How to Blow

We’ve all met them. Those irritating people who will happily claim, without a shred of irony or self-doubt, that they are good in bed.

Of course, it’s those sorts of people who generally turn out to be duds. Not because of any physical or technical failing – it’s because their arrogance gets in the way of being truly receptive to the needs of their sexual partner.

Here’s a tip: just because it worked for your ex, doesn’t mean it will work for everyone!

These people get so blind-sighted by their smugness that they fail to account for the fact that people are, like, different. And if their masterful performance fails to bring you countless screaming orgasms, then you must be the one with the problem.

Now, I know I’m capable of being great in bed, but I would never promise it to someone. There’s just so much that can go wrong, especially when you haven’t had sex with that person before. I’ve discovered the hard way that what floats someone’s boat can just as easily sink another’s. There are probably a few people walking around this world thinking that I’m a crap shag, and well, I couldn’t really blame them.

I’d also like to stress the importance of making mistakes. If you hold yourself back for fear of doing the wrong thing, that’s not sexy either.  We all learn by getting it wrong occasionally, and if you’re afraid to experiment a little, you’ll never grow.

And while we’re still in the key of Rant, let it be known that flipping through the sealed-section of Cleo magazine does not a great lover make. You can read all you want on the subject, but nothing can replace hands-on experience, communication, and intuition. The notion of keeping crib notes on the bedside dresser is both hilarious and sad.

Similarly, you’re not going to turn into a sex god/goddess because of something you read on the internet. So go on, turn off your computer, grab your lover, and go have fun.

That’s it. This is the best advice I can give you. (And yes, your computer has an off-switch. It’s true – I’ve seen it!)

I’ll just be over here, dusting my cat figurines.

Doo di doo. (*mutters: blasted porcelain Persians*)

Ah, guys? You’re still here.

*sigh*

Oh all right, fine. Fine! Off the back of the success of my highly-acclaimed Guide to the Clitoris, I present to you:

How to Suck and Not Suck: Helpful Tips for Giving Head

1. Lube Changes Everything.

Yeah, you can perform fellatio using only the moisture in your mouth, but it makes the job more difficult than it has to be. If you’re going for greatness, lube is your friend. Before you begin, whip out the lube and apply generously all over the penis and testicles. Seriously, more lube = more better. I just can’t stress this enough.

And don’t skimp on the quality of the lube, either. Again, if blowjob glory is what you want, you’ll need some decent silicone-based lube – not the KY-type crud you get at Coles. (Also, the cheap stuff tastes awful!)

My personal recommendation is Pjur. It’s silky smooth, odourless, and it lasts forever (thus justifying the cost). Available over the internet, or from most good sex shops!

2. Have Fun With It

Contrary to the notion that fellatio is a submissive act, it is actually extremely powerful. I mean, your man’s most prized and sensitive body part is between your teeth, and he’s the one with the power? I don’t think so.

For me, it’s the power trip of being solely responsible for the most awesome pleasure that man has ever experienced in his life that makes giving head not just a positive experience, but a pleasurable one. It’s the look of their faces – complete abandon and utter gratitude.

So many women approach this kind of thing with reluctance or disgust. And even though I know I’ll get lynched for saying this – I do think that in a committed, loving relationship, it should not be considered sexist or offensive or horrible for the man to want a blow job every now and then.

It’s all in the attitude. Approach it with a sense of playfulness and love, and it’ll bring you closer. Approach it as you would an overcooked hotdog, and it’s going to be much less fun, for both of you.

3. Take Your Time

If you’re racing through it, thinking ‘let’s get this over with’, it’s not likely to be great.

My suggestion is to start slow, and build your way up gradually. Perhaps start by licking the shaft and around the head, as opposed to sticking the whole lot in your mouth at once. Some guys like it fast and some like it slow – so to hedge your bets, start slow and go from there.

4. Use Your Hands

Bringing a man to orgasm using only your mouth is actually extremely difficult. For best results, I like to place one hand around the shaft at the base of the penis, and if possible, one hand gently cupping the testicles. Slide the hand that’s on the penis up and down in synch with your mouth (this is after you’ve poured on tons of lube). If you’re feeling lazy, just keep your mouth on the head, while your hand does all the work.

You can also squeeze the base of the penis, which keeps it hard, and which I’ve found can induce orgasm quicker (that’s only if you want them to come though – there’s a lot to be said for making them suffer and wait!)

