period sex (I can call it that, right?) is an area where I can be 100% sex-positive; it’s not a fetish of mine, and I don’t enjoy sex more when my partner has her period, but neither do I enjoy it less or seek to avoid it. That goes for vaginal penetration, mutual masturbation, and oral too: I can’t say I particularly like the taste of blood, but if you let me I’ll lick your clit till the cows come home. As my friend pointed out, women bleed for the best part of one week in every four, so why would I want to deny myself or my partner 20%+ of our available fucking time??

In this sense, at least, it may help that I came to sex relatively late. At 21, I’d outgrown any squeamishness I might have experienced as a teenager, and I’d also read enough erotica (god, had I read enough erotica) to have shed a fair number of my preconceived ideas about sex.

Not everyone views it that way, of course. I’ve had discussions with male friends in which they’ve reacted with disgust when asked about period sex, and I’ve also had a number of female partners who have had an issue with it, for reasons that went well beyond physical discomfort or affected libido, or even the ‘ew, ick’ response of the guys I’ve spoken to.

I’m not going to explore those reasons in any great depth here. Partly because it’s been done far better elsewhere (try Googling ‘period sex feminism’ if you’re interested), and partly because, as a man, it’s not my place to do so. Women certainly don’t need men telling them that period sex is gross, but they also don’t need us to point out the various things that are really, really dumb about that notion, or indeed to dissect where it came from. Like the pressure to remove armpit and leg hair, it sits firmly in the tradition of denying women physical and sexual agency, and of venerating purity and cleanliness over pleasure, desire and comfort. It sucks, basically.

As a man, what I can do is ensure that I give my partner just as much sexual attention during her period – assuming she wants it – as I do at other times. If I date someone who is shy about period sex, I can try to find a workable middle ground between reinforcing that view and pushing too hard to change it…which admittedly usually involves exploring all the non-penetrative ways to give both of us pleasure, and waiting for her to get carried away and jump me. If I’m talking to other guys about it, I can avoid lecturing or hectoring, and instead point out how ridiculous it is to short-change themselves in that way – not least because a lot of women seem to be especially horny during their period.

Being body- and sex-positive is something we learn as much from our partners and our friends as from the wider sexual culture. For that reason, I think that even if the mess and the blood did make me a little less keen to fuck, I’d feel a moral obligation to ignore that feeling. As it is, I’m happy that feigned enthusiasm isn’t required: as far as I’m concerned, period sex differs from sex at other times of the month only in the number of towels and tissues required, and I’d like to think that both my partner and I benefit as a result of treating it that way.

For a little while now, I’ve wanted to write about underwear. Women’s underwear. It’s a bit of a delicate subject for me, because the truth is that I don’t find lingerie particularly sexy. This has exasperated various partners over the years, who have gone to the trouble of kitting themselves out in expensive, matching sets from high-end boutiques, only to have me barely give the whole ensemble a second glance before stripping it off them. It’s also caused me to question my own sensibilities, from time-to-time; I find myself wondering whether – like a failure to appreciate opera, or a lack of interest in foreign food – it betrays some deep-rooted aesthetic deficiency. A poverty of the soul – or of the imagination, at least.

Before getting into the reasons for my relative indifference, I should say that in a wider sense, I do appreciate the erotic value that underwear holds. It’s often a key part of the virtuous circle that sits behind the concept of sexiness: for many women, wearing nice lingerie makes them feel sexy, and the sexier they feel, the more attractive their partner or partners are likely to find them; this, in turn, generally makes them feel even sexier, and the cycle continues. Lingerie is not the only driver of this, of course, but to my mind that’s where its true value has always resided: as something for women to enjoy, and to feel good about, rather than as a tool with which to entice or seduce men.

In terms of its more direct sexual appeal, my ambivalence probably stems from the fact that I don’t really buy any of the lines trotted out by lingerie advocates. These tend to cluster around three basic truisms: first, that mystery is sexy; second, that even once you’ve seen a partner naked for the first time, it’s good to leave a little to the imagination in future; and third, that well-chosen, well-fitted underwear can enhance a woman’s natural beauty and make various bits of her body look even better.

The most interesting of those, and the one I’ve spent the most time thinking about today, is the first one. It’s interesting because I suspect that if I’d been writing this fifty years ago, or even fifteen years ago, I might have felt the same way. To see a woman in her underwear would have been a rare thing, and to find out what’s underneath it, even more so. Now though? Now that ability to hint at something more, something lying just out of reach, has been eroded by an exponential increase in the number of sexual images that the average person is exposed to. Certainly I feel desensitized to female nudity, and not just because of my own direct experience with women.

