A while ago I ran a competition to get people to describe their own orgasms. The results were arousing, amazing and delightfully varied. One of the most difficult things about sex is that it’s such a personal experience. What turns you on might make me run in horror, and vice versa. Likewise my own experience of hotness probably differs pretty greatly from yours – even if you’re into the same things as me and have the same configuration of genital equipment, I can never see inside your head when you’re coming. That’s probably lucky, because if I could I suspect you’d call the police.
Which is why I felt a bit harsh when, a while ago, I challenged Stuart – who provides the gorgeous illustrations for this blog – to ‘draw a picture of an orgasm.’ That intangible thing that you feel but never see.
He did a pretty bang-up job (see left), and lots of people got in touch to say ‘oooh, that’s evocative! I would like to see more!’
So with the help of SexToys.co.uk, and Bish, who runs an excellent sex ed website, I’m launching a competition to see how other people do.If you fancy having a go at drawing pictures of orgasms, I have some ace prizes up for grabs: £100 voucher to spend at sextoys.co.uk, a copy of Bish’s excellent book, and a print of Stuart’s fantastic orgasm picture. I was going to split them into ‘first, second, third’ prizes, but to be honest I’d rather give them all to the winner, because I’m crap at admin and I like the idea of showering gifts on someone: a bundle of orgasmic gifts.
The rules are:
you can use any visual media as a means of showing what an orgasm looks like (so photos/graphics/crayon on the back of an envelope are all fine).
it mustn’t be an actual picture of your genitals. Your genitals are probably lovely but seriously, you’ll get no marks for initiative.
you have to be over 18.
you can submit your picture from basically anywhere – post it on Twitter/FB/your own blog, and then just drop me an email with a link to where I can see it, or email me the pic directly [hellogirlonthenet at gmail dot com] if you’re shy. Mark your email ‘OMG orgasms’ so if it gets lost in my spam folder I can fish it out it, and let me know how you’d like to be credited when I publish the pic (by your name/blog name/pseudonym or just ‘anon’).
on 11th November I’ll publish a shortlist of the entries on this blog along with a voting thing, so you can vote for the ones you like the best.
on 21st November the judges (that’s Emma from SexToys, Stuart, Justin/Bish and I) will take the entries with the most votes, and pick an Ultimate Winner. The winner will be announced on November 24th.
I’ve added this last bit for clarity – because I’ll publish the shortlist on the 11th, your entries need to be in by 10th November (UK time), and you need to be happy for me to share and publicise your entry, but obviously it can be marked anonymous if you’d like.
Sounds good? Of course it does. And the best thing is you don’t have to be amazing at drawing. I’m about as artistic as a donkey with a paintbrush in its arse, but the main criteria for winning should be that your pic is interesting and evocative. If we look at it and go ‘ooh, that’s a nice way to represent an orgasm’ then whether you can draw or not, you’re in with a chance. To give you some inspiration, here are a couple of excellent pictures: one shows the tingling waves of orgasm as they run through someone’s body, and the other’s a visual image produced by the sound waves recorded as he came.
Amazing.
What the sound of an orgasm looks like, by SoundlyDrawn
Six months ago I wrote a review of the Doxy massager. It did such amazing things to my clit that I nearly fired my right hand, so I have understandably been on the hunt for something that creates similar ‘tear down the walls’ sensations, but for cocks.
To assist me on my quest, Sextoys.co.uk gave me a ‘Pulse’ by Hot Octopuss – a magical dick-massaging device, which I think may well be ‘the one.’ What I really wanted to do was set up a stall in Camden and ask beautiful pierced boys if they’d like me to test it on them, but because I am selfless and giving, I couldn’t in all honesty test a penis-based sex toy myself. So I had it swiftly couriered to a gentleman, and demanded that he use his written eloquence and long-suffering cock to write me a special guest blog.
This is Lewis, and here is his totally unbiased review of the Pulse, by Hot Octopuss. Read it if a) you have a penis and want to find out if this thing is any good or b) you fancy dudes and want to read an intensely hot description of one jerking himself off.
