Tag Archives: mental health
Guest blog: Cake or death – pleasure and performance anxiety
I’ve written quite a lot about anxiety here on the blog, but I don’t think I’ve ever written anything as beautiful as this guest blog on performance anxiety. The way he captures the minutiae of life intruding on sexual pleasure, then zooms out to place those in the context of larger existential panics – it properly punched me in the heart. If you’re thinking of pitching me a guest blog but you’re nervous, please read this and see that you don’t always have to focus on one specific story, or give a super-comprehensive and detailed piece of advice: sometimes the best sex writing is about capturing a feeling, articulating it beautifully, and then sharing it to help other people feel a little less alone.
I don’t know you well enough to be fragile in front of you
I’d love to come out with you tonight. You’re fun and funny and sweet and sexy and so many things that I like in a man. But I have to cancel, I’m afraid, because I don’t know you well enough to have a breakdown in your presence. Come back to me next week, when I’ll have finished crumbling. Come next month, when I’ll be well. In three months’ time, when we know each other better, and this stuff doesn’t seem quite so weird. For now, though, I don’t have the energy to be the sexy fun girl you’ve enjoyed on previous dates. Leave me alone for a minute. I need to be fragile in peace.
Sometimes I like to suck cock as self-care
When I’m feeling shitty, I like to suck cock. One of the most frustrating things for me about not having a live-in partner any more (if you discount the fact that, you know, I miss him terribly) is that there’s no easy-access dick to suck when I’m feeling unloveable and down.
You don’t cure men’s anger by throwing them sacrificial women
How should we deal with the problem of incels? Well, we don’t fuck them, that’s for fucking sure. You don’t ‘solve’ the problem of violent misogyny by giving violent misogynists what they want. You don’t get men to stop hating women by ensuring they have intimate access to women. You do not solve the problem of incels by fucking them, because you can’t solve the problem of men’s anger by throwing them a sacrificial woman.
And so I hide
I’m not very chatty on Twitter any more, and it wasn’t until last night when I spoke to a friend on the phone that I realised… I don’t even call my friends that much these days. The last few weeks have been weird and frightening, and they’re only going to get weirder and more frightening until sometime in June when the fear will come to a head and I’ll either sink, swim, or cling desperately to any of the friends I haven’t so far pissed off by ignoring. This is how it works, when my mental health is bad: I hide.