“I still don’t understand why I have to take at least one female member of staff with me.” “All the clients working with you are female.” “Female-identified.” “Fine, that. It’s a matter of customer protection. You know this.” “I’m not dangerous because I’m a boy, you know?” “A boy? You’re not a boy. You’re a man.”
Am I? I’ve never thought of myself as a man.
We’re just normal men.
Sure, I’ve been called one by many people over time. I’m referred to as “the man” by members of the public who don’t know my name. My second girlfriend used to refer to me as a man despite the fact that I wasn’t particularly comfortable with it. I’m cisgender and male, so I’m fairly certain that various pieces of literature about me – medical records and so on – list me as a man. Back in my internet dating days, I was listed as “22-year-old man”.
And yet I still think of myself as a boy.
“I’m still a boy. You can refer to a ‘group of boys’ and they can all be adults. You can have a ‘boyfriend’ and he can be however old you want.” “I guess…” “And nobody seems to have a problem with the term girlfriend. Although it seems to be easier with girls. There’s a popular blogger with ‘girl’ in her name and she’s almost 40.” “That’s different.” “How?”
I’ve long had a problem with the term, and in particular the connotations of, the word “man”. There are plenty of neologisms which ascribe something to a man – something to be ridiculed (man pain, man flu, man look); something society sees as “female” being appropriated (man bun, man bag); a negative action (mansplain; manspread); be assertive to the point of being a dick (man up). Look at all of those and it probably goes some way towards explaining why I’m not comfortable with being a “man”?
And then there are those who whine about it. People who use the #NotAllMen hashtag non-ironically and protest about it being “not me.” Dude, we know it’s not you. That’s not what anyone’s saying. But, again, this creates a visibility issue. Men get accused of something and their automatic response is to bitch about it.
Incels, MRAs, PUAs and the like make media headlines and have paid-for ads appear on Pornhub. Things like Yewtree and the recent revelations about Russell Brand show the predatory side of men in power. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are universally hateable men who should, by all rights, be in prison by now. Michael Moore wrote a book rightly entitled Stupid White Men.
Look at this from the point of view of an alien coming here for the first time: men do terrible things, they can’t handle criticism and they’re dangerous and to be avoided.
(And yes, I know that isn’t what I’m actually getting at. This is hyperbole, I know. But just imagine.)
“I don’t really know. I’ve seen older women refer to themselves as ‘girls’ and nobody has an issue with it. Why can’t I be a boy?” “It just seems odd. Why wouldn’t you be a man?” “Have you seen what ‘men’ are doing these days, or for the past few millennia?” “But that’s not you.” “Yes, I know. But you shouldn’t need to say that. That’s the issue. If I’m a boy it doesn’t carry any of the negative labels. Plus, I’d have to admit I’d grown up, and nobody wants to do that.”
She paused. There was a stillness in the room during which I realised I hadn’t made the most salient point.
“Gender doesn’t exist, anyway. It’s a social construct.”
It’s an interesting concept, albeit one without a definitive answer. GOTN ran a competition about it once, as did Erotic Meet back in the day. One of those things where it varies from person to person. Maybe you have a specific image in your head when you orgasm; perhaps an orgasm looks like something from the outside.
But what does an orgasm feel like?
That is, perhaps, a more difficult question to answer. Like anything, it does change according to the individual – but it is certainly more complex than “do they have a penis or a vagina?”. Sex is deeper than such a binary concept. Everything changes according to situation, method, mood, and even time. Every orgasm is different, so even if you experience a similar feeling each time, it may be more possible to try to describe one orgasm than… well, you know where I’m going with this, don’t you?
I know it’s hot. It’s been getting hotter all week, even if it’s a little breezier today than it has otherwise been of late. Going outside means getting hotter, but there’s no reason I can’t do so inside.
It had been four days since my last orgasm, and although I will admit that’s not a huge gap (and there have been much longer ones…), it’s still sizeable enough to be noticed. I’ve had an odd weekend, to put it mildly, and even wondered if I’d completely lost my sex drive until he made himself known. This afternoon I found myself alone, so after a cheese omelette, cup of tea and a Pokémon film, I decided to put him to the test.
It didn’t take long to orgasm. Usually it takes a while (stamina, innit?); this time, however, it wasn’t a huge task. A bit of Emmanuelle, a few minutes’ fantasising and a couple of sexy words, and I was done. A very satisfying orgasm.
The very moment I came (hitting my wrist, thigh and my ankle, if it matters) was like an explosion of heat. I didn’t just warm up; I flared up. Heat burst out all over my body, more apparent with every beat of my heart. Taking in some deep, ragged breaths, I leaned back and let myself bathe. Basking in my own heat, feeling it emanate from my very core.
Beatriz identifies.
I was a mess. Hair everywhere. Tears leaking from my eyes. Cum all over my hand. Blazing with fire.
I wasn’t even all there. All I felt was the heat. For a while, I was just a fireball.