Enjoy.
Review of the Pulse by Hot Octopuss – how to wank like Batman
I get endless joy from touching my cock. I like touching it, I like you touching it, I like jiggling my fucking leg while I’m at work, feeling myself getting harder and more sensitive until I’m straining against my trousers with a cheap desk for dignity and trying to work out whether I can get away with running my nails down the length of it one more time.
It’s a wonder I’ve not been fired, really.
This desperate drive for self pleasure isn’t a new thing – my teenage diaries took less than a week to devolve into a meticulously logged masturbation journal, complete with helpful suggestions like “NB: Bag of ice pressed against balls doesn’t chill spunk – just makes balls cold” and “managed to lick the tip again- more flexibility needed.”
I don’t keep a diary now, of course, thanks to both Twitter and the fact that a twenty eight year old man with a spreadsheet of his wanks is less “horny teenage charm” and more “here is my collection of nail clippings from the last ten years”. I do, however, still take phenomenal delight in wanking, whether it’s a quick functional tug in the toilet or a full-on, Sunday morning session that ends with an arched back and a stomach covered with come.
Naturally, when GoTN approached me and said “Would you like to review a thing designed to make your cock feel amazing?” my response was calm and measured and definitely not a slobbering desperation to Put My Cock in A Thing.
The object in question was the “Pulse” by Hot Octopuss, a company whose name sounds like a character from a porny version of Metal Gear Solid and whose design ethic seems to be “What if Batman was really keen on touching his junk?”
The Pulse is a hand-sized rubbery business (NB – actually silicone) which envelops your cock like an over friendly stingray. It charges by USB, has several speed settings, and, when you’re not tugging yourself senseless, can rest on your cock so your partner can straddle you to join the fun
I’ll be honest: I was initially apprehensive about reviewing this after GoTN set the bar so fucking high on her Doxy review and those god damn sound files. I’m not particularly vocal when I wank and was desperately worried that all I’d end up with was five minutes of what sounded like a hungry walrus being denied a fish. I’ve also never really used a sex toy specifically designed for wanking before, preferring the god’s honest method of my hand, a bit of spit and maybe something in my arse if I’m feeling decadent.
Still. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
The Pulse proudly states that it is the first toy of its ilk that can be used flaccid or erect, as well as being fun with or without lube, so like the pioneers of old, I popped my unerect cock in a thing to see what would happen.
The vibrations are deep even at the lowest setting – a bass rumble that builds into an electrifying buzz as you increase the power – and within a couple of minutes I went from “vaguely horny but nothing special” to “cock straining against the Pulse fuck me this feels good more more more”.
I spent most of my first go in a hands-off way, simply enjoying the new and powerful feelings as the weight of the Pulse pressed my cock against my stomach, the relentless vibrations making me twitch and whimper until I couldn’t stand it any more. Holding the Pulse tight I gave myself quick, hard strokes until I was just on the edge of orgasm. It took a Herculean effort of willpower to let go then, but I wanted the Pulse to carry me over.
Fuck me it did.
I was harder than I had been in weeks. My entire body twitching and desperate. Slowly, achingly, I felt myself get closer. For a man who is normally very quiet when wanking, it was a hell of a shock to find myself panting “Oh god” over and over again as I finally came, covering my stomach in spunk and collapsing into a heap on the bed.
I’m not going to tell you that you should buy the Pulse, but I will say is that I’m going to use it tonight while my partner sucks me off.
I can’t fucking wait.
Thanks Lewis, you have put some filthy-hot images in my head that I will only be able to exorcise with a strenuous wank of my own. I hope that now you’ve read his review, you understand what a massive wrench it was for me to give this toy away, and why even I – a person who is offered free sex toys on an hourly basis – am going to fork out actual cash money to get me one of these. What better way to express my love than by running excitedly into the living room and shouting ‘I’m going to wank you off with Batman’s jizz-extractor!’
