Author Archives: sexblogofsorts

Self-preservation: 2 ways

Posted on by

1

So … you remember friend with the ex-fling who ‘joked’ about her being a size 14? Well, he’s been cementing his reputation as a total cunt this week by getting drunk and making more great jokes – this time about how, the morning after he slept with a girl, he drew a map to the nearest bus stop, gave it to her, rolled over and went back to sleep. That girl is my friend and they work together. It’s not like he was never going to see her again. But the deal breaker for me is that he regaled all her other friends and colleagues with this story on a night out – ok, he didn’t say it was her, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t something she wanted to relive. She was, understandably, pretty upset. But she didn’t let him know this, because this is her version of self-preservation:

Self-preservation #01

When someone, whether it’s a guy, a friend, a family member or whoever, does or says something that hurts you, you *never* let them know that it bothered you because that would just add to how humiliated and stupid you feel. You might, after a time, rant to other friends about it, about how he made you cry, or why you wish your mum would just shut up for once, but on no occasion do you mention it to the person concerned. If it’s particularly bad, you might give them the silent treatment for a while, but the key feature of this approach, to me at least, is ‘Quick! Brush it under the carpet!’

Self-preservation #02

Personally, I prefer approach No. 2. The only thing this has in common with approach No. 1 is that it sometimes involves the silent treatment, but rarely. More often it involves ranting and raving at the person who hurt you until both of you have lost the thread of the argument and are absolutely exhausted. Why do I handle things this way? Because just as my friend says it’s embarrassing to let someone know that they’ve got to you, I cannot internalize how much I hate myself if I think someone’s treated me badly and I’ve just gone along with it.

That’s the logical thinking behind it, anyway. The reality is more instinctive. If, for instance, I get a text or see something online that I don’t like, I immediately get pins and needles in my hands and feel like I can’t breathe. For a long time, I thought this was just me being melodramatic – I’ve since realised that it’s actually a mild panic attack, and as someone who suffers with anxiety and depression, I’m not sure why that surprises me. I’ll immediately fire back a text or an email with my gut ‘How dare you!’ response, because it feels like the only way to exercise some control over the physical reactions.

I should probably learn some relaxation techniques, but I’m far from ashamed of approach No. 2. Yes, it often backfires, but hopefully it sometimes also forces difficult conversations that wouldn’t otherwise be had (sometimes being the key word). I wouldn’t switch to approach No. 1 for the world.

How about you? Which of these approaches do you think works better? Or do you have a third way? Are you , *gasp*, capable of talking things through calmly?!

Making all his wishes come true

Posted on by

0

It’s probably about the time that I should be writing a festive post, but other than what I wrote about gifts, I don’t really have much to say about Christmas as far as sex and relationships are concerned. Probably because most of my Christmases are like this.

The only tenuous link I could think of between this post and Christmas is that it’s about making people’s wishes come true. Except, at Christmas it’s Santa who makes wishes come true (yes, I totally still believe!), and you probably wouldn’t want that to be the case with the kind of wishes that I’m going to write about here. But anyway, here’s why I’m a bad replacement for Santa:

A good while ago now, the boy brought up the subject of fulfilling each other’s fantasies – merely as a suggestion. I seem to remember feeling pretty vulnerable at the time and desperately craving vanilla and affectionate sex, so I told him I didn’t have any fantasies. He pulled me up on this, which was the right thing to do, because it’s clearly bullshit.

I have lots and lots of fantasies – they’re mainly centred around relinquishing control, letting someone else call the shots, and, when you get to the far end of the spectrum, being forced. But he knew this already, because in the bedroom we were always playing with aspects of my fantasies – he knew I liked being held down, bruised, told exactly what I wasn’t allowed to do. It was rare that this would become the main focus of the sex we were having, but it was always there.

