Exhibit A

On the long list of super-hot things someone can say to me in bed, “show me how you touch your cock” slots in somewhere pretty high. It’s hot for various reasons:

• It implies you enjoy watching me, and as an exhibitionist I love being watched
• It means you’re curious and can ask for what you want, both of which are really sexy
• Most excitingly of all, it suggests that at some point shortly afterwards, you’re going to touch my cock, and that makes me very happy indeed

I thought about the last of those today, when I read this very enjoyable – and impassioned – ode to the ‘lost art’ of fingering. I was chatting about it on Twitter afterwards and had the following exchange:

@hurricane_ros @notsosexintheci Ditto a good hand job, though it’s one area where a lot of women lack confidence, I think.

— Exhibit A (@EA_unadorned) March 4, 2016

It’s rare that I encounter a partner who isn’t enthusiastic about sucking cock. It happens, of course, but experience has taught me that most women are perfectly happy to get down there and give it their best shot when it comes to oral, with or without guidance on how I enjoy receiving it.

That’s not always a good thing, and probably deserves a blog post of its own, but it does throw into sharp relief the relative lack of confidence with which a lot of women approach hand jobs. It’s not hard to figure out why that might be the case. Using our hands to get ourselves off is something most of us guys have been doing day-in, day-out since our mid-teens.

We’ve spent literally thousands of hours stroking, tugging, squeezing, and rubbing our cocks, and if the main thought going through your head as you curl your fingers round it is ‘I won’t be able to do this as well as he can do it himself’, the chances are you’re probably right…

…and at the same time so, so wrong. Because here’s the thing. Maybe you can’t make us come as quickly as we could do it ourselves. Maybe you don’t know just how much pressure we like, or what to do with your thumb, or how much time you should spend focusing on the head of the cock. Even after we’ve told you those things, you might not be able to grip as firmly as we can, or develop that instinctive feel for when to speed up, or slow down, or keep doing it exactly what you’re doing it right now because please don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop.

But – BUT – so fucking what??

Going back to that finger-banging post, I can say with relative certainty that every partner I’ve had has known her clit better than I have. Known how to touch it, whether to be gentle or firm, when to apply direct pressure and when to tease around it. Same goes for her cunt.

When I push my fingers inside someone, it’s not my nerve endings being stimulated and not my brain receiving pleasure messages. I can read body language, I can fall back on experience, and I can respond to spoken or unspoken guidance, but I will never be able to feel the effect my actions are having, and as a result there will always be tiny missteps. Moments when she would stop thrusting if she was doing it herself, and just clench around her fingers, but instead I slowly force mine deeper. Moments when the rhythm is good – maybe even great – but not quite right. 95% right, 98% right even. Just not perfect.

That will never change. Sure, there might be days when I do give the A+, 100%, nine-dart hand job, exactly how she’d have done it herself, and if you don’t think I’m mentally jumping for joy on those occasions you clearly don’t know me very well. But even with a partner I know really well, and have been with for a while, it won’t happen every time. Not because I’m not fucking great at it, or because I don’t listen when she tells me what she wants – because it simply can’t.

Still, lots of women LOVE being fingered. Those I’ve spoken to about it have different reasons for that. Nostalgia. The power dynamic. The prioritisation of their pleasure. How easy it is to do it in public, or somewhere you really shouldn’t. Just the basic care and attention it involves.

There’s a physical side to it too. In most cases, my fingers are longer and thicker than my partner’s, and feel bigger inside her. I’m stronger, so I can thrust and pump more vigorously. I can also do it from different angles. From behind, with a pillow under her pelvis and her legs together, so it’s really tight and intense. Kneeling between her legs with a hand on her stomach, pinning her down, holding her still as I slowly squeeze three fingers inside. Standing up, my face buried in her hair and my cock pressed against her arse through our clothing; my hand slipping up under her dress and into her knickers – down between her arse cheeks and over her cunt.

From what I understand, women love being fingered – those who do love it – for any/all of those reasons and more. It’s not just the act of having their clit stimulated or their cunt filled, and it’s definitely not a direct proxy or substitute for something they could do themselves. There’s a wider context, which is often where the hotness comes from.

