At least once a day I drift into a blissful daydream about Serge Gainsbourg where we re-enact scenes from Histoire De Melody Nelson and generally jump around having fun and doing suitably Gallic 60′s things like smoking Gitanes and running along cobbled streets while breathlessly laughing.

Most people who I tell about my Serge love do a double take. “Serge? Gainsbourg? The ‘Je t’aime’ guy?” then they screw up their faces and tell me how perverted he was or about the Whitney Houston incident. Once or twice I’ve even been told how he evilly coerced France Gall into singing a song about blow jobs, which she innocently thought was about lollipops. On the latter count all I have to say is really, France? Really? Pull the other one. Fair enough, the guy made some pretty tasteless photo shoot choices with Jane Birkin (his then wife) and he did make that really creepy song ‘Lemon Incest’ with his daughter, but the overall impression one gets of Gainsbourg is a highly sexed man who loved women, and his family, who’s work ranged from the classic, to the sublime, the surreal, and beyond. Unlike most modern pop stars who hide behind a façade of respectability Gainsbourg was honest, painfully so and saw no reason to sugar coat his preferences. No matter what I hear about him, listening to the raw passion in his voice as he sings Ballade De Melody Nelson smoothes away any of his rough edges, and makes it so easy to retreat back into my black and white dream.

Of course I have crushes other than Serge and his knee shakingly beautiful voice: in fact one of my other long-term loves is Slash from Guns N’Roses, specifically during G’n'R’s 1987 Ritz gig. The thing is Slash now, and Slash at any time after 1987, has mutated into a bit of jerk. He writes self-indulgent biographies detailing what a prick he was, and how much he hates Axl Rose, as the two of them frequently argue in public about the most mindlessly petty things.

While I’m happy to point out that Gainsbourg was a very different person to the shambling greasy perv he is made out to be I have no desire to do the same with Slash. Its because I don’t care about Slash now; I have no interest in how he’s matured as a person, what he did after Use Your Illusion, how he feels about being in any of his subsequent bands, none of that crap. It’s also because Serge is dead so it’s easier to idolise him.

1987 Slash was a the perfect pin-up, the pinnacle of everything he’d ever be in public at least, so if I Doc Brown from came whizzing by in his DeLorean and asked me where I wanted to go it’d be to the Ritz, to stand right at the front, in a leopard print bodystocking, frantically swiping at Slash as he leant over the crowd. After he’d picked me out for some one on one post show backstage treatment, I’d hop in the DeLorian and be happy to wake up back in 2010. Obviously I’m hoping that this has no major repercussions on the world’s time line, although even if it did affect Slash in some profound way G’n'R had already written and recorded Appetite for Destruction so I think everything would work out fine. Who really needs November Rain anyway?

Time paradoxes aside, having Slash and Serge as my top two crushes creates awkward conversations when these sorts of subjects come up, those typical late night ‘guilty pleasures’ conversations. Other people’s secret crushes are people like the mild mannered Zachary Quinto, or wooden Stephen Moyer; people so nice and evenly mannered that my choices make me seem like an unstable masochist. However I’m unlikely to change my allegiances soon, and even if Slash came out with a bizarre Mel Gibson style rant I’d still fantasize about that half hour spent with sweaty top-hatted Slash in a backstage room in 1987.

You see it’s a fantasy, I don’t know anything about either of them; Serge could have been a puppy kicking maniac in his spare time, Slash could be personally doling out soup to street orphans every night, it’s all academic. Their politics, their views on women’s lib, bleh, I couldn’t give a toss. I just want to dream about fun, French accents, and deft fingers. And why not? Why make it realistic? Why can’t we in our fantasies seperate the real from the imaginary and give the people we find beautiful every attribute we’d like them to have in real life?

Do any of you have a genuinely guilty pleasure of a crush? If so tell! To those of you who can’t make the quantum leap, I say try, or at least make your dreamboats less mundane!

Further Reading:
Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons
Slash: The Autobiography by Slash and Anthony Bozza

Further Listening:
Histoire De Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg – Spotify
Appetite For Destruction by Guns N’Roses   – Spotify
A brief Serge Gainsbourg sampler I made on Spotify, otherwise look for the Initials S.G compliation.

