Do you know what can FUCK TOTALLY OFF? This news story about the rise in strip club takings. Specifically, the very first four words of it:

“The City is back.”

Amid all the controversy yesterday of date-rape-drug detecting nail polish and a judge who reckons women need to stop getting drunk, there was one piece of fucked-up bullshit that seemed to slip through the net. When I read it my immediate thought was: hey! Look! A primer for all those people who try to tell me that equality has come on in recent years and there’s no such thing as male privilege any more. Can’t be arsed to read the article? Here’s a summary:

Smarmy club owning tossbag Peter Stringfellow has announced that takings at his strip clubs are going up, as a direct result of financial industry clientele flocking back. Apparently the recession hit these poor lambs hard, and they couldn’t throw down top dollar like they used to. The fact that Stringfellow’s takings are on the rise apparently indicates that the bankers are back in force, braying into their champagne and celebrating big-win deals by paying for people to take their clothes off.

So why am I angry? I mean, the recession’s bad, right? We see all those graphics on TV of wobbly graphs going down and scary sting music announcing that we’re all screwed. Surely a cast-iron economy-boost sign such as this should be cause for celebration?

Maybe. If you want to celebrate the end of the recession I’m not going to snatch the bubbly out of your hand, but fucking HELL. Fuck. Ing. Hell. If we live in a world in which an increase in strip club takings can be a sign of an improvement in any non-stripping-related industry, then I think it’s time the human race was sent to sit in a corner for a while and think about what we’ve done.

Do I hate strip clubs?

No. I haven’t written much about sex work here before, so I should probably clarify before I launch into this rant. I’ve been to strip clubs. I don’t have a problem with stripping or any kind of sex work. I do have a problem with exploitation. These things cross over sometimes, but I don’t think they’re necessarily dependent. You might disagree with me on this point, and I’m sure we could have an interesting and feisty debate about it, but please understand that when I have this rant, it’s not based on a fundamental problem with stripping.

What I have a massive and aching problem with is the fact that these outings are work related. They are so part-and-parcel of the job in a particular kind of industry that it is considered completely normal and not a little bit weird that the owner of a strip club is citing ‘increase in takings’ as an indication of that industry’s revival.

Naked people as job perks

Want to see tits? Fine. Tits are, I understand, quite popular with some people. Want to see cunt? Again, fine. Expect to be shown either or both of these things as a reward for doing your job? Then you’re a bellend.

I am a sex-positive motherfucker. I am so sex-positive that sometimes my enthusiasm for the sticky activities of consenting adults makes my clit ache. HOWEVER, no sexual activity happens in a vacuum. Much as I’d like to be the one dancing naked in front of you and scattering tit-shaped petals at your feet, I’m afraid if you go to strip clubs on work-related jaunts, I’m going to have to piss on your bonfire.

Giving hand-jobs to consenting strangers is totally cool. Doing it in the middle of your open plan office is not. Engaging in consensual BDSM is cool. Spanking your secretary at the AGM is not. Going to strip clubs – also cool. Incorporating strip clubs into your working culture? Utterly reprehensible.

Putting any kind of sexual pressure on anyone is unacceptable, and in a work situation it is very difficult to say ‘actually I’d rather not get a boner in front of my boss, thanks,’ especially when your boss is the one buying dances. On top of this there’s the obvious objection, which I’m sure you’ve thought of yourself: what about your straight female or gay male colleagues? For these people, watching naked strippers may not actually be a ‘treat’ but instead an awkward outing that they have to grin and bear in order to win the approval of a boss and/or client.

Moreover, given that a disinclination to watch female strippers is not always dependent on sexuality, what about your straight male colleagues who don’t enjoy strip clubs? Unless you’re the kind of person whose misogyny is generally seasoned with a large and complimentary dollop of misandry, and you therefore presume all men are  slobbering fuckdogs, you’ll agree that there are straight men who don’t enjoy strip clubs.

If you want to treat your colleagues or clients, get them a nice meal. Take them go-karting. Buy them tickets to sodding Disneyland for all I care. But if you work in an industry that has nothing to do with sex, and you make something sexual a standard part of your operating procedure, then you don’t deserve a job.

Women in finance

All of the above goes only some way towards explaining why the article I mentioned so many swearwords ago boiled my blood. What pushed me from silent fuming to a terribly un-British mutter of ‘fuck’s sake’ as I perused the paper on the train was the fact that strip club receipts were so unquestioningly accepted as a sign that the financial industry was ‘back on track.’