And y’know what – the same could not be more true of hand jobs. I generally try to avoid speaking for all men, but in this instance I’m happy to say that we don’t expect – or indeed necessarily want – you to touch our cocks in exactly the same way we do it ourselves. It’s not that we’re too lazy to wank and would like you to do it for us, please – nor that we see the end goal of your endeavours as an efficient, fault-free orgasm, complete with perfect dismount and landing.

We love hand jobs – or I love hand jobs – because of everything that goes with them. It’s that wider context again.

I love that you want to touch me, and to give me pleasure.

I love feeling you explore my cock with your lubed-up hand, and that discovering all the different ways of playing with it makes you happy.

I love that sometimes you’ll do something to it that I wouldn’t have done myself, but in a really good, surprising way – and I’ll file that in the back of my brain for future reference

I love the way you talk dirty to me as you do it – or maybe how you stay completely silent, focused only on listening to my breathing and responding to my body.

I love that every now and then your other hand will wander down to touch your clit as you stroke me. That you massage my thighs, or brush a finger over my balls, or pay attention to parts of me that I never think to focus on when I wank.

I love the delight on your face when I spurt all over your hand. The sense of achievement and the horny joy of watching cum shoot everywhere.

I love when you put your hand down my jeans on the bus to circle your thumb and forefinger around my stiffening cock, or when you pull me into an alley, spit on your palm, and roughly jerk it till all I can think about is fucking you.

I love the power dynamics, of course I do, and the way you can use your hand to control me; to edge me closer, closer, closer to that orgasm I really want, but can’t have.

Pretty much everything I love about hand jobs has very little to do with their mechanics. Yes, there are definitely things you shouldn’t do – I don’t really want to feel like I’ve got my cock caught in a mechanical vice, for example, and nor do I want you to try and pull it off my body – but it’s up to me to tell you what those are, or better yet to show you.

I’ve got 20 years’ experience of making myself come, and unsurprisingly I’m pretty fucking good at it. If all you want to do is replicate how your partner does that – right down to the nth degree – you are probably going to fail. However, once you realise that there’s so much more to a hand job than its basic parts – that honestly, sometimes we really just want to be touched – it becomes one of the absolute best things you can do to, for, or with a man. Trust me on this one.

One afternoon last spring, I was messing around in bed with someone I was seeing at the time. Let’s call her Daisy. Daisy’s big thing was orgasm denial; it was a kink she’d only just started exploring, but she got off on it in a way I found incredibly sexy, and as a result I was an enthusiastic participant in her various experiments.

For her part, Daisy liked the fact that I could exercise that sort of control – or maybe just that I was willing to do so while she played with me. I could spend a couple of hours fucking her, then get up and struggle back into my jeans while she lay on the bed and stared at my twitching, straining cock. I was happy to edge in front of her, bringing myself closer and closer as she made herself come repeatedly with a vibrator, then stopping the second she decided she’d seen enough.

Sometimes I’d go without an orgasm for a few days before we met up, and those were the sessions that really brought out her inner sadist.

“How badly do you want to come right now?” she’d ask, her fingers curled firmly around my cock, or her cunt squeezing it with every thrust. I’d grit my teeth and stare at the patterned wallpaper above her bed, my stomach and arse tensing with the effort of holding back.

Daisy liked those visual cues, those little signs of distress, and she would find ways to intensify them. On one occasion, she smiled down at me, tightened her grip on my cock, and whispered “you can come now” as she slowly pumped her hand up and down. It was only when I started to push my hips up to meet her, my cock sliding through her fist and the white noise in my head fuzzing out conscious thought, that she opened her fingers and sat back with a smug grin on her face.

“Just kidding,” she said, and licked the pre-cum off her fingertips.

Anyway, back to that afternoon last spring. We were in my bed this time, and Daisy had two fingers jammed in my arse. Her other hand played lazily with my cock and balls, but most of her attention – and increasingly mine too – was focused on the way my muscles clenched around her each time she pushed in a little deeper, as if they were encouraging further exploration.

It was the first time we’d tried any focused anal play, and I realised very quickly that Daisy knew exactly what she was doing. There was nothing tentative or random about the way her fingers curled up into me, and she clearly wasn’t trying just to fuck my arse.

“You like that, don’t you? You like it when I press….just…there…”

And all I could do by that point was nod. Pretty much all of my previous experience of prostate stimulation had been trial-and-error solo prodding with one of my toys; to have someone else massage that part of me so casually was intense in a way that suddenly made it hard to breathe, let alone speak.

