Exhibit A

I’m in the privileged position of being able to talk or write fairly easily about the vast majority of my sexual experiences. If I wanted to, I could bash out 500 words right now on the first time I had anal, or the night I ended up in bed with my childhood crush at my sister’s wedding, or the ten most interesting places I’ve done it. That’s because, for the most part, my sex life has been happy and straightforward (if not always uncomplicated). I’ve never been assaulted or abused; after a few false starts, I haven’t suffered from any significant performance issues (insert joke here); and while I might shy away from putting a label on it (hetero-flexible? Bi-curious? Straight-but-y’know-interested-in-cock?), I don’t generally struggle to understand or express my sexuality.

In other words, I’m very very lucky. I hope I would be aware of my good fortune anyway, but eight-plus years of reading (and occasionally writing) sex blogs has been both educational and humbling in that respect. Inspiring too: I’ve been sitting on something for a few days now, feeling too embarrassed to talk to anyone about it; it was only this evening, when I thought back to some of the pieces I’ve read, and the traumas, dilemmas and confessions that other bloggers have candidly committed to print, that I gathered up the courage to dig into what happened the other night.

I should probably get the bare bones of it out of the way up front: on Friday evening I paid the equivalent of about £35 for a hand-job from a masseuse, who, it turns out, moonlights as a sex worker. It was the first time I’ve paid for sex, and I suspect it’ll be the last, though of course it’s dangerous to deal in absolutes. There are several reasons why it’s been nagging away at me since it happened, but one of the biggest is that I don’t really know how to feel about the whole affair; five years ago, I would’ve been horrified with myself…but then five years ago, I would have identified polysexuality with Mormonism, and regarded transsexuals with something approaching revulsion. Five years ago…well, let’s just say that I was pretty dumb back then, and that I’m grateful for the education I’ve had in the intervening period.

Anyway, yes, Friday. For a while now, I’ve had back problems; nothing major, but enough that the combination of nine hours a day hunched over a computer screen, and a refusal to give up high-intensity sports, has resulted in sporadic bouts of joint and muscle pain. Massage helps with that. Massage helps with lots of things, actually: knots in my neck, tightness in my calves…clutter in my head too, from time-to-time. It also feels really good – I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this before, but stroking my back is pretty much the quickest way to render me insensible. A couple of months ago, I found a spa here that seemed reputable. It was in a courtyard in the city centre, right next to a big business hotel, and it had a proper website, which listed its treatments and prices. On my first visit, I was asked which muscles I had problems with, and the hour-long sports massage I received was professional, thorough, and, I discovered over the next few days, incredibly helpful.

So helpful, in fact, that I recommended the spa to a friend who came to visit me here. I mentioned it to colleagues. I even wrote about it, in a December blog entry. And of course I booked a second appointment, this time for a full body massage, which, again, I left feeling much better than I had as I walked down from my office. Before I left though, I spoke to the woman on the front desk, who asked me whether I’d enjoyed the massage. We chatted for a bit – she’s very attractive, and I was pretty obviously angling for her number – and at the end of the conversation, she told me that next time I came in, she’d make sure that she was available to deliver the treatment personally.

That was a week or two before Christmas. When I returned after the holidays, I called the spa and booked a massage for the end of my first week back at work. I arrived, and was shown into the treatment room by my new friend Magda, who left me to shower and get ready. I should be clear about one thing: at that point, I suspected nothing. Nada. I’ve been offered sex for money before, but only on street corners in Soho, and hotel corridors in Hong Kong. Seedy back alleys and their equivalents, basically. This place did not fall into that category. However, when I look back, of course there were signs: whereas the other masseuse had waited for me to knock on the door when I was ready, Magda simply breezed in after a few minutes, just as I was picking up the towel to wrap round my naked body; then, after 15 minutes of pounding and pummelling my feet and legs, she snapped me out of the haze I was falling into by telling me that I had a ‘really great body’. With hindsight…

But then a good massage does funny things to your brain. I end up in a bit of a druggy fog, my thoughts and reactions dulled by dopamine. On Friday, four days removed from my last orgasm and half an hour or so into the massage, my brain didn’t really respond when Magda’s hand reached between my legs and started fondling my cock – instead it remained on stand-by while my body grunted and pushed back towards her. Five minutes later, she asked me to roll onto my back, and as I did so she eased the towel down onto the floor.

If I feel guilty, it’s because that’s the point at which I could’ve said no. By then, I knew what was happening, and certainly could have asked her to replace the towel, or simply got up and walked out; instead, I lay there, and let her rub oil into my inner thighs, then move up to stand with her breasts over my face while she massaged my chest and stomach. By the time she actually took the final step and wrapped her hand around my dick, I was rock-hard and aching for her to really touch me. I’d also woken up enough to think that maybe, just maybe, she was doing this because she liked me; that this wasn’t a service so much as a very aggressive form of courtship. I know: the things we allow ourselves to believe.

I won’t go into too much detail about the rest of it. Except to say this: I might have been naive, or self-deluded, or otherwise determined to avoid confronting the obvious, but when she kissed me, I got properly caught up in the moment…because it really was that – a moment. Just like you might experience on a first date, or with the person you’ve fancied for months: passionate, intense…the sort of thing you’re glad you’re already lying down for, essentially. After that, she stepped back and I just surrendered to what felt like the inevitable. Not that it took long for that to arrive: I was incredibly turned-on and she was very good, so a couple of minutes later I closed my eyes and came all over…well, all over everything.

