How to Build a Girl

  I have several areas of sex that I wish to be ‘specialist’ at. The first is S&M – pervy sex. I’ve listened to enough of Krissi’s Velvet Underground records to be aware of the whip, and the mistress; and in the yearnings of a masochist, I hear a furious sexual hunger like my own. A man who wants to be dominated has the same, desperate, almost incoherent need to be subsumed that I feel. I want to help these fellows. I want, again, to be useful. If a man ever wanted to be my gimp, I would be delighted to help him out. Like a small start-up business, I would delight in fulfilling an untended niche market. I would whip those craving boys with all the kindness I have.

  The second is blow jobs. Blow jobs are, mythically, what all boys want the most – and so, again, as a good student of market forces, I am very interested in them. Margaret Thatcher has basically made me pro-blow job. Having read all I can about them, I’m given to understand that the key thing is that you must swallow. Girls who don’t swallow are fussy, and must be coerced into swallowing – which is annoying for all parties. To gain dominance in the market, I fully intend to swallow. So all my blow jobs will be utterly stress-free in that respect, and no one will feel awkward, or ashamed.

  I also have one non-sexual skill I want to master: typing whilst smoking, like in His Girl Friday, and all pictures of Hunter S. Thompson. I’ve attempted it before, but the smoke always goes right into my eyes – leaving me smoking, weeping and typing, all at the same time.

  Last time I did it, Krissi saw me, left the room, and came back with a pair of swimming goggles.

  ‘To help you look cool,’ he said, putting them next to my laptop, and patting me on the head, pityingly.

  Three weeks after having sex with Tony Rich, I’ve made a start on this list – I’ve tried some S&M, using Madonna’s ‘Justify My Love’ video as my primary source of practical information.

  One hapless man who takes me back to his house seems very excited when I say to him, ‘Have you seen the “Justify My Love” video?’, and then very alarmed when I purr ‘Can you handle it?’ while dripping molten candle-wax onto his balls.

  ‘JESUS CHRIST!’ he roars, leaping out of bed and pawing at his genitals, spreading red candle-wax everywhere.

  Next time I see him, at a gig, he’s still standing slightly awkwardly, and will not make eye contact with me. He looks a bit scared. I hear later that there was so much dried wax on his balls that he eventually had to shave the entire right side, to get rid of it, and that his mates are calling him ‘Phil Oakey’ as a result.

  Obviously, I injured that penis too badly to fellate it – but, a week later, I’m in a flat in Ladbroke Grove – right on the borders of my Sex Map; four more streets to the West and I would have bailed – doing my first ever blow job.

  I’ve absorbed a couple of principles from Jilly Cooper: primarily that it’s all about enthusiasm, and that the top of the penis – the bit I keep thinking of as ‘Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s head’ – is where all the action should be centred.

  Also, logically – learning from my own masturbatory habits – I figure it needs to be rhythmic, and to speed up a bit at the end, like ‘Release’ by Aztec Camera.

  The penis turns out to be a pretty straightforward, easy-to-understand mechanism. At first, anyway.

  At the beginning, I find it unexpectedly enjoyable to have it in my mouth – it’s quite comforting, really. Like sucking your thumb, but whilst making someone else very, very happy. I like how friendly it is – I feel oddly honoured that he trusts me enough not to bite it, which perhaps proves how young I still am. Forty-three-year-old women probably don’t think, ‘Look! I’m not biting it.’

  ‘Here I am,’ I think to myself, ‘being totally capable with a penis – and no one ever taught me how! I’m an auto-didact! Well done me!’

  Things, however, become more complicated on the approach of orgasm – at which point he starts thrashing around a bit, making confusing noises, and then pushes my head down onto his cock.

  Now, not only is this last action impolite – I am, at the end of the day, doing him a big favour. Suddenly putting an extra, unannounced amount of cock in my mouth is basically like cadging a lift, then trying to blag six mates and a Welsh dresser into a Mini, too – but it’s also thunderously impractical. Because when you push a cock too far down someone’s mouth, they are, almost inevitably, going to be a bit sick. That’s just reflexes.

  Startled, I do a small, discreet lady mouth-sick – at which point, he comes.