If you want to find out more about it, visit the Pulse website, where you can buy one using my affiliate link (so I get a bit of money that helps me keep this site running) also see some dirty hot pictures of a beautiful tattooed guy, like this one:
“You’ve put it on the wrong way.”
“I… no I haven’t.”
“You have it’s… look, the vibrating bit goes next to the balls.”
“No it fucking doesn’t.”
I own a few different cock rings, most of them fairly simple rings with one bullet vibe attached. I mainly own these ones because, until the encounter mentioned above, I always thought that the WHOLE POINT of a cock ring was that I could grind my clit happily into the buzzy bit, then have an orgasm intense enough that my cuntspasms would induce orgasm in the gentleman I was grinding against.
When I discovered that is not necessarily the case, my tiny mind was blown.
It turns out that he’d used cock rings before during masturbation, and had particularly enjoyed the tingling sensation that comes from putting a cock ring on upside-down, and feeling it tickle his balls. This put me in something of a quandary, because I’d always thought that cock rings were meant for me. To discover that these joyful parcels of sexy sensation might, in fact, be something that I had to share gave me a twitch of selfish rage akin to a child being told she has to let other kids play with her Lego.
Four ways to use cock rings that won’t end in a fight
I have come up with four solutions to this problem.
1. Keep the cock ring on my way, grind against him and get him to play with my tits until the resultant orgasmic wave washed over me. After which point I’d take a short break to remove the ring and put it on his way (i.e. the WRONG way), then continue humping until he spaffed. This worked pretty well, but had the drawback that we had to stop shagging just after I’d come, when my knees were weak and wobbly and I was therefore quite likely to fall off the bed, thus shattering my illusion of erotic expertise.
2. Use two cock rings at the same time. I haven’t actually tried this one, but I imagine having two means not only that you can have one the right way up and one the wrong way, you also get an extra boost of a cock ring’s best superpower: the ability to get and keep a guy harder than he’d usually be, for as long as it takes for you to ride him like a horny pony. On the downside, as one commenter pointed out, it’s probably not particularly comfortable.
3. Turn around. I’m on top, so I can technically dictate exactly where my clit goes, and therefore by simply turning around I can make sure that it buzzes against me, and against his balls, thus keeping us both happy. Thing is, while plenty of guys I know are generous enough to appreciate the sight of my arse – even if they have their glasses on and are stone-cold sober – I quite like having my tits played with. In fact, my favourite thing about being on top is that I can grab his hands and place them firmly on my tits, feeling him squeeze and support them like an enthusiastic bra-butler.
Relationships are usually about give and take – going out of your way to ensure your partner’s pleasure, and putting their needs first. But occasionally – very occasionally – they are about spending twenty quid on a dual-vibrating cock ring to ensure you have no further arguments on the subject.
If you’re going to get a dual-vibrating cock ring, here are a couple of suggestions: this one’s a budget version if you’re tight on cash, and this one’s a slightly more expensive version but I reckon has a few more possibilities depending on which way round you put it on. This one is out of stock at the moment, but I’d quite like to have a go because it has a sort of cage thingy instead of just a ring, and therefore I suspect is REALLY GOOD at the diamond hardness thing. Use the code GOTN10 at the checkout if you want to get 10% off.
As a childless sex blogger, I’m prone to getting stuck in a bit of a bubble, in which I assume that any ‘sex issues’ are most likely to be about protection from STIs, dealing with weird fetishes, and other things that have affected me throughout my life. I forget, of course, that there are a million and one sex issues outside my direct experience which are massively important to highlight.
This week’s guest blogger, Danielle Meaney, has something really important to tell you about sex after a C-section. Something that her doctor didn’t mention, that I’d never heard of, and that she’d never been told before she gave birth.
Sex after a C-section
I have had one baby and one emergency Caesarean section. The two things are not unrelated.
I had wanted to give birth to my son in an all natural home birth, so having him delivered with the intervention of a scalpel and what felt like eighteen pairs of hands was something of a disappointment. However, I consoled myself throughout the entirely necessary surgery by loudly pointing out that at least my vagina would still be intact; nothing like fear and morphine to remove those inhibitions.
