Exhibit A

Enough time has gone by since I wrote the first half of this that I should probably answer the rest of the questions in a new post, rather than tacking them on to the original one. For the next few hours I’ll be jumping back and forth between work, writing, Wimbledon, and the World Cup, so I’m going to post these in batches, with the aim of getting them all up by the end of the evening. If anyone has additional questions for the list, kindly fuck off feel free to send them over!

Right then, here we go:

What’s the best approach to pick up a man in a social setting? Be witty? Eye contact? Inappropriate amounts of cleavage? What if you are shy and can only manage to stammer and look away quickly when he catches your eye?

Jeez, that’s a tough one. It kind of depends on the guy in question, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, just as there isn’t when it comes to picking up women. For example, some guys will be charmed and intrigued by the whole stammering/looking away thing, especially if they think they’ve directly inspired such shyness. Others will respond to a more forthright, confident approach. I guess what I would say is that while wit, eye contact and cleavage might be a turn-off for some men, they’re probably not the guys you want to fuck anyway; if they find those things actively unattractive, it suggests they have fairly ‘traditional’ views on how women ought to behave.

If you want to know how to pick me up, then yes, wit and cleavage would certainly represent a good start. I don’t often get chatted up (not in ‘social settings’, anyway), so the direct approach tends to work best – if you’re too subtle about it, I probably won’t realise you’re interested.

Did you ever have a crush on a teacher or professor?

Yes, though I’m afraid it’s not a very interesting story. I was 17, hormonal, bookish, and apparently invisible to women; she was young, attractive, passionate about Victorian poetry, and keen to tell me how brilliant she thought I was. Of course I fell in love with her. Nothing ever happened, because she was a teacher and I was a spotty, sweaty teenager, but I did get a lot of good wanking material out of the year I spent in her classroom.

I also had a slightly severe Politics professor at Oxford, who must have been in her mid-30s when she taught me, and while I wouldn’t say I ever had a crush on her, she did inspire some of my earliest fantasies about femdom and older women.

Have you ever run into a situation where someone ran into your blog who shouldn’t have? (Co-worker, boss[!], friend from school, sibling, etc). How did it turn out?

‘Shouldn’t have’ is a slippery little term in that context. Have I had to deal with someone who I didn’t want to find my blog stumbling upon it? Yes. However, you could ask that the person in question had a right to read it, so I’m not sure that counts. Otherwise (touch wood), I’ve been very lucky so far: either my family/friends/colleagues/etc haven’t found my blog, or they’ve been decent enough to keep quiet about doing so. Long may that continue!

Actually, it’s not something I spend too much time worrying about. I have around 300 followers on Twitter, and over the last few months have averaged just over 150 blog hits a day. In the context of the wider population, those numbers are very small, so the chances of someone I know finding it by accident are pretty slim – I just don’t have that kind of profile. If it happens, it’ll be because I do something monumentally stupid (type the wrong email address, for example), or because someone is malicious enough to expose me, and there’s not much I can do about either of those things, beyond sort of vaguely trying not to piss anyone off too much. I suppose it’s why I’m a bit less guarded about my anonymity these days than I used to be.

Who, out of all the people you have ever slept with, would you most like to spend a day in bed with and why? One who it isn’t actually possible to, i.e. an ex that you fell out with or now hate.

I received so many interesting questions that it’s hard to pick a favourite, but if you really twisted my arm, this is the one I’d go for. It’s certainly the one I’ve spent the most time thinking about. For starters, what criteria should I use? Should I pick whichever woman was ‘best’ in bed? Or someone I didn’t get enough time with? Or maybe I should go for someone from way back, when I didn’t know what I was doing in bed, and show them everything I’ve learned since then? Seriously, there are so many ways I could go with this.

The way the question’s worded does help though. If it has to be someone unattainable, that rules out various exes who I could, in theory, jump back into bed with. I think I can also forget about any I ‘hate’; a one-off hate-fuck would be pretty hot, I guess, but I’m not sure I want to spend a whole day lying next to someone I despise.

Who does that leave? Well, there are the ones who are married (or otherwise monogamously attached), the ones who now date women (and there are actually two of those), the ones who live thousands of miles away, and I guess there are the ones who, for reasons both good and bad, wouldn’t pick up the phone if they saw that it was me calling.