A few minutes later I managed to gather myself together, clean up with a handkerchief I need to put into the washing machine (mental note for later) and pull myself back into the real world.
Things to do, more cups of tea to make, you know.
I’ve been reliably informed that it’s getting much hotter outside. But who needs it? As I’ve demonstrated so gracefully, with my chair, my porn and my dick… I’ve got all the heat right here.
It’s a question that’s been asked over and over and over again. For the curious reader running the gauntlet of op-ed pieces – medical popular science claiming that masturbation is healthy for young men (because girls don’t masturbate, obviously); strait-laced but very angry, ranty sex-negative activists linking all masturbation to porn and using that to plan an attack; bright and breezy articles about masturbation being all rainbows, sunshine and candy; the endless “ZOMG! LOL!” of the tabloids – one question always rears its head.
How much masturbation is too much?
It’s also not a question I’m too keen on asking. A more salient question – and one which isn’t so judgemental – would be “is there such a thing as too much masturbation?” As a young man who came to masturbation quite late (I was 18 when I started), it was a question I asked myself more than a few times… never coming to a clear conclusion. I could have thought more about it, but I usually got distracted and would, instead, go off for a stress-relieving wank.
The fact that it took me years before I admitted to masturbating also delayed the occasion that I got around to asking anyone else about it. JackinWorld, an American website all about it, gave a slightly nebulous attempt at an answer – something like “there is no such thing as too much masturbation, unless it interferes with your daily life and usual activities,” which meant very little to me as a student, but made a friend laugh for about half an hour when I read it to him.
“Usual activities?” he wheezed, turning around in his computer chair.
“I don’t know,” I shrugged, reclining on his bed. “I mean, how many times do you do it?”
“Twice a day, maybe? Except when people are staying with me… then I don’t do it at all.”
“Not at all?”
“Not always.”
As our conversation continued from there on, and continued onto MSN once I’d gotten home that night, we shared more. We both enjoyed masturbation; we both set time aside for it as well as doing it spontaneously; we both watched porn when we needed an aid (he was gay, so didn’t like any of my recommendations); we both masturbated even when talking to other people on MSN… which, of course, made me wonder. But not too much.
Something I didn’t tell him was that, for years, I was convinced I was masturbating too much. I was, initially, a victim of my own efforts to stop completely – and, when that didn’t work, to cut down. “I’ll jerk,” I’d tell myself, “but I won’t jerk off. I don’t need any orgasms.” My blossoming sex life was more of a continuing cycle of masturbating, having orgasms, feeling guilty, deleting all my porn… and starting again.
I also didn’t tell him that I didn’t start masturbating until after I’d had sex for the first time – well after – or that I used to deal with my erections by curling into the foetal position and waiting for them to subside. And, of course, I didn’t tell him anything about my continuous attempts to quit.
It wasn’t until university that I gave up trying to give up. I had a lot of free time and had, in a short space of time, been dumped by my girlfriend, forgotten by all those at school and realised that I wasn’t going to make any new friends where I was. I bought some telephony equipment, hacked into the internet from my room, and discovered a whole new world of porn, erotica, and sexual excitement.
And I haven’t looked back.
So if you were to ask me the question – is there such a thing as too much masturbation (and, if so, how much is too much?) – I doubt I’d ever reach a definitive answer. I can reminisce at length about my own experiences, attempts, discoveries and masturbation. I can tell you how much I masturbate now, or even how much I used to. With my memory, I can even think back to frank conversations about exactly how much wanking went on in my early 20s.
But I can’t give you an answer. Because there isn’t one. There’s one for me; there’s one for you. Like most things in life, the answer’s probably different for everyone. I’m not everyone, so I can’t answer that question.
But I can give you one piece of advice, based on my own history:
I wonder if there is a checklist somewhere, or a flow chart, that parents have to work their way down when one of their children gets married. Of course, one of those is the egregious “why aren’t you going to have children?” discourse (GOTN has an excellent post about this) – as if that’s the default, or something. I, of course, have already given my family my reasons for this.
In fact, I’m not sure any of the five left in my generation want to have children. The family continues with my one niece and nephew!
So they moved onto the next box.
“Have you talked about what to do with your names yet?”
Strangely enough, it’s not the sort of light conversation that I had thought of having, at least not midway through our cute honeymoon in Stockholm.
I have thought about it, though.
When I was 16, I had started to envision what married life would be like if I ever managed to marry my current crush. (I even built up a sitcom-style introductory sequence in my head, complete with theme tune.) At that point, I was dead set on taking her last name, rather than having her take mine. I quite liked the way it sounded, and if you add the fact that her father (for whom I used to work) did the same thing, it kind of made sense to continue the tradition.
I’m not overly keen on my surname anyway. It’s difficult to spell – since it’s a homophone for another word that already exists and people keep spelling it that way – people have had issues pronouncing it, too. In fact, I have the same first, middle, and surnames of my great-great-grandfather… and his father… and his father… and, you’ll never guess what… his father.
