Category: Uncategorized

I’ve got some awesome excuses for missing my blog dates. I’ll post soon… from distant lands…

Monday, October 4, 2010

I haven’t added anything original to the blog for over a week now. Forgive me. I’ve been sick. 

It was nothing serious. There’s a good chance you had something like what I had. It’s a cold. Nasal congestion, cought, sore throat… no fever, no aches… I took one day off from work when I was at the hight of grossness, just to spare my fellow salt miners one day of my ambient miasma, but it wasn’t serious. I could have easily updated the blog… 

But I had this great excuse to “take it easy” and so I didn’t write. 

I apologize… 

Not much to tell you… except I also skipped a Jacks event because I wasn’t 100% better. I came in and set up, arranged furniture and played foreman to the opening crew, but I wrote the rules and one of them is:

8) ILLNESS
Do not attend an RCJ event if you have or suspect that you may have a disease you can spread to other members in the course of an event… 

I couldn’t very well break my own rule, could I? Very bad form. So I went home horny and not as sick, but still sick. 

This morning, I had clear evidence that I am on the road to full recovery: I had a spectacular orgasm with a fine fellow in the steam room at my gym. This was after a complete if easy lifting session, so I got it all done. Pumped up the back and biceps and cleaned out the tanks. I also had a second orgasm just a little while ago. I think I am going to feel even better tomorrow. 

I want to point out that I could have easily blown off this brief entry. I’m tired, my teeth are brushed, my face is cleansed and moisturized and my tanks are, once again, well drained. But I needed to follow through before another day passed. So this was my mundane, boring report on just getting better. 

Next, I will select a topic from my vast list and just write… Unless you “Ask Me Anything” and point me in a new direction… Either way, I appreciate you bearing with me. I’ll be back. 

And in conclusion, here is a picture of my very own penis, just so this isn’t a total waste of your time…

I hate this question. It’s a really good question but I really hate it… Screed follows… 

In the movie, Parenthood, Keanu Reeves’ character, Tod, says this: “You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car – hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.” (YouTube)

The question assumes that school is where children should be learning about sex… 

Parents already teach their children about sex from day one. The problem is, what nearly all parents are teaching is that sex is fundamentally naughty, wrong, bad, dirty, embarrassing, dangerous and mysterious at best; and at worst a sure-fire way to burn in hell for all eternity. In other words, they pass on the disinformation they believe, thereby sustaining all of the lies and diseased thinking that we all suffer from all our lives.  

Am I being too harsh? Too broad? Your parents weren’t like that? Granted, all parents are different to some degree… but don’t confuse being used to something with being over something… Fish may not be aware that they’re wet but they live in water so why should they think about it at all? We live in a deeply repressed world so we probably have only an inkling of what actual sexual liberation might be like. 

Children can’t learn healthy sexuality until the people teaching them know something about it themselves. Parents should model healthy sexuality for children from infancy onward and schools could support that with knowledge and valid science according to the developmental stage of the child. This only works, of course, if the parents know about and actively experience healthy sexuality themselves and are not, in fact, butt-reaming assholes… erm, I mean… sadly ignorant people. 

It doesn’t take much investigation to realize that sexually enlightened parents are the exception to the rule. Most, nearly all of our parents are, in my humble opinion, not… enlightened. Not so much… 

Look, I’m actually trying to be kind here because… well… they are our parents, but I’m sorry: It is highly unlikely that you, dear reader, had parents with a fully positive experience of healthy human sexuality, and they probably didn’t raise you to feel unreservedly great about real human sex. Now, you may be the exception, but I’m guessing that you have long struggled with freeing yourself from various sexual hangups you learned at home, starting long before you were out of diapers… That is, after all, the world in which we live. 

I’m not blaming your parents or you. A society can not shake off generations of institutional anti-sexual conditioning overnight. 

It should be apparent that I have a pretty dim view of the prevailing level of sexual enlightenment in the “modern” world. We are altogether too developmentally retarded by centuries of aggressive cultural colonization by the “People of the Book” (Christians, Muslims and Jews). I see those religions as the principal font of virtually all sexual repression in our world today. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it is a prime example of the cycle of suppression/obsession/maladaptation that twists us into knots. In many ways, religion wrote the book on sexual repression. 