Was the same true of his fantasies? Not so much. I don’t recall now whether we ever talked about his fantasies before I discovered, by accident, that he had a blog where he was writing about them (and even then I wasn’t 100% sure whether I’d stumbled upon his fantasies – he was writing fiction, and I fall whole-heartedly into the camp that says you can write stuff that you would’t necessarily want to do.) We’ve since had a couple of conversations about them, but I still get the feeling that talking about this stuff (with me, at least) makes him uneasy. And then the other day he said something about the fact that his fantasies ‘don’t interest me.’ Not in the sense that, y’know, I’m not interested in the stuff he likes, just in the sense that they’re not sexually interesting/arousing to me and therefore, are unlikely to get fulfilled.

That last part may well be true. Except that that part about not finding them a turn on is a little more complicated than it looks at first glance. I feel like a lot of what I’ve read about acting out fantasies focuses on women who don’t want to act out their partner’s fantasies because they’re in some way morally opposed to them. Even when they’re quite clear that it’s something they do want to try, as the question in this letter to the Telegraph suggests, the advice always seems to be ‘Are you absolutely sure it’s something you want to try?’ (I know, this could be my fault for trying to get my sex advice from a right-wing newspaper …)

Anyway, I digress. My point is that my reasons for not ‘being interested’ in his fantasies have nothing to do with my moral stance on them (no issues there), or being scared about acting them out changing the dynamics of what we have going on. The problem is that all my fantasies centre around giving up control of my body to someone else; while many of his centre around wanting a woman to take control and wanting to be the submissive one.

I’m crap at getting outside of my own headspace, my own fears. When he writes about something as simple as having his back stroked as being something that turns him on, my initial reaction is ‘Oh god, I’d be shit at that because I’m way too clumsy to ever do it well.’ Can you see, then, why stuff like pegging is way out of my comfort zone? Do I judge him for liking it? Not at all. Is my unwillingness to try it down to a moral objection? Nope, just down the fact that it means taking control of his body as well as my own, and, in my head, a massive risk that I’ll hurt him.

And yet, sometimes things take you by surprise. I thought I’d like being handcuffed, seeing as it also represents relinquishing control. The reality was that he cuffed me and I hated it. It threw my balance out, and meant relinquishing control over my body in a way that I hadn’t anticipated not liking. I might let him do it again one day, but only if he cuffed me to something, rather than cuffing my wrists together.

So, my point is that, in my opinion, if you are comfortable with the idea of acting out each other’s fantasies, do – don’t let The Telegraph make you believe that first you have to discuss it to the point of exhaustion and then, y’know, buy some erotica on the subject, just to be *absolutely sure* it turns you on.

On the other hand, if, like he and I, you haven’t really felt comfortable discussing it, then yeah, that probably is the place to start. Just don’t write somebody off as ‘not interested in something,’ without taking the time to find out why.

Educating Yorkshire or fuck, teachers are hot

Posted on by

6

When Educating Yorkshire was on, back in the autumn, the potential hotness of the teachers in it never really crossed my mind, which was surprising, because a) Caitlin Moran had quite a lot to say about it and b) way back when I was the queen of the teacher-crush. 

In my early teenage years, I went through crushes on teachers like most girls go through snogging boys in their own year group. There was the cute Geordie tech teacher who ended up being the reason I took Graphics GCSE despite not being able to draw, the history teacher with a penchant for Disney films and yet another tech teacher with amazing forearms. It was all pretty harmless though, until I got to my GCSE year and fell head over heels for the French teacher.

The French teacher was not hot in the way most teachers are hot (ill-fitting suits, intelligence, geekiness, a willingness to lavish attention on you not for how you look but for how you think); he was hot in the sense of truly, truly beautiful. With every crop of new starters, the rumours got more far-fetched – to start with it was claimed that he’d modelled for Next before he became a teacher, and in later years progressed to something about modelling Calvin Klein Y-fronts.

The latter was not totally improbable. He cycled to school every morning and he looked, well, as good as someone can look in lycra, largely because he was hung. Oh yes. He was hung, and I was sixteen, discovering masturbation and erotica, and god, I wanted him. Even to this day I can conjure up the smell of his aftershave just by thinking about it and remember how horny I’d get in 5th period A-Level French, which he taught sitting on his desk in shorts, because he taught boys PE the period before.

