Those cunts. Those absolute cunts. Those fucktard cuntbucket jizz stinking cunts who rejected you. How dare they look into the wonder that you are, and say “No thanks, I’d rather watch football in my pants”? How dare they? On your behalf I am mortified. I am beyond mortified, I am mortally offended, I am disgusted by their lack of taste. Their utter indecency. The swine.

But where do we go from here? Where do we take those feelings, and this box of Quality Street? What do we do with all that fancy lingerie and that perfectly waxed vulva? Firstly, feel it. Feel the anger, feel that boiling rage. Get upset, cry maybe, pace around your workplace throwing photocopies in the air and screaming profanities. Whatever works for you. Don’t hold it in, because you don’t want to become a festering pustule of bitterness. Go for a really long walk, and then stuff a scarf in your mouth and scream till you might be sick. Punch a punchbag and then drink a lot of whiskey. Possibly even cry in a cab on the way home while bleating things like “Only old dudes love me now.” while your friends laugh at your pain.

Once this has happened, and you’ve cried your contact lenses out take a deep breath. You cannot live the rest of your life inside a whirlwind of fury. That man, if he such a spineless scrote can be called a man, deserved your brief anger. If you are to show him that if he had liked he ought to have put a ring on it, then you need to move on.

While some of us like to throw ourselves wildly at whoever is passing at the time of our moving on, may I suggest a better alternative is to evaluate where you went wrong with the scrote. Was it poor judgement? Did they hide their true personality? What could you do better next time? There are times when a douchebag blindsides you, and there are times that, upon further scrutiny, were not worth any of your effort.

A lot of people recommend revenge. Let me tell you now: there is no such thing as revenge. There are only borderline sociopaths who think that the way to make themselves feel better is to bring someone else down to their sad level. People are entitled to reject you as much as you are entitled to feel upset about it. Whether the rejection was being dumped by a cheating fiancé or being knocked back by that guy at work with the really nice coat, it is their prerogative. As cheesy as it may sound the best revenge is living a good life.

So drink that shot, punch that friend (gently), and trash that insignificant gee-gaw that they gave you, then move on, brush the debris out of your fringe, and wait for the offers to start rolling in again, as I am sure, they will.

One morning I was walking to the station with a one night stand from the night before, and as I turned to go through the barriers he asked for my phone number. “Do you really want my number?” He began to nod, “Or do you just want to ask for it now, so that you don’t have to feel awkward about the fact that we slept together, and then take it never to call me again?” The pause felt infinite. “I’m probably not going to call you.” He admitted. “Then don’t fucking take my number then, grow some balls.” And I stormed through the barrier as sassily as was possible.

In retrospect, I may have overracted. A one night stand number swap comes with certain rules: I can text you twice at most, you have the right not to reply to either of these, and if you don’t, I get it, you get it, we all get it. There is no nice way to say to someone “I had sex with you once and that was more than enough.” so don’t, just step back and let the penny drop. However, the rules change when you’ve gone beyond a drunken fumble. Once you’ve taken the time to get to know someone, or at least feigned an interest in something other than their genitals, you owe them a little more than radio silence.

Maybe I’m just an attention whore, but there is nothing that hurts me more than being ignored. If we sat, over dinner, and you asked me for my life story, and I gave it to you, the horrible bits and all, and you told me you were thinking about ‘us’ even when I wasn’t sure there was an ‘us’ to think about, you owe me more than silence. You owe me a sentence, just one, maybe two: I’m sorry, I don’t want to do this anymore. You don’t need to write an essay, you can even go George Costanza and say it’s not you, it’s me. Just acknowledge the fact that this is over, we are done, there is no hope, bail bail bail.

