In the post I wrote yesterday there was a quote which said:
Emotionally I feel I can get more stressed out and worked up about little things that aren’t significant.
The quote isn’t in any real context on the site I took it from, so I don’t know whether it’s linked to disability + depression, or just plain depression. But god, I know the feeling.
Yesterday, I went to the theatre and for dinner with a uni friend who’s just started seeing someone new. The night before they’d had an argument in which he’d accused her of being negative/endlessly challenging his views. She wanted to know if I thought that was a fair judgement. As far as the first bit was concerned I think he’s wrong, but as for the latter, he’s bang on the mark. Continue reading
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.’
I was just getting to thinking that Juniper from the The Cut of My Jib and I shared similar views on quite a few things when she posted her To Do List for 2014 (admittedly this was at the beginning of the month, I’m late, as usual). I should’ve known from the first few items on the list that it wasn’t going to contain the kind of goals that I would ever set – 30 days of continuous exercise? Ben Nevis? Yep, that’s a no from me.
However, further down it begins to look a bit more promising again. She has a separate list for sex, which is always a good sign, intends to write fiction, and to drive more (personally, I could probably do with driving a little more nervously.) And then there’s the killer: ‘Learn to take kit off in seductive manner.’
Oh, Juniper. How could you do such a massive disservice to womankind? Isn’t it hard enough trying to find an outfit you look hot in, shoes you can walk in, and two halves of a matching set of underwear that are clean and dry at the same time?
I fully buy into the concept of getting dressed in order to get naked, and I’m happy to put the work in there. I’m ritualistic about having at least an hour prior to the boy coming over when I can have a bath, dry my hair properly, do my make up and have my first glass of wine while wandering around in my underwear. I usually also bother to make the bed, tidy up (a bit), and just generally enjoy the sense of anticipation building.
But do I put the same effort in when I’m doing it in reverse? Er, no, far from it. I think the boy is partly to blame for this – neither of us are very good at calmly moving the action to the bedroom and attempting to seduce – often I don’t think we’d even make it as far as the bedroom if it wasn’t for my overwhelming desire to be underneath him at some point. It’s lucky that I prefer hold ups to tights for sex – on the few occasions I have worn tights they’re generally hanging off one ankle as I recover from my orgasm.
I much prefer it that way – I’d hate to be the centre of attention and have him just lie back on the bed and watch as I attempt to shed garment after garment like a high-class stripper. I might be sexy, but I’m sure as hell not seductive – I still haven’t mastered the art of putting clothes on without covering them in deodorant. I have a friend who once expressed surprise that I keep my jewellery on during sex – I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the same is often true of my cardigan.
In fact, as far as I can tell, there’s only one downside to being unwilling to learn to undress seductively. That matching underwear I always bother to track down? It could be peach on the top half and mint on the bottom for all he cares …
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Girls are supposed to love shoes. A fully-blown obsession with what we wear on our feet seems pretty much essential for female bonding, understanding half the plot lines in SATC and looking hot when out drinking/dancing.
I don’t love shoes. In fact, mostly, I really fucking hate shoes. In the past week I’ve gone from falling over the way I normally do (ankle gives way, I fail to recover and end up on the floor) to being on my feet one minute and sprawled across the ground the next, with no idea how I got there. It’s embarrassing, not to mention pretty painful. Still, I suspected that the blame had to lie with my ankle boots, and that buying a new pair was something that could no longer be avoided.
A friend heroically dragged me round a number of shoe shops yesterday, most of which were in that horrible sale phase where you have to dig through piles of mismatched shoes in an attempt to find out if they actually have what you want in your size. She also wisely waited until I had wine with my lunch before she ventured the following:
‘Jones the Bootmaker?’
‘Urgh, no, too frumpy!’
This is bullshit. Many of my best/comfiest boots in the past have come from Jones’ and I know they work for me. I reluctantly agreed to look and tried on a pair of black suede ankle boots with a minimal heel. They were, y’know, neat, elegant, sensible. The kind of thing that most women would wear with no fuss. I put them back.
We went to Kurt Geiger. I stroked a pair that were similar, but with an extra 3 inches of heel. These were the ones I wanted, even though I knew that, while I might get away with wearing them in the office, the chance of being able to walk any distance in them was minuscule. There was no point even trying them.
You can probably guess how this ends. I stroked a lot of other sexy boots that I wanted but knew wouldn’t work for me, and in the end I went back to Jones’ and bought the flat ones. They are fine, honestly, and I’m making a fuss about nothing, but for once I really want to wear sexy shoes, and by that I don’t mean boots with a heel, I mean proper, vertiginous ‘fuck me’ stilettos.
