Exhibit A

In the last two years I’ve posted here a little over 200 times. I’ve posted stories, essays, photos, interviews, and contests. I’ve posted stuff that people have loved, stuff they’ve hated, and stuff they’ve barely noticed at all. I’ve challenged and even scared myself with some of the things I’ve put up here, but I’ve also learned so much about writing, about sexuality, and most importantly of all, about myself.

Among the things I’ve written that seems to have resonated the most was this post, from all the way back in September 2013, on why I don’t like blow jobs. I wrote it at a time when blogging felt a little like keeping a diary: I had very few readers, and certainly didn’t feel part of any sort of sex-writing community. More than anything, I was trying to work through my ambivalent response to receiving oral, and to confront my inability to discuss that ambivalence openly with partners. A useful exercise for me personally, an interesting read for anyone stumbling across it, but really, I kind of thought that would be that.

To my surprise, however, the viewpoint I expressed back then continues to come up regularly in conversation, especially when I enthuse about oral sex to a new partner who’s read my blog, and even from time-to-time when I build a piece of erotica around sucking cock.

“But you’re the guy who doesn’t enjoy blow jobs,” people will say. “I read that thing you wrote. You don’t like receiving head.”

And while I think my perspective was a little more nuanced than that, they do kind of have a point. After all, this is how I concluded that post:

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 [. . .] 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.

Here’s the thing though: sometimes people change.

I’ve alluded a couple of times since that first post to a shift in my attitude to having my cock sucked. I even wrote about the woman who, in the course of one incredible blow job, had me coming harder and faster than I have at just about any point either before or since. Still, for all my dancing around the subject, what I haven’t done is come right out and say it…so here goes…

…I fucking love blow jobs.

That doesn’t mean for one second that I’ve done a complete 180 on everything I said two years ago. I still don’t come often or easily from oral alone. I still (just about) prefer giving to receiving. I will still always get more physical and emotional pleasure from intercourse than I will from being sucked off. However, what I’ve learned since then – what I think I realised just through the process of writing that post, in fact – is that none of those things really matter.

Convincing yourself of that is the key to beating just about any hang-up – and of course, it’s much easier with some things than with others. Worried that your dick is too small? That your tits are too big? That your teeth are wonky or you have hair in a ‘weird’ place? Worried that you can’t come from penetration alone – or that you can only come from it? None. Of. Those. Things. Really. Matter. If you can embrace that notion – that realisation – it will become gloriously self-fulfilling; the more you believe it, the more true it will be.

As amazing as she was, Florence the cock-sucking machine did not make me fall in love with receiving oral. In fact, one of the reasons why she was able to suck me off with such terrifying speed and intensity is that by then I’d already started the process of getting over that mental hump. When I wrote that post, and especially when I put it out into the world, I forced myself to confront my fear, my anxiety, more directly and honestly than I’d ever previously done.

Specifically, I realised that my hang-up persisted because I was clinging onto unrealistic, externally-imposed expectations of how a blow job should be enjoyed; as a result, I often felt unable to communicate my own desires and preferences to my partners, in a way that would help them to give me an experience that I would enjoy. If I was frustrated, it was because I never just relaxed and allowed myself to enjoy what was going on – instead I lay there and worried about why I couldn’t come, or whether I was making the ‘right’ noises, or a million-and-one other crazy, crazy things like that.

99% of us are better at giving advice than we are at taking it. If a friend of mine had come to me and presented all the ‘symptoms’ I described in that blog post, I think I’d have found it very easy to set him on the right track. Relax, I’d have said. It doesn’t matter whether you come. It doesn’t matter what noises you make. There is no predetermined outcome to oral sex. Enjoy it for what it is, rather than what you think it should be, and don’t take it all so seriously! Above all, have a little faith in your partner. Don’t assume that she’s going to be hurt if you actually tell her what you want – I bet you really like a bit of direction when you’re going down on someone, don’t you? Communicate, don’t stress, and everything will be just fine.

Writing about my oral hang-up turned out to be the equivalent of giving myself that pep talk. Once it was all down on paper, I was forced to confront how silly and self-defeating I was being. How unfair both to my partners and to myself. That realisation – even more than Florence – was the first big step towards getting over it.

