#13 - laughing out loud at what others would deem to be an inappropriate moment...

I can still remember my first time like it was yesterday – from the film that we watched before the big deed, to the dodgy roll-up he made me afterwards that I pretended to smoke even though I don’t really like cigarettes, and I especially don’t like dodgy roll ups that have a bit of rizla card for a filter. I also remember being really annoyed that, despite much research on my part beforehand to work out what to expect, it had been rather rubbish. No doubt due in part to my own massive insecurities (ahhh sex! What if I’m rubbish? What if I look different to every other girl he’s ever had sex with? What if I look different to every other girl IN THE WORLD? Oh God I’m a freak of womankind, AND I’ve got a spot on my chin...) I was really, really worried that it was going to go horribly wrong, and that somehow I would be a failure at sex, and therefore at life. When it finally happened my main aim was to get it over with as quickly as possible, without saying or doing anything monumentally stupid.

This turned out to be exactly what happened. I can say categorically, without a hint of a lie, that I was a failure at sex that night, despite all my efforts to get through it without any mistakes. As I reflect now on that fateful night several years ago, I can see with perfect clarity where it all went horribly wrong for me, made all the more clear by the fact that I have never made this mistake again.

I did not laugh.

As a fully grown member of the adult brigade I really enjoy the fact that sex is a thoroughly entertaining business. Even the most attractive, lithe and limber couple of greek gods can’t pull off genuinely sexy, non-funny sex for longer than a few minutes at a time, because there’s just too much re-arranging going on! Unless you're willing to stay almost perfectly still in strategically placed lighting that makes everyone look a little bit more tanned and thin than they actually are, then you should be prepared for the fact that having sex sometimes makes you look like an over-excited seal playing find the salmon.

I discovered that sex was unintentionally hilarious when I worked a summer season abroad, nearly a year after that fateful night with the man with no visible sense of humour. For starters, we all lived in caravans.  Caravans are notoriously unsexy dwellings, and we discovered that three people living in a two-bedroom caravan for 4 months did not create a shag-friendly environment. Luckily, we also spent a lot of time wearing fancy dress¹ and getting drunk, which is an extremely shag-friendly environment! A summer of living such a carefree lifestyle completely changed my attitude and expectations of sex forever and for the better. For one thing, I actually enjoyed sex! It’s difficult to believe now that for several months I genuinely didn’t understand why everyone made such a fuss about sex – it wasn’t doing anything for me! I had a fling with one of my fellow holiday reps that opened my eyes to the possibilities of sex (how to risk assess sex in public places² – still one of my favourite extreme sports!) I returned to England with a new found enjoyment of sex and a much better understanding of the importance of intimacy (because you cannot have sex in a high-risk situation with someone you don’t trust!)

¹ which led to my best walk of shame ever - dressed as Princess Leia, with a faint blue sheen courtesy of the smurf I went home with

² do you require an escape route? Is it likely you will be arrested if caught? Is the environment populated with any dangerous flora or fauna? Is there CCTV? If you answered yes to 2 or more of these, then it’s definitely a public place – go for it!

Eight years later and I still feel a little lost in the crazy, strange world of adult relations. Thanks in large part to being single for most of my twenties I have had a fair few sexual partners since my holiday romance³, all of which have been memorable in their own way, for a variety of reasons good and bad. The most vivid memories are really, really good ones, which brings me back around to the point of this long and rambling tale: I am certain that sex is supposed to be fun, and therefore it’s ok to laugh during sex. Recently however I have found myself wanting to laugh for an entirely less savoury reason, and I am laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of one perpetrator: porn.

³ who is now one of my best friends, and has pinky-sworn to invite me on his stag night when it happens – I made him do it because I want to get drunk in Munich and wear a Viking helmet.

‘Laugh at porn?’ I hear you say – and I have done so many times, but never before for this particular reason....For a while now I have maintained a very casual friends-with-benefits relationship with one of my male friends, and even when I lived in London we stayed in sporadic skype contact. He is a very successful artistic type and very attractive to boot (just like me, boom!) and when I first moved back to Devon we had a few nights in together, as two single people are perfectly at liberty to do. I have often thought that a ‘relationship’ like this one is often the best way to enjoy the kinkier aspects of your sexual personality, safe in the knowledge that the only time you will ever have to look the other person in the eye is when you agree on a safe word. This was certainly true of our situation, and as much as I enjoyed spending time with him it was safe in the knowledge that he would never make for a good long term emotional investment⁴. As much as I respect and admire him as an artist, and enjoy his company (naked or otherwise) he has one flaw that is impossible to avoid – he has sex like he’s in a porn film.

⁴ for example, I’m fairly certain he has had sex with at least 5 of my friends, which makes for a very strange game of ‘Six degrees of separation’ that my mind can’t quite handle. I’m not one of life’s sharers.

