heliophilia
(n.) desire to stay in the sun; love of sunlight
My lounge windows are huge. At this time of year, as early evening rolls around, the sunlight floods in and bathes the room and all who are in it in gold. Fresh out of the shower and still damp, one of my favourite things to do is just bask in the glow.
I had some hand jobs to do this week. My dull and tarnished ring was buffed to a high shine and I got my first summery manicure of the year. I thought I’d showcase the outcomes.
Photo courtesy of Mrs Fever
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I lost my sexuality for a year.
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Game On
Rites of Passage Training – Sensual Details.
More than Friend’s: Chloe’s video
Molly: The First
Your Canvas
Sometimes I talk too much
His Dirty Rhythm
In case you didn’t get fucked last night.
Gossamer
Cataclysm
The Girl in Fishnets
Let’s Play a Game
Abandoning the Sofa
Smacked around a bit
Fuck You [Redacted]
Meet The Desperate Eye Of Censorship
The Catastrophe of Ageing
What it’s like to model nude for art classes
Tip Your Artists
Life… grief, depression and disability
Living with Chronic Lyme Disease
Welcome
The edge of glory
F/m Reader Q&A (audio with full transcript)
Teasing & Torment
Guest Post: Interview with Violet Fawkes
A landmark event for MPB – Public Play
“Turn round and get on all fours.” My mind will still occasionally drift back to my first experience of doggy, on a futon mattress in a flat in Acton, more than half a lifetime ago.
I love flashbacks. Moments become a library of visual stimulation I flick through when I’m alone, settling on the one that’s right for right now. The memories most frequently pulled from the shelf almost always involve fucking from behind.
Me, pushed over the bed. Him, his arse to my bedroom window. “Are you thinking about your neighbours watching us?” Yes, yes I am.
Crack. A new lover’s hand meets my arse, and my face is pushed further my pillow. He later comments on how hot my sound of appreciation was at that first smack. There’s nothing like the first time you realise someone is good with their palms.
“Watch this,” he says as he chucks his phone down in front of me. The sensations overwhelm me as I simultaneously feel him and watch us.
3am on a too-hot summer night. We are still awake. My lounge windows are low and knelt in front of them I can lean out of the window and grip the outside window ledge, biting my lip so I don’t let my sounds echo in the silent street.
Fresh from afternoon tea, I’m dressed like a lady. In the toilet near his office he bends me over and pushes my flowery frock up over my arse. I sit on a packed commuter train home with my knickers in my handbag. The next time I wear the dress is to a wedding and I smile at the memory as I sit in the church.
On my knees in front of my mirror, watching his hands on my hips and expressions of pleasure dance across his face.
Our eyes lock over her back as he fucks her, her face between my legs.
Ping. An email arrives moments after he leaves. A photo to add to the memory bank…
And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river
For men may come and men may go
But I go on for ever.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
I rarely travel with lovers but they’re often with me, in my phone, livening up long journeys…
8/8/2013
We’ve been exchanging filthy messages throughout our train journeys, his to Bristol, mine to Wales. I’m tucked into a seat by the window, bags piled up on the seat next to me to hide my hand wedged down the front of my jeans. As the train slows to halt, a cock shot appears on my screen and I orgasm. I never thought I’d come in Crewe station.
2/9/2013
I don’t notice the gridlocked road between Entebbe Airport and Mulago in Kampala, I’m too busy recounting the story of my night flight. My thumbs fill the screen with details of what my fingers were doing, 35,000ft above Sudan. How I felt too vulnerable with my night mask lowered to enjoy masturbating, yet when I pushed it up to observe my fellow passengers sleeping the orgasm was quick to come.
6/2/2014
I arrange the Rambutan, snap some photos and press send. The images arrive seconds later to recipient in a city in Eastern Europe. The following morning I grab the bag of fruit and head out into the Jakarta smog. Later I giggle to myself as I idly peel away rind, pop the flesh in my mouth and think about where they’ve been.
21/10/2014
I arrive in Addis Ababa tired, hungover and sick. I’ve travelled through the night the day after a university reunion and I have a cold. The whole team heads out for injera but I crawl into bed. I’m feeling sorry for myself. As I’m drifting off my phone lights up. A cock shot from home always make me smile. And this one is magnificent.
8/3/2015
We just made our connection in Qatar, our kit didn’t. A tyre blows on the long road out of Dar Es Salaam. Twenty four hours after leaving home we pull into the hospital compound. A huge mosquito breeding tent is pointed out to me. It turns out it’s one of the biggest malaria research sites in the world. I text a new man in my life – he’s a bioinformatician specialising in mosquitos. He’s more excited by this news than he is by photos of my tits. That one doesn’t last.
5/2/2017
He’s been sending me videos of himself wanking. They are hot. I’ve wanted to come all weekend but I’ve been on a creaky camp bed in my friend’s lounge and drinking wine and playing with her puppy has taken precedence. Sunday afternoon and I ease into a huge first class seat on the train back to London. I arrange my coat over my lap and tell him I’m going to watch his film and make sure I come before he does. Time passes and he texts: “Tell me when you’ve come.” “Oh, I already have. I’m eating the free cake now.”
25/8/2017
“Good morning to you (when you rise and shine!)… current status…pretending to be planning a client workshop, actually taking photos of my cunt on a train…”
“OMG you’re the best! 😙😙😙”
“Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin’ world go round.” Queen
I’ve shamelessly copied Exhibit A’s #bankholidaybumday photo today and am channeling the cover of Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls. With a little addition! I was gifted a Rocks Off vibrating plug by Tabitha Rayne at Eroticon. Thank you very much – it’s a very enjoyable addition to my toy drawer. Although it’s not actually spending much time in the drawer at the moment!
