Category: Sex

I’ve just booked myself in for a massage after work tomorrow. It’s cheap over here, and a good way to relax before an evening drinks event with a bunch of people I don’t know. Or it should be, anyway: the only problem is that it’s a complete lottery whether I’m going to find a massage relaxing or incredibly arousing, and if it’s the latter I’ll pretty much be good for nothing till I’ve dashed back to my flat and sorted myself out.

That’s what happened the last time I went to this particular spa. I’d had a long day at work, with a couple of fairly stressful meetings, and was looking forward to just drifting off for an hour while someone pummelled my back and shoulders. I was still pretty wound-up when I went through into the treatment room and stripped off to take a shower; even more so after getting the settings wrong on the showerhead and accidentally spraying the floor – and my shoes – with water.

However, the act of vigorously working shampoo into my hair – and giving my scalp a good, therapeutic rub in the process – took the edge off my antsiness, in the way that simple physical rituals often can; it was as if I was coaxing my brain into a state of silence, with all the sources of tension and angst being shut down one by one. By the time I’d towelled off and knocked on the door to let the masseuse know that I was ready, I actually felt ready to abandon conscious thought completely and just enjoy the feeling of someone’s hands on my skin.

With my head already resting in the face-hole, I didn’t see the masseuse enter the room, but as she walked around the table and asked me what sort of treatment I wanted, I picked up enough about her to know that she was young, Polish, petite, and fairly no-nonsense, in a perfectly friendly way. When she put her hands on my back for the first time, they felt small but very warm, and she pressed down firmly in a way that suggested she had the strength required to work all the knots out of my creaking, deskbound shoulder muscles.

It must have been about a quarter of an hour into the massage when my shoulders started to feel like less of a concern. I’d been hovering on the edge of sleep for a few minutes, but I kept getting pulled back every time she worked her fingers into the area just above the towel, at the top of my glutes. It was like being sleepy and a bit drunk in bed with a lover, having one of those almost hallucinatory conversations where the words you mumble flit between the coherent and the nonsensical – the almost-awake and the definitely-dreaming.

Except on this occasion the dreams got increasingly filthy with each passing minute. I had a vivid picture of someone else in the room, watching me from the corner. Watching me, and watching the masseuse gently remove the towel and circle her fingers closer and closer to my arsehole. I saw the scene through the eyes of the mystery voyeur, as my buttocks were eased apart and oil was rubbed into the crack.

I kept my eyes closed, wanting to preserve the intensity and clarity of the fantasy. I didn’t think too much about the intruder’s identity: male or female, stranger or intimate, attractive or ugly – it really didn’t matter. What mattered was what he or she saw. The low light, smudged at the corners, and this short, wiry Polish woman strapping on a cock and squeezing oil over its head. Her hair covering her face as she hopped up onto the table and straddled my arse. The way both of her hands were wrapped round the base of the dildo, her whole body a study in concentration.

I made myself go deeper. What would the stranger hear above the low, piped music? A solitary gasp – from me or her, it wouldn’t really matter – when she squeezed the fat head inside me and let the momentum from that firm thrust of her hips carry her forward till her stomach rested against my arse and her cock was no longer visible. Would there just be the sound of skin-on-skin contact and short, ragged breathing, or would that be punctuated by an incongruous squeak each time she pushed inside me and my torso rubbed along the surface of the bed? Where would her hands be? On my shoulders or the small of my back, pinning me down? Running through my hair as she stretched out along me? Would I push back to meet her on each stroke?

Later, as I half-walked, half-ran home, I embellished the scenario. I added more shadowy figures to the audience. I tried to decide whether the masseuse would reach round and jerk me off while she was inside me, or whether she’d turn me onto my back and get me to masturbate for the stranger’s viewing pleasure. Or whether she’d simply send me off into the night at the end of the massage, without letting me come at all. I told myself the woman at the front desk was watching it all on CCTV and getting off on watching her colleague fuck me. I made the masseuse male, and gave him a real cock, which would fill my arse with real come. None of that is really the point though. I went for a massage with the aim of emerging relaxed and refreshed; instead, I spent the last 40 minutes fighting an overwhelming urge to squirm, grind, and generally use the table under me to bring myself off. I walked the tightrope and fell down on the horny side of the mat, and there was no real rhyme or reason to it turning out that way.

I don’t think the masseuse ever realised what I was going through while her hands were moving over my body. When the hour was up, she waited for me to lift my head, then flashed a quick smile and left me to shower for a second time and get dressed. I rolled over on the table and just lay there for a minute, comically hard under the towel and extremely disinclined to move. There’s every chance I’ll find myself in the same position tomorrow evening: it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

A while ago I wrote a piece about blowjobs, and why I’m not generally a fan. It occurred to me this week that it would be good to write something to sit alongside that about some of the things that I do like.

