Food for Thought Friday: The road not taken

I don’t like saying this, because it’s so unlikeable, but I am scarily intelligent. When I was 11, I was top of the school at Maths by a sufficiently terrifying margin, I’d read all of the surviving dialogues of Plato, and the books attributed to Aristotle, and I’d worked my way through Principia Mathematica and found the joke at theorem 110.643. I’d read more English literature than my English Lit teacher. I’d decided that I was going to be either a poet or a philosopher.

But the girls around weren’t exactly interested in any of that. And I realised, looking at the underside of Debbie Brown’s thigh when she crossed her legs, that I was really, intensely, focussedly interested in girls. So I tried to talk to them more and make friends. And I hoped I’d get a girlfriend, and we could kiss and hug and stuff.   Maybe I could stroke her thighs. 

But I had no small talk at all. I only knew how to talk seriously about big topics. I didn’t watch TV, and barely knew anything about pop music, except that the Beatles had been good, and kind of unusual. I was a Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner guy. I couldn’t dance.  

So I bought a stack of albums so I knew Bowie from Beck, and both from a hole in the ground. I bought some magazines that talked about people on TV as if they were real people, and studied them. I learned to gossip. I had my hair plaited. I learned to say mildly amusing things, without trying to be Oscar Wilde.

It took about a year, because the girls at my school remembered the little professor, and he wasn’t boyfriend material. Also, I still couldn’t manage to pretend interest in sports or belief in any religion, and I sometimes let it slip that I thought both were boring and stupid.

So my first girlfriend was a new girl, who’d just transferred from another school. I made some missteps, like taking her to a film society screening, but next time we went to the beach. And she, bless her soul, taught me to kiss, which was a head-spinning sexual revelation.

And she taught me how to be interested in everything she thought and felt. So I was 13, with a girlfriend.

I should say that it’s not that I thought girls were dumber than me. It was that my IQ was off the charts. At that school, everyone was dumber than me. But I didn’t care about the guys. I know that saying so is not very likeable. 

So I had transformed myself from an intellectual who was never going to get laid, or at least not for years, into some sort of would-be hipster, who was obviously faking it but who could usually more or less pass. There were rewards, obviously. Sexual desire has always been the most important motivation in my life, and the new version of me, the new guy, got laid.

But there were costs, too. I had to hide, or at least tuck away, quite a lot of who I was and what interested me. At university I had a lot of wonderful sexual adventures, but not marks that identified me as all that smart. 

I don’t think I regret the self-transformation. But who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t done it?

I think I’d have spiralled further away from people, becoming more and more eccentric. And maybe become famous for solving some abstruse intellectual problem. I can’t imagine which one, now. I’m not that man. 

 

Food for Thought Friday: If music be the food of love

I was working as a psychiatric nurse, in some place out in the country. The job had an alarming side, or two sides.

On the one hand, some of the patients would kill you if you gave them a chance. They were always looking for that chance, in a focussed way. You, the nurse, are thinking about other patients, about the hot nurse in the other ward, and so on. So you sometimes got close to getting killed, when they made their attempt.

There was a blind guy, for example, of immense strength, and he’d always know where you were. Unless you backtracked extremely quietly, to get out of range. Then he’d grab something like an armchair, raise it high and bring it down on the spot you’d just stepped silently back from. He could do that in one movement, terrifyingly fast, because he was, as I said, immensely strong.

On the other hand, Barbara, who was also a nurse, once spilled some of the medication she was issuing to patients onto her uniform, which was mostly polyester. And the polyester started to dissolve! I was desperate for a chance to see through her uniform – hey, I was seventeen years old – but somehow that wasn’t sexy. Not even when I put her under a tap, in case any of it got on her skin.

She was twenty, which I thought was an utterly insurmountable age gap, so I’d never set my sights on her. But later she and I were hanging out in my room, and I put on Dark Side of the Moon. When we got the opening piano chords of “Great Gig on the Sky”, she said, “That girl sounds like I do, when I’m fucking.” 