With the hand that’s on the balls, just stick to tickling, stroking, or holding. (Do not squeeze – unless cock and ball torture is his thing). If you and your partner are the adventurous types, you can even venture down a little lower, and, ah, stick your finger(/s) up his butt. Once you get over the conceptual grossness of this, you’ll find that it’s actually the easiest way to bring him to orgasm (as it stimulates the prostate gland).

Don’t look at me like I’m crazy – it’s true – and if he’s comfortable with the idea, he’ll thank you for it. Trust me.

5. Don’t Stop The Instant He Comes

Orgasms can be increased and prolonged by staying there for a minute or so after the initial spurt. Which brings me to…

6. Swallowing is Easier Than Spitting. Sorry.

Yeah okay, so semen is pretty nasty. But swallowing is, by far, the better way to go. It’s like taking a shot of tequila – you wouldn’t put that in your mouth, swish it around a bit and then spit it out again, so why would you do the same with come? If his penis is in your mouth at the point of orgasm, it’ll hit the back of your throat, and then you can swallow without needing to taste it. Up until now I’ve been trying to resist using the phrase ‘suck it up’, but, there’s just no better way of saying it. Suck it up, bitches.

7. Watch Him Masturbate

If you’re in a relationship with the person, and comfortable around each other, get him to masturbate while you watch. It’s hot in a voyeuristic kind-of-a-way, and it also provides valuable information as to how he likes to be touched. Sometimes it’s impossible to get an understanding about how he likes it just from reading his body language, or even from asking him, which is why watching him jerk off will prove to be highly informative.

Watch, my friends, and learn.

***

Now, having said all that, there’s one final point I’d like to make:

8. Men Are Harder to Get Off Than Popular Culture Would Have You Believe

If you’ve been down there for half an hour, and nothing seems to be happening, don’t take it to heart. According to teen movies, getting a guy off is as easy as, say, slow-dancing with him for a few minutes during prom night.

Men are actually pretty tricky to bring to climax. Most of the boyfriends I’ve had have had difficulty coming during sex, let alone from oral.

The goal of any form of sexual activity should not be an orgasm – it should be about the connection, the pleasure, and the intimacy. Don’t approach this as merely a method of getting him off – try to see it as a way of giving him something incredible.

Finally, it’s your gift to give – not his to demand. (Well, unless you’re doing the D/s thing, which is kind of a different story, but even in that scenario there should be an underlying respect).

And that’s just about all I have to say about that. Happy blowing!

Not So Nice

When I was a girl, I believed the key to being liked was to be nice. I would put up with just about anything, just so people would like me. And, it worked. Except of course it meant that some people liked me not necessarily for who I was, but for what they could make me do.

In the adult world, being nice is not all that useful. When it comes to sex, it’s often a hindrance (let’s face it: assholes are hotter than saints). At work, niceness is usually interpreted as weakness, and those of us who are nice tend to get screwed over. And personality-wise, merely being nice is, unfortunately, just not very interesting.

I probably got it from my mum – who was famous for answering the phone in a honey-dipped tone of voice, maintaining a conversational tone that was ludicrously polite, thanking the caller profusely, and then slamming the phone down, picking up a butcher’s knife and screaming like a banshee.

(I’m not sure that wanting to be liked was the reason for my mum’s niceness – I think it was more to do with a deeply imbedded code of social obligation that states that no matter how much you dislike a person, one must always, always maintain a friendly facade. Unless of course you live with the person, in which case you can wield knives at them with frequency and vigour).

Being nice is like having the word “sucker” tattooed across your forehead. I can’t walk ten metres though the city without being asked for change/propositioned by a sleazy foreigner/accosted by credit card salesmen. For years, the common features of all the men I ever dated were ‘unemployed’ and ‘had no qualms about asking their girlfriend for money’. I also had a way of attracting guys who were trying very hard to come across as nice, but who were actually dicks.

It’s hard however to separate this incessant niceness from my personality. Apart from the fact it’s ingrained, it is also based upon a certain amount of fact.

But being sweet and lovely is kind of incongruent with being a depraved, horny, kinky slut-bag.

Hence my current dilemma. I’m a nice girl who wants some really nasty things, and who doesn’t want to say “please” anymore. Unless it’s in the context of saying: “Please, may I have another?”

This is not to say that to participate in the BDSM scene, you have to be a prick. Ironically, these so-called freaks and weirdos are actually some of the friendliest, most welcoming people you’ll ever meet. When I first stepped out of my shell and into the Sydney kink scene, it was with a sense of celebration. No longer did I have to hide my weirdness from the world – in these spaces it was valued and appreciated. Finally, I’d found ‘my people’; those to whom I could relate.

