OK; no more Grenada. I promise.
Instead, I'm going to tell you a story.
It's a funny story.
At least I think it's funny, and it's my blog so, there you go...but, I should warn you first; it's a funny SEX story.
So be warned; there are things in here that are not wholesome for impressionable young children. Or naive adults. Or people who are shocked by people talking about carnal matters. Or anyone shocked by nudity, because there's some nudity, too.
Are we clear on all of this?
Good.
Kids all out of the room?
Aunt Sally safely immersed in that Golden Girls re-run?
Alright, then.
First, let me say that I think I am a very lucky man.
I have a bride who I not only like as a person and cherish as a companion but desire as a woman.
I find her delightful and delight in her. For me she walks in beauty like the night; all that's best in dark and bright meets in her aspect and her eyes; thus mellowed to that tender light that Heaven to day denies.
One pleasant side-effect of this is that occasionally I have lovely dreams in which she and I are the principals.
Often these are merely diversions; we revisit places we visited in the light of day, or reenact things we did while waking.
Occasionally, these dreams are more...intimate.
But...and I hope nobody reading is disappointed when I confess this...they wouldn't make very good Penthouse-letter-reading.
(Which reminds me; has anyone even seen a "Penthouse" lately?Anyway...even in my erotic dreams I'm afraid I'm just hopelessly, boringly conventional.
Remember when those glossy stroke books were the ultimate in smut, the Nirvana of porn, the K2 of wankerdom? Remember going into...well, almost anywhere there were magazines and seeing them and Playboy and the other heavy-bond paper porno periodicals?
Seen them lately? Yeah, me neither.
Was there anything that the Internet killed deader than those glossy porno rags? If there is I can't think of it.
Sorry. Lost my thread there for a moment.)
They are usually nothing more daring than boringly wholesome hetero sorts of dreams, the Hallmark Channel of salacious imagination. Making love to my wife on a white sand beach, romantic trysts before a roaring fire, sex under the Christmas tree (without the annoying pine needles poking me in the ass)...you get the idea.
Nice. But...well, sorta vanilla, right?
No frantic kinks, no forbidden pleasures; no S&M, no sweaty pileups, no her dressing up like Mrs. Claus and swinging from the chandelier with four stalwart lechers pulling at her legs.
Nope. Just plain old boring romantic-ish married sex.
That's just jake with me, but it doesn't make for a thrilling blog post read, now, does it?
But...
About a week ago I had a dream.
It started off fairly typically; the two of us lounging in a huge white bed in this enormous tropical-sort of room; long white bedcurtains, huge windows with venetian blinds screening out the blazing white sunlight.
On the silky sheets my bride's pale skin glowed with the sort of luminosity you only see in photographs or in dreams; her whole body seemed to radiate a sort of lush intensity, a warm and fecund sheen that promised all manner of lubricious delights, as did her slantendicular smile below her lowered lids.
In my mind she looked at me and ran her palms down her thighs in a gesture of pure invitation.
So far, so good - and so far, so standard.
So I was dream-shocked when my dream-bride rolled onto her side, loured at me, and murmured in her best throaty dream-voice:
"I want you to make love to my ass..."
Whoa.
Look. I understand myself as well as I hope I possibly can. And - understanding that - I understand that I will take whatever licentious liberties I am offered.
(We're like that, men, most of us, I'm afraid...)
Like most men, though, I won't take what is not offered.
And so far as my bride is concerned - my real bride, my waking-hours bride - that particular form of congress is most surely not offered.
No fooling around back there. That's a one-way street. No trespassing. Do not enter.
Mi novia finds nothing enticing about the notion of having someone poking about the distal end of her digestive tract.
And that has always applied to my dream-wife as well. We don't cavort inside my head in ways we don't in real life - including that way.
At least, until the other night's dream.
But...even in my dream I couldn't really buy this sudden wifely desire for the entry into the Forbidden Zone. Dream-me was suddenly as still as the bunny when the hawk passes overhead; every nerve-ending jangling with the sense of imminent danger.
"Are you sure about this..?" I asked, motionless.
In answer my dream-bride writhed in what can only be described as an utterly shameless fashion. "Oh, yessss..." she moaned, "I want it. I need it."
I just sat there staring.
"You're kidding me." I said, finally.
