was time for a bathroom break. Most surprisingly, girls themselves didn’t even talk about it.
I remember spending hours with girlfriends as a teenager dissecting whether this or that particular boy fancied so-and-so, exactly whose hand was where during the slow song at the school disco, or whether Ricky Martin would ever be likely to shimmy his oh-so-hot and definitely-not-gay-just-flamboyant ass over to the UK to do bad, bad things to my best friend.
But never once did we talk about wanking.
We must have all been doing it, and none of us were particularly squeamish. There was just a feeling that no one should ever say. That we’d be breaking some sort of unwritten rule if we owned up. We were demure, delicate creatures. Creatures who were waiting to be defiled behind the bike sheds and wanted to maintain some semblance of innocence so that we could put on a shocked face when boys tried to touch our tits.
We could be in love, we could have crushes, and we could be curious. But we couldn’t actually have desires, for God’s sake. That would be cheating. A whispered discussion about what cocks were like was all well and good, but the powerful, wet, angry lust that we actually felt was a bit freakish, a bit wrong. No one ever had to tell us this, we just knew. We were allowed to have giggles and sleepovers and secret codewords and whispered gossip and posters of be-coiffed boyband members. But wanking? Wanking was for boys.
I’d like to say that things have changed now that I’m a grown-up. We live in a more liberated time, when we can wander into a bookshop and buy filth like … well … like this. Or read magazines that give sex tips alongside fashion advice. Or give a friend a dildo as a ‘sorry you got heartlessly dumped’ present. But I don’t think we’re really much further along the track.
Dildos and rabbit vibrators have made girl-wanking OK, but only in quite a specific sense. Women are allowed to experiment with wanking because now there’s a way to market it. You can have a vibrator or two, you can joke about having some ‘alone time’ with your rabbit, because discussion is no longer about the act of wanking, but about the accessories. We’re still ever so slightly weird about the idea of teenage girls locking themselves in their room and frigging themselves raw through their jeans.
Girls can be horny now; they can be hot and wet and desperate for a fuck. Their cunts can twitch and ache with longing and desire. They can feel that deep, angry kick-in-the-gut that signals something has triggered the naked, rutting, cavewoman instinct inside them. But they must do it all with a giggle and a smile and a wry sense of how liberated they are. They can read Fifty Shades of Grey on the bus, but when their friends ask they’ll say they’re only reading it to see what all the fuss was about, and they didn’t like it and it was badly written and they didn’t rub one out to it, honest.
I’ve heard men complain about this with smiles that say they’re only half joking. ‘Why is it OK for women to read porn on the bus but I can’t flip open a jazz mag without commuters running in terror?’ They can’t sit on the back seat with a copy of Penthouse flipped open, casually perusing the weekly selection of tits on their way into work. And they’re right, they can’t. Partly because—for fear of stating the blindingly obvious—Penthouse has actual pictures, for the love of Christ, and they might terrify people around them. But primarily because men are seen to have a different relationship with porn than women. When a woman looks at porn people raise their eyebrows, and assume she’s just curious. People don’t think about her cunt getting slick or her nipples getting hard or her heart pounding or stomach contracting. They don’t imagine her lingering over the hottest paragraph, the one where our hero finally succumbs to his own desire and bends the heroine over a desk, spanking her as she writhes and moans and pushing his engorged cock into her spit-lubed ass. No. When women read porn there’s a vague assumption that they’re doing it frivolously.
Men can’t read porn on the bus, but that’s not because we hate your porn, or think you’re a filthy pervert. On the contrary, it’s because we feel like you’re the only ones who truly understand it, who get what it’s for. Women can look at porn in public because strangers assume that they must have a motive other than the simple desire to get off. Men: you might not get to read porn on the bus, but at least you have the benefit of the doubt. When you say you’re horny, when you say you like sex, when you get hard over porn, we believe you.
I don’t think porn played a huge part in my teenage years. There was one computer, and it was in the dining room—even the bravest of teenagers would have to take quite a leap of faith to pull their trousers down in confidence that their parents wouldn’t walk in just as you got to the good bit. More importantly, I’d have had to ask permission to actually use the internet. Each minute you used it cost money, and all you’d get for your investment was a clunky image of a woman’s nipples, loading slowly down the screen, line by agonising line.
Whichever way you look at it, the nineties weren’t an ideal time in which to learn about sex, and all the filthy, spunk-covered, hair-pulling ways in which people do it.
But I tell you what we did have back then—imagination. Acres and acres of it.
To this day I rarely watch porn to have a wank. Occasionally, I’ll browse through a few of my favourite websites, clicking through videos to find the best moments, or I’ll read a book with the specific intention of putting it down halfway through, conjuring up the images in my head, gritting my teeth and then coming all over my fingers.
But more often than not I can come up with better images on my own. I don’t need porn to spark them off. Why? Well, the filthy naked people in my head always do just what I want them to do. No one’s going to put me off by saying something dodgy at the wrong time, or changing camera angle just when I was getting into it. Nor am I going to be wracked with guilt and worry that the people in my imagination might be being exploited.
Exploitation makes me careful about the porn I’ll seek out. I wouldn’t want to watch something that looks like it’s been filmed covertly, for instance. There are enough blurred videos of me sucking someone’s dick that I don’t want to encourage any more sex-tape-leaking than there is already. But the main reason I don’t like porn is that it can only take a tiny thing to completely kill my mood.
For instance, using the word ‘pussy’. As in ‘fuck my pussy’ or ‘you’ve got a nice wet pussy’. Just say it—say the word to yourself, and try not to shudder. ‘Pussy’. ‘Wet pussy’. It’s like something you might step in, not something you fuck. Likewise ‘hole’. Everyone has different words that they find hot, but the porn people in my head always talk about ‘cunts’.
Similarly, no matter how hot the porn scene, I can be instantly turned off by a switch to a close-up camera angle. Not that there’s nothing beautiful about a nice, thick, porn-star cock, but when I’m watching two—or three, or four—people fucking, I want to actually see them fucking. I don’t just want to see the bumping, wet smack as one small part connects with another. Just as I wouldn’t go to Disneyland and ride nothing but Space Mountain, likewise with porn I want to see the full show: the slaps, the grabbing, the facial expressions. In real life we know that a fuck is about much more than rubbing the right body parts together, but for some reason pornographers have forgotten that. They show us the dismembered bits: part A fitting into slot B, like a crude jigsaw puzzle. I want to see the whole thing. I want to watch as he bends her over the sofa, see his hand settled firmly in the small of her back. I want to see him reach forward with his other hand and grab at her hair or squeeze her tits. I want to see her throw her head back with desire when he does this. I want to watch her pushing herself back onto his dick, to feel the full, thick length of him. And I don’t get any of this if you just show me her cunt in close-up.
And finally, crucially, the main thing I hate about porn is that it so rarely reflects how actual sex happens. Even with amateur porn, or BDSM porn, or any