To be clear – I am not a porn prude. I have watched a lot of porn in my adult life, for a variety of reasons including entertainment, personal gratification, educational purposes, masters research and boredom, and have come to the conclusion that porn is ruining people’s sex lives.

I’m certainly not the first person to notice this – Caitlin Moran dedicated a chapter of her book ‘How to be a Woman’ to the topic, and Mr B Gentleman Rhymer raps melodically about the lack of kissing in porn. I spent hours of university lectures discussing how unerotic pornography has become⁵ and even more hours drinking wine with my friends and comparing notes on how rubbish we think porn is (which makes me a pub quiz level porn expert, at the very least). There are many ways to ruin a perfectly good sex session, and most of the ones I have experienced are related to copying moves you’ve seen in a cheap n’ nasty free porn vid (such as those available on youporn). The more I researched the more I realised that I have, for several years, been the recipient of stealth porn shagging! So many times my concentration during a sexual encounter has been disrupted by an awkward or confusing action that doesn’t fit with the natural rhythm of the moment, but I had never made the connection until recently...they were doing porn at me!!

⁵ which led to a heated debate about whether or not the table dancing scene in ‘From Dusk til Dawn’ is misogynistic. My personal view was that Salma Hayek effectively penetrates Quentin Tarantino after simulating urinating on him with a bottle of beer in a public place...no one else shared my interpretation.

Some of you are probably nodding knowingly – you too have experienced someone doing porn at you. If however you are still in the dark (or you think you might be a porn-doer!), here’s my top ten list of things I have personally experienced over the past 8 years that indicate someone is doing porn at you...

1.     Foreplay consists of attempting to wear you like a glove puppet, followed by genuine surprise that you don’t really enjoy that very much, especially when only given 30 seconds to warm up.

2.     Foreplay consists of saying hello, removing you clothes and attempting to enter the dangerzone in the space of 2 minutes. This drops to 1 minute 30 seconds if between the hours of 1am and 5am.

3.     Your partner attempts to have sex with you without touching any part of your body except your tinderbox, leaving you cold, stark and very confused.

4.     Your partner indicates, generally very politely, that they would much prefer you with no pubic hair. The reason will probably be that you will enjoy the sex more. It’s all for you.

5.     Your partner does not want to climax inside you⁵

6.     Your partner changes position every other minute – presumably to get a nice variety of camera angles?

7.     Your partner asks you to call them Daddy⁶.

8.    Your partner uses spit as a lubricant, and applies it by spitting on you.

9.     Your partner attempts anal penetration the first time you have sex.

10. Your partner attempting to 'sprint-shag' you for ten minutes. By then end it feels like someone has punched you in the cervix.

⁵ I am aware that this is not specific to porn, but when accompanied by any two other items from the list it’s a fairly good indicator.

⁶ yes, this happened to me once. No, I still haven’t completely recovered.

If this list sounds a bit unpleasant, that’s because all of these things are unpleasant to experience⁷. Luckily for me I have never had all ten in one sitting – can you imagine the therapy bill? Nevertheless these actions and many more like them are cropping up uninvited more and more in my sex life, and I don’t like it! Going back to my recent encounter with my sex friend, I got to the stage where I could no longer be annoyed if he did some porn at me. As unpleasant as some of these things are, they are also fairly ridiculous. When I realised this I very quietly began to laugh. And in hindsight, I think this is by far the most sensible option. Modern porn is unrealistic, unerotic and seemingly designed for instant visual gratification, with no room for lust, desire, romance or prolonged enjoyment. And that is ridiculous. The man in question however, is incredibly sexy and thoroughly invested in mutual gratification. I’m happy to state he’s in my all-time top three, despite occasional lapses of doing porn at me, thanks in large part to his non-porn related skills of seduction and other nifty tricks.

⁷ If it sounds unrealistic then Congratulations! You don’t do any of these things!

So my message is this – don’t let anyone do porn at you! Don’t do porn to anyone! Put the porn down for a moment and read an erotic novel, or watch Wild Things, or take up tantric sex. Then find someone who would like to share these things with you and share them, in a lovely, holistic, everyone’s having fun no-pants-dance party. And laugh a lot.

#12 - The golden rule(s)...

