The Modern Experience of Sex begins with the Sexual Awakening, which is a polite term for your first uncomfortable dream about that guy in school whom you were happy just plain hating before, but who your body now desperately wants you to hate-fuck instead. Yes, you’re 15 years old and you now want sex with everyone, including yourself. You’re not exactly sure what sex is, you’ve only recently found out that there is actually a third hole down there, and you feel about as attractive to the opposite sex as the slimy lovechild of Margaret Thatcher and an algal bloom (with even greasier hair and skin). But suddenly you’re getting some weird horny feelings to complement your new physique – and by the way, kid, good luck out there.
No doubt many of you will recall taking a sneaky peek at the sexy bits of your mum’s issue of She or Red when she wasn’t looking, but it’s often the teenage magazines that provide young women with their introduction to all things sexual. Pre internet porn and Snapchat, teenage magazines assigned themselves an educative role, perhaps in the knowledge that sex education was (and often still is) so shoddy – ask any woman you know and we guarantee she’ll know at least one person who thought they were bleeding to death when actually they had just started their period. The magazines of our adolescence such as Just Seventeen (J-17), Bliss, Mizz, Shout and Sugar were filled with advice on sexual problems, along with more information about vaginal discharge than you could shake a douche at. J-17 in particular pushed this frank approach to the limit, and received many an outraged parental letter as a result.
Magazines such as Bliss now try to counteract the demands to ‘BE A SEX GODDESS. NOW!’ (a real headline) that are ubiquitous in the magazines targeted at a slightly older audience by such campaigns as ‘Be Sexy, Be Sussed’ (‘Sexy girls have the confidence to say “No”’), and the well-qualified agony aunts and uncles (usually sexual health clinic workers and youth consultants) generally respond to questions about the birds and the bees with refreshing honesty. But even Bliss is guilty of running backward editorial such as their 2014 online quiz ‘How do lads see you?’ (For the sake of research, Holly did this quiz herself and got ‘Lads see: Mate not Date. You’re easy-going, confident and can talk to anyone … Problem is, lads are so busy having a laugh with you, they forget to see you as possible girlf material. Don’t stop being your sociable self, but maybe it’s time to let lads see the flirty side too.’)
The emphasis isn’t all on sex and flirtation in the land of the girls’ mag: with pre-teen magazines especially, for every problem page explaining that you can’t get pregnant from a blowie, there’s a collection of ‘embarrassing moments’, a spooky story, or a picture of a kitten to cover your physics book with. But much practical advice was gleaned from these semi-glossed pages in our childhood.
Once their readership outgrew ‘how to kiss with tongues’, successful girls’ magazines of the 1990s followed a similar format to their slightly more adult counterparts and moved on to ‘how to do that corkscrew thing with your tongue that your boyfriend saw in porn last week’. As the nineties progressed, magazines became more and more risqué, to the point where even the establishment was shocked. In 1996 Conservative MP Peter Luff proposed a bill that would require publishing companies to put age suitability warnings on the cover of magazines aimed at young women. Needless to say, it failed.
Grateful as we were for the information they dispensed, these magazines were never devoid of agendas. Sugar magazine, for instance, collated ‘boy tips’ with celebrity news, promoted an annual modelling competition (Rhiannon actually went to university with the winner of ‘Britain’s sexiest sixth-former’, as voted for by Sugar readers), and had enough ‘real-life stories’ to make you feel the right mix of schadenfreude and personal inadequacy. A common feature in Sugar was to discuss how to do ‘flirty fashion’, a look which usually involved a crop top and some glittery lip gloss. The emphasis on boys was clear, as demonstrated by topics such as ‘The big boy-mate question: to snog or not to snog?’, ‘How to be irresistible’, ‘Vanessa [Hudgens]: How I got Zac [Efron] … and kept him!’, ‘Pretending to have sex made me popular’, and, perhaps most depressingly, ‘Frenemies: why you should be friends with the girls you hate’. These early messages, which breed suspicion of other women alongside the dodgy subtext that changing yourself, or putting out, is how you get people, and especially men, to like you, weren’t even improved by the occasional red herring of a real-life story (‘I came home to find Mum ironing a chicken’ is a personal favourite of ours).
While touting ‘confidence’, Sugar pointed out the flaws in female celebrities through a number of those beloved backhanded compliments which would later morph into outright ruthlessness in the pages of Glamour and Grazia. Chock-a-block with make-up ads, and constantly correlating physical beauty with romantic and sexual success, it introduced its readers to the mentality that would make them susceptible to the grown-up mags’ plastic surgery push in their twenties. From Sugar’s free lip balm making your smackers ‘soft and kissable’, to the cover of Closer telling you that some reality star’s lipo means that ‘sex is amazing’, magazines wrestle you into a stranglehold from your first vague notion that sex exists, and keep hold of you until you admit through choking tears that yes, getting implants in your bum might make your partner enjoy doggy style that little bit more and that a Hollywood wax might be worth it, even if you have to spend half an hour with your ankles on the shoulders of some professional sadist who has the sick humour to carry the innocuous-sounding title of ‘beauty therapist’. From teenage magazines to your older sister’s Cosmo that you kept under the bed, they all carry the same message: that sex takes meticulous preparation and calculated planning, whether it’s learning how to ‘do sticky eyes’ (translation: staring at him sensuously before dragging your eyes away slowly as though they are bound to his with treacle) to attract that ‘cute boy’ or preparing your seduction ‘two days in advance’. Never mind that you haven’t even allowed him to unhook your bra yet – you might not even have a bra yet, let alone have worked out what it is you like sexually for yourself – it’s about time you got prepped for a lifetime of consumerism via self-doubt.
