I’ve been having a lot of typical sex lately. You know, the sort of sex you have when you just fancy some sex but have no particular desire to put a cherry on top. Basic sex. No-frills sex. If exciting and boundary-defining shags are the equivalent of a twelve-course tasting menu, then what I have been doing is eating cheese sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a whole month.

And guess what? It’s brilliant.

I love cheese-sandwich sex to almost exactly the same degree as I love twelve-course fancy sex.

My typical sex

It starts with a suggestion by one or other of us. Not a gentle touch or a barked command, or anything designed to elicit a specific sexual reaction. I’ve had shags that have started with playful sofa-fighting, and ones which I’ve kicked off by simply pulling my knickers down and offering my naked arse to the gentleman in question. Typical sex isn’t like this, it begins much more simply.

“Fancy a shag?”

“Yep.”

There’s a pristine beauty and simplicity to it. It’s not overworked, which means that if the second person doesn’t fancy one they’ll know it’s not the end of the world to decline. Nor is it overly-prescriptive. “Fancy a shag?” leaves you open to developing a particular type of shag if you like. I could respond with “yes, will you fuck me over the bath?” or “no, but I’d love to suck you off while I rub my clit through my knickers.” In short, ‘fancy a shag?’ tells me that you’re horny, and asks if I am too. All the rest is up for grabs.

Once it’s been established that both of us fancy a shag, we touch. Although I’m generally a fan of variety, in this specific scenario, when I am in the ‘typical sex’ mindset, I get off on the predictability of it. He grips me around the waist and immediately slides his hands down to my arse. There’s a delicious familiarity there – the exact size and shape of him is satisfyingly unsurprising. The exact degree to which he squeezes me has been carefully calibrated over years of ‘a bit harder’ and ‘oh God yes that’s it’ until he’s got just the right pressure to get me dripping.

The same familiarity comes, of course, from his dick. I know how quickly it gets hard, what motions will best help it to get there, and exactly how to open this specific pair of trousers (seducing someone new is great fun, but I never seem quite as suave as I’d like because I fumble with unfamiliar trouser openings). His dick has a very specific weight in my hand, and I’m an expert on just how to hold it and squeeze it to ensure that the typical fuck takes its course.

There’s no detour here for blow jobs – I’m describing my typical shag. And typically I don’t have time to take him slowly into my mouth, because we’ll both be too keen to start fucking. So fuck we do.

And the best part is that as soon as we begin, it’s all about the end. This is an ‘everyday’ fuck – something at least as fun and functional as masturbation.

He’ll fuck me with quick, efficient strokes – touching the bits that give him extra shivers through his dick. I’ll push back and squeeze around him so I can feel as much as possible inside me: so that every atom of my cunt is pushing into part of his cock. There’s no pretense that we’re trying to impress each other, or even making an effort to get each other off: we’re doing it because we need to, and because each of us is as keen as the other to feel those first twitching waves of orgasm grip us in the pit of our stomachs.

‘Typical sex’ doesn’t mean ‘boring sex’

It’s a fuck you have because you both need it. It’s even better than wanking because it’s a mutual pleasure, and is therefore sociable: like monkeys picking fleas off each other or you scratching an itch that I just can’t reach on my own. And the moans and ‘oh yes’s and sighs at the end don’t just signal joy or sexual ecstasy – there’s a definite tone of relief. We’ve soothed and satisfied each other.

That’s why I love the everyday fuck. I love it easily as much as I love the special ones, the exciting ones: the ones with extra people or special toys, or words that make me growl with lust. Because while twelve-course meals are undoubtedly exciting, sometimes you just want a cheese sandwich. Something you eat while standing up in the kitchen, dropping crumbs onto the counter and forgetting to put the butter back in the fridge. It’s everyday, it’s typical, it’s nothing fancy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t delicious.

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.