I recently celebrated another birthday, and as I sat with my best girl friends drinking wine and discussing all the interesting (or otherwise) things happening in our lives at the moment, I was reminded that my friends, though all of a similar age to me, seem to have made a lot more progression than me in the relationship department. I often wonder during quiet moments (on the bus, during the morning briefing, very occasionally in the middle of a live striptease) about how effective my dating strategies are? I deliberated at length before committing to online dating this time last year, and was pleasantly surprised with the results¹. I also discovered that despite spending a large proportion of my adult life singling out tall men with beards to date, that there are some very nice average height clean-shaven men in the world (well...Greater London), and shock horror, that there are literally thousands of single people living in London² who also wish everyone would be a bit nicer and politer and not randomly send obscene text messages to people they met once on a blind date in a chain pub at 5pm³ 

¹including the sex pests - statistically they helped me maintain a high average success rate

²and I presume the rest of the UK, but a lot of that is up north, which is really a bit too far away, and very cold, and despite statements to the contrary, not very friendly

³see #7 - making an exception that leads to a date with a sex pest...bugger the statistical average, it’s just rude

For many years I have lived by my own Golden Rule(s)⁴ of dating, and although not successfully shacked up and shagged out yet, I haven’t experienced any major disasters⁵ by following them.

Fanny’s Golden Rule(s) for successful dating

1.     Tall enough that I can’t tell if they’re going bald.

2.     Own teeth

And that’s it. Really, that’s it. Am I missing something? I always presumed that having flexible⁶ standards would not only offer more opportunities to meet different people, but also ensure that I never became the girl we all secretly hate, who is never satisfied with the appearance, personality or income of her partner (but also manages to never be single!)

⁴the notion of a Golden Rule implies that, like Highlander, there can be only one. But I have two. So there.

⁵although looking over my blog does make me question this...

⁶not low. Just low key.

Some of my particularly honest friends would say that these rules aren’t the sum total of my dating preferences, but I blame this on bringing one too many California boys⁷ home during my university days. They somehow got it into their heads that I only go for the uber-hotties of the world, but this is a tough one to call because, in my head, all the men I have dated have been uber-hot. It’s no secret that I enjoy a man with a beard (and my current celebrity beard of choice is the Big Hairy Growler, aka Dave the Bear. Phwoar.) but this preference is more aesthetic than anything else. I have also given up on exclusively tall men, as after years of rejecting my best friend’s sage advice (on the grounds that she is 4’11” and has no concept of what it feels like to be taller than your boyfriend) I have come to realise that you really can’t tell the difference when you’re lying down.

⁷see #6 – discovering how unsatisfactory being shallow can be...

And so as another years passes I have started to redefine my golden rule(s) for dating, and as I creep ever so slowly towards 30 with no clear idea in my head of what I may be doing in 6 months/a year/5 years⁸ , these rules are becoming more and more useful when making decisions. As with my taste in food, alcohol and trashy television, my taste in men has improved with age, and requires a more clearly defined set of rules to reflect my refined man palette...

Fanny’s Brand Spanking new Golden Rule(s) for successful dating

1.     Manners – whether you are making a joke at my expense, or subjecting me to some latent sexism (and it happens ladies, when you least expect it someone will do some sexism towards you!) then take a moment to consider: am I being rude? If my face looks like a smacked arse then the answer is almost certainly – yes, you’re being very bloody rude. Shut up please (see, manners.)

2.     Consistency – it’s all well and good to send speedy responses to my text messages or phone calls when you think a shag is on the cards, but if you are unable to write a reply to a general enquiry about dinner/the whereabouts of my keys/why daleks are rubbish villains⁹ in under a week then you are probably just being a bit rude. Because it’s a message, right? Not War and Peace.

3.     Lies – lying is pointless, it only prolongs periods of distress for the person doing the lying. Being lied to is really only a drag when you find out, but you do at least get months, possibly years of blissful ignorance. Liars get months of potential heart failure due to increased stress levels. Don’t lie. It’s just common sense.

4.     Looks – are entirely subjective. I had a conversation recently with a man about how quickly the novelty of a buff gym body wears off, noting that if a man looks like he spends most of his time working out at the gym, then he probably spends most of his time working out at the gym. This also means that a lot of his stories start with ‘So I was at the gym...¹⁰’ Do you see where I’m going here?

5.     Love – is easy to find, but less easy to say. I have managed it a few times, and enjoyed a varied range of responses, and in turn discovered that it is never, ever OK to respond to ‘I love you’ with ‘thanks’.  In this instance, manners will not save you.

6.     Own teeth¹¹

⁸I wrote out my 5 years plan, then hid it somewhere very safe...location currently unknown to me...

⁹they are overgrown pepperpots. Oooh, I’m so scared, I may sneeze myself into oblivion

¹⁰Which is far less entertaining long-term than ‘So I woke up in a skip next to a sign that said “Autobahn”...’

¹¹Because sometimes you need to be a little bit shallow

With my new and improved list of rules I am feeling ready to get back into the dating game. Unfortunately I do still live in the arse-end of nowhere, and there are now only two eligible men left in a 50 mile radius¹², so it looks as though I may be heading back to London soon, if only to sit in a room full of people I don’t already know for a while...

¹²I leave it to you to work out where the third one went – answers on a postcard...