One unfortunate habit I’ve picked up from my mum is a perverse appreciation of truly awful newspapers and magazines. When I was young, she’d spend many an evening laughing heartily at The Daily Mail. I lack the Zen-level irony mastery required to read the Mail without wanting to kick something, so instead I tend to flick through those awful women’s magazines you find scattered around supermarket checkouts. There’s something relaxing about knowing that, no matter how trivial I feel my life may be sometimes, there’s someone out there whose job it is to write about Jennifer Aniston’s cellulite with the same sense of importance and urgency as a dying journalist describing the slaughter of innocents in Rwanda, and I’m better than that person.
Anyway, the sex tips in these mags tend to be a special kind of magic. They’re almost invariably framed as “how to satisfy your man” tutorials, and the men in question are portrayed as slobbering dicking machines so traumatized by lifelong porn addictions their idea of foreplay is turning up and announcing they’re here to fix the fridge. The actual advice goes something like this:
- Have sex outside.
- Have sex in a car.
- Dress up as something tiresomely predictable (French Maid, Nun, Tellytubby, etc.)
- Massage your man with sensual oils from these undeclared advertising partners.
- Insert an entire ham into his rectum.
Presumably, there’s an entire generation of men out there who live in constant fear of having their nether regions invaded by household objects wielded by well-meaning girlfriends.
