Be Your Own Librarian

What is it that makes one fantasy (scenario/category of images/set of words) work one day, and not another? What is it about the real-life context that determines which particular thing it is that's going to send you over the edge this time?

Because it is, precisely, determined: in the sense of involuntary, unconscious, produced and constrained by factors that are outside your control. Except perhaps for those relatively rare times when I'm so insanely wound up that just about anything will make me come very quickly indeed, the process of masturbating to orgasm is a twofold journey. There's the physical journey, the feel of fingers on clit, of cock in cunt, of exploratory probing, which very soon fades from conscious awareness and kicks into autopilot. Meanwhile I'm deeply lost, absorbed, in the mental journey.

There's a library in my mind; the shelves are stacked with memories, with sounds, with ideas, with images from pornography which have been used and re-used so many times that they're almost unrecognisable from their original form. Worn smooth, stones at the edge of the sea. Rarely whole scenes, just something about the expression on a face, the look in someone's eyes, a snatch (nopunintended) of breathless speech, that grabs me for a reason I don't understand.

The mental journey to orgasm is a walk through this library, a survey of all the shelves and their strange overlapping classmarks. It's my own, it's idiosyncratic, stocked with all of the things that have worked for me over the years. But it's a diverse collection. Blood, pain, pissing, eggs, classrooms, laboratories, machines, animals, transsexuals, lesbians, furniture-fucking, exposure, humiliation...

At first, I browse tentatively, my attention ranging widely, picking up the occasional book and flicking through it to see what, if anything, grabs the attention. Playing the warmer - cooler - warmer - warmer - cooler - warmer - warmer - hot! hot! game. A rapid slideshow of images, people, juxtapositions, present themselves to the mind's eye, to see what works.

And the strange thing, to me, is the unpredictability of what does turn out to work. Something that seemed, last week, to be the absolute source and heart of my desire, is empty and flat today. It just doesn't fire. And then something else, that seemed absurd or even disgusting another time, seizes and hooks me. And I fall back against the library wall, breathless, every bit of my body heated up. It's this set of images, these words, this particular movement, that plays and replays and zooms in and repeats and intensifies until the moment where the physical and mental journeys reunite, where it all comes together, unbearable, transporting, all-powerful. A universe in a grain of sand.

Watching Men Come

In feminist writings, I've often encountered the argument that the emphasis on cumshots in porn is purely for male gratification: that it provides confirmation of his potency and his orgasm and disregards the woman's pleasure.

I can understand this view to a certain extent. Generally speaking, it's not that exciting to have someone ejaculate on you. [Notwithstanding my occasional bukkake-style fantasies, which are about degradation and exposure and excess and mass loss of control, and may or may not get a separate post at some point.]

And yes, the emphasis on the male orgasm as the endpoint of sex can definitely be detrimental in real life, even if it does provide an easy narrative closure. But I think these critiques perhaps miss the fact that for some women - for me at least - seeing a bloke come is very very erotic.

Admittedly, a lot depends on the specific way it's represented. I'm not aroused by watching a woman's face or breasts as she waits to be splattered on: in particular, the emphasis on women looking apprehensive or resigned or disgusted is unappealing, and probably somewhat misogynistic. And porn which fetishises the spunk itself doesn't do it for me either. Bubbles? No no no.

But watching a man masturbate - the gradual build-up, the rapid, instinctive, almost unconscious movements of his hand as he gets close, the twitches in his belly and thighs and balls, the sudden pulse through his body in the millisecond before he comes, the moment where his consciousness is annihilated - is incredibly erotic.

Hardcore pornography breaks down the boundaries between fiction and reality, performance and life, and this is perhaps most evident in orgasm. It must be difficult for a man to come on command in what is most likely an unsexy and uncomfortable environment. So to see him overcome that, to get to the point where the context doesn't matter any more, and he's just intent on reaching orgasm ... appeals to me very much, for some wrong reason.

I actively like the disjunction between the industrial conveyor-belt nature of porn and the immediacy, the realness, the physical ooomph of watching a man ejaculate. I like seeing him have to make a conscious mental effort to block out the surroundings. I like the flicker of relief in his face when he realises that, despite the situation, he is going to come.

Yeah, that's not right, is it?