Free Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression by Susie Bright Page B

leap to erotic adulthood, it’s been the reverse challenge for men to rescue their boyhood loves from the dumpster and to lavish a little tender

    loving care on their own romantic visions. There are plenty of men who are turned off by explicit pictures or who’ve never said a coarse sex word out loud. There are many men who find that an allegory of unreciprocated love and yearning is a thousand times hotter than a gang-bang marathon. These men, if they are heterosexual and want to be seen as such, find that they have to defend these preferences as vigorously as if they were protesting their very malehood.
    Our society’s attitude toward the vanity of masculinity is so rigid and hysterical that it almost seems that a man has to come out as a homosexual just to have a heart. The Tin Woodsman must obviously be a fag. After all, didn’t he only want to love and be loved more than anything else? He’s tender, and he wants nothing more than to increase his tenderness. “Off with his penis!” cry the keepers of the Real Man Registry. Stop the kissing and hugging. If he’s going to cry, let him rust away.
    Men are much more confident and aggressive than women about finding a way to make their sex stuff work; they aren’t as likely as women to sacrifice it. But over and over again, they will hang themselves up at the crucifix of the wounded male animal, wondering how much masculine power they have to surrender in order to be themselves. If they’re too soft, if they feel too much, will they lose their hard-on? It seems like a silly question, but GI Joe’s legacy begs for an answer.
    Some men are so guilty and appalled over their past limitations that they think they have to abandon ship altogether, that their hard cock truly is “in the way” of recovering their emotions. The activist-author John Stoltenberg is probably the person who has argued most persuasively that “male supremacy [is] so insidious, so pervasive, such a seemingly permanent component of all our precious lives…that [our] erection can be conditioned to it.”

    In his essay “The Politicization of Pornography” he illustrates:
    There’s a cartoon, it’s from Penthouse. A man and woman are in bed. He’s on top, fucking her. The caption reads, “I can’t come unless you pretend to be unconscious.” The joke could as well have taken any number of variations: “I can’t get hard unless—I can’t fuck unless—I can’t feel anything sexual un-less—” Then fill in the blanks: “Unless I am possessing you. Unless I am superior to you. Unless I am in control of you. Unless I am humiliating you. Unless I am hurting you. Unless I have broken your will.”
    Only a few men have spoken out militantly on this subject, but I can see the terror in many men’s faces when they think, “Yes, this is the price. If you give up your male vanity and arrogance, there goes the erection, too! I guess I’ll just have to settle for being a prick!” Or others may say, “I’m not a monster, I want not only a conscious lover, but an equal”—without wanting to pay much attention to how masculine sexuality got such a brutal, indifferent reputation in the first place.
    But men and women don’t have to settle for being prisoners in their little gender dormitory. Girls can be women with real adult sexual appetites; men can be love bunnies and still have raging hard-ons. It’s true. I’ve seen them, I’ve petted them behind the ears, I’ve shared their contradictions, and I’ve even swapped a few doll parts. The point isn’t to disown the masculine or feminine characters of our erotic identity, but rather to realize we’re hardly all of one piece, and we can’t claim our whole sexual selves if we insist on male and female segregation of our own feelings.

    I didn’t get my own “cock consciousness” until I made love to a woman who wanted me inside her. I’d never felt what it was like to take direct initiative with sex, to ask people out, to get