Imagine my horror then, when my husband decided to take it for a spin six weeks down the line, only to find that, never mind intact, the bloody thing had all but closed up. I had done this incredibly grown up thing in bringing a human into the world, and had had The Super Virginity bestowed upon me as a reward. I wasn’t a particularly big fan of my virginity the first time around; I certainly didn’t want it back now that I was a wife and mother. Yet here I was, on the sofa with my legs in the air, and feeling a deep, shooting pain in my pelvis that suggested my husband was trying to enter me with nothing short of a battering ram. Wincing with pain, I pushed him away from me and told him that I needed more time to heal. He’s a patient man and tearfully agreed before locking himself in the bathroom for fifteen minutes.
A few weeks later, we tried again. The pain was still there but I insisted that we push through it. I assumed that the pain was a result of tension in my muscles – it had been months since we’d had sex at this point, I was nervous – and that once we got going, everything would eventually loosen up. Only it didn’t. The pain continued every time we had sex, regardless of position or wine consumption, for a couple of months before I finally gave in and went to see the doctor. She helpfully told me that she had no idea what was causing my discomfort, but that it was more than likely as a result of some infection or another. With that firmly in her mind, she had a speculum up there before you could say “feet together and drop your knees”. After taking approximately one hundred and forty two swabs, she informed me that I may have to have the tests repeated as the light in her office wasn’t much good.
Sure enough, a week later I was in with the nurse and her head torch, explaining every symptom again in painstaking detail. She looked up at me from between my legs and sighed.
“You do know this is normal, though, right?”
I wouldn’t have thought that the position I was in at that moment particular suggested that I was aware of it being normal, but I bit my tongue and kept my knees relaxed. She finished what she was doing and clicked off her head lamp, before informing me that painful sex after a Caesarean was absolutely to be expected. I was slightly flummoxed; why hadn’t the doctor mentioned this to me instead of poking my cervix with cotton buds? Did she just not know herself?
Here’s the thing about Caesareans: they’re usually the last resort to a problem that is making a vaginal birth difficult. Quite often, they’re performed unexpectedly, as in my case, and in those situations you don’t really have a lot of time to research the future effects on your sex life. In fact, I think that us women give so much thought to what happens to our vaginas once when we push a human through them, that we completely neglect to give any thought to what happens if one comes out of the sunroof. Like me, I think that most women assume that everything below the incision will remain completely as it was before, and that just isn’t the case. The lovely nurse at my surgery explained that the incision is actually very low – my scar is about an inch below my bikini line – and goes through seven layers of abdominal tissue. Not only that, but they make it as small as possible and then stretch and pull until it’s big enough to get a small head through. How on earth did I ever expect for there to be no effect on my lady parts, sitting mere inches below and connected internally?
More alarming than my own ignorance is the fact that none of this was mentioned to me by any doctor or midwife. After a cursory search online, I found that I am far from being alone. In fact, many women report far more difficulty with sex after a C section than with a vaginal birth, and yet it is a subject that isn’t being discussed by the professionals. Instead we are left to worry that we’ve somehow been left damaged or infected, suffering hideous speculum examinations and endless trips to the toilet with sample pots.
It’s now eight months since I had my baby, and sex is just about back to normal, albeit with the addition of plenty of lube. If you’ve had a Caesarean and you’re worrying – you’re not alone. You haven’t closed up, your bits aren’t broken and you probably don’t have infection, but at least now you’re armed with the facts if you do need a check up from your own doctor.
Take your time and ease back into it; I promise you, it will feel good again.
If you’re struggling to have sex after a c-section, Dani’d provided a couple of links that explain the issues, and give you some tips on how to ease back into sex. Please do check out Dani’s parenting blog too, because it’s ace.
About three minutes after I tweet one of my filthy blogs, I’ll usually get a DM, email or reply saying “thanks a fucking bunch, GOTN, I just read that on the bus.” Sorry about that, commuters – while I try my best to keep the timings of the dirtier posts to those bits of the day when most people aren’t at work, it’s inevitable that – with Twitter and Facebook and all the things that ping through to your phone – most of us will get horny at inopportune moments.