Magazines love to claim that they’re confidence builders, especially in terms of sexual exploits, but what they’re actually doing is inserting their caustic world view into your mind so that it becomes inextricable from your sense of worth: this deodorant will make you more confident. Dressing like Cheryl Cole will make you more confident. The latest dayglo body glitter will make you more confident. Reading these increasingly ridiculous sex tips will make you more confident, because every other woman is out to steal your boyfriend, and what sort of a man would he be if he wasn’t naturally attracted to the woman who exudes the desire to please him the most? Ultimately, this is what the ‘sexual confidence’ touted by magazines is all about. Whether it’s ‘1000 ways to please your man’ or ‘The seven kinds of orgasm that you absolutely must be having right now’ (believe us, there is only one – maybe, sometimes, two), sex, and all that surrounds it, takes work. And more often than not, it’s women’s work. Female sexuality is all about man-pleasing, man-teasing, manipulation, deceit and insecurity. Male sexuality ‘just can’t help itself’: it’s excitable, spontaneous, clear, direct and easy.
Female masturbation is a normal, healthy part of adolescence and personal development and teenage girls learning to explore their bodies should be viewed in the same starkly simple terms as teenage boys, and yet the issue is cloaked not only in a scary amount of complexity, but also with a certain gross-out, ‘cringey’ vibe that women feel long into adulthood. US mother Gail Horalek, for example, was so uncomfortable with the masturbatory passage in Anne Frank’s diary that she wrote to her daughter’s teacher asking that it be removed from the syllabus on the basis that it was ‘pornographic’. Perhaps Horalek, too, had been taken in by the widespread and damaging belief that masturbation is only for certain women, doing it in a certain way, in order for men to get off on it on PornHub.
Women having sex – or, even worse, enjoying it – has caused great consternation since the dawn of time. As Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá point out in Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, men the world over go to great lengths in their attempts to restrain female sexuality, whether through female genital mutilation, corsetry, diagnosing women with ‘nymphomania’ and committing them to mental institutions, burning them as witches, or labelling them ‘sluts’.11 And yet, despite this urge to repress the female libido, the message that women don’t really enjoy sex anywhere near as much as men do (and that those who do are to be scorned and feared) is still being put about. As Ryan so wisely asks, ‘Why the electrified high-security razor-wire fence to contain a kitty-cat?’
It could be argued that the female enjoyment of sex is most threatening when it’s with ourselves. Thought you could take your orgasms into your own hands? Think again. Having decided that women were unstable and emotional creatures liable to suffer from ‘hysteria’ (which in the past was thought to mean that your womb had become dislodged and gone for a wander), kinky Victorian doctors found that ‘pelvic massage’ – or what your local charmer hanging around outside Oceana might call ‘a cheeky finger’ – was a great way of magically relieving it. This led to the downright bizarre fact that strait-laced male Victorian medical professionals actually invented the vibrator. Tiring of having to ‘massage’ these women back to happiness themselves due to painful RSI (we’re not kidding), they put together a handy machine – and later developed it for home use. One of the originals even had a motor that doubled as an attachment for a sewing machine (that one had us in stitches …).
From then on, masturbation (by various euphemistic names) was considered a cure for all kind of female ailments, and by the turn of the century magazines such as Women’s Home Companion were running advertisements for vibrators (one tells how the ‘pleasure of youth … will throb within you …’ – ooh-er!) while Good Housekeeping went so far as to review different models in 1909. By the time the Rampant Rabbit made its debut appearance in Sex and the City, vibes came in assorted sizes (from ‘bullet’ to ‘bazooka’), ran on seventeen different settings and were available in several respectable high-street stores. Nowadays, if you’re not sharing a two-way vibrating probe from Ann Summers with your latest squeeze or sitting on an inflatable chair with a plastic erection attached, you apparently haven’t even lived.
Men invented the vibrator when the female orgasm was taboo, women perfected it when sex became an open discussion point, and now that we live in an age where sex sells faster than hot cakes, marketers have convinced us that it’s all but a sexual necessity. The thing is, vibrators are still often featured in books and magazines as sex toys to be used alongside partners in the bedroom, but, while they might have you believe that masturbation is all about ‘finding out what to do with your man’, we all know that alone time can sometimes be just what the doctor ordered. Unfortunately, magazines still limit discussion of masturbation to within the bounds of heterosexual relationships. How many sex tips have you seen that incorporate self-love into some kind of for-his-eyes-only ramped-up bedroom lap dance? And, on the other side, how many have you seen advocating the Sarah Silverman method, as popularised by her wildly successful YouTube hit ‘A Perfect Night’, that is, in other words, to ‘stay home, order in, watch a movie and masturbate’? Exactly.
