Not a Madonna or a whore.

Everywhere you look, there are conflicting messages about heterosexual girls' virginity. If you have sex, you're easy. If you don't, you're frigid.

It's amazing how prolific the Madonna/whore complex is, how it's permeated even modern-day life. In its most basic form, it's the idea than girls come in two models of sexuality: Madonnas, the image of purity and chastity; and whores, sexualised and seductive. Which one is portrayed positively depends on the tone of the writer, if either is at all. It's a hangover from ancient times, when women having sex outside marriage would ruin your reputation, and illegitimate children were a threat to inheritence. Thus Madonnas were idolised. Since the rise of birth control though, girls who won't put out are uptight; they need to loosen up. What are you meant to listen to? It's a tangled skein of contradictions.

Honestly, it seems like a wonder anyone has normal functioning relationships at all.

"Sex is everything!" scream some sources. "Sex is the whole point of human existence! People only exist to be eye candy! See this girl? SHE IS TITS AND A BUTT. She's there for you to fuck! See this shirtless guy? HE IS THERE FOR SEXYTIMES. If you're not having sex YOU ARE WRONG. Asexuality doesn't exist! People should want to fuck ALL THE TIME. The answer to any of your woes is to HAVE MORE SEX."

I exaggerate, but you know the sentiment. If that sounds overly familiar, and I'm not exaggerating, then that's just scary. The advertising industry is the worst. It seems like ANYTHING can be sold if you stick a pair of tits next to it.

Then there's the more insidious 'sex-positivity' that comes from Cosmo and that ilk - the sort that doesn't actually encourage you to enjoy sex, but how to "make your man" happy. Your own enjoyment should come from pleasuring your boyfriend/husband/one night stand! Your sex drive should be malleable to his! If you ask for him to do anything for you, you're a greedy scum-sucking road whore!

On the flip side, you've got the Modesty Police and all those conservative moral guardians. No sex before marriage, or you will be forever tainted and no man will ever want you again. If you get raped, it is YOUR FAULT for being a sneaky whore and tempting men! These are the people who think women should be meek and mild. You know those chastity balls where girls take vows never to even TOUCH a boy before marriage? That's the extreme end of it. 

Looking at these contrasting positions, I find it strange that I, as a person, seem to fall more in line with the latter - the chaste one. I've had a few chances where I could have had sex: my friend's drunk friend who asked me to eat her out; my crush and I spending the night making out heatedly on an airbed; the boy I'm dating staying over at my house. (It was great; he'd lied to his parents about where he was, the same way as I'd lied about who I was having for a sleepover. I loved the puerile secrecy of it.) But I've never gone there, not yet.

I think I must have been corrupted by television. For all my sex positivity - which largely comes down to "YOU DO YOU!" - I don't want my first time to be on a whim. I want it to be... as near to perfect as possible. I want it to be with someone who loves me, male or female. But that requires relationships. I'm normally too lazy for those: I am a virgin out of passivity. That said, I'm pretty ambivalent about my virginity. It's just a transient status which has no wider reverberations on my personality, akin to saying "I bleach my hair" or "I have asthma". It's hardly a sufficient summary of my whole personality, you know?

One of my friends lost her virginity to a boy she'd known for three weeks, and been dating for two. I was kind of surprised - another friend and I sat, over coffee, wondering if she'd come to regret it. We thought she'd get hurt. But while our concern for her well-being may have been valid, it was misplaced: we were treating sex as something dangerous. We were denying her agency, something I take up arms about in all other situations. If she wanted to have sex with him, why were we this surprised about it? It was like we were slut-shaming. I spent the next few days mulling over that conversation, hating myself for being so judgemental.

In the same way as over-sexualisation is bullshit, modesty is bullshit. The idea that girls should cover up lest they tempt men to rape them? Utter balls. But it's still permeated our culture.

I'm half-expecting everyone who reads this to raise their eyebrows, but you're probably young liberal sorts, more likely to wonder why a virgin is writing about sex than why a girl would talk about her sexuality on the internet.

If things keep going this way, there is a good chance I'll screw The Boy. It seems too far away to think about in detail; even last night, when we were rolling around in my bed in only our underwear, firmly established at second base, sex never really crossed my mind. (I thought I could feel his boner against my thigh, but I didn't want to ask in case I was wrong, or my intentions were misconstrued.) It's less about actively protecting my virgin status, more just a reluctance to do anything in case I regret it later. It's not even an aversion to sex - hell, just writing this is making me want to jump his bones - but an aversion to trying to force the pace of our relationship.