"You really want me to have anal sex with you. Butt sex. Up the ol' dirt road. Drive the Hershey Highway. Bloop you up the doody chute. You're one hundred percent dead solid no-kidding abso-lutely sure you want this?"
My dream-spouse responded by rolling onto her elbows and knees into a position that in the higher primates would be called "presenting".
The sane part of my dream-brain was shrieking like an air raid siren (Warning! Warning! Danger, Doctor Smith, danger! Warning!) but my little dream-head was doing most of the thinking by this time and that thinking was "Well, OK then...".
I got to my knees and shuffled across the sheets. "You're absolutely sure you want this?" I said as I reached for the delicious fundament waggling before me.
In return I received a lascivious moan and a tremor-inducing whole-body wriggle.
Well.
Okay then.
I leaned forward in anticipation, and...
"You were gonna fuck me up the butt, weren't you?!" snarled my dream-lover.
"Weren't you!?!"
"And you know I don't go for that stuff, too."
"You...you...pervert!"
And with that she wrapped the robe that appeared in her hands around her body, wagged her finger at me one last time and stalked away, her bare heels beating out a martial rhythm on the shining wood floor.
I lay there dreaming aimlessly a long, long time.
Until my night-wanderings transmuted into something about cleaning the kitchen counters and unloading the dishwasher.
22 comments:
I'd love to comment in some really valuable fashion…I would! But I am too reminded of a Garfield comic wherein the fat kitty is confronted with a come hitherish chipmunk inviting him to play. Garfield looks around in kitty paranoia and asks "Is this a sting operation?"
Yep. I told my wife about this and she 1) laughed until she cried and 2) said "Served you right, you dirty dog."
I really need to do some wall-to-wall counseling with my sleeping brain. It's one thing to get into foolish bedroom situations in real life. But in your own dreams? That's just sad...
First you wrote that at 26 you were afraid, but eventually overcame the fear by reason of responsibility for the men in your charge. Now you write this. Coleridge said something to the effect that every man’s autobiography would be interesting if he only were honest. You certainly qualify.
To continue the honesty, Paul, I would say that, rather, I found that I could manage my fear. I never overcame it; I was still afraid - my problem is that I have one of those intensely vivid imaginations (as you can probably tell from this post...) that could visualize in great detail what a hunk of steel could do to my eyes, or balls, or a high-velocity slug could do to the inside of my chest cavity. That isn't fucking helpful when you're trying to work in those circumstances, and when I was a young troop it made me a much worse medic than I should have been.
As a sergeant I was still afraid; but I could also imagine what those bullets or that shrap-metal could do to my guys, and found it more important to try and keep my head and make good decisions to keep that from happening; it helped me forget about acting on my being afraid.
And, let's face it; we're human which means that almost all of us are sexual in some way. One reason I fell in love and married the woman I did was because I desire her body along with all the other aspects of her; soul, mind, and spirit.
And, given that, the old monkey-brain will devise places to put things, and not all of them are...socially appropriate, shall we say?
Most of us THINK these things. I just happened to think up one particular version that also turned into a funny turnabout; the reason I wrote this post wasn't so much to confess some sort of dark sexual secret as to tell a story that rebounds on me as a comeuppance.
The notion that even in my secret dreams I got busted for even trying something kinky seemed like a good joke on me, and I can't think of a better thing to do with a joke than to re-tell it...
I didn’t mean to sound critical, Chief. Actually I admire your honesty and wish it would come easier. Have been thinking about writing a memoir: not that my life merits other people’s attention, but as an exercise in housekeeping. It’s time to put things in order.
Facing the ambiguity of past actions requires radical, soul-stripping honesty. Among these actions are leading a mutiny aboard a federally owned vessel in the mid-Atlantic, coming within an rch of execution by Galveston cops, the way I mistreated my parents and first wife, what a Marine sergeant did to find courage to renew a relationship with an old girlfriend.
Then there are those who will have no other chronicler. People like Passion, a lady born with vestigial arms and an indomitable spirit, who helped pioneer computerized maintenance in the Navy. Or Col. Burt Miller, ex-Flying Tiger pilot and worshipful devotee of women, airplanes and high society. “Killer,” actually a gentle person, who exposed himself to beryllium dust so the rest of us wouldn’t have to. Dr. W.P. Baker, a leading Milton scholar who knew everyone from Einstein to Lillian Hellman and who would have loved the way Chief writes. Or Admiral Craik, former commandant of the USCG 7th District. We had differences, the Admiral and I, but it was hard to stay angry with a man who could look off into horizon and intone, “Conrad’s prose reflects the rhythm of the sea.”
