What, he's a fish. (That is, he's out of place on dry land -- tends to flop around aimlessly a lot. He's also an asshole, a cheap shot artist, and a Bad Mormon. The last you realize if you read his lips during a game.)
And, yes -- penis.
So, pdog, you're saying he's a dickhead?
Wow! I'm gone all day and look what happens. This is turning into one of the funniest threads I've ever read.
Soz, I hope the sozlet's feeling better. Come back when you can.
CodeBorg--if this gave you the idea of making CodePrincess a happy woman last night, the articles had a nicely positive effect.
Cavfancier--two? I guess you really do cook!
BeachBum, have to decide: do you talk to it or about it? You are among friends, remember.
B_P Bear, you are invited to my next party. Please bring you-know-who along.
Patiodog, loved the lyrics, but don't quit your day job. Quips are always welcome, especially when answered by Deb, littlek, or ehBeth or Soz, if she isn't too busy with the sozlet.
The next series of stories will be in the next two posts.
Enjoy.
Some men talk about their penises, others talk to their penises; others, yet, get answers from them.
There's a novel, called "Io e Lui" ("Me and Him") by famous Italian writer Alberto Moravia, in which a man talks with his penis. The penis advices him in the arts of business and seduction, with the disastrous results you can imagine.
Two films have been made out of this novel. I saw the Italian one, and it sucked (no pun). The German one is better, I have been told.
Here goes. I think I'll try all the stories in one post--just hope it doesn't overload a2k!
The Penis Papers, Part 2
When he's at the wheel of his limousine, it's all about listening to his female passengers. But later, in bed with them, his phallus is the engine.
By Terence Clarke
May 14, 2003 | A grand lover of women
Eddie is a limousine-for-hire driver in Chicago. He's a very large black man of 38. He wears a black suit, white shirt and black tie when he drives, and black leather driving gloves. His sunglasses are by Gianni Versace. Extremely articulate, he is nonetheless soft-spoken and very kindly.
I wanted to cultivate this image of being a grand lover of women. So I speak this way, with this voice, because I want to be a man of authority. Not cruel authority. Rather the kind of man in whom women feel they can find strength, sympathy, intelligence.
I've found that women respond very favorably to a man who does two things: He asks them questions about themselves, and then he listens to the answers. It's remarkable how few men seem to do this. I've been very successful doing it. If you show respect for someone, they'll respect you, and I've had many women fall in love with me, or just want to go to bed with me, simply because I listened to what they had to say. I ask more questions and listen to more answers, and it has always worked.
In my work, I meet a lot of women. Women going to the airport, women going to the theater, women going to the museums. We talk while we drive, and that's where I find out if I'm going to ... well, usually I can see it in the rearview mirror, the way their eyes look at me. So I'm asking questions, listening to their answers, and watching their eyes. Not directly. Not overtly. Just glances from time to time. I can see it in the glances.
If a woman invites me into her apartment, I know I'm in. I'm very considerate. I don't push too hard. I don't insist. But when we begin making love, things change. Then it's as though this engine takes me over, and my penis becomes the center of everything. It feels that way to me, and the women feel the same way. They tell me that. They think I'm fine, attractive and all that. But they think my penis is a dynamo, some sort of creative blizzard.
This has been going on for years, and I used to classify it as a kind of gig, like a musician's gigs. But lately I've begun to understand what it's like for a musician to be on the road, night after night, club after club. It's got to be difficult for them, playing in so many places to so many audiences. But I imagine the thing that sustains them is the fact that they're playing. They're improvising all the time. They're looking into their hearts, no matter whether it's in Philly, Pittsburgh or Chicago. No matter the moment, they're feeling their heart.
It's not like that for me. I'm beginning to think that, although my penis is talented, its talent is nothing more than superficial. I'm playing the notes, but what the tune can mean, what it can make you feel -- that eludes me. These are nice women, usually. Some of them have even been in love with me. Some of them. But after it's all said and done, they don't really seem to be into it.
My penis is into it, but not my heart. So every time I get into my car and drive away, I feel like this beautiful limousine is pulling from the curb with a well-spoken, considerate, grand lover of women in it who, way down deep, is a shallow loner.
