You are the best, darling.

In our porned-up society, sex-competitiveness has taken hold.

I give the best blow-jobs. Evah.

We screwed for hours man, hours!

Yeah, I'm a bit tired. Five times last night.

Boasting about length, volume, longevity, quantity or dirtiness of one's coupling is a kind of national vanity. One day the National Sex Directorate Czar will arrive to pin a blue ribbon on your chest: First Prize for Bonking.

Unfortunately, the Sex Directorate neglects to publish standards defining good and bad sex. It's the kind of basic oversight you'd expect from another dopey government department, so we naturally turn to the private sector for guidance. By default, the porn industry and its denizens give us the thumbs-up or -down for sexual behaviour, which leads us neatly back to where we started. If you want to know how to do something, seek guidance from specialists.

Ergo, porned-up world.

This is a notion utterly divorced from the truth. A big lie, if you like, that's all too easy to adopt. It's way simpler to discern good from bad sex based on porn criteria than to use our minds. Good sex begins and ends in the mind. Our bodies are the medium through which many layers of drives and emotion are expressed.

In the afterglow, when someone says to you: You're the best (pant, pant) darling, consider asking against whom he or she is measuring you.