Six men in the kitchen (The Lady, October 2015) & competition reminder

Someone once told her that she only needed six things in her kitchen: a food processor, a microplane grater, a good set of knives, digital scales, a stand mixer and a vegetable peeler.

It’s not true, she realises now. Sometimes you need other things. Sometimes you need six men, all of whom you’ve bedded, leaning against your worktop – not because you have doubts, but because you want a reminder of how you got here.

Her hen do was supposed to be mixed, but it has separated out, somehow – the girls and the plastic, novelty cocks in the living room, the boys – and their real flesh and blood ones – in the kitchen. She intends to flit between the two groups, but there’s an easiness to hanging out with the men. She’s never been one for slick, organised parties; she’s certainly never been one for pin-the-dick-on-the-fireman.

Instead, she plays her own game. She weaves between the guys, topping up their champagne, and for each one, she challenges herself to remember a specific moment or detail about the way they fucked.

Jamie’s fingers, and the way they curved against her G-spot until she drenched his sheets.

Max, who taught her to love face slapping, though she can’t for the life of her remember what made them try it in the first place.

Edward, bestower of tiny yellow thumbprint bruises all over her tits, and bigger, purple ones on her arse.

Stephen, the biggest of the six, who liked to slide into her before she was quite wet enough, stretching her wide around his cock.

Zac, who she only fucked once, at uni, when she was so drunk she can barely remember it, but whose pale arse, disappearing out of her bedroom door the following morning, will stay with her forever.

Fraser, who made so much noise when he came, the neighbours complained. More than once.

She’s found a man who is all these things for her now, but she would’t have got there, without these men. She wouldn’t have known that these things mattered to her.

*

The day itself doubles the contents of her kitchen cabinets. There are vegetable steamers, beautiful stoneware casserole dishes, cheese knives, and, from her grandma, cutlery for best, a concept that is still beyond her.

The boys don’t bring gifts – it’s not their style. Besides, they don’t need to – over the past ten years they’ve given her more than she could ever have hoped for.

For obvious reasons, this isn’t an entry for my competition to win a signed copy of Girl on the Net’s new book, but it is a reminder that you only have four and a bit days left to enter.

I’ll put up a separate post linking to the entries as soon as I have a few more, but for now, check out this epically-titled entry by Jo at Teachers have Sex.

[e]lust #80

Elust 80 Penny's Dirty Thoughts
Photo courtesy of Penny’s Dirty Thoughts

Welcome to Elust #80

The only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month. Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice or kinky discussions it’ll be here at Elust. Want to be included in Elust #81 Start with the rules, come back April 1st to submit something and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

~ This Month’s Top Three Posts ~

Something Meaningful
The debate goes on
Trim

~ Featured Post (Molly’s Picks) ~

No Take Backsies: Sexual “Politeness”
THE Process

~Readers Choice from Sexbytes ~

*You really should consider adding your popular posts here too*

He’s not a Tumblr Dom
All blogs that have a submission in this edition must re-post this digest from tip-to-toe on their blogs within 7 days. Re-posting the photo is optional and the use of the “read more…” tag is allowable after this point. Thank you, and enjoy!

Erotic Non-Fiction

She Strips The Boundaries Away The Black Bra
He enjoyed Playing with My Shoes
One… two… ménage à trois!
Doing Mt. Shasta
What’s Behind that First Strike…
Memories
How To Top Off Valentine Weekend Lovemaking
Watching Cunnilingus
Scened All Night
Spoiled in the Sun
The Tennent
01/14 Session With Mistress Claire & Others
THREESOME HEAVEN – extreme sensations
The neighbours don’t learn my name
home

Sex News, Opinion, Interviews, Politics & Humor

I Don’t Date on the First Sex
Meat market

Erotic Fiction

Lines
Who’s the Boss? (She is)
A Little Distraction
Let Me Share
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies…
a bit of filth
Original Sin
Watching

