‘Mr Sex’: The reason I joined this blog

I didn’t realise that there was a need for something like Todger Talk until the day I ejaculated blood.

Backstory: a few months ago, I began a dalliance with a young lady who I met in town, and we went at it like knives with for a couple of weeks. She was nice. The sex was ace. But she had a strange foreplay technique which involved bending my nob about like an Atari joystick during a particularly intense level of Pac-Man. Whenever she did this, I would stop what I was doing, point out to her in my best Sexpertly voice that I didn’t have a jelly dildo between my legs, what she was doing was painful, and to please stop doing it. She was about to go on holiday, so we decided to have a think about what to about the relationship when she got back.

A few days later when I was at home relaxing in a gentlemanly manner, and looking down at it at the point of no return (because men always do that, and if anyone says any different, you’re lying), it happened. And I’m not talking the odd streak. My proud gentleman reacted like a squeezy bottle of tomato sauce that was being jumped on by an errant child.

After climbing the wall like Spider-Man and shitting myself (brown, fortunately), I did the rational, level-headed thing. I typed 'I'M JIZZING BLOOD OH MY GOD OH MY FUCKING GOD I KNOW I'VE GOT CANCER AND I'M GOING TO DIE' into Google, and then legged it to the doctor. She (yes, she – at that point I would have gladly got my cock out for Margaret Thatcher, as long as she told me afterwards I wasn’t going to have it amputated) told me that I had broken a capillary in my proud gentleman through exertion, that it was a surprisingly common occurrence - she'd dealt with five or six other blokes in the area who had the same problem - and that it usually clears up in a month or so.

After jabbing something that looked like a teenage girl's felt-tip pen in me Oriental ocular apparatus to see if I'd got anything else wrong with me (I hadn't), I went on my way, and spent a month or so in absolute terror at the thought of never being able to use it on a female ever again (bar the odd stand-in for a Goth porn shoot), watching my Dad-Marge go from crimson to burnt ochre to having scabby bits in it to salmon pink to raspberry ripple to off-white, and finally back to normal. I thought masturbating with a bra catalogue when I was 14 was pretty sad. I never realised that two decades later, I'd be doing it with a fucking Dulux paint chart.

Although I’m profoundly grateful that it actually happened when I was on my own (as opposed to, say, being in a bus queue, or Pizza Hut) and have finally calmed down, I’m spitting blood as well as spoffing it. For starters, I’m furious at myself; I’ve been writing about sex for nearly 10 years for this mag, this mag, this mag and this newspaper, and I never knew a penis could actually do that. I’ve read countless men’s magazines – both Lad Mags and proper pornography – since I was old enough to get one under me jumper and into my bedroom. None of them ever mentioned that shit like this could actually happen. Not. One.

And probably the most galling thing of all was the reaction off some of my male friends. I told one of them about it and the next time I saw him with a female friend, he said “So how’s your nob, then?” and pissed himself laughing. Even more shocking was the private e-mails from other male friends who told me the same thing had happened to them. Thanks for that, mate – but why couldn’t you tell the rest of us that it was nothing to worry about in the first place? And if there’s so much secrecy about a comparatively harmless war wound, what about the really serious, life-threatening shit?

Here’s the point; if I was female, and something of comparative badness had happened to my lady-bits, something tells me that I would have had a bit more of an instant support system going. Men love to take the piss out of their partners going on about ‘women’s things’, but at least they actually give a fuck – whilst we’re still concentrating on getting one, regardless of quality and consequences.

What I’ve learned from the experience – apart from ‘don’t let anyone treat your nob like a bar tap’ is that men are even more lost when it comes to sexual health than I thought. We laugh about sexual misadventure, we trade gruesome stories (which always happen to someone else, naturally), and then we shit breeze blocks the moment something goes slightly wrong. We live in a world where the medical profession worries that ‘only’ 65% of women have a mammogram every two years, whilst celebrating the fact that a ‘whopping’ 35% of men bother to check for testicular cancer. Female media can talk about breast cancer with dignity, accuracy and depth. The male version seems to find it impossible to talk about testicular cancer without using a picture of Kenneth Williams doing his fruitiest ‘Ooooooo!’ face. Women are encouraged to think about their genitals. Men are still being driven to think with them.

And, if you’ll pardon the expression, that’s absolute wank. Todger Talk intends to be a small step in the right direction. Yes, it’s a sex blog, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be updating you on who we’ve given a tupping to, as there’s loads of blogs like that about doing a far better job than we could. Yes, we’ll be dishing out sex and relationship advice, but we won’t be trying to flog you pills that increase the power and volume of your spoff by 500%. And yes, the three of us know what we’re going on about (Dr Ayan handles the medical stuff, Sam is the relationship expert, and I rip the piss out of Sting’s horrible bedroom and stuff like that), but we’re always willing to learn more.

Right then - let's stop fannying about and get stuck in, eh?