As Daisy continued to work her fingers inside me, I lifted her other hand away from my cock, scared that if she kept touching it I wouldn’t be able to hold back. The drop in pressure, in the tingling, aching sensitivity, lasted a matter of seconds. If she picked up on the change in my breathing, on my sudden helplessness, she certainly made no allowance for it; instead she just flexed in and out, pressing the tips of her two fingers against my prostate and kissing my lips, muffling my weak sounds of protest.

Until that afternoon, my willpower with Daisy had always been top-notch. Since we’d started playing around with denial, I’d never come during one of our sessions, even after hours of her own special brand of provocation. Even when I’d gone the best part of a week without an orgasm, and it was just about literally the only thing I could think about. But with her fingers inside me like that, all my self-control vanished. I knew it was going to happen – could feel it building in a way that I’d only rarely experienced before then – and for the first time with Daisy I said and did nothing to stop it.

Maybe a part of me didn’t quite believe that I could come like that, with absolutely no cock stimulation, or maybe I thought she’d ease off when it became clear that I couldn’t do so myself. I don’t know – at that point everything got pretty blurry, and I barely had time to gasp “I’m coming” before it happened.

At the last moment she realised what was going on, and forced her fingers hard inside me, moving them back and forth to the rhythm of my spurting cock, as it shot cum all over my stomach. I was going crazy, overloaded with sensation and desperate for her both to stop and to really really never stop; in the end I grabbed for her wrist and she took the hint, easing her hand off my arse and rolling over to look for tissues.

That remained the only orgasm I had with Daisy. We stopped hooking up a short while later, after a couple of more controlled attempts at prostate play, and I went back to my butt plugs and other anal toys. Every now and then though, the memory of that afternoon would bubble up to the surface, and I’d have to make myself come pretty much immediately – something about the thought of her fingers working in and out of my arse is just impossible to resist, in the same way it was when she actually had them there.

Orgasms triggered by anal penetration are different in a way that’s actually not easy to describe. As they build up I feel constantly like I’m about to come, or even that I am coming, but without quite getting to the point of full release. It’s agonising and glorious and overwhelming all at the same time, and when I do finally push past whatever’s holding it back, there’s nothing that quite compares to that first rush of energy flowing out of my body.

It wasn’t until this week though that someone else touched me in the same way. Again it was unexpected, and this time the prostate stimulation was accompanied by her soft, warm tongue on my cock, and her lips moving up and down it. I knew right away that I was in serious trouble; at first I tried to fight it, but then those little surges of pleasure started, and with her mouth over me I suddenly couldn’t tell whether I was coming or not.

That disorientation was perhaps responsible for me yanking her up my body, onto my cock. Either way, it took no more than another 30 seconds before I really was coming, unstoppably and with one arm around her torso, clutching her tight against me as I pushed my cock deep inside her.

Having got back into bed expecting a long, lazy afternoon fuck, the urgency and intensity of that orgasm was the best kind of surprise. Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about her mouth and fingers, working together on my cock and arse, but also about the similar effect prostate play had on me with Daisy last spring.

Given how much I enjoy anal penetration more generally, I’m surprised by how reticent I’ve been about initiating or asking for that kind of stimulation. That’s perhaps because it requires the sort of anatomical explanation or guidance that can feel a little jarring in the heat of the moment – “no, a little more to the…yes, like that, only deeper…ouch, too much, too much” is pillow talk I maybe try to avoid with more casual partners – but I think it also has something to do with how I tend to want anal play to work psychologically. I want to feel like the other person is in total control of me, and that can make asking for it weirdly difficult – or confusing, at least.

I don’t know. What I do know is that having your prostate touched and massaged in that way is something every guy should try at least once. For my part, I certainly don’t intend to let another 10 months go by before I ask for it again.

Last Friday I read a Cosmo article on anal sex that made me angry and sad in equal measure. Claiming to be a ‘practical’ guide to a ‘misunderstood’ sex act, featuring two ‘anal enthusiasts’, it instead managed to combine a frankly horrible message about consent with a prudish, ill-informed and distinctly unenthusiastic attitude towards anal. Fail fail fail.