Hmm…that’s still a pretty long list. Anyway, after agonising over it for a few days, I managed to whittle it down to two. Let’s call them Diana and Rebecca.

I met Diana on a train. Actually, I’d spotted her about 20 minutes beforehand, in the rush-hour melee on the concourse at Paddington. Just for a second, the crowd thinned out and she materialised in front of me, small and pale and calm. She had dark hair and big tits, but those weren’t what I noticed at first; this will sound stupid, but as soon as we made eye contact, I could tell that she was interesting. I lost sight of her after that, but as I squeezed my way down the aisle on the train back home, she reappeared at one of the tables, opposite an empty seat. By the time I stepped out onto the platform in Swindon an hour later, I was completely smitten.

Diana lived (and still lives) with her boyfriend in Bristol. Every Tuesday, she went up to London to study for her part-time Psychology degree, and for the couple of months after that first encounter I met her each week at the station afterwards, for the trip back out west. It didn’t matter whether I needed to go that way or not, nor did I mind having to hang around for an hour or two before leaving London: the pleasure of her company was enough to make it worth the effort. There was an easy intimacy between us. We’d buy a bottle of wine, squeeze into the first seats we could find, and spend the little time we had together just talking non-stop. Not chatting: talking. I found myself storing up thoughts, ideas, and all sorts of interesting little nuggets during the week, to share with her on our journeys. Just thinking about her made me smile.

The sex was probably a mistake. It happened shortly after I moved to London: she came to visit one Saturday, and suddenly we had the luxury of a whole day together. We picnicked in the park, we went to the Tate, and after a couple of hours spent wandering through the streets together, we ate dinner down by the river, in the last of the evening sunshine. It was basically the perfect date…except, of course, neither of us could acknowledge it as anything other than a day out with a friend. Later that night, we settled down onto my bed to watch a movie, and it was only then that we both plucked up the courage to confront what was happening.

We had sex. Once. It was tender and passionate and heart-thumpingly exciting, all at the same time, but it was also terribly fragile. We clung to each other in an effort to stop it all spinning out of control, and I could hardly breathe for fear that this glorious thing we’d stumbled into was about to slip away. Which, of course, it did. After a few minutes, she looked me in the eye and said “no, I’m sorry, I can’t do this.” And so we stopped.

There’s a lot more to the story. The short version is that although Diana and I are still very good friends, those few excruciatingly wonderful minutes marked both the beginning and the end of what might have been something more. Since then, just enough distance has crept into our conversations to prevent a repeat of that night, but there’s still a part of me that wishes…that wishes…

Yeah, so she’s definitely a candidate.

With Rebecca, it’s a lot easier to explain. Our two sets of parents were university friends, and each year we’d visit her family in France as part of our summer holiday. Rebecca was six months younger than me, and my first real crush; I mean, come on, she was glamorous and French, and we used to run around half-naked on the beach together…even at the age of 11 I’m not really sure I stood much of a chance. I mooned after her for years, but nothing ever happened, and once I stopped going on holiday with my parents, we gradually lost touch.

Fast forward to 2010, and my sister’s wedding. I had just been dumped, she was there with her brother rather than her boyfriend, we both had a shitload to drink…did I mention that she’s French? She was sharing a bed with her brother at a local B&B, and while he went out on the town, she and I staggered back to their room and collapsed into bed together.

I’d love to be able to say that what came next lived up to all my teenage fantasies, but sex rarely works like that, especially when you’ve drunk your body weight in wine. We sort of fumbled around for a bit: I went down on her; she reached for my cock and tried to get me hard; one of us somehow managed to locate a condom; and that was pretty much it. No erection, no hot fuck, and no happy ending to the story I’d written so many times in my head over the years. When I woke up the next morning to find her brother asleep on the floor of the room, tangled up with one of my sister’s best (male) friends, the whole thing felt even more surreal.

What saved the situation is that we were able to laugh about it afterwards. As she said over breakfast (with a Gallic shrug), we’d known each other for so long that it was bound to happen at some point, and neither of us felt embarrassed by how the night had ended. However, while I don’t really think of it as a missed opportunity, there’s still a part of me that would like to be able to go back and do it properly – or to stay holed up in that hotel room with her for just one more night.