I was seventeen, as I said, and my sexual history was just four girls long at that time. It should have been longer because I was a pretty boy, not that I knew that. But I had a real fear of making an Unwanted Advance, so I often held back until I was certain, when in reality I’d been signalled so hard that the girl would decide that I must not be interested. I’d missed a lot of offers.

Anyway, I decided that might be an offer, so I put an arm round her, and she leaned in to me. We sat together, listening to music and pretending that was what we were focussed on. From that moment in this story (except for about five minutes of it), I have an erection.

When Clare Torry comes in and sings, Barbs kissed me, and I kissed her back. Then we were writhing around on the floor. Barbs undid my pants, kissed my cock, and then took it in her mouth. She was the first girl who’d done that, and it was incandescently pleasurable, of course, but also an enormous relief to me.

That is, I’d been in the company of feminist friends who talked a lot about cocks as if they were nasty things, a kind of horror that men inflicted on women. And because it was obvious that sexism and patriarchy were utterly unfair and unpleasant things, I’d started to think maybe they were right about that too. So as well as the sexual pleasure, Barbs also moved me emotionally, because of the acceptance of it: she must actually really like my cock!

If I’d told her all that, she’d have thought I was nuts, I was sure, so instead I just babbled about how wonderful she was. Then, when Clare Torry was winding down, I came and she swallowed. That was amazing to me too, because my come was a body product that I tended to think of negatively.

If there wasn’t a girl, and usually there wasn’t, then I’d splat it into tissue paper, and then flush it down the toilet. So it can’t be good.

This was the first time a girl had swallowed my come, taken it into herself, and it was the first time it occurred to me that my come is a sort of essence of me, and if the girl is fond of me then she may like my come, too.

Anyway, that was at the end of Great Gig in the Sky. We got off the floor and onto my bed, where I took my clothes off and then Barbs’s. And we breathed each other’s breath, except when I was kissing her tits, and eventually I said, “That was… amazing. But you didn’t sound at all like Clare Torry.”

Barbs frowned. “Oh, she’s the girl – Wailing girl? Well, I was sort of fucking you, but you weren’t fucking me. You want those noises, you need to fuck me.” 

So I put on Side 1 again. And learned that at seventeen my recovery time was: Speak to me (1′ 07″), Breathe in the air (2′ 50″), plus about a minute into “On the Run”.

But I managed to not come until she had, during “Great Gig”, and I can report that she told the truth. 

“Knowledge is good.”

 

 

Food for Thought Not-Exactly-Friday: Ritual of enslavement

On accepting a woman as my slave.

I’m dressed in all the Dom gear, which in my case consists of black jeans and a black tee-shirt, and the only actually bdsm-y thing is knee-high black boots with buckles all over them. I’m standing.

She is naked, and kneeling, leaning forward so her forehead touches the carpet. She’s not allowed to speak.

Me: Kiss my boots. Use your tongue. 

While she obeys, I say: You walk with me, following me and beside me. I promise to lead you. 

I raise one boot: Good girl. Now kiss the underside. 

While she obeys, one boot at a time due to my inability to levitate, I say: You come into this new relationship between us as my slave. You are always beneath me. You obey, you show respect, and you never forget your enslaved status.

Me: Good girl. Now kiss my hands.

While she obeys, I say: You are in my hands now, as my property. My hands are for your punishment when you need it, and for pleasuring you, too.

Me: Good girl. Now, using only your mouth, unzip me, kiss my cock, and take it in your mouth.

While she obeys, I say: We’re together now, for your pleasure and for mine. You will please my cock in any way I tell you, and I will please you. We’re together for love and pleasure.

Me: Good girl. Now kiss my mouth.

After she’s obeyed, I say: You listen to me, as your master, and you do as you’re told. I will praise you often, and sometimes tell you to prepare for punishment. And I’ll kiss you often, and lick your perfect cunt.

Me: Good girl. My girl. My property, little slavegirl. Now get back on your knees. Bow your head.

While she kneels, I fit her collar.