It seems that no matter what time I leave work my bus is full of teenagers. No matter if it’s girls or boys, they’re always talking about girls: who’s a slut, who’s a priss, who’s not even worth mentioning. On and on and on. I feel like I know about the sexual lives of every teenager in Dalston at the moment. No matter how hard I bury my nose in a book I hear them, “She slept with him yesterday is it?” “Oh, my, god! What a slut!!!” Nice girls, nice.

This is something that I guess I keep going over on this blog: what the fuck is a slut? What does that word even mean? As I’m too much of a nerd to ask the teenagers themselves I turned to the next best thing: Urban Dictionary.

This is by far the most popular answer. A slightly confusing backhanded compliment, but hey, it’s not terrible just sort of shitty.

Things get worse however…

Leaving aside the idea that someone could disassociate from their body quite at will (can someone teach me that?) this is a textbook definition and raises so many questions. Why does engaging in sex frequently and sharing your body with more than a handful of people make sex less special? What makes someone’s sexual preferences discriminatory? What about all those girls who make their boyfriends wait and wait and wait and then get cheated on, treated badly, and dumped? Should they have worked harder beforehand? Probably not. If you give it up on the first date or after the wedding it doesn’t make a shit of difference. Some people are douchebags, some people will be horrible to you. Sometimes you can sniff them out in seconds and sometimes it takes years. The amount of time you wait between meeting them and getting acquainted with their genitals makes no damned difference.

Now for ‘meaning and significance’. I think that often sex can be likened to food. Some meals you wolf down, on the run, barely tasting them or appreciating them, others, like Christmas dinner, leave lasting memories each time it’s consumed.

Sex is the same. Sometimes yes, it has meaning and significance, the first time you have sex after you fall really truly in love with someone is magic. For me in that moment the whole world seems to stop and there’s a lightbulb over head feeling: this is it, this is me and the person I love being totally, utterly together. It’s one of the most precious moments you’ll ever have, I think. I don’t know what having a baby is like, but I guess it’s like a non sexual version of that. With added pain.

But yes, sex can have meaning it can have significance, it can be an exploration of trust, an episode of mutual discovery, and a fun filled rollercoaster ride, sometimes all of the above at once. And other times it can be like scratching an itch. An itch you just can’t let alone. Do you have to scratch that itch with someone who understands you? Who likes you? Who thinks you’re hot? One out of 3 generally isn’t bad, but no, not really. Sex is sex, a strange, heady concoction that  can be tied up with emotions and meaningfulness, but mostly is about being in the moment and something going on around your genitals.

Firstly: chill the fuck out! That guy was being nice to you, and you just pissed on his dreams!

Secondly… what people say about sluts, and by extension sex, says so much more about themselves than ‘sluts’. Here we have someone equating sex with personal validation. The intricate way that her self-view is built into her idea of sex makes me think that for her having sex is a minefield: she at once wants to be accepted and loved and sees sex as a way of expressing this, but is also caught up in the idea that to give it away means that she doesn’t respect herself. She’s trying to withhold sex in order to get sex. Confusing? You bet.

FYI ‘man’ next time you see that lady give her a hug, she needs it.

SHIT! WE’RE ALL SLUTS!!!! Not you men. Don’t worry, you’re safe.

Amen. Read it, memorise it, and if neccessary tell people it, but in a more condensed manner because it’s kind of long, and leave out the bit about nipples showing, because sometimes we just can’t help it ok?

Stop calling other girls sluts, stop judging people by how many people they’ve slept with, and stop using it as a catch all insult. If you must call someone something nasty, and sometimes you must, then get creative! Call them a slinky eyed bottom feeding mouth breather, a higgedy piled rust bucket of pity, or a banana split on a cupcake, whatever feels right!

Or just move to Sweden and start confusing people.

Between the ages of 12 and 17 I was kissed precisely three times. First after my 12 birthday by my childhood crush (I screamed and kicked him in the legs) then aged 17 at a party where I got so drunk I passed out face down on the grass. The third time was by the person I would later lose my virginity to.

