I kissed a girl, and I liked it.

Or more truthfully: I kissed a girl and it was sort of OK but the main reason I kissed her is because there was a dude that we both fancied who we knew would be pretty aroused by the whole scenario.

It’s not quite as catchy, but it is something that happens a fair bit. Ever since I first saw girls kiss in nightclubs I’ve heard whispers about ‘lipstick lesbians’ – usually accompanied by judgmental frowning. I’ve heard people moan about it and damn these girls. They’re stupid, they’re pathetic, they’re attention-grabbing and – perhaps most damning of all – they’re not even really into it. How dare they?

I read an article today by Julie Birchill, in which she discusses these girl-on-girl kisses. Girls who like girls for boys, girls who like girls for attention, and – her example being the famous Madonna/Britney snog – girls who like girls for money.

Sometimes I kiss girls for boys

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there’s nothing wrong in principle with people pulling others for the arousal of a third party. After all, many fantastic threesomes have begun that way. Some of my fantastic threesomes have begun that way. And I’d be a miserable hypocrite if I didn’t admit that two boys kissing to try and turn me on would… well… turn me on. Finally I suppose I should also admit that kissing girls to give boys erections is something that I do quite frequently – it is, perhaps, one of the tamest things I have done in my unending quest to give guys erections.

Likewise, people do shit for money all the time. Money is not an illegitimate reason to do something – it’s the reason most of us haul ourselves out of bed at godforsaken hours of the morning five days a week to go and do boring things when, given the choice, we’d rather be at home eating crisps and wanking. If you’re a pop starlet who thinks she’ll make more money by kissing a girl, I can see you making a legitimate choice to kiss a girl rather than – say – do something headline-grabbing for charity or get strategically semi-naked in your next music video.

Finally – attention. We all want attention, don’t we? Short of hermits, nuns and wanted criminals, everyone likes having a few pairs of eyes on them. If we burned people at the stake for attention-grabbing, they’d come for the bloggers first but the rest of humanity wouldn’t be far behind.

We’re all just people, making decisions. And the decision to place your tongue inside someone’s mouth and move it around a bit can, like any other decision in our lives, be made because we want money, attention or sex. There’s nothing obviously crass about doing something for these reasons, and yet girls who kiss girls are often met with contempt because they dared to do something that wasn’t purely motivated by a desire for the kiss itself.

The ethics of snogging someone you don’t really fancy

I suspect what people hate most about girls pulling other girls in clubs – and why ‘lipstick lesbian’ is (in my albeit limited experience) a phrase frequently spat with disgust and horror – is the lies. No reasonable person could have a problem with two women who fancy each other pulling in a nightclub – the problem people seem to have with this scenario is that there isn’t always desire. We’re used to kissed being motivated by this, so any other motivation both looks and feels like a lie.

People aren’t angry about what your motivations are (money, attention, or arousing other people), they’re angry because of what they’re not. You’re not motivated by lust, therefore you’re lying.

But my issue with this is that although I hate lies as much as the next person, I don’t feel like this really is a lie – it’s a game. You’re play-acting like you fancy someone in the same way as you might play-act a naughty schoolgirl, or an angry sargeant major, or a runaway My Little Pony. There’s nothing wrong with games as long as all participants know the rules.

The only time this falls down is if one of the participants doesn’t know the rules. If I pull you because we both fancy a guy and want to watch him get an erection in the pub, and if that guy knows that we’re doing that for him, then a good time will be had by all. But if one person doesn’t have that knowledge, and thinks the kiss is the start of something beautiful, then their legitimate and honest desire has been turned into something tawdry and crass.

Imagine someone you’d fancied for years finally getting up the courage to ask you for a snog, which you gleefully do, only to find out straight afterwards that they were doing it on a nudge and a wink from their partner. Horrible, heartbreaking, cruel, and immoral.

That’s what we should be disgusted by. Not the kiss itself, but the way it’s done. Kissing is, like all sex acts, intrinsically dependent on the enthusiasm of the other parties involved.

The person who is kissing you out of genuine love or lust has the right to be offended and upset if you’re being dishonest, and knowingly misleading them, but the people who scowl and whisper ‘lipstick lesbian’ have no such rights. They can guess at your motivations, but they can’t know what rules you’ve established with the other people involved. All they will ever see is two girls kissing – it’s up to those girls to decide whether they’re happy with that.

Girlonthenet: Being an emotionless wreck, you’d be forgiven for thinking that my heart is never touched. You’d be wrong – only slightly wrong, but wrong nonetheless.

This week the lovely Jon, of ‘Things I have done to impress women‘ fame, sent me a guest post that made me both laugh and also pity him – and all men – who have a tendency to put cute women on pedestals and subsequently become terrified of talking to them.