This tells us that the financial sector remains not only dominated by men, but dominated by the unconscionably banal and pathetic attitude that masculinity rules the world. The kind of macho ‘dicks-out, tally ho, woof woof, nice tits, I just made a million dollars’ culture that should have died well before Wolf of Wall Street was released.

I’ll get men commenting on this saying ‘we don’t all go to strip clubs, you know,’ and it will make me want to weep tears of actual blood, then smash through my computer screen with my weeping, bloodied face. Because this is not me saying ‘all men are dicks.’ This is a much wider problem – a culture that unthinkingly accepts that all men want X, where ‘X’ includes sexual service, a pile of money, and a BMW they can use to cut up cyclists in the city centre. There will always be some pin-striped arseholes who want to see tits on the company dime. As long as there are quarterly sales meetings there’ll be some twat called Henry who suggests they all trip down to Stringfellow’s as a reward for hitting their targets. Henry is a lubed-up prick, for sure, but shouldn’t shoulder all the responsibility. I hate him for acting like a swaggering piss-bucket, but I’m far more angry at the culture that lets him.

This pathetic world, which unthinkingly correlates strip club takings with a financial sector ‘bounceback’ and doesn’t go ‘wait a minute! Isn’t this fucked up on such a large scale we can see it from the top of the Chrysler Building?’

Get ready

I have a message for you, Henry, and for all your mates in the city. All the managers and bosses who turn a blind eye to this bullshit. To the people who’ll nod and smile and say ‘boys will be boys’ or talk about the ‘culture’ of finance and why it just HAS to be like this. My message is this:

We’re coming to get you.

We liberal lefty do-gooding bastards with our ideals and our rage and our charity-shop jumpers. We’re coming to get you.

Fifty years ago Mad-Men-style ad execs would think nothing of slapping a secretary’s arse. Twenty years ago you could bribe clients with strip club trips and claim it back from work. These days, things are different. Arseholes have to suppress their natural instincts – avoid sexual harassment, overtly offensive comments, and sticking their boners on expenses. It still happens, of course, but it’s rarer. It’s rarer because we’ve made it so: we do-gooding bastards are actually winning.

We’re winning for a number of reasons. Perhaps it’s because we’ve got better messages – ‘equality’ sounds better than ‘jobs for the boys’, doesn’t it? Or maybe it’s because time and again we’re proven right – women enter a particular industry (be it factory work, finance, or tech) and manage to equal and often outperform their male colleagues. My favourite theory, though, is it’s because we’re just fucking right.

Call me a starry-eyed optimist but I believe the UK, despite making spectacular and regular fuck ups, is tending towards greater equality, and a much lower tolerance for sexist shit. Don’t cry ‘oh political correctness oh woe oh the horror’ – it’s not a scary thing – it’s a good thing.

Henry, we’re coming to get you, and when we do I hope you’ll welcome us with relief and open arms. I hope you’ll cry ‘thank Christ for that, I don’t have to live up to this weird cut-out stereotype of masculinity any more.’ I hope you’ll realise that bringing women into an industry and kicking obligatory sex shows out of it is a net win for all of us. And I hope that in fifty years time you look back not on the ‘good old days’ of Pete from Head Office treating you to a lapdance, but the even better days of not feeling forced into some weird misogynist ritual just to prove your worth in the workplace.

We’re coming to get you. Roll out the red carpet, or get run into the ground.

I don’t want to depress you, but none of us gets to live happily ever after. It’s not just cynics like me who can’t sit still for five minutes: none of us does.

I talk about sex myths a lot – the idea that faking orgasms makes you a bad person, or that you can’t be a feminist and suck dick – but some of the most pernicious myths out there are around relationships themselves.

Happily ever after

Once upon a time there lived a little girl. She was slightly scruffy, very enthusiastic, and if you wanted to make her day you could either tell her she was great at ballet (she wasn’t) or offer to let her read aloud from her book of ‘101 jokes that only children find funny.’ If you asked her what she wanted, she’d probably have said ‘a pony’, but a rainbow-coloured one, because no one wants an ordinary old pony. She believed that one day her prince would come.

Years later, that little girl grew up to be a teenager. The rainbow pony was replaced with an overwhelming desire for a black motorbike, and the skill to ride it. If you wanted to make her day you’d tell her that the purple streaks in her hair made her look a bit witchy, or that – despite being nearly six foot tall – she was graceful like a ballerina (she wasn’t). She believed that one day her prince would come. This time, though, she was a bit more realistic. She thought the prince would be unlikely to wear armour, and imagined him instead in tight black jeans and a t-shirt that clung deliciously to his stomach. He’d probably play the guitar, and read Wittgenstein.