Summer 2015 and I am six months into my forties. It’s a balmy Friday evening and I’m at the bar at Lewisham Street Feast.
Cute twenty-something barman: “That’s a really nice dress.”
Me: “Thanks.”
Him: “It’s Cos isn’t it?”
Me: “Yes!” (Impressed)
Him: “I ironed it for my Mum earlier.”
I don’t think I stopped giggling for about half an hour. When do cute barmen stop noticing you and start noticing that you’re wearing their Mum’s dress?! Joking aside, becoming invisible is the great catastrophe that befalls women as they creep into middle age. Or it is if you believe the Daily Mail, which last week claimed “midlife invisibility stings, whatever the feminists say.” Urgh!
Summer 2016 and I’m 18 months into my forties. It’s a balmy Thursday evening and I’m sat in my garden, savouring a glass of white wine and thinking about a conversation with a friend.
Notes > 25th August 2016, 22.35.
Am I invisible?
Spoiler: no!
It’s taken me another 18 months to get any further than that indignant ‘No!’ To find the right way to say that I don’t feel like I am becoming invisible. I feel more visible than I have ever been. Not to young men serving me drinks or the ones who to used to beep at me in the street and now drive by, oblivious. But in my life that I have chosen for myself, I do. I feel a little guilty that my experience is out of kilter with friends who feel differently and while I understand the reasons they give for feeling invisible, to me they are more visible and more vital than they have ever been.
There are many good reasons why women feel they become invisible as they age. We rarely see ourselves in positions of power or represented on the screen. There have been a total of 489 women MPs ever; there are 442 male MPs sitting in the current parliament alone. Just seven of the top 100 FTSE CEOs are women. A review by Harriet Harman in 2010 found that just 18% of TV presenters over the age of 50 were women. An analysis of 414 scripted movies, TV shows and digital series released between September 2014 and August 2015 found that men made up 80% of characters over the age of 40. When we do not see ourselves reflected in our leaders or in our cultural world we learn not to see ourselves.
But why, despite all of this, do I not feel the invisibility creep? I have mulled it over often and have my conclusions but I wondered how these would dovetail with the experiences of friends. So last night I messaged a few.
“I don’t feel invisible at all in work but that’s because I’m in a senior role I guess so it’s probably the only place I’m totally 100% visible!”
“I think being a mum made me invisible. People refer to you only as someone’s mum.”
“As much as I’m body positive and accept others for whatever they look like I miss the person I once looked like, and am at odds with the exponential speed with which [youthful] attributes diminish.”
“There’s a second-tier-citizen feel to it [motherhood] that feels a lot like invisibility. This bled over into physicality in that I completely forgot that I might have any sexual or physical appeal or power, outside of my own loving relationship I felt entirely separated from that whole notion.”
The benchmarks by which women judge themselves so harshly – work, motherhood, our looks and our sex appeal, not to mention our ability to be a success in all of them all at the same time – are all areas that at the moment I am at peace with. I did not want children so I am not experiencing that perceived invisibility. More significantly I am not juggling job and offspring. My business is a success and within my sector I am very visible. My relationship with my body, my looks and with sex is improving with age, in a large part due to this blog and the people and experiences it has connected me to. I think the reason I procrastinated for so long over this post is that I did not want to sound smug. But I am not smug, I just opted out of one big life choice so, for now, my experiences are different, possibly easier and I have more time to focus in on my priorities.
And the thing about the women who answered my questions, and those I did not have chance to message in my rush to write this post? They are spectacular! By the standards of visibility that they personally judge themselves by they may feel they are diminishing but my God, they are not. They are raising kickass feminist daughters and sons. They are looking after ageing parents. They are in senior positions. They are running businesses. They have created happy homes. They are beautiful. They are hot. They have contributed directly to the improvements in how I feel about myself. Through their friendships I am more visible. They are not invisible.
Zooming back out, are things going to improve? I hope so. I hope that #metoo and #timesup create lasting social change. I hope that soon women will no longer be judged on their looks, their ability to ’juggle’ or ‘have it all’. In the UK, today was the deadline on companies that employ more than 250 people releasing their gender pay gap data. I hope that pay transparency will finally result in equal pay for equal work. For single women that means they will be just as well off as a single man doing the same job. For women and men who have families the work/childcare split will no longer need to be decided on financial viability alone. Last year the Office of National Statistics data showed that the number of childfree women has doubled in a generation. Those women are women like me. I employ a 67-year-old woman and two working Mums, all of whom work the hours that suit them. I hope that the rising tide lifts all boats. I hope the increasing number of childfree women in senior positions afford mothers more flexibility. I hope older women in positions of power and influence offer other older women opportunities.
I’m going to give (almost) the last word to Tabitha Rayne, who said this:
“When I was young I heard from women in their fifties that they simply disappear. I decided a long time ago to make sure it never happened to me. However, now I’m in my forties I’m not feeling the same need to be in the limelight. I am happier to sit back, watch others take the lead. I actually don’t care now if I gently fade away. Maybe we make ourselves invisible? Self-contented ninjas. Shadow warriors of maturity.”
Lady! If you don’t want the limelight, that’s fine, but don’t ever think you don’t take the lead. You shine. You make beautiful art and wear your heart on your sleeve. You are leading a tribe into 30 days of orgasms! Self-contented ninjas and warriors of maturity I’m on board with, but there is no shadow. Until the world shines a light on the ageing woman let’s all reflect each other’s light back so women never feel invisible.
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