(Men’s bodies, steamy man-on-man sex, all in raunchy street talk, as you will see immediately, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Yesterday, in my posting “Prone, splayed, and humped up”, I looked at spatchcock(ed) chicken as a metatphor for getting ass-fucked in the prone position: (body) prone, (legs) splayed, (buttocks) humped up.
(#1) The roasted chicken analogue
Displaying your body in this position can serve as an offer of it; you can be easily fucked like this (a simple prone fuck), or you can raise yourself up on your knees, offering yourself for a doggy fuck. Illustrations from sites that aggregate scenes from gay porn and classify them by theme for easy searching:
(#2) Prone fuck, body fitted to body: intimate
(#3) Doggy fuck, body driving into body: intense
Prone and doggy are closely related positions in the family of out-facing (“rear-entry”) positions vs. in-facing (“missionary”) positions for ass-fucking. Points for these rear-entry positions: the angles of entry are easily adjusted for the comfort of both men; little agility or athleticism is required of the receptive guy (missionary positions are generally difficult, even painful, for me, because of my back problems); the insertive guy is afforded a full view of the ass he’s fucking, and that’s both satisfying and arousing in itself. Points against: the receptive gets the merest glimpse of his partner’s face; the insertive gets just a side view; it’s hard to kiss properly.
Still, they’re easy and physically satisfying, and they were my preferred positions for getting fucked by strangers at the baths, back in the last century when I did that sort of thing. Now, the short version of the story is that these couplings at the baths are usually initiated with some urgency on both sides, so that smiles and expressions of affection often go by the board in the drive of raw sex. If you’ve been reading my postings, you know that smiles and affection, especially kisses, are very big things for me, but different occasions, different practices, and with any luck there will be ample opportunity for smiling and kissing in sexual afterglow, the pleasurable postcoital moments of languorously lying in one another’s arms and talking softy to one another and just enjoying the surfaces of one another’s bodies.
Getting (way) beyond who does what to whom. My posting “Prone, splayed, and humped up” is almost entirely about anatomy and sexual mechanics — about perceptible things and events. That’s easy to talk about, but, as I’m given to pointing out, It’s Just Stuff. What’s important for actual people is the psychological payoff in the stuff: what I think of as the emotional meanings of the stuff. I went to the baths for sexual connections, with getting fucked at the top of the desirables list (and getting sucked off just behind it, but pretty much everything was negotiable), but why did I love to get fucked?
Well, you say, because it felt good. But even just considering the act as sexual mechanics, it’s not obvious why I should experience having a dick jammed into my asshole as pleasurable. (Most men would not, and saying that I’m a guy who’s sexually aroused by dicks tells us almost nothing about the path that would lead to my craving dick up my ass.) And that’s without giving any thought whatsoever to the relationship between the guy who brings his dick to the event and me as the guy who contributes his asshole to it — the relationship that leads, among other things, to sexual afterglow as an experience of mutual pleasure.)
I have, on occasion, explained the physical pleasures of getting fucked by another man, by describing the components of an ass-fuck. Three parts: stimulation of the exterior anus and the anal ring (which, like the lips and mouth, are jam-packed with nerve endings); fully packing the rectum (which stretches to accommodate fairly sizable contents); and massaging the prostate. Describing things this way is all bodyparts and mechanics. But each portion of the event can be experienced as pleasurable, stimulating, exhilarating, affectless, uncomfortable, annoying, weird, embarrassing, painful, and no doubt many other ways. As welcome, surprising, or invasive.
For me, it was generally welcome: I invited men to fuck me (though I took some care in selecting them — I was certainly a fuck-slut, but also a discriminating pussy-boy). And I found all three portions of the event intensely pleasurable (pleasure, as opposed to neural stimulation, being in the mind and not the body). I enjoyed having my asshole played with, opened up, by finger, tongue, or dickhead; I truly enjoying being filled up by my fucker’s dick, having his body inside mine; and went crazy when he hit my button.
That last sentence is all about the emotional content of these experiences — for me. You’re entitled to wonder what specific emotional values attach to the parts of getting fucked for me, and I have answers for some of it (but only some of it: the springs of our desires and pleasures are largely unavailable to reflection). Being filled up by my fucker’s dick is a big thing for me — and for a great many men (“Fill me up with that big dick!” is a common sexcry, in gay porn, but also in real life) — because his body is inside mine, becoming one with me, so that we’re sharing our masculinity, multiplying it by our joint action, and that sense of becoming intensely masculine and powerful is very satisfying for me.