And they were all butchers, apart from Grandad, who made weapons.
I am so pleased my dad became an actor.
I feel, as you may understand, very little connection to this family who were founded on principles which I believe to be ethically wrong, and our coat of arms is particularly stupid (it’s a red cock on a shield and there’s nothing else). My immediate family is very important to me, sure, but historically? No. I don’t really need my surname.
But then of course there’s the issue of my wife’s name, one which is also impossible to spell and pronounce, plus it’s their dad’s surname, and they never had a particularly good relationship with their dad. Their assumed Internet name of “Sleight” suits her much better, and I’ve ever started thinking of them as “Jill Sleight” in my head.
But back to me. I’m keeping my own name for the simple reason that the legal hoops I’d have to jump through would be a massive headache. I’d need to change bank details, passport, work details, qualifications, student loan accounts, Government documents… I’ve claimed benefits for a while so that would be changed, too. Not to mention the subscriptions I have for Nintendo, Cineworld, and Green Party membership. Oh, and my trade union membership and probably about a million other things that I’ve forgotten to list here.
And people refer to me by my last name at work, so I’d need to deal with that somehow.
I’d need to pay to change it, as well.
Just thinking about this makes my head hurt, and I wouldn’t wish to foist this extra amount of stress onto my wife. I’m fairly sure neither of us want to burden the other with a surname which carries an amount of baggage, and seeing as how only one of the married couples I know (Robinson and Lovely) have taken that step (and it took her years, as well), I can very much see the rational behind it.
But then it hit me that I’m married now. I did it. It’s done. We have a life to lead, and as to what my wife’s name is, I genuinely don’t care.
It’s their decision and I’ll go along with whatever they decide, because it really shouldn’t be an issue.
My family can move on to the “so are you going to buy a house?” question whenever they want. I’ll give them time for that one.
On LiveJournal, LiveJournal Makin’ fun of your friends behind their back LiveJournal, LiveJournal Chronicle your gerbil’s heart attack on LiveJournal
Oh boy, oh boy, oh (innocent lover)boy. This has been a really busy week so far and it’s only going to get busier. Bashing out a few blog posts was something on the back of my mind – say, one every day leading up to my wedding and one the day afterwards – but that may not be the most realisable thing. We shall see.
Anyway, here’s the meme I’m using in lieu of writing any real content. Today’s TMI Tuesday is almost entirely about online dating.
My first relationship started here!
I’ll point out here that I haven’t actually done a lot of online dating. It is true that I have met all four girlfriends online, and even then it’s been via blogging rather than dating sites – LiveJournal, Blogger and WordPress are my dating sites. In a few days’ time I’m marrying someone I nominally met on Twitter.
But I have set up profiles on dating sites – mostly adult ones. I’ve also had a stab at some of the more conventional ones. Were I single now, I’d almost certainly be trying one of the hookup apps… but then, I’m not single, am I?
1. What is your go-to question to ask in online dating?
This is difficult, because I don’t like asking questions; I’m much better at answering them. That’s not just an excuse to talk about me, it’s just something I’m more comfortable doing!
I like popular culture, so sometimes I’ll ask a question in that direction. The French au pair I once met on a dating site wasn’t very forthcoming with conversation until I asked her if she had seen The King’s Speech. She hadn’t, but she liked Natalie Portman and wanted to see Black Swan.
In the end I went to see Black Swan on my own. She moved back to France shortly after this.
2. How old is the picture you use for your online dating profile?
Since I don’t have an active profile, I can’t really answer that fairly.
Here’s something fun. When I was about 25, I got a picture taken of me in which I looked perhaps my best ever. It wasn’t truly representative of what I actually look like, but I did look pretty good in it, so for a while I used it for everything – Facebook profile picture, MySpace avatar, LiveJournal icon, and, yes, dating site image.
On my about page is a digital recreation of that very picture – it’s the one I sent to Boots for reference. I even once tried to use that as my profile picture on FUCK.com (but they weren’t happy about that!).
So, yes, that was my dating site image.
3. What is your biggest dating pet peeve?
Ghosting. I can’t stand it.
I’ve been ghosted many, many times – by people I’m talking to online, people who I’ve arranged to meet and haven’t turned up, and of course I’ve been a jobseeker, so I’m used to potential leads just vanishing into the ether.
It probably isn’t too difficult to say something like, “I’m sorry, but I’ve found someone / I’m not interested / I’m too busy / You are about as attractive as a buffalo’s bum,” or maybe that is difficult (I’ve never turned someone down so I wouldn’t know!), but it’s much politer than to just leave someone hanging.
I tend to invest a lot in romance, and I put a lot of effort into this sort of thing, so to be casually cast aside without being told I was cast aside did a massive number on my self-confidence.
At one point in my life I was responsible for hiring. I wrote back to every single applicant, even if they were applying on-spec when there weren’t any vacancies. I felt like I should be able to do for them what I wish had been done for me.