Thoughts & Advice on Kink & Fetish

My Day of Punishments Part 1
Filthy girl
Kink Without Sex: What Happens After Orgasms
Dominant roots
Using Our D/s to Get Through Stress

Thoughts & Advice on Sex & Relationships

First Times
The number of the beast…
Sometimes Love is Not a Pie
Bareback
Looking deep through reflection
Pussy Pics
So I Was Thinking

Events

A Night with Zombies – Cinema l’Amour
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Competition (of sorts): Win ‘How a bad girl fell in love’

Seeing as I love a writing competition, I thought the launch of Girl on the Net’s new book was a great excuse to run one, and the publisher have kindly promised me a signed copy of the book as a prize.

As I said in my review, Girl on the Net uses real magazine article titles for each of the chapters in her book – ’13 Scientifically Proven Signs You’re in Love,’ ‘So You’ve Decided to Watch Porn Together,’ ‘How to Seduce Each Zodiac Sign’ – and it’s one of the things I love about it.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to do the same – write a post, fiction or non-fiction, of up to 500 words, using a magazine article title as your title. It’s up to you whether you want to use an online or offline magazine, Cosmo, Caravan Monthly or Homes & Antiques. It just must be a real article title.

If you’re tempted, here are …

… the Rules…

(1) Your post can be fiction or non-fiction.
(2) Your post must use a magazine article title as its title.
(3) The post must (obviously) be your own work.
(4) There is no minimum length for posts, but they must be no longer than 500 words.
(5) You can enter as many times as you want.
(6) You must post the piece on your own blog and post a link to it in the comments section below in order for your entry to be considered.
(7) The competition closes at 23.59 GMT on Thursday, March 24th. Any entries submitted after this point will not be considered.
(8) You consent to me reproducing your post in full if you win.
(9) Should you win, you are happy to share your mailing address with me and Blink Publishing for the purpose of sending your prize.
(10) The competition is open internationally.

If I’ve missed anything, or you have questions, please let me know. Also, I’m taking a Twitter break at the moment, so please share this if you can. It would be good to get as many entries as possible!

Review (of sorts): How a bad girl fell in love

For the sex blogging community, and especially, I imagine, the British sex blogging community, Girl on the Net is the thing we have in common: the blog we all read, the blogger many of us aspire to write like. It’s weird to me that the world beyond blogging is less familiar with her – when my RL friends claim not to have heard of her, I’m surprised, disappointed even – because her blog is a way in to conversations about sex, albeit a seriously filthy one.

How a bad girl fell in love is her second book, but the first in paperback, which delights the print-geek in me. My favourite sex blogger just became giftable! And that’s important, because, all the good stuff I have to say about this book aside, what I think will be really interesting is how it’s received in the market more widely.

The Amazon blurb reads as follows:

From the UK’s smartest and most controversial sex blogger comes a unique story of ordinary love and incredible sex – and what happened when they came together. This is Girl on the Net’s true story – of falling in love and falling apart. From the honeymoon days of sex whenever and wherever, to the everyday issues that come with a solid relationship. This is more than a memoir, this is a must-read for all of us who have ever wondered…can great sex and real love ever go hand in hand?

I liked it a lot, but I wasn’t sure, when I started it, what made it different from the blog. One of the things I loved about Girl on the Net’s earlier blog posts was that they were all titled ‘On X…,’ a trope that many of us have since borrowed, because it works, and the equivalent trick in How a bad girl fell in love is to name the chapters with genuine magazine article titles and to introduce them with a snippet of conversation between Sarah, the narrator, and the lovely Mark, who I fell a bit in love with pretty damn quick. For example, Chapter 8 is called ‘Work-Love Balance: 8 Tips on Juggling a Career & Couplehood,’ and it starts:

Me: Thing is, it’s easier to ask for a fuck than to tell someone great that you love them. 

Him: For you. Easier for YOU.