Three things. First, you might well find my feeling that getting fucked enhances my sense of masculinity to be paradoxical and peculiar (and it might be a minority opinion — though a fair number of guys view getting fucked as “taking it like a man”); conventionally, a man getting fucked is being treated like a woman, so receptives are more or less automatically judged to be lacking in masculinity, or even as actually feminine (just to remind you: analogies and metaphors are not identities). In any case, a considerable number of men are happy to embrace, in greater or lesser degree, the symbolic femininity in getting fucked — a move that starts with valuing aspects of conventional femininity (I would hope that everybody gets on board with some of that), and moves on from there to incorporate some of those aspects into their views of themselves, their presentations of themselves, and their understandings of their sexual practices. There are many ways to compose suites of such views, presentations, and understandings, of course, all under the broad banner of effeminacy. The point is that other men find very different emotional meanings in getting fucked from mine.
Second, as presented here, my view of getting fucked as an emotional experience is deeply self-centered (even selfish). I went to the baths and offered my ass for guys to fuck so that they would give me what I wanted / needed (as a physical and emotional experience). I was of course aware that they were there to get what they wanted / needed and I was happy to accommodate them as much as possible; I am an amiable and cooperative sexual partner, but basically our desires were sweetly complementary, and each guy could just forge ahead to maximize his own pleasures, without attending much to the other’s pleasures. This is classic guy stuff; guys just wanna get laid, whatever getting laid is for them, and it’s every man for himself. (A lot of women just hate this attitude in their male partners.)
So we’d just plow on to our mutual satisfaction until he came; then there was a menu of end games for me, my favorite being jacking off while holding his dick still in my ass (which is intensely pleasurable for both men) and he encouraged me with dirty talk.
The key point here is that I never framed what I was doing as serving him, servicing him, getting him off. Eventually, my experiences in having sex with men, talking to men about having sex, reading about men having sex, watching porn of men having sex, and so on led me to a lot of men who frame things in just this way. “I like to get guys off” is what they say, and it’s a central emotional value for them. Sometimes they’re cheery and enthusiastic about it, sometimes quiet and accommodating. (I note that this attitude is often judged to be conventionally feminine.)
Third, broadening our view. Starting from the beginning of an account in my Xblog posting of 8/30/10, “The baths in a new world”, reporting on the San Jose CA gay baths in the late ’80s / early ’90s:
I am lying, naked, on my stomach on the bed in a [small] mirrored room, my face turned towards the open door to the narrow hallway. In principle, this means I’m offering my ass to be fucked, but in fact the signals are more complex than that. Men passing by will read my exposed ass in combination with my outward gaze as a general openness to sexual connection, including but not limited to a willingness to be fucked. If I turned my face away from the door, I’d be making one request – fuck me – not any kind of offer. If I lay on my back and contemplatively stroked my cock, it would be understood that my ass probably wasn’t on the program. If I sat up stroking my cock, offering it, then it wouldn’t even be clear that I was interested in other guys’ cocks. If I used my towel to cover my crotch, I’d be presenting a puzzle and a challenge.
I always lie naked on my stomach, eyes towards the door.
What’s more, when a guy entered the room, asked “How’s it going?” or “Want some company?” (lame lines to break the ice), maybe put a proprietary hand on my hot hairy ass (if he needed a smooth body, he wouldn’t have come into the room, the goods were plainly on view), I always smiled at him, to establish a relationship with him, and rolled my body back enough so that he could see my dick and exit quietly if it didn’t suit him (a surprising number of men don’t want to be sexually serviced by a guy with what they see as a small dick; the psychology is complex). A really nice guy would use this gesture as an occasion to cement a friendly relationship by briefly stroking my cock or taking it into his mouth. Then, most often, after some negotiation (verbal or non-verbal) things would slide into a prone or doggy fuck for me. But even if it was fuck-time and not something else, no two occasions were the same.
The emotional tones of the encounters were all over the place. Sometimes playful and inventive, with the two of us laughing together. Twice, pretty serious B&D, with me as the sub. Once, S&M, with me as the dom. Sometimes I’d go in heat and demand to be fucked harder and deeper. Sometimes we switched to cocksucking, once to him jacking me off while I kissed him. Several times, we rolled onto our sides and my guy fucked me slowly and sweetly in that position. Sometimes a workmanlike fuck, together doing a damn good job, him grunting, me moaning. Once, just once, a guy judged my nature and character and instantly transformed our encounter into a lovers’ secret afternoon — stepped back, held out his hand so I’d get up and shake hands with him, introduced himself gravely with his real name (not the sex names guys use for their subterranean encounters) and a little riff on his ancestry, so he got mine in return, kissed me, and launched us into several hours of varied sexual play (sometimes me leading, sometimes him), spinning raunchy fantasies, joking and kissing, telling each other pieces of our life stories, resting in each other’s arms, and just aimlessly hanging out. A dream Afternoon At the Baths.