We recall a boundary-pushing issue of J-17 which instructed girls how to masturbate, facing the issue with the tact and poise so often lacking in the stuttering, embarrassed delivery of sex ed teachers, who would undoubtedly be dealing with a pretty dry disciplinary hearing were they to instruct their female pupils, as J-17 did, to ‘Mount a pillow. It feels good.’ Young women in their mid-twenties always seem to remember this particular feature, not only because it was the first time many of us saw the word ‘clitoris’ in print, but also because that article was followed by a protracted eerie silence in magazines as far as stroking the bearded clam was concerned. In this sense, J-17 was a true pudenda pioneer; the topic of masturbation for many of us was hardly raised again until magazines for older women picked it up and rebranded it as ‘me time’.
Now women’s magazines make the whole endeavour of rubbing one out a high-maintenance affair. Your Tuesday-night wank has now been rebranded as expensively scented, ritualised ‘quality time with number one’, as though it was some kind of luxury spa treatment for your genitals. Just how many women out there actually rely on whale music and aromatherapy to get off? And why aren’t the men being told to stock up on Diptyque scented candles, rose petals and lavender bubble bath when getting down with their bad selves?
Although female masturbation has become a lot less frowned upon in the last couple of decades, there’s still a long way to go. TV might regularly nod towards teenage boys’ sheets cracking in half, but hardly anyone ever talks about the creaking and gasping sounds coming from the bedrooms of a nation of teenage girls. Whenever female masturbation does appear in visual media, it is usually presented as penetration-centric, presumably because a male audience would be dumbfounded if they were presented with an honest depiction of clitoral stimulation. Take the female masturbation scene in beloved comedy film of 2001, Not Another Teen Movie. The young girl in question takes out her gigantic dildo and inserts it into her presumably cavernous vagina – so far in that when her entire family walks into her bedroom she can’t remove it, and instead has to lie there in the throes of penetrative ecstasy as they talk at her. Give us a break.
Whether you do it with a lipstick-shaped bullet vibe in a footed bathtub surrounded by candles and musical accompaniment by Enya (as recommended by Cosmo, though such ritualising is possibly more reminiscent of an exorcism) or with your index finger while watching back-to-back episodes of Question Time, just go with it. Lady love isn’t about prepping for a man or ‘treating yourself to romance’. Most of us just really like to come, and can handle the job pretty proficiently ourselves, no steam-powered sewing machine motor required (but hey, if you want or need a little help from time to time, all power to you). Suffice to say, it’s depressing that teenage girls are reading magazines which tell them that there are umpteen different orgasms they need to master (not to mention umpteen different positions that they can reach them in), before they’ve even worked out the straightforward ways in which they can access their own sexual preferences. Perhaps it would be a good idea to start by telling them simply that it’s perfectly OK for them to give themselves one.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that women lose their virginity and men gain experience. The supposed purity and innocence that comes with not having had a dick inside them is still fetishised in girls, whether this manifests itself as compulsory premarital hymen checks and a creepy religious chastity ball that you’re forced to attend with your dad, or an abundance of ‘barely legal babes’ in schoolgirl outfits on the front page of Zoo magazine, ripe for visual deflowering by their readership. A woman exchanging her sexual services for various benefits is a classic paradigm, and nothing’s more of a commodity than purity. In our ruthlessly capitalist society, we can now cash in on such misogynistic assumptions by selling our virginity on eBay when the going gets tough, or ‘empower’ ourselves by offering lap dances to strangers on sugardaddie.com for a top-up on university tuition fees. Selling patriarchal idiocy back to men may well seem like payback – but however you dress it up, you’re still buying into the same steaming pile of fetid, sexist crap. And let’s not forget the age-old double standard waiting to catch you out: the option to ‘empower’ yourself sexually as a woman may exist from the moment you open your very first magazine, but don’t bet you won’t get called a slut in the process. Just because we are now much more in charge of our own transactions doesn’t mean that it’s liberating to conduct these transactions on a foundation of sexual doublethink.
Thanks in no small part to the popularity of ‘barely legal babes’ in porn, your purity is indeed a commodity, but only insofar as it can get you on the cast list for ‘Naughty Schoolgirls Gone Wild 2: Siege of the Virginity Bandits’. As soon as it looks as though you actually want to hold on to it, the media don’t want to know. While mothers may be engaged in a constant cry of ‘I can see your knickers!’ as their 12-year-old daughters roll their eyes and hitch up their school skirts, the younger generation are wondering where their teenage idol got that sequinned crotchless leotard from and pinning it to their ‘Saturday night’ board on Pinterest. This is a society where 14-year-olds can buy thong-attached skirts with ‘Easy Access’ emblazoned on them, and baby dolls come equipped with Babygros that rather terrifyingly ask ‘Am I fit or what?’ (Holly has photographic evidence of the latter, if you’re curious.) And it’s also one where those very same girls become social pariahs the minute they express a genuine interest in sex – they become ‘sluts’, ‘whores’, and ‘not girlfriend material’. In many ways, it seems like you just can’t win.
On the one hand, then, the ubiquitous emphasis on sex implies that every young woman should aspire to becoming sexually active ASAP, but on the other, relinquish your purity at her peril. Of course, the whole notion of a woman’s ‘purity’ is one of those things that many of us view as ‘total sexist bullshit’ – the idea that you transform into a different kind of woman entirely just because you’ve had a cock inside you is, of course, ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop our culture perpetuating it everywhere you look, and that includes teenage magazines. Don’t be put off by the fact that no one in the history of the world has ever put forward a convincing explanation for why women who have sex are somehow worse than women who don’t. What, is it because they’re slutty? Sinful? Aren’t willing to buy into paternalistic conventions of ownership? What is ‘sluttishness’ other than a woman simply showing consent and agency in her own sex life? Purity isn’t even a real thing, rooted as it is in the idea that female desire is unnatural, dirty and corrupting. Either that or nonexistent, so you must just be faking it to get something, or to manipulate men. The existence of the myths surrounding women and sex just shows how a significant proportion of the population still don’t believe you have ownership of your own sexuality, but that men do.