Most of my teenage years had been spent wondering why no-one wanted to kiss me. Ok so I was spotty and had bushy hair, but around age 15 I’d tamed my eyebrows and shrugged off the thick tortoiseshell glasses in favour of contact lenses, and yet offers were still thin on the ground. When I met my first boyfriend 3 weeks before my 18th birthday I realised he didn’t just want to kiss me while I was sloppy drunk. He wanted to hang out, talk rubbish, and watch telly with me. While we’d talked about lots of things on our 3 dates, but we’d not talked about whether I was virgin or not; it just hadn’t come up in conversation. For two whole weeks I thought about whether we would do it soon or not. If I told him that I’d never done it before I was worried he’d want to make it ‘special’ and there was nothing worse in my mind. Rose petals and candles might do it for some girls but even then I knew they’d just make me laugh. Though the majority of my friends weren’t doing it I wanted to. I knew it was going to be great: adults never stopped talking about sex. There was a big secret in the world and I wanted in on it.

Providence was on my side.

My parents inexplicably went to Brazil for two weeks just after I started dating the boy. I called all my friends and told them that I was home alone and having a party. On Saturday night teenagers turned up in droves, clutching corner shop bottles of vodka and Panda Pops, and we drank ourselves silly. Sometime around 2am half a dozen of us were left to sober up and clean the house. After a cursory tidy we decided to heat up a pizza from the freezer. Everybody, minus the boy and I, went to the kitchen to figure out how exactly this would happen. We looked at each other and got down to some hardcore making out. As he scrabbled at my top I suddenly thought to myself “Oh my god, we could do it right now. Here. In my front room. On the sofa.” I pushed the door shut with my foot. We had sex.

For the next few days I wandered round thinking even harder than before. So that was sex. It must get better. Maybe I would figure out what to do, or he would, or maybe something would change inside me and it’d be like all those late night movies: thrashing, hair gone wild, screaming, that sort of thing. I still didn’t tell the boy it was my first time, I didn’t really care if he knew or not. He was my boyfriend, he cared about me and we were still going out. I figured adult life was going to be pretty awesome. I think I was right.

(Picture from Radioactive Lingerie)

When I was a kid I told my mum that when I grew up I wanted ‘a red car, red dress, and red stilettos’ much like, it turns out, Cassandra in Wayne’s World. Though she looks totally sweet in a hair metal groupie sort of way, and I have always admired the work of Bebe Buelle and Sable Starr, I’ve found over the years that I’ve gravitated towards clothes with much less stretch lace, and a lot of bows and ruffles. Gradually the older I become the more childish my clothing choices. Only the other day I was thinking about getting my hair cut and the only photo I could find that in any way related to what I wanted was the youngest girl from The Chronicles of Narnia. Looking at that photo I would actually kill to own that cardi and dress too. Phwoar. Amazing.

Although wearing childish clothes could imply I’m some sort of infantilised, sexless, girl-child, forever trying to recapture a youth I never really had, it couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t want to start deconstructing my outfit choices because I dread turning this post into Pseuds Corner, but it seems that both men and women are obsessed with judging people on the way they dress. It is apparently imperative that we all have a distinguishable look, one that is solid, unchangeable, and instantly recognisable. There is not scope for moods, changes of attitude, or concessions to comfort. If you want to look sexy, and attract men for one night stands (it appears) you need to wear something short, tight, or low-cut, and preferably all three. If you wear glasses you could maybe be a ‘sexy secretary‘ (extremely NSFW link!!! hint: it features a video of Sasha Grey) but if you fail that test you’re relegated to quirky, cutesy, or worse: interesting. Wait, you can only be one of these things by the way! If you were both things surely that would mean you were not only sentient and possibly interesting but also a sexual creature. Madness. We all know these things can’t go hand in hand.

I’m not saying men get off much better than women in this ridiculous charade, however the manners in which men have to dress to be considered sexy, seem to be a lot less time consuming than they are for women. Really everyone gets a bum deal, forcing us all to either feel dour and neutered or constantly on and aware of our sexuality. What we need to do is recognise that much like with sex itself different things can make different people’s heads turn. Whether its a ruffle along a neckline, or an pea-coat hitting a hipbone at a certain angle there’s something to float everyone’s sartorial boat.

For the last week and a half I have been looking for a lipstick. Not any old lipstick, I found 100s of those, but the lipstick. One that will make me look like a lady, and that will not rub off all over cups, cigarettes, and boys’ faces.

Back in this post I mentioned a party so terrible that I forgot sleeping with someone at it. While I erased most of it from my mind I have never forgotten a lipstick related mishap that nearly stopped that entire sorry blog post unfolding (why didn’t it?? why??).