It’s clever, and the intro snippets are all funny and cute, to the extent that I kept sticking the book under friends’ noses and going ‘Ohh, this one’s *lovely*’ but I did worry for a while that it read more like a series of articles or blog posts compiled than a novel with a distinct plot arc. For some people, of course, that would be perfect, because they like to dip in and out of stuff, and it certainly makes it easier to do that, but me? I want arc.

On Wednesday evening though, with 75 pages to go, I meant to go home and eat before heading out again later. I was pushed for time and the book was burning a hole in my handbag. In the end, I snuck off to Carluccio’s and over sausage pasta, wine and tiramisu, I devoured what was left of it. It pulled me in so deftly, I didn’t even realise it was happening.

This is a book that’s strong on hot sex …

When Mark pushed his cock inside me I let out what felt like a sigh of relief. All the times I’d said no, and all moments when I’d sobbed myself to sleep feeling dry and useless and pathetic: they all came out in that breath.

Then he smacked me.

… on mental health …

I’m not weak. I’m fighty. I’ll shout and get angry about things all the time … Buggered if I’m going to cry just because my boyfriend is trying to push me to explain why I cried in a restaurant, and why all my friends have started tiptoeing around me, as if just one wrong word will turn me to dust.

… and on love and affection …

The miracle came the next day, when his key clicked in the lock and he came running through the hallway shouting my name.

‘Ugh,’ he grunted, as he pulled me into a hug. ‘It’s been a long day. I fucking missed you.’

The Evening Standard reviewed it a while back, and I think they missed the point. Is it clickbait in print form? Maybe. The title suggests so, at least, and perhaps the cover, too. But this…?

So what do women want? To fuck “for a variety of reasons: true love, sheer curiosity, politeness, money, boredom” or “because we’re horny and we just quite feel like it”? Or to find Mr Right? To be honest, I’m not sure GOTN knows. She swings erratically in her search for that special experience, from pub toilet cubicles to down the aisle.

The point, for me, is that Girl on the Net *doesn’t* know, and that’s the joy of this book. Personally, I’m sick of heroines who are nice, and uncomplicated – scatty, but essentially good – who know what they want, and always get it in the end. Real women *do* ‘swing erratically,’ though there’s not currently much on the shelves that acknowledges that.

Girl on the Net does. It’s what makes this really worth reading. I think the blogging community will love it. I hope the rest of the world will too. And in six months, I’ll be checkIng the Amazon reviews to see if they did, because the verdict will tell us a lot – about where we are with regard to talking about sex, feminism, MH issues and our bodies – and how far we still have to go.

***

I received an advance copy of How a bad girl fell in love in exchange for a fair review. I also have a competition, where you can win a signed copy.

Wierd

She finds it screwed up at the back of the wardrobe, twenty years later. Sugar paper. Christ, how long it seems since sugar paper and handwritten projects, photos printed out, guillotined neatly, and stuck down with Pritt Stick. It didn’t suit the perfectionist in her – too hard to make it look good.

Not that she expected to still be doing projects like that at seventeen.

It was meant to ease them in gradually, she supposes. Start of sixth form, something easy to make the classroom look pretty. A poster, for fuck’s sake. She wanted to get her teeth into the real work, to learn new stuff.

She’d learned new stuff with him.

With him, there’d been no easing in gradually. No steady working their way up through the bases. They covered them all in one night – first kiss mid-afternoon and her virginity gone by midnight. Though she liked him more than the hurry suggested. A lot more.

If he was nervous, he didn’t let on – she liked that – but he wasn’t cocky, either. He touched her the same way she imagined he’d handle a new phone – as if he still had a lot to learn but the basics weren’t beyond him – as if he trusted his ability to get to grips with her body.

School started again before she had the chance to find out, and the project, shitty though it was, gave them an excuse to pair up, a reason why he’d be in her bedroom of an evening, a reason for him to slide his hands up her top as she rendered the title in perfect bubble letters.

‘Stop,’ she laughed, batting his hands away, ‘we need to finish this first!’