So yes, these days I’m not only a fully paid-up member of Team Blow Job, I’m basically the Head Cheerleader too.  I’ve come far more from oral over the last 18 months than in the previous 10 years combined; even on the many occasions when it doesn’t lead to orgasm, I now feel happy and confident enough to really enjoy having my partner’s mouth on my cock, and to make it a more natural, sexy, intimate experience for both of us.

I love it when something I write has a positive impact on the people who read it, but like most people I know, I started blogging about sex because I wanted to better understand myself and my own sexuality; when I look back and realise how posts like that one have enabled me to change and improve such a fundamental aspect of my sex life, and to become materially happier in the process, I know for a fact that this has all been worthwhile.

 

So this afternoon I spent a very pleasant hour or so at the Wellcome Collection’s Institute of Sexology. The exhibition is fairly small, but they’ve managed to gather all sorts of fascinating items and documents, from ancient phallic icons through to video footage of the work done by Masters and Johnson in the 1960s/70s.

I really loved the table of sexual partners meticulously compiled by one woman (whose name I forgot to note down) in the early 1970s. She noted the duration of each relationship, and catalogued the nationality, penis size, profession, proclivities, passions, and performance of each of the men she slept with; if they managed to bring her to orgasm orally or penetrate her anally, that was also recorded. It was all very thorough.

However, the most interesting bit of the whole project is definitely the sex survey. Even just watching other people fill it in was something I could have sat and done all afternoon, regardless of the fact that I couldn’t see their answers. Their body language; the way they interacted with their friends or partners as they scribbled; the time they spent agonising over individual answers, their pencils pressed against the paper; all revealed something about our complex responses to some of these big, sex-related questions.

The answers are aggregated on an ongoing basis by the Institute, and will ultimately generate both a robust analysis of our current thinking on sex, and a huge archive of our individual sexual attitudes and experiences.

On my way out, I nabbed a blank copy of the questionnaire. You’ll find photos of its 8 pages – and the 25 questions it (currently*) contains – below the jump. Just click/zoom to enlarge.

At the Institute, all surveys are submitted anonymously, but if you fancy answering some (or all) of it in the comments section, I’d love to read what you have to say, and to get people’s thoughts generally on the way the questionnaire has been constructed, and the value of this as a social experiment. Either way, if you live in London make sure you get yourself along to the Wellcome Collection before the exhibition closes on September 20th, to check it out properly!

At Eroticon 2014, Molly Moore and Stella Ottewill (then Harper Eliot) ran a session on labels, and on the positive value attached to finding specific ways to describe ourselves sexually. After explaining their thinking, Molly and Stella invited us to share some of the labels we might choose to apply to ourselves; without giving it more than a second or two of thought, I stuck my hand up, and went with ‘magpie’. Why? Because when I see something shiny, I invariably want to pick it up and play with it.

~

At this year’s Eroticon, I sat in Remittance Girl’s brilliant session on jouissance, and thought about the magpie label again. I also thought about the end of Mad Men, platonic dates, and the woman I kissed in an East London park the previous week. I’ll get to those later.

I don’t take many notes at conferences. That’s either arrogance or laziness, or maybe a mixture of the two, but it also stems from a desire to focus on the whole message, and on the speakers themselves, rather than dutifully jotting down each individual point they make. What I do like to record is the nuggets: the little gems that somehow perfectly capture a thought or an idea – or which just express it better than I ever could.

In RG’s lecture (for that is a more appropriate way to describe it), I found myself scribbling (and tweeting) those nuggets, those gems, every couple of minutes. For example:

“People who like edge (play) are really seeking jouissance: they’re almost frightened to orgasm, because it will curtail that fantasy of the beyond-pleasure.”

Or:

“The problem with fantasy is that it’s so perfect – we never construct imperfect fantasies – so consequently phallic jouissance is never perfect. It’s always lacking, because while it’s good, it’s never quite right. You may think ‘oh that’s disappointing, that’s so depressing’, but no! Because if you ever got it exactly right, you’d never seek it again!”

And honestly, I wrestle with this whole area a lot.

I took a first stab at explaining it to someone in the bar on Sunday evening.

“I have this friend, right? And she’s really hot. We go on dates every now and then. We flirt. I want to fuck her, but at the same time I don’t. It’s like the end of Mad Men…you understand what I’m getting at?”