One might add a list of happinesses, something rarely written about. The Huffington Post has a photo of a couple who have been together for 81 years. Joy of shared lives radiates from their ancient faces. And there is the way old people come to appreciate the early morning sun and the gift of another day. Another sort of happiness is the Zen-like rush of pleasure that can overtake one when rebuilding an engine or performing close work with machine tools.
I could ramble on, but have probably said more than enough in this post.
OK, now, I'm really laughing out loud! Something about the horror on the cat's faces, I'm sure. And the fact that I've chosen for a celibate Friday, when something else might have been in the offing (just not ... THAT; not my cup o' tea, either.)
OK, so I happened to stumble upon this 4 minute TEDx talk by a cougar who is in the business of "re-educating and rehabilitating" the young men who think that the stuff pushed on them by porno is the only way to go. For some reason, anal intercourse is fobbed off as some sort of delicacy ... hmm, perhaps simply because its away from the norm, different, (to be charitable) more intimate. I suspect there is a latent homosexual urge, though I would never impute such an urge to you, Chief.
Anyway, for an informative and humorous 4 minutes, I submit --
Make Love, Not Porn
(Her site is makelovenotporn.com)
I liked the cat face, too, Lisa; I fiddled around with various stock photos of people with a gobsmacked look but I wanted a really over-the-top image to convey the bizarre quality of the dream moment; that's what made the funny. So I'm glad it worked for you. That was the whole point of this; just to tell a funny story.
And - that being the case - I'm not sure whether a curiosity about going in through the back door has anything more complicated to it than the male propensity to find a hole for the pole. Especially in this dream; the odd part about it in retrospect is that dream-me was more skeptical of my bride's sincerity than indifferent to the act itself; beyond a minor sort of monkey-curiosity I've never been all that excited by the prospect for a combination of reasons (pure fastidiousness perhaps the single most pertinent).
But...if there's any constant through time and space it's that if there's a penis-sized aperture some guy will try and put his dingus into it. That's always been the thing about the carnal act that, to me, makes it the most ridiculous and at the same time endearing thing two people can do.
Can you - looking at the entire business dispassionately - think of anything sillier than two hairless monkeys rubbing their genitalia together? The real issue with 99% of visual porn for me is just that; people having sex are often just ridiculous-looking.
IMO it's the intimacy with your lover that lends that groinical-friction whatever grace and dignity it has; the complete trust and closeness with that other person that makes those monkey-humpings into a twining of sweet tenderness...
But the distance between sexual tenderness and sexual farce is a tiny one, and in this case the laughable came to the fore. So; I'm very glad I could give you a farcical laugh on an evening when you didn't get to enjoy the sweet savor of that tenderness.
"IMO it's the intimacy with your lover that lends that groinical-friction whatever grace and dignity it has
Quite so. I don't come at my disdain for anal or porn from any doctrinal perspective, just a human one. That orifice isn't made for intromission and thrusting in the way that the vagina is. I feel that consuming porn lends an unemotional air to an activity which could be ennobled via the mixture of some feeling. I mean, if one ardently views porn and engages in impersonal sex, I feel one is missing out on one of the finer parts of the human experience.
I like bonobos from afar, but human bonobos don't appeal.
p.s.:
As far as males intromitting into any available opening, ISTM that those who choose for pool circulation vents (yes, males in FLA have been caught in that compromising position) or sterilized vacuum cleaner suction devices at least will not not pick up E. coli. The Gram (-) bacteria are posing a signifgicant threat.
Of course, swimming in the pool becomes a less savory option now.
I feel that consuming porn lends an unemotional air to an activity which could be ennobled via the mixture of some feeling. I mean, if one ardently views porn and engages in impersonal sex, I feel one is missing out on one of the finer parts of the human experience.
Interesting, Lisa, in terms of jim's recent piece on sex-as-friction...
But I think that - humans being humans - we're talking about two ends of a continuum, and, depending on the people involved, there's elements of both emotion, and friction to varying degrees.