At the start of the evening I bumped into someone I thought was my ONE TRUE LOVE. We’ll call him Chet. My primary reason for thinking this was because I’d met Chet while blissed out on some Es. The moment I met him was amazing: I looked up from my scrabbling hands and in a split second the world slipped away. For a few hours I followed him around, hands in his pockets staring at him like there was no-one else in the room. It was probably pretty creepy. A few days later Chet invited me to this now apocryphal party and most of the sheen had worn off him I was still fairly smitten. When I arrived he’d necked half a bottle of Ritalin and was gabbling at me about everything under the sun. I was horrible disappointed but followed him into an empty room anyway to put my coat down. Inside Chet grabbed me by the arm: “Nadia just kissed me.” My heart sank as he was smiling broadly. “She kissed so badly; let me show you.” and before I could say anything he was lapping at my face like a St Bernard. I seized the opportunity as he broke away: “How would you prefer it was?” and so we kissed. We kissed for some time stood in the dingy light of Nadia’s bedroom surrounded by coats and shoes and someone sleeping under a curtain. In my head I was going “Yes! Yes! Yes!” because I am an idiot and do things like that.

Then someone stepped in to drop a bag off and we stood about awkardly talking about how this was a terrible idea and that we should just be friends. Well Chet said that and I said “Oh yes I suppose so.” Mortified that I could have misread a situation so badly I had been staring at the floor, and when I finally had the courage to look up I realised my lurid red lipstick was all over his face. He was telling me, all serious like, that this was just something that we’d done in the moment, and that it would be best if we didn’t think about it again, blah blah blah. I gave him a tissue, told him to clean himself and left the room. It wasn’t until days later that I realised I too must have looked like Robert Smith when I walked back into the party. Subtle.

And so to avoid this ever happening again I have been looking for a matte lipstick that doesn’t smell like crayons, isn’t neon red, won’t dry my lips, and yet won’t leave a trail of smears everywhere I go. Any ideas? It’s rather important you know.

Photo from Le Smoking.

While on the bus to work a couple of days ago I sat near two old ladies. They were discussing the reasons women were marrying later and later, and sometimes not at all. It was, they reasoned, because women were too picky. Back in their day (I have no idea how old they were, but they had pure white hair and milk bottle glasses, so old old?) girls learned to love someone in time, instead of expecting to be in love straightaway. Cute huh? It’s like Stockholm Syndrome but with roses. Awww. This ‘expecting true love lunacy’ is because apparently we women go around with a check-list in our heads, trying to find people who will check all the boxes.

This got me to thinking what I want in a boyfriend, and the list I came up with was pretty ridiculous in retrospect. Here is a what I decided:

• Must dress well. No sandals, no ‘witty’ t-shirts, no polar fleece.
• Interesting teeth.
• Funny or witty but not wacky or zany.
• Taller than me.
• Likes comics.
• Does not have a wiry beard. Or wiry leg hair.
• Listens to decent music, possibly not everything I like because that would be odd, but a nice overlap would be good.
• Not sweaty.
• Does not exercise or talk about eating healthy.
• Likes animals but in a normal way.
• Does not scowl at children.

As you can see it was a lot easier to think about what he wouldn’t be like than what he would be. Although if he looked like this I wouldn’t care what he acted like. Phwoar. For all I know ‘he’ might turn out to be a woman, after all as Patrick Wolf says “I don’t know whether I’m destined to live my life with a horse, a woman or a man.” Nobody does really, you never know who you’re going to fall in love with or when or why, that’s the ‘great’ thing about it. My mother fancies Keanu Reeves and yet she got married to my Dad who is smart, skinny, and very English. Who you’re going to fall for is a totally unfathomable mystery! Only I do hope it’s not the horse.

When I was a teenager I thought I wanted fast cars, fast people, bright lights and the big city. My life was so mundane that I wanted someone to come and sweep me away into a new one. So I waited patiently for someone to spin my world around but they didn’t come. My brain constantly resembled a Louise Rennison book: hearts on everything, glitter drenched rainbows over all my dreams. Despite being SO SO IN LOVE all the time I was terrified that someone prettier, or cooler, or smarter, or skinnier, would come along all the time. After all what could anyone want with me when they could be with some raven headed pixie girl who ran her own magazine from the garret of a Georgian mansion?

