So, there’s been a lot of talk about words and their ability to turn people on/off going around on Twitter the past couple of days, and (as ever) I have more I want to say on the topic, so this is the first of a couple of blog posts about sex and words.
Category Archives: Comment
Tomorrow? I’m staying in …
For all I can be opinionated and pessimistic about all manner of things, Valentine’s Day just isn’t one of them. Sure, I’m as likely as the next single girl to want to throw things at smug couples, but I genuinely don’t feel any more like that on February 14th than I do on any other day.
Watching ‘The Undateables’ (kind of)
I should’ve known this was going to be a shit week. On Friday night, I left the office and promptly burst into tears because I’d missed a deadline and let the designer down (in my defence, the designer is *hot*). Then, I went to M&S and bought steak, which was the only thing I wanted for dinner – something which only happens when my body is screaming for iron. I got home and my period had started. Obviously.
Saying no (and yes)
I had a blog post all lined up to write this evening, and then I came across this article on Twitter, all about consent and boundaries, and it struck a chord with me to the point that I wanted to write about it straight away.
There are two parts of the article that I found particularly interesting. The first is the bit that says:
‘Ask the people you will be having sex with what their preferences and limits are. This fosters active consent and encourages communication.’
‘Being Thick Gets Dick’ – My Take – Part 2
So, on Monday, I wrote a post inspired by a piece over at My Potential One True Love, on whether girls who don’t play down their intelligence are less likely to get laid. I concluded that, personally, I don’t ever feel that I have to dumb down to attract guys, although sometimes I choose to. Before I wrote the post, I had a conversation on Twitter with Juniper from The Cut of my Jib about what is actually is that puts guys off intelligent girls, if it isn’t their brain power. With regard to me, at least, these are my conclusions:
I never shut up
I live on my own, and I love it. Seriously love it. But even though I obviously get to talk a normal amount when I’m in the office every day, as well as when I’m out with friends, it’s as if when I’m home alone, the words are just building up in my head, dying to escape, and so, when I find someone to bombard with them, I, well, do just that. My parents say that when I go and stay with them, I’m exhausting for the first couple of days while I’m offloading the backlog of conversation that’s built up in my head, and then, once I’ve got it out of the way, I go back to talking a normal amount. I think uni had an impact here, too – my Cambridge friends all believed that any subject was fair game for an argument/heated discussion, so now when someone says something that I feel strongly about, I can’t just let it go.
I don’t think boys (and other people too, but this post is about boys) mind that per se, but I can see that it could get pretty tiring after a while. I’m always confused by those girls who drag their boyfriends round the shops on Saturdays – haven’t their boyfriends had enough of them by now, don’t they want a break from each other? – but maybe those girls are quieter and more restful to be around, so the boyfriends don’t have to have time out just to replenish their conversational abilities, or, y’know, just to remember what quiet sounds like.
Juniper said she even talks during sex, although about sex, not about what she’s having for tea. I think I actually have been known to talk about what’s for tea during sex – in my defence, it was because I got jumped while I was in the process of trying to put tea in the oven.
I overthink everything
Ah, another Cambridge legacy, this one – although perhaps one that’s linked to the depression, as well. If something hurts me, angers me, upsets me, I can’t just let it go – I’m totally incapable of distracting myself by watching a film, or reading a book – I just keep turning it over and over in my mind, considering the various what ifs from all the different angles, and often, when it comes to relationships, settling on the version of events that is most harmful, most destructive, because I can’t bear the thought of getting hurt because I was naive, or because I turned a blind eye to something. It’s knackering inside my own head – I can’t imagine how tiring it is for someone else to try to follow my train of thought.
I don’t really fit in / like other people
You know that line about how you can feel loneliest of all when you’re surrounded by other people? Yep, that’s me. I’ve never quite felt that I fitted in – I’m absolutely shit at small talk and I feel on the fringes of both normal people and people with a disability. At eleven, my mum took me to NHS physio sessions with a load of other kids who had cerebral palsy. I was pretty sure I wasn’t as disabled as the other kids in the group, but how could I be certain? It’s like that thing where you put on weight, but you don’t notice it when you see yourself in the mirror; only when someone shows you a photo of yourself. It was confusing, because I thought I was normal, and there was society telling me that I wasn’t.
