Image by the brilliant Stuart F Taylor

Lots of people bemoan the fact that social media is a bubble, filled only with people who agree with you. It gives a skewed worldview, and leads to things like me weeping with bitter tears the morning after the Brexit vote, because I couldn’t quite believe the world wasn’t quite as I’d imagined it. But there are up-sides: your Twitter feed, properly curated, can essentially be a long list of people whose opinions, ideas, and words you find sexy. Given this, you may want to consider fucking them.

Yesterday Oloni asked her Twitter followers to DM stories of when they’d hooked up with their followers. And OMG did she get some responses. This one is my favourite:

[Text reads: My first and only Twitter crush came to visit me the first time we met in person. We talked on and off for almost a year so I didn’t think he’d seriously come. I didn’t realise how thick the sexual tension was we built up all that time we were talking until we were face to face. I lost count of how many times we had sex. One of our rounds he tied me up Japanese bondage style and blew my back tf out. I swear I saw my life flashed before my eyes with every stroke. Just before I orgasmed (one of many), he wrapped his fingers round my neck and whispered in my ear to cum on his dick. My legs wouldn’t stop shaking that night. Just typing this has me shook!]

YES I KNOW. This is one of the sexiest stories ever, and not just because she refers to the sex as ’rounds’ like they were bouts in a sexy wrestling match. The ‘cum on my dick’ line, too, is an absolute keeper.

Naturally this inspired me to think about Twitter followers I had shagged, as well as ask people on Twitter whether they’d done the same. Lots have.

Why you should fuck your Twitter followers

They’re sexy, you like them, and you can see pretty swiftly whether you’ll be a reasonable match. On a dating site like Tinder you get hardly any information about the person you’ll be seeing: a line about them, maybe. Their age. What their face looks like. It’s not exactly their life story, is it? But on Twitter you get all that plus their political opinions, photos of their latest day out, an idea of the kind of gifs they find funny, that kind of thing. It is no wonder so many of us develop Twitter crushes.

On top of all this, you may also get the most important information of all: whether they want a fuck, and whether they want to fuck you. Twitter flirting – via likes, RTs, DMs or in the most obvious cases replying to a tweet about sex with Twitter followers with ‘I volunteer as tribute’ (thanks to the people who did this, I have shamelessly used your joke in this post).

As a nervous wreck of a human, who utterly sucks at chatting up guys in pubs or nightclubs, when I was first on Twitter I shagged a few people who I’d met through the network. One or two were just lovely blokes who I’d been a bit flirty with on the public timeline, then one or other of us slid into DMs to say ‘fancy a drink?’ Two of them were semi-famous people (by which I mean: I had previously seen them do things on stage or telly and thought ‘ooh, I would quite like to sit on this person’s dick) who I would simply never have met if it hadn’t been for the ability to say ‘love @so-and-so’s work’ then allowed them to make deductions/approaches based on how slutty my timeline was at the time.

How to fuck your Twitter followers

On to the most important part: if you want to fuck your Twitter followers you need to do a couple of things.

First: make it clear on Twitter that you are single and up for a shag. In terms of indicating your available status, you can do far more on Twitter than you can in real life. In real life, it would be slightly odd to walk into a party and shout “I AM QUITE HORNY AND UP FOR A FUCK” but on Twitter you are essentially talking about your life, and in an environment where it’s considered totally normal to rate cats you met on the way to work, broadcasting your horny status is not going to seem wildly out of place. On dating sites like Grindr, Tinder and OKCupid, just being there is basically your statement that you’d like to meet people. On Twitter you have to do a bit of hinting.