A gringo lover
Jeffrey is 28 years old, born and raised in Los Angeles. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, works in investment banking and is a salsa dancer of remarkable ability.
It doesn't interest me so much, but it sure interests the women I dance with that I'm white. I mean, look at me! I've got this curly blond hair. I look like a Swedish accountant. If you were a film director and you wanted to cast some swarthy matinee idol to play the lead in your movie about Che Guevara, maybe you'd go to Benicio Del Toro, but you'd never even look at me. Maybe you'd let me park your car or something. I mean, you wouldn't even notice me.
But I was born in the barrio in East L.A. My parents had grown up there and the Latinos just moved in around them over the years. I spent years dancing salsa, at junior high school parties and in high school. I've been going to the Mayan in downtown Los Angeles for years, and that's the biggest salsa club in the world! So, I can dance! Salsa, son, son montuña, mambo, merengue -- all of it.
Everybody was used to me in L.A., so this wasn't a big deal. But here in New York, it is a big deal. You know the Copacabana on West 34th? Every Tuesday night at 6 they have a deal where you can get in for 5 bucks. Five! And that includes a buffet meal -- you know, chicken, rice and beans on a paper plate. But it's delicious. The crowd gathers outside after work, so you see hundreds of women, every kind of woman, mostly dressed for work because that's where they're coming from. Wool skirts. Heels. Conservative! But these are Latin women, so they're there to dance.
The minute the doors open, the DJ starts up, and those guys play the best music ever. The dancing is immediate. The first time I went to the Copacabana, I couldn't get anyone to even look at me. I stood in line, and I had a coat and tie on because that's the way I have to dress at work. I did get a few looks, but they were mostly of, uh, amusement. I went inside and got a plate of food, and sat down to watch the dancing. It was right away astonishing, just as good as at the Mayan. The difference was that at the Mayan the women are dressed in next to nothing. It's L.A., after all. At the Copacabana on Tuesdays they all look like lawyers. But they're lawyers that can dance.
I sat and watched for about an hour, and no one even noticed me. But then I asked this one girl to dance. Alma. She's Puerto Rican, very cute, with beautiful makeup. She was wearing a business suit, kind of State Department style, you know, dark blue with a dark gray blouse. Except she had on 3-inch red heels that she'd brought in her purse. I asked her to dance because she was absolutely the best dancer on the floor. But when I asked her, she looked at me as though I was the geek who wins the science prize in high school. I think what got her to acquiesce was that I asked her to dance in Spanish. That was a big surprise.
The bigger surprise came after we'd danced a number (it was a Ray Barretto) and she asked me to dance another one.
"Where you from?" she asked. "L.A.," I said.
"Everybody out there dance like you?"
She had kind of a Robert De Niro accent. I liked it.
"No," I smiled. She smiled back. "I'm the only guy that dances like me," I said.
Something that has always attracted me about Latina women is that they represent the Mediterranean to me. Warmth. Blue sea. They're very comfortable with themselves. I mean, anyone who can dance the way they do, can look at you the way they do, has to be comfortable about how they feel about themselves. Because they're moving in fact the way everyone else can move, but doesn't.
But Alma saw me as the exotic, I guess because she thought I'd had to come so much greater a distance than she had, just in order to dance the way I do. I mean, an emotional distance. A cultural distance. A white boy who dances like this?
Not that we talked about it all that much. Mostly the exotic thing for Alma once we had a chance to really, uh, relate is how my penis looks. We had danced several nights together, and really had started going out. She asked me to her apartment one morning after we'd danced all night. We were lying on her bed and she was kissing me. She was a little undressed, beautiful dark skin, with a gold necklace on, her eyes made up in blues and dark purples, beautiful. Black hair, fine hair shining in the light. And she took me into her hand and began giggling, a giggle of surprise, of delight.
"I never saw such a thing before," she said. She glanced up at me, into my eyes.
"I never made love to a man like you, Jeffrey." She kissed me.
"How so?" I asked.
"You're so pink!"
Lately, from some of the remarks that friends of Alma make -- kind of behind my back -- I think I'm getting a little reputation. I'm unusual. You know, there's always been this thing about Latin lovers? Well, I'm a gringo lover, and so there's a lot of speculation about me. It's nice speculation, just like Alma's laughter is nice. It's the laughter of -- discovery.
