The vast, vast majority of the time, I am a loser. A lank-haired, jeans-wearing, slouching drunken loser. With a cider in my hand, a chip on my shoulder and a face like a bulldog chewing a whole hive of wasps.

I say this only to counter what’s coming next: right now I am hot.

I’m hot because I’ve had my hair cut – it swishes in that shiny way that some people achieve daily, but for me comes round only twice a year when I go for my biannual hack. I’m hot because I’ve spent the last week doing more exercise than I normally would and – although there’s no immediate visual difference – I feel stronger and livelier and readier to bounce around like a puppy on MDMA. I’m hot because I’m wearing knickers that cup my arse comfortably, and because I’ve been doing DIY in hot pants and getting dirty and sweaty and wet.

We need to deal with your high self-esteem issues

I’m British, of course, so writing the above paragraph was torture – it took me a good ten minutes to bash out just a few sentences without tagging something self-deprecating on to the end. I’ve been trained, through years of TV, magazines and friendly banter, that to talk about the things you actually like about yourself is a social crime. Like eating steak with the fish fork or passing a joint to the right.

Most of the time this makes sense. After all, we’d all be excruciating and insufferable if our conversations started not with “how are you?” but “how hot am I!?” We’d barely get beyond introductions before we were hurling into buckets at the appalling displays of self-love.

No, instead we must only ever speak of the bad stuff, while desperately hoping that other people notice the good. We’re trained to make the best of ourselves, so we spend hours primping and preening and picking out just the right kind of shoe only to shit on all that effort later on by replying “no, really, I look awful” when someone says something nice. It’s a reflex gesture, and one which makes sense most of the time. When the hard-earned compliments come, we bat them away with great force, because self-hate is a much more attractive quality than arrogance.

Start fancying yourself

I’ve got nothing wrong with light self-deprecation, and on an ordinary day I’m far more likely to make a tedious aside about my weight than to bounce into a room and shout “Look! Aren’t my tits brilliant?!”

But not today. Because, fuck it, I don’t always feel good. And on the rare occasions that I do, I want to start making the most of it. In fifty years time I’ll be yearning for the chance to wear this arse again, to sit in hot pants on a stepladder sugar-soaping walls and enjoying not just being me but looking like me too.

You should do it too – go on, do it. Fancy yourself a bit. There are bound to be bits of yourself that you’re not a fan of. But isn’t it bizarre that it’s these disliked bits that get all the attention? Hours in the gym toning a stomach that you hate. Days in front of the mirror shaping eyebrows or facial hair in some sort of damage limitation exercise. Weeks spent traipsing around shops that make clothes for people who always seem to be a different shape to you. All that time spent rectifying or changing or enhancing – how much time do you actually spend appreciating?

You don’t have to take pictures of yourself in sexy poses and pin them on the fridge, or give yourself cringeingly awkward motivational pep-talks about how beautiful you are. Just give yourself a bit of time to appreciate the things you fancy. The things that your partners will go primal for. Stand in front of a mirror if you like, touch yourself if you want to, put on or take off the clothes that make you feel best, and just revel in a bit of self-lust.

Because no one else can love you like you can.

Well done, humanity, you have done me proud. When The Guardian printed this problem page question from a lady who fantasises about being passed around a group of old, obese men who struggle to get erections, I expected the comments section to be a sulphur-stinking pit of hellish mockery.

Because that’s generally what happens when someone admits to a fantasy that doesn’t fit with one of our traditional stories. I was going to say ‘an uncommon fantasy’ but to be honest, given the horror this woman feels about admitting to her fantasy I’d have to go out on a limb and say this dream may be far more common than we think.

To my surprise, though, the comments were mostly sensible.

“Why on earth would you feel guilty? And why do you think of yourself as ‘sick’? Those are strong statements. Your sex life is fine and If you don’t want to share your fantasy with your fiancė then don’t.”

“Of all the fantasies I’ve ever heard, this has got to be one the of the most easily realizable.”

Hot fantasy about old obese men

One of my favourite wank fantasies involves a pair of older guys. Ideally (because I love my backstory) in a position of power or authority over me. Traditional scenes begin in an office, where I play up to patriarchal stereotypes by wearing an incredibly short skirt and bringing coffee into the business meeting being held by these two men.

One of them is usually relatively young – thirty or forty – and he’s staring at my arse like he wants to bite it. The other guy is older, perhaps fifty or sixty, calls me ‘sweetheart’ and leers inappropriately through the stretched fabric of my tight shirt as I bend down to put the coffee tray on the table. One of them, inevitably, slaps my arse.

The older guy (my boss) remarks on how obedient I am, and asks me to show his friend just how willing I am to please. He leans back in his chair, unzips his flies, and pulls out a thick, twitching, semi-flaccid cock. I drop to my knees in front of him, and as he croons ‘that’s it’, I slip his dick into my mouth.