4. What are your goals with online dating?
Yeah,
So.
On the few times I set up online dating profiles, I was really just looking for sex. Anything else would have been a bonus.
This was, once, relatively successful. The… whatever I had… with Alicia was the result of flirting on an adult dating site. We had great sex and shared good company with nice food. It was never going to be a long-term thing, but for what it was, this was a brief success story for me.
It also broke my years-long dry spell, so I was grateful to find that I still had the knack.
5. Have you ever slid into a stranger’s DMs? Did they respond?
“Slid” sounds wrong. I’m aware that “slid” is both the simple past and past participle of the verb “to slide”, but it sounds wrong. Mind you, so do “slad” and “slud”.
What was this question about again?
Oh, yes. I’ve never sent a DM to a stranger with some sort of ulterior motive, and never really to flirt, If I want to talk to someone I know on social media, I’ll follow them first, at least. If I’ve got a lot to say, e-mail is there for that purpose!
I didn’t use this to date. But to flirt, sure…
When I used to spent a lot of time on sexchat, I got a lot of unsolicited DMs (known as “PMs” or “queries” on IRC), mostly from angry, horny men who didn’t realise that I wasn’t a lady, since I had a fairly gender-neutral IRC handle and was both chatty and smart in the channels, which was usually a sign of someone not being a dude looking for cyber.
These I mainly ignored.
Bonus: Do you think a couple’s finances should be together or separate?
This question came up recently. I was aghast at the assumption that my fiancée and I had a joint account.
I’ve actually got three: my current account (which is always overdrawn), my savings account (empty), and a third account to pay rent and bills with (which is – as of today – also empty). My other half has two, although I’m not sure how much is in either of those.
We’re going to need money for our honeymoon. I’ll puzzle that one out later.
I genuinely don’t see the point of going through the rigmarole of setting up a shared bank account for two people earning different amounts of money at different times. Having separate accounts, where one of us bails the other out, has saved our lives at a few points.
Plus, I don’t think I’ll ever do it. My sister did it with her ex, and they broke up shortly afterwards. She lost a lot of money from that.
Look at this sandwich! It’s made of cheese! Cheese is the best kind of sandwich! (We do not have toasting facilities.) SANDWICH! SANDWICH! SANDWICH! SANDWICH!
Two people I don’t know much about.
I have lots to say, but very little time to say it. In the meantime, please make do with this here meme.
A bit of trivia before we start. I actually have the complete works of Elvis Costello. My parents bought me a box set for my birthday once (and, if it wasn’t the complete works, it was damn well near, even including B-sides and the like), despite me not really knowing who he was. A couple of weeks later the box set vanished, and I only found out where it had gone when Elvis Costello songs started appearing on my parents’ mix tapes.
Today’s TMI Tuesday is lifted entirely from questions asked to Costello by Stephen Colbert. I don’t know who Stephen Colbert is either.
1. What is the best sandwich?
Here’s another bit of ILB Trivia: cheese sandwiches are my favourite food.
I will diversify, of course. Cheese and tomato. Cheese and spring onion. Cheese and chives. Cheese and (vegan) ham (alternative). Cheese and egg. My very favourite treat in the world, surpassing even my beloved sherbet lemons, is an honest-to-God cheese toastie.
Harris + Hoole do a really good one, but the sandwich shop just around the corner from us will do basically the same thing at a fraction of the price,
And now I’m hungry. Obviously.
2. Scariest animal?
I like all animals, and I can’t honestly say that I’m scared of any of them.
When I was a very young child, I was scared of spiders, or at least I thought I was. I had a quasi-nightmare once in which I would see a crowd of spiders and shout “SPIDERS!” at them until they ran away. I was once asked why I was scared of them and said, truthfully, that I wasn’t; I was just scared that I might hurt them if I got too close.
I was also terrified by the animatronic dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, even though I like animatronics, I like dinosaurs and I like the Natural History Museum. Again, I was very young at the time.
3. Ever asked someone for an autograph?
Yes. I will admit to being a bit of an autograph hound, or at least I was in my teens and early twenties. I’ve got the members of James several times, plus Mark Lamarr, Skreen from the Cuban Boys, Phillipa Forrester and CJ de Mooi.
My favourite experience of collecting an autograph was from Mel Smith. I was at a West End musical for my 18th birthday and he was in the audience. I asked him for his autograph and explained who I was and why I was there. He signed it with, “Happy 18th, from Mel Smith.”
I also once got one of the Jedwards at the premiere of Keith Lemon: The Film. As the signature was an illegible squiggle, I’ve still no idea which Jedward it was.
4. Favourite action movie?
Despite the fact that I’ll always tell you first that I prefer comedy, fantasy and sci-fi, I do have a lot of love for action as a genre.
Sharkboy, sans Lavagirl.
But there’s a lot of crossover there. Sci-fi films have a lot of action in them, usually. Are superhero films action, or are they fantasy or sci-fi themselves? What is Deadpool if not a comedy? Avengers: Endgame has a time travel plot, so is it more sci-fi than action? The live-action Cutie Honey adaptation is fun, but is it just that: fun?