Now, though, that girl is thirty. You can make her day surprisingly easily – with a pint of cider or an offer to do her washing up. She loves fucking, reading, and being comforted when she thinks she’s made a dreadful faux pas, and she fancies the kind of guys who sit in dark rooms writing computer code. She knows there are no princes.

‘Settle down’ forever and ever

Of course there aren’t any princes – even William and Harry are probably twats behind closed doors (or sometimes even in front of them). Besides, I don’t actually want the kind of idealised partner the fairy tale offers. Someone riding into my life to sweep me off my feet, removing all of my responsibilities and replacing them with some a saccharine, loved-up suburban ideal makes me as uncomfortable as it does sceptical. If my prince actually did come, I’d be less likely to fall at his feet than to ask him what he was selling.

And yet the myth of a ‘happy ever after’ lives on in the way we talk about relationships. People have always told me – since I was that tiny girl doing rubbish pirouhettes in my tutu – that one day I’d ‘settle down’. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty odd phrase – implying that my entire life up until the ‘settling down’ point has been an irrelevant stew – nothing more than the bubbling experiment that forms me into a complete human being. One day when I’m not too hot, not too cold, and certainly not too adventurous, I will pledge my life to someone else who’ll live out their days with me in a tranquil, almost opiate joy.

Well, bollocks to that. Because even if it were desirable (which it’s not, in my opinion – imagine a lifetime of cotton-wool calm), it’s not even close to the truth. I’ve been in a few monogamous relationships and – while wonderful, enjoyable, loving things – not one of them would ever be described as ‘settled’, or even moving towards that.

If pushed, I’ll say we’ve sometimes been ‘comfortable’, in which ‘comfortable’ could be defined as ‘haven’t had any blazing rows/worries about money/collapsing bathroom ceilings and job losses and panic attacks’ for a month or two. But even with this level of comfort – even if you love each other – you’re bound to hit a dodgy patch one day that has you shouting at each other in the kitchen over who forgot to buy the milk. Or, to pick a less trivial issue, even if you feel like you’ve ‘settled down’, a day will come when you meet someone who isn’t your partner, but who makes your chest tight and your stomach flip and you wonder ‘Oh God Oh God what if…?’

And we’ll all be sixteen forever…

These examples are just a couple out of many things that happen on a daily basis. And yet the word ‘settled’ invites us to keep striving for something permanent and tranquil – as if any relationship is a lake, and if we wait long enough the fish will stop swimming and the insects stop landing, the wind will stop blowing and eventually the surface will be smooth like glass.

Well, it isn’t fucking true. There’s no such thing as ‘settling down’. There’s deciding, and committing, and loving, and there’s a sense of security and relief that comes from not having to wade through crap responses to your online dating profile any more, but ‘settling down’? For ever and ever amen? I don’t think it’s real.

If we pretend it is then we end up with billions of disappointed humans who strive for relationship tranquility, when what they should actually be striving for is enjoyment. Love, passion, fun, all that jazz. Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s settled, and sometimes it’s shaky and nervewracking and the kind of thing that keeps you awake staring into the dark and wondering how you can make things right.

There are no princes: only humans. And I’m still quite shit at ballet.

 

I’m going to put it out there: I don’t mind if you fake your orgasm. No, really, go right ahead. What’s more, I’ll tell you that I’ve faked orgasms in the past, and if you think that makes me a bad person, or a pitiable sex-deprived creature, then you can fuck a thousand miles off.

In general, if you’re engaging in safe and consensual acts, sex positive people will cheer on your lubed-up love with an open heart and a total lack of judgment.

Unless you fake your orgasms.

Why do we think it’s bad to fake an orgasm?

This blog was prompted by the revelation today that men fake orgasms too. Cue tortured commenters screaming ‘how the fuck is that possible?’ and the inevitable smackdown by sensible people saying ‘well, duh, of course men do this sometimes – they are human.’

Whenever the subject of faking orgasms is raised, the general consensus is that it is a bad thing to do, for one of the following reasons:

• If you fake an orgasm, how is your partner supposed to know how to give you a real orgasm? You’ll be giving them the wrong impression, making them think that fumbling half-heartedly with your clit is the most surefire way to send you to heaven and back. Ergo you end up in a vicious cycle of rewarding poor performance, until your entire sex life consists of limp clit-fumbling gand your own exaggerated screams.
• If you fake an orgasm, it’s because you don’t realise that actually it’s perfectly normal for people not to orgasm. Thus, when you fake, you reinforce society’s ideas that orgasms are de rigeur, even if the shag you’ve just partaken in lasted less than the time it’d take for the kettle to boil.
• If you fake an orgasm, you are tacitly supporting the idea that orgasms are the Only Possible Goal Of Sex, and so both you and your partner will fail to spend time on the non-orgasmic things you enjoy. Like beating each other with wooden spoons or licking cream cheese from the inside of their ear canal, or whatever it is you get up to.