Second: be flirty but never pushy. I realise that this advice is going to be tricky for some people – the line between ‘flirty’ and ‘pushy’ seems clear to me, but judging by the outright aggressive pursuits I’ve had from some guys, it’s not actually clear to everyone. Chat, but don’t demand. Don’t assume that someone is going to give you their time. If you’re not sure that they fancy you, don’t ask if they want a shag – ask if they fancy a drink when you’re in town. Follow basic dating safety advice. Take no for an answer. I would also likely add: take being ignored as a ‘no.’ If you slide into someone’s DMs to ask them for a drink and they don’t reply, that might be because they find it difficult to say ‘no’, or that they like you in a friendly way but don’t want to actually meet up. This is common, understandable, and totally within their right to do. If they like you, they’ll reply. They’re not obliged to reply (even to say no) just because you’ve asked the question.

Third: praise/talk about them. Of the people I have fucked via Twitter, two came because I publicly tweeted about how much I loved their work. Many of the people on Twitter (me included) are there because we are desperate for attention/love or are trying to make a living promoting our work. If you fancy someone on Twitter who is the same, then ‘I adored X’s book/show/picture of a dog/joke about Brexit’ is a nice way to get on their radar, and it also shows you have been paying attention to the things they most want you to pay attention to.

When not to fuck your Twitter followers

I don’t really want this section to be necessary, but on the off-chance that someone reads this and then DMs all the people they want to bone saying ‘Hey! GOTN said you should fuck me, you should totally fuck me!’ I’m going to add this bit at the bottom.

There are many people on Twitter who talk a lot about sex. However, those of us who talk a lot about sex aren’t always up for fucking everyone in our timeline (I know, right?! Shock). Some of us are in monogamous (or monogamish) relationships, and we’re just not up for hooking up with new people, no matter how frequently we reminisce about these adventures on our timelines. Some people want to be able to talk freely about their sex lives without others assuming that they’ll shag everyone. Some are sex workers promoting their business – I’m obviously not qualified to speak for them, but I can tell you that most of the sex workers I know get rightly and royally fucked off with people tweeting at their work social media accounts essentially asking for freebies. If this is you, jog on.

In the other instances, as in all potential flirtation/shagging scenarios, you want to listen far more than you speak. Talk about your single status/desire for a shag as above, but don’t just randomly tweet at hot people asking them to get naked with you. Read people’s blogs (and the ‘about’ pages), as well as their timelines. Flirt gently if – and only if – you’ve found an indication that they’d be up for it. And, because I love fucking with people on Twitter who reply to a tweet without reading the article, in this sentence I am going to bury the information that I am monogamish at the moment and therefore not currently open to fucking people who follow me on Twitter. Bet I’ll still get people DMing me in response to this though.

You should also avoid doing this if your Twitter account is primarily one you use for work – if your Twitter name includes your company name, or your feed is mostly filled with talk of your company, your followers may well be with you for professional reasons. Chatting them up would be as appropriate as endorsing them on LinkedIn for ‘having a lovely arse’: i.e. not appropriate at all.

There are lots more things I should mention here, no doubt, and the sad truth of any chat-up – on Grindr, Tinder, Twitter or even real life – is that no matter how much advice you give on being respectful, some weapons-grade arseholes will end up smashing straight over people’s boundaries and ruining things for others. When we had this conversation on Twitter, a few people mentioned that their Twitter shags had turned from sexy beasts into horrible nightmares, and some had ended up having to block them or even delete their accounts to get away. I can’t tell you exactly how to avoid these people, only to offer my commiserations if you’ve met one, and urge everyone to treat Twitter followers the same way you should treat all other humans: with compassion and respect. It’s bizarre and frustrating that this even needs to be said – Jamie Oliver doesn’t have to add a disclaimer to his recipe books that says ‘please don’t serve this delicious lamb stew by chucking the boiling mixture into the faces of your dinner guests’, but for some reason when it comes to fucking, some people are fucking pricks.

So, a closing thought: there are real-life people behind those avatars. If you’re planning to fuck your Twitter followers, make sure that no matter what your interaction (DM, public, actual real-life meet-up, shag, etc) that real-life person goes away with a happy story. That when they see your avatar pop up in their timeline, they get a warm, fuzzy feeling. The main reason to fuck your Twitter followers is that they like you – don’t give them reason to stop.