This idea is borne out again and again by the advice given to teenagers about sex. Whether it’s in a magazine, a lesson plan or a teenage soap storyline, boys are taught when and how it is appropriate to express the sexual desires they are experiencing, while girls are taught to resist them. In other words, boys are taught to say, ‘Ohhh, yeah’ and girls are taught to say, ‘Whoa, no’. As many of you will no doubt recall when thinking back to your teenage years, the experience of being a sexually curious virgin involves the constant walking of a ‘reputation’ tightrope stretched between ‘slutty’ and ‘frigid’. And it’s even worse in the twenty-first century – one minute you’re reading ‘Ten steps to your first kiss’ in Shout and the next you’re expected to Snapchat Darren from 8E a photo of your ‘newly shaven pussy’. Yet despite all the naked selfies that are doing the school rounds as we write, losing your virginity is still often portrayed by the media as a defining moment in a woman’s life, with heavy emphasis on rose petals and romance.
No wonder, with all the pressure coming from every angle, the actual first time can fall spectacularly short. To cite an example, one of our readers described her first sexual experience at a peer-pressure-laden ‘party’ that her friend held while her parents were away one weekend. Arriving at a supposed sleepover laden with her toothbrush and a pair of flannel pyjamas at the age of 14, she was instructed by her best friend to ‘take your clothes off’, and, after minor protestation, was assured: ‘It’s a blow job party. All grown-ups do this.’ Kneeling on the floor in her Tammy Girl knickers and starter bra, she delivered a spectacularly bad BJ with the help of two of her childhood friends. ‘At that point, I didn’t even know semen existed,’ she told us. ‘Needless to say, I only realised recently that this essentially counts as the only orgy I will probably ever have.’ Judging by what we’ve heard from the Vagenda’s readership, this is by no means an unusual story.
If you manage to sidestep being labelled slutty for ditching your purity and test-driving the car before you really drive it, then you enter headfirst and relatively unscathed into the ritualistic world of dating. Sexual politics, as we know, are alive and well in this arena – in fact, they’re especially feisty. And there are all sorts of questions posed to women that, conveniently, men aren’t really expected to give a shit about. For instance: should you have sex on the third date? Should you ‘make him wait’, since the man horn is real but the woman horn is a mythological female ploy; a unicorn horn, if you will? Should you take the Pill? Should you lick his balls? Should you apologise if you’re on your period? Would you rather have a cup of tea?
Despite this bombardment, you can’t step away from the shelf for long enough to realise that the magazines are doing what they always do: identifying a problem, making you feel bad about it, and then ‘providing’ you with the solution (all for the £2 cover price plus £39.99 for the satin body-stocking), like the good little consumer that you are. And you fall for it hook, line and sinker because you’ve been conditioned to perceive yourself as lacking and the magazine as all-knowing. The doublethink culture really comes into its own here, because the media beast would have it that, yes, you lose something precious (read: something a dude would really like to take off you) when you sleep with someone for the first time and thus render yourself a questionable can of used goods; but then again, once you’re in a sexual relationship you need to behave like a squeezing, gyrating, permanently up-for-it nympho pixie in order to ‘keep the magic alive’ and prevent your boyfriend from straying. If you’re not dyeing your pubes red and shaving them into a heart shape for Valentine’s Day so he’ll get a nice view as you perform your latest striptease for him, forget it. If you haven’t invested in the latest deal from Agent Provocateur on fluffy handcuffs and tingling lube you may as well write off your shared love life as less meaningful than a quickie grope at the youth club under the sweet table. And if he doesn’t get at least one apologetic blowjob every time you dare to selfishly bleed out of your vagina for an entire week? Well, then you’re just so unreasonable that you’re lucky to have conned some poor bloke into bed with you in the first place. In other words, once you’ve lost your sacred virginity, Magazineland swoops in with a whole new range of things to worry about.
There was a time when sex was just you, your 17-year-old boyfriend, and a twenty-minute grope for the right hole culminating in a lot of commiserative cuddling. But in the twenty-first century, sex is complicated. Walk into an Ann Summers shop and you’re faced with a range of S&M testicle clamps and some awful contraption called the ‘dildo tree’, neither of which makes a particularly welcome addition to ‘date night’. In a world where you get a space of only about five years in between learning what the word ‘uterus’ means and getting your head around the fact that even your old best friend from the playground might now self-identify as a dominatrix ‘cumslut’ with a foot fetish, it’s not surprising that a large chunk of the population chooses to sit at home and log in to YouPorn with their left hand rather than venture into the scary realm of single people and all their possible oddities.