So there you go: Diana and Rebecca. Rebecca and Diana. Tough choice.

Can’t I just have both?

On the fluffier end of things, I’m always curious about what people would choose for their final meal, so in that spirit, what would you wish for your final sexual experience if it could be anything you wanted, from the most profane to the most profound?

Fuck, I don’t know! That’s like the whole ‘favourite song/book’ thing: essentially a question I don’t want to answer because it’s too fucking hard. But ok, I’ll give it a go.

Given that you specified a sexual experience, I’m tempted to cheat a bit, and pick an orgy. After all, that would give me the opportunity to cram in all sorts of good stuff, and I’m pretty sure I’d die happy at the end of it. Not sure that’s really in the spirit of the question though.

Ok, how about this. Back in August, I went to a trade fair in Birmingham. Manning one of the stalls was this incredible, devastatingly intelligent, pre-Raphaelite beauty…but with massive tits and a Geordie accent. We chatted, we flirted, we snuck off and drank beer together; at the end of it all, we exchanged business cards, and three months later she flew over for a dirty long weekend in Poland.

We agreed that on the first night, we’d just chill out and get to know each other a bit better. Sure, there was some kissing, but neither of us really wanted to jump the gun. We needed to build a bit of trust, and confirm that the chemistry we’d felt in Birmingham was not merely the result of boredom and lukewarm Carlsberg.

The following morning, I dressed for work. Florence (as we’ll call her) wrapped herself in my duvet and watched me dash around the bedroom through sleepy, sexy eyes. When I was ready to leave, she looked me up and down, then took me by the hand and pulled me back over to the bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress, naked apart from the duvet, and planted her feet either side of mine. I had time to take one deep breath, and then this 24-year-old machine unzipped my trousers, pulled out my cock, and proceeded to make me come in her mouth in about 45 seconds flat.

Seriously, I’ve never felt anything like it, either before or since. To this day, I’m not quite sure how she did it; all I know is that the second she took me in her mouth, my knees buckled and my eyes rolled back in my head. After she’d gulped down every last drop of cum, Florence zipped me back up, curled a hand round the back of my neck, kissed me hard, and sent me off to work.

Lots of women tell me they’re great at giving head: some really are, some really aren’t, and most are kind of in the middle. Florence told me that too. Florence delivered. It was awesome.

In this post, I briefly mentioned that I’d had cause to revise some of the indifference to blowjobs that I expressed eight months earlier in this post. Florence is basically the reason for that revision. If I had to pick a ‘final sexual experience’, I could certainly do a lot worse.

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a (hot) friend, which went something like this:

Hot Friend: “How’s the new job? Do try not to pork the payroll in your first week, darling”

Exhibit A: “All good so far, thanks! (And no comment re your helpful advice!)”

HF: “Ha, does that mean you already have? Fuck me…you work fast.”

EA: “That really would be impressive! But no, no I haven’t.”

HF: “I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time…”

EA: “Hmmm…well…hmmm…ok, no. But that was different. Obviously.”

HF: “Haha, I knew it – you’ve basically shagged your way through your CV, haven’t you?”

EA: “Hey hey hey…I’ve had 6 permanent jobs (including this one), and I’ve only shagged a colleague at 3 of them. Fine, 4 if you include shagging someone after I left the company. Which I don’t.”

HF: “Dirtbag.”

I think she meant that as a compliment.

I’m aware that sex in the workplace is something that conventional wisdom counsels against. ‘Don’t dip your pen in the company ink’, and all that. But then conventional wisdom is opposed to all sorts of stuff that I consider enjoyable and fulfilling (‘don’t go out boozing on a school night’, ‘leave yourself plenty of time to get to the airport, and arrive at least two hours before your flight’, ‘don’t drink caffeine after 6pm’, yada yada yada), so over the years I’ve learned largely to ignore its prim, pursed-lipped warnings and just get on with my life.

In fact, like a lot of things, fucking a colleague is fun in part because you’re not ‘meant’ to do it. You’re certainly not meant to do it in the office toilets in the middle of the day, or on the CEO’s desk late at night, or in the client’s car park just before an important sales pitch. I’m pretty sure conventional wisdom would frown on all three of those, and yet each was a heart-thumpingly thrilling experience.