Hope is a terrible thing to give someone when there is none, be it for an hour or a minute. The second you see that carefully crafted message that conveys eagerness, coyness, and a hefty dose of ‘whatever yo I’m totally cool, I can take or leave you, but please text me back because I can’t stop thinking about you, even though this message implies I am terribly busy and chic’, you know what your feelings are. You know whether you want to see them or not. Now I can see what the allure of ignoring is. It means you don’t have to step into an awkward situation, and that you can possibly come back in six months time and attempt to booty call this person when you’re in need of a tug.

On an even more dramatic note silence is disrespectful. It implies that what you had, however brief, meant nothing. It hints that you are too embarrassing, awful, or revolting to converse with, even via text. It also shows that you are a coward, scared of having even the most basic of courtesies, which means you’re unlikely to get that tug in six months time.

What I’m trying to say here is: don’t ignore me fuckface.

Stills from Grease and Pulp Fiction culled from Tumblr, photo by Stanley Kubrick.

Dear Ms Brick,

For all Twitter professes to hate the Daily Mail, I would guess at least 60% of it’s daily hits come directly from left-wing do-gooders like me, who have read some ludicrous article or another, and become apoplectic with rage. When I saw your article being passed around I couldn’t resist the siren’s call: glamour, bitchiness, confusion; and I clicked. So now, after subjecting me to your insane ranting, I’d like to subject you to mine.

First of all, let’s get something out of the way here: you are an ok looking woman. You seem to know what clothes suit you, and you are adept at doing your own hair and make-up. Well done. These are skills some never muster, even with a Gok Wan intervention. However, I feel that your perception of your own beauty may be somewhat skewed. As far as I can make out, a lot of men will do a lot of things to get a tug. There are also, a lot of nice people in the world. You say you have had bottles of champagne bought for you, bar bills waived, and bunches of flowers given to you in the street. Well so have I. I’ve even had a woman (a woman!) pay my excess luggage bill when I couldn’t afford it, and refuse to let me even buy her a bottle of duty free booze. Do I chalk these wonderful coincidences up to be being a stunner? Of course not. I am simply grateful that there are enough nice, and horny, people in the world who want to do me a favour, and then I move on.

Now, let’s take a look at your career. I’m not going to go over the discrepancies between your website’s claims, and IMDb’s records, because it’s cool, I get it: we all bump our CVs up now and again. But what I would like to look at is this sentence: ‘I’m not smug and I’m no flirt’ and contrast it with this one, ‘I have written in the Mail on how I have flirted to get ahead at work’. Now either you do, or you don’t, or someone tweaked your article a little, but I suspect that flirting with your male bosses to get a promotion may be one of the reasons your female co-workers disliked you. Seeing another woman undo the hard work you have put in with a smile and a giggle is demoralising, it sets us back, as women, and again places us as nothing more than sexual beings who just happen to show up to work for the boys’ benefit. But hey, I’m just guessing here. Stop me if I’m wrong.

It seems that rather than other women en masse being jealous of your beauty, you seem to rub it in their faces, believing you are the centre of the universe. ‘Take last week, out walking the dogs a neighbour passed by in her car. I waved — she blatantly blanked me.’ As you are not 12 years old, may I suggest talking to your neighbour? Considering that she may have not noticed you, despite you being a blazing ball of infinite beauty? ‘She doesn’t like me, I discovered, because she views me as a threat. The friend pointed out she is shorter, heavier and older than me.’ Well, when you describe her like that, however could she fail to like you?

Samantha, Sam if I may? You seem to be upset that other women judge you for your looks, and that you profit by them, and yet spend a large portion of the article belittling other people for either not making an effort, and judging them for theirs. Has it never occurred to you that by titling yourself the ‘most attractive girl in a room’ you may be overestimating your impact on the others around you? Have you ever stopped to consider that the female bosses you have had may have disliked you for other reasons? That they just may not have been nice people? Or that you may not have always been the right person for the job? I once had a boss who congratulated me for losing two stone while ill. What I took from that experience was: she is a bad person, not ‘She’s a jealous cow, who wants me to be ill forever. Ergo women are bitches.’