Despite some major breakthroughs on my part: I introduced him to my parents, who started inviting him to dinner, I managed to get myself invited along on upper sixth French cinema trips, nothing ever came of it. Oh, ok, I went from being a pretty average linguist to an offer to study languages at one of the best universities in the country, but was the reality of fancying a teacher any better than fancying a boy your own age? No. For me, at least, it was worse.

French was a bad choice of subject for me. I already had massive confidence issues, especially when it came to my body, and I just wanted to fit in. Ironically, my emotional instability at the time was such that everything I did prevented me from fitting in. He wanted to video classes so we could see the errors we were making with the language and learn to correct them, but the video camera sent me into total meltdown. My grades were on track, and I was interested and inspired by the subject still, but I’d storm out of lessons, throw stuff, burst into tears at the drop of a hat. Looking back, it was probably the first occurrence of the depression that’s plagued me ever since, but at the time I couldn’t understand how I could want someone so badly when liking them had such a devastating effect on my self-confidence. It was as if something about liking a grown up, who, let’s face it, was never going to reciprocate, sent me into total regression.

So, partly, I wanted to write about him here because I find it interesting that something which I’d now expect to boost my confidence actually had the complete opposite effect, but also because it’s not something I’ve succeeded in consigning completely to the past. A friend of mine has a dinner party game which consists of conversation starter cards (god, we’re middle-aged already, aren’t we?). We were playing it last NYE and I pulled the ‘Which relationship in your past would you like to revisit?’ card. Technically, it was cheating to say that, despite my hellish behaviour, I’d relive the years from 16-18 in a heartbeat, because it was never a relationship, just a *massive* crush. But do I wish I could relive those years again? Hell yeah. Because I’m still curious about what it would have been like to fuck him – I’d really like to see if what was under the lycra lived up to its promises.

We’re just people who fuck … and buy each other Christmas gifts?

Posted on by

0

Sometimes I worry that online shopping is my greatest skill. Seriously, I’m the kind of girl who not only has three Amazon wishlists for herself (one for stuff I’d like as gifts, one for boring stuff I need to buy myself and one for stuff to treat myself to – which is mostly erotica), but also has a private one that runs all year round with gift ideas for the people I love. I don’t technically *start* my Christmas shopping until November, but usually I know long before then what everyone else is getting. I don’t understand why people put themselves through the hell of the high street in December when there’s so much good stuff being made and sold by independent designer/makers and retailers. And books. If you have no other ideas, there are always books. Don’t even get me started on the joys of wrapping …

As usual with my blog posts, none of the above has that much to do with the central point here. The point is that, despite all my fabulous lines about how much I don’t care about him, about how we’re not even friends, just two people who fuck, I think I’ve pretty much undermined that with a lot of what I write here, so it probably won’t kill me to admit that, yeah, not buying him anything feels weird.

Actually, since I’ve known him I have bought him gifts at Christmas. Except for this year. Look, I’m trying to stay emotionally detached, ok?! He doesn’t buy me stuff, except for my birthday last year, when he did (best that I leave the specifics to your imagination!) This post isn’t about accusing him of a lack of generosity – he’s definitely well up on the tally chart when it comes to paying for drinks when we’re out and about, nor, really, about accusing him of not caring enough – he’s never made any promises regarding affection – it’s just that buying people stuff is one of the key ways I demonstrate to people that I like them, but I can’t do it with him because it just makes me look stupid.

So, essentially, I don’t want him to buy me a gift because I think I deserve to get stuff from him, or even because, whether I deserve it or not, I want it anyway (and don’t get me wrong, I do *love* it when guys buy me flowers). I’d like him to buy me a gift because then it means I can do  the same for him. Because, in my opinion, when it comes to saying ‘I care,’ nothing says it like ‘I spent twenty minutes tying this ribbon and it still looks wonky and shit.’

