Interviewing an Oxbridge Sex Blogger

Interviewing an Oxbridge sex blogger is – funnily enough – a little bit like losing your virginity. In all likelihood you went into it full of hope and expectation, but deep down you knew all along that it would be awkward, difficult and just a little disappointing.  As everyone knows, the point of losing your virginity is to tell your mates about it later. But, if I may stretch this analogy a little further and compare The Tab’s readers to friends, in this case I return empty-handed.

Sexatoxbridge’s readers visit her blog for the same reason that The Sun wet themselves every time a photo leaks out of the Newnham nuns wearing bin-bag bikinis and fellating bananas – it’s sex, but in a novel setting. Like 'Sex and the City', “Sex at Oxbridge” promises two equally glamorous things. And like 'Sex and the City', it’s shit. The word ‘sex’ is used today less as a descriptive term for intercourse, and more as a marketing ploy. Like sticking the letter ‘i’ in front of something, sex gets stuff sold. Then there’s ‘Oxbridge,’ that grand old institution, the perfect compliment. Take a great pillar of the establishment, cover it in lipstick, get it pissed outside Wetherspoons, and you’ve got yourself Sex at Oxbridge. It’s hard to see the papers not eating it up. Why, the only thing missing is the use of an @ symbol and it’s the 21st century media’s wet dream. Dragons Den it ain’t, but don’t you wish you’d thought it up?

I wish I had thought it up because if I had, I can guarantee to you right now that the front page of The Tab would read, “Sex blogger: I bedded fellow.” It would have been the perfect marriage of convenience: student tabloid meets endless source of made-up filth. But I was happy to settle for second best and secure an interview, in the hope that this blogger (who is almost certainly a female Oxbridge student, and not a 50 year old Geordie sitting in a lay-by somewhere) would be on my wavelength.
 

Unfortunately, the only headline sexatoxbridge could provide me with was "Nympho is a Prude” – and she came up with that one herself. “I'm realising more and more that though I have a lot of sex I come off quite prudish,” she tells me, just 15 minutes after explaining what she thought the sexiest font was for an essay (Georgia, footlight or book antiqua, since you’re asking). The blog is little more than a catalogue of dates by an OCD arts student who writes down details of every one of her shags, but shares limited information with her readers. Belle du Jour she is not, and there’s not really much in the way of dirty talk in either the blog or the interview: she balks at my “bit too tabloidy” enquiry about her pubic area (waxed), and her run-through of how to seduce a man is disappointingly mundane.

But after all, isn’t that the point? There is an assumption held by 99% of people who read about this Oxbridge sex blog that as readers we are entitled to something. Somehow, by reading about her in the Sun, or visiting her Twitter page, I have earned the right to leave sexatoxbridge’s blog with an erection. But when I end up disappointed, who’s really at fault? The ordinary girl who procrastinates by writing anonymously about her love life or the guy who spent an hour trying to extract some filth out of her because I can peddle it to pervs and papers. No one’s making you read her blog, just like the guy/girl who popped your cherry (hopefully) wasn’t forcing you to sleep with them. And after the interview, I couldn’t help but return to an all-too-familiar feeling that has followed almost every bad sexual encounter I’ve had: just like when you lost your virginity, it was probably shit for her too.