The wary look on her face said very clearly that I needed to find a more coherent way of framing it. As I tried to do that in my head on the train home, I kept coming back to the whole magpie thing, and to the more general impact of curiosity on who and how I fuck.

~

At some stage, I’ve thought about having sex with each one of my female friends. With a lot of my female colleagues (and a fair few of the male ones too). With just about every woman I’ve spoken to for more than about a half hour, in fact.

That doesn’t mean I’ve sat there picturing them naked, or dreaming up detailed scenarios and fantasies. It’s usually just an idle thought at the back of my mind. The mental equivalent of cocking your head and looking at someone in a different way, just for a moment. “Huh,” my brain says. “I wonder what that would be like.”

I don’t imagine I’m unusual in that respect. Sexual curiosity is just one dimension of our general desire to know people. We want to turn them over in our hands and find out what makes them tick, or to feel like we’ve pushed past the face they show the world and teased from them something real or profound. We want them to open up to us, in whatever way – we want to be invited in.

If I find someone interesting, I want that connection. I’m not sure intimacy is the right word, because it’s often so fleeting – more like a glimpse of what intimacy would look like. Either way, I find that it often naturally takes a sexual form. I’m just as likely to find myself getting curious about how someone tastes or what sounds they make as they’re being fucked, as I am about the music they listen to or the things they’re afraid of. All of it – each little detail – goes into shaping who a person really is.

Of course the opportunity to satisfy that curiosity rarely presents itself. For one thing we’re socially conditioned to frown on (what’s presented as) promiscuity, even now, and that can make it hard to initiate those sorts of conversation. Asking someone whether we can go down on them is also just not the same as asking to see their Spotify playlist – and maybe that’s a good thing. As Remittance Girl also alluded to, if we entirely remove the transgressive element from sex, we risk stripping away much of the excitement – to some extent, I want to feel like there’s something riding on it when I ask that question. I want to feel my stomach knot, just a little bit, while waiting for the answer.

And sometimes I want the answer to be ‘no’. Not because I only want what I can’t have, or bullshit like that – but because sometimes it’s better not to find out. Reality can disappoint; even when it doesn’t – even when it’s fucking fantastic – it can rob you of the curiosity that proved compelling enough to risk asking the question in the first place.

~

<Spoiler alert – next three paragraphs discuss the end of Mad Men>

My first response to the closing scene in Mad Men was to slam down my laptop screen in disgust. That’s it? That’s fucking it?? Seven seasons of emotional investment, and all we’re left with is Don Draper sitting in a field doing fucking yoga?! It didn’t feel like a resolution. All it did was leave questions unanswered. Questions about the past and the future; about who this man really was, and whether he could ever truly be happy.

I thought about all those things in the hours after the episode finished. I cursed Matthew Weiner for not playing to the crowd and giving us proper answers. I tried to piece it all together in my head, and construct the ’10 years later’ scene the episode never gave us. The more I did that – the more I obsessed about it – the more I was grudgingly forced to accept that maybe the whole thing had been pitch-perfect in its build-up and execution.

Weiner held his nerve and did one of the hardest things – he let his audience take over and paint their own pictures on the canvas he laid out. We could decide for ourselves whether Dick Whitman lived out the rest of his life in a hippy commune, or whether Don Draper went back to New York and made that Coke ad. By not having our curiosity satisfied, we were given the opportunity to indulge and enjoy it.

~

The point I was trying to make in the bar last Sunday is that there are times when I’d prefer to hang on to my curiosity. Meeting up for drinks with my friend’s sister every couple of weeks has turned into a sort of expanded version of edge play: we’ve taken a mutual attraction and stoked it over a series of ‘dates’, till it glows with an intensity that I’m almost afraid to burn off. Not because it can’t live up to expectations, but because by finding out I’d lose something that may be even more valuable.

Things don’t always reach that stage, of course – that’s what I mean when I say I wrestle with it. The magpie in me wants the shiny new adventures too, which is why the curiosity balloon usually gets popped before it can really start to soar. That’s rooted in a different fear – the fear of missing out on opportunities. When I kiss someone I’ve just met, I’m mainly doing it to find out what sort of reaction the chemistry between us will generate, but I’m also trying to make sure I don’t have cause to regret not kissing her. It doesn’t much matter whether that leads to something more or not – the experience itself makes the decision worthwhile.

