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Sex

Hey English Guys, This Is Why You're Bad at Sex

It's not the sex, it's how you deal with it afterwards.

In 2002, Canadian journalist Leah McLaren wrote an article about her dating life as a young foreigner in London. It was called “The Tragic Ineptitude of the English Male,” and many people, English males and otherwise, were pretty pissed. Her conclusion – that English men were too repressed, too polite, possibly misogynist and totally homo – was not particularly original. It feels like a few times a year a low-level internet fuss is made over the English being named second-worst lovers in the world, or lumped in with all British males as the least romantic men in existence (however that is even quantified), or the ugliest people in the world. Penises of Britain, your rep is not great.

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Before moving to England in 2010, I was given all the warnings. “The men are assholes and the women are frigid;” “It’s like a pubic Vietnam over there. You can’t move for pubes in that town;” “Oh, you’ll love it… if your favourite food is FORESKIN.” Etc. etc. etc.

I did my best to ignore these warnings, drunk on Hugh Grant and Cary Grant and Grant’s whiskey. I was in trouble as soon as I arrived in London, really – years of films and centuries of literature had left me expecting an impossible hybrid between Mr Rochester and Rupert Giles; an English master of innuendo who’d make cute jokes about my massive knickers after a night of unthreateningly perverse lovemaking. I felt like the thousands of North American women who recently – to the complete shock of everyone in the world – voted British men the “world’s sexiest”. And yet, the articles. The surveys. The misguided fantasy was Beckham. The reality, common wisdom seemed to dictate, is Boris.

Let me break down the reality for you. From my mildly objective perspective, the issue with English men is not that they are ill-equipped; English penises, from my smallish sample group, tend to be average-to-small, but like any population, the country’s pants are surely a beautiful cornucopia of shapes, girths and lengths. Neither is it that they are particularly unskilled in bed – you can get a crummy lay anywhere in the world, and some of the finest sex I have experienced took place in Stratford, even if his penis was average-to-small. I would posit that the Tragic Ineptitude of the English Male is not even 100 percent his own fault. Rather, it is that they are, to us weak-willed yet emotionally reasonable foreigners, too exquisitely skilled at everything pre-bed, and more or less incapable of anything post it.

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Pre-coitus, everything looks great. English men are, at least in comparison to my North American rowing mates, devastatingly good flirts. They generally understand the concepts of sarcasm/self-effacement and banter (which is rare, where I’m from), and are generally aware of what the world and the internet and the television are up to these days. Congratulations on your constant indoor weather, evidently it’s good for something. It helps all of this dramatically that the main place to find and flirt with an Englishman is the pub, and there are honestly very few things more fun to do than tease-and-be-teased by someone named Charlie or Eddie or whatever who is three pints in. By the time you’ve caught up with them, pint-wise, they could be reeling off a list of racial epithets they once used on a baby and you’d still be all, “DAT ACCENT, THO.”

But enough sucking up to the British male population. You dress well and are funny and smart and your faces are a bit weird but in a very pleasant way, and it’s all a lot to deal with for a foreign girl because, where we are from, these are signs that someone has it together, internally. This is not the case for you. Sorry guys, but holy shit: your repartee and statement socks and highbrow allusions are fancy packaging for what is essentially a giant can of worms. The crux of the English male is this: I have never met a group of people so skilled at getting women to go home with them, and so completely incapable – emotionally, intellectually, socially – of dealing with the aftermath. It’s false advertising. You can’t talk fun cool sex to us all night and then weirdly hover in the doorway mumbling “Uh, thanks,” before running off to hide behind time and text messages until it’s safe to emerge from whatever post-sex pit of self-consciousness you have hurled yourself headfirst into.

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I guess if we're thinking rationally, English awkwardness in the cold light of morning – plus a total inability to make eye contact with former sexual partners for between 1 and 3 weeks post-coitus – might have something to do with constantly being told by piles and piles of redundant and dubious research that you are literally the worst sexual partners in history. (And who is doing this research, by the way? Cancer is still a thing, researchers.) Who cares? Ignore the haters, people. You're better than that.

Speaking of which, McLaren’s 2002 article is, for whatever reason, no longer available on The Spectator’s website, but a more recent piece of hers stands out. Entitled “Englishmen rule", the newer article can basically be summarised as “LOL whups,” with McLaren chilling right out about the repressed homosexuality of boarding school blokes now that she has settled with and been impregnated by a strapping Northerner. Another, almost identical article features McLaren saying things like: “British men, regardless of background, tend to open up and reveal their complexity rather slowly, like good wine, and are thus deserving of close and patient inspection, rather than a cursory assessment.” Which, obviously: lolololol, but also can we just leave it alone for a bit? The male population of England is hardly all fine wines, but they’re not all smaller-than-average furry bottles of discount cider, either.

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For my part, my time in England has featured the biggest dick I’ve ever seen (hey bud! C U soon?) and the smallest (sorry dude, although I feel like you were probably aware already), some of the best sex of my life and the phrase “I texted… during.” Any real moments of disappointment with the species as a whole have stemmed not from their boners but from their behaviour once those boners subside. Who cares about your completely average peens or your alleged laziness in the sack? Take some self-esteem building workshops, drown out the surveys and the trend pieces and the first-person testimonials, and sort your shit out. Do you for a bit. And call yourself after, for God’s sake.

Follow Monica on Twitter: @monicaheisey

Read more from Monica on VICE:

How to Flirt at Work Without Humiliating Yourself

How to Sext Without Looking Like an Idiot

Why Girls Should Never Have Babies