Cos nothing completes a complicated working week like a spot of non-consensual sex.

Saturday morning my time (‘bout 4am in the UK) I found myself chatting online with a friend – someone I’m flirty with but nothing more. Seemed she was drunk and wanted to push the nothing more slightly. I played along at first but as she got more graphic I got self-conscious, initially giving evasive and elliptical answers (cybersex is a new game for me).

But then I got in to it. I forgot about the Boy sitting across the room, stopped worrying that my dirty answers sounded stupid, and discovered that one-handed typing really is tricky. After maybe half an hour of trashy talk I disappeared into the bedroom and didn’t mind when the Boy followed.

My friend repeated an earlier request to hear us and the Boy was game so we passed on our S’pore number. The escapade climaxed with the mutual sound of escapades climaxing.

Afterward I was ecstatic. It had been a dirty, kinky enjoyable experience, exploring IM sex was fun, and it was a new way to connect with an old friend. Because I’m a considerate lover (even virtually) I dropped my friend an email saying these things and asking her how she was.

Her confused reply gave way to horrid realisation. She hadn’t been online the night before. Her new and unknown to me boyfriend had been alone with her laptop.

I had a whole range of emotional responses to this: feeling stupid for not realising at the time; embarrassed for admitting to my friend that I would fuck her online if I could; vulnerable for sharing such intimate thoughts with a stranger.

But mostly I felt a steely sense of “These are my boundaries, I need to tell you that you overstepped them and that your behaviour was not okay.” Since I’ve done that I’ve felt fine. And on a scale from one to 10 (where one is receiving an anonymous valentine’s card containing a rude limerick and 10 is being gang-raped at knife point by seven burly men) it wasn’t a huge infraction.

Something interesting it’s left me thinking about is the social etiquette of not talking about things that might make our listeners uncomfortable. If you share something like “I miscarried/got raped/accidentally killed my mother,” and you’re not reclining on a black leather couch, you tend to pause and think “Shit, I shouldn’t have said that, now the other person is gonna be stuck coming up with an appropriate response.”

But in truth most responses are appropriate (laughing and saying “Man, sucks to be you,” is a notable exception). I think sometimes people just want to give their experiences names and words but there’s a degree of self-fulfilling prophecy – if everyone talked about dead babies and cancer more, we’d be more comfortable talking about dead babies and cancer.

Goddamn it if I’m not gonna change the world, one uncomfortable conversation at a time.