How Tos

Tough love with Tanya Gold

Every month in the mag our resident sexpert Tanya Gold imparts her libidinous wisdom to all who care to listen.

Q My girlfriend is incredibly open-minded and doesn’t care about leaving her lingerie (or worse) round the flat when my parents visit. Maybe I’m being prudish but I don’t think they want to see “that sort of thing” when they come round for Sunday lunch. How can I tell her to stop?

Just go up to your girlfriend and say, “Please don’t leave your stained panties around the flat, even if your vaginal juice does look like the face of Jesus and may therefore be of great interest to the Vatican. Put them in the wash-basket or sell them on eBay.” (There is apparently quite a market for stained panties on eBay.) If she still leaves them around, call her a whore. If she still leaves them around, burn the flat down. And what is “or worse”? Next.

Q I am in my thirties. I recently split up with my girlfriend and find myself living back at my parents’ house. Can you suggest a foolproof way of sneaking girls in at night and out the next morning without having to manually winch them out of the toilet window?

Let’s not talk about how to smuggle your girlfriends in to your parents’ house. That’s too easy. But, since you clearly have not read any Sidney Sheldon novels, here are a few ideas. A) Drug your parents. B) Disguise your girlfriend as a hamster. C) Disguise your girlfriend as a Liberal Democrat. D) Disguise your girlfriend as a plumber. E) Disguise your girlfriend as a sideboard.

I am amazed that you can even have sex any where near your parents. I cannot orgasm within three miles of my parents. Your desire to make love to a woman while your father is watching the snooker – I have an idea that all old men watch snooker, all of them, without exception – and your mother is wondering where she went wrong, is unimaginative. There are so many wonderful places to have sex. I want to have sex in every hotel on the North Circular.

No. Let’s talk about why you, a self-confessed man in his thirties, are living with your parents like a dirty, unloved, pointless piece of carpet. I can see you now, laying in your little bed, a squashed little child-man with little dreams, like Tom Hanks in Big. What is wrong with you?

There are only two excuses to live with your parents in your thirties. A) You have a baby and you hate the baby, and you are scared the baby will know you hate it, so you take the baby to live with its grandmother to try and deceive it into thinking you don’t hate it. (Babies, among other things, are easily fooled.) B) Your parents have a disgusting flesh-eating disease and have to be sponged regularly and no one else will do it.

So, pretend you live in the Amityville House and if you don’t leave, the evil spirits will get you. Get out, Babyman! Get out! Get out!

Send your problems to Tanya Gold by emailing editors@esquire.co.uk. Title your message “Tough Love”.

Illustration by Mr Bingo