It is rare that I find myself wanting to take someone’s body image down a notch or two, but I think you are one of those rare women who could do with it. If you want to be judged on more than your appearance then start by doing it yourself. Stop assuming that the reason people don’t like you is because you’re a megababe. The world does not revolve around your blow dry. We don’t care if you work out or not, and if we don’t, it’s probably because we don’t want to. Enjoy the treats your attractiveness brings you, for now, because once those flower givers and champagne bringers get to know you, the gifts will soon dry up.

Yours, sincerely,

Vanessa

YOU AREN’T FUCKING TRYING.

I probably should have saved this bombshell for later but seriously, seriously? You want to know why you don’t have one? Think about it. When was the last time you talked to an attractive man? When was the last time you logged into OkCupid? Have you ever given your number to a guy in a coffee shop? Told a friend you thought their friend’s friend could be your boyfriend? Are you out there in the world looking? Or are you at home, logging into twitter, talking about how you’ll be #ForeverAlone?

Look around you girl! The world is full of beautiful people just out there for the picking, and yes it is scary, yes it is stressful, but you want it as much as your Facebook updates suggest you do then you are going to have to work for it. Any man who finds you at home in your knickers plaiting your fringe and singing All By Myself is a rapist (how did he get in your flat uninvited?) And we don’t date rapists.

This isn’t to say you should be doing all the things above, at once, that’s insane. What are you? A Sex and the City character? But you have to put yourself out there to be found. Men are not waiting, in a patient line outside your front door, or by the edge of your desk. They are aware that you don’t have a boyfriend, but are they aware that you want one, or even that you might want them personally? Show a little interest, start a conversation, get knocked back, have a cry, watch Blade Runner weeping on loop for five hours, then go out, find someone else awesome, and do this all again, until it works out, because when it does, it’s worth it.

If you don’t, it is almost certain that you won’t find someone. Love is not like a film: you will not be so instantaneously alluring that you are chased through a city by a dashing hunk who begs to take you for dinner, based on a glimpse of your fringe alone. It is scary, it is hard, it is fucking demoralising when a guy you thought would be fun for a night or two tells you he’s too good for you, but it’s life. There is unfortunately no other choice than to just deal with it.

Now, before you flex your fingers and start to write out a tirade worthy of a YouTube commenter, there are other reasons. Of course there are other reasons! Why am I single when I do all that stuff? I don’t know! Sometimes, it’s just not your time. Sometimes you look amazing, smell delicious, your jokes are just hit after hit after hit, your clothes are fitting and flaring, and that guy just isn’t it it. No-one’s into it. Believe me, I know your pain. There is nothing worse than feeling like you’re at your prime and you can’t give this shit away.

But this post isn’t for us. It’s for the women who clog up dinner talk with how lonely they’ll be, how men are just so useless!!, and how they haven’t had a date, for like years, seriously ladies! So please, before you subject everyone to another ten point list about why it’s like totally depressing that you have to sit alone, with your cats, and like just watch TV all day, think twice: firstly, you don’t; secondly, no-one gives a shit because we know you. We know you.

Photo by Joseph Jasgur and illustration by Riikka Sormunen

I was going to write a really interesting, witty, provocative, blog post about all the things I’ve learnt while doing this Lent challenge, when I realised there was only one thing I wanted to talk about. Now, how do I put this? Shall I be coy? Dive straight in? I don’t know. Ever since I gave up sex for Lent I’ve had one thing on my mind: going downtown. Eating out. Tipping the velvet. A breakfast of champions. Are you catching my drift?

Prior to the last 23 days I’d never thought that much about it. More often than not it was something a guy did to me, and I kinda sorta enjoyed a bit, before we moved onto other things. In fact there were occasional moments when it was utterly awful, terrible, one of the worst things ever to happen. A tiring charade where I tried to get into it, they flailed about, and I said “Let’s do something else” but in the sexiest way I could.