This week’s guest blog is from just such a guy, and one of the reasons I love it is because it captures that exact feeling of ‘oh God I need to come right this minute and I can’t.’ While I can’t pretend I suffer from the same degree of sexual frustration, I can certainly empathise – and I suspect many of you do too. So read, enjoy, and then let me know if you’ve found any ingenious hiding places to have a quick one to calm the nerves…
The lament of the sexually frustrated…
When I read Girl on the Net’s column, I revel in the joyful atmosphere of sexual freedom, honesty and opportunity. But it’s not all saucy happy funtimes, because although reading her site gives me the massive and righteous horn every time, I’m almost never in a situation where I can do something about it.
Her book lies half-read on my Kindle, the screen metaphorically stained not with the ultraviolet evidence of excited DNA, but with the sweaty misery of tube-ride blue-balls and the anguished tears of tossing (not like that) impotently next to a light-sleeping partner.
And of course it’s not just GotN who’s responsible for inopportune arousal. Chemistry lends a hand, raising testosterone levels first thing every day, and just the act of turning over in bed, or pulling on a pair of pants, can provide friction that, if not dealt with, causes eye-rolling distraction until some mundane task that nevertheless requires concentration removes the physical need. Or I sneak to the bathroom for a speedy one off the wrist.
So it’s clear that the baby Jesus wants us to be getting it on before the sun even gets close to the yardarm. Heh, “yardarm”. But then the baby Jesus never had a baby of his own. Mornings no longer belong to either of you (or even to your left hand), but to the crapping, moaning thing that needs feeding, wiping and reading the same bloody book eight times in a row.
Dreams should be the perfect place to let off steam sexually, right? My god, if I were one of the lucky few who could lucid dream, I’d wake up exhausted every morning after a long night fulfilling every erotic fantasy I’ve ever had and several I thought might make a nice change. But no. Even worse, when I do have a hot dream, my subconscious (usually) wags a scolding finger and reminds me I’m in a monogamous relationship.
Location is another big factor in the unwelcome stiffness stakes. Unlike some people, I seldom get actively frisky on the train or the bus, but when my mind is set off in that direction there’s no delicious sense of naughtiness or anticipation, just a frustration that whatever is stimulating me, I can absolutely guarantee I won’t be fucking it.
Work has more potential, if only because I figured out how to lock the other cubicle door even when I’m not in it, thereby giving my colleagues no reason to hang around in the loos. It’s usually a release-type situation, rather than something to be savoured, though sometimes – and they are a bit glorious – it’s a 2 or 3 times a day thing. The exception to this limitation – and I don’t know if this happens to everyone or if it’s just a superpower of mine – is when I’m hungover. I’d love to know the physiological mechanism behind it, but when hungover I can more or less have as many orgasms as I like without the fundamental drive dissipating as it normally does. Silver linings, eh? Though on the down side, I invariably don’t look great, definitely don’t smell great, and if she’s had a skinful too then no amount of pleading or prodding is going to get me what I (repeatedly) want.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloomily rearranging my privates on the 38. There are times when the stars and schedules align, and I know nothing will interrupt me until either I’m utterly sated or the dishwasher needs emptying. Woody Allen got it right (not words you hear often these days) in “Annie Hall” (mmm, ’70s Diane Keaton, I’ll be in my bunk, etc.): “don’t knock masturbation, it’s sex with someone I love”.
What all the above does tend to mean is that when I do get time to myself, I spend a lot more of it on self-abuse than, say, doing an open university course, playing squash or learning Flemish. But I’ve long since come to terms with this outcome, because it’s fucking great, regardless of whether or not I’m misunderstood in Oostende.
The gent who wrote this blog post has donated his guest blog payment to the next person, so the next accepted guest blog submission will get £20 instead of the usual tenner. If you have an idea for one, check out the guest blog page and get in touch!
