We can be horny, we can be hopeful, we can be keen, we can be enthusiastic, but woe betide us if we’re desperate.

Desperation is unsexy

There’s nothing less sexy than someone who whines for you. Who doesn’t just want you but who needs you in a pitiful, clingy way. I’ve been guilty in the past of turning my nose up at such people. You know the ones – the ones who text you straight after a first date asking for another, the ones who try to wheedle an invite back to yours even though you’ve already said no. The ones who send you emails saying “why didn’t you reply to my last email?”

I snort dismissively, delete their texts, and pity the poor fools who think I’m anything special to fuss over.

But I’m wrong, and I’m cruel, and I know that this is bad. I shouldn’t write off the desperation of others because I fall victim to exactly the same feelings. The difference between my desperation and yours is that mine feels more true, and raw and painful.

We’re all desperate sometimes

Tonight I’m having an evening of self-imposed celibacy, and as a consequence I’m pathetically desperate for sex. Not just sex, either – I specifically want to be beaten. I want to be toyed and fucked with. I want a guy to bend me over, spank me with the palm of his hand, dip his fingers into my cunt to feel how wet I am, then beat me some more.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m capable of walking to the nearest pub, picking the loneliest-looking guy, and begging him to take me roughly in the beer garden. And then I get hornier and more desperate and I realise that I can’t – sex with a stranger will scratch a different itch to the one I actually have – the desperation to fuck a guy who knows me, and who can beat me with the strength and lustful conviction of someone who knows how I like it.

Have a wank, then

When I confided in a friend about this problem he said exactly that: “why don’t you have a wank?” but unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone (what I do know, though, is that it’s rarely the same for everyone), but if I come home from work and rub one out, five minutes later in the kitchen as I’m pouring a gin and tonic, it occurs to me that – well, the last wank was nice, why not have another? And another? And… you get the idea.

Wanking is not a nice, relaxing release of tension. It’s like Pringles.

Sometimes you have to beg

The only solution to this problem is to find a boy I like fucking, and persuade him that – no, it doesn’t matter that it’s a school night – he has to fuck me right now. This works sometimes, and the resulting sex is satisfying and powerful and – usually – incredibly quick.

But I don’t think it’s easy to do this. Doing this properly involves putting yourself out there as a desperate person. Texting someone to say ‘I desperately need sex now – are you free?’ is far more difficult than saying ‘Free tonight? Fancy a shag?’.

‘Fancy a shag?’ has less baggage – it’s less needy – it’s more likely to get a reply.

But it’s also less likely to be successful. I once sent a casual message of this type to a friend, after a similar self imposed (but this time week-long) celibacy, and he offered to come and pick me up and take me to his house. My cunt twitched and ached as I waited in the cold outside the train station – imagining a quick journey to his, followed by a swift beating and a cold, functional fuck bent over the side of his sofa.

I didn’t wear knickers, I hadn’t even bothered to wear shoes – flip-flops thrown on as soon as his ‘yes’ text came through meant I was prepared for nothing other than a quick shag. I needed it just to calm me, to prevent me from rubbing my thighs together on a train in a manner that was starting to look suspicious to those who regularly joined my carriage.

He stopped nearby, and I limped over to his car, wondering if there was somewhere nearby we could retire to, saving ourselves the ten minutes of dripping, twitching agony as we drove to his house.

But I’d been too casual. I’d been too jokey and calm. ‘Fancy a shag?’ hadn’t fully conveyed my need. He stopped at a pub on the way, and insisted that we had a pint. I downed my drink then squirmed for 20 minutes, staring at him. I batted my eyelashes and crossed my legs and jiggled my knee up and down under the table, willing him to drink up.

It was the longest twenty minutes of my entire life.

There’s a rather excellent exchange in Queer as Folk that goes something like this:

Alexander: “When you have a wank, do you think about him?”
Vince: “What sort of question’s that?”
Alexander: “Do you think about him?”
Vince: “No.”
Alexander: “Congratulations, he’s your boyfriend.”

By this definition, this boy is definitely not my boyfriend. I’m a bit more than in love with him – I am obsessed by him in a way that cannot be healthy. He takes my waking thoughts and as much of my spare time as I can find between work and writing and drinking and sleep. What’s worse – he takes up the fantasies that were previously reserved for the faceless strangers who’d play out scenes of angry fucking behind my closed eyelids.