  In many ways – although initially unwelcome – the sick makes the subsequent sex-admin easy: at least I don’t have a last-minute dilemma over whether I am actually the kind of person who spits or swallows – because, for the sake of politeness, I just have to swallow the sick anyway. That’s the common-sense thing to do. There’s nowhere to spit a medium-sized amount of vomit out, unless – I scan the immediate vicinity – I use either an empty wine glass or his pants, neither of which seem in keeping with the mood we’ve established: one of heavy sensuality.

  I wonder – as I so often do in sexual moments – if this has ever happened to Madonna: if she’s ever given someone a blow job in a shabby bedsit, mouth full of sick.

  Eager to seem still ‘welcoming’ re: the blow job, I keep on sucking long after he’s come – until he jack-knifes over in bed with a hand on my head, going, ‘Careful, sweetheart – it’s very sensitive.’

  We try to do some sex again, later – but my over-enthusiastic sucking has led to him getting a tiny tear in his foreskin, and so the penis is out of bounds: we both look at it, sadly, for a while, and then I look out of the window, and say, ‘Oh well, I suppose I’d better get the bus,’ and leave.

  I can’t even kiss him goodbye, because my mouth still tastes of sick and come, and I don’t want to put him off – even though it’s all his fault anyway.

  ‘Farewell, then,’ I say, formally, as he moves in for a kiss, on the doorway – only for me to take his hand, and shake it, instead. He looks very confused. Also, still, residually, in groin-pain. But none of it was my fault! Oh, it’s all so complicated.

  ‘I keep breaking penises,’ I think to myself, dolorously, on the 37, heading towards Euston Station. ‘And, also, no one, yet, has made me come. I am still the greatest lover of me. I’m still the best I’ve ever had.’

  Some of these men have tried, of course – starting the kissing on the belly that is the prelude to oral sex: looking up through their fringes, eyes asking ‘Shall I?’ – but I have always stopped them.

  Why? I’m trying to work it out. I can’t decide if it’s because I feel I don’t deserve it – that they wouldn’t enjoy doing it, they’re just being polite, and so the correct thing to do is demur – or whether it’s because I don’t feel they deserve it, instead: that I don’t want these men to see me lose control, and come by their hand, as I do when I’m on my own.

  I have, after all, never seen a woman come, except in When Harry Met Sally, which to me is still more a scene about an amazing sandwich than some sex. These are the days before internet pornography. In all the dirty films I’ve seen, only the men ever come. In a way, I would have to invent the female orgasm from scratch before I could do it with someone else in the room. I have no template for where you would fit it into sex – or how. Should I come before we fuck – or after? When is the usual schedule for these things? How long should you take to come? Do I take too long? Should you not even ask it of a man if you take more than, say, four minutes? Is that simply unreasonable? I don’t want to be a difficult case, and give someone RSI. I don’t want to get a reputation as a ‘hand-wearier’.

  Also, I have to admit that a large factor in my not-coming is because some of them have been absolutely hopeless. One man’s hand in my knickers is so achingly adrift from where it might be useful that, in the end, as he tries to manipulate my thigh to orgasm, I looked up at him and say, ‘You know what? If it’s there, I’ll give you the money myself.’

  But he doesn’t get the reference, and the joke
falls flat. Later, as I make myself come next to his sleeping body, I whisper, resentfully, ‘Bette Midler wouldn’t put up with this shit. Everyone gets Bette Midler’s jokes,’ come, and fall asleep.

  TWENTY

  This intense training season of casual sex reaches its peak with Big Cock Al.

  Big Cock Al is in a band from Brighton called Sooner, and I keep bumping into him at gigs and getting off with him – but then having to stop, because he needs to get the last train home.

  The next time Sooner have a gig in Brighton, he invites me to stay the night in a phone call that might as well be called the ‘Shall we have sex next Thursday?’ phone call.

  So here I am in his flat in Brighton – four storeys up, looking out over the rooftops from a room filled with batik throws, joss sticks, Buddhas and guitars.

