Tuesday, March 10, 2009

1.) When I was very young, my friend who lived next door would come over to play, and we devised a game in which one could earn points redeemable for toys from the other by taking down his pants and showing his ass or his penis, the latter being worth more. He euphemistically referred to this only as "The Game," and would harp on me relentlessly about coming over to play it. I only recall actually doing it twice because I began to sense a dominant/submissive dynamic developing that put me in a very vulnerable situation, so I told my parents what we was going on and they stopped inviting him over. I now realize this as feeling the first pangs of sexual guilt.

2.) The first time I kissed anyone, it was my best male friend, on the jungle gym at recess in second grade. A girl in my class saw us and menacingly shouted, "What? Are you GAY or something?" I was very young and had no concept of hetero /homosexual, had never even HEARD of "gay," but the way she said it was so threatening that I would flash back to it many times much later when I thought I might actually be gay. It's hard to remember exactly what I felt in these situations, but I don't believe "desire" really entered into it. Girls were simply non-entities to me.

3.) I was thirteen the first time I masturbated. That summer when I visited my grandma, who lived just a few blocks away, I had taken to playing with her handheld showerhead, pulling my foreskin over the tube and letting the stream of water rush around the head of my penis. I had no idea what was happening, and it didn't feel particularly good, or at least not good enough to make me as obsessed as I was about doing it. One afternoon, I started feeling really intense responses to it, not just physically but, like, animalistic monkey-in-a-zoo compulsions to KEEP DOING THIS!, and I came. I was then instantly aware of this being masturbation, and I grew so ashamed I started crying even before I fully stopped ejaculating. When my mom came to get me for dinner that night, I was so afraid she'd somehow know, smelling it on me, that threw up in my hat.

4.) Despite this, I did it again and again, which I find amazing considering how terrible I always felt after orgasm. In seventh grade, a girl I thought was cute bent over my neighbor's desk and I could see down the front of her loose yellow shirt. Her breasts were so jarringly white and pretty, and I thought of what it would be like to kiss them, which was my first explicitly sexual thought ever. I excused myself and jacked-off in the bathroom. This was my first sort-of public masturbation, which lead to me doing it in an airplane bathroom, in restaurant toilets, in a dressing room, and while driving.

5.) The longest I've ever gone without masturbating, no touching allowed at all, was nearly six weeks, when I was fifteen and going through a major religious crisis concerning any sexual feelings. I took a "no jacking-off" vow during Lent, and made it until Good Friday, three days short of my "goal," because there was an episode of "The Fresh Prince of Bel Aire" on T.V. that afternoon where Will and Carlton went to a pool party at the Playboy Mansion. At the time, I was, again, crushed and convinced I would have to answer for my actions, but now I realize it's a pretty fucking adorable story.

6.) The first time I kissed someone and knew what I was doing occurred during my first week of college. I was eighteen and this girl who thought I was cute drove me behind a used car lot and said that she was going to make out with me. It was horrible. I thought her mouth was like a sucking vacuole and I knew that I didn't want to kiss her ever again. I thought, "Eighteen years for THIS?"

7.) I lost my virginity when I was twenty to my third girlfriend. The first girl I dated was also totally sexually inexperienced, and I was terrified of being her first time. Our touching and kissing was never arousing or even exciting, but I found out much later that she really wanted to have sex and went on birth control "for me." By that time she had cheated on me over the summer break and it was a moot point. The second girl I dated fooled around with me a lot, and always came loudly when I'd give her cunnilingus. One of those times, she told me to slip myself inside her, but it all fell through because I couldn't keep an erection. Thank God. It would have made for a terrible scene, since I had wanted out of the relationship for a while and we broke up three days later, but even in those occasions you sometimes find yourself awfully close to naked genitals.

8.) I really do love giving oral sex and I've been told that I'm very good at it. So much of the appeal comes from the denial of my own personal physical pleasure and if my partner is particularly into it as well, my horniness mounts to unbelievable levels.

9.) I've never had a one night stand, not because of some upstanding moral code but for what is probably the most shallow reason: I would hate having someone with bad taste in my list of sexual partners. I did once date a girl for the express purpose of having sex with her, but we also liked doing a lot of the same things and figured that it might be nice to do them together. For instance, we watched a lot of Jim Jarmusch movies. We went out drinking together and talked about how bad the jukebox was. And we had a lot of sex.

10.) That particular girl couldn't get off without dirty talk, and it annoyed the piss out of me. Spontaneous outbursts can be incredibly sexy, but otherwise it seems like I'm being forced into an awkwardly written patter of stating the obvious. "Oh, yeah baby. You're fucking me so hard." "Do you like me fucking you, baby?" "Uh huh. You're really fucking me." I found myself spending boring lecture periods trying to think filthy things to lecherously mutter, and I'm sure my lack of enthusiasm frustrated her.