He was rock hard in his jeans, distracted no doubt, as he captioned a photo of a ‘weird and wonderful museum’ in deepest Wales.

Her back was turned, and then, ‘Wierd?! You idiot! You’ve ruined it now!’

He stormed out, the front door slamming behind him. In class the next day, he’d moved seats, tippexed out their intertwined names from his pencil case. Her cunt couldn’t forget him so fast, and the B they got for their efforts was poor compensation for the empty ache inside her.

Eventually she thinks she’s forgotten him. She no longer wanks over his memory, his too-big boxer shorts, his thick cock. There are other men, of course.

But she’s kinder to the ones who can’t spell.

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When C4 get it right: Born to be Different

I am a bit of a sucker for documentaries about growing up or growing older. When I left my last job, my colleagues bought me the box set of the Up series, and it remains one of my favourite things I’ve ever seen. I love Child of Our TimeBut I’m particularly drawn to Born to be Different because this is growing up/growing older + disability.

I’ve taken Channel 4 to task before for what I consider to be ableist, unfair disability programming in the form of The UndateablesI stand by what I said in that post. But equally, Born to be Different is proof that when they get it right, they really, really get it right.

Disability is a strange thing. In some ways, with many disabilities, it seems the biggest physical challenges come early on. Will a child walk? How bad is the brain damage? What’s the diagnosis? Once those things are established, it can only get easier, right?

I’m increasingly not sure that’s true.

The Born to be Different kids are turning 16, and I’ve realised, for the first time, that disability splits in two. For some people, it’s a battle to live with a condition – to maintain self esteem, independence, faith – in the face of a world that increasingly judges them. For others, with life-shortening conditions, it’s a battle just to survive.

The life-shortening conditions are heartbreaking, obviously, but they’re harder to relate to. The kids with these conditions are still just that – kids, and it’s their parents and siblings you really feel for, because they can express just how hard life is in the face of such epic disability.

And then it gets complicated. Because although Zoe, who has arthrogryposis, is much more disabled than I am, I relate to the challenges of her condition, which affects the mobility of her arms and legs. I’m in tears as she talks about giving up netball, and then PE more generally, because ‘people can be nasty.’ Now, she says, ‘she wants to be a barrister,’ and I recognise too that turn to academia as an area in which is is possible to succeed. And god, I want Zoe to succeed.

In the episode I watched tonight, she was encouraged to apply for head girl, and I was immediately transported back to my last year of middle school, when I won the prize for overall contribution to the school. I was twelve, and it felt like the last time I was in any way at ease with myself (in many ways, I already wasn’t). Zoe panicked about making a speech, and as she struggled up to the podium, I completely got why – it’s not easy being the centre of attention when your body won’t cooperate. I cried, a lot, both for her, and for me, because I feel a million miles away from a happy-go-lucky childhood, and I’m not sure I could readopt that approach to the world even if I wanted to – snark and sarcasm are an easier and more robust defence. But Zoe is lovely, and I hope that, against the odds, she finds a way to maintain that as she grows older.

The boys in the programme so far have all been much sicker, so it’s hard to say whether there’s a gender split in how hard disability hits as you reach adulthood, but the Radio Times’ summary of next week’s episode, and its focus on dating, depressed me:

‘At 15 years old, Emily is interested in boys, although she’ll need one who won’t balk at her manually sluicing out her bowel several times a day. Similarly, Zoe worries that boys who claim to see past her arthrogryposis don’t mean it.’

There is something about the way that’s written that pisses me off. Will both Emily and Zoe find dating harder because of disability? Almost certainly. But ‘manually sluicing out her bowel several times a day’ is oddly graphic and unnecessarily explicit. Presumably Emily can do this independently, and any potential boyfriend would have no need to witness it in quite the icky terms its described in here? We need to understand disability better, undoubtedly, but it shouldn’t give us free rein to pore over the details which, it strikes me, are only there to make an able-bodied audience recoil in horror at the realities of life with a disability. It’s a precursor, I reckon, to questions like this.

