What do the following things have in common?

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

“I’m not really a ‘books’ sort of person.”

“Haha – your boyfriend’s a shortarse.”

Any guesses? Here’s the answer: they’re all things guys I’ve slept with have said to me shortly after I’ve met them.

How to chat up a woman

I’d be gobsmacked if anyone who writes about sex hasn’t been asked the question “So, how do I go about getting laid?” or something similar. I’ve been asked a fair few times, most recently I’ve been asked what someone should say to make girls like him. The generic ‘how to chat up a woman’ request. I’d love to be insightful and wise bout this, but unfortunately all I have is some very generic advice:

• if you want to sleep with women, talk to them
• listen to them, and try to establish whether you’ve got anything in common
• make the most of the opportunities afforded by the internet
• don’t be a dick

I think what the people who ask these questions are looking for is something more specific than this: some magic words or a few good conversation starters that will have the average lady slipping off her chair with arousal halfway through the first round of drinks.

I can’t do this, I’m afraid. And anyone who tells you they can is either incredibly deluded or having you on.

I’m rubbish at chatting people up. My technique runs from the obvious (send them a flattering message on OKCupid then hope that when we meet in person I am drunk/brave enough to suggest a shag) to the arduous (develop a friendship over the course of many years, cross fingers that one day they’ll fancy sleeping with the girl who’s been hanging around like a bad smell) to the direct (“Fancy a shag?”). The benefit of being appallingly bad at chatting people up is that I fully understand how difficult it is, and sympathise with anyone who has spent two hours staring at a stranger across a crowded bar trying to pluck up the courage to offer them a drink.

Redefining success

I don’t think anyone’s bad for asking – naturally anyone who’s had crap luck when approaching people they fancy would be keen to see if there’s a way to minimise any failures in future. So often I write about what people shouldn’t do, it might seem logical that there’d be something we should do to improve the odds. Unfortunately this is one of those issues where although there are standard things you should avoid when you’re trying to look attractive (being rude, for instance, or accidentally being sick on their shoes), there’s no guaranteed ‘hit’ technique.

As the original ‘lines’ in this blog demonstrate – you can say something either mundane or cringingly foot-in-mouth but still end up in bed with the person you approached. Likewise, you can wow someone with your charm and charisma and still end up going home for a lonely wank.

But (and I appreciate it might not seem like it when you’re lonely and keen to find someone) the fact that there are no magic words is a good thing.

If I were a charlatan, I’d tell you there are techniques that’ll have anyone eating out of the palm of your hand. But if that were true, the world would be an awkward and horrible place: one where we ended up getting together with people purely on the basis that we fancied them for five minutes. If you had a magic ability that meant anyone you liked would be persuaded to shag you, you’d end up shagging a hell of a lot of unsuitable people.

Can you think of anyone you fancied on first site but then ended up disliking? Because I sure as hell can. I fancy most liberal-sounding, scruffy-looking, slightly-nerdy guys I meet purely on the basis that I’ve had pretty decent luck with these guys in the past, and most of them have turned out to be both fun and hot. But that doesn’t mean they’ll all be. If I had Abracadabra’d all of them into bed, there’d have been plenty of awkward mornings in my life when both of us woke up and realised that we weren’t suited to each other at all.

So: chatting up. It’s never going to be 100% successful, and I can’t give you any advice that will make it so. Because your aim when introducing yourself to a stranger should never be as simple and boring as just ‘getting that stranger into bed’. Your aim, in my honest and unskilled opinion, should be finding out whether you both actually want to go to bed together.

I’ve always wanted to be good at finding romantic gifts. Small yet exquisitely formed tokens of affection that have my other half either weeping with joy or laughing in ecstatic delight.

But unfortunately, I suck. I umm and err if I have to buy a guy a birthday present, caught between something expensive, tasteful and brilliant and something expensive, rubbish, but hilarious.

In the end I usually end up declaring my romantic intentions via the means of drunk text messages or half-formed sonnets written in fridge magnets. But still. Very very occasionally I’ve bought, made or done things that have had the desired effect. Here are the top five romantic gifts that I have generously bestowed upon gentlemen I have known:

A blue rose

We’d had a row about whether or not blue roses existed. So, when I spent ages hunting down a blue rose, and triumphantly presenting it to him, it had the benefit that it was not only pretty cool-looking and unique, but it also harked back to a shared in-joke. If I hadn’t handed it to him while shouting “HA! In your FACE, Mr WRONG” it might well have got me laid.

A week later, as the water in the vase started to turn blue as well, I got the sneaking suspicion I’d been had.

A hand-drawn cartoon card

This one was FUCKING AMAZING, OK? Just, honestly. Ignore the fact that I draw about as well as a dog licking an inkwell. Forget that I had essentially drawn pictures of the two of us engaged in one of our numerous fights. It was pretty and big and took time and effort – I’d even coloured it in! And hardly gone over the lines!

