(About men’s bodies and about sexual peasure, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest. Meanwhile, more chapters in the story of my sexual life; and, again, that might not be for everybody.)
As for packages, this is specifically about the male genital package, as playfully represented (metaphorically) by the banana and eggs in these little Spanish lessons (from my long-ago collage-making days):
(#1) The metaphorical penis
(#2) The metaphorical testicles
My banana and my eggs, they comfort me. In fact, they do, and that’s the first thing I’m going to talk about. The second thing is that if you’re an old guy, nobody wants to hear anything about this, it’s just embarrassing — but I’m going to push against that attitude.
(And I note that though I’m talking here from a male perspective, the two main points apply as well, with some adjustments in details, to women.)
A companionable life with my package. When things are going well for me physically, my package is in synch: it easily provides me with pleasurable ejaculations when I want them, and it doesn’t obtrude on my life with demands for attention otherwise.
That’s where I am right now, after a long period of troubled times, during which my package periodically went to sleep for extended periods of time. Now my body is working the way it’s supposed to, and that makes me very happy. (So I’m telling you about it. In fact, I would wish for something comparable for everyone.)
Then a complexity: the sexual act that my package facilitates for me is in fact masturbation (and this has been my way of life for over 15 years). There are many who feel very strongly that this isn’t real sex, so I suppose they think I ought to be trying to hook up with other guys. My various physical disabilities make such encounters awkward at best, and I don’t think I could cope emotionally with being on the sexual marketplace at the age of 80, but since I’m now living in isolation in the face of Covid-19, the whole matter is moot.
In fact, though, I’m quite happy with my solitary sexual life. It wouldn’t suit everyone, and that’s fine with me.
Sex (and social life) for old guys. It turns out that many people (including many medical professionals) find my open discussions of my sex life embarrassing: (a) the idea of sex among the old is icky, period; (b) there’s a strong deriding (with its roots in religious beliefs) of one of the relevant acts, masturbation, as worthless and unproductive; and (c) there’s another kind of moral objection (again, with its roots in religious beliefs) to many other sexual encounters among the old, on the grounds they involve sex outside of marriage and/or sex without enduring commitment. The old are expected to be sexually proper, and also quiet.
For gay men, things are even worse. Almost all the gay men of my generation were wiped out in the previous great plague, the AIDS crisis. As a result, a gay man of my age in search of a partner (for a moment, for the rest of his life, or anything in between) will be looking at younger men, and many people take a dim view of cross-generational relationships — as necessarily exploitative, on one side or another. I’m out of the sexual marketplace, so this is no issue for me; but other (unpartnered) gay men of my age have a real concern.
(All of these issues are blown up for people, but especially gay men, in care facilities of various kinds — places where gay men are likely to confront hostility and incomprehension in a number of forms. Such places strike me as nightmares, but my family reassures me that I that I would adapt easily, as I have in the past on being thrown into alien and unwelcoming environments — by altering myself and finding a niche where I would be at least minimally acceptable, by exploiting my amiability and empathy (see digression below). After a career of quite public intransigence about my sexuality and a life as a highly visible queer, I view the idea that I should just change myself to fit in — time to stop making a spectacle of yourself, you old faggot! — insulting; and I doubt that I’d be willing to do it.)
[Digression: I’ll tell the story in another posting, but I haven’t always adapted easily on being thrown into an alien and unwelcoming environment. In fact, the first serious, near-catatonic, depression in my life — I didn’t want to die, exactly, but I did want very much not to be, and it took me a long time to come out of it — was triggered by finding myself in an alien and unwelcoming environment that I couldn’t cope with. (The issue was not, at least directly, my sexuality, but was instead my masculinity. Still… ) That was 60 years ago, and it is still vividly unpleasant in my memory. I did in fact eventually find a complex kind of work-around built on my amiability, but I certainly wouldn’t want to use that fact as an argument that I really could adapt to anything.]
The fact is that, thanks to soc.motss (in its various incarnations), I have tons of gay male friends (even, in a few cases, boyfriends, back in the day), but all of them are young enough to be sons of mine (and some, grandsons). That used to be of little consequence, since we were socially, in effect, the same age. But now I am damaged and no longer very mobile and require care, and the nature of these social relationships is changing, in a way that distresses me: after some 50 years or so, I am once again a parent and less and less a friend. A parent, but now a burden and maybe an embarrassment.
At the moment, I’m in a good place. I can mostly care for myself, and I’m able to continuing spending most of my days on my writing, which is the central thing in my life. I need help with some things; for example, I now need help handling my medications (whereas I used to do it all on my own), since there are now something like 17 different ones, to be taken on a complex schedule at 6 different times of the day.
Problems that have been accumulating since a bout of pneumonia last March (and, of course, the withdrawal from alcohol) are improving. I’m sleeping well and have plenty of energy. My taste problems — for a while I lost my sense of taste and smell, and then afterwards I had little interest in most foods, which tasted unpleasant and metallic — continue to moderate, so that I’ve been expanding the range of foods I can take pleasure in. The terrible memory problems that afflicted me after alcohol withdrawal finally largely submitted to many hours of rehearsal and slow dogged practice. (For those who have been following this blog closely: Wells Fargo – Yahoo! – Punjabi)
And, as I said, I now have a companionable life with my package. Most people don’t want to hear about an old man’s jack-off pleasures, but I’m always willing to push the envelope.
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