He’s big and looks bigger – looming over me with his paunch and his jowls and his filthy, smug grin. He knows I feel obliged to do this to him, and that’s part of the turn on. The other part being, of course, the ability to show off his toy to his friend.

As I suck him harder, he pulls my head down so that my lips are around the base of his cock, his thick head pushing hard up against the back of my throat. Occasionally he makes small grunts to show just how much he’s enjoying it, or mutters ‘good girl, just like that’ through gritted teeth. But in between these interjections he keeps talking to his friend.

“Good, isn’t she?”

“Absolutely. I should get one for my office.”

“You can… ungh… you can have a turn when I’m done if you like. She’d be only too happy to oblige.”

The friend sits there watching, stroking at the erection that’s pressing against the crotch of his suit trousers. But I don’t fuck the friend – I never get a chance. Because as I picture the thick, desperate hardness of the older guy’s dick pushing solidly against the back of my throat, and imagine the strangled grunting sounds he makes as he comes, and conjure up the feeling of his thick, hot spunk gushing down the back of my throat… that’s usually the moment when I come.

The younger guy rarely needs to fuck me in order to complete the fantasy.

Being ashamed of fantasies

So, to all the Guardian readers who refrained from making comments along the lines of ‘ewww’, when someone confessed to fantasies of obese older men, I salute and thank you. I guarantee you that this particular fantasy isn’t limited to one individual, and that there are many more people who like that sort of thing.

To the woman who wrote the letter in the first place: don’t be upset. Most people have at least one thing that gets them horny in secret but that they wouldn’t want to shout from the rooftops. There’s no need to be ashamed of if you get off on something unusual. You’re not hurting anyone by doing it, you’re just pushing the specific set of buttons that happen to have been wired in your brain that way.

As one of the Guardian commenters so excellently put it:

“There is nothing wrong in a fantasy, like emotions, they are not good or bad. they just are. We can’t control them but they do no harm to others (it is our actions that may hurt others, not the thoughts in our heads), so whatever they are they are nothing to be ashamed of.”

Every now and then Twitter goes on a nostalgia trip – everyone starts using the hashtag #TweetYourTeenageSelf to dispense wisdom their real teenage self would never have listened to.

But I’d have liked it, I think. Even if I didn’t take the advice. We’ve all got wisdom we’ve love to impart to our younger, less knowledgeable selves. And I’d certainly pay big bucks now to hear from GOTN aged fifty, and find out what I should or shouldn’t do in the next twenty years to avoid being a spectacular fuck-up.

This post is a bit saccharine, bordering on the cheesy, but anyone who has read my book will know that although I come across as a sex-crazed harpy, there’s an emotional romantic underneath. She’s just quite deep underneath.

So, in no particular order, here are the top five things I wish I’d known as a teenager.

1. There’s no such thing as ‘good in bed’

Really. I used to believe that being ‘good in bed’ was like having decent hand-eye coordination: a skill that you either had or didn’t. The nervousness that accompanied my first few fumbling shags was made more terrifying by the knowledge that This Was It – the time when I would find out whether I was part of team Goodshag, or team OhChristThatWasShocking.

It turns out that’s not the case at all: one person’s Goddess is another’s Godawful, and there’s no one holding up scorecards when you’re lying in a postcoital sweat. Sex isn’t a skill that individuals have or don’t have: it’s a skill you learn together.

2. People you fancy rarely notice the things you hate about yourself

I say ‘rarely’ because there are some things – being overweight or excessively tall, for example – that have attracted the odd comment from guys I’m attracted to. But in general, the worries I have about my appearance are things that my loved ones only notice if I point them out myself. For instance, I’ve got a slightly dodgy tooth that prevents me from smiling too often, but people are far more likely to notice that I’m not smiling than the reason for my grumpy face.

So, I’d tell teenage me: there’s basically nothing wrong with you, because there’s something different about everyone.

3. Your cunt is actually something straight guys like looking at

Ah, youth. That period of time when all the things about your body that are usually hidden under clothes suddenly become fixations for your own self-disgust. I remember being quite unnaturally scared of what my cunt looked like when I was younger. It looked a bit like the cunts in porn, but not exactly the same, even when I tried to shave it so I’d look more grown up.

The first time a guy went to go down on me I leapt away in terror, begging him to turn the lights off lest he see the actual lines and curves of it. I’d probably have enjoyed teenage sex more if I could glimpse the future: a future in which I’m lying on a bed in my own grown-up flat as a boy I love runs his hands over it and tells me, for the millionth time “you’ve got a pretty cunt.”

4. Those douchebags don’t actually care what you wear

Like most people I know, I had a fairly rough time in school. I was tall, broad, scruffy, and not very good at makeup. What I’d loved to have known is that the people who laughed at me for being a goth didn’t actually give a flying fuck what I wore. I could have come in dressed head to toe in designer gear, with hair dyed blonde and swishy, heels that rapped a sexy rhythm as I sashayed down the corridor – they’d still have said the same old shit.

