The following is a commentary piece submitted on 2 October 2003 for possible publication in the Washington Blade, DC's gay paper. I thought it was high time to try getting the masturbation message out to a wider audience, and at the same time, counter the subculture's dangerous over-valuing of anal sex as the absolute peak of male/male intimacy, and something that "everybody does." I will keep you updated on what happens with the Blade. -- B.Jack
Top, Bottom, Versatile? None of the Above...
by Rob McGeeLast week I decided to upload some racy photos of myself wearing nothing but a smile and a woody to one of those websites specializing in amateur pics of men showing off their equipment. (Don't laugh -- I know some people disparage this sort of do-it-yourself erotica as the pastime of desperately unattractive pervs, but I see it as a vast source of free porn, potluck-style.)
There was an online form allowing users to fill out basic ''stats'' -- age, height, body type, hairiness, and so forth -- in the hopes of hooking up with chat buddies or actual sex partners. I started typing in the appropriate answers, and then I got to this item:
I'm a...I hesitated -- where was the button for my real, honest answer to the top/bottom question? Namely, ''I'm neither. I don't like anal. Yes, I've tried it, both ways, and I find it uncomfortable, as erotic as cleaning a litterbox, the very opposite of intimate, and I'm frankly sick of faking an interest just to avoid losing a guy.''
__ Top
__ Bottom
__ Versatile
__ Prefer not to sayLet me flash back to the early years of my sexual history. Though I didn't come out as gay until my fourth year at the University of Virginia in 1992, I'd known since the dawn of adolescence that I liked to think about naked men when I masturbated. And what did I imagine myself doing with these guys? Well, jacking off together, for sure. Maybe taking his penis in my mouth if he'd let me. Kissing I wasn't quite sure about at that age -- it seemed, you know, rather gay. The one activity that never appeared on the fantasy menu was fucking. I mean, what was so erotic about the lower end of the digestive tract?
Post-college, when I had come out and found a gay social circle, my older and more experienced friends tried to enlighten me. By that point, I'd tried anal, both as a top and a bottom, but still didn't get what the appeal was. My friends advised that plenty of practice with a dildo would open up a whole world of delightful sensations for me. Well, I hadn't liked beer the first few times I tried that, so I bought a small rubber cock and dutifully practiced. The results were disappointing -- it wasn't that the sensation was without pleasure, but rather that the extra boost from the prostate stimulation was so modest, and seemed scarcely worth the discomfort and mess.
Meanwhile, I'd entered what would become a six-year relationship. My boyfriend let me know early on that he liked to bottom, and I did my best to oblige, but being inside him was joyless for me, and I couldn't think of anything less intimate than looking at the back of his head.
Still, topping him was preferable to gritting my teeth and thinking of England, which is what bottoming invariably meant for me in my experiences before and after those six years with my boyfriend. Thanks to some j/o buddies I hooked up with as a newly single man, I began to figure out at last what I really loved -- mutual j/o and genital-on-genital rubbing with plenty of kissing and body contact, which some enthusiasts call ''frot'' or ''c2c,'' for ''cock-to-cock.''
But most gay men seemed to want anal, and I continued to halfheartedly consent, thinking I must be wired differently. Then, in the past couple years, I began to compare notes with other men on masturbation-oriented websites. I heard from many other guys who confessed that they found anal sex to be a chore at best, physically unpleasant at worst. Men who said they were privately relieved if a partner didn't ask to fuck or get fucked. Men who, like me, had unexpectedly discovered that non-penetrative ''frot'' could feel much more intense, pleasurable, and intimate than buttfucking ever had.
I also found a website run by one Bill Weintraub, who advocates frot and unsparingly slams what he calls the ''dictatorship of analism.'' Weintraub documents the extraordinary energy that gay cultural forces -- our pornographers, our playwrights, our safe-sex educators -- have put into promoting and defending anal sex. This despite the fact that virtually every case of HIV transmission via male/male sex is attributable to anal. Not to oral, and certainly not to mutual j/o. And despite the fact that, for many men who've tried both, non-penetrative frot feels much better than fucking.
Weintraub urges that men-who-love-men abandon anal sex altogether. I have a pair of less radical suggestions for the community at large. First, if you're a man who has ever pretended to enjoy anal more than you really do, stop it. There are guys out there (me, for one) who will be thrilled that you want to stick with healthier types of sex. Second, the ''Use a condom, every time'' slogan is criminally inadequate. Of course, putting on a condom is a sensible risk-reduction approach. But for the love of God and human reason, what the message should be is:
Mansex doesn't have to be anal to be hot -- so consider not fucking. (But if you must, wear your rubbers.)
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