On imminent big birthdays

Posted on by

1

One of my best friends turned 30 today – the first in my uni friendship group to do so. I’m in the slightly strange position of being young for my school year, but old for my uni year because I took a gap year, which means that roughly half of my friends will be turning 30 before I do, while the others still have a year to go.

Let’s get one thing clear: I’m far from having a breakdown at the idea of turning 30. Casual sex aside, I’m really not a massive fan of a lot of things you’re supposed to spend your late teens and twenties doing – clubbing, getting blind drunk, travelling the world – so I’m quite happy to, shhh, whisper it, ‘settle down.’

Quite happy, that is, apart from one thing – I want to be a mum, and I’m worried that the things that need to fall into place for that to happen won’t fall into place until it’s too late. And when I say ‘want to be a mum,’ I don’t say it lightly – I’m the girl at dinner parties cuddling the babies of mere acquaintances, the one who inevitably doesn’t get to eat dessert because my hands are taken up cradling someone else’s kid who’s fallen asleep on my shoulder. I’ve wanted it for as long as I can remember and I don’t see that feeling going away any time soon. 

Society’s views on women like me aren’t often very helpful either – I know I shouldn’t let the Mail rile me, but god I was fucked off when Liz Jones wrote this piece. You might steal men’s sperm as payment for microwaving the odd ready-meal, love, but don’t you dare imply that it’s something the rest of us would do. I think a woman in her early 30s should be able to be open with a man about wanting to have a child without the man automatically assuming that that means that she wants to have one with him, and feeling accordingly threatened because that’s not something he’s interested in.

That, plus the fact that I can’t quite get my head around how I will meet, fall in love with and build a sufficiently strong relationship with a guy before the mental cut-off point that I’ve established by which I need to make this a reality (35, if you must know), means that my usual, defensive position is: ‘I don’t need a man in my life to have a baby, I’ll have one by myself.’ That line though, I’m increasingly realising, is just self-preservation – it’s my way of persuading myself, and other people, that I’m in control and have a game plan, even though the reality is, yeah, not so much.

More and more I’m realising that, while I would still have a baby on my own, I’d rather have one with a guy who I love and who I’m in a relationship with. The question is: if I know that that’s something I want from my life, should I give up the relationships happening in my life now that clearly aren’t leading to that in order to dedicate myself more fully to what I want in the long term, or should I stick with what’s working in the short term and assume that the bigger picture will sort itself given time?

 

The best post ever on being single at Christmas …

Posted on by

0

… is not one of mine.

Just a very quick post to say that I noticed this week that Lucy Robinson, one of my favourite bloggers, is back on Twitter after a substantial period of down time. Way back in 2009, she wrote this for Marie Claire – rarely has a blog post stayed with me for so long. If you’re single, and you’d rather not be, it might be worth a read.

http://lucy-robinson.co.uk/breakups-the-end-of-the-world/

Enjoy! x

I like your cock … just not as your avatar – Part 2

Posted on by

0

It’s Sunday again, which means it’s also #SinfulSunday, something which makes me increasingly anxious with every week that passes.  I have no issue at all with the premise, but if I was being totally honest, does it bother me that it’s something the boy likes to take part in? Yes.

I deserve to be pulled up on that – Sinful Sunday is all about images which are erotic, not just graphic, which does tend to mean that you get more of a sense of the story behind the image than you otherwise might, something which I said I liked in the first post on this topic a few weeks back. The boy is both clever and funny, and it comes across in the pictures he takes. So far, so good. 

The other reason why I deserve to be pulled up on it is the reason why I always intended there to be a 2nd blog post on this topic. For all I have a list of wants regarding naked pictures, and despite not being a huge fan of the cock shot I can’t help but be a little bit in awe of people who have sufficient body confidence to put the bits of themselves that they like up for public consumption. It’s not up to me to decide which bits of himself he should like enough to flaunt. A story: I was in the bath this afternoon, shaving my legs and as I ran the razor down over the back of my right calf, I noticed that I actually have pretty good muscle definition there. This is about the only upside to having a left leg that does fuck all in terms of weight bearing – despite doing absolutely zero exercise I actually have a pretty sexy bit of muscle tone going on between my ankle and my knee. That’s a bit of me I like – I doubt he finds it quite as hot.

