Two things (OK, actually three things) to kick off your Monday… a BBC programme on devotees, the ‘right’ amount of sex to have, and a kickass sex story set on a train.

The good: Meet the Devotees

If you’re not already following @EmilyRYates on Twitter then you totally should. She’s a writer and accessibility consultant who writes fantastically about sex. She’s just made a programme – Meet The Devotees – which explores ‘Devoteeism’ – people who are turned on by disability. It’s an uncomfortable, eye-opening, and incredibly difficult topic. Here she writes about one of the devotees she met:

“Gray’s interest in disabled women first emerged at school when a girl with a very short leg and one arm entered his classroom, he says he fell immediately in love: ‘To me she was obviously the most gorgeous woman in the whole school district.’ “As I spoke to him, though, I wondered if his attraction was more about vulnerability and power – things which I didn’t want others to consider when they look at me.”

Read Emily’s article about making the show, or watch the whole programme on the iPlayer.

Update: Emily also just sent me this open letter from a writer with cerebral palsy, and it’s incredible:

“Your panicked questions, the constant pressure, and those backhanded compliments all imply that my disability is a problem I need you to solve. That’s kind of the only language we have for when able-bodied and disabled people get together. And I, for one, am pretty bored of it. So let me offer an alternative: I don’t need you to save me. I need you to see me.”

The bad: the ‘right’ amount of sex to have

Are you shagging enough? What counts as ‘enough’? Often the discussion around sex frequency relies on the idea that there’s a ‘right’ amount of sex to have to keep us happy. But an article in Scientific American recently speculated that it’s not about the overall number, it may be a comparative thing:

“Unlike in previous studies, a subtler pattern also appeared: at frequencies greater than once a week, the happiness graph flattened out. The reason “is an open question that we are exploring,” Muise says. Her team thinks one possibility is that people are satisfied when they are doing it as much as they think they should be, a standard set by their peers. Indeed, the average for couples is once a week.”

Which isn’t necessarily bad, it just highlights again how rubbish humans are at understanding our own pleasure exclusive of others. With sex – as with lots of other things – we’re intensely keen to compare. What’s a ‘normal’ amount of sex? What’s the ‘right’ way to do it? Blergh.

Bonus thing: awesome sex story

SexBlogOfSorts is running a writing competition, where you pick the title of an article in a magazine and write a sex story using that title as a prompt. Jo, from TeachersHaveSex, picked a pretty spectacular title and wrote an amazing story – check it out…

“Sitting on a KTX train bound for Daegu, I see my own reflection absentmindedly staring out the window at the mountains passing by. As so often happens when I’m not thinking of anything in particular, my thoughts drift to you. To your strong fingers, your expressive brown eyes, your dirty words whispered lovingly into my ears. Your mouth on my nipple, seen from above as I’m straddling you. Your sex and heat and body odor-mingled scent in the late morning after an all-night fuck marathon.”

Read the full story here…