For those of us doing a full-time office job and sleeping for seven hours a night, roughly 40% of our waking hours will be spent with work colleagues. That’s more than we generally spend with family, friends, or loved ones. It’s no wonder that sexual tension swirls and eddies around most offices, occasionally picking up speed and sweeping people off their feet, into the stationery cupboard, and out of their underwear. It’s natural, it’s entirely predictable, and for the most part I tend to think of it as a Good Thing.

Why ‘for the most part’? Because of course I’m writing from a ridiculously privileged position. Conventional wisdom actually misses the mark on this one: it’s not the pen-dippers who tend to suffer when workplace shagging goes wrong. As a man, I’m unlikely to be slut-shamed in the office kitchen if I end up in bed with the MD after a night out. Nor do I have to worry about accusations of sleeping my way to the top when it becomes known that I’m having a fling with one of the management team. My wardrobe choices aren’t immediately sexualised, or viewed and judged through the lens of the effect they might have on unsuspecting male colleagues.

More generally though, I have less to worry about than women in my position. I don’t have to fight for equal pay, or to break through a glass ceiling, or even just to be taken seriously in a corporate environment. I can fuck to my heart’s content, safe in the knowledge that even if things do go wrong, it’s probably not going to be used against me, or jumped on as an excuse to solidify an existing prejudice.

Not all offices harbour (or would tolerate) that kind of sexism, and even in the ones that do, there are plenty of women who don’t give a monkeys what other people say about their sex lives. Good for them, and with any luck this is a problem that will fade away over time, as the workforce becomes more modern and gender issues are gradually dealt with. However, for those of us men who enjoy mixing business with pleasure, it’s worth bearing in mind the potential professional (and personal) vulnerability of the female colleagues we chase. I’ve been guilty of ignoring (or just not considering) that in the past – I intend to take it more seriously in the future.

That said…I will always be a dirtbag…

EDIT: The feedback I’ve had from y’all on this has been really interesting. It’s worth clarifying that I don’t think it’s my role (or any man’s role) to police who/when/where/how women fuck, nor do I think that women are delicate flowers who need to be protected in the workplace. However, I do believe that as guys we have a responsibility to challenge the kind of slut-shaming and sexism that contribute to women who sleep around being viewed in a different way to men: that responsibility extends way beyond the office, but in that kind of environment, where people’s professional reputations can be at stake, it’s especially important.

As this is my 100th post on this site, I thought I’d answer some questions from the people who read it. Great (if rather self-indulgent) idea in theory, terrible headache in practice: brevity is not one of my strengths at the best of times, and as quite a few of the questions were interesting enough that they probably warranted a full blog post in response, you’ll understand why I found this exercise a little tricky.

There were 23 questions in total. Thank you to all the people who took the time to send me one. If you sent me a question and I’ve missed it off the list, then a) I blame the Gmail/Twitter gremlins for deleting it from my inbox, b) if you believe that, you’ll believe anything, and c) please re-send it and I’ll make sure it’s added somewhere below.

(Note: I’m going to post these in two batches – 12 now, 11 later.)

Why the circumcision, and do you have feelings about it one way or the other?

Let’s start with something nice and cheerful, shall we? I was circumcised shortly before my 5^th or 6^th birthday, though you’ll forgive me if I haven’t made a point of remembering exactly which one. The time of year is hard to forget, as I opened my presents at my birthday party wearing nothing but one of my Dad’s t-shirts – turns out that having a piece of your cock lopped off leads to a reasonable amount of post-op pain.

Anyway, that wasn’t your question. My parents had me circumcised on medical advice after I suffered through a couple of bouts of cystitis. Interestingly, the NHS still lists UTIs as a reason to circumcise boys, though they do now add that it’s ‘usually only recommended if a boy has a risk factor that increases the likelihood of repeated UTIs.’ From what I understand, they were a bit more cavalier in the mid-80s.

I must admit, I don’t really have any strong feelings about it as an adult. As a child, I did – I distinctly remember being too embarrassed to take my trunks off in front of the other boys after primary school swimming lessons, because I was different to them ‘down there’ – but since puberty it’s never really bothered me.

It probably does have an impact on my sex life, especially living in the UK. Studies show that around 15% of British men aged 16-44 are walking around without a foreskin, compared to 70-80% of American men, 92.5% of Filipino men, and 95% of Ghanaian men: it makes sense, therefore, that American, Filipino and Ghanaian women, for example, know their way around a circumcised dick better than their British counterparts.