I like:

1. Kissing. This really should go without saying, but I recently met someone who told me that she’d never enjoyed it, and she’s presumably not alone in that. After I wrote about my ambivalence towards receiving oral, I realized that one of the most common reasons why we don’t enjoy things is that we think we’re no good at them; that’s certainly true for me with blowjobs (or used to be, anyway – I think I’m improving…), and it was also a big contributing factor to her dislike of kissing. She worried that she was bad at it, so couldn’t relax enough to take any pleasure from it herself. Anyway, I love kissing: not because I think I’m especially talented, but because the more you do it, the more you appreciate how simultaneously simple and subtle it can be. Everyone does it differently – it’s the sexual equivalent of a snowflake – and it serves a variety of purposes: as a signpost to how a new partner might display the rest of their sexual repertoire; as a wordless way of communicating your own lust, or passion, or tenderness; as a slow build into something more, and as part of the afterglow from it; as everything or nothing, basically.

One more quick story. Not too long ago, I spent the weekend with someone I’d chatted up at a conference a couple of months earlier. We didn’t know each other very well, but she’s apparently the spontaneous type, and pitched up in my apartment for a couple of days of fun. After we jumped into bed on the first evening, she turned to me and said that she only had one rule: no sex on the first night, just kissing. It was the first time someone had said that to me for a long time, and while I wasn’t thrilled at first, it added a greater intensity both to that night and to the one that followed.

2. Intimacy. I had a conversation about this with someone a few weeks ago, who told me that I ‘do intimacy well’. The implication – subsequently made explicit – was that intimacy is a cloak that you can consciously wrap around yourself, and around others. We talked then about how the physical connection between two people does not depend on a wider emotional bond for its strength; intimacy can be compartmentalized, and achieved equally with someone you met that day or with someone you’ve loved for decades. Anyway, I like sex to be intimate, in the sense that I want to feel like I’m actually with the other person, rather than lost in my own world; that doesn’t mean it has to be gentle, or vanilla, or any of the other words often associated with intimacy, but it does mean that I like to be able to touch the other person’s face, and look into their eyes, and kiss them with feather-softness as well as greedy passion. Some people don’t want that in a one-night stand or a casual partner, which I think is a shame.

3. Submission. It turns out I know quite a few brilliant women, because it was over a bottle of wine with another of them that I managed to articulate my strong preference for the ‘BD’ half of BDSM. As I’ll write about in the second half of this post, I’m not a pain enthusiast; I will willingly inflict it in moderate, carefully-managed doses, but I gain no pleasure from genuinely hurting someone, and in a sexual sense my own pain threshold is pretty low. However, I have always enjoyed playing with power in the bedroom – exercising it, surrendering it, fighting over it, and batting it back and forth. Sometimes that involves nothing more complicated than the understanding that one of you is calling the shots, and the other’s role is to follow without question; on those occasions, restraints aren’t required, because the control is all contained in the way you communicate with each other. On other occasions, the cuffs, ropes, belts, scarves, or whatever else is to hand, add something stomach-churningly thrilling to the process of taking or relinquishing power.

Through both choice and circumstance, I usually find myself cast in the role of the dom, and I enjoy that very much. I just wish my sex life wasn’t skewed quite so heavily in that direction, and that I knew more women who were as comfortable (or more comfortable) taking charge. It’s almost certainly why I fantasize as much as I do about being dominated, and why I tend to get so much more of a kick out of it when it happens: I have to pour all of my desire for submission into sporadic, one-off encounters, which always feel super-charged as a result. That infrequency also ramps up my kink levels and my sense of adventure, because I never know when I might next get the chance to explore that side of my sexuality. For that reason, submission goes on this list and dominance doesn’t, even though considered in isolation I get just as much pleasure from one as I do from the other.

4. Anal. No, not giving it (though also YES, GIVING IT!). I find anal hottest when it’s a reciprocal thing. In some ways, its taboo status is something I wouldn’t want to wash away, because that feeling of doing something bad, something dirty, when I lose control and come inside a woman’s arse, or when I bite down on the pillow as a thick strap-on pushes its way into mine, is one that turns me on just to think about: it has a power that goes beyond the physical sensations associated with those acts. I don’t want anal every time, but when I do, I want it to be sweaty and sweary and rough and loud, and if I’m on the receiving end I want still to feel it the following day as I walk down the street.

5. Watching and being watched. Masturbate for me. Sit calmly in a chair with your clothes on and make me stroke my cock in front of you. Get me hard under the table in a bar, then take my erection out and play with it while someone in the corner pretends not to be looking at us. Video yourself sliding a toy – or another man’s cock – inside your cunt, then send it to me at work and give me 20 minutes to get-home-right-now-and-fuck-me-pleeeease. Take photos of me tied-up and blindfolded on your bed, and wank over them when I’m not there. Do any or all of those things and you will guarantee that I’ll get hard whenever I think about you.