Up to that point, I had a pretty big group of friends, but in the years that followed I found it much more preferable to have a handful of very close friends instead – people who understood and liked who I was, and who didn’t force me to step outside of my comfort zone. Meeting new people, which had never been my favourite thing in the world, became steadily even less appealing. I threw myself into my studies, told myself that boys would never be interested, and then set about proving myself right. And somewhere along the line, proving myself right, and disguising my vulnerability with an almighty temper, have become pretty much par for the course.
So yeah, I don’t think it’s my intelligence that puts guys off – I think it’s all this stuff: the fact that I’m a larger-than-life girl who’s capable of being much too intense, way too neurotic, and who won’t have watched any of the films you’ve watched, so won’t be able to have a casual discussion about those with you, either? I never, ever wish I was less intelligent, but I do often wish I could tone myself down a bit. Am I the only one that feels that way?
‘Being Thick Gets Dick’ – My Take – Part 1
The lovely Laurie at My Potential One True Love blogged a few days back about what she at one point in her post called BTGD (Being Thick Gets Dick). She’s uncertain whether this term is crude, so she didn’t title her post that – I think it probably is crude, but I don’t care. After all, my keyring says Cunt.
Anyway, that’s beside the point. I think it’s an interesting topic. Judging from what she said in her blog post, she and I come from similar backgrounds – homes where education and intelligence are valued, and where your opinions are listened to. For me, the same was true when I went to uni. True, I did a French degree, so there were way more girls on my course than there were boys, but the boys I did know treated me as an intellectual equal, even if, when they declared Madame Bovary to be romantic, my response was: ‘No it’s not, it’s shit.’
In fact, all the boys who’ve played a major role in my life – the ones I’ve slept with, loved, had massive crushes on, my friends – have been pretty damn intelligent. Of the five guys I’ve slept with, three have been Oxbridge-educated, although that’s not, *ahem,* a condition for entry. They listen when I’m ranting on about my views and opinions and they give the impression, at least, of taking me seriously. What’s more, they’re capable of taking me seriously over a glass of wine and then fucking me senseless later in the evening. So far, so good – I’m getting my dick without having to pretend to be in the slightest bit thick.
But here’s the embarrassing bit. Sometimes I like to play the ditzy woman in the company of men. I don’t mean that I pretend not to know stuff that I do know, more that I’m er, guilty of steering the conversation in the direction of subjects that I’m much less knowledgable about. In her post, Laurie used this quote from the ITV show Take Me Out:
“So, like, you seem proper intelligent, yeah. Like if I asked you, like a question, would you be able to answer it? Like do you know what the capital of Germany is then?”
Why is it always bloody Germany? Let’s just clarify at this point that I do know what the capital of Germany is, but when people (sometimes boys, sometimes not) catch me out on geographical knowledge, it usually has something to do with Germany. My Granddad, who used to sit me on the rug in front of the fire and quiz me about world capitals, would turn in his grave if he could see some of the howlers I’ve committed with regard to German geography. I told my mum it was landlocked (she reminded me it has a Navy). The boy and I once had a conversation about the countries that border it. I was doing ok, and then I ran out of ideas. I think he said something like ‘You must know what the other one is. It’s pretty big,’ and I replied ‘Er, Russia?’
To be fair to me, this is not entirely wrong, it’s just very out of date. It turns out that it’s easy to forget about the existence of Poland in modern Europe. I can’t remember if he laughed so hard he shed actual tears, but I do have a distinct recollection of watching his shoulders shake. And truth be told, I liked it – making him laugh was worth bringing my intelligence into question for.