I feel like that because every day I see billboards, magazine ads, newspaper photos, and countless online images that feature women in their underwear, or indeed out of it. What was thrilling and risqué even when I was a teenager is now commonplace and even dull. The same increasingly applies to cock shots, I’m sure: if you’re a relatively tech-savvy woman, and have been some shade of single for a significant proportion of the last decade, the chances are you’ve received dozens, or even hundreds of photos of dicks, of all shapes and sizes. Maybe the first few shocked you, or turned you on, or grossed you out, or whatever, but by now, I doubt that’s true unless there’s something exceptional about the photo/dick in question. I don’t know how many penises the average 30-year-old woman had seen in 1950, but I bet it’s a fraction of the 2014 figure, and while familiarity may not breed contempt, it certainly diminishes the impact.

So yes, mystery is sexy, but I no longer feel like that’s relevant to any discussion about lingerie. Not for me, anyway. In that sense I get stimulated far more effectively by what someone has on over their underwear. A tight polo-neck sweater; a pleated skirt; a dress that shows just a hint of cleavage; the right outfit on the right person, basically. The line between full nudity and nothing-but-underwear has become so thin, so blurred, that one can no longer act as a teasing preview of the other; they both lack any kind of shock value, so I’d rather just have the one that looks better.

That, to be clear, is full nudity. Tall or short, fat or thin, when I’m in bed with someone I’m there – to some extent – because I find her physically attractive, and because I want her body. I don’t want it nipped and tucked and lifted up just so by a layer of fabric. I don’t want it airbrushed in photos, and I certainly don’t want the equivalent of that when I’m looking at it in person. No, what I want is to feel her properly against me, and to be able to stroke, grab, kiss, and spank anywhere I like, in any way I like. Also, once I’m actually in bed with someone, there’s something sexy – and reassuring – about a willingness/desire to be completely naked. It suggests a healthy level of body confidence, and that’s pretty much the most reliable indicator of great sex.

Underwear can be sexy. There’s something visceral and dirty about yanking someone’s knickers to one side in a public place and fingering her, for example – and it’s way hotter than doing it to a woman who’s not wearing any. I also get a bit shivery at the thought of watching a partner get dressed in the morning, then bending her over, hiking up her skirt, and fucking her – partly because morning sex FTW, but it’s mainly that I love sending her off to work in the knowledge that she’ll spend the first part of the day with come oozing down out of her and soaking her underwear. Occasionally it’s so context-dependent that the type and quality of the underwear is completely irrelevant: a few years ago I had a girlfriend who I played squash with, and after a few months of sweaty, post-game sex, I realized that the mere sight of her fraying, faded sports bra was enough to turn me on, whether it was hanging on the washing line or wrapped around her tits. So yeah, when it does get me going, it’s not about how much it cost or even what it looks like: it’s who’s wearing it, what we’re doing, and how it’s being used.

Does it matter that, in isolation, even the nicest underwear on the hottest body just doesn’t do it for me? I don’t think so…as I wrote at the start, it’s more about what it does for the person wearing it. If great lingerie makes her feel sexier, then I’m certainly not going to object: I’ll just hope that she’s equally happy for me to remove it, because that’s the bit that turns me on.

I’m in the privileged position of being able to talk or write fairly easily about the vast majority of my sexual experiences. If I wanted to, I could bash out 500 words right now on the first time I had anal, or the night I ended up in bed with my childhood crush at my sister’s wedding, or the ten most interesting places I’ve done it. That’s because, for the most part, my sex life has been happy and straightforward (if not always uncomplicated). I’ve never been assaulted or abused; after a few false starts, I haven’t suffered from any significant performance issues (insert joke here); and while I might shy away from putting a label on it (hetero-flexible? Bi-curious? Straight-but-y’know-interested-in-cock?), I don’t generally struggle to understand or express my sexuality.

In other words, I’m very very lucky. I hope I would be aware of my good fortune anyway, but eight-plus years of reading (and occasionally writing) sex blogs has been both educational and humbling in that respect. Inspiring too: I’ve been sitting on something for a few days now, feeling too embarrassed to talk to anyone about it; it was only this evening, when I thought back to some of the pieces I’ve read, and the traumas, dilemmas and confessions that other bloggers have candidly committed to print, that I gathered up the courage to dig into what happened the other night.

I should probably get the bare bones of it out of the way up front: on Friday evening I paid the equivalent of about £35 for a hand-job from a masseuse, who, it turns out, moonlights as a sex worker. It was the first time I’ve paid for sex, and I suspect it’ll be the last, though of course it’s dangerous to deal in absolutes. There are several reasons why it’s been nagging away at me since it happened, but one of the biggest is that I don’t really know how to feel about the whole affair; five years ago, I would’ve been horrified with myself…but then five years ago, I would have identified polysexuality with Mormonism, and regarded transsexuals with something approaching revulsion. Five years ago…well, let’s just say that I was pretty dumb back then, and that I’m grateful for the education I’ve had in the intervening period.