 

That’s the ritual of formal enslavement. I’ve done it three times in my life. It marks the transition from one kind of relationship, even if it was already a bdsm relationship, to another. So it’s very formal.

I thought about how to mark it, they first time I entered a master/slave relationship. I felt that it should be very formal, and ritualistic, with each step and each aspect (like the fact that only I speak) having a clear meaning. It may seem flat, on the screen, but live, in the moment, it has power.

When it’s done the next step follows from the ritual, but isn’t defined by it. She’s allowed to speak again. What she wants might be a glass of wine, or a fuck. Or something fierce and harsh. When the ritual’s over, the moment dictates. 

 

Food for Thought Friday: She was just fi-ifteen, you know what I mean

When I was at university, in my third year, I had sex with a student who was in her first year. I’d met her a few times at the Students Association, and found that she was funny, flamboyant, radical, and one of the few people I knew who’d actually read a lot of books that weren’t bestsellers.

One day she was down about a fight she’d had with a friend, and I sat with her to commiserate. We finished up pressing foreheads and holding hands. Nothing came of it because I had to go and work. But later that week there was a dance in the Students Association Hall, and she came wearing sparkly little pants and and strip of sparkly, semi-see-through material round her breasts. 

So we danced together, and drank cheap student wine and smoked student joints. The ribbon round her breasts was slinky stuff, and tended to come loose. So from time to time we’d stop dancing so I could tie it back again.  

Then we went and talked for a while, and in a dark corner we did away with that sparkly material altogether. And when it was clear that we were more or less fucking, and it was time to drop the less and do more, we sneaked off.

I had a motorbike, and (this is bad behaviour too) took her on the back to my place, with the sparkly material round her hair since she didn’t have a helmet. 

So we fucked. Then the next day I blindfolded her, not for bdsm reasons, and took her for a smell walk through the flowers and trees in the local park. That night I spanked her, for bdsm reasons, and that became the nature of our relationship.

But here’s the thing. She said she was 16, which was the age of consent in my country. I’d travelled, and been politically active for a while before going to university, so I was six years older, at 22. And I decided that it was okay because she was a first year university student, and a highly intelligent one, with a long sexual history that was in some respects more deviant than mine. For example, she’d already beaten me to “first threesome”, and I still had three years to wait till mine.

But nearly ten years later, friends told me she’d lied about her age, just a little bit. She’d had to get special permission to enrol at university because she’d finished school, but she was only 15. So for the first six months of our relationship I’d been breaking the law, and fucking an underage girl. 

Apparently there’d been scandalised gossip. But I never heard about it, at the time.

All the kids in my school had been trying their best to have sex before they turned 16, so that they could say they were sex criminals. I tried too, but ineptly, and when I finally made my sexual debut I was a boringly legal 16.

But by my 20s I wasn’t too unhappy because I’d broken other sexual laws. For example, you could go to jail for 10 years, the law said, if you had anal sex with a woman (anal sex with a man only cost seven years; I’d love to know the thinking behind that) and I broke that law repeatedly before they repealed it.

I committed a kind of quasi-incest, by shagging my sister-in-law, which doesn’t count, legally, and a couple of cousins, which doesn’t quite count either. Though it would in some countries, I think. Unfortunately, I didn’t fancy my mother or my sister, so I had to leave that law unbroken. 

So my first reaction was shock that she’d felt she had to lie to me (because I’d have talked about it a bit more first, but it wouldn’t have changed the outcome), followed by surprise, and then a kind of stupid satisfaction: “Oh, I did manage to break that law after all.” 

One thing I’ve never felt about it is guilt. As it happened I didn’t know, but it wouldn’t have changed much if I had. She was still an intelligent woman, still more worldly, in some ways, than I was (she knew wine, and how to behave at various formal events), and I reacted to the person I was with. I had no doubt at all that she knew her mind, and that if she wanted me then that was just my ridiculous good fortune. I still don’t doubt that, even looking at it with hindsight.