However, there are days when I don’t feel all that celebratory about my sexuality. It can be a right pain in the arse, and I wish I could just be a goddamned normal person. I feel like kink is a burden that makes the chances of me meeting a compatible partner astronomically difficult. Sure, in the scene I’m surrounded by people who share my taste in perversion, but I have other passions and interests that go beyond a desire to be tied up and violated. Sex, while an important part of any relationship, is not everything.

Lately I’ve been faced with the dilemma of needing to get my kinky rocks off, but being utterly exhausted by social situations. It’s strange – in order to fully relax, let go, and truly be the person I am, I must first make a bunch of chit chat and go through the motions of pretending to be a confident extrovert. As a representative of the Under 30s group, I feel it’s expected of me to be something of an ambassador –  to ‘network’ and make favourable impressions upon all the right people.  It has started to feel like work.

I’m just so sick of being nice all the time. Being submissive is supposed to be about being selfless, but it can also be a very selfish thing. I want to be tied up, I want to be punished, I want to be used. I find myself feeling guilty for ‘taking’ from others – even though I’ve allowed them their kink, too. These wilful, demanding ‘wants’ of mine don’t go together very well with being nice. The Creature doesn’t care about putting other people at ease, or asking how a person’s week was, or being intelligent and witty, or laughing at other people’s jokes. It just wants what it wants, and lately, it’s been running out of patience.

Cue: anxiety.

So I’ve been thinking of ways around this problem. Is there a way to separate the kink from the social?

Then I realised, of course there is. It’s called seeing a professional.

It’s funny that I’ve come all this way, to wind up right at the point where so many others begin their journeys. For a lot of my kinky male friends, their first BDSM experiences were of going to commercial dungeons and seeing pro-dommes. For some, the bulk of their kink happens with a professional mistress, and they go to public events simply to socialise.

After having been involved in the scene for years, that approach seems unusual to me, but then I have to remind myself that way-back-when, I once believed that the only way for a submissive female to get their rocks off was to be a porn star. It’s only because I started meeting people who were volunteering to dominate me that I stopped thinking that way.

Seeing a pro-domme doesn’t mean that it has to be strictly business. Just because you’re paying someone to have their way with you doesn’t mean you can’t also be friends. But… that’s not what I’m after. I want someone who doesn’t know me, who hasn’t met my ‘Nice Girl’ persona, who doesn’t care about whether I call them the next day. Because some of the things I want are really pretty fucked up – stuff I can’t even admit to my kinky friends. I don’t want those things to be associated with ‘me’ –  yet I want them all the same. They are things that I myself am not particularly happy about wanting. That hard edge where what you’re comfortable with slides into the grey area of what scares the crap out of you. The sweet spot.

A pro-domme could be exactly what I need to be able to live a ‘normal’ life. See, I could date a man who is not in any way kinky (but who is passionate and sexy – this is non-negotiable), and then go off to see a pro every month or so to get my dose of electro torture/latex/breath play/blood, pain, depravity, etc, and be completely content.

I mean, yeah, nothing in life is ever quite so neat as that, but still, I think it could be a workable solution.

There is just one small problem: money.

Darn.

Ah well. As soon as I sign that movie deal for my best-selling novel, I won’t have to worry anymore. Until then, I guess I’d better keep being nice to people.

Subspace

Ever felt tired of being you?

I know, right. Strange concept. For we all love being ourselves, all the time, continually without ever taking a break, even though we’ve had our entire lives to trawl over the same sort of things we always think about, through dealing with the never-ending barrage of trivial concerns that come up in the course of an average day. (What will I eat for dinner tonight? In my fridge is a carrot, some cheese I’m too scared to look at because it’s been there a while, and half a litre of soy milk. Does that constitute a meal? / Gosh, it’s a bit chilly; I should have brought my jacket. But of course my favourite jacket is at the dry cleaners. Damn that incontinent cat! / Will that person I like ever call me back? I texted them on Tuesday, and then again on Wednesday, and they didn’t reply, but maybe they have run out of phone credit? Maybe they were involved in some sort of heinous accident that rendered them incapable of using their thumbs? Or maybe, just maybe, they were put off by that time I stalked them. But surely not – nothing says ‘I love you’ like a stalker… right? / I should probably do more sit-ups; I’m starting to look a bit chunky-monkey down there. But how many sit-ups is an adequate amount? My Wii Fit instructor said I had a ‘beautiful posture’, but is he really to be believed? Maybe he’s just buttering me up so I feel positively-inclined towards Nintendo, and thus decide to fork out the stupid amount of money needed to purchase the next edition of Rock Band??)