Anyway, yes, Friday. For a while now, I’ve had back problems; nothing major, but enough that the combination of nine hours a day hunched over a computer screen, and a refusal to give up high-intensity sports, has resulted in sporadic bouts of joint and muscle pain. Massage helps with that. Massage helps with lots of things, actually: knots in my neck, tightness in my calves…clutter in my head too, from time-to-time. It also feels really good – I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this before, but stroking my back is pretty much the quickest way to render me insensible. A couple of months ago, I found a spa here that seemed reputable. It was in a courtyard in the city centre, right next to a big business hotel, and it had a proper website, which listed its treatments and prices. On my first visit, I was asked which muscles I had problems with, and the hour-long sports massage I received was professional, thorough, and, I discovered over the next few days, incredibly helpful.

So helpful, in fact, that I recommended the spa to a friend who came to visit me here. I mentioned it to colleagues. I even wrote about it, in a December blog entry. And of course I booked a second appointment, this time for a full body massage, which, again, I left feeling much better than I had as I walked down from my office. Before I left though, I spoke to the woman on the front desk, who asked me whether I’d enjoyed the massage. We chatted for a bit – she’s very attractive, and I was pretty obviously angling for her number – and at the end of the conversation, she told me that next time I came in, she’d make sure that she was available to deliver the treatment personally.

That was a week or two before Christmas. When I returned after the holidays, I called the spa and booked a massage for the end of my first week back at work. I arrived, and was shown into the treatment room by my new friend Magda, who left me to shower and get ready. I should be clear about one thing: at that point, I suspected nothing. Nada. I’ve been offered sex for money before, but only on street corners in Soho, and hotel corridors in Hong Kong. Seedy back alleys and their equivalents, basically. This place did not fall into that category. However, when I look back, of course there were signs: whereas the other masseuse had waited for me to knock on the door when I was ready, Magda simply breezed in after a few minutes, just as I was picking up the towel to wrap round my naked body; then, after 15 minutes of pounding and pummelling my feet and legs, she snapped me out of the haze I was falling into by telling me that I had a ‘really great body’. With hindsight…

But then a good massage does funny things to your brain. I end up in a bit of a druggy fog, my thoughts and reactions dulled by dopamine. On Friday, four days removed from my last orgasm and half an hour or so into the massage, my brain didn’t really respond when Magda’s hand reached between my legs and started fondling my cock – instead it remained on stand-by while my body grunted and pushed back towards her. Five minutes later, she asked me to roll onto my back, and as I did so she eased the towel down onto the floor.

If I feel guilty, it’s because that’s the point at which I could’ve said no. By then, I knew what was happening, and certainly could have asked her to replace the towel, or simply got up and walked out; instead, I lay there, and let her rub oil into my inner thighs, then move up to stand with her breasts over my face while she massaged my chest and stomach. By the time she actually took the final step and wrapped her hand around my dick, I was rock-hard and aching for her to really touch me. I’d also woken up enough to think that maybe, just maybe, she was doing this because she liked me; that this wasn’t a service so much as a very aggressive form of courtship. I know: the things we allow ourselves to believe.

I won’t go into too much detail about the rest of it. Except to say this: I might have been naive, or self-deluded, or otherwise determined to avoid confronting the obvious, but when she kissed me, I got properly caught up in the moment…because it really was that – a moment. Just like you might experience on a first date, or with the person you’ve fancied for months: passionate, intense…the sort of thing you’re glad you’re already lying down for, essentially. After that, she stepped back and I just surrendered to what felt like the inevitable. Not that it took long for that to arrive: I was incredibly turned-on and she was very good, so a couple of minutes later I closed my eyes and came all over…well, all over everything.

The immediate aftermath was…not great. She left the room five minutes after my orgasm, and at that point I started to feel really low. I didn’t cry in the shower, but I was very close to doing so: mostly though, I was just dazed and confused. I hadn’t prepared myself emotionally for that kind of experience, even if my physical response had been fairly unambiguous. After towelling off, I was torn between dressing really quickly and getting the hell out of Dodge; and taking my time, delaying the point at which I’d have to go out into the foyer and confront what had happened.

I’m glad I did confront it though. I’m not sure this story has a happy ending (yes, yes), but actually going up to Magda and looking her in the eye really helped. It reminded me that she was still just a regular person, and that I shouldn’t treat her – or myself – differently as a result of what had happened. We spoke for a while, not least because I was curious about how the whole arrangement worked; she told me that they offer a discreet ‘VIP service’ for guests they like and trust…flattery I allowed myself to succumb to, and use as insulation against whatever dark thoughts might be just round the corner. She told me to come again soon; I lied, and said that I would. The money conversation was awkward, but mercifully brief. And that was that. I walked out into the frosty night, and didn’t stop till I reached alcohol.