Anyway, after washing the bad taste out of my mouth with this response, and prompted by some lovely people on Twitter, including Girl on the Net and Citizen Erased…

@EA_unadorned “I hear girls who like it do this etc” maybe interview one of them then??

— Citizen Erased (@inyourworld_12) February 5, 2016

…I decided that if Cosmo couldn’t put together a decent guide to anal sex, I’d have to do it for them. Keeping the same interview structure, I tweaked the questions a bit to make them, y’know, good, and sent them out to a couple of women who actually do enjoy anal.

As part of this revolutionary approach, I also decided to include a male perspective, because whether gay, straight or bi, there are plenty of men out there who adore being penetrated that way.

All three of my interviewees were happy to be named in this piece, because none of them see a love of sex – any kind of sex – as something to hide. Good on them.

Woman A is Ella Dawson. Ella is a twenty-something blogger, writer and feminist, whose passions include sexual health and education, media depictions of female sexuality and STIs, and The Bachelor. She is, quite franky, awesome.

Woman B is Honey, owner and author of the sex blog Happy Come Lucky. Honey is in her mid-4os and describes herself as a shy exhibitionist, who is loving life now more than ever before. It shows.

Man A is Gryph, a Pervert Ninja, Paperwork Assassin, Flesh Heckler, former podcaster, and one of the nicest men I’ve met in the sexblogging community.

As a group they were awesome to interview, and I hope their answers give anyone curious about anal sex a real sense of what ‘butt sex in the wild’ is like.

Oh boy, where to start with this one. Last July, Cosmo published an article with the following title:

I’ll get this out of the way now – no, I don’t know why I read it either. Cosmo sex articles are, almost without exception, epically shit. I could link to a dozen different smackdowns of their weird, warped, shamey take on sex and the female body, and I’d barely have scratched the surface.

Still, when this delicious-looking clickbait popped up in my Twitter feed this morning, I couldn’t resist; encouraged by the words ‘anal sex enthusiasts’ and ‘real talk’ in the lede, I dived straight in.

The intro was…not promising.

“the urban sex legend goes, ‘Guys want it because they’ve heard it’s tighter than normal sex and they’ve seen it in porn, and girls occasionally acquiesce as a bargaining chip/reward/very special birthday present.’” [all emphases mine]

Nice straw man to kick things off there. Anal sex ≠ normal sex and only men actually enjoy it. Women give in from time-to-time, but only in exchange for something they really want or when their fella deserves a nice treat. Got it. Right.

(Whoops, sorry, I mean wrong, wrong and really fucking wrong.)

Depressingly, things get much, much worse from there. The two women described as ‘enthusiasts’ at the top of the piece are asked a series of questions about their experiences with anal, ostensibly as a way of dispelling that myth and telling Cosmo readers how ‘real’ women feel about having their arse fucked.

And that would be absolutely fine – if either respondent came off as enthusiastic in any way. I’m going to bypass Woman A, who seems basically indifferent to the act itself (sample quote, when asked if it ever feels good: “I know some girls who love it…”), and go straight to the clusterfuck that is Woman B. Woman B does NOT enjoy anal sex. In fact, Woman B’s answers are full of red flags about the sex she’s having more generally.

Probably the No. 1 thing we all want to know is … does it hurt?

Woman B: Yes! If it didn’t, this wouldn’t be a topic of conversation.

Why do it?

Woman B: I usually only do it when drunk and if trying to impress the lucky dude I’m with.

Who wanted to do it more — you or the guy?

Woman B: Him. When it happens, it’s because I’ve conceded. Depends on how much I’m into him … and afterward, I kind of feel like he “owes me something.”

To recap: anal sex causes her pain, she only does it while drunk, it’s entirely for the dude’s benefit, and after she’s been pressured into letting him fuck her arse, her takeaway thought is “now he’s in my debt.” None of this exactly screams ‘active consent’. Let’s go on…

What does it feel like the first time?

Woman B: At first, extremely unpleasant. Kinda feels like a penis going in your anus.

What does it feel like over time?

Woman B: Over time, you adjust. Similar to vaginal intercourse, I suppose.

Does it ever feel good?

Woman B: It never really feels good. Just becomes more tolerable, I suppose. It also depends on the size of his manhood.