Channel 4, to their credit, have avoided that this time. It would be nice if the Radio Times could do the same.

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Gift guide (of sorts): Mother’s Day 2016

Molly of Mollysdailykiss.com fame asked if I’d be doing a Mother’s Day gift guide, and I said no, because they’re time consuming and they don’t get as many hits as the sex related stuff, but then I’ve seen a lot of cute stuff in the past couple of weeks so I figured I may as well share it…

From left to right:

1.Betsy Liberty Print Mini Suitcase, £65

This would be perfect for keeping stationery, craft materials or make up in  – it’s girly, sure, but it’s also really lovely.

2. Mini Lipstick Charms, £29

Charlotte Tilbury make up has a kind of retro, Hollywood glamour to it (makes sense, she’s a celebrity make up artist) – the packaging is stunning, but the products are also really good quality. This set of three lippies is particularly good because all the colours are wearable, *and* they have fab names. Bitch Perfect, anyone?

3. The Nordic Bakery Cookbook, £13.48

Since I went to Copenhagen last month, I’m obsessed with all things Scandi (travel guide potentially on the way). Scandinavian is basically a synonym for cosy, and I think this book looks like the perfect way to create cosiness at home while waiting for Spring to properly arrive.

4. Ren Moroccan Rose Bath Oil, £26

I’m essentially incapable of writing a list that doesn’t have bath oil on it. Rose wouldn’t usually be my top choice of fragrance, but I’m swayed by how subtle this is, and by the beautiful bottle, which makes it great as a gift.

5. Mr B’s Reading Spa, £65

Mr B’s Reading Year was on my original Christmas gift guide, and it was one of the most popular things on there. This, the cheaper version, gets you a voucher to go and discuss books and eat cake with a member of the Mr B’s team, and £45 to spend on books. Great if your mum likes to support independent retailers.

6. Elle Decoration Subscription, £38

This is what I’ve got for my mum. I think it’s a good choice because it has actual content worth reading (i.e. isn’t Cosmo), and is much less old-fashioned than most of the home magazines out there.

7. Dark Chocolate, Pistachio and Raspberry Brittle, £5.85

Pistachios always make me come over all Nigella, because they’re such a great colour, and paired with dried raspberries and dark chocolate, this is so pretty, I almost wouldn’t want to eat it, but is also from Ottolenghi, so guaranteed to be delicious.

8. Andy Warhol Ideas Book, £13.99

Like bath oil, there’s always a notebook. This one has unlined pages with Warhol quotes, and can be used for writing or drawing. And it’s hardcover, which is always a bonus.

9. Feminism Dress, £14.99

I saw a girl wearing this slogan on a tee, which sadly no longer seems to be available, but this would be a great dress for lounging around in at weekends.

10. Glitter Hearts iPhone 6 Case, £20

I can’t decide if this is cool or tacky, but I think it would definitely be hypnotic, and she’ll know you love her, at least…

11. Hay Kaleidoscope Trays, £56

There’s a real Scandinavian theme to this list, but Hay trays are cool because you can buy as many as you can afford and keep adding them in new colours and sizes. I think this would be a great way to store jewellery.

12. Champagne Saucers, £20

Champagne saucers allegedly make fizz lose it’s well, fizz, quicker than flutes, but I don’t care, because I love them. Match these with a bottle of cava or prosecco and some elderflower or peach liqueur and you have a perfect afternoon…

13. Beaufort Necklace, £48

I want this, so your mum probably will too, right?

14. Set of 3 Photo and Cardholders, £23.42

I bought a set of these, and they’ve proved to be super useful – especially good if your mum likes bringing home postcards from exhibitions and has nowhere to display them.

15. Wire Mesh Memo board, £55

This is one of two ways of displaying postcards on a list of fifteen items (oops), but I would totally love this as a way of creating a kind of mood board for my novel. Perfect for creative types.