The profound influence of this tragic ideological malignancy is so thick in virtually all families and educational institutions that it couldn’t possibly be resolved without great difficulty and hardship. Healthy sexuality is only one of many aspects of genuine humanity which we have sacrificed to this ancient monster. 

I do believe it is getting better. A lot better in some places, but I think we’re still some generations away from anything like real sexual enlightenment as a culture, and only then if we can free ourselves from the tyranny of these ancient religious proscriptions against it. The superstition that still rules so much of our lives keeps us from reality.

The reality I’m talking about: Our sexual impulse is fundamentally good, creative, integrative, connecting and fully, primordially human. Doesn’t exactly align with philosophies based upon a concept of “original sin” now, does it? 

Someday, humanity may include cultures that understand and embrace our innate biological natures, and those natures will not be at odds with everything else we value and aspire to. Unless and until we finally grow up about sex and shed the obsolete, ideological scales covering our eyes, schools will just reflect and perpetuate our ignorance. 

To end on a positive note, I really do think that we are part of the solution, those of us willing to embrace the most healthy expressions of human intimacy available to us and willing to exchange ideas about sex with each other, frankly and honestly. If we can drag humanity out of its long, dark night of sexual ignorance, our schools will naturally reflect and expand upon an evolving ethic of fundamental sexual goodness. 

I’m a big believer in the ultimate victory of water over stone.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

I don’t know if every single living man does this in the course of his life, but I invested quite a bit of time and energy into exploring the different ways I could masturbate, and while the pace of experimentation has slowed as I’ve aged, I still love to explore what my penis has to offer.

One of the earliest variations I learned was from that time I was sitting in 8th grade social studies and a kid sitting nearby was stroking the underside of his penis through his underwear. I could see it clearly from my vantage point beside and slightly behind his desk near the back of the class. His fly was open and he was sitting back against the chair instead of leaning forward on his desk, and the bulge of his boner was right there, clearly exposed, the underside being brushed back and forth by the side of his thumb. Subtle enough so nobody would see him doing it unless they were viewing from my angle, but he was clearly masturbating right there in class, right where I could watch…

Of course, I was completely absorbed in watching him, even as I struggled to not be caught watching. I didn’t want to be seen staring and I didn’t want him to be caught either. I didn’t want it to stop.

I’d never seen another person masturbate before, and definitely not in a dangerous circumstance like IN CLASS, and it had never occured to me to just stimulate that one part of my penis, what I understand now to be the frenulum, that little trigger nerve on the underside just past the divit in the head. I would come to know that specific two inches better in the coming years and I have that kid to thank. I wish I could remember his name…

Holy crap, it was Joe Morris… (I really did just remember, but I’ve changed his name.) I don’t remember a lot of names from my childhood, and Joe and I were not friends… but I think that moment of crystalized childhood memory has preserved his name for me. He was, in that moment of middle-school recklessness, a trailblazer of sorts for someone he never suspected had caught him stroking his dick in class…

I started following his lead by doing exactly what I saw him do, though not in any place I might easily get caught. At home, in the living room, I lay back on the big blue sofa and opened my fly, keeping my already stiff and pulsing dick inside my briefs. My penis has always naturally oriented in an upward direction in my underpants, so it is natural that when hard the most easy access is to the underside and tip. I took my hand and just gently stroked up and down on those magical two inches with the side of my thumb, just as I’d seen Joe doing, paying close attention to the sensations growing inside my penis, that “tightening knot” feeling which seems to radiate from the core of the shaft.

I found that a faster rubbing than my usual slippery-piston method was natural and produced a more intense sensation of building pleasure. I also found that a specific change in the character of that pleasure happened when I judiciously avoided touching the head altogether. Later, I experimented with switching back and forth between the underside alone and the head alone, seeing how the alternating, specific stimulation felt different.

