Unless you’re a swinger, how did you learn sexual technique and etiquette? From a porn movie or 100 perhaps?

I thought so. Me too.

With nearly everything else in life, there’s a handbook to tell you how to be really good at things but with sex, you’re pretty much on your own — except for those videos. I think porn videos have a lot to answer for in the way they portray women and real sex.

For instance:

* All women must be fine as hell and not older than 19. OK, 20 but then they’re MILFs.
* They must have platinum blond hair and fake boobs (over the size of DD).
* Women are all either bi or lesbian.
* Lingerie is simply not sexy and must be removed as quickly as possible.
* As soon as any sexual activity starts every shred of clothing (remember, lingerie is not sexy) must be removed. Ok, one exception — high heels must be worn throughout the entire sexual experience.
* All men must sport a mustache or marines haircut and leave their socks on especially during the good bits.
* If there is a black male involved he will be hung like a horse.
* Upon orgasm, men must ejaculate at least 27 pints
* Extremely beautiful women really want to have sex with a 67 year old man
* During sex a woman must maintain a word to swear ratio of at least 1:17 respectively
* Only overweight men who also have a severe case of gut overhang like to have sex
* Women must always moan from pleasure while giving another man oral sex.
* Women usually apologize to a man by giving him a blowjob.
* All women can have an orgasm by just taking off their clothes.
* One sexual position or act is not good enough. Four different positions in a couple of minutes is what EVERYONE else does
* Men are never impotent.
* When performing oral sex on a woman, 10 seconds is more than satisfactory.
* Women who get caught masturbating by a strange man will not scream with embarrassment; instead she will insist he have sex with her.
* Women are indifferent as to where a man’s ejaculate lands
* Women always moan uncontrollably when giving a blowjob.
* Women always orgasm when men do.
* Men always groan “OH YEAH!” when they orgasm.
* Women always make Oooohhh Ahhhhh noises when they have sex.
* Asian men don’t exist, but their chicks are HOT!
* Nurses tend to give blow jobs as an exam method.
* Nuns are always wild and eager for sex.
* Children do not exist
* Women never have headaches… or periods.
* Women always look pleasantly surprised when they unzip a man’s fly and find a penis there.
* Every woman on the planet is bi
* Pubic hair is just a myth.
* If you offer them enough money, all women are willing to have sex with you
* There are no such things as natural finger nails.
* The man always decides on the position, no objections.

Real people have real sex. Women have periods. Some women do not want to be spanked. Some couples can have sex without swearing. Some women don’t have sex with everyone who comes to the door. If you’ve been treating your sex life like you see in a porno movie, it’s time for a re-think.

At some point in our loves the question comes up, “How old is too old?” for certain things. Now for me, I don’t think I’ll ever be too old for lots of things. Truthfully though, I know I’m too old to wear a miniskirt – I think anyone who orders from the back page of Denny’s menu is too old for that. I’m too old to be a Rockette, I’m probably too old to take up boxing and I’m too old to think about becoming a brain surgeon.

I’m probably too old to wear a baseball cap backwards and I’m way too old to give a rat’s ass what anybody thinks about what I do.

I’ll never be too old for sex.

I don’t get caught up in the age thing because it’s just a number. The yearning for sexual intimacy doesn’t go away. You’ll never ever be too old to find someone to be intimate with. I’m 100% convinced of that.

Matt Dunn

Man may traditionally be the hunter-gatherer, but when it comes to finding a mate, forget it – especially since our ‘let-you-know-we-fancy-you’ strategy seems to consist mainly of us trying to conceal any evidence that we do.

Back when we were twelve, it was easy for you to tell when we’d crossed the line from finding girls repulsive – mainly because our reaction to the strange stirrings we were feeling down below was to tease you and pull your hair. And while you may still make us go stiff at the most inconvenient of times, more likely nowadays it’s with fright.

But fortunately for you women, it’s a lot easier to read our body language than it is for you to read maps. There are always tell-tale signs. And if you suspect that we may be interested in you, don’t always leave the first move to us boys. If you do, you might be waiting a long, long time…

The guy in the bar
Let’s face it, when we’re out on the town, we eye up any girl who walks past, so how do you tell if that sexy faraway look in our eyes is because we’re lusting after you, or just due to the fact that we’ve put away one pint too many and can’t focus on anything? Well, once you’ve ascertained that we’re looking, which will be easy because we’ll be making such a bad job of not looking, the trick here is to watch where we’re looking. Whenever we think we can get away with it, our eyes will be roaming all over the various (obvious) parts of your anatomy, but if we’re really interested in you, the area of flesh that we really want to see bare is the ring finger on your left hand. Then, if you do manage to engage us in conversation, we’ll ask you questions about yourself, and actually listen to the answers. If we offer to buy you a drink, chances are we’re being more than just polite. If we let you buy us one back, even more so. And when we need to go to the loo, if we apologise for it, then nip back with such indecent haste you’re nervous about touching our hands, you might want to think about booking the church.