Anyway, this is a hotter taboo now, I think, than it was twenty years ago. But I’m a sex criminal, for breaking the age of consent law and the anal sex law (RIP), and I don’t feel bad about either. 

That doesn’t mean that I think there shouldn’t be a law. Just that it should mostly keep away from young people consensually exploring. 

 

 

Food for Thought Friday: A near miss

I’ve written two novels, and one day will write the third in the trilogy, about a probation officer who spanks and then fucks one of his clients. In the novel he is fired, and decides he should never again work with clients. Other complicated things happen. 

I’ve been a probation officer. But I’ve never fucked, or spanked, one of my clients. Though I did meet one client after she’d finished doing probation and I wasn’t a probation officer any more. We had sex, as we’d wanted to do since we first met, and the conversation we had in the morning about our mutual attraction is part of why that series of novels exists.

This is the other source. I had a client, a girl of eighteen (I was a boy of 21) who kept getting arrested for absurdly trivial offences. She was a Pacific Islander, and impossibly pretty, with huge eyes and a beautiful mouth and – when she wasn’t in a probation office – enough vivacity to power the planet.

It was obvious that the cops were gunning for her. A bit of investigation established that one cop in particular wanted her in jail, where he could rape her. That’s how the system worked. 

So I was preparing a case against him. She didn’t trust a white guy involved in what she saw as law enforcement, so it was always hard getting information out of her, and she never really listened to the things I said to her. 

Anyway, I was a probation officer as part of my degree in social work. It was a practical part of the course, called a “placement.” And my supervisor went round visiting all the students doing placements. 

He was as abrupt and challenging as he knew how to be, and said I should be doing more to make a difference.

I later learned that this was how he was approaching everyone, to see how they’d react, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was quite badly shaken. Then he took us out to lunch, where wine was served.

My first client interview after that lunch was this girl. As usual, she sat, mostly looking at the floor, while I tried to tell her how to avoid getting arrested, and to report police harassment. We were getting nowhere.

Finally – my shaken state of mind, and the wine drove this attempt – I told her how frustrating this was. I said I wasn’t part of the law enforcement system; I was doing my best to keep it off her. I said we should know more about each other, and then we should actually talk. She glanced at me briefly and went back to staring at the carpet.  

I had the urge, very strongly, to use a particular tone of voice and tell her to Come here! And I’d make her pay attention to what I wanted her know about how to handle cops without getting arrested, and why she shouldn’t let her arrest record get any longer. And of course she was very pretty, and I’d learned that, though I couldn’t see it myself, I was a pretty boy; it wasn’t hard to imagine what would quite probably happen after that attention-getting spanking. 

I realised I was being, from her point of view, as bad as the cops. If I did what I’d just imagined I’d be far, far worse than them. 

So I finished, kind of lamely, “But that’s up to you, of course.” 

And so I stood at the door of some very bad things. And I shut that fucking door.

I’m not sure how near a miss it was. The urge was very powerful. My brain knew me well enough to couch it in terms of being real and doing good. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I actually did anything of the sort. Even in a more than slightly fucked-up state of mind that was stronger. Thank fuck for that.  

 

 

PS:

I got the Probation Service to warn the cops, which knocked the harassment on the head. For her, at least.

I should say I don’t want or expect any applause for resisting an obviously nasty and destructive impulse. Nor do I think I deserve much condemnation for having an evil impulse. No one has a spotless mind. It’s what you do about its worst impulses that counts. 

Food for Thought Friday: Room 101 (my biggest fears)

I fear human stupidity. Partly because it often comes accompanied by violence, and occasionally that violence is directed at me.

I can handle myself in a fight if I need to, but there’s always one reflection that gives me pause: a stupid person who gets in fights a lot doesn’t mind getting hurt nearly as much as I do.

Even if I “win” a fight I didn’t want, as far as I’m concerned I’ve still lost, because at best I’ve had to deal with fear.

At worst I’ve only “won” in the sense that the other person is slightly more damaged by the fight than I am.

