The V Spot

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter of the Vagenda Magazine

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How "sex tips for girls" are ruining sex

Is letting someone lick Nutella off your nipples really so different from ‘lie back and think of England’? Or are they just different ways of going through the motions?

Cosmopolitan magazine, which promises to destroy "sex myths".
Cosmopolitan promises to destroy "sex myths".

Have you ever seen anyone having sex? And we mean actual sex, where at least one of the participants has cellulite, and oral more often produces jaw ache than cataclysmic mutual orgasms. One of us once caught a neighbour in the act. We say ‘caught’, but the circumstances surrounding the scene imply that our witnessing of said act was entirely intentional. We’re talking kitchen table, curtains wide open, house lit up like Blackpool pleasure beach - a delicately staged performance, in other words, as opposed to an accidental act of voyeurism on our part. The couple wanted us to see their Tuesday night session by the colander. And boy, did we all see.

The word ‘performance’ is key here. The randy couple living opposite knew that everyone was watching them getting jiggy with it in their kitchen, and behaved accordingly. Thus the (un?)fortunate inhabitants of a particular street in Finsbury Park were treated to the full shebang: hair grabbing, theatrical moaning, arse gyrating - the kitchen table received the humping of its life. In fact, the female part of this magical experience behaved with such enthusiasm that it really can’t have been necessary for the male to be there at all.

Anyone with a shred of sexual experience (and we’re talking the kind of rudimentary knowledge that can easily be gained from a quick teenage fumble behind the youth club bins) can distinguish spontaneous shagging from amateur dramatics: we all know the difference, whether we like it or not.

And as much as a well-planned - and expertly executed - carnal production may well do it for the Finsbury Park exhibitionists as well as a fair few others in the world, it’s not quite as convenient as a night in with a hot chocolate and a cheeky finger. Truth be told, the fingering over a warm beverage is way more spontaneous as well. So why is it that nowadays, we are increasingly encouraged to adopt the theatricality of porn and incorporate it into (‘improve’) our own sex lives?

Women’s magazines are especially to blame in this regard. They tell us, weekly and in slightly different ways, that the way to spice up our love lives is through role play, lap dancing, and double-ended plastic dildos. ‘Make his fantasy become reality!’ they scream - for it is, more often than not, his fantasy, or so we’re told.

How beneficial all this play-acting is to men remains something of a mystery - and nine times out of ten, they would probably find the truth behind the reason you introduced a seven-foot pole to the bedroom horribly disconcerting. After all, Harry wasn’t overjoyed by Sally’s demonstrably fake public orgasm; even last generation’s men were baffled by the things that women did to ‘spice up their sex lives’ without actually enjoying themselves any more than they previously did.

A couple of issues ago, a confused young man wrote in to Cosmopolitan, questioning their sex tip culture. ‘What’s wrong with a bit of a oral sex and then the missionary position?’ he asked, which turned out to be the equivalent of walking in on a pride of feasting hyenas and asking why they don’t give vegetarianism a try. He was told by the ‘professionals’ on the magazine’s sex tips panel, in no uncertain terms, that he would have to work harder should he want to truly please a woman.

The reply to his perfectly innocent question was an unequivocal ‘that’s just not good enough’. Poor lamb. Just for the record, Brett, 21, from St Albans (or whatever your name was): we’re with you. Cunnilingus followed by sex seems like a thoroughly enjoyable Tuesday evening activity - if everyone’s still cumming, don’t tear yourself apart that it was due to your tongue rather than the latest vibrating cock ring.


Much of the so-called information that they sell is derived from pornography, fatally ignoring the distinction between porn’s fantasy land and Real Life Sex that men (and women) actually want to partake in. The unbelievable element is one of the things that draws an avid viewer to porn, just as we accept that chick lit fairytales are unrealistic and the likelihood of a Batman-style vigilante popping up to save Stoke Newington from mobile phone snatchers is sadly quite low.

In other words, a solid dollop of common sense will tell you that watching porn and shagging someone you really fancy are two very different activities. It’s when someone tries to blur the two that the whole thing becomes unnatural, staged, and frankly confusing for all involved. Sex becomes pre-meditated, an activity planned with military precision: ‘I need you to be at home on time this evening, because we’re doing spanking.’ And how many plastic implements do you need, really, when we’ve all been blessed with perfectly adequate genitalia for the act?

That’s not to say that donning a wig and pretending to be strangers who have just met doesn’t do it for some people every now and then. It’s when the assumption that it does it for everyone, all the time - that every sexual encounter should be mediated by pornographic shenanigans, and as such needs to be calculated, arranged, and ultimately worried about - that it starts to look less like freedom and more like a sexual circus. Before you know it, you’re hanging upside down from a trapeze every Monday after work and looking at your watch out the corner of your eye while he tries to kick start your ‘squirty flower’. It just sounds like so much effort.

Perhaps it was inevitable that sex would become just another form of labour, that we would all begin to bandy around phrases like ‘erotic capital’, and that our most intimate of activities would come to be defined through consumption and performance. But if enjoying each other’s bodies at a leisurely pace when you’re just plain knackered is seen as a bit of a sexual failure, it feels like we might have taken a wrong turn somewhere on the way to Liberation Town and ended up at Surrealville.

Because really, is letting someone lick Nutella off your nipples really so different nowadays from ‘lie back and think of England’? Or are they just different ways of going through the motions?


