Girl on the Net

I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times someone’s removed my bra with dexterity and skill. It just doesn’t happen very often. There’s a reason for this: bra hooks are pretty tricky to handle! When I was younger I think I bought in to the propaganda that a guy who was ‘good in bed’ would be able to magically unhook my bra one-handed while we were making out, without any fumbling whatsoever. But that’s bollocks. Nowadays, I think that the hottest way to remove a bra isn’t to fumble with it, or even dispense a little quick-fingered wizardry. The sexiest and most efficient way to remove my bra is to just tell me to take it off.

How to remove a bra without using your hands

Consider the following scenarios:

You reach up under my shirt while we’re snogging, using both hands to grab my bra strap. Best case scenario here is that you manage to get it undone swiftly, without me even noticing. I’ll feel a sudden release, perhaps be briefly impressed that you did it so easily, and then continue with the snogging. The best case scenario is one in which bra removal is almost unnoticeable. Worst case? You fumble a bit (which, to reiterate, is completely understandable – bra hooks are fiddly little fuckers) and then after a few attempts during which you get increasingly worried you won’t be able to do it, you either manage it and breathe a sigh of relief or I realise you’re struggling and take over. In both of these scenarios, bra removal is a task that you have to perform in order to get my tits out: like homework. Like a test.

Consider instead the following scenario: you tell me to take my bra off myself. Perhaps you growl a command into my ear – ‘take your fucking bra off’ – or maybe you grab one of my bra-enclosed tits in your hand and say ‘this. Off. Now.’ If you’re feeling romantic (or you’re not as obsessively kinky as I am), you might instead choose to say ‘take this off please, I want to see all of you.’ I can’t really think of a worst case scenario here, because all of them seem good to me. They bypass the ‘homework’ aspect of you having to figure out how my bra fastenings work, and they also allow you to do one of the things that (in my opinion) all shags would benefit from more of: talking.

There are lots of little moments like this during sex: tiny bumps in the road that could so easily be tackled as if they’re obstacles to climb over, but which fare far better if we acknowledge them as part and parcel of a fuck and have fun with them. Locating and putting on condoms, asking for more lube/grabbing lube, changing position, checking in, etcetera. Often when we talk about them we hammer in the importance of doing them in the first place, and of course that matters, but in doing so I think there’s a danger that we end up seeing them purely as ‘necessary’ – sticking them in the ‘task/homework’ box – and forgetting that as intrinsic aspects of a really good shag, there are also ways we can make them really fun.

How to put on a condom without disrupting the mood

Consider the difference between pausing midway through a make-out and apologetically stumbling through ‘I’m just going to grab a condom, hold on a second’ versus pausing midway through a make-out, staring intently into someone’s eyes and saying ‘stay exactly where you are – I’m going to get a condom so I can fuck you.’

The difference between ‘sorry, I’m struggling to get wet today because I’m a bit anxious – do you have any lube?’ versus ‘I really want you (your fingers/cock) inside me, get the lube.’

See what I mean?

I don’t pretend to be good at this. I would hope that – if asked – past and current lovers would say I manage to make things sexy roughly fifty percent of the time. The other half of the time I forget, and allow my inner panic and insecurity to take over while I fumble indefinitely with belt buckles and stammer out requests for lube that come from a place of shame rather than confidence. But still. When I do manage to nail it, I try to remind myself that this confident way works better: telling subby men to shut the fuck up and stay still while I roll a condom onto their dick, or tugging gently at someone’s belt and saying ‘this. Off’ rather than scrabbling around with trembling fingers.

There are many tiny physical tasks that we will never be able to perform consistently and smoothly. Some we’ll never be able to do better than another person (undoing your own shirt, for example, will always be quicker than undoing someone else’s). If you’ve never worn a bra, even if you’ve put in some serious practice, you’re probably never going to be able to remove mine as swiftly and seamlessly as I can because I do mine every day. And even if you can do it like a pro, the best case scenario is that I might briefly appreciate it but otherwise be unmoved.

Whether getting condoms, changing position or trying to remove a bra one-handed, your goal is to lift me so gently over the bump in the road that I barely notice it was there.

It’s an admirable aim, but it puts a lot of the onus on you. It emphasises sex as performance rather than collaboration. In my opinion, it will always be better to acknowledge any obstacles as part of the journey rather than try to pretend they don’t exist. Same goes for getting condoms, grabbing a vibrator or lube, switching position, and any other tiny tweak to a fuck that might seem like something you have to smooth over and make seamless.

You can’t lose the game if you don’t play it…

Recently, during that hot-as-fuck transition between making out and fucking, a guy said to me ‘get a condom, let’s see how well you can roll one onto my dick’ and honestly, I grinned. Probably not the sexiest thing for me to do in that moment, but he’d so perfectly nailed the whole ‘instruct’ thing that I couldn’t help it. The act of rolling a condom onto someone’s dick can often be a stressful one for me, because naturally I want to get it right while also looking/seeming as sexy as is humanly possible. It’s an act that can be imbued with intense horn, but which we rarely see framed in a horny context because condoms in porn are pretty rare (though there are some awesome examples of it, like in this incredible scene by my sponsor FrolicMe which I adore). So unless I was either oblivious or superhuman enough to have lived for nearly 40 years without absorbing any social pressure (which, spoiler, I am not), putting a condom on someone else’s dick is always going to constitute at least a tiny bump in the road.

But just as acknowledging my own insecurities and flaws often helps to disperse them a little, acknowledging the parts of sex that might be tricky helps to lower the stakes for them too. As soon as you’ve acknowledged the bump in the road, there’s no longer any need for me to try and lift you over it so smoothly that you do not notice.

I’m sure I don’t speak for everyone here: there will certainly be some people who actively get off on the performative aspect of sex, taking genuine pride in how easily they can undo a bra one-handed, or roll a condom onto a dick with barely a pause to check it’s the right way up. But I think there’ll be plenty of people for whom the ‘tell don’t show’ strategy works far more effectively to turn a shag into something genuinely fun.

For me, sex is always more enjoyable if the stakes are low. It’s why I will pretty much always enjoy the first shag we have together less than the hundredth. The more we have sex, the lower the stakes for each individual fuck. And I love low-stakes. I live for low-stakes fucking. The lower the stakes, the more we can experiment: offer suggestions, make requests, try out new kinks. Tell someone exactly what we want and how we want it, without worrying that in doing so we’re throwing shade on the way they were doing it before.

As I say, this won’t be true of everyone. But for me, one of the most valuable (and difficult) road bumps when it comes to sex is lowering the stakes. Especially right now, when most of the people I might shag are new to me.

Taking it from nervewracking performance to collaborative effort by applying words instead of pressure.

Words are pretty magic, after all. I know I bang on about it a lot here, but they really are. They are the solution to nearly every problem I have. How do you remove a bra without using your hands? Use your words.