Now, after what feels like an interminable amount of time in the wilderness, I can’t stop thinking about it. My rules stated I could do ‘everything but’ and now when I am near a man, any man who is at least half attractive, the idea pops up in my head. It’s the same process every time I look at them: my eyes feel sort of fuzzy and I slide sideways into an alternate universe where we are making out and then suddenly, inexplicably, we are naked and they are moving gradually southwards.

Needless to say this is becoming slightly hazardous. At the lights I was near a man so hot his bicycle may have been melting underneath him. We happened to be going the same route home and I may have drifted slightly as I cycled and imagined just lying back and doing nothing but enjoying myself for forty or so minutes. How I reached my own house without being hit by a car or falling off my bike I will never understand.

Whether this is a product of a sexless lent, or a fevered imagination, I don’t know. All I know is that I wish there was a switch in my head I could flick and turn off this slideshow of crude images, because I’m starting to feel like a teenage boy.

Photo of Paz de la Huerta by Frances Tulk Hart

While generally sticking visual identifiers on people which alert you to perceived negative faults is a no-no (see Nazis), there is something to be said for a ‘douchebag’ sticker that some people would benefit from wearing. For those of you who think I am being needlessly hyperbolic, let me explain. Recently I met a man, he was charming, if with slightly straggly hair around his temples, and polite. We struck up a conversation in the queue for the oh so fashionable unisex toilets. The conversation skirted around the obvious toilet humour, he touched my arm. We smiled. Lights were bursting into life inside my head. Aha! I thought. This is flirting! I remember this! As the night wore on we kept bumping into each other. Each time there was a joke, a touch, a lingering glance. Everything was going swimmingly.

Out on the smoker’s terrace we looked across the city he put his arm round my waist and I thought that maybe I could get past the straggling hair, in time. The man offered me a cigarette which I declined, another sign of my increasing maturity I thought to myself piously. “We really shouldn’t stand here like this.” He said exhaling straight into my face. I attempted a playful cough. “Why ever not?” “This place is full of my girlfriend’s friends. I don’t think they’d like it much.”

Within 3 minutes flat I had thrown a drink onto the floor, located my coat, and left the bar. Storming down the street in the pouring rain I looked up at the rooftop and attempted to look both furious and glamorous at the same time. Whether I succeeded or not can only be judged by Mr Fuckface up there with his cigarette and manky hair.

Is this the first time such fuckery has been committed? No, of course not, in fact this is hardly notable. It was a brief blip in an otherwise enjoyable night (I stormed off to somewhere much more fun, incidentally). When I look back in a few years I doubt I’ll even remember anything about the incident at all. And yet, it stings. The brief moment that lifts you, that moment of excitement, a feeling that this could be something, is this something? Is this feeling that I’m feeling a feeling?

That is not to say I’m looking at every Tom Dick and Harry who crosses my path as my next One True Love. It is just that when you are single, those flashes of romance, even drunken fag soaked romance, are bliss. Once you can learn to accept them as momentary flashes, that will probably never lead to anything more, then you can appreciate them. They are your chance to rip off your clothes and stand naked and proud shouting “Here I am! Take me!” and be taken, for a moment.

Dramatic? Yes. Slightly ludicrous? Obviously. But in essence that’s what a one night stand or a fling is. A fun ridiculous interlude in an otherwise sexless existence that makes you remember how awesome this whole game can be. Not someone who’s getting it on the regular leading you towards joy and then letting you down.

This is why they should wear badges.

Illustration available on Etsy, and gratuitous picture of Paz de la Huerta. 

Now I know we’re two days into Lent already, so this post isn’t terribly topical, but sometimes a good idea doesn’t hit you straight away. Having not given up anything for Lent for years, I thought this year I’d make an effort. One year I gave up potatoes, and to this day can remember my celebratory meal of roast potatoes with chips and potato salad. Pure, utter bliss. But what this year? Being competitive I wanted to something difficult to give up, but not something impossible that would simply serve to depress me when I failed. I gave up smoking just after my birthday, don’t eat junk food or drink booze regularly enough for it to be difficult, and am blatantly never going to stop biting my nails as long as I have hands.