At the one end there is intercourse as pure selfish mechanical satisfaction; the satisfaction of a genital itch, the uncomplicated rush of orgasmic relief. I can't pretend that that doesn't exist, or that some people don't look for that kind of sex (whether principally or exclusively), or that I haven't indulged in that myself; I have.
At the other end, though, there's the idea that "it-must-be-love-because-it-feels-so-good", or, conversely, the notion that because we feel tender and loving towards someone that making love with them should always be epic and magnificent - with the concurrent conviction that if the sex isn't great then it must be because there's an emotional dysfunction...
My opinion is that it's all related; it's all one big nutroll. So loving partners can have a purely physical fuck whilst those same lovers can be out of sorts - who knows; nerves, tiredness, little aches and pains..? - and the sex is rotten or, worse, boring and perfunctory. Some people just want a zipless fuck without the emotional connection (kind of an empty exercise, IMO; why not just masturbate - it's simpler and doesn't risk disease, pregnancy, and having to remember your partner's name?), while others get themselves into a swivet because "He/she must not love me anymore!" when the real reason is that he is tired and his testosterone levels are low or she's had something nasty for lunch and is worrying about the meeting on Friday?
As an aside; it's just this sort of genital tsurris that makes me laugh at these "abstinence education" programs. You're talking about a human drive - a desire, a need, an obsession - that has ruined empires, toppled thrones, destroyed (and redeemed) lives. Trying to reduce it to "don't put your totem pole in that donut hole because...bad!"
????
Yeah, THAT's gonna work.
I will agree with jim on this (though not on his gender-based conclusion): I think that for some people sexual intercourse IS pure friction, purely the relieving of genital pressure.
For others, there's a smidgen of emotional connection but it's mostly about having an orgasm.
For others there's a balance of emotional and physical enjoyment of their lovers, and to my mind that's a good balance to have.
For still others there's a too-tight connection between love and sex; those are the sorts of people who assume that love HAS to equal great lovemaking, and that great sex HAS to mean epic love.
But...I'm not going to buy jim's take that men are Mars and women are Venus, that all men are just looking to spread their seed (and put their poles in the nearest hole) while all women are needy emo-vampires who want their sex with a side of burning love.
I believe the he's half-right; more men than women are sexually voracious, and more women than men equate love and sex. But I'd argue that the range of variation within the genders is wider than the differences between them; there's a HUGE overlap there...
I think a lot of the issues arise because on top of everything else we live in societies, most of us, that hammer on the "boys-are-dogs-who-want-some-action" and "girls-are-fluffy-bunnies-who-want-to-cuddle" stereotypes.
So I think my question would be; how much of this male-female sexual "difference" is the basic nature of men and women and how much is the form fitted to us by what we see, hear, real, and talk about?
Oh, and I have to close this part with another joke, speaking of pool vents and popovers (or whatever else the boys have been caught poking...
The guy at the end of the bar is pretty hammered and he's at that stage where as a drunk you start monologuing.
"I've built half the houses from here to the river, but do they call me 'Bob the House-Builder'?"
No.
And I've taught half the kids in the village how to hammer and saw, but do they call me 'Bob the Teacher'?
Hell, no...
But you fuck one sheep..."
Back Door to Dreamland and old Bob are as funny as anything that’s appeared on the Internet, and that’s saying a lot.
But, finally, what difference do the mechanics make? Sex is a kind of frufraw. A fever, according to Hadrian, when the self is displaced and colors brighten and merge. As he neared death, the Emperor was reported to have said that he had been “much loved, human-fashion.” The implication is that human love is not enough. The ancients, some of them anyway, looked for something beyond sex, some mathematically purer plane of existence.
Dear Chief,
There is much to say.
Jim has it half right, but only half. If one stays at that friction level, well, why not just masturbate, as you say. Cleaner, quicker and more honest (it recognizes the health aspect of regular stress relief.)
Jim, of course, is a particular male, but I believe he speaks for many. Many men are bored to tears by women, and find succor in their guns/guitars and militaria.
Jim and others may also be operating from the "burned" perspective, and self-preservation is a strong impulse (funny that many whose sex is impersonal is nonetheless, non-protected; one must wonder if the impulse to "protection" is really overriding.)