The other frightening thing about human stupidity is that there’s so much of it, and it affects the quality of decision-making in democracies. For example, the Australian population has just voted to reinstall a government that intends to kill the Great Barrier Reef by putting in a coal mine that will be dumping waste into the ocean there. They also intend to do nothing about global warming except for encouraging more coal use, using tax-payer money to make mining companies even richer. In exchange the mining companies donate more money to the Government’s political party, and to individual Government members.

Stupid bastards are killing this planet, and we don’t have another one.

So stupidity scares me. Humans need to become more intelligent, and prize intelligence more.

But that’s still not the thing that scares me most. What scares me most is being without a lover, of living unloved.

Thank fuck there are people who love me, but if I lost that it would destroy me. I would go literally mad, insane with grief.

I know this because that has happened to me, causing the most intense misery in my life, and pain I could barely stand. I never want to experience that again. 

So loneliness is really my biggest, darkest and most personal fear.

Food for Thought Friday: Fool for Love

f4tf_button2Kat, from the Food for Thought Friday team asks: 

 

What is the most foolish thing you have ever done in the pursuit of love or sex?

 

Answer:

Her name was Kristina. I thought she was perfect in every way: long blonde hair, papa-shell eyes, a laugh like birdsong and a pretty nose. She was always immaculately dressed and she always had dry hands, which was unusual in a seven-year old. Pristine Kristina.

I was eight, and when I saw Kristina I wanted her at my side, to hear great plans and make some of our own. She might even kiss me. I started having ideas about deeper and more adult possibilities. I’d been shown a girl’s cunt, or two, and I had an older brother tell me that they felt really nice. So there was that to consider, too. Kristina went to my head.

But she hadn’t noticed me.

Well, I reasoned, I could fix that. I’d do something heroic that would display my courage and physical skill, and demonstrate my love for her.

At our school there was a thing for kids to climb on, with two enormous rope cargo nets fixed over a frame. The two nets met at the very top of the framework. So one day, when Kristina was climbing on the net, I bounded up as well. “Look!” I said.

My precocious interest in ropes and knots, you see...

My precocious interest in ropes and knots, you see…

I wormed my way between the nets, until I was close to the top. I put my feet into the net’s holes, one on each net, and then let go with my hands so that my body hung down, head first into the bare clay, hard as concrete, a terrifyingly long way below me. But I held on with my feet, and didnt fall.

Some teacher turned up and yelled at everyone to get off the nets. Then he bawled me out. Apparently there’s a lot of paperwork if one of your pupils gets killed on your watch. 

He wanted to know why I’d done it. I thought that if I told him I’d be bandying a lady’s name about, and I already knew that bandying is bad. So I claimed I couldn’t remember why. I cleaned many blackboards that afternoon, for the purity of my love.

Anyway, Kristina sidled up to me later. “You hung down between the nets!” 

Well, I remembered that. I was glad she remembered, though. “Yes!” I said. And I started to say something about running away to join a circus, but she interrupted.

“When you were up there, hanging between those nets -”

“Yes?”

“We could all see your willie!” And she laughed and skipped off, and never bothered to notice me again. 

From that I learned … nothing. I learned nothing at all.

Frisky business among the Venetian searchlights: Food for Thought Friday

f4tf_button2The Food for Thought Friday people have asked: 

Where is the riskiest/most adventurous place that you have had sex?

Did you get caught?

 

My answer:

Richard Wagner died in his rooms at a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice. The locals, naturally, turned this great historical building, rich in artistic associations, into a casino. 

Wagner's old digs. At night

Wagner’s old digs at night. See the dark area on the second floor, towards the left? We were there

A few years ago I went to the Casino de Venezia with Niamh, a girl I’d met in Dublin. Gambling bores me, and she said she didn’t care about casinos one way or the other. But I wanted to have a look at Wagner’s old rooms, and she came along because we were sharing a bed so we might as well share this too. Also, I’d promised and demonstrated that if she didn’t do as she was told I’d smack her arse. So there was that. She was fond of the hairbrush, in particular.

