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 …
Wow, the blog has strayed far from its original purpose, hasn’t it? Look at what my About section says: ‘I blog not only about my fiction, but also about the things that matter to me, both in the bedroom and out of it.’ My life in the bedroom is supposed to be secondary to my writing, and somehow it’s become the main focus. This isn’t leading to some big conclusion, or change of direction, it’s just a reminder to myself that the people in it are real and I should go steady here with what I write about them.
Anyyyway … this post is more about me doing something I’m uncomfortable with – reviewing someone else’s writing. I haven’t written a book review since I was in school, and honestly? I don’t really know where to start. Especially because, when it comes to erotica, I don’t always read chronologically, and some bits get, erm, much more read than others. But I do think it’s important. The erotica market, in the UK at least, feels to me like it’s in a bit of a mess at the moment, and surely if women want to see a range of high quality, well-written erotica, then we actually have to talk about the stuff we’ve enjoyed and recommend it to others.
Starting with something based on someone’s real life experiences seemed a good place to start – after all, it’s something I think I understand the motivation for. And the other thing I loved about Alison Tyler’s Dark Secret Love? The heroine has agency.
I think that’s a bigger deal than it might seem at first. I plan to review much more of what I read here, and I have no intention at all of comparing everything back to FSoG. But it’s worth doing here. In FSoG, Ana doesn’t have any submissive desires of her own – she desires Christian, and she wants to be sub because that’s what he wants.
Although in the UK edition, Black Lace have tried to suggest otherwise with the cover (‘It’s ok, bashful ladies, this is just a book about a rich guy with nice ties, nothing to be ashamed of’), there’s none of that in Dark Secret Love – Sam, the heroine, is very much submissive by her own choice.
The other thing I really liked is that she’s fundamentally monogamous. If you put FSoG and all its spin offs to one side, it can sometimes feel like erotica is dominated by people who are polygamous, and that, if you really love sex, you have to be having it with more than one person. Dark Secret Love proves that that’s just not true. Monogamous but filthy? Yep, that’s totally a thing.
For me, the only downside was that the type of BDSM Sam is into is the formal kind: whips, canes, spanking … whereas the type that gets me off tends to be more about psychological domination. That’s very much a personal thing, and if you prefer the former, there’s no doubt that this is a very hot book.
In the introduction, Alison writes: ‘This is meta-fiction, beta-fiction, masturbatory fiction.’ For me, it wasn’t the last of those, not quite. But for a lot of people it will be, and it’s good to know that Alison is happy for you to use it for that purpose.
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?
I love the fact that I’m not scared of saying what I think. I wouldn’t change it for the world, even though, as you’ll see here and in a post I’m planning to write later this week, it gets me into shit sometimes. In fact, the only detention I ever got at school was because I just couldn’t resist having the final word.
A week or so ago, just as I was trying to get to grips with the prospect of a new year and going back to work, and maybe beginning to organise something to celebrate my approaching milestone birthday, the boy and I came pretty close to calling it quits.
I’m sure lots of you who read this think that might have been the right thing to do – certainly I can see that the cumulative effect of my posts could give that impression, and in fact that was partly what triggered the whole thing. But I’m not ready to draw it to a close just yet, and so we’ve reached a decision that for now we’ll just take it as it comes.
Except. This time I am scared. Scared of blogging honestly about him because, as I’ve said before, I do understand why he finds that difficult and also because I blog so instinctively – what you see is how I feel right here, right now, and yet it’s up here for the world (and him) to see any time they want to. It’s why I haven’t written about it, and partly why I made the decision to maybe lay off the blogging for a while (except, I know, that hasn’t happened).
One of the things that he very accurately observed is that I have such a tendency to run with my emotions that I often take that to the point where it does more harm than good – both to me and the people around me.
My fear is that honesty for me is like chocolate – I’m an all or nothing girl. I haven’t yet figured out how to reconcile wanting to be honest with not letting that honesty run away with me. Both here and in the stuff I say to him directly. I’m worried that the only solution is to go cold turkey – to not mention the stuff that bothers me, to keep correspondence infrequent and bland.
Any yet, he likes my sassy mouth, so I can’t think of anything that would kill it quicker than anodyne back and forth text messaging. It’s a learning curve, I guess.
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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.
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?
When I set up SBoS, as someone very neatly called it the other day, I was torn about the kind of blog I wanted – half of me wanted something where I could rant and rave about my opinions on … Continue reading
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.
Sex blog (of sorts) 