In case her first answer wasn’t clear, Woman B really wants you to know that anal isn’t fun. Nuh-uh. Maybe you’ll adjust, in the same way you did to that whole ‘normal sex’ thing, but don’t expect to enjoy it, especially if the guy you’re with has a big dick. Sorry, ‘manhood’.

On average, how soon in the relationship — if it’s a dating scenario — do you think it generally happens?

Woman B: Hmm … in my experience, if he’s into it, you know soon into the relationship. This type of “fetish” isn’t easily concealed, in my opinion.

Do you have to get an enema and/or anal douche?

Woman B: Nah. If he’s requesting entrance to my exit, he should know the risks at hand. Unless you had Chipotle for dinner. Then I’d say enema, for sure. I feel like this tends to present itself in the heat of the moment. Who’s gonna say “Hang on, hon, let me go flush my ass. I’ll be back in a few?”

Anal sex is a ‘fetish’. Anal sex is risky. Anal sex is the sort of thing you don’t talk about, you just do, mostly when you’re drunk and want to impress someone – or when they wear you down enough that you give in.

Honestly, even measured by Cosmo’s abysmally low standards, this is dangerous, depressing stuff. It sends a fucking horrible message about sexual consent by implying to readers – female and male – that it’s fine/normal for anal to happen only when the guy is persistent enough and the woman is under the influence.

Look, there are plenty of guys out there who are shit at consent, and who undoubtedly do pressure women into anal. It’s important to acknowledge that, but it’s bad journalism to hold it up as the norm; as what happens in ‘the real world’. What’s even worse – what elevates this above your average, shitty Cosmo sex article – is to do so without flagging that behaviour as wrong, especially when you then bundle the whole thing into an article that purports to showcase the views of women who are enthusiastic about anal. That’s not just bad journalism, it’s borderline irresponsible.

The responses of both women also reinforce the ‘urban myth’ cited earlier in the piece, by painting anal as something to be enjoyed by men and endured by women. Female pleasure is pretty much nowhere to be seen here, and that’s a massive problem, given how many women out there clearly do enjoy the physical sensation of being fucked that way.

Of course not everyone is a member of Team Buttsex and that’s fine, just as it’s fine not to enjoy oral, or missionary, or spanking, or whatever. I happen to love putting cock-shaped objects in my arse, and I love it even more when partners put them there for me, but I can see why plenty of people don’t share that preference. It can hurt, and it is sometimes messy, and I don’t want it all the time.

But the answer to all that is pretty simple: if anal isn’t really your cup of tea, maybe don’t do it. If you actively dislike anal, definitely don’t do it. It’s not a bargaining chip or a reward, and anyone who thinks it’s fine to nag, coerce or drug you into ‘acquiescing’ ought to be tossed firmly and quickly into the bin.

If I’m reading a practical, mythbusting article about anal sex – about any sort of sex – I want to hear from people who fucking adore getting busy that way. People who can talk knowledgeably and passionately about the dos and don’ts, the ins and outs, and whose enthusiasm shines through in what they’re saying. Those people are the ones who will tell me what it’s like to have anal sex; who will give me an idea of whether I want to try it and how to go about doing so.

Instead, Cosmo gave us a piece that does a disservice not just to women who dislike anal (“hey, I know it hurts, but maybe consider trading it for something shiny, yeah?”) but to those who love it too (“here, this is what normal women think, you deviant”). It fails on every single level.

One of the many highlights of Eroticon 2015 was the all-too-brief time I got to spend chatting to the lovely, utterly brilliant @EuclideanPoint (and her husband @beaudujour – ALSO lovely & brilliant).

Of course outside the conference bubble, life tends to intervene, and so it was the best part of five months before we managed to reconnect. EP and I identify as switches, and prompted by a particularly filthy Twitter thread in early January we started chatting about how that impacts both our fantasies and the way we play with different partners. From that conversation, this excellent guest post was born.

If you also switch and want to add your thoughts on how this dynamic works for you, please do chip in via the comments section, or get in touch with one of us directly. I’ll be picking up the baton from EP at some point too, as this is a whole subject area I find pretty fucking fascinating…

—

In The Detail

A short while ago, Exhibit A and I had a chat about being a switch. We talked a lot about how it affects the way we approach new (sexy) scenarios, and that conversation raised various questions for me. Do I automatically imagine myself as the top or the bottom? Would that decision depend upon the scenario in question, or what frame of mind I happened to be in that day? Are there certain types of dominance or submission that appeal to me from one perspective and not the other, or scenarios where I’d be happy to end up on either side?