Maybe I need to live more in the moment. Maybe I need to stop second-guessing myself. I definitely need to stop judging other people. It doesn't matter if your first time is with someone you love or someone you barely know; as long as it's consensual, it's all good. I will lose my virginity when I feel comfortable, and I shouldn't be made to feel guilty if it's sooner or later than anyone else.

It doesn't matter if you're a nymphomanic or totally asexual, Jezebel or the Virgin Mary - judgement is bullshit. The virgin/whore dichtomoy is bullshit. Real sex positivity comes from just doing things that give you pleasure, and fuck other people's considerations: you do you.

Meditations on terminations.

April 4th marked my seventh date with the boy my friends lovingly refer to as my "ambiguous manfriend". It was just shy of seven weeks since we'd met, and just under six weeks since our first date. He was not my boyfriend. We were dating but not going out.

We met in Caffe Nero after I got out of work, and I watched him drink hot chocolate while telling him about my day. He'd had a haircut. It was hilarious. He offered to buy me coffee, but I refused; I'd spent the day in a tea-fueled haze and my stomach was full of sloshy liquid. After an hour of giggling in the coffee shop, garnering dirty looks from the rest of the pseudo-hip Oxford Street caffeine fiends scrounging for their next espresso shot, we decided to get dinner. We walked next door to get Chinese food and held hands across the single street we crossed.

Our conversation over dinner started out innocuous - the weather, shoes, Singapore. American politics.

"The South is scary," he said. "I wouldn't want to live anywhere with such lax gun laws."

"The Midwest isn't so peachy either," I said. "Like, North Dakota is fucked. They've just passed a law banning abortions after six weeks! And that's six weeks from your last period, not even the date the baby's conceived, so you could be pregnant for only two weeks and denied an abortion. Now that's scary!"

There was a silence which stretched slightly too long.

"Is it bad I think abortion's a bad thing?" he said. I glanced at him, then back down at my vegetable fried rice. I tried to remember my friend Emily's technique for using chopsticks, but ended up reverting to my method of shovelling the food with them.

"I'm not sure it's a good thing, necessarily," I replied, "but it is necessary. And trying to curtail it when there isn't a real reason is really stupid."

"But - ah - isn't there a real reason?" he said, eating his own rice. I realised what was about to happen. I was going to spend the rest of this dinner sat opposite a boy who made my heart flutter, arguing about an issue close to my heart. It was something people had died over before. I thought about Savita Halappanavar, the Northern Irish women denied an abortion because there was a foetal heartbeat; she died of septicemia, in agony, her baby along with her.

"No?"

"It's all life, isn't it?"

Isn't it?

Is it?

In my mind, a foetus is not alive. It doesn't have rights. The point of viability - around 26 weeks - the point when a baby can live outside its mother's body: that's when life begins. When the brain can process pain, and has developed the startle reflex (and can react to external stimuli) - that's when it goes from being a hunk of cells into something real and living. Before that, in my mind, a foetus is nothing more than a parasite.

If you rely totally and utterly on another organism to keep you alive, all take and give, then that's hardly a symbiosis. It's all well and good if you want to carry the baby, and keep it alive: I recall hearing some mothers say that pregnancy is something sacred, something pure. But if you don't want to? If your own resources are being drained to feed an alien inside your abdomen? Nobody should have to suffer through that involuntarily.

I tried to explain this to the boy, and added that safety is another issue. Women have been getting rid of unwanted babies throughout history; better to do it safely, with medical care, than illegally and alone in a back alley.

"But whenever a woman has sex, and she gets pregnant, it's a risk she knew she was taking, so it's her fault - or, equally her fault and his fault."

I looked at him. I'm pretty sure the rice fell off my chopsticks. It was the sort of statement I'd expect from Todd Akin, not the beautiful cello-playing Tory-hating liberal biochemist sat across the table from me.

"So she ought to be able to rectify the mistake," I said.

"What about the father? Doesn't he get a say? What if this girl gets pregnant, and six weeks later says, I'm pregnant and want an abortion, and he says no, I want us to have kids? What then?"

"She has an abortion," I said. It was a stupid question. The baby wasn't going to invade him for nine months, get in the way of all his plans, strain to breaking point her friendships and physicality. The baby wasn't going to stretch his orifices, possibly kill him giving birth, make him gain weight or swell his ankles or strain his back.