6. Having my back stroked. And more generally the sort of full body arousal that comes from being touched and caressed by someone with the patience and skill to find all the right places. Forget handcuffing me to the bed: if you want to render me 100% pliant and immobile, have me lie on my stomach and then run your nails gently up and down my back, or through my hair. I may even start purring. Don’t be fooled though, because while it might look and sound like I’m drifting into a state of total relaxation, if you reach your hand under my stomach after a few minutes of touching me like that, you’ll almost certainly find my cock pressed hard against it.

7. Multi-orgasmic women. I’m a little hesitant about putting this one in, not least because it’s not something that most women can control – as someone who’s felt sexual and body shame for various reasons in the past, the last thing I want to do is inadvertently trigger it in others. There’s also a whiff of hypocrisy about it: on the one hand, I prefer partners who come, and then just want to keep going, ideally till they’ve had half-a-dozen more orgasms; on the other, I’m aware that as a man, I’m pretty much one-and-done, at least when it comes to penetrative sex, and am therefore deeply limited in that regard. All of that said, it remains a gloriously indulgent treat to be ridden to the point of exhaustion by someone who just can’t get enough, or to feel a woman grip my fingers hard with her cunt while my tongue is on her clit, then push my head back down between her legs and beg for more. It also reinforces the differences in sexual responsiveness and anatomy that aren’t always as immediately obvious in women as they are in men; for every woman who comes three times in the space of five minutes, there’s another who’s so sensitive after coming once that she can’t bear to have her clit touched for the next half-hour.

8. Other stuff. Sunday morning sex, pre- and post-brunch. Sex in the sunshine. Sex outside in pretty much any weather. Feeling my erection slowly die inside someone after I’ve come, but staying there for as long as I can, spooned up against her. Using toys on someone while I go down on them. Women’s bodies, in all shapes and sizes. Grunting, panting, moaning, and swearing – I’ll take them over loud, pornographic screaming any day, and no, you really don’t need to say my name or tell me how big I feel for me to know that you’re having a good time. Talking dirty…when it’s done right. Orgasm denial: giving and receiving. Orgasms generally – yours more than mine. Happy sex with people I like, and who like me.

Yeah, that last one is pretty crucial.

I’ve been thinking a lot today about sexual hang-ups. A friend of mine wrote something a while ago about the relief she felt when she discovered that the majority of women don’t come from penetrative sex alone, having spent her teenage years believing that there was something wrong or different about herself, because she couldn’t get off that way. Carrying that level of anxiety about a perceived sexual flaw can be exhausting and deeply inhibiting: its impact isn’t just localized, but instead leaks into other, nominally unrelated areas of our sex lives, causing us to worry about acts and scenarios that we’d previously looked forward to.

It helps to talk though, and in sharing a hang-up with others we invariably discover that, far from being alone in our misery or embarrassment, we’re actually surrounded by fellow ‘sufferers’, in the same way we would be if we were confessing to a fear of heights or an inability to roll our tongues.

In that spirit, here is my Friday confession: I don’t like blow jobs.

Actually, I should qualify that. I like blow jobs: I just don’t enjoy them to the same degree, with the same frequency, or in the same way as I’ve been led by porn, Cosmo, and a host of former partners to believe that I should. And for years the gap between those externally-imposed expectations and my own experience served to restrict even further any pleasure I derived from oral sex: while I did sometimes manage to let go and lose myself in the physical sensations, in the end I’d always be dragged back into a state of frustration and guilt, especially if I could tell that my partner really wanted me to come.

At the grand old age of 32, I’m now a lot more relaxed about it all, but I still have those moments when I can’t help wishing that the other person would stop; that we could move on from the amuse-bouche and tuck into the rest of the buffet. Every now and then I feel that way because my partner simply isn’t very good at giving head, but happily that tends not to be the case: whether through luck or judgment, the vast majority of the women I end up naked with seem to love sucking cock, and in most cases their enthusiasm is matched by their skill. Instead, it’s what I perceive in that moment as my own inadequacy that makes me want to wriggle free and pay them some attention instead. The more they break out their best moves, the more conscious I become of the fact that I’m probably not going to give them what they want, especially when that very obviously involves a mouthful of cum at the end of it all.