My topping fantasies tend to work mostly on an emotional level. I fantasise about humiliating my sub, keeping them on the back foot, orgasm denial and, my favourite, seeing fear in their eyes. Acts undertaken to achieve these goals depend on the psychology of the sub themselves. I also indulge in a healthy dose of wish fulfillment – I love my submissive to explain one of their fantasies to me so I can repeatedly act it out with them, discussing and honing the details each time to get it as close as possible to the version in their head.

It’s important to me to find those little things that capture the essence of submission for them – particular words, gestures or techniques that really push their buttons. It took my chat with Exhibit A to realise that I approach domination in this way because that’s how submission works best for me.

As a switch, I am probably a quarter dominant and three-quarters submissive, so I tend to have a few more submissive fantasies and they are invariably more detailed. Over the last few years though, I have found that the level of detail has got a little out of hand. Sometimes for my lovely partner’s sake I wish I could just fantasise about simple stuff – a list of toys and sex acts that I like. Unfortunately lately that just doesn’t do it for me. Just put clamps on my nipples, and I’ll probably be bored. Tell me you’re going to put clamps on my nipples for 15 minutes. Then tie me to a chair and make me sit there for 15 minutes to think about that. 15 minutes is a long time to sit doing nothing; to imagine living each moment again with the pain of the clamps. It’s this anticipation and build up that I need. None of my submissive fantasies are complete without some kind of numerical rules, an imaginative and sadistic form of punishment, and lots of sitting and dreading (or nervously anticipating…) what awaits me next.

By way of example, I’ve always enjoyed sucking cock and then being caned or cropped for not meeting the required standard in some way. Having thought about this at length, let me present to you in all its convoluted glory the latest version of my cock sucking and caning fantasy.

My hands are tied behind my back. Ideally the rest of me is tied up too. I don’t have the ability to move my head; either it is tied back against a wall or post, or you hold it and move it up and down onto your cock yourself. I may be wearing a ring gag. My ability to enhance your pleasure of my own volition is limited to the movement of my tongue and how enthusiastically I prioritise sucking over breathing.

Before we’ve even begun you have explained to me that I will be judged on my abilities, and my performance will be reflected in the beating I am given later. Sometimes I will be scored out of 50 or 100, and for each point I fail to achieve a stroke of the crop or cane will be given. You will find this amusing, and will tell me that while I’m not making much of an effort, you’ve been planning to give me a low score anyway because I deserve a good beating.

Other times I am given a number of minutes, and will be given one stroke for each minute it takes me to make you come. For this particular scenario you will probably have wanked beforehand, ideally in front of me after you’ve explained the rules of this game, to give me a tougher job. When you finally come in my mouth you announce the number of strokes I am to receive and I am left for a while with the taste of you in my mouth thinking about what awaits me.

For my cane strokes I am put on all fours, tied down by my wrists, elbows, knees and ankles. You make it clear that you don’t want me flinching away from any of the strokes, which will be delivered to my ass, the back of my thighs, but mainly to that sweet spot where they meet. You discourage my flinching by inserting an ass hook into my ass and tying this with rope to my hair. I now have to keep my ass pushed out, back arched and head up. You add clover clamps to each nipple and attach a small weight to each one to keep me still and focused. As I’m still gagged from before you’ll probably be the one to count the strokes, repeating any that you don’t think were quite hard enough to count.

I’m not sure why this level of detail is important to me, or how much it detracts from my submissiveness to have such prescriptive ideas of what I would like. I honestly don’t want my partner to feel like an actor in my play, and I genuinely do like to be dominated. Sometimes it’s a bit of a struggle for us to make these kind of fantasies come true without him feeling like he’s reading from a script, or me feeling like I’m too in charge of the situation. Perhaps I have a dominant’s brain trapped in a submissive’s body. I often think that it just takes me a certain amount of anticipation and calculating what will happen to fully shut off the other stuff going around in my head so I can completely enjoy the moment.

All I know right now is that when it comes to being submissive, for me the orgasms are in the detail.