"Is that it? You're throwing away a whole life because it gets in the way for nine months? Just think of the potential you're wasting!" he exclaimed. I raised my eyebrows.

"Okay," I said. "Say that couple was us. Say tonight, we get a bit carried away and fuck without protection, and in six weeks' time I'm pregnant. It's not you who's going to be pregnant. It's not you who will have all your future plans for the next almost-year fucked up. It's me. It's my body. And before the embryo turns into a foetus into a baby, it's just a part of me, which I don't want, so I have to be able to get rid of it."

He looked at me around his mouthful of egg-fried carbohydrates.

"Why are you prioritising the woman's life over the baby's?"

"Because she's alive," I said. "She's me. The baby is just... cells. Especially at six weeks. You don't issue stem cells with passports and birth certificates. The baby doesn't exist anywhere outside of a tiny triangle of uterus. She does."

When he replied, I smiled, tight-lipped, and carried on eating. He was an athiest, like me; but every argument he spouted sounded like the same old Sanctity of Life bullshit which the Church has used to enslave women for as long as written records stretch back.

"I don't think it's wrong," he finished, "just... I don't know if I agree with it."

"I just..." I started, but I couldn't go on. I picked up my spoon and ate the rest of my dinner with it, scraping up the last few vegetables. "Yeah."

The silence returned. We both cleared our plates, methodically eating every last item.

"I like your nails," he said, and I was glad he'd changed the subject.

"Thanks."

At least our first argument was about something that mattered, rather than any of the usual trivialities like how to split the bill or where to go for dinner.

We returned to talking about lighter things, less fractious ones. We walked through the chilly London streets and went to a busy pub. We drank, leaning against a wall because it was too busy to sit down. Eventually a sofa became free, and I snuggled into his shoulder when he put his arm around me. Before we left I ran downstairs to the bathrooms, following the shiny signs to the shiny white ladies'. I ducked into a stall, and noticed the smear of new red blood in my knickers. Five days of stomach cramps and low-level mood swings and craving for sugar would follow. But it could be worse.

Well. At least I wasn't pregnant.

Looking up, looking down.

Last week, my friend Lydia turned 18. It's been a long time coming - 18 years, to be precise; but about seven months since my own 18th, to be less facetious. To celebrate, her parents paid for her and six of her friends to see the view from The Shard, the 306-metre London eyesore which is has earned the title of The Tallest Building in Europe.

The thing about being in strange places is that I find it crystallises my thought process. Things become a lot more insignificant when you're somewhere different, somewhere which stands as a testament to the creativity and doggedness of the human spirit.

These are my thoughts from the top of The Shard...

- Tall buildings are the most phallic of all phallic symbols. It's the evolution of the who-has-the-biggest-club competition from caveman times. What better way to overcompensate for your fragile manhood than constructing a 1000-foot skyscraper to sell as ludicrously expensive penthouse flats?

- Imagine living in one of those flats on the 40th floor and having the lifts broken. Imagine walking down forty flights of stairs to the ground floor, only to realise you've left your stuff. Like, "aww, man, I can't believe I left my gym membership card back in my room, I gotta go walk up another forty flights of stairs to get it back?! Fuck that, just walking back up stairs counts as exercise for the day."

- If we're on the highest floor you can be, and it's floor 72, then what's above us? What happens if I look up?

- How much time in the whole of human history has been spent looking up? Staring at building, staring at the stars, just staring at the world?

- How much history can I see just by looking out across the city? It's a big sprawling metropolis. Civilisation. Humanity's greatest achievement is just learning to live together, how to navigate the changes from village to town to city to concrete forest. And rolling through the middle is The Thames, which made it all possible. Look, it's St Paul's. How many times has that been rebuilt? Props to us, humans. We're really good at rebuilding things. But how much history have we lost through this progress?

- Is progress worth paying the price of losing the past? Does tradition really matter that much?

- God damn, my feet hurt.

- It's really windy up here. I'm glad I'm not wearing a hat. I'd be pissed if I went to The Shard and lost my hat.

- But where would the hat go? It might get blown the whole way out over London. It might land at the feet of any of the tiny people I can see walking around, going between the tiny buildings and getting in their tiny cars and tiny trains, living their huge lives. And my hat would just be a tiny thing to happen in their day. 