For that matter, where do the Star Wars movies go? There’s plenty of action in them and I could watch all nine over and over again.
In fact, the only movie I can think of which is “just” action that I enjoy the most is the Jason-Statham-versus-shark flick The Meg! And even that’s funny!
5. Favourite rom-com?
My first instinct is to put Four Weddings and a Funeral, because my uncle is in it, but then again, my uncle’s been in a lot of stuff. Anyway, it’s not really my style.
I quite like When Harry Met Sally, Love, Simon and Warm Bodies. But I’m going to go for Muppets Treasure Island. Yes, it’s totally a rom-com. I’ll be taking no further questions.
6. Window or aisle?
These questions don’t give a lot of detail, do they? They may as well be asking whether I prefer the aesthetics of the word “window” or “aisle”.
Assuming that this isn’t the case and that I’m meant to be thinking about seats on public transport, my default answer is probably “window”. Whether I’m gazing dreamily out of a coach window, seeing the only oxbow lakes I’ve ever been aware of while speeding through countryside on a train, or even on a bus to work, I like to see the rest of the world from my little travel bubble.
Last week I took a plane (for the first time in years) to Germany and back. On the return trip I had a window seat. I intended to spend the flight looking down at Germany and France, then the Channel, until I touched down in Stansted. This worked well enough until clouds got in the way.
I’d forgotten about clouds.
7. Favourite scent?
I have a few of these, and some are the classics – fresh bread, newly-cut grass, brewing coffee, that sort of thing. I also like lemon, as I’m a citrus person, and wood smoke, as I’m a camping person! It’s very calming to me!
My favourite perfume is Flower by Kenzo, although that’s probably bias because the Seamstress used to wear it (she probably still does!). It’s a nice scent nonetheless.
But my very, very favourite scent is new books. I love it, and I especially love it when I’ve bought some to breathe in as well!
8. Least favourite scent?
Cigarette smoke. I genuinely can’t stand it.
The Seamstress (again!) once accepted a cigarette from a friend when offered one, a decision I found difficult to parse since she was, nominally, a non-smoker. Her rationale was that it was difficult to say no to a friend, which I also felt sounded weird – even if it’s a friend, what you’re saying no to is sticking a roll of burning leaves in your mouth, pouring tar into your lungs and dramatically increasing a risk of several interestingly-named deadly diseases.
She didn’t see it this way. It was only years later that I realised that, for a person who spent a lot of her time telling me to be more assertive, this was a moment of weak will from her, for the sake of something she probably didn’t enjoy anyway!
9. Most used app on your phone?
Twitter. I don’t really use my phone for anything else. I keep in contact with people, mostly, through WhatsApp, but Twitter is genuinely the app I’ll open first, even if purely by habit.
Unlike a lot of people, I don’t game on my phone. I’m a console gamer, mostly, and can’t really justify paying even a small amount for a momentary distraction when I could be playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land on my Switch, which is about two metres from the place I usually use my phone!
10. You only get one song to listen to for the rest of your life, what is it?
Wow, this is a long meme.
I genuinely can’t answer this question. I’d get sick of any one song, even one of my favourites, if I had to listen to it over and over again for however long I’ve got to live. I’d probably end up choosing one of my own, if I had to, as long as I didn’t inflict that on anyone else, as being in my presence they’ve probably suffered enough!
Bonus: Describe the rest of your life in five words.
“The rest of your life” already is five words, genius.
Since I’ve been struggling to think of things to write, I’m once again grateful for the existence of Five Things. MPB has been unwell for a while, which means that the meme appeared to have stalled for a while. It’s back tomorrow, and there’s an accidental crossover with an upcoming Kink of the Week, so I can be a massive troll and take part in both memes before the link parties open.
ILB, you crafty little rascal.
Anyway, so, clothes. I can do that. I wear clothes.
1) My Look
I don’t really have what could be termed a ‘look’. Throughout my life I’ve stuck to casual wear as often as possible – ranging from tracksuits to combat trousers. I wear T-shirts most of the time, as well, as opposed to shirts – which I wear to work – and I’ll generally put on the first thing I can find, without making some sort of attempt to co-ordinate.
I also don’t tend to source my clothes from any particular place. I hardly ever buy any – I sometimes get a few for Christmas. Some of my favourite clothes have been in my possession for as long as I can remember, and some I’ve owned since I was 14!
If you’ve met me at Eroticon, you’ll probably have noticed that I turn up in a flannel shirt. Rose once tried to talk me out of wearing it to Erotic Meet, so I didn’t. I tried to stop her, but she overpowered me!
2) Not My Look
I strenuously resist, and will continue to resist, fashionable clothes. Despite knowing people who work in the industry – and I even went to a Viktor & Rolf exhibition once – I’ve never become attached to the idea of being a fashion victim.