For anyone reading this who has only handled uncut cocks before, and wants to know the difference, I’ve got two words for you:

1. Lubrication
2. Pressure

With no foreskin, there’s no natural lubrication to help with handjobs; and because the head of a circumcised cock is exposed the whole time, it tends to be less sensitive than one that spends most of its life under wraps, which means a firmer grip is generally required. Just not too firm. Yeah. Ow.

In your post ‘On My Sexuality, Part 2’ you talk about your first threesome. Is that your only threesome? If you’ve had others were they MFM or FMF or MMM? Want to tell us about it?

350 words per answer is probably not sustainable, so I’m going to rattle through a few quick ones, in the hope of creating some momentum. ‘Pithy’, that’s what I need to aim for.

Sadly, at time of writing, that’s the only threesome I’ve been a part of. It would be nice to change that at some point, and having only really been interested in MFM in the past, I find myself increasingly turned-on by the idea of FMF these days too. Really, either would be gravy. MMM? Probably not right now, but never say never.

You come home after a really stressful day at work, how do you de-stress? Does this change if you have a partner?

Here’s the thing – I don’t really wank to relax. I wank because I’m horny, and if I’m really stressed, I’m probably not going to be in the mood to rub one out. It’s different if I have a partner, especially if we’re close enough for her to recognise when I need someone to help get me out of my own head. Sex is great for that, though it usually takes someone else to initiate it.

When I’m on my own, I de-stress sometimes just by lying down in a dark room and having a nap. Naps always help. Otherwise I try to go into zombie mode. I plonk myself in front of the TV, or go for a run, or open a bottle of wine. I rarely pick up the phone and seek out a friendly voice: I’m not good at talking to other people about my problems.

Tell me your favourite song, the one that picks you up no matter how low you are.

Ok, but no. Can’t do that. Can anyone do that? How do they isolate one song among the gazillions they’ve listened to, and call it their ‘favourite’?? I suppose you’ve added one helpful criterion, but actually even that prompts more questions than it answers. Why am I low? What sort of a low is it? Am I at home on my own, listening to the radio in the car, or in a pub with a bunch of other people? Context matters.

I cattle-prodded my family into doing a Desert Island Discs thing last Christmas, because I enjoy it when they all hate me just a little bit. Of the eight songs on my list, I suppose the first five would qualify as ‘favourites’, while the other three were all picked for purely sentimental reasons. Make of it what you will:

1. Let Down (Radiohead)
2. Poses (Rufus Wainwright)
3. Country Feedback (REM)
4. The Boxer (Simon & Garfunkel)
5. Design For Life (Manics)
6. Letter From America (The Proclaimers)
7. Suavemente (Elvis Crespo)
8. Nessun Dorma (Pavarotti)

And yes, I fucking love The Proclaimers. Sue me.

Summer storms…..sexy or scary? Have any stories about summer storms?

Definitely not scary. Sometimes sexy, sometimes just ohmyfuckinggodhowamazingisthat. I actually have more happy memories of going running in summer storms than I do of fucking in them – the adrenaline shot I get from rain like that always makes me go faster for longer. Suppose that works for sex too…

And no, no stories, I’m afraid.

If you had to choose between watching porn or reading erotica for the rest of your life, which would you pick? And why?

Erotica, hands-down. Actually, I’m just going to cheat here and link to the article I co-wrote with Em for her Any Girl Friday blog last month, about my feelings on porn. I would get bored of porn long before I got bored of erotica.

Did you actually measure the volume of your penis when you took that Sinful Sunday photo? If not, how about just giving us the length and girth instead?

I’m afraid I did not measure the volume, and despite a couple of ‘generous’ offers to help me recreate the experiment, I don’t think I’ll be calculating it any time soon. However, show me a man who’s never taken a ruler, wedged it against his dick, and hoped for the best, and I’ll show you a man with no hands… So yes, I can give you the other dimensions.