- I am that tiny person. You are that tiny person. We're all so, so tiny. We're the centre of our own universes, but when you look at us from that far away, we are all so small. All our worries seem really big, but they are so small too. They will not subsume the whole universe - only our own. And that's tiny. And everyone else has their own universe full of their own tiny worries. We have no sense of perspective.

- We spend too much time in our own heads.

We're all just people, doing the best we can, and sometimes we get too wrapped up to really look at what's going on around us. How much amazing stuff do we miss every day just because we don't take the time to stop and stare? How much did I not notice because I was too busy inside stressing the little things, worrying about texting and tweeting and technology?

Sometimes all we need to do is look around and enjoy the view.

Kiss me.

Kiss me the moment you see me.

Kiss me like an almost-drowned man kisses the land. Kiss me like an astronaut kisses the stars. Kiss me like a 19th-century Russian novellist kissed their typewriter.

Kiss me like you can't believe it's been so long since you last kissed me, like the time has gone by in an irksome crawl since then, like this waiting has been a mistake you want to rectify as soon as possible.

Kiss me like I'm a test you've been studying for all week. Kiss me like your last-minute nerves are kicking in your belly. Kiss me like you're going to get full marks.

Kiss me like there's a butterfly on my lips and you want your breath to tickle its wings.

Kiss me like there's a magnet under my skin and your lips are made of iron. Kiss me like we're hydrogen atoms and you want to covalently bond. Kiss me to get me to stop making terrible science jokes.

Kiss me like a supernova. I don't even know how that would be possible. But I want it to happen. I imagine it will be colours and lights and heat and spectacle, something rare and sharp and shocking. Kiss me like that.

Kiss me on the Tube. Kiss me in public, where everyone can see and judge us for being obnoxious and young. Kiss me when we're travelling, because it's not the destination that matters but the leaving, the going, the arriving.

Kiss me like I'm the love of your life. Kiss me like I'm a porn star.
Kiss me like I'm made of memory foam and every touch lasts forever. Kiss me like you're trying to corrupt me.
Kiss me virgin, kiss me whore, kiss me patriarchal dichotomies where, just for once, I'd win either way.

Kiss me like an absolution.

Kiss me like you're telling me your thoughts in another language we're both trying to learn.

Kiss me so hard that you've backed me against a wall and it's all saliva and teeth and lips and tongue and basic human anatomy, and all rational thought has been replaced by the need to be close, closer, closest.

Kiss me like a secret you can't bear to hide any more.

Kiss me like you could break me, fix me, bend me, shape me, mould me, push me, pull me, complete me, empty me, perfect me, ruin me, totally and utterly verb me.

Kiss me goodbye.

Kiss me like we're kids hiding in a tree house and learning what each other's bodies are for. Kiss me like I'm going to write a song about it, and you want it to be three minutes of heaven. Kiss me like you wish we could spend the night, like this wasn't the end of another date.

Kiss me like you want to keep me.

Just shut the hell up and kiss me.

Jilling off.

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I am scared of everything.

I know I haven’t been around for very long. Eighteen years is nothing. The universe has been around for billions of years. I am less than a blink of the grand celestial eye. I am like, a millionth of a blink. A billionth. I am such a small part of something so big that the numbers make the mind boggle. I am so insignificant that it’s a wonder I write anything, or that you read it, because none of it matters – not really. None of this is going to change the world.

But why should you trust what I have to say? I, after all, am nobody. I don’t even trust what I say, and I’m the one spewing this shit twenty-four hours a day.

The one thing I am sure of is this: we are all scared. We are scared of losing what we love, or not realising we love it until it’s too late. We are scared of the future, of the past, of having life fuck up, of having it turn out exactly the way we want it to.

We are scared of disappointment. Disappointing ourselves, our friends, our families. We are scared of the fact we are scared. We are scared we don’t love ourselves enough, that we love ourselves too much, that we don’t listen enough or talk enough or think enough. We are scared of things that contradict each other. We are scared into paradoxes of fear, where any decision could be the wrong one. We get too scared to even make decisions sometimes, and end up just playing Temple Run 2 for hours on end because it’s easier than doing something and getting it wrong.

And anyone who isn’t scared is a liar. We should all admit it. I’m scared of you, reading this right now. I'm scared you'll think my writing is so pathetically mediocre that you've wasted your life by reading it. I'm scared you'll troll me, or leave some perfectly articulated criticism that perfectly describes why I hate my own writing; I'm scared you'll say something that cuts so deep it makes me never want to write again. I'm scared nobody will read this and it'll all be pointless, and I'll essentially be yelling into the night forever with nobody even pretending to listen.