Throughout my adolescence and young adulthood I made a conscious effort to not appear fashionable. I wore the most outdated things I could find and, if something suddenly appeared to be ‘in’, I stopped wearing it. Until the age of about 12 or 13 my garment of choice was an oversized Super Mario Bros. 2 tee, often coupled with blue shorts.
I’ve never been cool and have no desire to be, so why try?
3) Rock ’em, sock ’em
In an attempt to placate the vague implications of participating in KOTW.
When I was a child I never wore socks. I once asked my mother why African tribesmen in TV dramas never wore footwear and she said something about having tough feet due to walking through deserts. While I’m not sure that was actually true, I spent years attempting to toughen my feet by going barefoot while playing my adventure games in the garden or alleyway behind my house.
Green socks. I’m not even sure if I own any.
Which is ironic, really, because socks are my favourite clothes. I don’t have any special ones – they’re mostly black, grey, or blue. But I like the way they feel – they keep in the large amount of heat one loses through the soles of one’s feet, they are pleasantly soft and comfortable, and the few times I’ve had sex wearing them, it’s always been pleasant…
I’ve also appeared in ES Magazine wearing nothing but pants and a pair of socks! (I’ve tried to tell my family this, but they didn’t believe me.) It’s not a fantastic likeness, though; a quick glance at the issue reminds me that I look more like the bloke on the next page whom GOTN is trying to seduce.
4) My Colour
I don’t have a colour, as such.
Some people do. My fiancée wears nothing but black (yes, I know black isn’t a colour); my youngest cousin favours vibrant colours including bright green hair and yellow nail varnish. My uncle wears Hawaiian shirts. I don’t really do any of those.
Most of my clothes are blue, grey, blue-grey, dark green, or khaki. It’s not a deliberate attempt to do anything, but it does tend to suit my mood. I’m struggling now to think if I’ve ever owned anything yellow. I don’t like red (the colour; I don’t care what I wear), but I once owned an oversized red jumper with a white stripe down the middle.
Which I’ve just realised is the Austrian flag. Fantastic.
5) …and a sex thing.
Basically in order to fit this into what is ostensibly a sex blog.
I’ve very rarely had sex with any clothes on, although it’s occasionally just happened. My favourite trope, despite this, in soft porn is for people to have sex with some of their clothes on – often just their shoes – and my favourite look on a woman is for her to be topless but still wearing blue jeans!
Before I had sex for the first time, my girlfriend and I used to engage in dry sex – that is, the movements (and some of the noises), but with clothes on. It was fun, cheeky, and now that I think about it, probably quite cute.
“Do you know what the problem is?” she said once, as we lay in a tangle. “No,” I said, worried that she genuinely wasn’t enjoying herself.” “Clothes,” she said simply.
Say I love you, girl, but I’m out of time Say I’m there for you, but I’m out of time Say that I’ll care for you, but I’m out of time Said, I’m too late to make you mine, out of time
An appropriate picture since I’m the King of Cake.
Wow, okay, it has been a while since I did a blog post.
Time has not been on my side. I have spent two weeks caring for a fiancée with incredibly debilitating COVID-19 (worse than when I had it; I just slept most of mine off). The art project I’ve been doing has been pretty stop-start as a result of this, and although it started well, I genuinely don’t think I’m going to finish it before the deadline. I’m also still looking for a job and, every now and again, have a trial day somewhere that fails, or get given a start date somewhere that ghosts me.
I genuinely want to blog – it’s one of my favourite things to do, even here partway through year fifteen. However, with everything going on at the moment (even though it seems like I have a lot of free time, I genuinely don’t), blogging has had to fall on the back burner.
It’s fitting, then, that one of the few snatches of time I’ve got to knock out a post is on a Tuesday, when there’s a handy meme to get the fires burning. I don’t know if there’s a theme with this one (it appears to be “savour”, as evidenced by the image), but it genuinely allowed me to get my geek on.
1. What did you last savour and when?
Three Batman-themed OREOs. Just now.
OK, I will explain. There are now OREOs with Batman’s face on them, to tie in with the upcoming release of The Batman. They don’t actually taste any different from normal OREOs, nor do they cost more. But I am a gullible fool, and yesterday I was having a Batman marathon thanks to a box set I got for Christmas, so in the evening I saw a pack and bought it.
J’onn and his one true love.
I’m still not going to get over the fact that they’ve never made Martian Manhunter OREOs. I mean, he’s the superhero who actually manages to savour them.
2. Athletic, mind-blowing sex or slow, sexy romantic sex, what do you want right now?
Can’t slow, romantic sex also be mind-blowing?
In any case, having not had sex for about six or seven years now, any type of sex would be good for me. I’ve put on a bit of weight and lost the use of my left arm since, though, so I’d be a little nervous about not being that good any more!
(Is my excuse, anyway. I’d probably just get her to orgasm via oral and then see what happens.)