At the gym
Ever wondered why us guys always work out in front of the mirrors? Well, it’s not so we can keep an eye on our form. A classic hunting ground for the male of the species, the gym is a tricky one to read, as more so than in the bar, given your lack of clothing we absolutely don’t want you to catch us staring and think we’re a perv. Instead, demonstrating twisted bloke logic, we’ll position ourselves so we can keep tabs on your reflection, thinking this doesn’t therefore count as gawping. And it’s likely that we’ll try and mirror your behaviour, too – watch to see if we cut short our session on the treadmill just as you finish your run, then hang around to see where you go next. We might take the machine next to you, even when there are plenty of others free, or if there’s a bank of three stretch mats/bikes/steppers, we’ll get there first, occupying the middle one just to ensure you have to take the one next to us. And the proof of the pudding? If, despite our workout programme finishing, we don’t until yours does. It took my mate Mike hours of Stairmaster stalking before he finally managed to ask gym-babe Julia out. But not only did he gain a girlfriend – he lost half a stone in the process.

Your neighbor
The days of us hoping you’ll pop round to borrow a cup of sugar are over, particularly because by the looks of you you’re a sweetener-only girl. So how do you tell when – to paraphrase a certain Aussie soap – good neighbours might become more than good friends? This can be a hard one to work out, as everyone’s generally neighbourly, and helping you to take out your bins doesn’t necessarily mean we want to take you out too. But if you see our curtains twitching every time you pass, don’t be fooled into thinking that we’re just doing our Neighbourhood Watch duty – there’s only one thing in the neighbourhood we want to keep our eye on, and that’s you. Here, the Rule of Coincidence applies – if you notice that we always seem to be leaving for work at the same time as you, or when you’re sunbathing in your back garden, we’re ‘coincidentally’ mowing the lawn. Similarly, when you’re outside washing your car, we pick that moment to wash ours, even though you’re sure you saw us do it yesterday. Remember – once is luck, but more than once is lust.

Your brother’s friend
Back when you were growing up, you were our mate’s little sister, so of course we didn’t fancy you. Instead we’d look after you, buying you drinks, and frightening off any spotty oik who’d dared to glance over in your general direction – behaviour that nowadays would have you convinced we were crazy about you. Now you’re older, we’re still not technically allowed to fancy you out of loyalty to your brother, so how do we show that we, in fact, do? Well, by ignoring you, of course. But although we might not even acknowledge you when you walk into the bar, we’ll surely be watching you out of the corner of our eye. The giveaway is when we do eventually deign to talk to you, we’ll know much more about you than we should, especially considering that we ‘ignore’ you most of the time. And when you crack a joke, we’ll be laughing the hardest, because it’s ’safe’ to laugh at something funny, and we’re desperate to make some sort of contact with you despite ourselves.

Your housemate
Housemates tend to see the worst of each other, particularly first thing in the morning; hungover, hair dishevelled, unshaven – and us guys don’t always look that great either. So watch for when we start taking an excessive interest in our personal hygiene – which for most blokes means having a regular nightly bath rather than a regular bath night. And if you get home and we’ve done the Hoovering, the washing up, or you find us doing the cleaning, chances are it’s because we want to do the dirty with you – my friend Nick swears that it was the sight of him in his Marigolds that finally convinced his flatmate Emma that he was interested in sharing more than the household chores. Of course, she may just have had a rubber fetish, but other tactics include ensuring the two of you are the last ones to go to bed then offering to make you a coffee, or suggesting that you give your night out with the girls a miss to watch some slushy DVD that we’ve rented ‘by mistake’. Subtle, we’re not.

Your mate’s ex
You’ve possibly always suspected we’ve fancied you, maybe from those odd glances held a little too long, or the good-natured insults. But we know there’s around a three-month cooling off-period (although if blokes made the rules up, it’d be about five minutes) during which we won’t dare make the move – perhaps out of loyalty to your mate, but more probably because we’re worried that she’s told you about the strange face we make during sex. So when we feel it’s safe, we might test the water by swapping insults for backhanded compliments – ‘You’re a lot more sensible than Jen ever was’, or ‘I wish she’d had your sense of humour’ etc. The clincher is when we try to demonstrate how caring and sensitive we are by calling you up to ask you how your mate’s doing since the split up – what we really mean is ‘do you think she’d mind if I asked you out?’.