  I’m wearing only a dark-blue nylon petticoat, and Al’s down to his trousers. I’ve just unzipped the fly – and released the biggest penis I have ever seen. It takes two hands to get it out of his pants. I feel like a snake-handler on Blue Peter. It’s alarmingly huge. In my startlement, I believe I hear it go ‘thump’ as it comes out. The last time I saw something like this, it was at dead Fat Nanna’s house, across the bottom of the front door, as a draught excluder, with two buttons for eyes. There were boys I went to school with who had legs shorter than this.

  ‘Blimey!’ I say – agitated into speaking like a Cockney chimney-sweep on spotting a silver sixpence.

  ‘I know,’ Al says, with the lazy, triumphant grin of the gigantically endowed.

  Now, everything I have ever read, up until this point, has led me to unquestioningly believe that the more penis, the better. Jilly Cooper has been very, literally, firm on this: that men’s cocks are basically like buffets, at parties – there is simply no such thing as too much. Whatever you can’t handle that night, in the heat of the party, can simply be cling-filmed and had for breakfast, the next day – as a treat.

  This, however, clearly is not the case here. This penis is so large, it’s basically a medical emergency. If I’m going to risk getting even half of that in me, we’re going to need some paramedic units hanging around, just in case of a terrible accident – like they do on the difficult bends, on F1 race courses.

  With something of this size, Al’s not really asking me for sex. That’s not what’s going on here.

  ‘You don’t need a vagina,’ I think. ‘You’re simply trying to avoid rental charges on an appropriate storage facility, instead. My friend, you will need council permits to park something like this.’

  Al’s lying on his back, eyes closed, so I get a chance to look down at it again. Oh, it does make me smile. It is an insane body part – it looks like child’s arm, or the snout of Alf from ALF.

  It has the air that I’m starting to realise all erect penises have – one of hopefulness, coupled with something that almost borders on pleading: ‘Please stroke me! I am nice!’ – but, given its sheer size, it can’t help but look slightly, inevitably menacing. The scale is all out of whack. You know – like the giant fluffy white kitten in The Goodies. It’s a lovely, fluffy white kitten! But it is undeniably stepping on your house, and crushing you to death!

  This penis will undeniably step on my house, and crush me to death.

  ‘That,’ I say, in a very friendly voice, ‘is a very large penis.’

  ‘Yes,’ Al says, quite urgently. ‘Suck it, and make it bigger.’

  Haha, I will do no such thing, you joker. I’m not a lunatic.

  But what am I going to do? This is quite the dilemma. If I continue touching this cock, it will – as I have just been fairly warned, although it seems, frankly, impossible – get even bigger. If I try and fuck it, it’s just going to go straight through me and come out of the top of my head, like the stake on a scarecrow. And if I just back off completely, that’s the end of sex – which would be a massive and frankly intolerable waste, given that I’ve spent £25.90 getting down here, I’m wearing a hot new petticoat, I want to have sex, and there is a whole, naked man here in a locked flat – which is the thing I always want, but almost never have.

  I spend one second thinking about the ‘not sex’ plan, and have a quick flashback to my parents’ house. Thursday night. If I go home, tonight’s tea is potato soup, and then we’ll be playing charades. Oh fuck that, no.

  What I really need is for Al to offer to go down on me – because that is the sex we can have without it killing me – but it appears not to have occurred to him, and my understanding about men eating women out is that the rules are a bit like the Prime Directive in Star Trek. You know – where the crew of the Enterprise are forbidden from telling other, more primitive cultures about astonishing and enjoyable technological advances on other planets.

  I, Tiberius Kirk, cannot tell this non-oral man about the glorious eating-out revolution. This is news from the future he will not be able to handle yet.

  I look at his cock, and sigh. He looks up.

  ‘You alright, love?’ he asks.

  We end up having sex, of course. Never look a gift hose in the mouth. In the end, I find what works is to stop thinking about what I am thinking about this particular sexual intercoursing – mainly ‘I am alarmed! This is the biggest penis of all time, surely! Quick! Call Norris McWhirter!’ – and start thinking about what he’s thinking, instead. How clearly excited he is by my mouth, and the ‘grab a handful’ aspects of my arse.