I discovered that a strong stream of water from the shower onto the magic underside felt great too. I facilitated this by wearing my briefs into the shower, so my dick would stay in the upright position, underside to the stream of water, and I could control exactly where the vibration of the tight stream would hit me with a slight movement of my hips and legs, and of course, no hands.

It was during this prolonged experiment of frenulum play that I began to get use to ejaculating in my briefs, a specific pleasure I would not call a fetish for me, but something I clearly enjoy doing and seeing others do.

I found a strap-on massager in my parent’s room which opened up a whole new world of sensation. It fit on the back of my hand, transforming the whole hand and each finger into an intense vibrator. It plugged into the wall and was so powerful it made my hand tingle for a long time after turning it off. I tried turning it on and cupping my whole crotch, moving my hand very slowly but mainly pressing it into my penis and testicles, feeling it respond with my hand and swelling up almost continuously toward an amazing and rather quick orgasm.

I bought a “Jacpak” that I’d seen advertised in one of the gay slicks, marketed by Jack Wrangler. It was a simple white vinyl sleeve with a specific smooth texture that I could blow up, grease up and fuck. It was beautifully low-tech and easy to clean, I could slide it up and down on my cock or wedge it between pillows or mattresses hum and cum into. I wish I could find an old ad for that thing. It was a sort of proto-fleshlight.

I also put my penis into socks, shirts, jocks, ripe melons, banana peels, raw meat…

I tried zapping it with an electrostim machine I had to rehabilitate my knee after surgery. I just strapped it to different parts of my dick instead of my quad muscles…

It’s interesting to me that I was less interested in putting things in my ass than in stimulating my cock itself, but I think that’s just how I’m wired. I like anal stimulation as much as any guy, but I’m far more dick-hungry than butt-hungry. I think it’s safe to say that I just don’t think about or crave a mouth or dick in my hole ever, although I really enjoy it a lot when it happens, it’s not on my A-list. I think about putting my dick inside other guys all the time… I’m also turned on by the thought of fucking a trans man… as long as he’s a hairy guy…

As I understand it, if a guy is not successfully conditioned to not masturbate, to avoid sexual pleasure through psychological aversion like religious condemnation, he is likely to follow his penis into all kinds of experimentation and exploration, including some incredibly dangerous places.

This almost universal drive to devote an unparalleled portion of one’s life to exploring a tiny percentage of our bodies’ real estate is emblematic of the innate importance of sexual pleasure and our evolutionary heritage of sperm competition, but also the ancient Greek aphorism, “Know thyself.” In the absence of aversive influences, we naturally delve into our own bodies and become explorers of our personal landscape.

I think it’s natural for us to gradually move from one area of exploration to another as our lives progress, and I think it’s likely that the suppression of sexual exploration prevalent in so many cultures frustrates that natural “moving on” process so that we become more obsessed with sex than we perhaps should be. 

My personal experience is that the more one knows the landscape of one’s own sexual response—the freer one feels to own one’s own mojo without reservation or hesitation or shame—the better one is equipped to share one’s true self with one’s fellow humans, the more easily we are able to connect intimately with one another.

I am so grateful to have had relatively little intense sexual aversion as a horny young pup, just the same ambient bullshit we all grow up with. I often wonder how different our lives would be if we were allowed and encouraged to masturbate and explore our bodies healthfully. I don’t believe that teaching children about sex is inappropriate, abusive or wrong in any way. I think that neglecting to be completely honest and positive about sex is abusive. We need to give our youngest explorers the tools to navigate their lives intelligently so we might eventually move out of this long, dark, frustrated sexuality we’ve been stuck in for centuries.

We are all natural explorers. It is part of our evolutionary heritage: To find out more—to go further—to explore deeper.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

I haven’t been able to quickly find the survey I read a few years ago, but I’m going to cite it now and come back and amend this entry with a link later…

A large, popular sex survey was done by some Canadian magazine a few years ago, and it had a lot of interesting results (because hello… it was a sex survey…) but there was one statistic that leapt from the screen and branded itself in my mind.