So how do I feel about it now? I really don’t know. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. From what I could glean, Magda wasn’t being exploited in any way, nor was it the sort of arrangement that involved an obviously high level of physical risk or coercion. I have a much more enlightened attitude to sex workers now than I did a few years ago, and I recognise that consensually trading a hand-job for money probably carries with it no more ethical baggage than selling various other goods or services. Still, I’m not comfortable. I chewed it over in my head all weekend, and couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d done something wrong; that I’d lied to myself in some way, by getting into that situation and allowing it all to happen without first creating a conscious decision-point. I don’t know whether writing about it here will help, and I may very well take this post down at some point – I certainly wouldn’t want my Mum to read it, though I suppose that applies to most things on this site. However, life has gone on as normal, and I certainly don’t feel like a different, or lesser person. Nor do I think any less of Magda than I did when I assumed she was just a regular masseuse. Perhaps it’s just another sexual experience to process and learn from: less straightforward and unambiguously positive than most, for sure, but only really harmful if I allow it to be.

What do *you* think?

On a couple of occasions over the last few months, I’ve tweeted a link to this video:

I’ve done so, first and foremost, because it’s funny, ballsy, and hey, who doesn’t want to watch a group of attractive women making an impassioned plea for more dong?? However, it also resonates because the whole issue of full-frontal male nudity in TV shows and films has long struck me – alongside the Bechdel Test and the onscreen presence of women over the age of 50 – as one of the more obvious bellwethers of any shift in the prehistoric attitudes toward gender and sexuality that still shape what we can and can’t see in mainstream media.

In the case of male nudity, it’s an attitude that not only has a direct impact on female (and gay male) viewing pleasure; it also shapes the way men feel about their own bodies, and limits both their comfort with being naked around other men, and their ability to discuss male nudity (and its associated issues) in a mature way. I was lucky enough to play team sports with grown men from the age of 14, so although it took me a while to shake off puberty-induced shyness, I eventually grew comfortable with the whole routine of showering and changing alongside other men (getting naked in front of women was, for a long time, an entirely different matter). Other guys aren’t so fortunate: in a lot of cases, once they leave the towel-whipping, size-shaming, rough-house confines of the school changing-rooms, the only real exposure they get to full-frontal male nudity comes via porn, which hardly gives a representative picture of body proportions.

Because of the way it venerates the penis – and the large penis above all – porn is often blamed for male anxiety around cock size and, by extension, sexual prowess. None of that is really porn’s fault though. Sure, the fact that most viewers like their male stars to have a big dick is partly a consequence of way the industry has actively shaped their preferences, but I think there’s also an argument to be made that it’s primarily an instinctive, organic thing: simple aesthetics more than cynical, exploitative marketing. As far as visual entertainment is concerned, the real crime has been committed over the last few decades by Hollywood studios and the big TV networks, which allowed female nudity to become more widespread, more explicit, and, in a few enlightened cases, more honest, but continued to ensure that the area between a male actor’s belly button and his lower thigh remained a mystery to most viewers.

The result is that for years now the average Joe in the street has been able to leave school at 18, and go through the rest of his life without ever seeing another man’s penis in any real detail – and certainly not his erect penis. For some people, that probably comes as blessed relief; for others, there’s a decent chance it’s actually beneficial as far as body image is concerned; but for a lot of guys – particularly those who watch porn – all it does is distort perceptions of what constitutes ‘normal’ and how they themselves stack up against that. Ignorance breeds myth-making, and that in turn feeds into and reinforces a general, widespread discomfort with the idea of simply being naked around other men.

A few more cocks on the telly won’t sweep all of that away, of course. Too much of the way we feel about our bodies comes from the way we’re educated, our sexual experiences, the influence of religion, the enduring misconceptions and prejudices around homosexuality, and a bunch of other shit that will take years and years to confront properly. However, in the context of all of that big stuff, a few inches of ‘Grade A man-meat’ on our screens every now and then would be a pretty easy place to start. As well as taking the first baby steps toward addressing a serious (and seriously sexist) imbalance, it would find favour with plenty of viewers (both female and male), make sex scenes feel more authentic, and serve as a valuable reference-point for a lot of men who are shy and insecure about their bodies. In time, it might even help to normalize the idea of male nudity, and to remove the lingering stigma from the idea of straight dudes looking at other dudes’ genitals.

So yes, HBO, you should absolutely listen to your female viewers and show a whole lot more premium penis – not least because, in the process, you’ll be doing your male viewers a big favour as well, regardless of whether they realise it at the time.