I’d really love to buy a pair that I could get away with wearing just in the bedroom. I want a guy to undress me until I’m wearing nothing but hold ups and the shoes, and then fuck me against the wall, hard. Is that realistic, ladies? How much balance does it require? And, if it’s feasible, where’s best to buy cheap but pretty shoes?
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.
I don’t think I’m massively out of touch with the world, nor do I think I’m particularly romantic, but recently a few things have caused me to call my views on monogamy and love.
I’ve never dated in the traditional sense of the word – met someone online, through a friend, at work – and seen that blossom gradually into a relationship, so I don’t know at what point most couples discuss the subject of exclusivity. I’d imagine, and hope, that it happens once they start to like each enough that they’d rather spend time with one another than anyone else who might be on the dating horizon. That they agree to be monogamous because, y’know, they care about each other. And even then, it confuses me a bit that it requires a full conversation, or even a discussion – surely you just need to establish that you’re both similarly into each other, and that’s that?
I can see that, when it comes to discussing monogamy with someone you’ve been sleeping with on and off for several years, the situation becomes a little more complex. The fact that the existing arrangement has carried on for so long suggests that both parties find it largely satisfactory. Except, of course, if you’re having to have a conversation about a potentially different set up, it suggests one of you maybe isn’t quite as happy with the arrangement as they used to be.
When it comes to my own life, if I’m having that conversation, it means I’m really not happy with the old arrangement. I’ll avoid difficult conversations at all costs – in fact I’ve fucked someone in the Gents at his place of work in order to stall the conversation for as long as possible. The reason for this is simple: even when we’re just fucking on and off, I’m already being faithful – I have neither the desire nor the emotional capacity to handle sleeping with more than one guy at a time.
So that’s where I behave badly – if you know a conversation needs to be had, shying away from it is counterproductive and unfair on the other person, who may also have had to psych themselves up for this chat. However, I’m shying away because I don’t understand what there is to discuss. If I’ve been sleeping with you for a while, and the subject of monogamy comes up, I think only the following three paths are possible:
1) Ideally, it won’t have been me who brought the subject up in the first place. I already have feelings for you, but I haven’t said anything because I’m a complete scaredey-cat and have been doing my utmost to hide the way I feel (no, this story isn’t very ‘girlpower’). One day you realise that you have feelings for me and that these feelings are important enough to warrant us being in an exclusive relationship. It may not work out, but the mutual affection is great enough for it to be definitely worth a try.
2) I somehow find the guts/something pushes me (far more likely) into admitting that I have feelings for you and that I’m no longer happy to sleep with you if you’re also sleeping with other women. I tell you this, and you care about me enough to want to try being in an exclusive relationship with me. It may not work out, but the mutual affection is great enough for it to be definitely worth a try.
3) I somehow find the guts/something pushes me (far more likely) into admitting that I have feelings for you and that I’m no longer happy to sleep with you if you’re also sleeping with other women. I tell you this, and you say that you’re sorry, but while you like me and enjoy the sex, you’re not interested in an actual relationship with me. Sure, I’m sad and a little bit hurt, but with time I’ll get over it and find a guy who does like me enough to want the same things I do.
Do you see why I don’t think there’s a full-on discussion in any of these scenarios? To me, monogamy is black and white – you either like me enough to give it a go, or you don’t. Yes, there’ll need to be conversations about the ins and outs of a monogamous relationship: how often we see each other, if/when we get to meet each other’s friends etc. etc., but the actual monogamy bit is much more clear cut.
Because sadly, I think that if, like me, you avoid conversations you’d rather not have, from time to time people will exploit that. I might have told a guy that I’d rather he no longer slept with other women, but if I keep putting off actually talking about it, the word can keep cropping up and yet nothing ever changes: I’m still sad and jealous as hell that he’s still fucking other people, and he too gets to carry on exactly the same way he did before.
The above situation has happened to me, and it’s made me more cynical about men than I used to be, something which in the past I wouldn’t have thought possible. Now I think they’ll all play on my unwillingness to talk about commitment, and I’ll keep fucking them nonetheless – trapped between fear of the conversation on one side and the fear of them no longer being in my life on the other.
And I do think there’s a romance side to it, too. No one wants exclusivity to become a business deal to be wrangled out with both parties trying to concede as little as they possibly can. I don’t want you to be faithful to me because you feel you have to be, I want you to be faithful because you want to be – because your feelings have developed to the point where you’re happy to give up other girls, not resentful about it.
So what do you think? Do I need to man up and tackle the issue of monogamy head on or am I right that the desire for monogamy comes from the heart, not the head, and that it doesn’t therefore need a discussion at all?
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.
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.
Sex blog (of sorts) 