The point: the bits of him that I find hot (not going to list them here, it’s a little personal and at risk of descending into FSoG ‘OMFG, the way his pants hang from his hips’ territory, I feel) are not necessarily going to be the bits that he likes best about himself. It would  be very easy, and very obvious here to say that of course his cock is going to be his favourite part of himself – he’s a man, isn’t he? – but it would be a cheap shot, and not one I actively believe in – I love my tits, but I have friends who aren’t quite so enamoured with theirs and presumably men are the same – some like their cocks, some don’t, and, if they do, of course they have the right to show it off if that’s what they want to do.

My personal gripe with him doing it is fuelled by the same fear that motivates the other things I dislike: that the reason he does it is to attract women. Again, it’s my problem, not his, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be honest about it. I mentioned this blog to a friend the other day and she asked if I started it ‘as an act of revenge against him blogging.’ Er, no, not at all – I started it because my relationships with men, with love, with sex, and with him are all complicated and because I write and I wanted to work my feelings through in writing. Did it need to be in the public domain? No. Do I regret making the decision to put it there? No. 

He’s not a massive fan of it, either, and I get that, totally. I need somewhere to work through the things that bother me, but would I like it if he was doing the same to me? No, I’d go fucking psycho. But equally, it’s not really about him, it’s about me, just in the same way that his cock shots aren’t mine to like, dislike or even comment on. So, really, what I want from a cock shot is pretty irrelevant – if a guy has the confidence to flaunt it then kudos to him for achieving that level of self-acceptance. Just understand that I can admire you for it without liking the fact that you do it, that’s all. 

Stop blitzing him with calls and texts!

Posted on by

0

I’d probably have written this post, or one very similar to it, off my own back, given time, but I noticed in the press this week the story about the jury in the phone hacking trial being told about Chelsy Davis ‘blitzing Prince Harry with calls and texts’ while he was at Sandhurst. I also noticed that the Daily Mail removed the ‘jury told’ bit of the headline in their page header, thus presenting Chelsy’s actions as fact. Sigh.

Now I’ll admit, there’s a lot I don’t know about military training (unsurprisingly!). Apparently Harry was only able to field her calls after he’d finished training, which was “sometimes after 10pm.” This bit doesn’t seem that surprising to me – I can see that checking your phone isn’t that compatible with target practice and obstacle courses. Not, incompatible enough though, apparently, that Harry considered just turning his phone off. Instead “He keeps the phone on, but on silent – it buzzes and vibrates so frequently with new M [sic].” How fucking inconvenient that he should have to keep the phone on silent because of silly Chelsy – I mean, if it wasn’t for her he could have kept the sound on – it’s not like messages from other people who aren’t nutjob girlfriends cause the phone to buzz or vibrate.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I can’t help but feel that the story would never have made it out if the roles were reversed and it was Harry doing the bombarding. So I did a bit of an experiment. I googled ‘Should I text him first?’ Total results: 744,000,000. I changed it to ‘Should I text her first?’ Total results: 423,000,000. It seems pretty clear that most of the ‘rules’ around texting are being dished out to women, not to men.

The other reason it bothered me so much is because it’s a constant minefield in my life, too. I’m pretty clear on how often I’d like to see the boy in an ideal world, pretty clear on the fact that I like texts to end with a kiss. But we can’t reach a sensible position on communication because he can’t win – if he gets in touch it makes me stressed, and if he doesn’t get in touch it makes me stressed. The issues aren’t all to do with him – I’m terrible at contacting my friends too because I don’t want to seem needy. It’s not that I don’t care how they are, or that I don’t want to spend time with them, I’m just sure they have much better things to do, like spending time with their boyfriends or closer friends. And of course the irony is that it’s precisely that lack of self-confidence that makes me neediest of all.