In short: when I have a wank, I think about him.

I think about him bracing himself, restraining me, fucking me in the ass. I think about his whispered words and his hard kisses and the far-too-infrequent slaps he sometimes gives me. I think about the quick, sharp, angry strokes with which he fucks me.

Get out of my head

This boy commands my attention in a way that others don’t. I joke with him that it’s because of his dick. His dick which is wonderful, thick, almost permanently solid – straining at his jeans as he grips my arse, or slips an idle hand down my top. And I joke about it because the truth is worse – it’s not just his dick: it’s him.

He’s warm, he’s kind, he’s funny. He’s beautiful. He has big arms and hands that envelop me like I’m tiny. He says utterly ridiculous things in an accent that makes me drool. He wraps me in big sweaters and brings me coffee, like this kind of calm happiness is the most normal thing in the world. He swings quickly from gentle to passionate, and every time he does it takes me by lustful surprise. And when I get angry or unreasonable he nods, and listens, and tells me I’m not mad, then holds my big, mad head in his gentle hands and makes me feel like a normal person again.

It’s a trap

Rather ridiculously, I am more terrified of writing this than I am any of the other stuff. I can talk to you about group-gropes in a sex cinema, my excessive love of spunk, or the fun I’ve had with piss-play. But telling you that despite my lust for any guy with a nerdy charm and a solid dick, right now I’m just not in the mood for group sex and spanking circles, is pretty fucking tricky indeed.

The fact that writing this entry is a bit like pulling teeth lays bare all of my own prejudices about love. That love is a pathetic shadow of the independent lust on which most of my recent relationships have been based. I feel like, having mastered the art of being happy on my own, and withdrawing from boys who have too much emotional control over me, I’ve failed if I ever think too much of them. I’ve failed if I love them, or miss them. Above all, I’ve failed if I can’t put them out of my mind for long enough to have a wank about someone else.

I’m just going to smash everything

It’s not that I haven’t been in love before – I have. But I’ve never loved healthily – I don’t know how to be in love casually. I want to be able to do this to just the right degree.

On a night out drinking there’s that brilliant moment when I’m merrily drunk, having fun dancing and flirting and chatting and smoking endless cigarettes, and I think the night’s perfect. Then one more drink and I’m grumpy and spinning and weak and desperate to go home to bed. Love is the same.

I can like guys, I can lust guys, I can fuck them with a desperate, panting enthusiasm yet still remain healthy and in control. But then just a bit more – a few more nights spent sleeping beside them, a few more hugs that don’t end in a fuck, a few more secrets exposed and intimate discussions and suddenly it’s all too much. I can’t sleep, I can’t think, and worst of all I can’t come without thinking about him fucking me into submission. And I can’t be in love this hard without overdoing it.

So I fuck men and I play with men and I flirt with men and I follow them from pub to bed to pub to strip club to pub to bed and back again. And I hope that they’re just friends, and I tell them that they’re just friends, and I break up with them when they’re more than friends, because I don’t ever want them to become precious.

If I can’t fuck or wank without thinking of a specific someone, then that someone has become precious to me. He’s special enough that most of the time I don’t want to fuck anyone else – I barely even think about anyone else when I’m lying horny on the sofa thinking about what I might wank to. I know what I’m going to wank to – the same fucking guy who’s in my head even after he’s left my bedroom.

I’ve accidentally become monogamous. And worse, I’ve accidentally created a relationship so precious that I’m in danger of smashing it. I’m at the merry stage of drunk and reaching for another pint and smiling because the night can only get better and I’m so happy and I’m dancing and I’m horny and I want more oh please let me have more and just another pint and another dance and I just want to stay here a bit longer and I’m definitely not going to be sick. I promise.

Initially I thought number 20 was a massive liar. I only saw him once, but he was great – beautifully scruffy, with a lopsided smile and a penchant for getting so stoned I could feel the high through his tingling skin. It was good, for a first date. But I still thought he was a liar.

(more…)

A friend of mine (who knows damn well how to wind me up) sent me a link to a forum on which they were discussing the question “Is watching porn cheating?” to which the answer any sane human being would give is very obviously ‘no.’ On the thread women (and some men who are recovering porn addicts) argue that perhaps it is, and that it certainly feels like it is when a lady accidentally stumbles across her boyfriend’s internet history.

