Category Archives: Ranty ones
Are you cut out to be a sex writer?
Are you interested in sex? Do you enjoy the fact that humans have sex in different ways, with a number of different people, in a variety of interesting positions? If someone tells you about a cool new sex game or a fetish that’s new to you, is your first reaction to go ‘ooh, wow! That sounds interesting please tell me more’?
You might want to be a sex writer.
If any of the above things have made you recoil slightly, a frown of disgust on your face, or made you feel like you should hammer out a comment about how some people are just ‘sick’, ‘creepy’ or ‘gross’? Then I cannot stress this enough, but please:
do not become a sex writer.

Don’t tell me sucking dick is easy
Today a guy wrote a Vice article about why he doesn’t want to eat pussy. There are a number of things I could say in response to his article, mostly involving swearwords, and desperate pleas that he stop repeating the same tedious bullshit that comes out whenever any straight bloke thinks he has a Scorching Hot Take on the subject of eating cunt.
As a general rule, my opinion on cunnilingus is that it’s not really my bag, but I’ll enjoy doing it to a lady if I’m fucking her. If you want to eat it, tuck in, but I won’t shame you if you’d rather not.
However, what I DO object to is the implication that it’s far more onerous to ask someone to give cunnilingus than it is to ask for a blow job. In the piece, the author says:
“The penis is a simple thing – it’s hard to get things completely wrong.”
To which I reply: HOW FUCKING HARD ARE YOU SHITTING ME, SUNSHINE?

Beware the Superdom, and other people who tell you they’re good in bed
There’s a man who is half-human and half-legend. He is fierce, strong, powerful. He can pick you up with his bare hands, flip you over his knee, and give you a spanking so perfect that it will transport you to a new realm of ecstasy. Afterwards he will fuck you so skilfully that you will become aware of a new level of orgasmic joy.
That man is the Superdom.
If you’re lucky enough to meet him, it will probably be on a kink forum somewhere. Perhaps he will write a post explaining to other, lesser Doms how to control a submissive, hinting that if you’re lucky you could be one of them. Maybe he slides into your private messages with an order to “Obey.” If you don’t immediately slick your knickers/pop a huge, granite-hard boner, then you are probably not the submissive for him. He does not want your questions or your negotiation: he demands only your unquestioning obedience.
Superdom, sadly, is all too real. I met a fair few incarnations of him when I was pretty active on the kink scene. He’d look at you with smouldering eyes, and tell you exactly what he was going to do. He’d usually let you know that you could only come if he ordered you to, and that you’d come at exactly the moment he specified (yeah, right). He’d give you lists of punishments and tasks and insist on you calling him ‘Sir’, even if you’d never agreed to submit to him.
He was a dick.
Biased, obviously, but I’m sad about the demise of FHM
I’m gutted that FHM is going to suspend publication. That might sound odd because I’m a feminist, and surely I should be ready to dance wholeheartedly on its grave, the way some people were accused of doing when Nuts magazine folded. It should also – to those who read FHM – sound perfectly natural for me to be sad, because for the last few months I’ve been a contributor.
I’m gutted on a simple level: I won’t be able to write things for them any more. But I’m also gutted for the other people who work there, many of whom were publishing some good stuff. Looking back on the FHM I first pored over in my teenage boyfriend’s bedroom and its more recent editions (October’s issue, for example, had an awesome feature on ‘rule breakers’ including interviews with a female CEO, a North Korean defector, and a 95 year-old sprinter), there’s a world of difference, although I appreciate that many of you might disagree.
I’ve been critical of some things FHM has done in the past (like their ‘sexiest women’ in 2012), but I’ve also been fairly open about the fact that I don’t think we should ban lads’ mags, or even imply that there’s no place for them in a society that has healthy views on sex. Sex is not the opposite of feminism, and being a feminist doesn’t mean ignoring or quashing straight male sexual pleasure. What it means, I think, is pushing for a broader representation of sexual pleasure – making it clear that the glossy magazine pictures are just one of a million things that might turn some people on.

Yes, you can run an anonymous blog and still be accountable
When I introduce myself to people, I use a different name. I have quite a few – I like them. One of them I wear so often it feels more comfortable than my ‘real’ name – I wrap it round me like a blanket, and it makes me feel safe.
Unfortunately, one of the questions I’m asked most frequently is: “is that your real name, though?” Like somewhere deep in my heart there’s a secret and special name, and the people I’m speaking to will be elevated above the status of mere acquaintance and into, I don’t know, God, if they can determine what the deep and immutable truth is. Problem is, knowing my real name doesn’t give anyone special powers, it just gives them a fact. And hand-in-hand with that fact comes a fairly big problem for both of us.
When I first started blogging I decided that anonymity was the best way to go – for a whole host of reasons, but primarily employment. We still live in a world where talking about buttsex on the internet and holding down a job at a company that gives a shit about your social media life is, if not impossible, at least tricky. As time wore on, there were more reasons, and then more. Recently, Kilted Wookie wrote a post about anonymity on his sex blog and it got me thinking about a lot of stuff. The primary thing was that there are far more reasons to be anonymous than I’d considered when I first began.