And so I’ve not stopped asking silly questions, or at least phrasing my questions in a way that makes it sound like I’m about to ask something really stupid. Lying in a hotel room with him, watching postcoital BBC World (the sexiness of my life knows no bounds), a report came on about the Central African Republic. I said ‘Can I ask a question about the Central African Republic?’ He smirked. ‘Are you going to ask where it is, because I’m going to give you five seconds to decide you don’t want to ask that question.’ That wasn’t what I was going to ask, and I could have protested that he doesn’t take me seriously, but really, where’s the fun in that? Far better to squeal in mock indignation at his meanness, because it’s true – that is the approach that’s far more likely to end in laughter, and ultimately, more sex.
But he’d fuck me either way, as, I’m sure, would other guys, so why do I do it? I could get laid and maintain some dignity. Well yeah, I could, but here’s my theory. Clever girls never get to be the class clown. They’re too busy sucking up to the teachers, making perfect revision notes that get photocopied for the rest of the class (yes, I really was that obnoxious) and, if I’m really honest, trying not to get bullied. It’s only by the time we’re in our twenties and thirties that we’re comfortable enough with ourselves, secure enough in who we are, to want to draw that much attention to ourselves. It’s not that we think that we have to play thick to get dick – it’s just that we’ve always wanted the opportunity to try it. Most girls did it at fifteen. Me? I’m doing it now.
On sexting
If you search Twitter, or the internet more widely, for blog posts on the subject of sexting, you really would think that only teenagers do it. Everything I could find was about how to try to persuade your teenage kids not to try it. There was one piece intended for middle-aged divorcees reminding them that if they’re tempted they should remember to password protect their phone, not leave it where other people can see the screen (actually, I could learn a few things from that – I once switched my phone back on after a flight and accidentally shared a dick pic with everyone else who was standing in the aisle), and certainly not to do it when drunk. Then I remembered a blog post I read recently about the joys of reading the Mumsnet forums, and thought I’d check out what they had to say about it. The result? I ended up feeling *really* sorry for this woman’s ‘DH’.
Anyway, what got me thinking about it was the fact that I’ve received a couple of (admittedly very softcore) sexts in the past couple of days. I said that I wouldn’t share my #100happydays posts here, but if it wasn’t for the fact that they need to be documented by photos, the sext would definitely have been today’s happy moment.
I don’t get photos any more. That’s what you get for expressing pretty strong views on cock shots. Twice. I retweeted this yesterday, and although I don’t share the author’s affection for cock shots of men she doesn’t know, I do agree with this:
“… it’s the dicks I do know that capture my attention. I like to think about who that dick’s attached to, the ways that person excites me—whether physically or intellectually—and the good times that dick and I have shared.”
And actually, word-sexts, rather than picture-sexts, have the same effect. I don’t think the best ones are lengthy descriptions of what you’re doing right now, or what you want to do to me, a simple ‘I’m feeling/doing x, and I’m thinking about [your] x,’ is more than sufficient to fire up my imagination. But I like them for the more than the fact that they make me horny. I like them because no matter how many times that you tell me I’m hot, no matter how many times you get hard in my presence, as soon as you leave I develop the memory of a goldfish. I’m not capable of remembering that that’s how you feel about me for longer than three seconds when you’re not here, so those little reminders out of the blue? They make my day.
Now I just have to learn how to reply.
FFS, or, ‘The rise and rise of erotica for women’
So, the plan for today was to write the second part of ‘Things I read in 2013.’ But, as often happens, something got in the way, something which matters more to me and which I think needs writing more urgently. Secretly, I like it that way – I much prefer writing posts about things that have got me riled up than calm, collected review posts (don’t worry, Part 2 will still happen at some point).
This morning I got up, and was all cosied up on the sofa in my dressing gown, watching Gary Barlow’s Big Ben Bash Live (although not live, obviously) and browsing Facebook, when I came across this article entitled ‘The rise and rise of erotica for women.’
Sounds good, yes? Sadly, like most things in the post-FSoG era, the truth is a little more complicated and a lot more disappointing. I’ll start by saying that yes, I’ve read all three FSoG novels, and sometimes I even defend them (I think EL James has mastered the romance plot. Do I think it’s erotic romance? Not particularly, no.) Plus, after FSoG was published, a lot of good things started to happen, which I thought were promising both as a reader and as an aspiring writer of erotica, not least that the UK erotic romance line Black Lace was resurrected.
