English single-sex private schools, paradoxically known as Public Schools because in the 14th century they were supposedly open to anyone whose parents had the money rather than just members of the aristocracy or clergy, are strange places. Supposedly refined and middle-class they could be brutal places once the veneer of privilege had been lifted. In the 1960s they were arenas of sexual repression and guilt too.
As a non-white scholarship boy coming from a home that was by turns both conservatively libertarian, Victorian and prudish in nature, I knew next to nothing about my penis as a child. With an absent father, I was brought up by my mother and my grandparents and, though sex was referred to obliquely and jokingly in adult conversation, it was not discussed. My mother perhaps felt unqualified to talk about male sexual matters, my grandmother would certainly have been too embarrassed and my grandfather might have been concerned that it was not his place to talk about such things. So such things were not talked about. My pre-pubescent erections were an embarrassment when I was at home and shameful by the time I went to boarding school.
When puberty started to strike, masturbation was not so much something I discovered but something that revealed itself as an aching, throbbing, thrilling and troublesome force that seemed to be controlled by an outside entity; as if some alien spirit or sexual ghost had taken over my desires. And, regardless of the reputation that Public Schools had for being centres of homo-erotic pleasure, any talk of sex that was not overtly heterosexual was condemned; the general air of aggressive machismo being thoroughly antithetical to gentle erotic discourse, let alone correct or useful information.
I felt both addicted to and mistrustful of masturbation, I disliked my penis and yet was fascinated by it and in thrall of the cultural power it was supposed to possess and that I, as a male, was supposed to possess too. Such is the pervasive power of patriarchy and assumed male supremacy; values that were most openly displayed had their roots in assumptions which were never discussed without recourse to prejudicial, rhetoric and invective posturing.
I have therefore not been comfortable with words like cock, dick, todger or john-thomas. They carry with them a swagger, an embarrassment or both. So I have always preferred the word penis. It’s a rounded word that, being technical in the public arena, becomes more promising in the private world of real sex. Vulva has that effect too, though cunt and cock are perhaps on the cusp in that regard as they gradually shake off their insulting shackles and become charged again with loving purpose.
My first genital sexual experiences, after masturbation discovered me, were at boarding school with boys of my own age. Some of us, as we were to discover later, were heterosexual, some gay and some in between or both, and I have no reason to think the mix might be statistically different from the rest of the population. But such was the pressure to be heterosexual that we all either assumed or pretended we were. As it happened, after my first kiss with a girl, I knew that genital sex was not a measure of general orientation and I have felt heterosexual ever since; a discovery that was somewhat of a relief as I had suffered terribly from not being mixed-race in a culture that was, at the time, only 0.5% non-white and could not face the thought of being gay too. If that societal pressure had not been present I think I would have been happily bi-sexual and I suspect so would huge numbers of men, given the chance.
Intellectually, I am as happy with my penis as I am with the rest of my body but emotionally, it’s a different story. The childhood shame still lingers. I’m a tallish thin man of sleight and slender build, sometimes camp in movement and gesture and always wanting to seem more substantial, more reliable and more heterosexual. In that regard, I’m the male equivalent of the heterosexual tom-boy woman and have always been attracted to androgyny and the declassification of gender expectation. Yet my loves have been of many different shapes and sizes; for the mythology of love is as unreliable as the mythology of sex.
I’m fascinated by pornography yet it doesn’t do it for me at all – well, perhaps only rarely. Mostly I’m amused, amazed and surprised that the market for the myth outweighs the desire for the real; and yet it is all too predictable given the power-relations involved. The exceptions are those images which my partner and I produce images and writings for each other and it has been, in part, through that process that I have learned to love my body more and feel less ashamed about my penis. I hope too that my partner’s experience has been similarly positive, but I do not speak for her.
My favourite masturbation is within partner sex and my strongest masturbatory orgasms have been during phone sex when we have been apart for a couple of weeks. Solo can be pleasant but feels more like an essential health treatment than a sexual act of love. And while I feel guilt-free at the time, the old shame and guilt still kicks in afterwards; though I know it now for what it is. I tend to touch and hold myself gently, firmly and with slow movements, usually with only one hand; my thumb crooked around the base of my penis, my fingers on and under my balls (does anyone like the word testicle?) and the addition of fingertips around my perineum. My other hand is usually stroking my belly, chest or thigh. I like to take my time.
Well, it seems I am over my allotted 800 words and will end soon. I only add that it has taken decades for me to get this far and I sincerely hope that prevailing power-relations do not continue to cast sex in the old moulds that have so drastically misshaped the beauty of sexuality for so many men and women of my generation.