Except, except…erections are slippery bastards. I don’t know about other guys, but mine vary a fair amount in size, depending on how horny I am, how recently I’ve come, what someone’s doing to me, whether there’s a Y in the month, and even what time of day it is. Broadly speaking though, they range from about 5.7”-6.2” in length, 5.3”-5.7” in circumference (at the thickest point), and, if we’re coming over all Pythagorean, 1.7”-1.8” in width. However, while my penis is elliptical, it’s not perfectly circular, so I guess it’s more like 1.8”-1.9” at the widest point. Broadly speaking, I’m happy to be average. In other news, geometry is awesome.

How many sexual experiences have you had with men? Would you identify as bisexual?  And added to that, do you think that fidelity would be challenging for you because you swing that way? (Basically, are you a big gay sub in denial?)

Yes, thanks for that one. If you don’t count looking at other guys’ dicks in the shower and coming over all funny inside, then I’ve only really had one sexual experience with another man. I identify as straight, but with the caveat that I consider it to be a bit of an umbrella of a label, covering lots of different feeling that all happen to have at their core the belief that you’re only interested in a ‘romantic’ relationship with someone of the opposite sex.

Fidelity is challenging for me for various reasons, but I don’t think an attraction to other guys is one of them. The ‘sub’ bit is more relevant, I guess. In order to be happy in a monogamous, committed relationship, I would certainly need to find either a partner who was comfortable switching roles in the bedroom, or at the very least, a partner who understood that side of me and was willing to help explore other outlets for it.

You have mentioned you’re not a huge fan of blow jobs. What is your favourite thing for someone to do to/for/with you?

Honestly? Make me a decent cup of tea. Everything else varies according to the person and situation, but anyone who knows how to make a proper cuppa is golden in my book. Back massages are great too – after all, I can stroke my own cock any time I like, but when I have a sore back, reaching round to try and rub it only makes things worse.

If you could be anywhere right now, where would you go?

Right now? I’d go to Brazil and stay there for the entire World Cup, especially if you’re willing to chuck in tickets to a few of the matches as well.

What book changed your perspective on life?

This is a bit like the music question above, in the sense that I can’t really give just one answer to it. Lots of books have changed my perspective on life, because that’s one of the things that really good books should do. Sometimes the change has been radical, more often it’s been very subtle, but either way there are few things better than getting to the end of a book and realising that you’ve started thinking about something in a different way. All of which is a roundabout way of saying ‘I don’t know’. Or ‘lots of them’. The last book to really challenge my thinking about a particular topic or issue was Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder.

When I was in grade school, a classmate informed us all that his father told him sex with a woman was like sticking your penis into a hot oven. We were all slightly horrified and titillated at this. As an adult, I find “hot oven” to be an unsatisfactory description. Please elaborate.

Firstly, I’d say that if that boy’s father experienced a burning sensation in his penis on a regular basis, he should probably have consulted his GP.

You’re right though, that’s disturbing and wrong. The terrible thing is, while I can think of a million better ways to describe the sensation, I can’t think of one that really captures what it’s like. Oh, oh, except you know the scene in Flash Gordon, where that guy has to stick his arm down inside a dark, damp, gnarled old tree stump, only it turns out there’s a poisonous Wood Beast lying in wait, and the Wood Beast bites him, and then Timothy Dalton has to stab him in the chest with a sword to stop him going insane? Yeah…it’s nothing like that.

To be continued…

Imagine the scene. It’s early morning and you’ve just left the house of the person you spent the whole night fucking. They chatted you up in a local bar, then took you back to their place. The chemistry between you was electric, but you also seemed to have loads in common. You clicked. You got each other. Still, they seemed awfully keen to get rid of you this morning, and when you wrote down your number so they could call you for a proper date, there was an awkward silence before they took the slip of paper from you. They didn’t offer their number in return.

That’s when the penny drops. You’ve been used for sex. Some smooth talker made your head spin and your pants drop, just because they fancied a fuck. You were gobbled up with practiced efficiency, then spat out the next day – the click of their door closing was the last you’ll hear from them, and you didn’t even get a leisurely breakfast together to enjoy the afterglow.

How do you feel about that? About being used by someone who wanted a warm body in their bed that night? If it hadn’t been you, maybe it would’ve been the next suitable target who walked into the pub. Your actual identity – who you are as a person – was largely irrelevant. All you did was tick the right box somehow, even if you don’t know what that box was or how you ticked it.