There’s no doubt that the experience of sex has changed dramatically over the last hundred years, and not in isolation from women’s rights. You only needed to contrast the pages of recently defunct more! magazine (1988–2013) to the chaste virgins of 1920s romantic magazine fiction to know that things have become a lot more adventurous in terms of where things are being put and how. More! was particularly famous for its ‘position of the fortnight’ feature, which invariably involved recycling the same five sex positions and giving them increasingly ridiculous names (‘the dolphin’, ‘the robot cuddle’, ‘the upside-down wheelbarrow’) while illustrating them with Barbie and Ken dolls. It is fondly remembered by those of us who hadn’t even had sex yet, but were nonetheless fascinated by the mechanics of the reverse cowgirl.
Betwixt teenagehood and womanhood something odd begins to happen. You’ve grown out of your teenage weekly read and into the strange Cosmo Girl universe. The advice of agony aunts, doctors and counsellors begins to wane and in its place you get ‘His steamy sex fantasies’ and ‘Clever tricks to drive him wild’. In other words, women’s magazines ramp up the raunch and the focus shifts away from female sexual pleasure to ‘the secrets of the male orgasm’. For magazines written by women and for women, there’s certainly a lot of cock-centric editorial, and it would be foolish to think that ‘raunch culture’ doesn’t play a part.
Cosmopolitan, a magazine which 90% of young women in America reportedly look to as a significant source of sexual education, has spent the last two decades reserving the upper left-hand corner of its cover for a raunchy headline, which almost always features the appetite-whetting word ‘sex’ in giant capital letters next to the cover girl’s face. A quick flick through their back catalogue reveals a smorgasbord of shagging know-how, including: ‘Win the sex factor’, ‘Sex Q&A’, ‘75 sex moves men crave’, ‘All new 60 sex tips’, ‘Sex survey results’, ‘Men, sex and you’, ‘1000 true sex confessions’, ‘How normal is your sex life?’, ‘Be a sex genius’, ‘Sex uncensored’, ‘Best. Sex. Ever’, ‘His 6 secret sex spots’, ‘Guys rate 50 sex moves’, and the exhausting-sounding ‘Sex truths we learnt from 2000+ men’. Glamour also got in on the action with the ‘What men think of sexual things you do’ trend; examples include: ‘25 things you do that guys secretly love’ and ‘12 little things every guy wants in bed’. Every one of these features, unfortunately, will be identical to the last, because, let’s face it, there are only really about ten sexual moves in existence, and human beings have had them down for centuries now.
The fact of the matter is that most sex that you see or hear about in the media is not just boring, generic and stereotyped, but also geared almost entirely towards pleasing a man – and yet it claims to be proof of our sexual liberation. Sure, it’s just great for guys that boobs are now on show at eye level in every local newsagent’s via such bastions of decency as Playboy and GQ, whereas in times of yore you’d only find them on the top shelf – with the nudie calendars and the cardboard holders for packets of pub peanuts. Yet the ‘boobs’ we see peeking out of these lads’ mags and the porn that influences them are more often than not plastic, sculpted appendages bearing very little resemblance to the fat-packets we usually carry on our chests. Likewise, the infantilised women in submissive poses appearing in videos online, who act theatrically the moment a man points his chapseye at them, tell us as little about actual, real-life sex as the saucy stories our great-grandmothers read. The characters are just more naked, is all. We’re told this is liberating, and perhaps it is for those who enjoy being aggressively rammed in flat-pack bedrooms while a pumped-up himbo tugs on their pigtails. For those women whose tits have a natural droop and who have the audacity to get their kicks from clitoral stimulation? Not so much.
While magazines such as Cosmopolitan once sought to liberate and empower women by allowing them to take control of their own sexualities, they now seem to envisage their readers as a troop of performing sex monkeys. Whether it’s recreating a strip club environment in the bedroom or dressing up as a sexy nurse complete with phallic syringe, much of the advice doled out to readers in need of ‘spicing up their sex lives’ contains an element of performance that would not be amiss in your average, workaday porn film. And a low-budget one, at that. So why not do it like a pornstar? Well, first of all, men still comprise the major audience for erotic film in its current form. We are fed the same stale line again and again about how the demand for visual erotica just isn’t there from the female side: apparently women prefer Anaïs-Nin-style literature (or Fifty Shades of Grey) and when they do watch porn, they want a candlelit view of romantic coupledom where the man cries a little on climax. (‘Tissue to wipe your spaff away, babe?’ ‘Thanks, sweetheart – but let me get my tears of happiness first.’) As much as that is all fine and dandy, if you actually want to see a real woman having a real orgasm, then there are very few places for you to turn.
In other words, women aren’t staying away from porn in 2014 because they don’t care for sex and ‘just aren’t visual creatures’: they’re staying away from it because it’s just another tiring male-dominated sphere that has absolutely nothing to do with female pleasure. If you’re a randy woman perusing the internet for wank fodder, you’re going to find either the dirty scenes from a cheesy chick flick or a barrage of doe-eyed, finger-licking girls who get their most powerful orgasms from the sheer pleasure of licking up the pizza guy’s swimmers from the kitchen floor. A world of plenty it may be, but in the catalogues of pornography, where ‘needle fetish dwarf porn’ is genuinely out there for your viewing pleasure, it’s difficult to find a single accurate representation of a woman having sex in an enjoyable manner. The same is true of magazines – all too often, women are expected to plan, conform and perform, rather than enjoy the ride. His pleasure comes first: hers is always secondary.