Faking orgasms is not as bad as people say it is

While the arguments above all have some basic merit, I strenuously object to the way they are often used, not as a piece of general advice but as an absolute decree: Thou Shalt Never Do This. Yes, faking orgasms can lead to trouble, or be symptomatic of problems if you’re doing it on a daily basis, but there’s a big difference between accepting these things and acting as if those who fake orgasms are bad at sex, and must be either pitied or corrected.

Realistically, people fake orgasms for a whole host of reasons. Some good, some bad, some practical, some habitual. You know, like many of the sex things we do. Sometimes I’m not up for a long make out session, but my partner is and I know that if I do it chances are I’ll get his hand down my knickers at some point – the jackpot I’m actually angling for. Sometimes I’ll suck a dick not because I’m desperate to get it down my throat, but because it just feels like the natural next step in a fuck I’m playing jazz with. Often we do things because they make us wet and hard and throbbing and horny – occasionally we do them for other reasons.

I’ve faked orgasms

Although the vast majority of it has been spectacular, there have still been occasions where I felt like faking an orgasm was the right thing to do. I’m lucky enough that I usually find it easy to come during a shag, and right now I’m with a long-term partner who has a thick cock and a good rhythm, and who knows me inside out, as it were. I also have a Doxy and my own two hands, should things prove more difficult on a particular occasion, so I haven’t faked one for a good long time. But have I faked orgasms in the past? Goddamn right I have.

Not because I’m tired, or because the sex is appalling and I can’t quite bring myself to say so: I’ve faked orgasms for the simple reason that coming represents the nuclear button in my sexual arsenal – when I come, he is more likely to come.

Six pints into a very late night, if we’re having an exciting fumble followed by a sticky and determined hump, it’s probably going to be tough for both of us. I’m deeply horny, and shivering with lust, but I know that it’s just not going to happen. The one thing I want right now is to feel the twitching throb of his cock pumping spunk inside me. I’m faced with a choice. Do I pull out one of my just-about-adequate sex moves? A hand gripping just the right place, an arched back, a filthy sentence or two to help him on his way? Or do I pull out my ultimate sex move – clenching my cunt nice and tight and moaning like I’ve sat on a washing machine?

Faking orgasms doesn’t make you a bad person

Conclusion of this unnecessarily sweary rant: you’re not an awful bastard if you fake orgasms – no matter what your gender or your reasons, this is a choice that you get to make for yourself. I’m not going to pass any judgment on what it says about your sex life if one day you want to twitch your genitals, roll your eyes, and Meg Ryan your way to climax. Even if you’re fucking me – if you fancy putting a bit of AmDram into it, go right ahead. I’d like to think I can tell, but wouldn’t we all? If you know the end’s a long way away, but you also know I love it when you make those moany noises, then just make the fucking moany noises already. It will, in all likelihood, bring my orgasm closer, and even if it doesn’t then at least we can put a full-stop to proceedings, albeit a jizzless one.

I care about this quite strongly because, as a young-un, I used to fake orgasms quite a lot. Almost every single time. I probably faked more orgasms than I had actual orgasms, even during a period when I was wanking so frequently you’d have thought I had eczema of the clit. I faked, and I pretended, and I loved every second of every minute of every fuck I was having. But every time I scanned an article on sex tips it screamed at me: “do not fake your orgasms! You are ruining your sex life! You are teaching your partner to do the wrong things and basing your love on a lie!” So I’d fret and I’d stress and I’d worry, and in the end I’d fake it anyway, because while I hated feeling like a liar I loved it when he came.

One day, while I was making the noises and twitching my legs and clamping my cunt down hard on his cock, it actually happened for real. The climax started and I felt hotness swell from my knees to my crotch, waves of happy-horny-oh-yes-don’t-stop-fuck-nnngggghhh-jesus-yes crashing hard up to my chest, enveloping me in pleasure and surprising the fuck out of me.

He couldn’t tell, of course, but then I don’t think I really needed him to.

ATTENTION MEN! MANLY MANLY MEN: Would you like to buy a toothBROsh? It’s a toothbrush, but for BROs. It’s meatier and more muscular than your average toothbrush – to prove it we’ve coloured it grey and printed ‘GRRR’ on the packaging.