In the case of the woman in the park the other week, a perfectly pleasant date had led us to the point where an experimental kiss felt like the natural next step. Or, more to the point, like a natural next step. Taking it was an active choice, but not one I made with any thought of what might follow the kiss. There was no weighing up of pros and cons – no wider context. I kissed her simply because I wanted to know what it would feel like to do so. That desire – and the tingly anticipation that precedes the kiss itself – is often why I go on dates like that in the first place.

Making that choice is not always the right thing to do. There are times when curiosity can hurt other people in your life, and times when the short-term rush of adrenaline can give way to other kinds of regret or remorse. Occasionally it’s just flat-out disappointing. I’ve got it wrong plenty of times, I know that much, and I’m sure I’ll get it wrong in the future too.

Those failures won’t stop me trying though. I agree that when it comes to the gap between fantasy and reality, we should celebrate imperfection rather than allow it to weigh us down. It’s what keeps us curious, and what gives us the impulse to go out and make connections with people.

~

The two Eroticon sessions, 18 months apart, helped me to frame and unpick a tension within myself. A tension between competing and contradictory impulses: the need to know (to touch, to taste, to kiss) and the fear of what that knowledge might cost me – of what I might lose in its acquisition.

Over the last few years I’ve learned to live with the (false) perception that I’m basically a massive slut who will jump into bed at the drop of a hat. I’m not ashamed of who I am, and will never apologise for wanting to indulge my curiosity, but after a lot of thought I’m no longer sure the magpie label is quite right.

I imagine I will always want to swoop down and pick up the shiny thing – it’s just that these days I also have a better (and calmer) appreciation of the value of staying in my tree. Not least because it’s only from there that I can watch the sun dance brilliantly over its surface, simultaneously hiding and illuminating what lies beneath.

Late last year, I got an email from someone who reads my blog. That happens on a reasonably regular basis: people have questions and comments, which they’re not always comfortable posting publicly, or they just want to say hello and have a bit of a chat.

One of the advantages of being a male sex blogger is that I’ve never felt threatened or creeped-out by that sort of attention; the people who contact me are always polite, friendly, engaging and articulate, and I’ve been able to respond to them without any real fear of the consequences.

Occasionally it’s clear that they want to do more than just talk. When that happens I have to decide very quickly whether to let things play out or whether to back off and steer the conversation in another direction.

Amy’s intentions were not difficult to decipher, and the first paragraph of her email was intriguing enough that instinctively I wanted to know more.

“I’m 30, live in North London with my husband, and work in the City. I’ve been following your blog for a few months, after finding it via Girl on the Net.  Every time I see you have posted I have a little buzz of excitement.  Your writing is very entertaining and at times deeply arousing…perfect for a dreary autumn day.  Sometimes when I walk or sit on a bus down Upper Street I find myself playing a little guessing game about who you are and where you might live.”

We exchanged a few messages, and I quickly learnt that Amy’s husband knew nothing of her online activities, and certainly wasn’t aware that she was sending increasingly explicit messages and photos to other men. Four days after her first email we met for a drink in a local pub, and within a couple of hours we were hurrying back to my flat, where we barely made it through the door before ripping each other’s clothes off.

Amy made no attempt to hide either her intentions or the motives behind them. Over the second glass of wine, she told me that she loved her husband very much, and that she was certain they’d spend the rest of their lives together. However, they’d been a couple since university, and over time their sex drives – and sexual interests – had diverged to the point where she was no longer happy with that side of the relationship. He didn’t want an open marriage, so she’d made a conscious decision to spend 12-18 months ‘having adventures’ without him.

“This way I get to experience all the things I know I’d otherwise miss out on, and hopefully end up with a bunch of memories I can still wank over when I’m 90. It would hurt him too much if he found out, but in the long run this will work out best for both of us.”

I was impressed by how clearly and calmly she’d thought things through, even if I didn’t find her solution wholly convincing. Illicit sex is thrilling and addictive, and the idea that she could just stop at a given point felt counter-intuitive – or at least at odds with my own experience.