In response to the question, “Would you like more intensity in your sexual experiences?” Thousands of respondents seized their pens and gave one common response in thundering unison: Yes!!!

100% of respondents to this survey said “Yes, I would like more intensity in my sexual experiences, thank you very much.” My thoughts spun around that universal agreement and has continued to do so ever since… It was a very straightforward question. It didn’t ask, “Are you dissatisfied?” It just asked if you would like more intensity.

Twenty years ago, I sat in a 12-step meeting listening to a bunch of drunks and drug addicts sharing about their recovery and one guy said something that similarly made a lasting impression: “I’m not addicted to ’drugs,’ What I’m really addicted to is ’more!’”

The two ideas seem related to me. Okay, the two ideas are obviously related, although one references sexual experience in general and one references a behavioral disorder. What I know is, these statements are true for me in both contexts. I would also like more intensity in my sex and I am addicted, for want of a better word, to “more” in all areas of my life. I want more food, more money, more love, more clothes, more muscles, more sex, more semen when I cum, more men shooting their loads all over my body…

Forgive my related tangent… There’s a lot to chew on in the assertion that all people want more intensity from sex, so I will just chew on this one little morsel over here: Safe sex is, reputedly, less intense than unsafe sex, and is therefore counter to our natures (unless it includes some measure of increasing excitement, in spite of the apparent nature of safer sex, and safety in general, being the quality of “boring”).

“Safe” is sometimes used interchangeably with “boring.” What we experience as excitement is actually our reaction to a symphony of chemical reactions in our bodies that include adrenaline and insulin and cortisol and testosterone and a mad soup of hormones and enzymes and… stuff… that makes us react to life. It seems the top cause of excitement is threat, a sudden perception of danger that puts us into response mode.

So there is something inherently more exciting in the moment a bare cock slides into your ass than in the experience of a becondomed cock making its benign entry…

Dog bites man: Danger is thrilling. Lack of danger doesn’t make those same chemicals pump into our veins and so “safe” sex has less appeal because… we all want MORE INTENSITY.

Oh sure, we can settle for safer sex, for a primary focus on the elimination of threat and taboo, but if we’re going to continue to experience the fleeting satisfaction of sexual excitement, we have to find ways of not being TOO safe… of taking responsible sexuality to a more exciting level without genuinely endangering ourselves…

I think this is actually part of why jack off clubs can work well for some people, the key element of newness, the natural “not 100% safe” feeling we get with a stranger’s cock in our hands allows us a modicum of thrill… There’s also the disorientation—for the newbie, anyway—of group sex, but even community sex, social sex practice when one is accustomed to seeing sex as an exclusively very private act…

We are, thankfully, not wired to be excited only by danger. Evolution has provided us with a long menu of options for feeling excitement… Like shaking up a routine, changing roles, changing scenes, changing partners… As the manager of a JO club, I consider these drives in the context of running a successful non-profit business, sustaining a community…

I think there’s a lot I understand about men and the way they relate to each other as friends, lovers and casual sexmates, and so I do not take it personally when relatively few men are consistent members of the club, but come and go, sometimes disappearing for weeks, months or years only to reappear later, fatter or thinner or stronger or weaker or very much the same… but just ready to experience some excitement from the experience again. Many can do that with a JO club.

This is why the Jacks has, by design, a loose architecture of rules, that allow some latitude and encourage exploration within some boundaries. This is why most clubs deemphasize the “safe” aspect of the sex and instead focus on the kink part, the thing that’s fun for us rather than the no-fun things we are being safe from…

I’d be interested in comments related to bringing more intensity to shared masturbation. God knows, a lot of men continue to find ways of adding intensity to solosex… What do you think?

Thursday, September 16, 2010

You may disagree with me, but I feel strongly that masturbation is sex.

It seems ludicrous to me that anyone would think otherwise, but I know we like to parse words and find ways of telling our stories so that we can continue to do what we want to do.