Because real life is nothing like an American teen movie. No one changes their place in the hierarchy just by getting a makeover, because the cool kids’ disgust has nothing to do with what you wear or look like – those are just easy things to get bitchy about. Their opinions are actually founded on some arbitrary moment in the past where people were divided into cool and not-cool. These labels stuck

But don’t worry – your label will expire the second you leave the building.

5. There is more than one love of your life

That guy you’re head over heels for? He’ll go. Then there’ll be another, and he’ll go too. Then there’ll be more who – you guessed it – will go. And each and every time it’ll feel unjust and impossible. You’ll want to scream and cry and tear the world apart because you just loved them so much and you’ll never find someone like that again and oh God how can you survive this pain? This misery feels utterly unbearable.

But don’t worry: you’ll bear it.

According to some people who give way too much of a shit, Jeremy Paxman has grown a beard.

Think what you like about it, but by God you have to think something. Today the internet has been bubbling with chatter: are you for or against the beard? Does it look good? Does it look scary, because for some reason someone once decided that all bearded men are Harold Shipman? Has your attitude towards Paxman’s hard-hitting interview questions changed because he happens to have some hair on his face? Let’s do a sodding online poll about it, shall we?

Anyway. Because I’m fucking contrary and annoyed, I’m going to weigh in to the beard debate with the definitive answer as to Whether Beards Are Good. Ready? Here goes:

Growing a beard is good

I’m a fan of beards – they’re often a pretty sexy way of framing and defining a man’s face. I’ve been with a few guys who have had some sort of facial hair, and with one guy who found facial hair so amusing he would regularly grow a beard just so that when he shaved it off he could experiment with various comedy styles.

They’re occasionally a bit scratchy when you’re kissing someone, and might irritate you if you’ve got sensitive skin, but the same can be said of a particularly coarse jumper fabric.

I love running my hands over a guy’s beard, feeling the scratchy texture of the hair on my palms. I love watching him trim the edges, that ‘I’m so grown-up’ feeling I get when I think about him doing something so adult. I enjoy the way it frames his face, and the variety – the different stages of beautiful he looks as it gets longer, shaggier, and eventually gets tidied up.

But the best thing, I think, about men who have beards is that they are clearly capable of making independent decisions about what to do with their own face.

Not growing a beard is also good

I also, though, like clean-shaven dudes. There’s a certain elegance and beauty about a really smooth shave. Again, I like to watch men do it, particularly the bit where they tip their head back to get at the hairs on their neck. I love the slight scratch of stubble as it starts to push through in the evening. I utterly adore the smell of a freshly-shaved guy when he rubs his face up next to mine.

But again, the best thing about a clean-shaven gentleman is that he is capable of making independent decisions about what to do with his own face.

Growing a beard is your own decision

I’m surprised at the number of people who would respond to the ‘should women shave their legs?’ question with a loud and decisive ‘it’s none of your fucking business’, yet are happy to pass judgment on a TV presenter just because he has chosen not to shave. I wouldn’t bother writing about this issue if it were just Jeremy Paxman – I appreciate that people are having a bit of fun and Paxo isn’t going to be sobbing into his autocue because some people on Twitter said his beard was shit. But the beard vs no-beard debate leaks awkwardly into a lot of our sexual discussion in a way that is pretty offensive to men, and this seems like an appropriate time to tackle it.

People say things like:

“I just couldn’t kiss a man with a beard”

“Men with beards just look untrustworthy”

Or even, in a move designed to hit not one but two of my ‘rage’ buttons: “The only thing worse than a beard is a ginger beard”

I’m not making these up, incidentally, these are all things people have said to me – the latter prompted a bollocking in the form of a tedious drunken lecture. Mumbled apologies ensued. Awkwardness happened. Lessons were probably not learned.

Preference vs pressure

I understand that people have personal preferences: some gentlemen really do prefer blondes, and some people really can’t get aroused unless their partner is clean shaven. Fair enough – passions like these are hard to control, and there’s no rule that says we must bestow equal lust on men no matter what their facial hair situation. However, there certainly is a rule that states we must avoid pressuring people to do certain things to their bodies just for our aesthetic pleasure. It’s the ‘don’t be a total arsehole’ rule.

Most adult men, in their natural state (and most women, come to that) will grow some hair on their faces. It might be dark, light, thick, coarse, downy or patchy, but ultimately most people will grow some hair on their faces. Having some hair on your face is the natural default for the majority of the adult population. The decision to remove it is one that can only be made by the owner of that face, and making them feel bad about their decision based purely on your aesthetic opinion about beards makes you a total arsehole.

So, just as it’s none of anyone’s business whether I shave my legs, wear make-up at work or wax my pubes into the shape of a lightning bolt, likewise it’s not for us to decide what hair Jeremy Paxman should or shouldn’t remove from his face.