I guess I should admit that I’d answered her ad on Fetlife, once I realised I was going to be in Ireland for a while, so even before we’d met we’d both established that Niamh was a girl who liked doing as she was told. And getting a smacked arse. Anyway, there we both were. Niamh still wore that afternoon’s wonderful summer dress, the top of which was held up mainly by her breasts. I wasn’t so glamorous, since I was in jeans, but at least I had on decent shoes and a jacket. 

Once we were in the top floor I asked a few casino staff where the Wagner rooms were. They didn’t know. They’d never heard of Wagner. If I wanted an explanation of anything you could do with dice and some cards – in public, at least – then they’d be happy to help, but this Wagner fellow … They’d shrug and hold their hands open and empty.

I got annoyed with this, so when I found a closed door I opened it, and when I found a closed curtain I drew it. When I found the back stairs we went down them to the mezzanine floor where Wagner had lived. And died. It turned out that someone had made a Wagner Museum out of Wagner’s old rooms. It was closed of course. Well, it was closed in the sense that it was dark and there was no-one there. But I turned the door handle, and it opened.  

I wondered about security alarms, and decided that I could probably bullshit my way out of trouble if an alarm went off, and I held the door open for her. Then I followed, and after a minute it was clear that if there was an alarm someone had forgotten to switch it on. Italy’s cool like that. 

I moved through the exhibits, feeling a certain mix of excitement and disappointment. Excitement because we’re here, where Wagner lived! And this is his stuff! And disappointment because I’d hoped for some sense of communion and connection. But there wasn’t. There’s his piano, but he’s dead. He’s not here. 

Wagner's Rhinemaidens. They may kill you but it's worth it. Drawing: Arthur Packham (detail)

Wagner’s Rhinemaidens. They may kill you but it’s worth it. Drawing: Arthur Rackham (detail)

But there was a certain kind of homage to the great man when Niamh came back from her exploration. I kissed her, and then pushed her dress down to her waist, so her breasts were bare.

Like a Rhinemaiden’s. Like a Flower Maiden. Then I put light pressure on her shoulders and she sank to her knees, unzipped me and took out my cock. She licked, then kissed my glans, then opened her mouth a little wider. Oddly, it was me who said, “Ahhh.”

So I was standing there, my cock deep in the mouth of a bare-breasted Irish girl, when I heard something. A security guard had walked onto the mezzanine floor. He’d seen us. I put my hands on Niamh’s shoulders and squeezed, to let her feel how pleased I was with her, though my cock was already conveying that information, and to obscure her peripheral vision.

Then I looked at the security guard and shrugged the apologetic Italian shrug. Niamh was still sucking me, oblivious. He considered for a second or two: is a couple having oral sex in the museum likely to steal things? Or are they innocents pursuing innocent and harmless pleasures? He didn’t smile, but he lit a cigarette (yes, I know; it’s an old building) and wandered back to the stairs. 

overthewallLater I pulled out of Niamh’s mouth and took her by the hand. I opened the window out onto the Grand Canal. There was a ledge with a stone barrier. There were also lights lighting up the front of the casino, but they left pools of darkness at the sides of each projector. So that’s where I bent her over, smacked her pretty little ass, and took a condom from my wallet and put it on my cock. And put my cock in her. 

You’d think that was the riskier situation, but it wasn’t. Our view was fantastic, lights and gondolas and vaporetti, and the throng of people, and so was the softness of her cunt and my hardness sliding slowly together, and the gritty stone under her breasts, uncomfortable in the good way, and our urgency slowly building.

It’s a good place to fuck. Venice is a city for lovers, because without us there wouldn’t be the money to pay to preserve all those drowned streets and buildings. So there aren’t many people in Venice, I don’t think, who don’t like the sight of bare breasts joggling while their owner gets pumped from behind.

But they missed out. Even when Niamh and I came, fairly close together, and not completely succeeding in suppressing orgasm noises (we sounded like donkeys coughing), not a soul noticed us. 