Biding my time hoping to be dazzled made me bored and grumpy: I was now in my twenties and still waiting. Every day was unbearable. Then I had a revelation. One evening, a shitty rainy Wednesday, against my better judgement I went to see a gig with a friend. At 4am I was standing wrapped in a nothing but a shower curtain on a burning hotel mattress while skinheads danced around me trying to douse the flames with brandy, all of us singing and laughing. And that’s when I realised it: I could be my own adventure.

Maybe it shouldn’t have taken causing a few grand’s worth of damage to an innocent hotel room to realise that but it did. No-one was going to come along and ‘save’ me because I didn’t need saving. All the excitement I wanted was there for the taking: I just needed to reach out and touch it. I’m not saying it’s been some smooth ride since then, nor am I going to claim that my life is a high octane thrill ride, but it’s a damned sight better than looking at every face trying to figure out if they are the one who’s going to inject the glamour into my life. The reason I was so scared of that girl in the garret? She was out there, doing things, not waiting to be found, and I was horribly jealous.

It is killing me to type this, it really is, but waiting to be driven appears to be a, whisper it, girl thing. Boys don’t seem to plan on a jazzy girl coming along and changing everything in their life, unless they’re in an indie film, and then it’ll just be to teach them to get in touch with their feelings (don’t mind me while I barf over here). I don’t want to use the words ‘knight in shining armour’ but that’s exactly what it is.  Whether it’s Josh in Clueless rescuing Cher from a life of braindead inanity, or Robin saving Helen from a lifetime of bogey eating in Wetlands, there’s always a man ready to take the wheel and continue the drive. Even in adverts women are constantly being rescued.

But what happens after the credits roll? Once you’ve finished being thankful for your saviour where do you go from there? When I meet my Future Baby Daddy I don’t want to kick it while he decides the course; I want us to be co-pilots, bobsledders, tandem cyclists, or possibly even runners in a three legged race. If I’m hammering this point a bit much it’s because it’s important!! All these stupid dating books I’m reading (for you! not for me! I hate them!), and all the advice I get from my friends, tells me that if I wait ‘he’ will come. Why do I have to wait? If I can take control of my life in every other way then why can’t I take control here? Waiting turns us into slaves to romance. Waiting makes fools of women, it takes us back to the predator/prey idea of relationships, and belittles the efforts that we make to meet someone new.

It’s hard not waiting, almost as hard as waiting, and there are books, tv shows, and nosey old ladies on the bus, who are going to tell you “When you least expect it, they’ll come along, and then everything’ll change!” but I’d rather be getting on with my life and living it the best way I know how, than counting the days on my calendar until he comes along.

Photos by Yann Faucher, blog title stolen from Heartsrevolution‘s awesome song C.Y.O.A

Reading Platform’s piece on one guy’s distinctly unsavoury experiences with threesomes got me thinking about how shitty threesomes are. Logistically they’re a total nightmare: who has the time and resources to arrange one with three sane flexible people? And once you’re in the swing of it who’s going to be the facilitator making sure everyone’s having fun? Despite my total disinterest in these sordid situations being someone who is fairly obvious about wanting to have sex, and lots of it, I’ve come close way too often. I won’t go through them all because most attempts were just pathetic and boring, (touching my knee, then my boyfriend’s knee and then grinning like a maniac and saying you’re too drunk to take yourself home is NOT sexy thanks) but here are my worst moments:

• Candy and I had spent most of the night getting totally trashed at The Dolphin when an incredibly good looking bloke came over, flirted ineptly for a bit, then he invited her back to his. For some reason she invited me and soon we were watching the sun rise from his amazing flat. Smoking weed, drinking ice-cold pear schnapps: everything was brilliant. Then he started massaging my foot. Being a fucking idiot I thought I’d let it go as I was so mashed it felt pretty good. He lent over my lap and started talking to Candy then suddenly they were snogging. I watched them while his hand travelled slowly up my leg, totally paralysed with awkwardness. I blinked and saw him looming towards me lips puckered. The next few minutes are hazy,  I remember shrieking “No!” in his face, and Candy shouting at him before running off to vomit. She was adamant that she didn’t want to go back to “the Marquis De fucking Sade’s brothel” and so we snuck out while he looked for my jacket. Annoyingly we ended up trapped in his apartment complex for so long that we resorted to lying on the tarmac in the car park crying until someone came and unlocked the gates an hour later.

