Part LXXXVII
Human beings have only three orifices of sufficient size to accommodate a penis inside, the mouth, the anus, and, for females, the vagina. For most guys, having sex is the same thing as being able to fit the guys hard-and-erect penis into one of these orifices and once inside, then ejaculating. For guys both straight and gay having sex is a polite way of saying that I found someone who will let me put my dick into an orifice they have, and then ejaculating while I am in there. Another term that is used is “partner sex” to make sure everyone understands that I was not engaged in solo sex which is the polite way of saying masturbation which when defined, for a guy at least, as stroking one’s own penis to first get hard and erect, and then often proceed to a gratifying ejaculation.
For a long time it was somehow believed that sex involving placing the penis in a vagina was normal but any other act of penis inside another bodily orifice was somehow abnormal. Gradually, some heterosexual couples engaged in what was termed oral intercourse, which meant that the guy’s penis was being inserted into the mouth of the penis. Back in the 1960s when I was an undergraduate, guys were going out on serious dates that, err, sometimes had a sexual component to them. In my dorm, a guy on a date would come back to the dorm in the wee hours of the morning and the first thing one of the other guys would ask is “does she suck”?
I was so young and n at that stage of my life that I hardly understood what exactly was being so bluntly asked. But even then, in the 1960s here were questions being asked was not “Did you get your dick into her vagina?” but rather “Did she allow you to put your deck into her mouth and then suck the semen out of it?” To the guy asking the question to the guy coming back from the date, clearly the oral sex was at a higher level of eroticism than “normal” copulation (dick in vagina). In those days no one talked about dick in anus, at least not when other guys were around.
Dick in anus was reserved exclusively for two gay guys having partner sex, and, back then being gay was considered a treatable sickness by everyone including the American Psychological Association, so no guy openly admitted that he was gay. Coming out was not what you did. And the idea that heterosexual couples sometimes err, had experienced “copulation by putting his dick in her anus not her mouth or vagina was something only really oddball and weird couples did. This was not a “normal” sex act at all.
Time moved on. In the book “Everything you wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask” written by the psychiatrist David Reuben and first published in 1969 was a best seller in part because it had chapters dealing with topics everyone was curious about but traditionally were hushed up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reuben_(author)
Two topics interested me in particular, the chapters dealing with observations on gay guys and the chapter dealing with masturbation. Reuben actually admitted in the book that gay guys have been known to put a dick into the other guy’s anus, which he thought was more than a little weird. Perhaps a straight couple who admitted to doing this needed psychological help or maybe the guy needed a map of the female body orifices and where one was supposed to put one’s dick in order to have real sex.
But in retrospect he also said some odder things. First, he claimed that gay guys tend to favor clothing that fit snugger to their bodies than straight guys do, and that you sometimes could determine who among the males was gay but not openly gay simply by observing how snug the shirt or pants fit to his body. But he also admitted that a lot of modern men’s fashion consisted of ideas that originated in gay male communities and then somehow spread to straight males, so this clothing-focused approach to identifying gay males was not always perfect.
At least in the early editions, Reuben believed that being gay was a type of mental illness and as such any guy who had this problem should see a psychiatrist. Further, there were excellent psychiatrists out there who had the necessary techniques to fix the problem and turn practically any gay guy straight!
Was that advice ever off base!
Masturbation fared little better than being gay in Reuben’s analysis. That chapter indicated that guys commonly masturbate when they are young and that was just OK. But as a guy gets only a little older, say in his late teens, there would be more and more opportunities for having penis-vagina sex with a female partner, and gradually a guy’s interest in masturbation will fade as he ramps up having real intercourse. He noted that elderly guys living without a female partner as they age may ramp up masturbation again, and that was probably OK for guys who no longer had a convenient vagina in which to ejaculate, but for everyone else, penis-in-vagina partner sex was a lot more fun and should be the norm of what we as guys do.
Over all of this I was thinking about my own situation. I guess other guys were wired differently from me. First, I was never that turned on by females my age, if at all. I had female friends but I did not feel compelled to put my penis into a vagina, like a lot of my male college friends seemed focused on doing. Somehow I must be wired differently from them, but how?
Even at a young age I liked to wear clothing items that were snug-fitting. Was Reuben saying this made me gay? Well not exactly. And increasingly I began to believe that being a gay male meant that I was enthusiastic about putting my dick into his anus or mouth, and quite frankly this appealed to me, if anything, even less than the idea of penis-in-vagina. For me, having a sexual partner who wanted my dick would prove to be interesting for less than 24 hours, if that.
But I love getting a hard on-and then ejaculating. In this regard I am not asexual at all. It’s just the partner stuff involving putting my dick into the orifice of another person that is the turnoff.
So, I have a medical appointment and have to fill out a questionnaire. One of the first questions is am I straight or gay? There is no other option. I had already checked the “single” box. But singles don’t generally live without partner sex in some form, or do they? I suppose that if I checked gay, there would be immediate interest in whether or not I would have an STD commonly carried by non monogamous gay guys, most notably HIV. Saying straight would go down a different medical path assuming I was having regular sex with females that I was not married to and all the messy issues associated with that. If there were an option “neither of the above” the assumption would be that I engage in both anal sex with men and vaginal sex with females and that creates an even messier and more complicated potential set of medical issues.
But I enjoy myself sexually immensely with none of the baggage associated with living with another person and somehow getting my penis into a partner’s orifice, whatever that orifice might be. Because of this I suppose some guys would say that I have missed out on some of the most enjoyable aspects of being a guy. But I am who I am. I’ve enjoyed life immensely in part because I never got bogged down doing the stuff a lot of other guys enjoy doing.
In the stories I have written you will notice that the characters often deeply enjoy masturbating, often by themselves but occasionally engaging getting into mutual masturbation. But never does a dick go in partner’s orifice. In that regard, my stories are at least somewhat autobiographical. I like leaving characters in this situation of dreaming up interesting ways to engage in male self abuse, but never actually engaging in true partner sex. From my vantage point, that is the place to be! Modern medicine I guess doesn’t realize that there are guys who see the world, sexually, from my vantage point. Maybe lots of us! If you are reading this, perhaps you too are one of these.
To be continued…