When a man fucks a woman without a condom, it is sex. There’s little argument there, but there are some who think it is not sex as soon as you put on a condom. You can see where this kind of thinking leads…

Well, if you can’t, it leads to disease pregnancy and Catholics. Three things the world could definitely benefit from less of. 

The problem is, it’s massively dishonest. I suspect we make such distinctions because of our primordial drive to procreate, and the natural inclination to not let anything get in the way, but a lot of it is to justify any kind of sex that’s not conventional. You know, the fun stuff.

Guys on the DL justify gay sex by telling themselves that it’s not “sex.” As I’ve said before, this is like the Christian sorority girls who swallow cum and take it up the ass but justify it because they’re still “virgins” when it comes to “real sex.”

The denial is what makes us sick, and makes our sex sick. When we’re open to sexual possibility and honest with ourselves and our loved ones, we actually get the sex we desire and those cravings don’t come out in malignant ways (like abusing thousands of children all over the world…)

A.C. Grayling said, “Imprisoning sexual feelings is an invariable recipe for potentiating them.” In other words, suppressing our sexual needs doesn’t make them go away… it makes them stronger.

Now, I saw a Canadian sex survey a few years ago that had one question that received a 100% affirmative response. The question was, essentially, “Would you like more intensity in your sex life?” I think this is part of why we find taboo so erotic, the idea that being bad or naughty is more fun than sanctioned, vanilla sex. I would as,“Do we have any idea what sex feels like really free from any trace of taboo?”

I think that the individual sex acts we participate in, from bareback fucking to conceive to cocksucking, pussy licking, every conceivable kink and every individual alone, making love with their own cock or clit, is all sex, all equally valid, all part of being sexual animals.

The intimacy I experience jacking off with a man while surrounded by dozens of other men, is just as intimate as any sex I have, as long as my mind and heart are there in the act, and I’m not distracted by the pointless babble of the inner critic, the inner moralist. It’s all about what I bring to the moment that makes it intimate, but it’s all sex. Sex is a general term and I don’t like to over-parse it.

I don’t have to argue about a muffin being food in comparison to a hamburger or an apple or a dish of peas… They are all food.

The sooner we accept that the sex we have is sex, the sooner we can take ownership of our pleasure and start experiencing genuine sexual health. Even if it’s a very basic step in that direction. So let’s start there: That quick wank you had in the shower this morning? That was sex. That blow job you accepted from a gay guy? That was sex. You had sex with him, even if you did not reciprocate. Wake up and stop parsing the word. You’re having sex. Enjoy it!

The last course of this blog binge is below. I hope you’re as relieved as I am… You can read part 1 here and part 2 is here.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

In 1990, I moved to Chicago at age 32. I was still a total slut but I had shortened my playlist by then and stepped away from bottoming completely. On the rare times that I did fuck, I was always a top, which I definitely felt more at home doing, but in general, I didn’t focus at all on anal sex.

And then, within days of arriving, I was scanning the personal ads in the Windy City Times, a typical crappy gay newspaper, and I saw the ad for Chicago Jacks. My response was instantaneous: All I wanted to do was find them and sign up. There was no doubt that I wanted this, I only wanted to get in there and experience it myself…

The sign-up process was ridiculously convoluted. I had to make a photocopy of my driver’s license and mail it with a check for $25 to a PO box, all of which could have been a scam but I was a man obsessed. I don’t think I knew how much I’d been craving this scene until the possibility was in front of me. I though of little else. I even think I remember the moment I dropped my envelope in the blue mailbox and began counting the days until I heard something back from them. I knew there was a risk that they were just going to take my money and blow me off. That would be easy enough to do… But I was hopeful and waited.

The envelope had a mimeographed calendar of upcoming events, an address and an information sheet about the club. I mainly remember the calendar, how they had a few events every month in a re-purposed VA hall in Wicker Park owned by the Hellfire Club, a long-lived leather community in Chicago. I saw the schedule had an event for wearing Speedos, and another for underwear… My mind spun.

