Image by the fabulous Stuart F Taylor
I know I always bang on about how there aren’t any universal tricks to make your sex life better. There’s no ‘one simple way’ to please your lover in bed. But I’ve decided – after a decade and a half of sex blogging – that there is actually one change that would have a near-universal positive impact on everybody’s sex life. It isn’t something an individual can do on their own, it’s a choice we need to collectively make as a society. But we can make this choice if enough of us get on board. The one simple trick to give everyone a better sex life: Universal Basic Income.
Hear me out.
I’m an expert on this topic. Not on the economics of it, that’s boring – working through the economics is a task for far more qualified people than me. Though it’s worth noting that many different trials have been done to try and answer the question ‘what if we just gave people money? Would that help them live better lives?’, and often the studies have come back: ‘yes’.
No one’s ever done a study (as far as I know) into whether Universal Basic Income (UBI) will help with people’s sex lives, but that’s where an expert like me comes in. I can tell you for a fact that it would. When you give people money, you buy them freedom from some of the stress that life throws at us on a daily basis. You buy their time, previously spent working a job to make money for somebody else, and you give that time back to them. They can spend that time however they like, and many will spend it wanking and having sex.
Freedom from worry
Money isn’t everything, and it cannot buy you love. But platitudes like that are usually only wheeled out by people who have plenty of it. Sure, when you have enough money to not freeze or starve to death, to not get evicted, to go on holiday when you want to and buy new shoes if you spot a pair you fancy… then money isn’t everything. And the philosophical question of whether it can buy you love is one you have the luxury of pondering.
When you’re poor, you’re too fucking poor to think about this shit. Money may not be everything, but it’s extraordinarily significant in a society where you need to have a certain amount of it in order to stay alive. You need to pay rent and bills, buy food. Top up your travel card or fill up your car. Buy insurance and clothes and PE kit for your children. There’s a certain amount of money that’s required to cover the very basic cost of existing in this world.
It’s really hard to be horny when you don’t have enough to eat.
Sex is not one of those ‘basic’ needs like food, but most adults do experience sexual desire and would therefore place sexual pleasure somewhere on their hierarchy of needs. The pursuit of this particular kind of happiness often takes a back seat to all the other stuff, and because of this the vast majority of people don’t have time to sit and ponder all the ways they’ll make their partner smile the next time they get naked.
I’m not saying ‘poor people don’t have sex’, nor am I saying that poor people have less sex, or worse sex, than rich people. I’m saying that it is much easier to enjoy sex and our own bodies when our minds are not occupied elsewhere: when am I getting paid? Will it be enough? Should I turn on the heating, or can I buy dinner for tonight? Emily Nagoski talks of ‘brakes’ as well as ‘accelerators’ of sexual desire, and many of the things that can act as a brake on arousal (stress, for example) are caused or exacerbated by poverty.
On a less extreme level, consider the concept of ‘free time’. Most parents I know are itching for a bit of free time. A moment to themselves with a glass of wine and a book, an hour in the gym or out walking, a night spent binge-watching their favourite show. Pleasurable activities may not always have a financial cost, but they always cost at least a little bit of time: sex included.
One of the key things UBI could do is buy people time. Instead of spending all their spare hours hustling in a second job, looking for a better paid one, or haggling with godforsaken broadband providers to try and shave a few quid off their bills, everyone would have a little more time to spend doing the things they really want to do. UBI would give us all some breathing room. It would buy us all a bit of extra time.
How would you spend yours?
The luxury of thinking about sex
From 2014 to 2025, I worked full time as GOTN. I got paid to think, talk and write about sex for a living. Huge thanks to the fabulous sponsors you see in the sidebar ads, companies who have commissioned me to write articles or give them consultancy, and above all an incredibly supportive team of people on Patreon – they made it possible for me to do this. Obviously there was work involved in actually earning the money. I had to pitch articles, promote the site and Patreon, edit audio and commission work from other writers/readers, consult with companies, and sometimes even attend boring meetings like normal people! Eugh! But by and large I was paid to just… kind of… do what I feel when it comes to sex – write porn, have a big old think about it, spend money on art that reflects a diverse range of body types (my biggest thanks must always go to Stuart, because his work is such a defining beautiful thing about this site), come up with new blow job ideas, have an Opinion about whatever sex discourse we were having at the time. Ponder how I might like to fuck someone with a strap-on, then spend time interrogating and articulating those desires in ways that will turn people on.
Patreon is the closest I can imagine to having a ‘Universal Basic Income’, allowing me to do what I really want to do. I was lucky in a way that feels increasingly rare these days: the way I earned money was the way I would have lived anyway, if money didn’t exist. Given infinite options as to how I’d spend my time, I’d do this. Forever.
I can’t help but imagine what other people would do if they had the same option. People whose novels are currently sitting inside their heads, whose blogs and photography projects languish unstarted. People whose films and TV shows won’t ever be written. Whose businesses won’t be set up. Whose training for their Dream Role will never begin, let alone be complete.