Very little in what I just wrote is about anatomy and sexual mechanics, bodyparts and positions. Mostly it’s about emotional meanings and values and the nature of (sexual) relationships. It’s all the stuff in our heads that’s important, even though that’s incredibly hard to talk about.
Important things about this emotional world:
— there’s an enormous amount of variation in the emotional meanings for a piece of stuff: different meanings for different people, for one person on different occasions, for a couple in different contexts
— a single piece of stuff (like a cowboy fuck) can have multiple emotional meanings for one person on one occasion (I’m serving him by sitting on his cock, I’m using him like a dildo, I’m in charge of our encounter, I’m getting him off, I’m bonding with him through smiles and kisses, and on and on)
— those emotional meanings can shift during an encounter
But back to prone and doggy. A Twitter comment from Richard Vytniorgu on 6/13 (which is in fact what prompted this posting) about my “Prone, splayed, and humped up” posting (you might want to go back and look at #2 and #3 again):
I think prone is often considered more intimate, especially for the bottom, who cannot see the top. The top might embrace the bottom this way, unlike in doggy etc. It can provide comfort and intimacy.
The comments are clearly focused on emotional meanings, and in general I agree with them. The fit of body on body in prone is literally intimate. The weight of the top’s body can be experienced as sheltering and protective, and the constraint on the bottom’s movements as comforting (rather than restrictive). The top can lift his hips to piston in and out of the bottom’s ass if he wants, but he can also offer the bottom a subtle and gentle fuck (which satisfies me enormously); he can also, as Richard points out, embrace the bottom. And both men have their faces close to the other’s body, close enough to smell one another (smell is a big emotional thing for me). Or to whisper appreciations.
Both men can then experience this position as especially affectionate (coming close to melding the two bodies together), sweet and easy.
Of course, those are not necessarily the emotional tones the two men want; a fair number of man-desiring men are wary of affection, closeness, and emotional openness, preferring instead to exhibit power, dominance, energy, and independence. (These attitudes are obviously closely tied to normative masculinity, with its aversion to what is perceived as feminine. But they can manifest themselves in a variety of complex ways, and in different ways in different men on different occasions.)
In any case, these more intense, even aggressive, emotional tones can be well served if the bottom just raises his ass by getting up on his knees. This small postural change causes the the top to rise up on his knees, into position to pound the bottom’s ass, driving into it. And so moves the bodies of the two men apart. In any case, the top now gets the emotional satisfactions of pounding another man’s ass, whatever those satisfactions are for him. And the bottom now gets the (very real) emotional satisfactions of getting his ass pounded by another man — submission, feminine identification, endurance, proving his strength, accepting humiliation, absorbing the other man’s power, a giant mixed bag of emotional values (which can in fact be experienced simultaneously even if they might appear to be incompatible; it’s entirely possible to simultaneously enjoy being humiliated and exhibiting strength by rising above a challenge, or to simultaneously enjoy identifying as feminine (in some ways) and masculine (in others).)
As it happens, in several decades of sex at the gay baths, mostly getting fucked, I found prone and doggy to both be enormously satisfying, in somewhat overlapping but mostly different ways. Some days you want to paddle a canoe gently in a lazy stream, some days you want to go white-water rafting, some days you want to experience a little of each.
I think I’ve said this before, but let me repeat it: Richard Vytniorgu and I are both receptives / bottoms, but with somewhat different tastes. In the crudest terms, he’s fem and sub and I’m masc and dom — but with huge asterisks on both masc (I’m quite far from normative masculinity, and not just because I’m a fag) and dom (I tend to like being in control, but mostly just in service of getting what I want; in the right circumstances, I’m capable of demanding, not begging, to get fucked). I hate the labels, but our somewhat different brands of homomasculinity do involve salient aspects of normative femininity and masculinity. The terminological problem is how to avoid importing the value system of normative masculinity (which devalues things that smack of femininity in any way).
Bonus: a lexical note on doggy vs doggie. From NOAD:
adj. doggy: [a] of or like a dog: his doggy brown eyes. [b] informal fond of dogs: it was a doggy household. noun doggy (also doggie) a child’s word for a dog.
The construction we want to describe the act pictured in #3 has the head N fuck ‘an act or instance of having sex.’ (NOAD), in combination with a preceding modifier, either an Adj conveying ‘like, in the manner of a dog’ (so, with stylistically neutral choices underlined: (elevated) canine fuck, doggy fuck); or a N referring to a dog (so: dog fuck, (slangy) pooch fuck, (childish) doggy / doggie fuck). As in: Bill and Ted begin every day with an excellent doggy fuck / dog fuck. Both of those choices sound fine to me, while doggie fuck would have the childish N (sort of like the cutesy bow-wow fuck); so between doggy fuck and doggie fuck, I’m inclined to prefer doggy. But it’s a small point, and actual usage goes both ways
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