Oh ho ho. Who would ever want a break from such scintillating commentary? Well, call me crazy, but that kind of shit gets old, man. And so if someone gives me an opportunity to escape, well, I’ll take it.

Trouble is, there isn’t an off switch. It’s like… well, okay this is a long story, but it’s relevant, trust me. Right, so, when I was a kid, my grandparents lived in the country. Thus every summer, my psychopathically self-absorbed loving parents would drive me and my sister several hours to the country for a visit. I would barf in the car every single time, but that’s not the story I’m trying to tell. No, the real doozey was the time the cassette tape (c’mon kids, you remember those) melted a bit and got stuck in the player, so that mum couldn’t get it out. A drive out to country NSW is interminably boring, thus any music was better than none. Which is how we came to listen to Tracey Chapman’s Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution about forty million times, and mum’s favourite: Can’t We Talk it Over in Bed by That Dude in the Eighties. Well anyway, what I’m trying to get at here is that my head is much like an overheated Commodore with a dicky tape deck that refuses to let go of a cassette that was maybe okay the first time, but makes you want to hurl yourself out of the car after repeat listens; of which you have no control over; it just plays and plays and plays.

(Incidentally, it took me until I was about twenty-four years of age to realise that a request to ‘talk it over in bed’ is not quite as innocent as donning your flannelette PJs and tabling your arguments over mugs of warm milk. *Shudders at thought of how many arguments parents had, and how many of those were conciliated ‘in bed’.*)

Even though a bed is all some people need to chill out, unfortunately it’s not quite so simple for me. As previously mentioned on this blog, I tend to think a lot – especially a lot – during sex, of all things. Which is frustrating, because I pride myself on being a switched-on and considerate lover, but sometimes my goddamned head gets in the way.

But then, there’s kink.

Ah, now we’re talking!

Last week, I had the pleasure of being hogtied. It had been so long since I’d done anything kinky, I’d nearly forgotten why I like it so much. All this time I’ve been all cranky and depressed, and all this time I’ve been thinking: “I don’t need nuthin’ from no one.”

As I’ve also mentioned in this blog, there is a big difference between suffering artfully and just bloody suffering.

Last Wednesday, as the rope cinched tighter around my wrists and ankles, I started to float. My thoughts slowed down and became quieter. Any petty physical complaints I had disappeared. I stopped feeling self conscious about my body. The energy in the room altered; intensified.

Subspace can be described as calming and meditative. For me it’s both of these things but it’s also deeply sensual – my perception of the world shifts from my eyes to my skin. It’s like tapping into an undercurrent which is always there, but which is ordinarily obscured by sounds, sights and thoughts.

What I love about subspace is that I don’t need to try. It’s not up to me. See, normally, I’m a control freak who thinks that good things only come about as a consequence of putting a lot of effort in, and conversely, that bad things happen because if I don’t try hard enough. Submitting to another person’s will forces me to remember that I’m not responsible for every single thing, and that it is necessary to sometimes drop your defences and let yourself be held.

There was a moment on Wednesday when, after I’d been hogtied for about fifteen minutes or so, I started to feel physically uncomfortable. I had to hold my upper body up somewhat, and I was starting to get sore. Reality was seeping back in, and I was starting to feel like my ordinary, annoying self again. But just as I was on the verge of asking to be untied, I realised that it wasn’t about me. My will was largely irrelevant. The person who had tied me up now had control over my body, and it was my duty to endure whatever he wanted for as long as he wanted it.

And just like that, I swooned with pleasure and acceptance, and dropped so deeply back into subspace that I can’t even quite remember what happened after that.

Lost, swimming, weightless. Warm and dark and vast. At peace.

I closed my eyes and became perfectly still. He lay beside me and stared at my face. It was the most intimate and revealing place he could have looked, and it was almost too much to bear. To have someone look into me that closely, to really see.

Stripped, naked, and vulnerable; yet unharmed. Cared for. Cherished.

‘Freedom through bondage’ is by no means an original concept. But it’s the best way to describe it. For I was free – free from time, from the constraints of my physical body, from my mind, from the constant burden of having to be productive all the time; from everything except that which was pure and true.

Also, it was sexy. I think that deserves a mention.