I'm scared of the people I love and what they think of me, and what they would think of me if they knew about the horrible thoughts that live inside my head. I'm scared of my plans for the future - what if I'm wishing for all the wrong things? What if I achieve my dreams - then what? What if my dreams are actually really disappointing? What if I love the wrong people and do the wrong things? I have nobody to blame but myself.

I'm scared of going blind! I have no logical reason to be scared of going blind! But what if one day I wake up and boom, my retinas have detatched and dissolved into the jelly of my eyes, and I can't see ever again? And going deaf! I'm scared of that too! What if, one day, I can't hear music anymore? WHAT IF I LOSE ALL SENSORY EXPERIENCE AND CAN NO LONGER EMPIRICALLY PROVE ANYTHING. WHAT THEN?

In fact, I'm scared of pretty much everything. Autonomy is a big scary thing and being in charge of our choices is also big and scary. But when I get really, really scared, I go outside at night and look at the stars – or, really, Google Sky, because England is too fucking cloudy all the time to see the stars – and I remind myself that I can fuck up. I can fuck up so many times that there is nothing left in my life that I haven't fucked up. Literally everyone in the world could hate me. And it wouldn’t matter, because those stars are going to keep shining*. Nothing I can do is going to affect them. The universe is still going to be there. And it’ll be scary, but there will always be the chance to strike out into the world again. We are all under the same sky; those stars remind me that I always have a second chance.

*(Unless you’re The Doctor. In which case, you fucking up really COULD destroy the universe, so I recommend exercising caution. You do you, Doctor..)

How am I supposed to leave?

We all have to leave sometime.

I have lived in this village for as long as I can remember. It is too small to have a train station, and the buses to the nearest towns only come once an hour. It is big enough to get lost in, but I haven’t for a long time. I have lived here for seventeen years and I don’t know the names of most of the roads. Once, on the day of my first driving lesson, my instructor asked me where Fish Street was.

Fish Street? No, I don’t know Fish Street; it’s The Common, which changes names halfway down for no apparent reason. It’s the little curved apostrophe of a road where all the terraced houses have window-boxes full of cheerful pink carnations, and cars parked in front with two wheels up on the pavement. It’s a road I can describe with my eyes closed, but I’d never paid any attention to its name. I saw the road name on a sign every day, and it was so obvious that I never noticed it.

When someone says “home” to me, I think of the High Street in the summer, when hanging baskets adorn every lamppost and shop front, suspended on fragile chains beside the door of the chemist or the chiropractors’, and the whole street smells like a garden centre. Home is the gravel path of the church I used to walk up every week as a child, before my creeping antipathy for religion rendered me an atheist. My mother still walks that path every Sunday, and the nave is where we sat the last time we said goodbye to her own mother. It’s a safe place for her.

There’s the bench next to the needle of the war memorial, the criss-crossed paths cutting across the Common that are surrounded by a canopy of trees, the cratered road my childhood best friend lived at the other end of. Driving down her road was an exercise in how to ruin your car’s suspension and her parents always used to mutter darkly about how extortionate it would be to repave it. But I loved it, and loved how running over the bumpy surface could make it feel like you were flying, never quite sure where your legs would land.

My hometown is affluent, a microcosm of suburban paradise where children play in the river and climb trees, and where my elderly neighbours still stroll with impunity. The worst thing that’s ever happened to me here was when I got honked at by a passing car when I was walking home from the shops at age fifteen; it’s that sort of place.

And with each day that passes, I get closer to leaving it. I’ll be flying the nest. I don’t yet know where I’ll be going, but it’ll be two hundred miles away or more. I won’t be living in a place where I can go for a walk at 2am, on my own, and feel utterly unfazed. I’m excited for the city, for the new people, for a room that is mine and a place where I get to be someone new. My village is dull, but it's safe. It won't surprise me or hurt me. It seems inconceivable this place could ever change: it's going to be the same forever. I know I've outgrown it.

But I’ll miss this. I’ll miss holding open the door of the post office while a pensioner closes her umbrella and we share a knowing smile about the weather. I’ll miss the white gates of my house and the feeling of being anchored, to a specific place in a specific moment of time. I suppose that moment is coming to an end, and something new is about to start.

I don’t want to go. I can’t wait to move away. I could stay here forever. We all have to leave sometime.