It’s pretty, it’s poetic, it’s funny, and it’s warm. In short – it is everything that I am usually not, which is why I adore it. Over to him:

Crushing it

The thing is, you never know when it’s going to hit you. Sometimes, you’ll just be thirsty. It’s a cold, crisp October morning, and you just want a hot drink. So you’ll go into the nearest corporate coffee emporium and order the silliest sounding hot drink. While pondering whether you want one of those little caramel biscuit things, you realise that the barista is asking you a question. You’re just in the middle of saying “large” when you look up and meet her eyes. Christ. They have a piercing quality that burns through your skull. You manage to say something that sounds like “laaaarr-g-g-le”. She smiles slightly, and brushes her dark hair from her eyes.

“Do you mean grande?” she asks, and you notice that there’s a slight tang of European accent there. You go into a conversational tailspin, trying to ask about the differences between grande and large, while worrying that all this size paranoia is somehow conveying that you have a small penis.

“And how will you be paying?” Shit. Do you give her a handful of change, or your debit card that’s been sellotaped together like a torn up love letter. She laughs at your card, while you make a feeble joke about hobo credit cards. She laughs, properly. You bask in the sunshine, and then, her headlamps turn onto her next victim, and suddenly you’re cast from the garden.

You do the dead man’s walk to the delivery table, cursing your inability to order a new credit card and not make jokes about the size of your cock. After a few minutes of mentally abusing yourself, and thinking about how absolutely ridiculous it would be for a girl like that to fancy you (I bet you think lap dancers are really into you too, right?), you realise they’re calling your order. You grab the coffee and walk out of the shop.

As you sit on the park bench sipping the molten hot java, you realise that there’s something written on the side in pen. Next to the ‘Grande’ tick box, she’d written “…But it’s what you do with it that counts! ;)”

For a guy, especially a lonely guy, sometimes it doesn’t take much to ignite the crush protocol. A kind word, a wink, a nice gesture across the office photocopier, and it’s fucking on like Donkey Kong.

Some crushes burn slowly, like incense, gradually filling your mind until you’re incapable of smelling anything but their honeyed fragrance, and you can’t look at a fucking lamp without thinking about what it would look like being knocked onto the floor when you sit them up on the desk and rip their knickers off.

Others hit you so hard and fast, you can’t even duplicate a report without thinking about laying her down on the glass plate and making 100 paper copies of your thrusting. You might even contemplate stapling all the pages together to make a flipbook, so you can replay your fucking in stop-motion.

You can’t talk to her on the phone without putting your hand down your pants and thinking about her on top of you, her hair falling in her face as she smiles and smiles while she rocks up and down on your steel hard cock, while she traces a finger down your perspiring chest. You rub your thighs and laugh as your cock has all it’s birthdays at the same time.

Sometimes, you can’t even buy a coffee without wanting to leap over the counter and offer her extra cream for once.

In some ways, whether it’s with someone you’ve hardly met or a friend that you shouldn’t really fancy, the crush is the perfect relationship. They’ll never disappoint you, they’ll never leave you – hell, they’ll always be the same age they were when you met them, frozen in the amber of your memory. They’ll always be wearing that outfit that made you shoot boners out of your eyes. It’ll always be that night when they drunkenly looked into your eyes for just a second too long. The sex will always be mind blowing, the kisses tender and the touches desperate and fumbling. It’s really the most perfect relationship you’ll ever have. And the only way you can ever fuck it up, is by trying to make it real. So as long as you can live in the bubble of imagination indefinitely, as long as you can deal with the constant gnawing feeling of incompleteness, the tangible taste of the unknown forever on your lips, you’ll always have a grande old time.

But it’ll cost you a fucking fortune in Cinnamon Dolce Lattes.

See? See?! Awesome. If you love it as much as I do you should read more of what he writes. And tell me about your own crushes in the comments, so I can pity and love you too.

Let it henceforth be known that you may do anything you like with my friends, or my casual fucks. If they consent to it then you may touch them, kiss them and shag them in whatever depraved manner and in whatever tantric position gives the most pleasure to the two of you at the time.

But if you touch the boy I love I will tear you into a billion pieces. I will scatter those pieces across the globe, then spend the rest of my life retracing my steps so that I can stamp on each individual one of them until you are ground into a shower of dust.

Jealousy isn’t as bad as we think

The key argument against jealousy is that it implies ownership. I don’t think that’s true. Ownership of a certain kind is good – whether your relationship is open or monogamous there’s a delicious thrill in being able to say “he’s mine.”

It doesn’t mean that you own that person completely, and feeling jealous does not in fact give you any rights at all over the other person. But part of mutual love is giving a tiny bit of yourself up to the other person. And being jealous is your way of saying “I give a shit about this. This is significant.”

But there’s a world of difference between being a bit possessive – “I want you all to myself you scrummy pile of gorgeousness” – and being so jealous that it becomes destructive – “I don’t want you to see your best friend any more because I’m worried that you fancy them.”

