Exhibit A

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

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

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

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

Flatmate: …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the bad news, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

“Fuck, what was that?”

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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