After a brief Google around the subject I discovered that rather than being a mockable minority, the people who believe porn is cheating are not only serious, but worryingly numerous.

I’m presumably preaching to the choir here, but I’d like someone to disagree with me so I can form my argument more fully than I have in this post, which essentially consists of me going “What the ACTUAL MENTAL FUCK ARE YOU ON ABOUT” over and over again.

My boyfriend watches porn and it’s like he’s fucking someone else

No. It’s not at all like he’s fucking someone else because it’s just some pictures on a fucking screen. You’re no more cheating when you watch porn than you’re a vampire when you read Twilight, or a member of the Secret Seven when you crack out the childhood Enid Blyton books.

You sometimes put yourself in the place of people acting in scenes in order to enhance your enjoyment of the material, but that does not mean you are actually there. It doesn’t even mean that were these people performing a live show right in your living room and getting their awesome porny juices all over your sofa, you would join in.

But it’s cheating in the mind, right?

No. Because what you’re describing there is a thought crime. If watching porn is cheating then writing slashfic is a form of rape.

I think this comes from female (and it is usually female – I’d like to see how men react to the idea that their girl watching porn is ‘cheating’) worries about not being adequate, and their partner being sexually interested in other people and things. It’s ‘cheating’ because he’s getting off to something that isn’t you, and that taps into a fairly primitive female jealousy about boys leaving their girlfriends for younger/prettier/thinner/more-willing-to-do-anal models.

Well, it probably sucks for these girls to hear this but he is interested in other people. Sexually. No matter how stunning or sexually adventurous you are, you are not the only thing that makes your man’s dick hard. Nice though you might think that would be, it’s not practical, nor even desirable. Many of his best moves have probably come from things he’s seen while doing some one-handed browsing during an idle moment.

But what he watches is so disgusting and degrading

Hahahaha.

Haha.

No, seriously, stop it – you’re killing me.

It’s so much easier to demonise men for the porn they watch because men tend to require more visual stimulation than women do to get off. In short – you can watch theirs too whereas yours is probably locked away inside your head. Saying that their fantasies are ‘degrading’ and ‘disgusting’ is really easy to do when your own fantasies aren’t exposed for all to see, at the click of a mouse on the 3 a.m. section of your Chrome history.

SECRET ALERT: Women’s fantasies can be disgusting and degrading too.

While John’s beating one out to a video of someone getting beaten on YouPorn, Jane might be having just as much fun imagining biting into her partner’s abdomen until she draws blood and he whimpers and comes into her red and ready lips. Or thinking about her old Geordie history teacher reaching into her open shirt while she finishes off her homework, squeezing her nipples and calling her a ‘good girl’ then dragging her to the front of class to finish the rest while sitting on his lap. Ahem.

I’ve never been as degraded, humiliated, used and spat upon as I am in my own fantasies. It’s extremely lucky for me that most exist only in my head and not on an easily accessible hard drive.

Porn and sexual fantasy is by its nature degrading because the people in it are there for one purpose – to get you off. Even if you’re rubbing one out to the thought of your ex (who you’re still hopelessly in love with, and have a deep and abiding respect for) touching you up until his cock throbs, at the moment you’re fantasising you don’t give a fuck if he’s real or unreal, alive or dead – all you care is that his fictional dick is hard and his fictional fingers are fumbling at your fictional crotch through your pretty, fictional, soaking wet knickers.

But it’s a violation – it just feels disgusting

Porn is disgusting. Your fantasies are disgusting. But that’s OK. We can wallow in gallons of misery and shame during frantic solo sessions and no one gets hurt – our relationships don’t get a fucking look in. You imagine some things in private that you wouldn’t dream of in real life, because it’s unreal – and the unreality of it is what allows you to abandon yourself.

Your wanking is your wanking – it has little to do with your partner or your ex-partners or the guy who delivers you pizza – it has everything to do with the things you think inside your head, or the things that happen inside your head when you’re watching the teeny screen people frig each other off for your delectation.

Wanking (whether to porn or to your own imagined depravity) is usually a solo sport – it wouldn’t work if we allowed others to scrutinise it properly.

If we start giving that the ‘cheating’ label to our personal fantasy life then monogamy is not just dead but hung, drawn, quartered, burned, then fired out into space to make sure it’s gone forever.

If wanking is cheating then no one is faithful.