Pizza and a blow job

What can I say? Sometimes I’m just a mind reader.

A limerick about his cock

This one actually counts for about fifty, because that is how many limericks I have written about this one boy’s cock. Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships, he has a penis that inspires a thousand poets.

Top tip if you’re thinking of recreating this, though – should you feel inspired to write a birthday limerick about your loved-one’s genitals, be sure to write it somewhere other than in their actual birthday card. Otherwise you might find yourself having to dive across the room to whip it out of his mother’s hands when she loudly exclaims ‘oh, how sweet, do you mind if I read it?’

A games console

Now I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking “hey, Gotn, I thought the message of this blog was going to be about how you don’t have to spend loads of money in order to make romantic gestures!”

Well, you don’t. But that’s not to say that spending money can’t sometimes be a really bloody romantic gesture. Especially if it’s money you don’t really have, that you’re selflessly spending just because the love of your life wants something bizarre and out of your budget range.

The most romantic present I ever gave someone was a games console. Not an Xbox or a Playstation: this was much much better. Months before this boy’s birthday, we’d been watching the shopping channel with friends when an utterly amazing product came on. It was an old-fashioned plug-directly-into-the-telly console that had modern copies of ancient games. Heavily pixellated, retro-awesome tat. Needless to say, he was excited:

“It’s even got a gun! You can do clay pigeon shooting!”
“With blocky, clunky clay pigeons?”
“EXACTLY.”

So. It was settled. I’d save up the pitiful amount of money that I had (I was poor enough at the time that the 40-odd quid this thing cost was a serious budgetary commitment) and ordered one. As his birthday neared, I was quivering with nervous anticipation. I worried that he might hear me whispering the secret in my sleep. Every time he mentioned his birthday, and the fun we were going to have in the evening, I almost exploded with the desire to say “and we can play with your birthday present because it’s AMAZING.”

As the day dawned, I could barely speak for excitement, imagining the look of pure, squirming love on his face as he’d open it, turn to me, and beg me to stay with him forever. This was no ordinary love gift: it was the One True Gift that would cement me forever in his heart.

Have you guessed the ending yet? Because I certainly didn’t. When I met him in the morning, babbling excitedly about his party at which I’d get to present him with The Gift, he hit me with a conversational bombshell:

“So I met this girl over the weekend. We’re going out now.”
“But… you’re shagging me!”
“I know. But… we’re not really going out, are we?”
“Aren’t we?”

So there you are, kids – there’s the moral. It’s not that ‘love costs nothing’, it’s ‘beware of forking out too much on expensive trinkets, because if your partner is going to dump you then no amount of consumer electronics will stop them.’

I gave him the console anyway. Turns out it was quite shit.

This blog is a bit of a meta-blog about blogging. If that’s not your thing, don’t worry. Normal posts on filth and angry feminism will resume shortly.

*Update* – Vagenda has responded to this and agreed to proactively ask for link backs. Still no guarantee of full name credit, but certainly much better than it was before.

The Vagenda, if you haven’t heard of it, is a blog written by a huge collection of people, and run by Rhiannon-Lucy Coslett and Holly Baxter. It’s a varied mix of really heartfelt stories, funny articles, feminist ranting, and almost anything else you could care to think of that’d fall under the category of ‘popular feminism’. It’s naturally a mixed bag, but I want to say up front that I like some of the stuff that’s published there. I even wrote for it once.

However, something about it really frustrates me: when I find an article that I like, I usually want to find out more about the author. I want to view their personal blog if they have one, or read other articles they’ve written. But I can’t.

Not because these writers are all anonymous (although some of them choose to be), or even because they never link through to their own blogs (occasionally they do), but because the Vagenda has a policy of never naming their writers. Unless you’re a famous journalist like Hadley Freeman, they will only credit you with initials. 

Who the hell is ‘JD’?

Don’t believe me? Take a look:

This is a great article on the morning after pill. It’s written by RW.
Here’s one on Chris Brown, by DB.
This one is credited to ‘MW’.
This one is credited to ‘RP’.

When I wrote for the Vagenda, I asked them to publish the post under my blog name – girlonthenet – they said they don’t do that, and instead published just the initials ‘GON’. They did include a link to my blog, though, so I still got referral traffic and probably picked up a few new readers, so it was a good thing for me to do.

But there are hundreds of writers who have blogged for Vagenda and seen no return whatsoever – no traffic to their blogs, no one googling their name and coming across their awesome piece then paying them to write something else, not the warm fuzzy feeling you inevitably get when you see your name on a popular website. If any of these people want to go into writing as a career, they can’t even use their Vagenda experience on a CV. Jane Doe has no way of proving that the article credited to ‘JD’ is hers, beyond pointing at it and saying “but it is! Honest!”

Pay versus promotion

There’s a huge debate about the ethics of not paying writers, and simply expecting them to write in order to gain ‘exposure’. I appreciate that if you’re not making money, you might not be able to pay people. I also think that if you are making money, not paying people is deeply unethical. If you expect writers to produce something of value for you, you have to give them something of value back. At the absolute least you should acknowledge that they’re a person with a name.