 

On red lips & falling out of love with my body

Being brave with make up is an odd one. When I originally started thinking about this post, I was intending to say that it’s perverse how, the more at ease I am in my own skin, the more tame my make up. But it’s not perverse; it’s complicated.

In my teens my skin was greasy, but even then, I escaped lightly compared to many of my schoolmates. My mum bought me a few Rimmel bits when I was ten and the fashion for Body Shop parties meant that make up quickly became part of my daily routine. Foundation, mascara, lipstick – we were allowed to wear it at school in those days, too.

I never felt I mastered make up, and I never experimented with it that much, but I liked playing with it, and I was interested in it, in a way I never was with clothes. Glitter gels, iridescent powder shadow (thanks, Miss Selfridge!), stick on hearts. It was tacky, and joyful, as fuck.

In recent years, the frequency with which I’ve worn make up has dropped dramatically. I rarely wear any at work, and the contents of my day-to-day make up bag (listed below), is pricey, but play-it-safe in the extreme.

Chanel Les Beiges Healthy Glow Foundation
Hourglass Ambient Lighting Powder
Benefit Roller Lash Mascara
Clarins Multibush
Tom Ford Lips & Boys Lipstick in Eric

It worries me that I’ve stopped wearing make up. Not necessarily because I think I ‘need’ it, although it does make me feel more confident, but because every day I get up too late to put any on, every day I go to work with wet hair and bare skin, I’m reminded of the following statement on the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale:

‘I have lost interest in my appearance.’

The scale requires you to rank how much each statement applies to you between 0-3, and I’m never quite sure what to do with that one, because although I do wear less make up and spend less time getting ready, I still buy new clothes, I still read a couple of beauty bloggers, I still spend money on new products. And that’s both a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s bad because increasingly, I buy make up in the same way some people buy bags and shoes – because I’ve put on a stone and a half in four years, I’m uncomfortable in my body, I feel fat, and buying clothes is miserable. Make up always fits, but it’s also an excuse to not take a long, hard look at myself and the way I really feel about my body. It’s an excuse not to change.

But there’s a flip side, too. I already feel conspicuous, because of the disability, because of the weight – and so, for the first time in my life, I’m not afraid to choose cosmetics that will make me stand out. In the past couple of years, I’ve bought three *bright* red lip products – MAC Red, MAC Sweet Sakura and, this week, Lipstick Queen’s Seven Sins gloss in Anger. 

The name is not a coincidence. I am angry, mostly with myself. But on my lips, that anger is transformed into something vital, something kickass. One of the saddest conversations I had with a friend of mine – who is beautiful – was about lipstick.

‘I’d never wear red,’ she said. ‘I just want to blend in. I don’t want to be noticed.’

It’s her choice, obviously, but it’s not what I want for myself. I’m not convinced red lipstick suits me, or is flattering, but I also don’t care. I’ve been reading Ella Risbridger’s wonderful lipstick columns for The Pooland she talks often about liking shades of lipstick that might not suit her. And I think she’s right – it’s psychological, as much as anything else. It’s colour, in a world of beige.

Red is anger. It’s also love, passion, fire, heat. It’s brave and it’s unapologetic.

And right now, it’s what I need.

e[Lust] #79

Elust 79 header
Photo courtesy of Marie Opens Up

Welcome to Elust #79

The only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month. Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice or kinky discussions it’ll be here at Elust. Want to be included in Elust #80? Start with the rules, come back March 1st to submit something and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

~ This Month’s Top Three Posts ~

The Joy of Sucking Cock

Making Porn

My Valentine

~ Featured Post (Molly’s Picks) ~

The One

Midweek Fantasizing – The Portrait

~ Readers Choice from Sexbytes ~

*You really should consider adding your popular posts here too*

Marionette
All blogs that have a submission in this edition must re-post this digest from tip-to-toe on their blogs within 7 days. Re-posting the photo is optional and the use of the “read more…” tag is allowable after this point. Thank you, and enjoy!