Euan McArthur's picture

MASHTHEHOMEROW: Hmm, not really. The article acknowledges at several points that everyone is different and there are diverse ways of exploring one's sexuality; it's point is that the manuals offered in such magazines are often one-dimensional and suppress individuals' true desires, particularly those of the women they are marketed to. These are not produced inside some kind of vacuum, as if there is a free exchange of sexual ideas; they are the hegemonic - misogynistic - 'norm' against which deviation or inadequacy are measured, and must be critiqued. No 'conspiracy' or malicious intent suggested, or implied, here. You say we cannot force our ways on others - I agree, and no one is, these are merely words, and if you experience them is that they are compelling, maybe that's telling you something? The whole point of the article is to advocate a libertarian approach towards sexuality, one that interrogates one's real desires, suggesting that we commonly substitute this for pre-given models (a provocative point whether you think it wrong or right, and one that you don't address...).

PaulDavies12's picture

Can't you just write in English, without trying to making yourself sound academic sexologist yourself. Read it twice to find out you'd nothing new to say.

plain john snith's picture

Wonder what Mehdi Hasan makes of all this? He will try to murder you kuffar one of these days.

Hugh O&#039;D's picture

Very well written article, funny and thought provoking. Cosmopolitan has been to sex what a lead necklace would be to a bird!

Eddie_b's picture

My friend made a video tape of him having sex with a (conseting) goat atnd I was like WAHT A GOAT CANNOT CONSENT and he did not agree they had known each other for a long time but I repeat A GOAT CANNOT CONSENT

mashthehomerow's picture

Essentially what this article and the articles pointed out miss is that everybody is different. Not everyone will be satisfied with what may be considered standard. That being said its considered standard for a reason.
The journalists writing these 'what men really want' columns are not part of some evil Durex funded conspiracy to replace genitalia with outlandish vibrating contraptions in the next 10-15 years, but merely trying to show people who aren't in the know what else is out there, should they find that the 'standard' doesn't cut it for them. If it doesn't work they can always go back. and if you don't feel you need the advice quite simply don't read the article; better yet don't buy the magazine.
we mustn't force our own ways of life on others and variety is the spice of life.
However next time your neighbours start going at it in plain view drop round with a bottle of cheap plonk, a teary look in your eye, and complain about how your other half just left you and you don't think 'you should be alone tonight' and see whether they enjoy watching as well as performing amateur dramatics.

McMac's picture

Being a man in my 40's I'm at the peak of my sexual prowess, the sweet spot of experience and physical ability. I don't need magazine articles to tell me how to have great sex. Missionary lights off, or if you're feeling saucy, Missionary lights on. I can do both.

BTW. If you, like me, are wondering at the etymology of Missionary Position;


Courage's picture


hugh markey's picture

To protect the male ego don't go messing with no rulers, metric or inches. Remember it's safe sex we're after.

Des Demona's picture

Don't think I've ever bandied about the words 'Erotic Capital' Unless it was in a sentence containing Amsterdam and Europe.
On the basis that I don't tend to read female magazines the women in my life get whatever comes into my mind at the time. And as far as the women are concerned I prefer enthusiasm over gymnastics. Your mileage may vary. Such is the nature of sex.

DisplacedVanity's picture

It's a shame that these articles which are supposedly meant to help women leave so many of us feeling so sexually inadequate that sex is no longer fun and exciting, but an anxiety inducing fear-fest that is even more unsatisfying than a mere 'boring' lay with a bad lover. Not only am I not having a good time because I'm so focused on whether I'm jiggling too little or too much and if I'm purring and moaning sexily enough I'm also forced to do it all with a smile, nay, a hazy look of blind lust! All to make HIS experience 'better than porn'.

Alternatively, it's articles like this that also warp the minds of men. He thinks he has to plow into me like a piston or a horny teenager for hours on end. Men now also think all we want is big penises and marathon sex sessions when I need barely six inches and no more than 10 minutes to get where I'm going. Am I an anomaly? Perhaps but I'm certainly not alone. Not every woman needs six hours with an anaconda to get off. It's a sad state of affairs but it's one that an entire adult industry is built upon, from magazines and books to toys, lotions, creams, plastic and latex contraptions and devices

I've seen some couples closets and I'm sure if they're having sex in their evenings or performing some sort of weird alien autopsy.

hugh markey's picture

Most men cotton on to the idea of desirable women fighting over them. We think this idea become fact many centuries ago - surely its in the pages of the Bible.
Woman trained in the arts of love and in competition with each other. Man, that is awesome. Creative male minds have tried to re-establish this blissful state of affairs - but even the Playboy Mansion can't quite cut it.
Just imagine a harem favouite turning down an eighty-year-old sultan.
And of course the Rat Pack had a go at it. Frankie the Sultan of Swing ended up a very old man indeed.
But for the older female element in the Harem there was the race to further their son/s prospects of succeeding the Sultan. Or else - succumbing to the law of being garroted by the bowstring. Fair.
And yet these ladies had a lot of political influence. Not as much as the Chief Eunuch mind.
Did a lot for the male ego. Just imagine bearing the 'tag' Suileman the Magnificent. Takes some beating right?
OK, Ok. Catherine the Great did come on strong. And Messalina. And Agrippina And Cleopatra.
See, problem solved.

Herbert's picture

One of the greatest surprises of my life (after believing what I'd read before I finally had sex) was that many women actually wanted sex in the missionary position.

Ms Sceptical's picture

People without cellulite can't have 'actual sex'? WTF?

Pavlova's picture

"basically a group of mainly female journalists trying desperately to second guess what men want"

About sums up the entire genre of Women's magazines.

None of these "journalists" have any life experience or ever actually go and speak to anyone. All the quotes in their articles are from one another.

They are a vehicle for selling clothes and makeup. End of story.