—

For years now, I’ve really wanted to go to Lebanon. Why? Because I want to sit outside a cafe on a bustling Beirut street, eating mezze and drinking the excellent local wine. I want to visit Crusader castles, Mamluk mosques, and Ottoman hammams. I want to hike and ski in the mountains, then head back down to one of the sandy Mediterranean beaches and relax with a cocktail or two. Lebanon is the perfect mix of everything I want in an overseas trip: history, culture, tradition, great food, great wine, a diverse landscape, big cities, wide open spaces, and the opportunity to swim in the sea. Having studied Middle Eastern politics for both my BA and my MA, I’ve always wanted to visit the region and see it for myself, and where better to start than a country that’s been at the heart of so much change and struggle over the centuries.

Where else do I really want to go? Well there’s Argentina (Patagonia! Iguazu Falls! Steak! Wine!), and various other parts of South America. Iran would be awesome, though I’m not sure I could tell my Mum about that one. The Maldives, because despite all evidence to the contrary, I still like to think I’m the kind of person who could enjoy sitting on the beach for a week, and because huts like these ones look amazing. Northern Scandinavia – don’t care which country, just somewhere cold and dark/light enough to make me feel like I’m on a different planet. Nepal. Japan. Tanzania. Vietnam. Etc. Etc.

We only have one lifetime though, and most of us are limited by time, resources, or our own basic laziness. We have to make choices – to prioritise. Fuck it, what I really need is a travel bucket list. There are plenty of places I could go if I wanted help compiling one, but I’m already not short of things to put on mine. Lebanon, Argentina and Iran: yeah, that sounds like a good start. I can work with that.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote this piece for the Brit Babes, about the awesomeness of fucking older women. It got a pretty good reception overall, but there were a couple of dissenting voices, and I was unsurprised to find that those voices came from women in or around the age bracket I was writing about. Packing people together into groups, assigning that group a label, and then generalising about the characteristics and behaviour of the individuals within it is always going to be a mug’s game: for every person who recognises herself in what you say, there will be two more who find your observations trite, shallow or insulting.

So yes, I was prepared for the fact that what I wrote would piss people off. The following day, I got involved in a really interesting conversation on Twitter with the lovely @Juniper3Glasgow, who happens to be one of my favourite bloggers on sex and relationships. She said that she dislikes the assumptions that younger men make about her; the idea that just because she’s in her mid-30s, she must be insatiable in bed. She explained that their attention often feels indiscriminate. They don’t want to fuck her, they want to fuck what she represents. As she put it: “I just don’t want to feel like an item on a bucket list.”

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I really want to go to Lebanon, Argentina and Iran. I also really want to have a threesome with two women, get fucked up the arse by a guy with a big cock, and have sex on a train. I’m very happy to refer to that first set of desires as my travel bucket list. I would be much less happy talking about my ‘sexual bucket list’.

Read Juniper’s comment again. “I don’t want to feel like an item on a bucket list.” An item. An object. If I say that I’d love to visit an Inca temple some day, I’m effectively taking a group of unique structures, each with its own history, quirks and design features, and giving them one label; not only that, I’m then saying that I want to visit the generic ‘temple’. And that’s fine, for the most part.

It’s actually the same with the examples I used earlier. If I want to go to Lebanon, it’s because I have an (incomplete) idea in my head of what Lebanon is like. However, that idea is really just a collection of different things people have told me, stuff I’ve read, and my own desires and beliefs. I have created a Lebanon-ideal in my head, and decided that I want to visit it. The details around that desire – who I go with, what conversations we have, who we meet along the way – are irrelevant at this stage, as is the accuracy of the Lebanon-ideal in my head. The actual experience can be filled in later.

We’re pretty comfortable doing that with places. We’re less comfortable about doing it with people…or, perhaps, we’re less comfortable about people doing it with us. I would love to have a threesome with two women, but by putting it on a ‘bucket list’, I’m suggesting that the identity of the two women, and the context in which I fuck them, are irrelevant – all that matters is that they are women, that there are two of them, and that they’re in bed with me doing all the very bad things that I’ve grouped together under the heading ‘MFF threesome’. If I tell enough people about that desire, can I really blame any actual, real-life woman for being wary of helping me to fulfil it – or at least for thinking that I don’t want a threesome with her and another woman, I just want a threesome with two women, of which, at the time it takes place, she happens to be one. Not only that, but my desire exists because, in my head, I have a set of expectations for what a threesome with two women must be like – her job, presumably, is to live up to them.