Just as in porn, in the fantasies pulled straight from the pages of Cosmo and Glamour the male gaze has primacy. Where there is a focus on female pleasure, it involves howling and screaming in ecstasy as soon as the tip of his member touches your vaginal walls, whether or not you feel like it. Often, you’re seen as little more than an object to enhance what one of our readers sarcastically termed ‘his wank into your vagina’. The cult of being single and in search of a sexual partner generally revolves around transforming oneself into this sort of man-pleasing man magnet (indeed, Helen Gurley Brown is frequently quoted as having said, ‘If you’re not a sex object, you’re in trouble’).
This notion of the ‘sexy single girl’ is Cosmopolitan’s raison d’être. The Cosmo Girl is also ‘liberated’. She can have sex whenever and with whomever she wants, is economically independent, confident, consumerist, and has a handful of filthy sex tricks up her sleeve. All these sex trips are, naturally, gleaned from Cosmo itself. The Cosmo Girl can drive a man wild in bed and hold her own in the boardroom. She can shop at Agent Provocateur without feeling embarrassed, owns an admirable array of sex toys, and is adventurous and experimental in spirit. And she’d never, ever admit to having a bad lay.
Except, of course, none of this single girl sexual experimentation can happen on the first date. Kinky sexual exploration is all very well, but you can’t expect a man to marry you if you’re whipping out the handcuffs the first time he walks you home. Amidst all of its efforts to make you into a slathering unpaid prostitute, Cosmo also reminds you, with the double standard that only someone who truly loves you would hold, that it’s just not a good idea to get too liberated. Don’t go bandying about your reverse cowgirl technique on the first date or anything.
Cosmo is having a virgin–whore personality crisis. It wants kink, but kink within limits. It tells you that you should be having sex with whomever you want, wherever you want, but follows it up with a load of articles telling you exactly what it is you should be doing. For instance, ‘8 new places to have great sex’, examples of which include, honest to God, ‘shedlike structures usually placed in remote areas’ (aka the set of a teen slasher movie), in the fridge, and in a rowing boat.
The contradictions in Cosmo’s outlook are amplified by the fact that every sexual proclivity is now catered to by that filthy behemoth that is the internet. Whether you like to wear a nappy, indulge in a bit of ‘bum fun’, or get jiggy with it in a full fluffy animal costume, the internet has it covered. Of course, women’s magazines could never feature any of this stuff without kissing goodbye to their advertisers. No one at Clinique is going to want to see their moisturiser advertised next to a feature on bukkake (for a start, the visual references are too reminiscent), and last time we checked, none of them were down with the brown (got to keep Cadbury happy, after all). As a result, magazines are constantly searching for new ways to appear to whet the readers’ appetite without undermining their own financial interests.
This ‘pushing of the boundaries but within limits’ strategy is how you end up with ridiculous sex tips such as the ‘doughnut nibble’ from Cosmo’s ‘31 Days of HOT SEX’ feature: ‘slip’ a hot doughnut around your man’s penis then slowly nibble it off? (This suggestion caused some consternation among our Vagenda readers. The hole in the doughnut is, wel … rather small?).
In order to avoid the repetitive recycling of sex tips (which nonetheless seems to make up much of the content), journos are finding themselves having to be all the more inventive within more and more stringent boundaries – with hilarious, and sometimes disturbing, results.
The magazine sex tip is a long-standing institution, ranging from the sticky to the impractical, the ridiculous to the sublime. Here are some of our favourites.
Cook dinner topless, apply a little tomato sauce to your nipple (make sure it’s not too hot), and ask your man if it’s spicy enough.
Follow this tip and – voilà! – the normally tedious task of cooking dinner becomes a saucy masterclass in eroticism. If you ask us, said writer hasn’t gone far enough. Men love beef. Men love boobs. Why not dump the whole lot on your naked body and allow your man to frolic in your beefy bolognaise boobs to your heart’s content? That’ll get his juicy tomatoes really throbbing.
Incorporating food into your passion play is a classic carnal activity. Take a few of your favourite erotically appealing flavour combinations, like peanut butter and honey or whipped cream and chocolate sauce, and mix up yummy treats all over his body.
Sex tips will vary as to whether it’s your body providing the buffet or his, but surely having that many sticky substances in your various orifices cannot be good for you (and indeed, they’re usually the kinds of foods that the magazine would advise its dieting readers to avoid). And what if you have allergies, not to mention the issue of your partner’s possibly copious chest hair? When one coeliac sufferer complained about the clear gluten bias in Cosmo’s food sex strategies (and doesn’t she sound like a hoot!), the magazine responded by suggesting that she surround his, ahem, love salami (read: penis) with cold cuts of meat for her to nibble on. Sadly, she was also a vegetarian.
Sprinkle a little pepper under his nose right before he climaxes. Sneezing can feel similar to an orgasm and amplify those feel-good effects.
Why not give your boyfriend a sneezegasm? First you let him come on your tits, now he’s phlegming in your face. But what’s one more bodily fluid, eh? Three litres of water and a bottle of syrup of figs and you’ll have completed the set!
Sour Belts: While you’re making out, use the belts to playfully whip each other’s butts. Spanking releases feel-good endorphins and dopamine, which up the pleasure factor and increase arousal and excitement.
Sour belts are those sweets which look like extra long frogs’ tongues dipped in sugar. This sex tip is from an entire creepy article about how to get your rocks off using candy from your childhood. This one’s for you, Herr Freud.