• It was my first year at uni and my roommate Brigid had a totally hot boyfriend Gerard. Brigid and I got drunk, made out a bit, and she asked me if I fancied Gerard, which I did. So we walked over to his and tried to get something going. I learned a few things that night: the threeway kiss from Laurel Canyon is totally rubbish, no matter what they say it is never ok to crush on a friend’s boyfriend, and that when your friend walks out saying “I’m not cool with this.” that’s your queue to follow. Thankfully/sadly it all finished rather early on while we were all mostly clothed, I mean I definitely still had my tights on. In fact I think this is my least sexy moment ever: sitting in my undies, ringing Brigid’s phone, and smoking a roll-up as she’d taken all my clothes, my coat, and my bag with her when she stormed out, while Gerard made a cup of tea.

It’s funny isn’t it how in your head the whole thing seems to move so seamlessly from ‘oh look me and my friends are by the pool and it’s far too warm’ to ‘hello!’ whereas in real life things seem, well, so horribly real and much less pretty. Everyone’s hairier and pastier, and boobs didn’t feel like I thought they would. Having said that to counter these two rubbish moments is that time when Sigrid crawled into bed with Evan and I that morning and… ahem. Yeah, maybe I’m not that disinterested in them after all.

Photo of the amazing Lara Stone from French Vogue.

During London Fashion Week there are only two things to do: work like a donkey and drink to celebrate no longer working like a donkey. Though my involvement in LFW has, until recently, been fairly minimal I can’t refuse a party with free booze and so it was at one of these strange sleep deprived designer and half starved model filled do’s that I saw him: Brody. Until that night he had been someone I had googled, who’s picture had lurked in a folder to peek secretly at when I was bored, and who I had stared at blissfully across party after party. It was time to make this real. High on sugar and rum I shambled over to say hello and told him I was a friend of his friend Audrina’s. We chatted until everyone sane had left then stumbled upstairs to his car. Foolishly we drove around all night until 5.30am when we found ourselves alone in Hampstead: too far for me to go home and too close to his house not to pop by…

When I woke up from my couple of hour’s sleep, and some sloppy drunken making out, I was dizzy with excitement. This guy, the same one who I’d been dreaming about for months, was here with me and mostly naked! I leapt on top of him and kissed him, grinning from ear to ear like a maniac. He just lay there. Last night’s sugary drinks had made me insane and I bounced up and down gleefully as if two hours sleep was no thing. In my head fireworks were exploding by the dozen: me! him! here! together! Everything was going to be amazing!! As I darted around gleefully putting my clothes back on Brody stared silently. Just as I was about to leave I asked for his phone number. He looked confused but gave it anyway. I chalked it up to tiredness and walked to the tube station high on alcohol and seratonin.

A week later I was sitting at lunch with Audrina discussing what would happen next with Brody. He had been in touch yet only seemed faintly interested in meeting again. Audrina shrugged, “I don’t know what his problem was. He really liked you when I showed him your picture.” My fork stopped in mid-air. “What? You know I did this! You told me to!” The fork was stuck there. “You said you liked him, so when I ended up back at his house I told him, do you remember when I called you all drunk?” I remembered. “And you told me to tell him you liked him.” Did not. “So he asked what you looked like, and I showed him a picture …” Oh god. “… and just to be sure he wouldn’t forget you I gave him your number.” It’s all a dream, a horrible dream. “You asked me to help set you up! I was helping!”

I sat there thinking while Audrina fiddled with her phone. A man, a quiet, shy man, is accosted by Audrina who is a ditzy, babbling, girl. She tells him her friend fancies him and shows him a grainy picture, then proceeds to save the random girl’s number onto his phone. Later, while standing soberly at a party, said girl comes up, blithely introduces herself, then goes home with him, and proceeds to deny him sex but be happy to roll around in her underwear. The next morning she leaps around like the Tigger of romance and giggles like a giddy teen. It’s mind boggling just to think about never mind live through.