Jolene
Jolene's given name is Edward. She's been Jolene for about 10 years and is very close to signing the paperwork for a sex-change operation.
I told my mother, and even though she was shocked out of her mind at first, she finally agreed, and now she supports what I want to do. My mother's been just great, really great about it. I'm not sure my dad would have been so, you know, so willing to go along. In fact I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have been, and I guess it's good that he passed away before all this got to be such an issue. I've been through all the hormone changes. I haven't shaved in years. I've got tits now, beautiful ones and, you know, I'm kind of shapely!
The one thing that I find both funny and irritating, though, is that I still get these looks now and then from people in elevators or at the supermarket. It's as though they know! They can see that I'm, well, a tranny. Not quite a man, not quite a woman. I think it's because of my hands, actually, and maybe my shoulders. I'm a little embarrassed by my hands, if you want the truth. They're like my father's hands, and he was a building contractor. His were like slabs of meat. Mine are too, sort of, even though they're, well, they're more refined than his were! But it is hard to find a nice ring for my fingers. Women's rings don't come in my size.
This paperwork's a problem, though. Not that there's so much of it or anything. I mean, I can fill out a form! But I can't really do it yet. It's not as if I don't want to. I knew when I was 3 that I was a girl. Being a boy just never was interesting to me. So even though I had nice pairs of jeans and cowboy shirts and all that, I spent all my time being a girl, at least in my heart. I got beat up a few times in high school, by those jerks that go around beating up queers.
So it was a real blessing for me to get out of Las Vegas and go to Columbia. I was happy at Columbia. I got to read what I wanted to read, wear skirts and blouses, go shopping for shoes with other girls and be a girl, like I always wanted to be.
But still there's this paperwork. And here's the problem. I sit at my desk with my robe on. It's satin. It's dark blue. Real cute. There's all this paper in front of me. Releases and newsletters and legal documents and all this stuff! But there's also me spread out before me. And when I open my robe and look down at me, that's me there. My penis! I never thought of it as even a penis. Maybe a bulbous vagina. Or a kind of large-ish, uh, clitoris. But when you get right down to it, it's a penis. That's for sure. Can I possibly just erase it, like I'm planning to do? Is that fair? I mean, is that fair to it? Oh, I know I'll have a nice little pussy and it'll be pretty and womanly and all that. But I think, despite everything I just said, I worry that that penis really is me! It's just very confusing!
Everything in my life has been aiming toward this change, and in my heart, now, for the very first time ever I realize I'm a man, too. I sit here wondering, how can this be? Me? A man? So I touch it and a look at it and I try to figure out how I feel about doing it in like this. I probably will. I'm pretty sure I will. I've always been excited about what I'll be gaining when I do that. But it's likely I'm going to be losing something very important, and I'm worried about it. Worried about it! Which is something I never thought about until the moment I started filling out the damned paperwork.
Tomorrow: Little Timmy gets me in trouble
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About the writer
Terence Clarke is a novelist and screenwriter in San Francisco.
Fbaezer, Io e Lui sounds hilarious. I'll see if I can find it in the video store. Did you see Talk to Her? Not really about talking to penises, but still a touching and funny story about sex and insecurities.
Diane, the Italian film is truly bad, if you want to, rent the German one. I haven't read the novel (though Moravia is a very good writer).
About Talk To Her, here's the thread on A2K:
http://able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6826
Hmm, must preserve continuity from my previous post...
Most men would think that being born with "Siamese penis syndrome" would be a blessing. Funny thing is though, the average 6 inches was divided 3 X 3. I named the little buds Eng and Chang, in honour of the original Siamese twins. Another problem with "Siamese penis syndrome" was the wee black faces on their tiny heads. This made inter-racial dating a problem...I would ask, "Would you be dissapointed if my head was wearing blackface?" and for some reason, they always ran. Eventually, through much hand training, I made emotional peace with the little guys, and found the confidence to date again. Coincidentally, I met a dwarf woman with a small double vagina who was greatly satisfied with the trouser dudes, and she remains my wife to this day. It just goes to show you, God has a plan for everyone...I feel so much better for sharing...
True story: A friend of mine has two uteruses (uteri?).