The immediate aftermath was…not great. She left the room five minutes after my orgasm, and at that point I started to feel really low. I didn’t cry in the shower, but I was very close to doing so: mostly though, I was just dazed and confused. I hadn’t prepared myself emotionally for that kind of experience, even if my physical response had been fairly unambiguous. After towelling off, I was torn between dressing really quickly and getting the hell out of Dodge; and taking my time, delaying the point at which I’d have to go out into the foyer and confront what had happened.

I’m glad I did confront it though. I’m not sure this story has a happy ending (yes, yes), but actually going up to Magda and looking her in the eye really helped. It reminded me that she was still just a regular person, and that I shouldn’t treat her – or myself – differently as a result of what had happened. We spoke for a while, not least because I was curious about how the whole arrangement worked; she told me that they offer a discreet ‘VIP service’ for guests they like and trust…flattery I allowed myself to succumb to, and use as insulation against whatever dark thoughts might be just round the corner. She told me to come again soon; I lied, and said that I would. The money conversation was awkward, but mercifully brief. And that was that. I walked out into the frosty night, and didn’t stop till I reached alcohol.

So how do I feel about it now? I really don’t know. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. From what I could glean, Magda wasn’t being exploited in any way, nor was it the sort of arrangement that involved an obviously high level of physical risk or coercion. I have a much more enlightened attitude to sex workers now than I did a few years ago, and I recognise that consensually trading a hand-job for money probably carries with it no more ethical baggage than selling various other goods or services. Still, I’m not comfortable. I chewed it over in my head all weekend, and couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d done something wrong; that I’d lied to myself in some way, by getting into that situation and allowing it all to happen without first creating a conscious decision-point. I don’t know whether writing about it here will help, and I may very well take this post down at some point – I certainly wouldn’t want my Mum to read it, though I suppose that applies to most things on this site. However, life has gone on as normal, and I certainly don’t feel like a different, or lesser person. Nor do I think any less of Magda than I did when I assumed she was just a regular masseuse. Perhaps it’s just another sexual experience to process and learn from: less straightforward and unambiguously positive than most, for sure, but only really harmful if I allow it to be.

What do *you* think?

On a couple of occasions over the last few months, I’ve tweeted a link to this video:

I’ve done so, first and foremost, because it’s funny, ballsy, and hey, who doesn’t want to watch a group of attractive women making an impassioned plea for more dong?? However, it also resonates because the whole issue of full-frontal male nudity in TV shows and films has long struck me – alongside the Bechdel Test and the onscreen presence of women over the age of 50 – as one of the more obvious bellwethers of any shift in the prehistoric attitudes toward gender and sexuality that still shape what we can and can’t see in mainstream media.

In the case of male nudity, it’s an attitude that not only has a direct impact on female (and gay male) viewing pleasure; it also shapes the way men feel about their own bodies, and limits both their comfort with being naked around other men, and their ability to discuss male nudity (and its associated issues) in a mature way. I was lucky enough to play team sports with grown men from the age of 14, so although it took me a while to shake off puberty-induced shyness, I eventually grew comfortable with the whole routine of showering and changing alongside other men (getting naked in front of women was, for a long time, an entirely different matter). Other guys aren’t so fortunate: in a lot of cases, once they leave the towel-whipping, size-shaming, rough-house confines of the school changing-rooms, the only real exposure they get to full-frontal male nudity comes via porn, which hardly gives a representative picture of body proportions.

Because of the way it venerates the penis – and the large penis above all – porn is often blamed for male anxiety around cock size and, by extension, sexual prowess. None of that is really porn’s fault though. Sure, the fact that most viewers like their male stars to have a big dick is partly a consequence of way the industry has actively shaped their preferences, but I think there’s also an argument to be made that it’s primarily an instinctive, organic thing: simple aesthetics more than cynical, exploitative marketing. As far as visual entertainment is concerned, the real crime has been committed over the last few decades by Hollywood studios and the big TV networks, which allowed female nudity to become more widespread, more explicit, and, in a few enlightened cases, more honest, but continued to ensure that the area between a male actor’s belly button and his lower thigh remained a mystery to most viewers.

The result is that for years now the average Joe in the street has been able to leave school at 18, and go through the rest of his life without ever seeing another man’s penis in any real detail – and certainly not his erect penis. For some people, that probably comes as blessed relief; for others, there’s a decent chance it’s actually beneficial as far as body image is concerned; but for a lot of guys – particularly those who watch porn – all it does is distort perceptions of what constitutes ‘normal’ and how they themselves stack up against that. Ignorance breeds myth-making, and that in turn feeds into and reinforces a general, widespread discomfort with the idea of simply being naked around other men.

A few more cocks on the telly won’t sweep all of that away, of course. Too much of the way we feel about our bodies comes from the way we’re educated, our sexual experiences, the influence of religion, the enduring misconceptions and prejudices around homosexuality, and a bunch of other shit that will take years and years to confront properly. However, in the context of all of that big stuff, a few inches of ‘Grade A man-meat’ on our screens every now and then would be a pretty easy place to start. As well as taking the first baby steps toward addressing a serious (and seriously sexist) imbalance, it would find favour with plenty of viewers (both female and male), make sex scenes feel more authentic, and serve as a valuable reference-point for a lot of men who are shy and insecure about their bodies. In time, it might even help to normalize the idea of male nudity, and to remove the lingering stigma from the idea of straight dudes looking at other dudes’ genitals.

So yes, HBO, you should absolutely listen to your female viewers and show a whole lot more premium penis – not least because, in the process, you’ll be doing your male viewers a big favour as well, regardless of whether they realise it at the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, that last one is pretty crucial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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