As a certified grumpy bastard, I can tell you that it’s always much easier to be negative than positive. As someone with access to web stats I can also tell you that if you want to get clicks, and you’re not writing porn, you’re always better to be critical than optimistic. I’m throwing all that out of the window today, though, because of a conversation I had the other day that went a little something like this:

“Know what’s brilliant?”

“What?”

“We could have sex now if we wanted to.”

“I’m not really in the mood, but…”

“Ah, but you don’t have to want to, you just have to appreciate how cool it is that we totally could if we wanted to.”

Sometimes I go through miserable phases when I look down at my body and think ‘huh, there are some things that have happened here that are basically irreversible.’ I worry about stretchmarks or consider the fact that I’m no longer able to do the things I did when I was eighteen. I may still be able to get my ankles behind my head to brace against the bedposts, but I’ll no longer do it without a groan of effort. I can bend over sexily, but I’ll say ‘oof’ when I get up. Cramp is not so much an occasional visitor as a permanent unwanted house guest.

But, while it’s easy (and certainly more clickbait-friendly) to snark about the negatives, it’s also worth remembering the benefits of having sex in your thirties. This post is about giving credit to all the things I often take for granted…

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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.

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Billy was an ordinary boy. He lived in an ordinary house, in an ordinary street, and every day he’d go out and play with his ordinary friends. Billy had a happy life.

But one day, as Billy’s friends took it in turns to swap brags about how cool their houses were and which level they’d reached on the latest Xbox game, Billy was struck by a bolt of lightning. Turning him from an ordinary, everyday boy into…

I-Call-Bullshit Man!

Now, in his superhero guise, Billy wanders the twisting corridors of the internet, shedding what he thinks is light into anything he perceives to be darkness. In comments and on Twitter he pops up, shouting that oft-heard phrase:

“I call bullshit!”

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I sometimes struggle with getting head – finding it hard to get out of my comfort zone when I don’t feel any element of my own submission. But when he tells me ‘I want to taste you,’ it is not submissive. He’s not begging me for a lick that I may or may not deign to give him: he’s issuing a command. In the same way as he’s issuing a command if he tells me ‘bend over’ or ‘take off your knickers’ or – holy fuck this happened recently and it still makes me so horny I squirm – ‘squeeze that cock.’ Uttered in a breathless rush just before the grunt as he comes.

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If you’re not British, you might not be familiar with Marmite. It is either:

• a delicious brown substance created during the brewing process, which you spread on toast with butter before having a mouthgasm OR
• diarrhoea brewed in the anus of Beelzebub.

For me it’s the former, for others it’s the latter. I pick Marmite because not only is it a great example of something that has divided a nation (their literal slogan is ‘you either love it or you hate it’) but also because there is no moral value in either liking or disliking Marmite: you’re not a better person if you choose to try it. However, you are a bit of a dick if you try to sneak it into someone’s breakfast without them noticing.

Pretty much all sex acts are like Marmite. Oral sex? Some love it, some don’t. Probably a larger group of the former than the latter, but whatever. Likewise hand jobs, using sex toys, doing anal, bondage: any act that two or more people can take part in.

Here’s where sex acts diverge from Marmite: sometimes you really want your partner to try something. No one really cares if I like Marmite or not. It won’t break my heart if Jon Hamm announces, on our wedding day, that he won’t be eating any of the brown stuff. Sex, on the other hand, is something you can enjoy with your partner, and so if you have a particular kink and your partner’s not keen, that can be pretty gutting. If Jon Hamm tell me that he really hates spanking, I’ll be very upset (as well as surprised, tbh, given how much he loves spanking in all those dreams of mine he’s shown up in).

Anyway, given the Marmite nature of various sex acts, I can see why people often ask me the following question:

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