Try Some Naughty Props
Do something unexpected with toys you already have lying around the house.
Hairbrush: A hard-bristled hairbrush is perfect for gently scratching his skin.
Rolling pin: Run this baker’s basic over his back and thighs during an erotic massage.
Blush brush: Skip the pricey feathers you find at sex shops, and use this to tickle his neck, chest, arms and package.
More ways of transforming domestic drudgery into sexy fun play! And using tools which some hard-line feminists would regard as objects traditionally associated with female oppression – bonus! We especially like the rolling pin – why not kill two birds with one stone and roll the pastry out on his naked back before wrapping it sensuously around his member to create a real-life sausage roll? It looks funny and it’s yummy, too – plus, you’re performing two wifely duties in one fell swoop. Multitasking is just another talent that a woman brings to a sexual partnership, and why stop there? Those Marigold rubber gloves are the perfect accessories for digital anal exploration. And that fish slice is a perfect BDSM prop when slapping his bare bottom.
During intercourse, you’re all wrapped up in each other. So extend that carnal concept even further by literally tying yourselves together. Take a really long piece of sturdy plastic wrap (long enough to fit around your body about eight times). Then fold it in half, twist it into a long rope that fits snugly around both of your bodies twice … you won’t be able to move more than a few inches from each other.
Another inspiration from the animal kingdom. Did you know that foxes can’t physically extricate themselves from each other for up to half an hour after sex? That one’s all about sperm protection, but this one’s all about fun times – though they don’t mention how you detach yourselves afterwards. What if you end up stuck like that for ever, unable to reach the telephone, until one of you starves to death and your only sustenance, bar human flesh, comes from the tiny globules of spaghetti sauce left over from the last sex tip you tried? They really haven’t thought this one through.
Forget about just stroking your man with a simple pair of satin panties! For a real treat, pop those silky numbers in the freezer a day before you’re ready for action. Then loosely wrap the icy fabric around his package and gently slide it up and down.
Freezing temperatures generally have an adverse effect on the male member’s … ahem … turgidity. But the same is not true of your vagina. Instead of using the ‘panties’ (and doesn’t that word immediately bring to mind a creepy old man?) to wrap around his penis, why not don the knickers straight from the cooler? It’s the perfect antidote to that burning cystitis you’ve been battling all week.
Don a wig. It will transform your looks and, consequently, your sexual personality.
Ah, a classic women’s magazine assumption wrapped up in a helpful hint: your looks have changed and so, ‘consequently’, has your personality, allowing you to play out the classic ‘sex with a stranger’ fantasy (as long as it isn’t an actual stranger, obvs, you big slag).
Shave each other’s pubic hair into pretty patterns: a heart, for instance.
His friends in the rugby club changing rooms will love you for it.
Sneak Up Behind Him
Blow his mind with this sneaky move: stand behind him and stroke his penis.
We have now definitely entered Creepytown. Walking up behind someone and grabbing his genitals while he’s brushing his teeth or dreamily looking at the clouds, whether you yell ‘Surprise!’ or not, is unlikely to pan out the way that you wanted. It’s not only unnerving but also deeply impolite. Men are keen to protect their nads from potential attackers at all costs, so following this advice may lead to his accidentally putting you in hospital.
Start by stacking six scrunchies on top of each other over his package. Then remove them one by one using your lips and tongue … as each piece is removed, it releases a little bit of pressure in his penis, which will make his orgasm more intense when it happens. Plus, the movement of the fabric will feel wild on his skin.
We knew the nineties were having a resurgence. Who says those glittery butterfly hairclips don’t make excellent nipple clamps? Then again, if you’re going to have nineties sex why not just crimp your hair, drop an E, whack Now 42 on the CD player and let him touch you over your clothes?
Late at night, light off, phone off the hook. Make the atmosphere as spooky as possible. Watch a horror film to psych yourselves up even more. Then, dress in a skimpy outfit that makes you feel vulnerable, make him count to 100, then hide. When he does find you, it takes a woman with nerves of reinforced steel not to scream, wriggle, and half-heartedly try to escape.
There are no words.
Despite all the weird, wonderful and downright terrifying ideas that magazines have for spicing up your sex life, one thing you may have noticed is how none of their ‘moves’ are actually that kinky. Take an article that US Cosmo ran online in June 2013 on the difference between making love and f*cking (their asterisk, not ours – the presence of which, incidentally, leads us to question their suitability for giving sex advice in the first place – they can’t even say the word). The ‘making love’ segments involved such romantic endeavours as ‘tossing a sheer scarf over a lamp’, gentle kissing and ‘languorous oral sex’ (which will at least leave you feeling fully sexually sated before you die in a blazing scarf-related inferno). Fucking, sorry, f*cking, meanwhile, involves incorporating some garden-variety filth, including handcuffs, thigh-high boots (which they describe as ‘totally out of character’ – because you’re a good girl, not a hoebag), stroking his ‘backdoor’, and telling him – WITHOUT CRACKING UP – ‘I’m gonna give it to you good’. ‘Make some noise,’ you’re also told. What? Just any indeterminate noise? Or can it be the sound of you walking out of the house while slamming the actual backdoor in frustration? Because even the most soft-core genuine erotica at least has the gumption to use the word ‘arsehole’.