Surely stereotypes hold: Most women seek to lasso a male with her feminine whiles, and males submit for whatever social benefits accrue them. I understand most marriage proposals are actually made by women themselves. Most men do not rationally go into what will often be a fenced pasture after their stud duties are discharged.
This is a broad brush, but it seems to fit well > 50% of both sexes.
But beyond all of that, there is much to feel beyond the orgasm, if we could allow ourselves to be free of our programmed constraints.
There is no necessary reciprocity between love and sex; like Tina Turner asked: "What's love got to do with it?" They are distinct phenomena, but as social animals seeking a (hopefully) life mate, vulnerable commo must be a part of the union, lest one live like two marsh voles entering and ending their day essentially alone tho' sharing a bed (actually, the voles may be more intimate than that.)
Per, "all women are needy emo-vampires who want their sex with a side of burning love," I feel this fear of the vagina dentata is much overlaid. I do not think most of my sisters are looking for burning love (though the secretaries hooked on Gothic romance might make you think so.) No --that is sublimation, and something they never had and were probably too selfish (or programmed) to seek.
What they want as a side with their sex is the ring in the bull's (=your) nose. To that end, they become consummate actresses and I will quote from Simply Red -- "Nothing had the chance to be good; nothing ever could."
(more ...)
FDC asks:
"my question would be; how much of this male-female sexual "difference" is the basic nature of men and women and how much is the form fitted to us by what we see, hear, real, and talk about?"
I believe we are different, down to the nuts-and-bolts (physiology, hormones, brain structure), and beyond that, the horreur or our programming. If one does not stumble upon truly good sex, which to my mind would be an entire immersion of heart/mind/soul, beyond the friction level -- how does know what to seek, and what to call a "good"? It is the old male joke about the worst sex of his life was still pretty good. Men are perhaps better at compartmentalizing and enjoying their physical sensation because they are a simpler creature (sorry for the objectivity.)
As my mentor once said, "imagine if you had a clitoris the size of a penis? Well -- they DO!" So that's quite a compelling reason in itself for why men might be more willing to buy into the garbage that is most porn -- surely women must want it as badly as we do?!? Umm, nope, but they do need a paycheck, and if men will be silly, most women will gladly take them for a ride.
I like your joke. I'm game to go farther into this. Perhaps this hooks into your earlier question of why man and women can't be friends. I was leery to answer that as I did not feel qualified to go down the various avenues of why it's not a very common thing. Pity, really, as we have much to learn from each other.
If one does not stumble upon truly good sex, which to my mind would be an entire immersion of heart/mind/soul, beyond the friction level -- how does know what to seek, and what to call a "good"?
I think that, again, goes to the heart of what makes people different, is as varied as people are varied, and is more varied between individuals than it is between genders.
And I'll be the first one to admit; for some people most of the time (and most of us some of the time, I suspect) the "friction-sex" is good enough.
And I also agree that men are "blessed" (or cursed) in this respect - we're physiologically designed to get erect, orgasm, and ejaculate with very little else other than pure physical stimulation.
(There's obviously a lot more to it than that or we'd all be rubbing ourselves up against the wallpaper like cats in heat, but there's a hell of a lot of truth to that, the "old male joke about the worst sex of his life was still pretty good.")
But I'm not sure that we're as simple as all that.
(And I wonder how much of that "simplicity" goes down to being told repeatedly of the sort of "boys don't cry" ethic as kids. Boys don't cry, boys don't cling, boys don't get all goopy and emo...so I wonder how many boys become men who have learned not to do that? Along that line I wish I could remember where the hell I read the thing by the "pick-up artist" type guy who was in a frothing rage that - because he was heterosexual - he had to have sex with women and her really didn't like women...except for fucking them. Anyway, where-ever the hell it was I remember reading that thinking 1) "What a fucked-up attitude" and 2) "Hell, why not just buy one of those Popiel Pocket PussiesTM if that's your attitude?")
Point is, yes, there ARE guys like that.
But I'm not sure if they're a vast majority or even a simple majority.
"What they want as a side with their sex is the ring in the bull's (=your) nose. To that end, they become consummate actresses...">
Again, I've known women like this. But not an overwhelming majority of them or even the bulk of them. My experience has been that the women I've known had approaches to and outlooks on sex (and intimacy) as varied as my own and as that of men I know.