If she ever has twins, each one could have a private womb.
But they have to check-in before they can check-out!
Her boyfriend says it was difficult, because once in a while
he'd get sorely confused.
He was a real trooper on the job though,
would just put his head down and pull a double shift.
No joke. Really.
Anytime I am in hospital, I insist on a private womb...
Seriously, I have heard of this. Fascinating...
Yeah, I'll third that hearing of...
Hmmm, double penises, double uteri, LOTS of double talk! The ability to avoid the issue shows all the creative wit that I admire in all of you!
Fbaezer, thanks for the recommendation. I'll see if I can find the German version, although I might not be successful until I get back to Connecticut.
Too bad the Talk to Her thread ended so soon. I need to rent the video again to refresh my memory; the posts have brought back subtleties I had forgotten.
What do all of you think of these stories? Do they seem credible or made up; honest or enhanced with wishful thinking?
I find them to be fascinating. I've never read about or heard men talk this freely about anything this intimate before in my life. I like the fact that they could set aside the usual jovial kibbutzing and speak with such detailed intimacy.
I don't expect that on this thread--it is far too public for that to be comfortable for any of you, but I would like for you to address the impact these stories have on you. Can you identify--not with the individual stories, but with the way each man tells the story and the sense you get of his honesty? I would be just as interested in how women have reactied.
I'll post the third series of stories either tonight or tomorrow.
Here is Part III:
The Penis Papers, part III
Little Timmy
Tim was once a salesman for a printing company.
I hate to tell you this. I mean, I'm pretty embarrassed. But I was working at a company until last year, where I'd been for 10 years. There was the "A Team" and the "B Team" and I was always on the "A Team." They were the salespeople that sold more than $10 or $12 million dollars a year of printing. So there were cruises every year, golf vacations, stuff I won all the time because I sold so much.
I had three clients, the largest of which was a huge bank. The buyer there was a woman named Beth, and I'd always liked her. So much that I broke the one rule that I said I'd never break. I took her to lunch, which was OK. I took her to dinner, which was OK. We played golf. But we got involved.
I'd never done that sort of thing before because I knew how dangerous it can be. But she had made it very clear that she wanted me. And, once we'd consummated the affair, how much she wanted Timmy. "Timmy" is what she called my penis. "Little Timmy" actually. She had names for every part of me. My balls. (I won't tell you what she called them!) My tongue. My right hand. But Timmy was always Timmy.
She loved Little Timmy, who she said filled her up. Also he had talents at the entrance to the Tunnel of Love. Her skin was very soft there, like little flesh tulips, sort of. And she loved it when Little Timmy kissed her there or, you know, sort of mooshed around, up and down, in and out a little bit. Kind of playing with her there at the entrance for, you know, a long time! Used to drive her to distraction if you want the truth.
Something happens when you display that kind of interest. That kind of playfulness. I was amazed at what power those sorts of "nothing" actions can have. But they do! They have real power. But what happens sometimes is that you get to places where you feel immune to ever being caught, like those securities traders at big companies who lose billions for the company and their clients. Because they feel they'll never be seen, that their abilities to hide money transactions show how smart they are and how they'll get away with the whole thing.
The same thing happened here, only I wasn't trading billions of nonexistent dollars. I was just mooshing around. Like a dummy, I got panicked. I couldn't stand the pressure. Those meetings with my VP of Sales every month, when he'd ask me, "So, Timmy, how's Beth doing over there at the bank?" Of course he meant, "How's the account doing?", not "How's Beth's love life?" But every time he'd ask a question about her, I worried that maybe he knew what was happening.
No, the pressure got to be too much. So I asked Beth, could we stop? Please! Couldn't we just go back to the way it was? Her response was to get so angry with me that she threw me out of the office. Then she called me, time and again, many times. I'd talk with her, but she couldn't understand what my problem was. Weren't we happy? Didn't I love her? She came to my house one night and confronted me with wild weeping. I had to ask her to leave, which only made her more furious.
So my VP called me in after a few weeks and asked me "What's this about Beth?" I asked him what he meant. He told me that she had called him and asked that I be removed from the account. I was untrustworthy. I wasn't responding to her calls. I'd become indifferent to the account, she said, and here she's got a half dozen printers a day calling her for her business.