  ‘He’s having such a great time with me!’ I think, cheerfully, as he climbs on top, and diligently starts trying to feed into me nineteen miles of extraneous cock. ‘I am being a generous lover!’

  In later years, I find this is called ‘physical disconnect’, and is all part and parcel of women having their sexuality mediated through men’s gaze. There is very little female narrative of what it’s like to fuck, and be fucked. I will realise that, as a seventeen-year-old girl, I couldn’t really hear my own voice during this sex. I had no idea what my voice was at all.

  But right here, in this room in Brighton, with the batik bedspread knotting underneath us, and a pile of D&MEs stacked up in the corner, all I know is that his desire is making me desirous, and I am pretty pleased with me for getting at least half of this cock inside me without shouting ‘Blimey! No pushing at the back! Settle down there!’ Really, my sex-behaviour is borderline … noble.

  And in between enjoying the sex – which I do, at several moments – I find time to compile, in my head, a little list of hints and tips for a future putative help-sheet, entitled ‘Ladies: How YOU Can Deal With An Unfeasibly Large Penis, Too! By A. Friend’.

  When in the missionary position, place your palms flat on his chest and brace brace brace with your arms. This limits thrust-depth. It also, pleasingly, pushes your tits together, so it’s kind of like a good tip for looking hot, posing for future photographs, etc., too.

  In doggy, you can subtly but essentially keep crawling away from the penis – making it impossible to get more than the first five inches inside. During our ten-minute session, I manage to make a whole circuit of the bed, on all fours, as Al ardently pursues me, kneeling. A speeded-up film of this would make Al look like Bernie Clifton, very slowly riding his ostrich (me) around a putative Bedsit Fuck Arena.

  Over the course of an hour or so, you will find that, helpfully, eventually, everything within a woman stretches, to accommodate. Although there’s probably some technical term for this, at the time I think of it as ‘Using the penis like a small trowel, to dig a bigger hole’.

  Think of Han Solo.

  Keep on pretending you’re Al. Think about how amazing it is for him to be able to have sex with you! He must be looking down at your arse – shuddering with each rush – and thinking it’s Christmas. Yes – this is a good day for Al. Lucky, happy Al.

  Think about how little you would like to eat potato soup and play charades. Everything is relative. Particularly your relatives.

  Use blow-job breaks in the same way American football uses ad-breaks.
Everyone has a chance to get their breath back, and attend to running abrasions and injuries, etc.

  Think of Han Solo and Chewbacca doing it together – all tenderly after some huge intergalactic laser-fight. Mmmmm, so hot.

  This is quite fun.

  Never, ever, ever going to come from it, though.

  Al finally comes, with a rather plaintive roar – such as Aslan would make, having a thorn removed from his paw. I make a supportive sound – kind of an ‘Mmmmmroooo!’ – and he falls off me, and lies, breathless, next to me, as if he’s completed the last foot of a parachute jump, and the tangle of my petticoat is the silk.

  I still don’t really know what to do in post-coital situations. I presume the basic rules must be like chatting in the pub. After a minute of silence, I decide to get the convo-ball rolling:

  ‘Did you read Tony Rich’s piece on the Cocteau Twins?’ I say, gesturing to the pile of D&MEs. ‘In it, he uses the word “basorexia” – the overwhelming need to be kissed. Isn’t that an amazing word? “Basorexia”. I keep thinking I might get a tin, and keep amazing words in it. “Basorexia”.’

  When this is greeted with silence, I turn on my side, to look at him. While I’m bright as a button, Al’s demeanour is very strange – as if he’s just been hit on the side of the head with a massive Acme frying pan, by the Road Runner. I later learn this is called ‘being post-coital’.

  ‘Mrrrrwww, nah?’ he says – eyes oddly loose in his head. ‘Din read. Sorry, babe.’

  ‘I had sex with Tony Rich!’ I add – half proudly, half to keep the conversation going. People love talking about sex! It is the best topic of all!

  But Al is asleep.

  ‘Well done on fitting all of my penis in you, Dolly!’ I say, brightly. ‘Thank you for making that effort! It wasn’t bad at all, given that this was your third-ever shag! Given that you’re essentially still a child, and I’m a grown-up, you managed that with aplomb!’