Back at my place, Amy was everything her words had suggested she might be: enthusiastic, energetic, curious, and a lot of fun. We had terrific sex that night: she fucked with the intensity of someone trying to squeeze every drop of pleasure out of the time available to her, and I allowed myself to be swept along by the sheer joy of making her come again and again. When she left, I spread myself out on the soaked sheets like a starfish, and laughed at just how unexpectedly magnificent life really was.

We met up a few more times after that, with equally spectacular results. Because she wasn’t ashamed of what she was doing, time with Amy felt comfortable both in and out of bed; we could fuck for a couple of hours, then head to the pub for a drink and a chat, with no awkwardness or recriminations. Amy was happy to talk about her marriage, and I enjoyed listening to what she had to say – even as we lay naked in each other’s arms, her wedding ring resting against my skin. It was obvious not only that she loved her husband, but that she genuinely saw this period in her life as finite and precious; as something to secure their future together, rather than jeopardise it. In that sense our time together felt unwaveringly honest.

Not least because for all the warmth and intimacy of our various encounters, Amy was always very clear about the limited role I played in her life. She compartmentalised in a way that I found both familiar and admirable. She didn’t comment on my blog or interact with me on Twitter. We didn’t swap phone numbers. We didn’t make plans. We weren’t friends. We communicated by email, and when she wanted to fuck, she told me.

When the time came to draw a line under things, she told me that too. I emailed Amy one day to suggest a hook-up, and got the following response:

“Remember I told you when we first met that I thought my adventures were going to come to an end soon…well I’m there now. I don’t regret any of it, but it’s time for me to stop and focus on my marriage.

I’ll continue to read your blog with interest and occasionally wet knickers!”

Of all the words she said or wrote to me, the only one I ever resented was ‘occasionally’…

~

Amy was not the first woman I helped to cheat on a partner, and there’s every chance she won’t be the last.

There was the woman who discovered just before her wedding that her fiancé was still sleeping with his ex-girlfriend, and decided to even the score three days after walking down the aisle.

The woman whose husband hit her when he was drunk, and who took revenge by sucking my cock in the marital bed.

The woman trapped in a loveless marriage, counting down the months and years till her kids were old enough to see their parents separate.

The woman whose relationship was stuck in a rut; and the woman who didn’t yet realise how wonderful hers would be.

The woman in a long-distance relationship, who simply missed the physical intimacy; and the woman with a boyfriend recently returned home after two years abroad, who mourned the sudden loss of her emotional independence.

People cheat in relationships for all sorts of reasons. They always have done. They cheat because they’re angry, or lonely, or jealous, or bored. They cheat because they long to break free, and they cheat because it’s the only thing that will help them to hold on to what they’ve got. They cheat because they’re just plain horny.

Some of them have good reasons – some of them don’t. Some of them are clear with both themselves and others about why they’re doing it – others lack the self-awareness or the courage to recognise and confront whatever impulse drives their actions.

I’ve been all of those people. I’ve blogged before about my own infidelity, with far more honesty than I often gave to the partners on whom I cheated. I’ve learned not to judge ‘adulterers’ like Amy, because if there’s one thing the last 12 years have shown me it’s that our relationships are really fucking complex, and no two are ever the same.

Plenty’s been written about the Ashley Madison cyberattack over the last couple of weeks. Unfaithful spouses make easy targets, and I’ve read a lot of gleefully nasty commentary as a result. ‘They had it coming’ seems to be the prevailing opinion – on social media, at least.

I find it hard to share that viewpoint. Without doubt, there are terrible, dishonest people who use sites like Ashley Madison to betray their partners – but to view every single user in cold, judgemental black-and-white is to ignore the reality that stares us in the face. All of us have either cheated or known someone who has. All of us have lied to a partner at one time or another. Even if it didn’t involve sex, all of us have done something to betray a partner’s trust.

Blanket condemnation achieves nothing. The more we try to paint infidelity with broad, monochrome strokes, the more we reduce our chances of understanding the individual choices that people make. Maybe most of those will still appear bad and selfish, but there will be others that many of us can understand – can even empathise with – if we open ourselves up to that.

When someone decides to cheat, they’re faced with three potential lies. The lie they tell their partner, the lie they tell the person they sleep with, and the lie they tell themselves. Like most things in life it’s far from perfect, but with Ashley Madison – as with Amy – at least only one of those lies gets told.