Jealousy is still really fucking bad

The key problem with jealousy is that it is arational. There’s nothing inherently green-eyed-and-evil about getting angry with your monogamous partner for snogging someone else – they broke your agreement, so you have a right to be angry. Your possession of this person extends up to (but not beyond) an expectation that they don’t have sexual contact with anyone else.

The problem with real, steaming, burning jealousy is that it is prompted by things that – to a rational observer – are not a cause for rage at all. Some wholly innocent events have our inner Iago stampeding out from the recesses of our brain screaming “I like not that!”

The receipt of a flirty text. A look interpreted as meaningful. A feeling that your partner’s too close to a certain person. A desire – a need – to know not just what they want to tell you but all the private things in their head as well.

And some people feel this more than others – some have a tendency to quiz their partners, go through pockets and trample on their privacy to get at whatever their gut tells them must be the truth. So as kind, understanding humans we need to try and comprehend why our partners feel this way. I’m not talking about giving in and letting them strip-search you because you were late home from work, but having patience and being willing to discuss the issue can – in my experience – do a hell of a lot to assuage the arational anger that is jealousy.

You’re probably better than I am

I am a terribly jealous person. I’ve destroyed nights out because I worried that boys weren’t paying me enough attention. I’ve ranted about that bitch from their work who won’t stop flirting. I’ve – oh God, my blood runs cold to write the words down – I’ve read a boy’s emails.

As expected, none of these things did me any good. Because at the end of the day, although it’s nice to know you’re wanted, no one’s partner ever said “hey, do that cute thing where you interrogate me about my close friends again, before reading my text messages behind my back.”

So just as we have a responsibility to be faithful (whatever ‘faithful’ means within your relationships), and a responsibility to be understanding when our partners occasionally swerve into unnecessary jealous rages, those of us who do tend towards jealousy also have a responsibility to be rational.

Our partners have chosen us, and that’s really significant – they’re not going to un-choose us in a hurry. And the majority of people are more likely to stumble into an innocent situation that causes one’s jealousy to flare up than they are to casually fuck a passing stranger. Boring, I know, but it’s the rational truth.

So, in relationships as elsewhere in life, we need to ignore our emotions occasionally and examine things with a rational head. Consider whether an innocent explanation is more likely. Step away from our partner’s phone and avoid reading their texts. We need to listen to our brain rather than the seething rage in our gut. When our inner Iago says “I like not that” we need to tell him to fuck off.

This might sound callous, but I don’t care if you break up with me by text message. Same goes for email. Sod it – text the ‘letters’ section of the Metro for all I care. If you’re going to dump me, just dump me.

Yes, I’ll be sad. But I’ll be no more sad than if you – quite literally – made a meal of it. Took me out for dinner, had a long discussion prompted by occasional irritating sighs, ending with The Chat: ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t fancy you any more/we have nothing in common/I’ve met someone infinitely more likeable.’

It hasn’t been emotional

People say that the reason they wouldn’t break up via text is because it’s cold-hearted. But the problem is that few of the relationships I get into are emotional enough to require a drawn-out conclusion. Most of the ‘break-ups’ I have been involved in recently have happened either because

• he’s found a girlfriend who’d rather he didn’t fuck anyone else
• he lives outside Zone 3 and so I am far too lazy to see him regularly

And so in this context, a break-up text will do just as well as a long conversation. If he’s a boy I’m shagging he’s a boy worth shagging, so naturally I’ll be sad that I can’t fuck him any more. But I’m not going to cry my face off over a tub of Häagen Dazs – we were probably never that close.

More importantly, it takes me just five minutes to read an email, less than one minute to read a text, but it takes an entire evening to have the break up chat. A whole evening. Think of all the things I could do in an evening! While I’m listening to you tortuously apologise for ending something that was inevitably going to end anyway I could instead be dying my hair, writing another blog, livetweeting The Apprentice or – crucially – finding someone else to fuck.

There is nothing more valuable to me than time. And giving me more of it, even if it means swallowing your natural desire to project emotion onto sex, is a wonderful thing to do.

Just tell me

But the main reason I think text break-ups are fine is because very occasionally, because of the way I meet and interact with guys, I end up in a weird limbo where I’m not entirely sure if someone is still with me. In the last year I have had three guys who have broken up with me by just ceasing all communication.

Two guys stopped fucking me after a few lovely evenings which I’m reasonably sure they enjoyed. One guy stopped fucking me shortly before we were due to go away together for a weekend.

This isn’t a rant about getting dumped. I’ve been in many ‘things’ that have ended, so I don’t get particularly upset about the endings themselves.

