'Mr Sex': It Shouldn't Happen To A Sexpert

Big news in the realm of the shag-blog: Girl with a One-Track Mind is pissing off to America, and inadvertantly causing an international incident along the way. Although I'm ever so slightly narked at her having a go (or being pushed into having a go) at British men (i.e., Londoners), I'm hoping to get me end away when I go on holiday later this summer and am shitting myself that the Skegness Standard are going to blow my cover, so I'm very much feeling her pain on this one.

The first time I clocked GWAOTM, It didn't strike me as particularly shocking. To my mind, 'Single woman working in the media in London has loads of sex' is about as shocking and controversial a premise as 'Dog enjoys licking own genitals'. Nothing wrong with that. And actually, quite a lot right with it. If she wasn't as good a writer as she is, I would have looked once and never gone back.

Of course, the really interesting bit of the story came when the Sunday Times decided to out her, for reasons that no-one can really understand. My reactions were as follows;

1) Oh, the poor cow, that's bang out of order.
2) Who gives a fuck who she really is?
3) Welcome to our world, duckie.

The thing is, being a sex writer is a double-edged sword that constantly gets rammed into your genitals. People think we all sit around with our £500 shoes on the table of some poncy bar, knocking back Cosmopolitans and talking about anal masturbation before going off to have an orgy with each other. The reality is a bit different. Yes, it's a good laugh; I've done loads of mad shit, it opens a lot of doors, I've got to know some of the best people one could ever share a life with, and I don't regret it at all.

But there are drawbacks. I know loads of female sex writers, and with a few exceptions, they've had absolutely shocking luck with men. The job they do - talking and advising about sex - seems to automatically turn them into twat magnets. It's not hard to see why; whenever I went round the house of Well-Known Sexpert (who is, more importantly, one of my favourite people in the entire world), the first thing you'd clock was a huge pile of dildos, vibrators, and assorted sex toys stacked up in the corner. The second thing you'd notice was a huge bookshelf with titles such as 'SO HE'S SHIT IN BED' and 'HOW TO HAVE MULTIPLE ORGASMS WITHOUT A RUBBISH TOSSER OF A MAN KNOCKING ABOUT'. I would immediately become intimidated and defensive, and I'd only come round for a cup of tea. God knows what any chap she bought back thought.

The horrible paradox about being a sex writer, if you ask me, is that you automatically seem to get less of the sex that civilians have - the proper, affectionate, we're-doing-this-because-we're-into-each-other sex. If you're female, and writing about sex, you automatically seem to have to rule out 90% of any potential shag-partners that hove into view. It's easy to see why, in a sad, we're-in-the 21st-century-and we're-still-not over-this-shit way; half of us are intimidated as fuck, and the other half is terrified that our sexual technique is going to be analysed, held up, laughed at. A lot of times, the only men who appear to zone in on sex writers do it for the prestige, and they end up going out with (and being absolutely fucked about by) an absolute shower of bastards, mouth-breathers, stalkers, and outright shitbags.

(and yeah, it's even worse for male sex writers, but in different ways - but I'll talk about that another time. And it's different for me, because I also do porn, which is a profession somewhere just above live animal-skinner on the 'desirable professions for potential boyfriends' list. And I'm a bit rank. But anyway)

And sure enough, the Curse of the Sex Writer befell GWAOTM, who went from writing an anonymous blog about having sex to writing a blog about writing an extremely nonymous blog, and all the shit that came from it. Sure, she got a 'six-figure book deal' out of it (not true, but it sounds good), but then again, you can't fall asleep at night in a post-coital haze in the arms of a book deal. I've never met her, but she repped for TT right from the off, and I wish her nothing but the best and hope she doesn't end up in bed with some neurotic Woody Allen-type.

(Postscript: all my sexperty female mates all ended up with proper, decent blokes in the end. Aw. Bless)