I will recount the tale of my first Experience at Chicago Jacks another time, but almost instantly, Chicago Jacks became my primary sexual outlet. Yes, I still cruised phone sex lines (this was before computers took over my social life) and the beach and the streets and I very certainly masturbated enthusiastcally on my own, but I was replaying my electric moments at the Jacks, remembering the feeling of multiple loads dripping down both of my legs, the feeling of a man’s impossibly firm butt as he straddled my thigh as he stroked, remembering standing and stroking cock-to-cock with a very relaxed man with a very alert penis, and moment after moment…. I loved that club.

And less than a year after finding and embracing the Jacks, I met a man while working on a play I was understudying for. He was wickedly smart, strange, very funny, talented and sober… We had a lot in common. Three months after meeting him, I told him I loved him and that same night said that I thought I might actually want to be monogamous. I meant it.

I wasn’t trying to drive anything away, and I didn’t feel guilty for anything I had been doing. I just had fallen in love. I don’t think I’d really done that before as an adult, but then again, I’d only been drug-free for two years so adult-hood was actually kind of new to me…

And so ended my time with the Jacks and so began a relationship that is about to enter its 19th year. Much later, I would find out that Chicago Jacks folded a year after I stopped going there. I felt sad.

I don’t know when I started to understand that there was a special fascination for me about the jack-off club experience, but it was definitely there long before I experienced it in the physical world. It has held a fond place in my heart ever since I saw that ad in the Reader and I think that I will always want to support it, even after I’ve lost the ability to participate myself. I know this is my kink, something most men don’t focus on, and I’m completely at peace with this. Many kinds of sex turn me on and satisfy me, and there is only one person in the world I really need to make love with, but I’m grateful that I can do this too.

As Pee-Wee Herman says, I’m the luckiest boy in the world!

Wow. You go right for the meat, don’t you?

I had to think about this. “Importance” isn’t an easy thing to measure since it’s relative to so many factors…

I think the most important thing I’ve gotten out of my involvement and participation in JO clubs is a strong sense of sexual self-possession.

What I don’t mean by that is narcissistic self-absorption, and I don’t mean that I’m more objectively centered on my penis. I mean that I have developed a strong sense that my body, my cock, my sexual response, my whole life is completely my own. I am fully responsible for my cock and fully in charge of what happens to it and who interacts with it. I am also fully freed of responsibility for the pleasure of others. In other words, if I’m attempting to give pleasure to a sex partner, and they’re not having it, it’s not my fault or responsibility. There’s no need to take it personally. Either our energy just doesn’t match up at that moment or we have no natural, mutual chemistry. It’s nobody’s fault.

Mutual pleasure is then a mutual gift, a generosity of intimate being and something that should always be viewed as a generous gift, not a duty or routine. This is why, in new member orientation, we put a strong emphasis on the ownership of each cock being solely vested in the man it is attached to. A man owns his own penis and is in charge of it. Fully accepting and embracing that concept is, I believe, an essential part of true manhood.

It does not mean being selfish, but it means not surrendering responsibility for your actions to anyone else. It is true maturity, and it is a kind of true honor.

All my opinion, of course… my personal philosophy and ethical code.

But I do suspect that it is not just me, but part of a common experience available to all healthy men. When we discover masturbation as boys, and partly as an outcome of keeping it to ourselves for a time, keeping it private, I believe there is common potential for an experience of original self-possession with respect to our penises and by exploring them, our real sexuality. There’s a sense that “This is mine” and, “This is magical.” At least until it becomes more or less routine as we get older.

Our culture teaches codependency in myriad ways in almost every corner of our lives. Codependency and addiction in general embody a breakdown in the appropriate placement of responsibility—in placing our own responsibilities in others and taking on those that do not belong to us—and the recovery of a sense of real responsibility is an essential element of recovering a healthy life.

This is something I got deeply in the course of participating in JO clubs. From my communications with other long-time Jacks and organizers of clubs, including original New York Jacks lore, this sense of all of us being in charge of our bodies is common in the culture. I think it’s something that not all, but many men who are drawn to JO clubs can and do experience, and reflecting on this question, I believe it is not only something I personally have experienced, but the single most important thing I’ve gotten out of it.