Black Lace books have featured prominently in my life for years now. As a teenager, I bought them in secret and stacked them high on my bedside table, hidden by ‘real books.’ I’m pretty sure my mum knew they were there all the same. When they stopped publishing, I kept buying old titles from the only places they were still stocked – motorway service stations – and tried to avoid the curious looks of checkout staff more accustomed to selling overpriced chewing gum. I even mentioned this by way of an utterly bizarre chat up line to someone once, but hey, it worked!
So when it returned, I was understandably delighted. Except … I’ve been disappointed with nearly everything I’ve read by them since. There are exceptions, of course. I loved Kristina Lloyd’s writing the first time round, and I still do. Black Lace also own the UK rights to Alison Tyler’s Dark Secret Love, which I’ve just finished, and which I’d also highly recommend (review to follow in the coming weeks). But a lot of the other stuff has just felt gimmicky, or too much about the happy ending (no, not that kind of happy ending!), such as the Christmas anthology, Stocking Fillers (Black Lace used to do excellent anthologies – check out this one, if you’re interested).
The Contributoria article quotes Gillian Green as saying:
“Black Lace titles are erotic romances rather than a string of sex scenes held together by a thin plot. Women, it seems, still want their Mills and Boon-style happy ever after, just kinkier.”
Now, I read Mills & Boon – rarely, now, but often, in the past and I just don’t agree. I’m pretty vanilla (monogamous, Gary Barlow fan, used to enjoy the bit in Famous Five books where they all go home and have tea way more than the actual plot), but when I’m reading erotica, it’s the sex scenes that matter, more than the plot, or the ending. Of course it is – these are the books I use to get off. Someone asked me on Twitter the other day whether the ending of Kristina Lloyd’s Asking for Trouble made me cry. Er, no – because by the time I actually read the book in order I pretty much knew it inside out anyway. Which isn’t to say that Kristina writes a weak plot or a weak ending – nothing could be further from the truth. She just doesn’t write a romance plot (although she writes emotion amazingly). So why does Gillian Green think it has to be romance – why not an erotica thriller, or just a contemporary erotic novel in which the girl doesn’t end up with her guy?
Plus, the article also mentions that Black Lace “plans to publish a series of erotic memoirs.” Do these all have happy endings? Really? Because that makes me nervous. I wrote what could essentially be classed as erotic memoir for NaNoWriMo this year and Black Lace is one of the publishers I’d eventually consider submitting to. But what I wrote doesn’t have a happy ending, because I think true life rarely does. I’d be pretty gutted if, in order to find a publisher, I had to put some kind of positive spin on the ending.
My final bugbear with the article is the way it ends:
“All publishers and authors agree that stylish covers are important for sales, as well as good proofreading.”
Maybe Black Lace books do have what the industry consider to be stylish covers, I don’t know. Personally, I’m not a fan. They do, at least, finally have men on them sometimes, but when you compare them to the beautiful covers used by the US imprint, Cleis (this is my favourite), they’re pretty disappointing. When I bought Alison Tyler’s Dark Secret Love, I was disappointed to get this cover, not this one. I’m not the kind of girl who’s ashamed to be reading erotica, so please, let’s have covers that reflect the content of the book.
Still, at least there’s one positive thing to come out of this:
“Green says she is always on the lookout for broadminded editors who don’t flinch at editing explicit sex scenes.”
Maybe 2014 will be the year I get a new job …
Things I read in 2013: Part 1
Lots and lots of people are writing year in review posts right about now, I know, so sorry for not being particularly original and just jumping on the bandwagon. I thought though, that seeing as this blog hasn’t even been around for a year yet, rather than looking back at the highlights of what I’ve written, it would be better to write about the best things I’ve read. Part 1 is all about blog posts; Part 2 will focus on erotica and will follow in a few days when I’m back with my books.
Because Sex blog (of sorts) was neither a blog nor a Twitter account at the start of the year, I went back to my personal Twitter account in search of good things I’d read. In January, there was apparently nothing that I enjoyed enough to warrant a retweet or a mention; and my memory doesn’t go back that far, so I guess we’ll have to assume that there really was nothing good out there.