Audrina shrugged off the silence easily and we wandered to the video shop when she darted down an alley saying she’d meet me in a minute. Two doors later I ran smack into Brody and his best friend. We exchanged awkward hugs and I asked what he was doing so far from home. “You should know,” he replied curtly, “Audrina asked me where I was having lunch then said you might both pop by.” Brody looked over my shoulder. “I think she was hoping we could all bump into each other by ‘accident’.” He looked back over his. “That would have been brilliant.” His voice was becoming steadily more monotone. “I’d have really enjoyed something as unexpected as that.” After scanning the street comprehensively he looked back at me. No matter what I said he would never believe I hadn’t followed him here, or asked Audrina to paint me as a desperate harpy, it was pointless. While I gawped, trying to find the right phrase, he squeezed my arm and said goodbye. Then he, and the friend, ran until they were out of sight, never looking back.

Photos by Terry Richardson, and Alex Prager.

Back in the day, which was a Wednesday if you check, men assumed their wives were virginal, and women that their husbands were super studs, so I hear. Blissful sexist ignorance it may have been, but everything changes with time. These days everyone wants to know what came before them (literally and figuratively) and so the dreaded ‘number’ conversation comes up.

Everything will have been going swimmingly, you might even have changed your Facebook relationship status (!!), and then he asks you, “So, how many people have you slept with?” Maybe it’s just me, but that question always feels like a punch to the gut.

Firstly it’s so open to interpretation. What does ‘slept with’ mean? Are we just counting full penetrative sex? What about if you were naked but didn’t get round to that? What if you had your clothes on, things got a bit heated, but again, no actual penis in vagina action? Why is the term so loosely defined? There should be rules so we don’t have to get bogged down in semantics like this.

Then there’s idea that there’s an ideal number. Unless you are both virgins (and if you are, you’re not having this conversation, duh) it’s unlikely your numbers will match up. Who’s will be greater and by how much? Will telling him change his opinion of you? Should you lie? So many questions!

As for what counts as sex it’s up to you. Sometimes it’s easier just to say that if a genital didn’t go into another genital area then it wasn’t sleeping with someone, no matter how intense or moving the experience was. It just makes everything easier; that’s the scale I’m using anyhow. I mean of course it’s easy for me to say that being a straight girl, but hey, I can’t solve everyone’s dilemmas, sorry! Just decide on something and stick to it. Easy.

Now then, as for the ‘correct’ number? There isn’t one! Come on, you knew I would say that, right? If you’re worried that one of you will be more experienced than the other then remember it’s quality, not quantity, that counts. Whether you’ve slept with three people or three hundred you can still be crap in bed. What matters is listening to the other person, asking questions, and giving a shit about their enjoyment; otherwise you might as well just have a wank.

If the number thing bothers you because you think he’ll think you’re a slag then who the heck are you dating that is so narrow minded? When someone asks you a personal question, and you reply honestly, throwing the answer back in your face is cruel. In fact why does it even matter? As long as you’ve been careful, (or even if you haven’t yet you’ve managed to miraculously avoid any STIs), it just isn’t relevant how many people you’ve shagged. A high number doesn’t mean you’re going to cheat on him, and a low number doesn’t mean that you’re going to get obsessed and turn into a bunny boiler. They’re just fucking numbers!!

You and he are here and mad about each other in the here and now which is all that matters. Sure you are an amalgamation of everything you have seen and done before today but the you that is standing in this moment is the most important one. The reasons someone fell for you still stand true. After all no-one falls in love with someone because they’ve slept with exactly 15 people, so to fall out of it for the same reason is stupid.

There is one minor exception to this rule: when someone tells you a number over 100. At this point I’d be wary. Once I met someone who claimed they had slept with 500 girls. Five. Hundred. I mean the logistics of that alone are mind boggling, the only person I know who’s slept with more (around 600 at the last count) is seven years older than that bloke, and one step away from Sex Addicts Anonymous. Either way both of them have such sketchy dating habits that I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. But I’m sure there are some people who’ve slept with a thousand (Peter Stringfellow maybe?? Gag.) who are absolutely lovely, just beware of the rest.

Anyway the moral is that it’s just a fucking number! A number which means nothing! A number you don’t really even need to know! So don’t ask the question, and if you do, don’t get upset by the answer. The person answering it is still the same as they were five minutes ago, nothing has changed, so just let it go and get back to making out!

Photos by Michela Heim and Kelley Smith.