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I can’t find it in my Twitter mentions, but Juniper’s comment was quickly followed by someone else saying that they would LOVE to be an item on a bucket list. That ‘someone else’ was male.

Go all the way back to the start of this post. I’m not suggesting that the reactions to that specific scenario will split neatly along gender lines – not in this constituency, at least – but I would be comfortable making certain generalisations about the way men and women respond to the idea of being ‘used for sex’.

As a man – and a white, educated, middle-class man, at that – I spend very little time worrying about being exploited, objectified or used. There is no glass ceiling for me at work. I don’t have to fight for equal pay, or equal treatment, or just to be taken seriously when I speak in meetings. People don’t link the clothes I wear with my sexual availability. I don’t carry a rape alarm, and I don’t keep a close eye on my drink in bars and clubs, in case it gets spiked. If I talk about my sex life on the bus, people might think I’m a bit of a dickhead, but it’s unlikely they’ll whisper ‘slut’ or ‘tart’ or ‘he’ll never find someone to marry him if he drops his pants that quickly.’ Even if they do, I have the luxury of not caring.

Being ‘used for sex’ is a novelty for me, rather than the latest manifestation of a challenge I face every single day. I can shrug it off easily enough – dismiss it as a blip, a one-off – and resume my normal position as a man in charge of his own sexual agency. A sexual agency, by the way, that I don’t have to fight tooth-and-nail to establish or to justify to those around me. The whole experience becomes a story to tell down the pub, maybe punctuated by a rueful shrug, or even a knowing grin – after all, if someone chose to take me home and fuck me all night, that must mean I’m pretty hot stuff, yeah? And who in their right mind is going to shame me for that?

We see it all the time in popular culture too. When men are used for sex in movies or on TV, it’s generally played for laughs. You see them high-fiving their mates afterwards, and at worst they might be on the receiving end of some good-natured teasing. The suggestion is always that not only were they were lucky to find a woman so sexually voracious that all she wants from a man is his body – they were lucky to be that body.

When it’s women who are used for sex, they’re presented as victims, or, worse, as cautionary tales. “Dress/behave/talk like that, and of course men will only want her for one thing – she basically brought it on herself.” It’s a less pernicious strain of the school of thought that blames rape victims rather than rapists.

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I’m aware that I’m in danger of over-analysing this.

We put things on ‘bucket lists’, because we think they must be so awesome that we absolutely have to see/visit/do/eat/try them before we die. We have to have that experience. By saying that, we acknowledge that we have a mental image of what that experience will be like. Of how we, as individuals, will experience it. It’s a very personal thing. A selfish thing.

With sex, all that plays in to various other issues around expectation, power, agency, and perception – issues which some of us have the privilege of not worrying about on a daily basis. To believe that someone wants to fuck us purely because ‘x has always been on my bucket list’ is to believe that they already have a set of expectations around what fucking us will be like. We are an ideal in their head, and if we don’t conform to that ideal – if we don’t give them the experience they’re looking for – we have failed in some way.

But there’s more than that: we’re also forced to confront the notion that they’re only fucking us in order to tick something off their list. We are being used as the means to an end, not enjoyed or valued as the end itself. We are the un-named travelling companion or, even worse, the airline that takes them to Lebanon, or Argentina, or wherever.

As a white, heterosexual man, none of that really crosses my mind when I think about why someone might be fucking me – or if it does, I don’t really care. It doesn’t reflect how I experience the world generally, and the issues it raises aren’t ones that I’ve been forced to confront by previous encounters with women. I have no problem being an item on someone’s bucket list, because fundamentally, for me, that’s all it is – there are no wider connotations to worry about.

I don’t have a sexual bucket list. I do have a mental list of things I think I’d really enjoy, and would love to try some day, provided I find the right person or people to try them with – and of course I have various expectations and beliefs, which have come together to help form that list. I could call it a bucket list if I wanted to – it’s close enough to our understanding of the concept – but language and perception matter, even more so with sex than with most other things. So I won’t. I’ll stick with this one instead:

• Lebanon
• Argentina
• Iran

That’s my bucket list.