To some extent, it’s a lack of communication on my part that’s to blame, though I’m less guilty of that these days. It took me a long time – and a couple of slightly older, more experienced partners – to shake off the belief that telling a woman exactly how I want my cock sucked constituted a clear breach of sexual protocol and a grave insult to her finely-honed technique. Clinging on to that fallacy meant that a lot of my partners didn’t really stand a chance; they were blind squirrels using trial, error, and unreliable muscle memory to try and find a nut, before giving up or being gently pulled away and smothered in my apologetic kisses. I still find it difficult to be completely upfront about what I want – at least till I’ve let the other person do it her way for a bit – but I’m certainly much more vocal than I used to be, especially with women who make it clear that they appreciate a few pointers.

I suppose what I’ve only recently come to realize is that unless I’m in that rare state of arousal where just about any physical contact will send me over the edge, oral sex will never function for me as a direct route to climax, except when it’s basically delivered as a souped-up hand job. Expressing that can be awkward – a lot of women seem to view it as a defeat if their mouth alone is not enough to coax an orgasm out of the man they’re with – but when I manage to do so it allows me to reach a point where I can appreciate the act for the overwhelming pleasure it gives me, as well as for any enjoyment that my partner takes out of sucking my cock. It makes sense as well. I’m circumcised, so lube has always been key to pretty much any form of stimulation I receive; at the same time, the vast majority of mouths are not strong enough to apply the level of pressure needed to the slightly desensitized head of my cock; it’s only when someone really nails the contrast between the firm grip of their hand and the soft, wet, supporting stroke of their lips and tongue, and uses the two in tandem, each reinforcing the other, that I start to lose all sense of where I am or what year it is.

As a stand-alone act, I think I’ll always feel slightly ambivalent about the blow job, and will continue to suffer – with new partners at least – a level of performance anxiety that I’m mercifully spared in all other aspects of my sex life. That makes me a little sad, especially as I know it’s almost exclusively a result of my own failure to readjust and articulate my view of the role it plays in my sexual enjoyment; when my partner and I have both been in a place where we see it as a supporting element of foreplay, or as an ongoing (or one-off) expression of dominance, I’ve enjoyed receiving oral a lot more, and been much more confident about doing so.

Maybe that’ll happen more in the future. Maybe this is one hang-up that will just melt away completely. Until then, I’ll continue to feel just a little bit shy about admitting that when it comes to giving head, I’d much rather be the one on my knees.

I’ve frequented various dating sites over the years, and a question I often get asked by potential matches is some variation of ‘where’s the most interesting/strange/exciting place that you’ve had sex?’

I love having sex in public places, especially when there’s a genuine risk of getting caught, but still, I’ve never really had a stock answer to that: I’ve tended to adapt my response according to the situation and, more specifically, to the person asking the question. However, everyone knows that men love pointless lists, so in that spirit, here’s my top five ten interesting sexual locations:

1. De Bijenkorf changing-room, Amsterdam. Most people associate Amsterdam with sex, but they tend to focus on the red-light district and its myriad charms; less front-of-mind is the Netherlands’ premier department store, with its changing ‘pods’ in the middle of the shop floor, perfect for quick, quiet, knee-trembling sex in front of the mirror.

2. Spring Street subway stop, New York City. A late-night blow job on a railway platform constitutes a formative experience, it would seem, and is definitely enhanced by the knowledge that the next train could appear at any moment…

3. Backstage at the Burton Taylor theatre, Oxford. Previously unforeseen perks of dating the producer apparently included oral sex during Act One.

4. The Mull-Iona ferry, Scotland. The Highlands don’t attract many tourists in October. A mid-afternoon ferry from the small island of Mull to the tiny island of Iona attracts even fewer tourists. Going from re-enacting Titanic’s ‘king of the world’ moment to fucking from behind against the back railing of the boat was a happy consequence of those factors.

5. Oxford University Parks. Honourable mention here goes to two college libraries, but coitus al fresco is always both liberating and energising, and as a fairly inexperienced 22-year-old, rolling around in the bushes next to the main path through one of Oxford’s busiest attractions was the winner when it comes to sex on university property.

6. Various London boozers. Too many to name individually, but I still get a tingle of excitement whenever I revisit one of them and remember fucking in the toilets, or in a dark corner of the bar…

7. Highway 1, California. Hat-tip to all other ‘highways & byways’ encounters, but as glamorous as it was to give head in a layby off the A420, it’s hard to dispute the Pacific Coast Highway’s position at the top of this particular category.

8. Westfield shopping centre. More bathroom-based action. Made the rest of the shopping trip much more enjoyable and relaxed.

9. The Managing Director’s desk. Illicit encounters with a senior work colleague had both benefits and drawbacks – among the former was the opportunity to stay in the office after everyone else had left and bend her over her boss’s desk.

10. Royal Albert Hall. Fucking in the cinema? Not bad. Theatre? Pretty classy? Braced against a pillar in the standing gallery of the Albert Hall? A worthy way to round off the top 10…

What/where would be on your list?