I don’t blitz boys with texts, most of the time. Sometimes when I’m drunk, or when I’m angry – when it’s completely the wrong communication medium to use, in short – I’ll send two or three in quick succession without waiting for a response, but normally, I stick to just the one message, and, if I don’t hear from him first, I’ll wait two weeks before I send it. I’m no Chelsy Davis. 

When he and I spoke about this, I couldn’t explain why I’m so cagey about communication. I don’t think he’d ever accuse me of texting him too often, and nor do I think I have to play hard to get – I’m pretty sure he’s not going to go off me because I asked twice in one week what he’s been up to. But having thought about it some more, the problem lies exactly there – the reason I don’t text is because I don’t want to know what he’s been doing, or, more accurately, who he’s been doing. When he texts me it’s extremely unlikely I’ll have been fucking someone else since the last time we spoke: the same can’t be said for him. 

Of course, he’s not so heartless that he’d admit to this, or gloat about it – it’s just that knowing that it is something he does makes me nervous about otherwise innocuous lines like ‘I’ve got friends staying’ or ‘I’ve been away for the weekend.’ I’m sure he’d say I have to get over reading too much into what he says, and working myself up over stuff that I can’t be sure about, but I disagree. If you’re sleeping with someone and it’s exclusive, yes, the above is the kind of paranoid jealousy that will inevitably tear things apart. If you’re not exclusive, and a polygamous relationship isn’t your ideal, it’s not paranoid, just sad. And it’s why I won’t be becoming more proactive about communication any time soon.

I’m not going to go into the reasons here about why I’m still persisting with something that makes me unhappy, because that’s not the point of the post. The point is, you’re an intelligent woman, you can decide how often is too often. Personally, couples who text each other every day scare me a bit, because I can’t imagine someone being that massive a part of my life, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable if that’s what you want. 

So here, in brief, is the point: text him first if you want to or wait for him to text if you’d rather. Because one thing is certain: even if both of you are waiting for the other person to move first, eventually one of you will get drunk and break the deadlock. That’s just how these things work. 

Fat is an issue that I’ve not had in my relationships … thank god

Posted on by

1

Earlier this week, my neighbour came round with my Christmas gift, a bottle of marsala wine and a legendary M&S stollen – a vision of icing sugar and flaked almonds. He handed it over and wished me a 2014 that was ‘lucky in love.’ My neighbour is amazing, and if he wasn’t over 60 and married, I’d probably be making a move.

Anyway, that’s by the by. I took the stollen to work, commenting to a colleague that if I ate the whole thing by myself, it was unlikely that I’d be lucky in love next year, because, y’know, I’d be huge.

‘Do you consider your chances in love to be linked to your weight?’ she said, sounding vaguely horrified, as well she might.

I nodded and she shook her head. ‘That’s not good,’ she said. ‘Not good at all.’

She’s right – it’s not. You shouldn’t keep an eye on your weight because you’re worried about what a man might think about it, you should do so (if you want to) for your own health, sense of wellbeing, desire to reach a goal etc. etc.

A friend came round last night, after her work Christmas dinner. She mentioned that one of her colleagues, who she had a bit of fling with back in the Spring, had joked, after she’d finished both her risotto and sticky toffee pudding. ‘Wow, seeing you eat like that, it’s no wonder you’re a size 14.’

Now, this friend is petite, height-wise, and she’s a size 10-12. She said she’d laughed off his comments, told him to fuck off and felt smug that that particular day she was wearing a size 10 dress. Because that makes his comment fine, obviously.

I said this, and pointed out that that was hardly the point – how is it funny to accuse someone of being a dress size that’s smaller than the UK average? Because her attitude didn’t thrill me either, rather than calling him a cunt, which is what I’d have done, she was just pleased that he was two sizes out.

I am a size 14, bordering on a 16, and I pointed this out to her. She backtracked sharply, ‘Oh, but it’s different, isn’t it, because you’re taller, and curvier, and you have bigger tits.’ Well, yes, all of this is true, but it’s also a massively flawed argument. If we were the same weight we’d be very different sizes, but if we were the same dress size we’d be just that, the same dress size.