We should also mention that most magazine sex articles are deeply heteronormative: women’s magazines will only suggest lesbian love if it’s in the context of giving your boyfriend a sexy treat. One women’s magazine even suggested that, if you are uncomfortable with a threesome (or, to use their words, find it ‘too racy’), then you can simply ‘pretend someone else is there when you get it on’. Because initiating sex while pointing at thin air and saying, ‘Mike, this is Martha. She wants to suck you off while I read the paper’ looks completely normal.
Ridiculous sex tips aside, what is it about women’s magazines that makes them so, well, vanilla? At risk of sounding like Mean Girls, there’s something about them that is just so very … uncool. We think we’ve worked out the reason for this, and it has something to do with their soft-focus, rose-petalled, white-knickered concept of sex being so alienated from the actual, real-life experience of shagging that it’s almost as though they are two completely different activities. Which, in fact, they are. Real sex is dirty, sticky, occasionally awkward, and lots and lots of fun. Magazine sex, meanwhile, is illustrated by stock photographs of clean-cut, smiling men and women tossing and tumbling on pristine Egyptian cotton sheets as a precursor to the ‘soulful climax’ they will both undoubtedly achieve simultaneously and while making eye contact. Very occasionally, one of them will get out a dildo but only as a prop, and, as no one in Magazineland has bodily fluids, it’s never going to be much of a lark for either party. You don’t need us to tell you that the sex in these magazines bears absolutely no relation to the sex that millions of people engage in, in their houses, every night. As human animals we sweat, we grunt, and we heave as we clumsily try and arrange our respective flaps of skin in a way that is pleasurable for both parties. Making the beast with two backs is an often cack-handed endeavour which, to an outside observer, looks like slapstick comedy.
Yet a magazine will never tell you this because it ruins the glossy airbrushed façade it is touting: that perfect, candlelit epiphany where you both see stars and no one gets semen in their hair. Everything about magazine sex is plastic: the models are plastic, the act is plastic, and the cock ring Cosmo told you to buy and which your boyfriend is now inching away from with a haunted look in his eye is, you guessed it, plastic.
What effect does this plasticised version of sex have on its female readership? Well, if you’re a teenage girl, chances are that your first confrontation with an angry, red, throbbing penis is going to be something of a shock. Penises are, in our humble opinion, somewhat lacking in inherent aesthetic appeal, so chancing upon one unprepared for the first time is likely to be a little alarming. No one tells you this. And they never, ever talk about fingering. The fact that contraception is also conspicuously absent hardly prepares you for the awkward condom fumble of your first, second, third, and let’s face it, probably twentieth sexual experience.
Sex involves flaps and fanny farts and foreskins and sometimes, yes, even fisting, but most importantly, it should be with someone you want, when you want, and how you want it, not how some media conglomerate thinks you should want it. It’s important to relationships, whether you’re in a fetishistic polyamorous triad or ushering in the golden anniversary of your blissfully happy monogamous marriage, so why have the media packaged it in a smooth, shiny silicone box and served it up to the teenagers of today with an extra-large helping of bullshit?
The sad truth is that, once we become alienated from sex, we become alienated from our bodies too, and rather than seeing them as physical entities to be explored, enjoyed and experienced, we start to compare them unfavourably with the shiny fakeness in the media or in porn. Despite the best efforts of many teenage magazines to counteract this effect (they have what can almost be described as a preoccupation with crabs, discharge and toxic shock syndrome), it almost seems that we’re becoming even less comfortable with our bodies, which certainly isn’t something that tallies very well with our so-called ‘liberation’. As anyone who’s been thoroughly rummaged in by a gynaecologist knows, talking about this stuff isn’t easy. In fact, it can induce full-on vagina panic. We’re increasingly told by the media that our genitals should be as smooth as a peach, as well as tight, white and out of sight, so a trip to the clinic for an exhaustive STD test or a Pap smear can seem very daunting. Granted, no one actually enjoys mounting a speculum while a doctor commands the nurse to ‘get this girl some lube’, but it is, to an extent, part and parcel of being a woman, which is why it’s so weird that we clam up (pun intended) at the very mention of our fannies. It’s not until something goes wrong down there, say an abnormal smear, a bout of chlamydia, or pain during sex, that you realise how alone you can feel. But on the plus side, it’s not until your vag hits a medical speed bump that things tend to, er … open up. Suddenly women you barely know are matter-of-factly discussing their cervixes and telling you you’ll be fine, and we have it on good authority that once you’ve had a baby (if that’s your jam), you’ll be so used to having other people poking around in there that you’ll be jumping up on that medical table and spreading your legs quicker than your doctor can say, ‘That’s really not necessary for tonsillitis.’
The culture of shame surrounding female sexuality is alive and well. That, rather than all of this razzmatazz involving whips and handcuffs and anal beads, is why we need more frank and honest communication on the subject (the handcuffs can come later). Sex is, after all, a relatively uncomplicated rhythmical movement involving two people’s genitalia, and despite what the Cosmo Sutra may tell you, there are really only a handful of possible bodily contortions you can manage while keeping a penis inside a vagina (we once saw a position that involved a woman sucking off a man in a deckchair elevated to the status of ‘beach blowjob’ – oh, more! magazine, how we miss you). Strip away the leg restraints and the dirty talk from any porn that’s going and you’ll see the same thing: an in-and-out motion involving your naughty parts. Let’s not get too carried away; it is, after all, just sex.