I don’t think everyone would be a sex blogger if they had the free time and mental/emotional capacity – though I do reckon there’d be more sex blogs and erotic projects knocking about, which would benefit all of us. But alongside the actual work portion of my job there was a hell of a lot of freedom to just do the thing I love to do the best: dream about how I’m going to fuck the person I’m seeing, test out different fantasies, and enjoy being able to do this without bricking it about where the next gas bill payment is coming from.
For ten years I had time, space and emotional/physical/mental energy to spend thinking, talking and writing about sex. I was given sex toys to play with that I didn’t have to pay for, and although I still worried a lot about money (I always struggled to make minimum wage so I was never ‘safe’ from worry), for most of the years I was doing it I had enough to scrape by. And ‘scraping by’ will probably always be enough for me! I don’t need to buy myself shiny objects or spend tonnes of money on subscriptions or whatnot – happiness for me means being able to dedicate as much of my life to sex and love as I can. And guess what? I was HORNY. I masturbated at least a couple of times a day, most days. Unless mental health problems or physical exhaustion were taking their toll, my sex drive was generally bubbling away, ready to be dragged into action at a moment’s notice. What’s more, I was creatively filthy in ways that just wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t had this headspace.
What I do is not a result of talent. And the ‘work’ portion of it is not a hardship but a privilege. Once you’ve got the inclination to do something like sex blogging, getting to a place where you’re good at it mostly comes down to practice and work. I got to do that work because I had the luxury – the privilege – of getting to practice it every working day for the best part of a decade. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending I don’t think I’m good: I am good at this. Even people who don’t especially like what I do or the way that I do it would be hard pressed to tell me I’m bad at it. But I’m decent because I’ve been able too put the time and energy into it, and that was only possible because I didn’t have to spend that time elsewhere, doing some other job to get my bills paid, which left me too exhausted to think about fucking when I collapsed on the sofa at the end of each working day.
Money buys freedom
Recently, thanks to increasing censorship and an economy that means people don’t have much cash spare to spend on sex toys and audio porn, I had to go out into the big, wide world and get myself A Real Job. One that has little to do with sex, and which – though enjoyable and very gratefully received – doesn’t make my heart sing quite like this one. I can’t spend as much time sex blogging, because I have to work shifts earning money to pay the bills. I don’t resent it, I am very lucky to have it, but my God has it hammered home how extraordinarily lucky I was to be able to do GOTN full time for so long. Even more than that, it’s reminded me just how difficult it used to be in the very early days of this blog, trying to squeeze sexy ideas from a brain that was made of jelly after a hard day’s work. These days I get home at the end of a shift and I am rinsed. I drag myself to my laptop and try to keep up with emails, but the chances of me writing something beautiful after a full day doing something that has fuck-all to do with fucking are practically zero.
If you have ever used a sex tip I’ve written, wanked to some porn I wrote, or thought ‘wow, how does she come up with these ideas?’ then the answer is here: time and money. I had money to survive, and that bought me time, which I chose to spend becoming a massive horny thinky nerd about all the sexy shit that many of you could probably have thought of if you’d had enough time yourselves.
Money isn’t everything, but it buys time. And I think one of the key obstacles getting in the way of people fucking beautifully, communicating brilliantly with their partners, enjoying the pleasure of their own bodies, finding new people to connect with and love and enjoy… is time. We spend so much of our time earning money, and then pour so much of that money into covering the basic cost of living. Only when these needs are met do we have the energy – emotional, physical, whatever – to dedicate to the things that bring us pleasure.
Like sex.
So if you want everyone to have a better sex life tomorrow, and you’re looking for a universal tip, the best one I can give you is Universal Basic Income. Naturally, as a massive lefty, I also want people to have UBI because I think all humans deserve housing and food and heat and education and healthcare and the opportunity to make the most out of their lives. But I also think if we give them those things we deliver a kind of freedom that the vast majority of people would never experience otherwise. The luxury of time. Of choice. Of being able to ponder what brings us pleasure, and focus on that. I’m not saying UBI will make us all have more sex, but if we free people from the need to work themselves to exhaustion just to eat and sleep, then many of us will spend at least some of our newfound freedom exploring sex and love. Maybe friendship as well, who knows? And community. Family. All the things we wish we had more time for, that we have to put off and ignore because the gas bill’s due and we haven’t yet been paid and we need to get two more shifts in this month to cover the car insurance and oh shit the boiler’s broken and fuck I haven’t called BT yet to try and haggle down our broadband.
If we’re not completely shackled to capitalist obligations, what choices might each of us make? I was lucky enough to get ten years of freedom, and I spent it mostly on sex. I hope that choice has brought a few other people some joy along the way.
Imagine how much joy could be created if all of us had that same choice.
