Category Archives: Ranty ones
Sex dolls: is loneliness more taboo than kink?
If you want to bend your partner over and beat them with a leather paddle, or be tied to the bedposts with soft bondage rope, blindfolded and shagged, there are a shitload of things out there that you can buy. Companies will be clambering over each other to sell you beating implements, rope and blindfolds along with a tonne of other exciting stuff you can turn on, lube up, and shove in your twitching rectum.
Which, as someone who enjoys all of the above, is a delight and a relief. After my first hushed-whispers visit to a sex shop about twelve years ago, I’m delighted that so much more of the stuff I love is not only available but openly encouraged. No more hiding things in a paper bag and wondering why I have “DIY solutions” on my credit card receipt.
But regardless of how much more comfortable we’ve become with our kinks, buying the kind of products that would have made us blush twenty years ago, there are some things you’ll still rarely see in ads and toy reviews: sex dolls.
Spin the bottle – how many kisses is enough?
“I know I’m married,” she tells me. “But I haven’t snogged enough people.”
“How many people have you snogged?”
“Ten.”
“And what would be ‘enough’?”
She thinks for a bit.
“One more.”
Working from home tips – the wanking routine
For those of you sitting in a comfortable office, wondering what your colleagues who work from home are getting up to, I can tell you that more often than not your suspicions are correct. We’re wanking.
Not all the time: we work as well. But consider all the time you spend distracting yourself from work by doing other things: making a cup of tea, eating biscuits, gossiping with colleagues about why you found a copy of so-and-so’s CV in the printer. We have some of these options (biscuits) but not others (gossip), so technically we have a fair amount of break time that can be dedicated to furious masturbation.
Is The Apprentice sexist? (warning: contains graphs)
Ah, The Apprentice. One of my favourite cheap telly treats, and a hotbed of ridiculous posturing, comedy reality-TV characters, and occasional gratuitously sexist remarks. Lord Sugar begins most seasons by splitting the candidates into ‘boys’ vs ‘girls’, as no other serious employer would even dream of doing, so the easy answer to this question is ‘yes.’
But I wanted to see if that made a difference to the end results. Yesterday was not only Equal Pay Day – highlighting how, despite appearances, there’s still a huge discrepancy in male and female pay in the workplace. It was also the day when Apprentice candidate Sanjay hauled two of his female teammates into the boardroom to face Lord Sugar’s interrogation when it was obvious to everyone that he should have blamed James.
While I’m sure Sanjay is a nice enough fellow, it got me thinking: are Apprentice candidates inherently biased? Is the show’s general knockabout sexism translating into boardroom appearances and wins? Luckily, there is 9 seasons worth of info on Wikipedia now, including names of project managers, who they brought into the boardroom, and who was eventually fired. So is The Apprentice sexist? LET’S FIND OUT.
In defence of monogamy
Here is a can of worms. Please sit down, make yourself comfortable, and watch as I try to sort them into delicate piles without squishing any of them.
I’m in a monogamous relationship. For me, that means that my partner and I both lust desperately after other people, but we try not to do anything about it, save sighing and making the odd comment about how beautiful those other people are.
When I tell people this, often they’re surprised, and some of them make efforts to persuade me that I really should consider opening up my relationship. That it’d be healthier if my guy and I could see other people, or that polyamory is actually the best course of action for everybody in the human race. I like the sound of it: I do. I like the idea that there’s a hell of a lot of love in the world, and you get to share lots of different kinds of love with lots of different people.
Thing is, I’ve tried it, and it sucks for me. It really sucks. I get jealous, angry, upset, and anxious. I feel worthless. My rational brain tells me that he can fuck other people without it having any bearing on how he feels about me, and that if he goes for a drink with a girl he fancies with a view to potentially snogging her at the end of the evening, that act itself isn’t sapping any of the fun or love that he and I share together.
Unfortunately, my irrational brain is a tedious Iago – piping up and screeching “I like not that!”, and ruining everyone’s fun.