Recently The Vagenda began a Kickstarter with the aim of raising money to revamp their website and – if possible – pay their writers. This is a good aim – if their blog is making them money, paying their writers is the ethical thing to do.

But while they’re not paying cash, at the very least they can help talented writers gain the exposure that’s so important. On the Vagenda Kickstarter page they say:

“We already have a huge pool of awesome contributors from around the world and we’d really, really love to be able to pay them or shower them with gifts, even if it’s just a little, for their amazing work.”

Well, you can start by crediting them. You don’t even need a Kickstarter for that – it’s free. Offer your writers a byline, author bio, and link to their personal blog if they want it. If you don’t have any money yet, that’s an easy thing with which you can shower them.

Vagenda initials-only policy

I emailed Vagenda and put this issue to them (the full text of my email, and their reply, is below in the comments). Naïvely, I half expected them to reply by saying ‘blimey, you’re right. We should add credits.’ But instead they explained why they do this. I don’t think the explanation is good enough. Here are their reasons, and my thoughts:

Many of our writers would like to keep what they write separate from their work

Understandable, of course. But ‘many’ is not ‘all’. I’m 100% sure that some of their writers don’t want to keep their Vagenda articles separate from their other work. The choice to have your work properly acknowledged is being taken away from all writers because some writers might choose otherwise.

It also stops people pitching us puff pieces/PR stunts

Annoying though it is when people do this, it’s one of the hazards of running a popular blog. I suspect that the initials-only policy does little to stop people pitching anyway – I get emails from PRs all the time, despite never publishing the guest posts/sponsored links that they suggest.

It protects people when they’re writing personally/it prevents writers getting abused on Twitter

On the surface this seems like a nice reason – protecting the people who write for you from getting abuse. However, criticism is one of the potential hazards of writing, and it comes hand-in-hand with praise.

I fully understand why some writers might want to remain anonymous, but others might choose to take the rough with the smooth. The people who contribute to Vagenda are more than capable of making this choice for themselves. Warning writers that they might get abuse is one thing, refusing to credit them ‘for their own good’ is quite another.

It also sits at odds with this:

We link people when they ask

So they won’t add your name in case you get twitter abuse, but if you ask them nicely they’ll add a link to your blog. Vagenda – you’re either protecting people by keeping them all anonymous or you’re not. Which is it?

Moreover, do the authors know they have to ask for a link? Why aren’t they proactively offered the option? I think the right way to deal with guest blogs is to ask the author exactly how they want to be credited – what links they want included, which name they’d like to put to the piece, etc. Let’s not forget that the writer is doing more than being ‘given an amazing opportunity’, they are providing valuable content for free.

We also have an arrangement with the Guardian whereby, if they want to cross post anything from the Vagenda, the writer gets a byline and a picture on the Guardian website.

The Guardian credits its writers. It protects anonymity where people ask for it, but when they don’t, it will appropriately credit the person who wrote the piece. Which is exactly as it should be. The fact that Vagenda editors want to protect the women who write for them, except if their piece is popular enough to get picked up by the Guardian, seems odd. Presumably Vagenda writers can choose whether they want to be credited by the Guardian, so why can’t they choose to be credited on the article they wrote for Vagenda?

Finally, I should highlight – as Rhiannon did in the email she sent me on this issue – that neither of the editors claim author credit on the blogs they write. They’re only credited using their initials, like all the other Vagenda writers. This would be a good point if they were just as anonymous as the ‘RP’s and ‘JD’s of this world, but they’re not – they’re incredibly well known. And, ironically, they’re well known because their full names are credited on the articles they write for other publications – Guardian, New Statesman, etc. These other publications are acknowledging a truth that the editors themselves don’t seem to have grasped: that writers deserve credit for their work. They have names.

So what exactly is the point of this, GOTN?

I love some of the articles on the Vagenda, and I got a fair amount of blog traffic when I wrote for them. I know that the site itself invites mixed opinions, but I’m not in any way saying ‘Vagenda is awful oh God make it stop’. What I am very loudly and clearly saying is that it needs to rethink this ‘initials only’ crediting policy. Given that the blog wouldn’t exist without the army of writers who contribute to it, the very least the editors should offer them is the option to put a name to their work.

In the words of the Vagenda editors themselves, publishing just initials at the bottom of each article

“makes writers difficult to distinguish from one another”

So, a heartfelt plea: Vagenda, even if you can’t pay right now, could you at the very least give the talented, interesting and occasionally fucking superb people who write for you some credit? They have names.

Full text of the email exchange between me and Vagenda in the comments below. Feel free to tweet at The Vagenda editors (please keep it civil – they get a lot of shit on the internet and I’m hoping to persuade them to change their policy, rather than subject them to a torrent of unnecessary rage) and let them know if you think they should change the way they credit people.