The same was true of February. It’s going well so far, this year in review, isn’t it?
March was better. Not only did I discover that there’s such a thing as a Naked Man Orchid, Girlonthenet also wrote about the way men smell. Just rereading the words ‘active sweat’ makes me wriggle in my chair a little bit.
April was bittersweet. Nic and Lace posted this wonderfully hot story about losing your anal virginity, which I still go back to whenever I need a quick turn on, but April was also the last time that they blogged at all, which made me sad, because I thought so much of their writing was excellent. On the love and relationships side, I really enjoyed this article in the Guardian by Ruth Wishart about deciding not to have children, and on the general life/health side, this one on keeping your shit together when you’re depressed.
I’ll start May off by cheating a bit. Technically, this post by Kristina Lloyd, with an extract from her novel Thrill Seeker, should probably be in the 2nd part of this post, but I was so excited that she’d written something new that you’ll have to forgive me for mentioning it all over the place. I’ll come back to Thrill Seeker at the end of this post. Completely different, but equally thrilling was the fact that Allie Brosh started blogging again, after a long battle with depression – if you’re struggling to explain to family and friends what depression feels like, show them this.
June brought Mathilda Gregory writing in the Guardian about whether werewolf erotica has literary merit, and a great post by The Pervocracy on domestic violence. Most memorably for me though, it was the first time that Alison Tyler put up a call for submissions that I actually had the guts to send something in for, and better still, it was for a great cause.
Nothing at all for July, I’m afraid.
In August, I went to a great erotica writing masterclass with Rowan Pelling as part of the Edinburgh Festival – no posts linked to this but it was memorable because it was the first time I started to think seriously about blogging/writing. I also read this guest post for Girlonthenet by Halfabear, about sex, disability and inappropriate questions, which rang very true with me and made me realise that ‘sex blogging’ isn’t necessarily restricted to people who are great in bed or know loads about sex, and that it was fine to approach it in a slightly different way if I wanted to.
September was the month in which I wrote my very first blog post, which was a bit of an introduction to me, but reading-wise, I really enjoyed this piece that Sommer Marsden wrote for Alison Tyler about how far you should let your significant other define you.
In October, I really caught the blogging bug and amazingly, Girlonthenet, who is, y’know, someone I idolise just a little bit, let me write a post for her all about my first time. In the same month, she wrote about how words are hotter than pictures and I discovered Rosetintedguy and this piece on the hotness of the walk of shame, which is something I plan to write about myself this month.
Most of November was taken up with NaNoWriMo (which I won, yay!) and listening to this great Kings of Leon cover version of Robyn’s Dancing on my own, but I still managed to read loads and loads of wonderful stuff. Firstly though, this piece from the Telegraph, about flirting via text made me pretty uncomfortable – this is something I do a lot, and the thought that when someone appears to be engaged in a text conversation they could actually be giving you just 10% of their attention, struck me as the kind of train of thought that could very quickly drive you crazy. The stuff I agreed with/liked more? This piece by Mollysdailykiss on why we shouldn’t ban simulated rape porn and Rosetintedguy (again!) writing about fuck buddies, in a post which broke my heart a little bit (I can’t bear the thought of something not having a ‘proper’ ending.)
And finally, December. In a way, there are far too many posts to link to here – December was the month in which I realised that I was becoming more of a relationship blogger than a sex blogger (weird, seeing as I’m Little Miss Doesn’t Do Relationships) and added four bloggers in a similar vein to my BlogLovin feed because I was enjoying so much of what they wrote. I’ve linked to Juniper’s post on finishing her dating blog in a previous post, but it’s definitely worthy of another mention here, as is this piece by Laurie about avoiding married men not just due to moral objections, but also because they’re unlikely to be the ones who’ll give you what you’re really searching for.
So, that’s my year in blog posts. Anyone else got something they read in 2013 that they think I’d love?
Educating Yorkshire or fuck, teachers are hot
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.
Sex blog (of sorts) 