Limits? (I pissed on a girl, and I didn’t like it.) Food for thought #10

The Food For Thought team has asked these three questions:

Food for thought #10: Limits questions

If4tf_button1s there something, (or things), that you would absolutely say no to in a sexual context?

What are your limits? Are they hard? Soft?

Have your limits changed over time?

Response

I have a personal ad on Fetlife, and I tell readers that I won’t have anything to do with shit, or urine, or knives or pins or sharps. Or animals. I also mention that I’m only interested in women, sexually, and that I’m a dom and I don’t switch. 

All of that’s still true and I feel no need to change any off it. But the edges can get fuzzier than I’d expected when I wrote it. 

For example, I’d prefer to have nothing to do with shit, in a sexual context. But I’ve already mentioned cleaning around the asshole of a girl I’d just buggered, because she’d leaked a bit. That’s not scat, because there was no shit-related pleasure in it for me, or her. It was just a job that needed to be done, quietly and discreetly.

I dealt with it by switching off part of my reaction for the duration. I’ve worked on farms, and I’ve cleaned shit from sheep and cattle, where it’s necessary to prevent flies from breeding. And there’s a mental attitude you get where you do what’s necessary, with a kind of detached benevolence until the necessary is done. So I could refine my statement so it reads, “Well, yes: I’ll deal with shit in some sexual contexts, but not for pleasure.”

I’ve found that I will do things that don’t attract me, if the submissive really wants me to. Once, under severe begging from a submissive girl I was just short of in love with, I pissed in her mouth and then, more generally, on her body. (She’d moved to the bath for the experiment.)

My thought at the time was, “Well, this is a new and unsexy experience, but it is taboo-breaking, isn’t it?”

So I felt that detached irony again: I was there and not-there, simultaneously. There was a kind of kindness there, and I like to be kind, but there was nothing erotic in it for me. But though I pushed that limit, it’s still there. It was a one-off, never repeated. 

I suppose I could amend “I won’t do anything sexual with urine” to read, “I won’t do anything quasi-sexual involving piss ever again.” But then I’d have to tell the story above to explain that, and I don’t feel like it. So I’ll let the current wording stand. It’s still true.

See? Sharp's erotica. Some people like it, but it's not for me.

Sharp’s erotica. Some people like it, but it’s not for me. (Confession: just a cheap joke. I’ve never read any Olive Sharp.)

As for sharps, I have an absolute horror of them. I once got cut quite badly when I was a child. It was just an accident, but to this day I feel a little cold chill in the pit of my stomach whenever I’m confronted with a sharp blade. I don’t let it interfere with anything I have to do, but there’s no way I could make it part of something pleasurable. I won’t cut or stick anyone with a blade, and I expect the same courtesy to be extended to me. 

So there’s no change at all in my attitude to sharps: they’re always off-limits. Oh, and animals are still right out, too. And so are shit and piss. Except that I’ll clean them away when it’s my responsibility.

So I guess my limits can be pushed a little, but they’re still hard limits. 

Terence

No-one really knows what Terence looked like. The Vatican, and Wikipedia, pretend this is his portrait.

Terence is a Roman comic playwright. He borrowed and translated that line from the Greek comic playwright Menander. No-one really knows what Terence looked like. The Vatican, and Wikipedia, pretend this is his portrait.

I’ve always been proud of holding and applying Terence’s line: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”: “I am a human being. I consider that nothing human is foreign to me.”

Sadly, when it comes to getting sexual pleasure from sharps, animals, scat and urine, I’m not only out, myself, but I don’t really see how it could be much fun for anyone else. So although those are still human desires, they’re all still foreign to me.

I think that’s a fault, not a virtue, because it’s a failure of imagination and a lack of empathy. But there it is, anyway. 

 

First time (Food for Thought Friday)

f4tf_button1The Food for Thought team ask: 

What was the first overtly sexual act you performed on someone else or had performed on you? How did you feel about it afterwards?

The answer involves sexual contact between young children. No-one comes to harm as a result.