Then, last Friday, I found myself drunk in a pub at 3am. I was with a man who was nice and someone’s idea of attractive. He kissed me and I let him. I didn’t take my hands out of my pockets and stood there letting him kiss me. It was, ok, I guess. I thought about how these kind of situations usually went down when I made an effort. They usually ended in me waking up the next morning and thinking “Why do I bother?” and as I passively allowed him to kiss me I wondered what it’d be like if we stopped here. If I lied and said “Yeah, this was nice.” and went home alone, instead of reciprocating in the hope that it would get better.

Since becoming a fully fledged sexual adult I can count the number of times I’ve had sex on a second date on one hand, as for the third, well I can probably count the number of third dates I’ve had on one finger. So, this lent, I thought I’d give ‘waiting’ a go. Not just till the third date, should there be one, but for fourty full days and nights.

I wanted to know what it’d be like if I tried it. Whether I’d feel more connected when we finally got round to it. I also wanted to know if this would make people more likely to stick around. I have always held the view that if a man doesn’t respect me for sleeping with him on the first date then he’s an idiot, but what if it wasn’t about respect? Could holding off be a revelation?

Since my celibate record is a year I thought holding out for 40 days would probably be pretty easy, and so I decided I’d make things difficult for myself by creating a set of rules.

1. Everything except sex* is ok.
I figured this rule would be good because it requires superhuman willpower to be naked, rolling around in bed with someone, and then say “Wait. No. We have to stop.”

2.  For every time I masturbate I have to go swimming.
Lest you think this is some form of self-flagellation I am training for the Swimathon, so thought this would spur me on to train more often. It may just cause me to wank less. Only time will tell…

3. I must put myself in the way of as much temptation as possible.
3a. I will endeavour to go on a date every week (natural disasters/illness not withstanding)
This is where you come in dear reader! Since I am not exactly knee deep in clunge I need your help to try and tempt me off the path of goodness. Are you an eligible bachelor who wants to take me on date? Email me! Are you a sex toy shop/manufacturer who wants to send me things that will have me spending all my waking hours alternating between swimming and wanking? Go ahead! Do you have other ways to try and make me fail? Hit me bro.

And so begins my sexless Lent…

Photo of Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst (pictured in front of a Jerry de Wilde photo) by Autumn de Wilde. Illustration from the cover of pulp paperback Alimony, culled from Vintage Gal’s amazing Tumblr.

*Sex is defined as a penis in a vagina or bum, I’m not a Catholic schoolgirl: bums count.

“Well, actually, of course, a telephone is a fantastically rude thing. I mean, it’s like going, [banging rhythmically on desk] “Speak to me now, speak to me now, speak to me now!” You know. If you went into someone’s office and banged on their desk and said, “I will make a noise until you speak to me,” it would be considered unbelievably rude.”
Stephen Fry – QI: Series 2, Episode 5

The older I get the less I enjoy communicating with people. I hate phone calls. I despise emails. I abhor text messages. Instant messenger is the bane of my fucking life. Letters generally contain bills. My dream would be somehow to retreat within a self made bubble and never have to communicate with anyone beyond notes that read ‘pizza’, ‘hug’ and ‘please’.

I can remember a time, probably just before I was 15, when I between the hours of 8am and 4pm I was virtually un-contactable. In an emergency someone would find me via the school’s receptionist, or maybe once I got home, but between those hours I was my own person. If someone came face to face me and began to speak I could handle the situation as I pleased. A red light did not constantly flicker in the corner of my vision. No-one texted me to remind me about an email they’d sent to follow up a conversation we’d had on Twitter. In fact almost nobody called me at all.