11.) I dated my last girlfriend for little more reason than to cross her off my list of people I wanted to have sex with before I graduated college and moved away. I have not allowed myself to admit this to anyone, most of all to myself until very recently. I feel especially terrible about this because now I don't think about how nice she was to me, or how it was probably the most dedicated relationship I could have ever had, but instead remember the feeling of my fingers guiding hers through her pubic hair to touch her clit.

12.) I find myself attracted to boyish women, and the natural extrapolation of this is that I'm also attracted to lithe and feminine young men. I am overwhelmed by heterosexual feelings, but I also think of sexuality as a two scale system and feeling some light-to-moderate gayness just serves to make my options more interesting. Making out with a cute boy would be a total turn-on, and though I rarely consider the mechanics of actual gay sex, if the circumstances were right, I'd undoubtedly allow the situation to go where it will.

13.) I have dreams that I'm able to fellate myself. They feel astoundingly authentic, and while the novelty of them was exciting at one time, I've started to find them kind of jarring and would rather not have to deal with them again.

14.) I fantasize about having sex in a library above all other places. (I once told this to #9/10, and the next night, she "warmed me up" by telling me how she masturbated to thoughts of giving me oral in the secluded reference section of our college library. I appreciated the spirit, if not the execution, of her gesture...) While loud, wanton, capital-F-Fucking satisfies a primal need, there is nothing so Goddamn hot as watching a girl come while she's trying to be quiet.

15.) I love girl-girl porn, and especially soft-core photos that claim the designation "art nudes." There is a glorious tension to those images, bodies touching but not quite touching, lips out for a kiss but not quite kissing. Watching two girls just barely stroke each other's naked bodies in evening sunlight is a far bigger turn on to me than those same women going at it with a double ended dildo.

16.) To that point, while the Internet has opened a vast world of beautiful perversion and helped me understand the pleasure in things I never believed could be pleasurable, I also feel that it has made me lazy and unimaginative. Knowing that there is smut tailored to every possible smutty feeling I may have, sitting down at a computer to find it takes up the time that could be spent on the giddy joy of developing a mental fantasy.

17.) The prospect of sex in costumes doesn't excite me, but I've watched enough David Lynch to think that a topless woman wearing cute underpants and a large animal head is pretty big turn-on.

18.) I had sex with only one girl who shaved her pubic hair, and though it was something I really was looking forward to, I absolutely prefer reaching into a girl's pants and feeling a soft, lovely thatch.

19.) A further confession related to #9: Part of my reluctance to random sex play is that, though I'm now very skinny, I spent much of my growing years as a fat kid. As a result, my skin is still stretched out around my chest and stomach and when I'm naked it makes me feel unattractive, or at least undesirable. To top it off, I'm pretty hairy. These things aren't really noticeable when I'm clothed, so I've conditioned myself to think that since my outward package is deceptive, I'm better off revealing it in little stages to someone in a position to judge my physical prowess.

20.) I love all of the "gross" parts of sex: the sweat, the cum, the spit, the wetness. I have a hard time with sexual partners who are repelled by these things and get out of bed to wash up right away.

21.) The most intense orgasm I ever felt was from a handjob.

22.) I develop sexual crushes on almost all of my women friends, and I think the line about sex ruining a friendship is a cop out. I see nothing wrong or awkward about attractive people who already clearly share some form of love trusting each other to not judge a need for sex and providing an outlet for such strong feelings. I also realize that this requires a level of understanding and suspension of jealousy that I don't have and is probably unreasonable to request of someone else. I merely bring it up as a concept that I think has merit and I'd like to strive to attain.

23.) I admit that breasts are important to my sexual satisfaction, but I love them in all variations. I've begun to appreciate backs, mostly because I think I perform best coming in from behind and there's so much back to look at. I've also got a little thing for armpits, not in a fuckable way, but a touching/kissing/fondling way. They're so warm and soft, and a little hair can be cute. I'm also obsessed with noses. A nose of the "right" style can get me lusting after a girl like *that.* All things have to work together, though, and I can be very picky.

24.) At the risk of this coming off like a personal ad, I think I'm a very generous lover. I'm naturally submissive, so I derive a lot of pleasure from doting on my partners, and when we're in bed together, I lavish their bodies with attention. All manner of physical quirk is fodder for interesting, unique sex experience; scars and moles are definitely make-outable. In this way, I feel dominant on the microcosm.

25.) I feel that my comfortability with sex is hard earned, and it bothers me when my aforementioned close women friends say something like "I think you're a good person on the whole, but a lot of the time you're just an Asshole Guy." Yes, I sometimes say things that make me sound arrogant or slutty, but as I've never been unfaithful to anyone I was seriously dating, I no longer think it's wrong to want interesting sex. If, for example, the subject of a threesome is never breached, how will a threesome ever occur? It's not that I'm unhappy with the sex I'm having; I'd be happy kissing, licking, sucking only my partner's left breast for hours. But, with so much beauty in the world, I see no harm or shame in wanting to expand the parameters of pleasure.