Tag Archives: communication
The one thing I always do after sex
What do you do after sex? Chat, maybe? Fall asleep? Sometimes a fuck is so energetic that when you’re catching your breath afterwards you barely have the energy left to high-five. Perhaps your post-sex ritual involves a large bacon sandwich and a coffee with two sugars.
Whatever floats your boat: despite having been super-judgy about it in the past when I was young and wrong, the post-sex ritual is as individual as the shag itself. Some couples need peace and quiet, others need coffee, but for me there’s one thing I always do once the spunk has settled: a kind of sexual post-match analysis.
Emotional labour: how much can I ask of you?
I’ve always been the one who gets to hear people’s secrets. Maybe I’m great at keeping them, or perhaps I just have the look of someone who’s keen to hear all the dirty details. Maybe both – I hope so.
Even before I started sex blogging, I’d have friends email or text to say ‘I did something super-hot yesterday and I’m not sure who else to tell so…’ We’d chat about it together, swap stories and share experiences, and give each other the best non-judgy advice or support we could muster.
Then I started a sex blog.
I still chat to friends about sex secrets and details, but I’m lucky enough that I have an outlet for it here. You read and respond and share and chat, and we have a special club where we can talk about this stuff. It’s awesome. It’s reciprocal. It’s simultaneously a shared joy and a shared burden – depending on what we’re talking about.
It also means that lots more people confide in me privately.
What about the men? Listen to this…
You should listen to this. It’s a podcast of a show by Dave Pickering (@goosefat101 on Twitter). He guest-blogged for me a while ago, after conducting a survey on what men think of patriarchy. His show is about the results of that survey, but more than that it’s about the way that structural inequality has hurt him – directly and indirectly. He tells a really gripping story, that includes a lot of things I think and say, and it touches me a lot purely because it comes from the mouth of a man. One day I’ll explain exactly why that’s important to me.
It’s an hour long, and it contains some quite disturbing material – there are more specific content notes at the beginning of the recording.
Go and visit Dave’s website here – Mansplaining Masculinity. And please share this. Each time you share this, you save one woman from having to explain yet again, with a weary exhaustion, that when we rail against inequality we’re not fighting against men. We’re hoping men will join us in making things better for everyone.
Foreplay for people who suck at foreplay
I’m not very good at foreplay. In fact, on the scale of ‘things I am incredibly bad at’ it ranks below even running, remembering birthdays, and ‘not eating the second half of an open tube of Pringles.’
But, as with most sexual things, I’m willing to learn. After recently being berated for the fact that my seduction technique often involves me stripping to my pants in the bedroom and shouting ‘DO YOU WANT SEX?’ so loud that he can hear it from the kitchen, I am working on getting better at it.
Touching, hinting, saying sexy things: you know the drill.
Here’s how my foreplay lessons are going…
Two things: A gorgeous personal story and a bad rant on marriage
Very quick ‘two things’ update this week. An amazing piece of writing on intimacy, followed by a weird rant in the Guardian about marriage. Click, read, comment etc – and if you do spot things that you think I should be featuring in my Monday posts, then please do recommend stuff in the comments.