3. You are being interviewed and asked to comment on sex work. What do you have to add to the discussion?
Nothing that hasn’t already been said, although I have plenty to say about sex work.
I was once stopped by a madam in Soho who offered me girls, and when I politely declined, boys. She also said that I didn’t actually have to have sex – she could offer massages with or without happy endings to savour – but I again politely said no, thank you, I was in a bit of a hurry anyway, but thanks for thinking of me.
I couldn’t fault her sales patter – offering viable alternatives according to the customer’s needs – but I think she was as surprised as I was that I stopped to talk to her!
4. Should sex work be decriminalised?
Yes, and it should have been already.
I’m astounded that it hasn’t been. From what I can tell, criminalisation is dangerous, the Nordic Model is overly regulated, and because there are so many different types of sex work (full-service isn’t the only type – do you count a porn star or an erotic masseuse as a sex worker?), it would be impossible to introduce a law to protect them all.
Decriminalisation is the only way, and it’s only really because of the social stigma that this hasn’t been given a higher agenda. I’m saying this now: if I ever become an MP, it’s the first thing I’m mentioning.
5. Fill in the blank. Don’t…
…throw fruit at the computer. Don’t what? Don’t throw fruit at the computer. Don’t what? Don’t throw fruit at the computer.
Who do they think I am? Some kind of fool?
(If you know what this is, I love you.)
Bonus: Are you bored with people who are successful and unhappy? Why?
No; people who are successful and unhappy are fascinating. It’s interesting to see exactly why people can be emotionally down when economically up, and it’s also a refreshing antithesis to the “greed is good” philosophy of the ’80s and the already-rich silver-spoon élitism of the Tories.
I’m more bored with those who are successful and happy, or even worse, successful and smug about it. Even if (and this is overall not the case) they have actually worked for it, the way they overtly savour their wealth is sickening.
Of course, a lot of the most interesting people I don’t know have no idea what they want to do with their life. There are a lot of cultural riches to be found within the average Joe, and so many more than you will find behind the vacuous smile of someone so often in the spotlight.
I was an opinionated little boy. Ask ten-year-old ILB and he would tell you that he was a pacifist. At nine, he became a vegetarian. At eight, he cried to his mother that he was upset by boys in his class using the word ‘gay’ as an insult. At two, a Tory canvasser came to the door and he squeaked “Vote Labour!” while sitting on his father’s shoulder.
I had my moments at the age of eleven, just after I started secondary school. A woman in uniform came to assembly to recruit young children to be cadets and I got up and walked out. My head of year said we had visiting rats who came to the playground after dark so I left food for them in hidden corners. I complained loudly about the school selling Nestlé products and refused to use the tuck shop unless they stopped (they didn’t stop; I stopped buying tuck).
My one blind spot was sex.
I’ve known about sex since I was about two, but the concept never appealed to me. I’d missed out on the year 5 sex ed video because I was sick that day, but I didn’t miss anything I didn’t really know. I knew, basically, the mechanics of it all, but I considered it dirty, and disrespectful, even – that is to say, I pretended I did. In reality, I was starting to get interested in sex; I still didn’t want to have any, but I found the concept a fascinating study.
And this was a rapid change.
A teasing young girl came up to ask me if I was interested in someone I’d never heard of before. When I said that I wasn’t, she answered with “So you don’t think she’d be good in bed?” “I don’t know what it’s like in bed,” I said theatrically, with an eye-roll. Later that day, I tried to envision what it would actually be like. The following day, I did the same. And again, and again, and again…
My brain invented my sex machine once we’d had the biology module and I knew what sex could actually look like. By this point, I was too far gone – and, although I wasn’t masturbating (because I knew that was wrong), I had come around the idea that sex, although it still wasn’t for me, was okay.
By the end of the year, the eleven-year-old boy who wrote the sentence “I don’t know why humans would want to have sex other than to have children” was twelve, standing in his RS classroom, making a speech about how sex outside marriage was perfectly OK, consent to such an act was perfectly dependent upon the individual, oh, and that there was nothing wrong with being gay. (That wasn’t in the question: I just added it on.)
Young ILB grew quicker than he would have liked, but his opinions kept coming. He fiercely defended his opinion on gay people in year 9 when his History class seemed resistant to the concept. He stood outside biology classes when they dissected animal hearts. He stopped fights by standing between the belligerents, preferring that they hit him instead of each other.
And, by the time he was fourteen, he was a full-on sexual justice warrior, fiercely defending the right of people to have sex when, how and if they wanted to – talking freely about consent, what an orgasm was, how to use a condom, and wondering exactly what periods were, since they didn’t tell us that bit. I even tried to talk to my parents about sex (they were a little abashed).
Young ILB’s first real sexual obsession.
At 17, I was one of the first (and few) young people in my year to lose his virginity; by 18, I was one of the… two? three? ish? people in the year who was actually having regular sex with a regular partner. I was dumped when still 18, and until the age of 21, while not having any sex at all I was getting in touch with my sexual identity, pleasuring myself all the way through university.