Also, I haven’t eroticised the description at all.

But if this is likely to make you uncomfortable, I’d suggest not reading below the word “Answer”. 

Answer

I was walking home from school, aged five. There was a girl playing in the back yard next door. She must have been four, because she wasn’t going to school yet. Her family had just moved in. So I waved at her.

That was when I realised that she was wearing a towel, because she opened it to demonstrate that it was all she was wearing. And beckoned me over. 

So I walked down her drive and introduced myself with my best five-year old manners, because I didn’t often get to condescend to people younger than myself. She invited me to play, so I stayed.

I can’t remember my motives. I don’t think they were sexual in anything like an adult sense. Partly it was that I was  taught to be a nice boy and I thought she must be lonely because she’d just arrived. Also, she’d just done something “rude” when she’d flashed me. That was interesting too. 

“Rude” was the term that children, round there, used to describe what adults would call proto-sexual explorations and demonstrations. She was being a rude girl.

She invited me to play in a little shed with little chairs and a table. It was bigger than a doll’s house. It was big enough for a little girl and a very awkward little boy to sit and drink water from her collection of tiny plastic tea-cups and eat imaginary biscuits. 

It felt odd to be playing a girl’s game. In the games I played, I tended to shoot, climb and fight. I wasn’t sure how this game worked, though I was prepared to go along with it. I thought she needed company, and so looking after her made me feel very adult and protective. But when she suggested that we play Mothers and Fathers I was surprised because I thought, with the cups and saucers and such, that we already were.

It turned out that the rules of Mothers and Fathers, as she played it, meant I had to show her my cock and let her play with it. Her play with my penis was, according to my memory, kind of aimless: artless, unskilled. She didn’t know how to stroke a penis. She just sort of waggled it from side to side. 

Looking at this with hindsight, I’m pleased about her lack of expertise. I’ve spent some of the period between then and now being a probation officer and a social worker. I know now that some of her actions may suggest something abusive happening in her family. On the other hand, she had no idea how to make a penis feel good in a sexual way. An abuser, if there had been one, would almost certainly have taught her that sort of thing.

Anyway, I had no sense of distress or discomfort from her. Still, abuse wasn’t something I knew about or thought about then, so I could have missed something. I’ll never know.

I also think we freak out unhelpfully about childhood sexual exploration of the kind that doesn’t involve adults. Sexual exploration isn’t unhealthy in itself. Children are curious. Adults just have to back off, sometimes. 

Anyway, she expected me to reciprocate, but I wasn’t sure what to do. So I stroked her labia a few times, as you might stroke a dog to convey the idea that it’s a good dog. As I’ve pointed out, I really had no idea.

I was actually relieved when my mom called me in to dinner. It’d been interesting, and it was the most “rude” thing I’d ever done or had done to me. But it was also off-the-scale awkward and embarrassing. After that, I mostly played with her when there were other kids around, to delay Round 2 of Mothers and Fathers.  

There were a couple of repeat games of Mothers and Fathers, but I mostly kept my pants up. Her, too. We did some experimental kissing. We drank water as tea, and ate biscuits I’d stolen from the kitchen. So at least I provided a sugar hit. 

When she started school, she went to the local Catholic school, while I was going to the local state school. So we lost touch. 

What I feel is mostly positive. The explorations didn’t teach me anything much about adult sexuality – except that if a girl flashes you, you may as well stick around. You might think I should have realised that I only had 11 or so years before I’d have to show better girl-stroking skills than that, but that didn’t occur to me then, either. Mainly I learned that boy-girl things can get awkward. Girls can have very different interests from me, and still sometimes expect things from me. 

ThickAsABrick25thAnnivI liked her. I still worry about her a bit: if she were a little girl doing that today, she’d be suspended from or thrown out of school, and she’d meet a whole lot of cops and psychologists, care workers and senior teachers, all in a panic, and passing the panic on to her.

So would I have, come to think of it, just for going along with her. I can imagine my bewildered five-year-old features on the cover of the local rag: “Face of evil”.