In quick succession I got a beeper, a mobile, half a dozen more mobiles, and then, finally, a Blackberry. Now, at any hour of the day or night I can look at the wretched thing and find someone asking for a moment of my time. This is not to say that I am a particularly sought out person, the complete opposite in fact, but the stream is never ending.

The work emails, the mailing lists, and hilarious links, are fine, it’s the text messages and missed phone calls I hate the most. They require both immediacy and thoughtfulness. Phone calls require me to go somewhere quiet, stop reading an article on the Wall Street Journal, eating a sandwich, and tweeting about welfare reform. Text messages require me to condense down all my feelings about someone into something light, bright, pithy, fun. And in five minutes or less.

In the past I replied at my leisure. A day, an hour, maybe a week, could pass before I manage to get it together and reply to “Hey, how’s it going?” because I just don’t know what to say. How to condense the last week into so small a space? Do you really care? Do you want to know if I’m busy? Down to fuck? What do you want from me? If I say the wrong thing there’s no way to take it back, explain the context, destroy your phone, it’s there, for you to squint and stare at forever. But now if a reply is not forthcoming within, let’s say 3 hours, I get another text, or an email, or a bitchy tweet, or I presumably just really hack off the person who sent it which explains why I then spend the next two days jiggling awkwardly and waiting for a reply. (Don’t point out the irony of my displeasure: I am fully aware of it).

While the bubble and notes are possibly unachievable, and slightly lonely, what I would like is to have the same ease of communication that I have with my best friends, where we can text each other “WHAT?”, “Will you come to this party with me and hold my hand? I’m scared.”, and “Maus, I love you.” without worrying that these things will be misinterpreted. I’ve only achieved that with five people in my entire life time, what are the chances of making it to six?

Photos by Giorgi Dadiani and unknown!

Picture the scene: you’re alone in a room that isn’t your own. You know that you have 20 or so minutes entirely to yourself. A computer is open in front of you. There are notebooks and scraps of paper everywhere. There are drawers and cupboards begging to be opened. What do you do?

What I did was sit on my hands. I sat firmly on my hands because I couldn’t trust myself not to snoop. For five solid minutes I sat there biting my lips, fingers going numb and itching all over with the painful urge to root and root and root. Eventually I decided that rather than risk dead hands I’d check my email, which meant shutting my eyes and hammering ‘sign out’ as fast I could. If I dared open my eyes more than a tiny chink I ran the risk of reading email titles, snippets of messages, possibly incriminating things. And the lure of a snippet would cause me to click the email, open it, write words in the search bar, possibly my own name, and then maybe go utterly insane, and be discovered lying on the ground turning in slow circles using only my feet and nearby cupboards.

Having freed my hands and logged out of all social media presences I found myself rather bored. I laid a hand on a nearby notebook and thought hard. The last time I’d read someone’s diary (hi Paul! Sorry about that!) it had revealed precisely nothing about ‘us’ being a diary with nothing but social engagements noted in, and I was heartily disappointed. The time before had been disastrous. I wondered what exactly I was trying to find: admissions of a homicidal nature? Declarations of undying love? I wasn’t sure which was creepier.

The desperate urge boiled up in me. I shut my eyes and jiggled like a child desperate for the bathroom. I thought about how horrible it would be to leave someone alone in my room and risk them finding my stash of diaries. Or the box of sex toys. Or that one diary, right at the bottom of the diary stash, that is full of emotional things like ‘WHY DOES NO-ONE LOVE ME?’ and ‘I SAW ALIENS’ from when I had a nervous breakdown in 2005. It’s surprising how embarrassing mental illness can be.

Back to the room. I’m sitting there jiggling, a feeling of denial so strong it was physically painful. I wanted to snoop more than I wanted to do anything. My whole body ached, yearned to open a dozen drawers, lie face down in a pile of coats, roll around eyeball deep in a pile of diaries with sordid words wafting round my head like feathers. Just as my jiggling white hot need reached boiling point the door swung open, relief flooded over me. It felt as good as an orgasm on a warm day. For the first time in months I needed a cigarette.