36-year-old ILB looks back and wonders where the binary switch was.
And now it comes to me that maybe I wasn’t alone here. Maybe everyone had a moment where they woke up and suddenly a “sex is gross” / “sex is great” volte-face clicked into place. Possibly a single epiphanic event or possibly a number of experiences. Or, like me, it just happened.
It’s just occurred to me that I’ve never really asked anyone.
During the week a local councillor was suspended from the Green Party of England and Wales for transphobia. As co-chair of the GPEW’s “Women’s Group”, she made the “unremarkable factual observation that transwomen are not female” (not my words). She was ousted from her position for this.
Kathryn Bristow, her co-chair, is a transwoman – or, as the co-ordinator for the Bridgwater Green Party puts it, “a man who wishes to be identified as a woman”. The GPEW councillor in Sunderland weighed in on this, including sentences like this:
“I have witnessed female colleagues issued with death threats and threats of rape by trans rights activists, so in comparison, I have only had a small taste of this vile behaviour.”
gpew sunderland councillor
The prevailing wisdom in the under echelons of the GPEW is that, despite the fact that we passed a gender self-ID motion at Conference, trans people (and, more specifically, M-to-F transwomen) are dangerous to women and children. Pink News reports on this story here.
Yesterday I received an e-mail from my local Green Party (of which I am still a paying member) in which the writer, a party contact, said this:
As a party that claims/seeks to respect science it is outrageous that someone has been suspended for saying that transwomen are not female. Firstly, it’s true. Transwomen have XY chromosomes, the definitive marker for male sex.
local green party contact
He followed this up by saying that “telling the truth is, for [him], a matter of conscience.” So I did the same.
My e-mail read thus:
Much as I shouldn’t be surprised by any of this, I am astounded that this sort of viewpoint exists within the GPEW and maybe even some fringes of [my local GP].
Transphobia is not, in any way, an acceptable point of view, and as much as it can be an ‘accidental’ prejudice, it is nevertheless a prejudice, and both dangerous and damaging in every imaginable way, comparable to racism, sexism and homophobia. I have already had my issues with whorephobia (SWERFism) in the GPEW; on this issue, however, I am not content to be silent.
First of all, although ‘sex’ is biologically defined by chromosomes at birth, ‘gender’ is a social construct, and often weaponised. As a cisgender male, I’ve been subjected to “boys don’t cry” narratives (occasionally with those exact words); the recent tragic death of Sarah Everard has added weight to the right-wing media’s “girls are weak” and/or “need protection by men from men” sort of thing. All these viewpoints are damaging. They are insulting. They do not help. They also promote gender stereotypes which we should be working to eliminate.
We should not be focusing on ‘protect our daughters’, rather ‘educate our sons’. However, it is equally important to acknowledge that not everyone is a daughter or a son.
As a social construct, and as a matter of consent, gender is intrinsically flexible and changeable, and it is the individual’s right to make that decision (as many times as they wish; gender identity can be switched at any time, and as there are more than two genders in existence, this decision can be made multiple time), it is incredibly dangerous to label someone as one gender, especially if they have explicitly said they identify as another. If you are uncertain, it is possible to just ask someone what their gender identify and/or preferred pronouns are; neither question is offensive.
It is grossly offensive to call someone who identifies as a woman ‘a man’ or ‘male’. This is a genuine insult and has no place in acceptable, moral discourse. Trans people have suffered under the pressures of societal norms for far too long (and they shouldn’t have suffered to begin with). The right-wing press label trans activists as unnatural; they are seen with suspicion or unwarranted curiosity for the simple act of not being cis, or hetero, or both, or either. Even at an inclusive event, trans people are often singled out – a lesbian activist group at Pride in London came under fire for handing out anti-trans leaflets, saying that transwomen are not women. Jess Phillips MP recently read out a list of “women and girls” in Parliament, purported to be a list of all female victims of violence, but excluding all transwomen, who weren’t on the list as its author considers them to be ‘not real women’.
Do you have any idea how insulting this is?
It’s been said at some point that the GPEW is tying itself in knots about trans rights when we should instead be focusing on the climate emergency (and we should, but we are not a single-issue party and I would urge us not to become so). But we shouldn’t be. It is not an issue to be debated, it is a simple fact:
Trans women are women Trans men are men Some people don’t have a gender Gender is something you identify yourself
and
TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS
and I will not stand by while anyone says anything different. Come at me if you will, but everything I have said above is correct.
ilb (he/him)
I make no apology for anything I said in the above. I joined the GPEW in 2010 because I saw it as an inclusionist, radical left-wing party and this is the first time I have been genuinely shaken by something somebody in the party has said (even if it goes against party policy).
I am sharing this on my blog because I feel that it needs to be highlighted before the press gets their hands on this story.
I am not resigning from the GPEW, but I plan to challenge these damaging and transphobic views in my local party’s upcoming AGM. I will, of course, update you with anything else that arises from this.