Some did want to use it to "hook" a man. Some wanted love and tried to use sex to spark it. Some were just curious, others were just horny. Some were aroused by men in general, some by a particular "type", some by one individual.
And, again, I think that a lot of the "she uses sex to get love/a meal ticket" has as much to do with how we've set up our society - and how a hell of a LOT of societies are set up, with the men in control of most of the jobs and most of the cash - as it does how humans work, either emotionally or sexually. I think it's hard for us to avoid assuming that the former is because of the latter rather than the reverse.
Hard, hard to escape conditioning you've lived with all your life; it's like breathing air, you just don't think about it consciously...
Many men are bored to tears by women, and find succor in their guns/guitars and militaria.
While I won't disagree - I've known guys like this - I find that tremendously sad.
Bored with women?
You might as well be bored with Life.
I mean, hell, there are lots of people, people in general, male and female, that make me want to hit myself in the head just so I don't have to pay attention to them.
But that's a PEOPLE thing, not a woman thing. There are just a hell of a lot of people who are as interested in things around them, things outside them, anything of greater import than who's on American Idol XIII or who's screwing whom at the office, and those people ARE boring, by and large.
But not because they're women.
Maybe I'm just fortunate in knowing women that are passionately interested in music, or sports, or history, or science, or medicine, or literature, who have their own interesting take on Life, the Universe, and everything.
Plus, well, they're women; many of them look nice, smell nice, presumably taste and feel nice...
How the hell could you ever be bored with that I have no effing idea.
"Perhaps this hooks into your earlier question of why man and women can't be friends."
I do wonder, especially in light of your comment about a certain kind of guy being "bored" with women. Nobody wants to pal around with a bore, so perhaps that's part of the problem. That and the fact that the gals often don't share the fondness for "guy things" if they're defined as involving physical discomfort and kinetic energy (which is where I get a chuckle out of guys who are all about weaponry and yet don't seem to find themselves in places like southeastern Afghanistan where automatic weaponry is the New Black. The real bottom line is that military service is compounded of long hours of boredom, chickenshit, occasional terror, and irritating discomfort and privation. Finding value in that because it also includes getting to shoot people with automatic weaponry takes a very...special...person and often not in a good way).
"I was leery to answer that as I did not feel qualified to go down the various avenues of why it's not a very common thing."
Like I said; I'd really be interested in hearing your take on this. If you're coming to the point of being willing to explore further, let's discuss...
Yes -- the conditioning is incessant and from the point of birth; very hard to escape, and is only accomplished one at a time. Most haven't the encouragement, time or brain capacity to achieve escape velocity, I feel.
You are among a special group of humans who find value out there, in curiosity and connection, and compassion. That is a magnificent thing, and the majority are not keyed for that.
The "boys don't cry" ethos is a true tragedy, and puts the clamps on boys early on. How much tragedy might be avoided if we took the time with boys to acknowledge and nurture their more empathic feelings? How much richer might be their lives?
Nick Hornby's "How to Be Good" has a painful theme running through about how most people learn to acclimate to simple "button-pushing" (=clitoral/penile stimulation), "making a life" out of all of the other familial and parental obligations therein. However, that part we may call the "soul" which aches for something more dies here and now, and re-enters the cosmos or collective unnconsciousness, as Hornby depicts it.
The following may indeed be one reason many guys do not have gal pals:
I do wonder, especially in light of your comment about a certain kind of guy being "bored" with women. Nobody wants to pal around with a bore, so perhaps that's part of the problem.
Yes, I am ready to look into the question now. I've posed it to a few people, with differing takes. I think I shall ask on FB soon ... I use that forum for naught else, but it might be an interesting lab.
"Yes, I am ready to look into the question now."
Excellent! (said in a gloating voice whilst rubbing hands together...)
OK:
So, I posted the query to FB and didn't score much new; I saw some defensiveness with those who claimed only insecure people had a problem with this.
In light of your earlier statement on the opposite sex ("Maybe I'm just fortunate in knowing women that are passionately interested in music, or sports, or history, or science, or medicine, or literature, who have their own interesting take on Life, the Universe, and everything"), let's reify our question:
Have you personally found it difficult to acquire/maintain female friends? Is this something you have witnessed others having trouble with?
With this input, I will go forward.
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