"So what's goin' on, Timmy?" he asked.
I mumbled a few answers, which he interrupted by calling Beth while I was there, and asking for an appointment with her. Could we both come to see her? She said yes. So we went. When we got into the office, she went into a monologue about what a silent salesman I'd become, how it was that I seemed so absent, that I didn't care for the account anymore, that I didn't return phone calls, that I didn't send her paper samples, that proofs were always wrong, that I missed appointments -- it was all a lie, but it got me fired, finally.
She had gone on to say that any company that would hire someone like me, any vice president of sales that would hire a guy like me, didn't deserve her business. The VP guy told me later he'd never been so pissed in his life, sitting there taking **** like that, getting blind-sided like that. He said he'd always thought I was a stand-up guy, and here I'd been deceiving the company about my activities. Not returning phone calls! "How could you do this, Timmy?"
I never admitted to him the truth of why Beth was so angry because I felt that if I did he'd not only fire me, he'd probably kill me as well. So I'm out! The company's out. Little Timmy and I got fired, and he's the reason I've got such a bad cash flow problem right now.
You know I worry very much about this. It's as though my penis were my personality, and what's that all about? Power? Maybe, but I'm the one who's powerless now. I thought I wouldn't get caught, and it was all for that feeling of release, that clutch that coming gives you, and all the liquids and the writhing and the movement. It's all so glorious. But in this case it was also all so misleading. I just worry that I'm hanging off the end of it, instead of it's hanging off the end of me.
"The book is the penis that gives me the message"
The father of all letter carriers
John is a printer of religious books in Atlanta. He speaks in a very refined way with a deep Southern accent.
When I was in high school I read a lot. This was a kind of secret endeavor because my friends were the guys on the football team, student government types, and guys who owned and worked on cars. Reading was not their first choice of something to do.
What I read drove me even further into a kind of secretiveness. I liked parlor novels. So, "Little Women" has always been a favorite of mine. I can read Jane Austen over and over again. Barbara Pym is a true model for how to write such stuff. "Mrs. Dalloway." I was a guy, nonetheless. I mean, a guy. I did sports and became an outdoorsman, a skier, a hiker. Women have always told me that that's a source of my appeal, that I am such a guy.
What they haven't always known is that this particular guy is interested in 19th century women's dress, in the unexpected revelation of love in a letter to the heroine from an unknown admirer, in the details of a ride through the English countryside in a chaise-and-four. In the way sisters help each other find a beau. In the worried meddling of mothers. Even when I've told women about my reading, they still have told me "Gee, that's wonderful, especially in someone like you who's so obviously -- a guy!"
So a few years ago I decided to just look at myself. I mean, literally. In the mirror! I hadn't thought about it much, if ever. What does a guy look like? I mean, I know what a guy looks like, but I'd never really looked steadily at myself to see what it is that makes me a guy. There were a lot of things. My chest is big, muscular. My legs, too. The feet and hands aren't so big, but they're thick, especially my fingers. When they're resting on my chest, they wouldn't be mistaken for a woman's hands. I looked at all kinds of things. My upper legs. The way my feet approach the floor when I walk. All kinds.
But what I found myself not looking at was my penis. It was as though I wasn't supposed to look at it. It's not something that I've paid a lot of attention to in my life in any case. It's just a part of me, and I haven't much thought about it as a being unto itself. But when I realized that I was being prudish, that I was being shy about my own penis, I decided to go ahead and have a look.
This was a revelation because I quickly realized that I was observing the part of my body that is most spectacularly intimate. It's the channel that delivers my entire genetic make-up to someone else! The whole message that I have to give is contained by that penis for those few seconds of passage, as my sperm surges up it in a mad race for release, for embrace, for connection, the intimate connection with someone else's message. It's filled with nerve endings, and each one of them is seeking release, a glut of release. So it plunges into the closest of intimacies, and glories in it when it gets there.
Knowing this, I look at my penis now whenever I have the chance. The father of all letter carriers! This has also helped my reading. I now know that novels are a similar form of intimacy to what I found in my penis. They bring the glut of feelings and thoughts that the writer has to offer. The book is the penis that, in a desirous frenzy of words, gives me the message.