But what I am emotional about is not knowing. Because I like to plan. I like to know. Just as I like to know how you like your blow jobs and whether you’re into spanking, I also like to know exactly where you stand on the issue of whether you are or aren’t willing to put your dick into me.

It’s not you, it’s me

And it honestly is. I think I’m alone in this, because I’ve told other people about my preference for rapid-fire, heartless relationship comms and had them weeping over my cracked and battered soul. But a text or email at least has an immediacy and honesty that I wholeheartedly respect.

You might wait for weeks for the right moment to have ‘that’ conversation and (in the case of some of my past boys) end up never having it at all. So if your mind’s truly made up, and you really really mean it, what better way to tell me than to bleep it to my phone?

Not only will you have furnished me with useful information, you’ve also saved me time. I’ll be able to read it, digest it, mourn and move on in less time than we’d have spent on pre-dinner drinks.

The problem with human interaction is that it’s so fucking nuanced. I mean, why can’t people just be obviously good or evil? It would be much easier to decide whether we should give someone a knighthood or throw them to the wolves.

There’s been a trend recently that I find utterly disturbing, of people being hauled over the coals for misjudged (and sometimes utterly prickish) comments that they have made on the internet, and I’d like to take a bit of time to lay down some ill-thought-out rules and opinions. If you want to skip the waffle, go straight to my 3-step guide to not being a prick on the internet.

In the meantime, here’s why I don’t think you should be fired from your job for being rude on the internet.

Representing your company

You, as an individual, are representative of your company, right? Wrong. I feel quite strongly about this, and it is my duty as an anonymous sex blogger to point out that nothing I write on the internet in any way relates to my job. If it did, my job would be far more interesting.

Yes, if you’re tweeting from a company account, you should conduct yourself as if you were on company business – no gratuitous swearing or trollery. This should be fairly common sense. But just as I wouldn’t expect to conduct a pub chat as if I were chairing a meeting, likewise I will say things on my personal Twitter feed that I would never say at work.

But when people who tweet personally are then linked to their job, the waters get a bit muddy. This week Grace Dent received what I can only describe as a tawdry, prickish insult on Twitter. Rather than ignoring or blocking the offending person, she clicked through to his biog, where he had a link to his personal website that had a link to the company where he worked. A company that happened to represent Grace Dent.

This man was an idiot. By his own admission he shouldn’t have posted it. Were I his boss I’d be having a serious chat with him about the nature of social media, and insisting that he remove all links to his workplace from his profile. But I categorically do not think that he should be fired.

If he’d threatened her, yes. If he’d been bigoted, or obviously inciting hatred, maybe. But he made a stupid joke about her looks. The problem is that this is a level of reasonably inane and harmless cuntery compared to hate-speech and threats, and we find it hard to come up with a solution that deals with the nuance. Grace Dent has decided that she would like him to be fired.

I have a lot of respect for Grace Dent, who is the epitome of everything I admire – someone who gets paid to write funny stuff on the internet. But in this case I think she’s desperately wrong.

Pic and Mix rules

If you accept that what you say on Twitter is subject to scrutiny by your workplace, you have to accept that your workplace could skip over the insults you’ve written and instead concentrate on the more personal/political things that you say.

It’s then more than possible to end up with situations where someone will be censored not because what they’re saying is offensive, but because it isn’t in line with company policy.

You could tweet about a political figure on whose good side your company would like to stay. You could say something negative about an organisation that your own company is about to partner with. In the case that inspired this post, you could say something rude about a client of your company. Or finally, in a sudden and sledgehammer admission of my own personal interests in this tale, you could tweet about piss play and get fired for being a pervert.

I’m not saying people should say and do what they like and damn the consequences. It’s of the utmost importance that people at least try to conduct themselves with courtesy and respect, because otherwise society will fall to bits and you’ll end up sitting at a laptop in the middle of a nuclear armageddon typing “OMG u r a troll you fat slag lolz” while the remnants of civilisation crumble to dust around you.

All I’m saying is that we should be careful what we wish for – accept that a man gets fired for being catty about a client and we have to accept a certain degree of company interference in tweets that we post on our personal stream. And that way lies unemployment for political bloggers, interestingly opinionated tweeps and – most importantly – me.

 

Final thoughts:

To prove I’m not advocating total anarchic trollery, and for those unsure of how to conduct themselves online, I have compiled a handy 3-step guide to not being a prick on the internet. Please print out, affix to your screen, and have a glance every once in a while before you post rude things about powerful journalists.

Three-step guide to not being a prick on the internet

1. Got a criticism that is threatening, illegal or hate-filled? Don’t post it.
2. Got a criticism that doesn’t fall into category 1 but would be hurtful to the person on the receiving end? Don’t @ them in it.
3. Got a criticism that is thoughtful, interesting and genuinely contributes to the discussion? @ the author, reblog, talk about it, or spaff your wisdom intelligently in the comments.