Your friend
Sadly, the days of letting a girl know we liked them by chasing her around the playground are over – for most normal people, anyway. Instead, our mature, sophisticated approach will probably be to insult you, or even to try and chat up your friends, when really it’s you we want to ask out. You’ll notice a subtle change in the way we look at you – or rather, don’t look at you. And when you’re alone with us, if we constantly question you about your boyfriend, tell you what a jerk he is, and how you need to go out with someone who treats you like you deserve, you don’t have to guess who we’re referring to. But be careful – you’ve got to get this one right, as the last thing you want to do is ruin a beautiful friendship.

Your work colleague
A lot of people meet their new partner at work – it’s just a shame that many of them are still going out with their ‘old’ partner at the same time – and there’s nothing more embarrassing for a guy than becoming the subject of office gossip by asking out someone at work who’s already loved-up. We need to find out precisely what your current romantic status is before we do anything else, and the only ’safe’ way to do this is by (gulp) talking to you. So how do we engineer this? Well, by ‘accidentally’ bumping into you several times a day at the water cooler, or just happening to be walking past when you’re struggling with the jammed photocopier. Us blokes will plan our whole afternoon workload just so we can drop everything and pack up in five seconds flat when we see you making for the lift at the end of the day. And if we do get you chatting as we, ahem, go down together, watch to see if we’ve managed to ‘casually’ enquire about your evening/weekend plans (i.e. love life) before the lift doors have even shut.

Your senses are heightened. You can literally feel the heat coming off you as you eye that daiquiri sipping guy or girl by the bar. You have your eyes on the top prize tonight! You are now in your collect and select mode for the sexual prospect of the night. And whether it’s an enticing stranger or someone you have met before, you’re aware fully aware that now is the time to take your connection to the physical level. You can feel that he or she is also feeling the sexual tension you have been feeling. When you finally get the one you have been eyeing, how do you make this first time with someone new a glorious moment you’ll both fondly remember rather than a nightmare you’d just as soon forget?

The first thing to remember before hopping into bed with some guy or girl is to think of what you want to achieve from the experience. Are you in it solely for the lusty one-night romp or would you wanting it to be the beginning of a longstanding passionate relationship?

We, human beings have been primordial sexual beings. It is our natural inclination to be attracted to people. Sometimes these attractions induce sexual tension within. One of the ways we can release the pressure building up is to hook up with people we have just met. There is something extremely exciting about sex with a stranger, with absolutely no strings attached. Many women feel this way, not only men. What we all have to be careful about is simply using the other person, treating them as an object only for our satisfaction.

No one likes being treated as an object. No one likes being used for someone else’s purpose. Both men and women typically use each other as sex objects. But what does it mean to treat a person as an object? It means you use that person to get what you want without particular regard to what happens to them or how they feel. At one extreme you would not even care if you actually cause harm. More frequently harm is not intended, but the well being of the person you are using is of little or no concern to you. Their feeling or well being is of no importance you. After you get what you want, you are oblivious to their post coital feelings and you simply discard them.

When you want sex and you do anything necessary to get it, you are typically using your romping partner as a sex object. You may lie and otherwise be deceitful about what is really going on. You may pretend to care or be interested but all you really want is to get laid. The fulfillment of the sexual urge is on the ultimate priority list. After you get what you want, you disappear and they never hear from you again. There could also be ill feelings like contempt or disgust channeled to the other person because they agreed to sleep with you. But in most cases, this is really a disguised form of self-contempt and self-hatred projected onto the opposite sex. It is very unhealthy and in the long run will leave you alone, lonely, bitter and cynical. This is hardly a formula for happiness.

Quick sex or “no strings sex” between consenting, mature adults is not about using each other as an object. It is also important that both of you understand what is happening, and that there should be no deception. With no-strings sex, both parties understand that it is not intended that you will ever see each other again. There are fewer or no expectations afterward. You do not exchange addresses or phones or personal histories. A fine line is drawn between partners. It is understood that there will be no post sex convo or anything like that unless the parties involved have decided they want to take things to another level. There is absolutely nothing wrong with one night stands or “no strings sex” but make sure that before you collect and select, you are fully aware of the things to come and you are prepared for the post sex consequences.

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