Ever since someone put a selection of different meats between two slices of bread and decided that the resulting ‘manwich’ was so epic it could only be tackled by a rugged lumberjack, marketers have been gendering objects.

Gendered products are odd

My pet go-to example is the ‘man-bag’. Until the late twentieth century, gentlemen who wished to transport items would make use of a product known as a ‘bag’. Alternatively, perhaps a ‘rucksack’, a ‘satchel’ or a ‘briefcase’. These were all items that could be used indiscriminately – your carrying needs had nothing to do with whether you were a ‘Mr’ or a ‘Ms’.

Enter the man-bag. The man-bag is a special manly bag full of slugs, snails, puppy-dog tails and so much testosterone it could probably arouse the late Queen Victoria. This rebranding of the humble bag, despite shifting lots of units and gracing the style pages of all the best men’s magazines, was a complete and total failure. Not for the bag-makers, you understand, but for humanity.

Because ever since the successful gendering of a particular type of bag, men I know have been subject to a bizarre and almost completely incomprehensible form of mockery. “Nice man-bag,” say twats, to advertise their belief that carrying a bag is an innately feminine thing to do, “Do you keep your man-purse in it?” they continue, to the detriment of the entire species.

Thanks, brand people. You haven’t made ‘carrying a bag’ an acceptable thing for men to do, you’ve done the opposite. In trying to encourage people to buy more of one particular style of bag, you have placed another explosive on the minefield of gender presentation.

Other gendered products

It’s not just man-bags, there are plenty of gendered products that are tailored to appeal to our average shark-wrestling, macho dude:

• Guyliner – it’s like eyeliner, but for guys! Because guys don’t wear eyeliner! Except the ones who totally do!
• Guybrator – because until now literally all vibrators have been designed purely for women and no dude has ever stuck one up his arse.
• Mandals – a type of shoe, similar to the ones Jesus wore, but now worn by men! Oh, wait.

There are plenty of other examples of these things – gendered marketing has been around for years and isn’t likely to disappear any time soon. But amongst the obnoxious pink laptops aimed at women, cute squirrel-shaped vibrators and the ‘it’s not for girls’ tagline on a Yorkie bar, these portMANteau words stick out like an even sorer thumb. They’re so obvious. So bizarre. And so utterly othering.

Apart from the fact that any of the above products can be used no matter what your gender, the whole thing is deeply, deeply illogical. You’re presumably saying ‘hmm, men will be nervous about purchasing this thing that is traditionally aimed at women, so to market it we will highlight the fact that it is traditionally aimed at women.’ You’re not saying ‘dudes you know it’s totally OK to use these things as well’, you’re saying ‘dudes it’s basically odd for you to be using these things, but at least now if you do then you have the excuse that you’re being stylish.’

Do gendered objects make money?

As I’ve said before, I actually don’t give a flying fuck if this stuff works. I’d hazard a guess that certain words (guybrator, for instance) help enormously with PR when you’re trying to get a new, and seriously intriguing concept product to market. Saying ‘it’s a vibrator for guys which you wrap round your dick instead of put up your arse’ is a bit of a mouthful, whereas ‘guybrator’ trips off the tongue and makes people want to find out what it is.

But here’s the thing: there are a million and one things that we know are going to help make money. Charities could show grotesque pictures of dead people, payday loan companies could write letters from fake lawyers,  bloggers could include shameless promotional sponsor links and tell you that if you don’t click on them and buy stuff they’ll kill a basket of kittens.

We could do that, but most of us don’t (honest – no kittens will ever be harmed in the marketing of this blog) because we know that it’s wrong, and a bit uncomfortable. Those of us that do think only about the bottom line are usually called out on mistakes, as people recognise that although money is important, ethics matter too.

Most marketers probably think there’s nothing wrong with peddling a manbag, or even a toothBROsh. I’m not saying ‘guyliner’ is as bad as fake legal threats, of course – it isn’t even close – but in slapping a gender label on something otherwise universal, marketers are contributing to a world that focuses on exclusion rather than inclusion. One which stacks us all into neat piles according to the way we’re presented, and draws a circle around the things we can do, have, and be. Gendered products maintain the cycle that made gendered products necessary in the first place. In the short term you’ll shift a few more pairs of ‘mandals’ to guys who were worried that ‘sandals’ were too feminine, but in the long-term you’ve just chained yourself to notion that certain products can only appeal to half of the human race.

So in making that choice, ‘Mandals Incorporated’ has ensured that there’s a huge crowd of customers they will never be able to acquire. A pile of money that they can never take to the bank. I hope someone else does.