What I've always liked in the novels I read is the sensuous detail. The women and men who write such books understand that perfectly, so Jane Austen, with all her delicacy, is writing all the time on every page about sensuality. I wonder if she realized that, pen in hand, she was fashioning a penis of her own.
The laundry
James is a wealthy man with a tight, pursed demeanor who parlayed millions in inherited money into many more millions through his management of a group of news and media companies. He is 60 years old and a very conservative Republican.
I was going back to Yale for my second year, and my father was driving me to the railroad station. Whenever you looked at my father, no matter what time of day or night, chances are he would be wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, dark tie and black shoes. I'm not sure he even owned a pair of brown shoes. He was a gruff man. His patrician clothing and frigid manner, his distance from everyone around him, belied his very occasional salty humor.
During our drive to the station in his Packard, he engaged me in the first conversation I ever had with him about male sexuality, the function of the penis, about my sexuality and my penis in particular.
"James," he said, turning a corner, "we've had to send too many of your sheets to the laundry lately."
That was it. I went back to Yale. The remark was typical of my father. Deadpan. Understated. Dry. Hilarious. But I have a large regret about that day. That is, that one of the most humorous opening gambits toward a really important conversation I've ever heard was not an opening gambit at all. It was a closing gambit, an endgame. My father and I never talked about sex again.
Tomorrow: Penis problems
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About the writer
Terence Clarke is a novelist and screenwriter in San Francisco.
Diane , 3 interesting, if not revealing tales of human emotion.
#1 I think goes t prove that relationships with someone you work with can be fraught with danger
Diane , 3 interesting, if not revealing tales of human emotion.
#1 I think goes t prove that sexual relationships with someone you work with can be fraught with danger, and needs very careful navigation
#2 a rather pragmatic view of things perhaps
#3 masturbation is fine, but just like with eating , clean up afterwards.
The penis is a remarkable organ in what it does and what it produces in the way of reaction and emotion. Between the extremes of disgust and adulation.
I've a problem with the former, biased I spose. How can it be disgusting. It is part of us, we live with our penis night and day. Most of the time it's out of sight , out of mind. When it's released sexualy, the penis gives tension, excitement, satisfaction and frees so many stresses that have bound us up.
Do women tho like looking at pictures of naked men, in the same way that men look at naked women ? Are mens pictures adored with or without an erection ? How do womens minds react when a man holds her and kisses her and she feels him, his penis hard, pressing against her. And does it matter if a man is circumcised or not.
Whatever it does, the penis isn't going to go away, so let's accept it for what it is and enjoy it. I've enjoyed having mine.
John, I've not seen many pictures of naked men, which makes me wonder if it is such a social taboo that there haven't been many pictures available. I'm sure this is directly related to the double standard in western countries, especially in the US and, I would imagine, in South America.
The answer to your question, for me at least, is no, I didn't find the picture very exciting; but I can't answer in the way you asked because I don't know how men feel when looking at a picture of a nude woman--aroused, I suppose. I wasn't aroused when I saw the picture of a naked man, but this might call for some research.
Thankfully, I think the shamefulness of sex has been reduced greatly since the 60's, including normal bodily functions such as masturbation.
Women most definitely are aroused by the feel of a man's erection while they are kissing. I wouldn't care about circumcision or not, but I can't speak for other women.
I am beginning to realize that these stories have fascinated me far more than the men who have responded. Perhaps, simply because they are men, they are not surprised by these stories. I have found them to be an incredible insight into what a man feels about himself and his sexuality.
Thanks to all who have responded.
Quote:John, I've not seen many pictures of naked men, which makes me wonder if it is such a social taboo that there haven't been many pictures available. I'm sure this is directly related to the double standard in western countries, especially in the US and, I would imagine, in South America.
Diane, the pix are out there. They might not be as easy to find or in the same quantity as female nudes, but they're out there. Jerry always found some good ones. I think male nudes are often designed for gay men rather than for women. Must say something about double standards.
I already mentioned here, in another discussion, a study that measured physiological responses and found that women react just the same way to visual stimulation as men do, but are less likely to SAY so. Maybe they really don't
think so, either...?
I don't mind pictures of naked men one bit.
And yeah, the guy's level of arousal makes a difference.