Thoughts & Advice on Sex & Relationships

A kiss is just a kiss
Turning Corners
Another Day, Another Planned Parenthood Visit
My first vanilla date
Want, Need the Power of your Masculinity!
I don’t know how to date.

Erotic Fiction

Soft Lips
The Introduction
Erotic Fiction: “Words”
Darkness and the Rose
Taste
THE SESSION THAT WENT WRONG
Be Careful What You Wish For
Motivation
porn
The Tube

Erotic Non-Fiction

For You, It’s Always Yes
Gawan: Intro to Flogging
The Talker: An Introduction
My wildest fantasy: Ship slut
Marionette
Time for something quick…
Spread Legs and Open Mouth
My Girl in Havana
Let’s Watch some Porn

Sex News, Opinion, Interviews, Politics & Humor

An Artist’s Story: Tails and Portholes
Sleeping With Our Future President
To Dude Who Was Offended By Lack of Escort
Try Love, Not Anger
Risky Sex
Why Cosmo is the worst (again!)

Writing about Writing

Condoms: fictional contraceptive of choice
Writing Fat Characters In Erotica

Thoughts & Advice on Kink & Fetish

Masochistic Mastermind
Take me to where I need to be.

 

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Screw you, Mr Dior

‘Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world’ – Marilyn Monroe

‘A woman with good shoes is never ugly’ – Coco Chanel

‘i would hate for someone to look at my shoes and say, ‘Oh my God! That looks so comfortable!’ – Christian Louboutin

‘Too many women think shoes are unimportant, but the real proof of an elegant woman is what is on her feet.’ – Christian Dior

‘I can’t concentrate in flats’ – Victoria Beckham

When I participated in Sinful Sunday for the first time, just before I turned 30, I wore stilettos for the first time in my life, and I loved them. I couldn’t walk in them, but god, I wanted to be able to. If I didn’t like heels, I’d have a much simpler relationship with them, one that would roughly equate to can’t wear them, doesn’t want to wear them.

I want to wear them.

That’s why I wore them in that photo: it was supposed to reflect me as I’d like to be seen, and I’d like to be seen as the kind of girl who wears heels.

Even though I think, rationally, that every one of those quotes above is bullshit.

It’s not that disability gives me the ability to not care about what I wear on my feet – that’s not a privilege disability buys you. At job interviews, weddings, formal dinners, I’m expected to look as elegant as the next woman. And yes, you can pull off elegance in flats, but they’re often not an option either – I can’t keep ballet pumps (or any court shoe) without a strap on my feet, so I rely on Mary Janes being in fashion each and every time I need to buy shoes for a formal event. Guess what? They’re not. And even when they are, I’ve grown to dislike them. They make me feel frumpy. They remind me that my body, not my mind, dictates the footwear I can and can’t wear.

I’m not the only one, of course. Every time the subject of shoes comes up on Twitter, a whole host of women commiserate with me because they can’t wear heels either. The reasons are myriad: arthritis, balance issues, hemiplegia, cerebral palsy …

It makes me feel less alone, but it also makes me pretty damn angry. Inspirational quotes are fine –they have, I’m sure, their place in life. But there is something about the way they describe some kind of everywoman – one who lives for shoes, kittens, handbags, chocolate and prosecco – that makes me angry. I can choose whether or not to define myself through most of those things, but believe me, when it comes to shoes, I, and many others, can’t.

I guess what I’m saying is please think twice before you use a woman’s choice of footwear to judge her more intangible qualities. Wearing heels shouldn’t be a marker of being elegant, grown-up, sexy, kickass, or anything else. To suggest otherwise just gives women like me another thing to beat themselves up with for not being feminine enough.

Wearing heels is indicative of two things:

  • the ability to wear high heels
  • the desire to wear high heels

It really shouldn’t be a marker of anything else. But, if you see a pair of cute, nude, mid-heel, elegant courts with a strap and maybe some embellishment, before the wedding I have to go to in May, please do let me know.

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