Lucy-Ann Holmes - Don’t Hold My Head Down

Also by the Author

Fiction

Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy

Unlike a Virgin

The (Im)perfect Girlfriend

50 Ways to Find a Lover

Non-fiction

How to Start a Revolution

If sexual pleasure were divided into ten parts, only one part would go to the man, and nine parts to the woman.

As told by Tiresias in Ancient Greek mythology

If you dont follow your bliss, how will you find it?

Beth Stephens

The way you make love is the way God will be with you.

Rumi

When I stand in front of another and I love myself entirely, when I love my face and my thighs and my breasts and can ignore all the bullshit that people trying to sell me stuff tell me.

When I love the woman that I am.

When I take the stories of all those who have gone before me, and all those who are here now, who suffer because they are women, those who are raped, murdered, beaten, cut, denied a voice, a vote, an education, when I take their stories and hold them to my own, when I draw on the strength of the women who fought for my rights to vote, to earn, to own property, to be able to have sex for pleasure.

When I stand in front of another knowing that my body is miraculous and that I am wonderful. I am love. I am truth. I am strength. I am woman. I am mother, daughter, sister, ally, healer, visionary, mystic. I am fucking magic.

When I look into the eyes of another and I accept their love and their respect and their wonder.

And I say,

Come, touch my breast, gently with your fingertips.

Well, when we do that, I think the earth moves a bit, and the tide turns a touch quicker.

At some point I should really start this book.

Hello, Im Lucy, the writer of this sex book you have in your hands. Ive been referring to it as the sex book as Ive been writing it, and in the long periods when I havent been writing it, its been lolloping around on the sofa in my mind, feet up, not going anywhere. Ive been calling it the sex book because theres rather a lot of sex in it. It might even have been called The Sex Book , had someone else not already pinched that title. However, it will very soon become apparent that I am no sexpert.

The writer Beverly Cleary said: If you dont see the book you want on the shelf, write it. This book is my attempt at doing that.

You see, glossy pictures of different sexual positions, and advice such as tell him what you like werent cutting it for me. Id been having sex for years and years, yet I still felt like a novice. I longed for a book, or a mentor, something, anything, to help me navigate my sexuality. But the book I needed also had to know that I felt a little bit broken in this area, that something fundamental was missing for me. I didnt want it to assume I was a strong, powerful, sexually confident woman, because I felt galaxies away from being so. No, this book needed to know that when it came to sex and relationships in general, I still felt like a girl.

I never found the book I was looking for, but I did go on a journey and find some gold. Now, Id like to share the treasure.

All great stories start with an inciting incident, an experience that catapults the hero onto a journey of discovery they will never forget. Mine starts with me having a wank to internet porn.

Its not quite Dorothy and Toto running away from home in The Wizard of Oz , is it?

Ill set the scene. It was half past nine at night. Id drunk two pints of strong European lager and a cheeky half in a pub beforehand and was now sitting fully clothed on an unmade bed trying to find something on the internet that turned me on.

This wasnt a particularly unusual situation for me. Id been using/watching/waiting for porn to buffer for years. If youre feeling horny then you turn to porn was something Id learned not from my mother or the convent school I went to, but from the culture I lived in. Theres loads of people having sex on the internet for your viewing pleasure, I had been told, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Joey and Chandler from Friends watched it. Samantha from Sex and the City watched it. Alan Partridge watched it. Everyone was at it. Porn was mainstream, everyday. Id never really questioned it, or thought about it, it was just what it was.

Looking back, although Id used it, I wasnt exactly a fan of it. Mainly because one thing that my internet porn fiddles had always done was no, not facilitate an orgasm. One thing that my internet fiddles had pretty much always done was make me feel horrible afterwards. Yes, it was weird, but every time I masturbated to porn Id always feel a little bit ashamed, a little bit sad, a little bit urgh, I dont really like myself now after. I remember discussing this with a bloke who used porn a lot.

How do you feel afterwards?

Oh, yeah, really terrible and worthless, hed replied.

My behaviour post-internet wank supported this. I didnt throw open my window like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and sing, Ive just had a wank to porn, I didnt post a Facebook status update informing my friends and family, I didnt tweet, Just had a wank to porn! #wanking. I deleted my computers history, I washed my hands and I lied to my mother about what Id been doing if she called.

Finding something that I liked on these sites could be pretty laborious. What tends to arouse me is people, and especially women, really enjoying themselves. People I sense are acting pleasure doesnt do it for me, neither does straight to penetration sex, or fourteen-minute blowjob prior to penetration sex. So it would generally take me a while to find something that aroused me. Its like normal shopping, where you see lots of bits you definitely dont want before you find that which you like. In the world of online porn that means you see a lot of stuff.

That night I saw an image of a girl and I say girl, because she looked like a girl, a beautiful blonde teenager with a mans penis squirting semen into her face. This is not unfamiliar in online porn. It wasnt the act that jolted me I was used to that it was how young the girl looked. I found myself wincing at the screen, hoping she was OK.

I cleared my computers history and I sat there cogitating. I thought about the girl. And then I thought about myself. Now, you might well be sighing at me, Whoa there, the womans bound to be fine, she just looked young. You had a disappointing wank, no need to write a book about it. But it got me thinking, and as I sat there mulling all this over, I was typing bits and pieces into Google. Good sex, great sex. Everything led me back to the same free sites, these garish cornucopias.

Now, I didnt have children at the time, but I had four nieces, amazing young women, and I thought about my youngest niece, curious about her sexual awakening, doing the same Google searches I was doing, getting the same porn sites over and over, and it made me feel a bit sad. This was the sex we were giving our young women and men, and there didnt seem to be any clear alternative, or at least, if there was, it wasnt very easy to find. When I thought about my nieces, these young women I loved, I wished somehow that the sex being presented to them was different.

But what was the sort of sex I wanted for them? I wasnt sure, but I wanted it to be more respectful. I didnt want them to have to pretend to enjoy getting semen in their faces if they didnt like it, or to be forced to gag on a penis if they didnt want to, or to think that the be-all and end-all of sex was penetration. I hoped there would be tenderness in it. And I wanted them to be able to shape the sex they had for themselves, for it to be more mutual, and more, well, beautiful. There didnt seem to be much beauty in what I was seeing.