Everything was going to be ok, until of course I was left alone in the room again…

Pictures from unknown Tumblrs!
Title from one of my favourite songs ever: Hide and Go Seek by Bunker Hill

Another friendly reminder that I’m swimming 2.5k in April, to raise money for Marie Curie. If you want to sponsor me then click here and make both myself and a very worthy charity immeasurably happy.

The first time I watched porn I was twelve. It was a grainy video of some German couples in lingerie and during the extended closeups of their genitalia I remember thinking it looked like lunch meat. Being twelve years old I did not masturbate during the videos, I had no fucking idea how. Instead I ate a sandwich, squinted, and felt incredibly confused. Was this ‘sexy’? What was ‘sexy’? When I finished the sandwich I turned the video off and did some homework. Life immediately went back to normal.

As the internet took off porn stopped being about videos found in salubrious locations, and suddenly was being shot at me from every angle. Even on dial up I can remember surreptitiously clicking onto porn sites, peeking at pixelated boobs, and then shutting down the window and deleting my computer’s history in a fit of terror.

Obviously, being female I had both a whole host of body and eating issues as a teenager. Convinced my body was repulsive I found it hard to believe anyone could ever fancy me. How could they? The girls that you fancied didn’t have thighs that touched, they didn’t have frizzy hair, or spots, or pale skin, and they certainly didn’t have small boobs. Every time I watched TV, read a magazine, or passed an advert in the street these skinny silky haired tan girls grinned at me with their pneumatic perky boobs and perennially sunny nature. One afternoon in a fit of tearful depression I took a marker pen and drew balaclavas on everyone in Just 17. Even then their lithe limbs jangled at me. Fuckers.

While the bodies I saw in magazines were uniformly oppressive the ones I saw in porn weren’t. There were of course legions of women with breasts bigger than my head, held up by hope and complicated feats of engineering, but they were flanked by women skinny snake like women with S-bend curves in their backs, middle aged women with crepe like lips, and chubbier girls who wobbled all over to everyone on screen’s delight.

The mainstream media was telling me, constantly, that the key to being loved, to having any value at all, was by being thin. Not healthy, not fit: thin. And that only by being thin could I maybe be considered as being pretty, and therefore have any worth to any society. However of course I couldn’t have any worth if I was slut. How dare I enjoy sex? How dare I enjoy kinky sex? Ew. Ew. Ew. Shut your legs and eat a rice cracker already.

While porn is fraught with problems, problems so enormous it would take legislation, a lot of therapy, and some frank and honest sex ed classes to solve, not just a simple blog post, it is not the body fascist hell hole that it is assumed to be. If you want to see women with shaved heads, pear shaped hips, who aren’t a size zero (whatever that means anymore…), that aren’t white, and dudes who not only want to eat you out but also care about your feelings, then seriously: try porn.

Finding Alexis Texas*, who’s measurements differ from mine by barely an inch in places, made me realise that the body I have can be seen as beautiful. That having a big arse doesn’t mean I need to dress to hide my ‘faults’, as so many women’s magazines had told me, but that this wiggly jiggly thing was capable of being beautiful, adored, and obsessed over. And while I don’t want to refer to myself as Buttwoman and become the sum of my parts, there is nothing wrong with wearing a tight skirt and shaking my hips every now and then.

Still from Prince’s Kiss video, and self-portrait by the amazing Sam Haskins.
*This is the one NSFW link in this whole post, promise! Except for maybe the ‘shaved head’ one, I dunno, it depends how liberal your workplace is. Shouldn’t you be working anyway? 

Lastly: I’m swimming 2.5k for Marie Curie’s Swimathon, in April. I am not an amazing swimmer and this is totally going to be a huge challenge, so please do sponsor me, it’d mean the world to me!