Her attitude isn’t quite as bad as his, but it’s still not great, and in my life I’ve found most of the pressure around my weight has come from other women (namely my mum), not from men.

The boy, for instance, has never made me feel remotely fat or uncomfortable about what I eat or drink. The only thing he has a go at me for consuming is wine which is clearly in his glass, not mine. Last week I mentioned, in passing, that the night before I’d eaten two bowls of cereal, a croissant, and then my dinner, all because nothing seemed to sate my hunger – and then I’d felt massively sick.

‘Well, obviously,’ was his only comment. ‘I’d expect a seven-year-old to know  that.’ He wasn’t at all bothered by how much I’d eaten, just by the fact that I seemed surprised that it had made me nauseous – and that was worth teasing me about. It’s that attitude which makes me happy to fuck him on top of the covers, sober, in daylight, and to wander around naked after sex without worrying about the size of my tummy, and fuck, it’s liberating.

So please, ladies, don’t fuck anyone this Christmas who makes you feel fat. There’ll always be men, but there won’t always be lebkuchen (this statement may be  slightly flawed). But seriously, if he wants to sleep with someone skinnier than you, then that’s what he should do. You don’t need to be a certain weight to make him happy.

A single girl and her sex toys

Posted on by

0

As I’ve said many a time here, I’ve been single forever, and so inevitably, one of the most important relationships I have in my life is with my sex toys. Except, ahem, I say ‘sex toys,’ but this is another area in which I’m completely monogamous, so let’s revise that. Sex toy.

I have had a number of vibrators over the years – from my first rabbit, which I had sent to myself overseas when I was working abroad on my gap year, to my Hitachi magic wand which I bought a couple of years back and *hated* (yes, seriously – I prefer my fillings not to vibrate, thank you very much). I used to want to run Ann Summers but I’m over that now – recently I’ve decided that running this would be dream retail career. My absolute favourite vibrator I replaced three times – it was a bog standard Ann Summers clit stim, that took a single AA battery (because seriously, that’s the golden rule of vibrators – make sure you’ll always be able to replace the batteries at the all night garage) topped with a soft dolphin whose purpose I could never quite figure out. In fact, I’m pretty sure its purpose was negligible because it always broke off in the end and I can’t say I enjoyed the functionality less. I didn’t replace it because of the broken dolphin, either, I replaced it because the strength of the vibrations always ended up breaking the lock on the battery compartment, which apparently, is why Ann Summers eventually discontinued it. Luckily, the amazing Sh Women’s Emporium now sell this one, which is pretty similar, except for the silly rabbit sleeve bit, which is like putting a cover on a hot water bottle (hot water bottles and baths should be scorching hot, and vibrators should be powerful without anything in the way to dull the sensations).

It does other fancy stuff that the Ann Summers one couldn’t do too, like knowing how to breathe underwater (by which I mean it can survive underwater, obviously!), but I’m not interested in any of that fancy functionality. As soon as I bought my first vibe, I lost interest in making myself come in any other way than with a toy, on my back, in bed. In many ways, it’s not a problem – I can come that way in less than 5 minutes which is helpful not only when I’m horny but also when I’m knackered but have a lot on my mind and can’t quite drop off to sleep. The other day, the boy challenged me via text to come in less than 90 seconds, and I nearly managed it – only afterwards did I realise that I think he meant me to use my fingers. But then, I wouldn’t beat cake mix by hand, so why would  I choose to make my life more complicated in the bedroom?

The issue comes from the fact that I have pretty much entirely forgotten how to make myself come using just my fingers. If a guy tells me to touch myself during sex, it makes me less likely to come, not more – I find that my fingers get in the way of his thrusts and it throws me out of the moment, because I always expect it to take ages. But it makes it harder for him to make me come that way, too, and that is something I’d like to change, because much as the pursuit of my own orgasm is one of the least important aspects of sex for me, I miss the fact that guys using their fingers no longer feels as good as it used to when I was still a desperately horny teenager.

So, single girls with a love of toys, I guess what I’m asking is – how do you avoid losing your touch?