Thoughts on just being a guy

[sebbie]

Part VII

In this part, I am going to discuss some ideas that most guys are very reluctant to admit to or openly discuss with anyone—and that list includes parents, siblings, male friends, female friends or literally anyone. What I am about to say applies not only in the post-puberty teen years but also may represent closely-guarded “secrets” that continue to apply to guys in relationships, married or not, and even throughout a guy’s adulthood. What could be so important to a guy that it is necessary to keep as such a closely-guarded secret, anyway?

Well, the answer to that question of course is anything that has to do with solo sex, more commonly known as masturbation. I have thought about this a lot and also about how this applies to those in a sexual relationship with another person or not. As many of my readers know, another aspect of this involves situations where two males, are, say roommates in a college dormitory, and exactly what happens there.

As a young guy growing up, a guy quickly learns that anything involving jerking off needs to be done privately and without attracting the attention of anyone else who might be in a position to learn something even inadvertently about what a guy is doing. Of course, a guy also quickly learns that pulling this off without leaving any post-ejaculatory traces to be uncovered is all but impossible to do. At minimum, there are those starchy yellowish stains that show up on whatever a guy wears to bed at night, on the sheets, or worse. Whoever does the laundry, say your older sister or even mom, is going to see something that suggests that the guy must have gotten off.

Then there is the problem of nocturnal emissions, or so called wet dreams, which end up probably leaving a trail of crusty stains in the morning. Is it better to act as if these stains occurred while the guy was completely asleep and not awake and helping the process along a little? In short, can some “remnants” of ejaculating be more easily rationalized or explained away? And who really cares if the event was a true nocturnal emission while asleep or something the guy may have encouraged in some manner. This is no small problem for a teen male, who probably is confronting all of this on a daily (or nightly) basis and each “event” may require a new approach for dealing with the post-ejaculatory consequences.

Then guys also quickly learn that if night time jerking off is fun, doing the same during the day can easily be more fun. But then there are additional problems relating to privacy and being discovered as well as covering your tracks. Male shower masturbation is the choice for a lot of guys because (1) a shower is usually private and (2) the post-ejaculatory “evidence” gets washed down the shower drain.

Still, this is not a perfect solution either, and most guys come up with alternative methods as well.

To be continued…

[sebbie]

Part VIII

Interestingly, this is where the items of snug-fitting clothing enter the story. But first, let me make a couple points with respect to basic male anatomy.

First, the penis is highly sensitive to anything that touches it, except that one also needs to realize that the sensitivity of a guy’s penis becomes much stronger and psychologically more interesting if there is an erection going on. Obviously guys function normally with a flaccid penis under whatever clothing they are wearing, and they somehow “tolerate” the sensation of whatever cloth is touching, rubbing or brushing against their penises in their normal daily activities without constantly going into erection mode.

The sensitivity of a guy’s penis is not the same over its entire surface. There are warmer spots and cooler spots in this regard. Touching, rubbing or stroking the top side of a guy’s penis in general will elicit less of an involuntary erection response that the exact same thing happening on the penis underside. There is a biological reason why this occurs which I won’t go into here except to say that if a guy wants to quickly get an erection he needs to focus his efforts on the underside of the penis. The glans or tip that is also largely on the underside is a real ejaculatory “hot spot”, so hot in fact is attention is directed toward that small area many guys can and do ejaculate even before.

For guys, in normal daily activity wearing ordinary clothing the flaccid penis will be pointed downward with any clothing item such as underwear only touching the top side of the penis. This allows a guy to go about his normal day without being concerned about the possibility of accidentally getting an erection just from what he is wearing down there.

The whole idea of wearing loose-fitting cotton boxer shorts is linked to the idea of not wanting to have to deal or cope with an unwanted erection occurring in an inappropriate time or place.


As the fit of the underwear becomes snugger, the possibilities for placing oneself in a position other than down are enhanced. It depends on what a guy would like to have happen and whether or not whatever happens occurs in what can be called a “safe” area or not. A snugger-fitting pair of cotton briefs, or even a longer-legged pair of what are called boxer briefs, allows a guy to put himself into another position, still flaccid, but pointing forward not down. Interestingly, unlike the down position, this gives a guy access to the underside of his penis. A lot of guys discover that with that access, it doesn’t take more than a few strokes to begin to get hard. This is the way many guys must begin to learn the nuances what it takes to have a great masturbation session. After all, the cotton briefs will do a nice job of collecting the ejaculate and can be easily tossed into the weekly wash without raising comment from others whoever they might be.

Of course, as a guy gets harder the penis can move from the forward position to the up position with the underside of the penis rubbing against the cloth of the brief. But it is at about this point that a guy learns that the type of cloth used in the undergarment matters in terms of how all of this feels down there and that a smooth stretchy fabric introduces some sensations not obtainable from, say a coarser-textured pair of cotton briefs. But wearing something in a smooth slick fabric will also signal to male peers (say in the locker room of a gym) that you are aware of all of this, and probably, well… The issue of course is that other males probably know why you are doing what you are doing and are, at minimum, at least amused by what they think might be happening.

That hasn’t stopped the underwear manufacturers from coming up with lots of designs aimed at attracting buyers who want to engage in this type of behavior alone or with a partner. Options are everywhere. Further as guys enter adulthood, chances are they have accumulated a bunch on items they find useful in pleasuring themselves. Younger guys keep some of this stuff hidden in the back of a dresser drawer. College roommates face additional issues in this regard, especially roommates who somehow think they need to convince each other that they never masturbate.

The list of items guys like to jack off in include not only pieces snug-fitting underwear of various sorts and swimming briefs but also other items such as athletic supporters, wrestling singlets, compression gear etc. Each guy has a separate list of things he likes and each guy thinks at some level there must be something “wrong’ with him for pursuing this stuff.

Still, what guy would NOT like to secretly have a snug fitting swim brief in his dresser drawer just simply to jerk off in periodically? What possible “harm” can there be to that?

To be continued…

[dm106]

You seem to ignore, Sebbie, that some guys as teens had "jerk off" buddies. They may or may not have jerked each other off, and they may or may not have gone beyond that.

[sebbie]

I realize that but my point for now is that there are all sorts of stuff that happens, and it is not surprising that a lot of guys are more comfortable keeping everything they do in this respect as private as possible.

Some guys who openly engage in mutual masturbation with one or more other males end up eventually entering long-term gay relationships, but for many, perhaps most males, this is just a temporary phase that leads into adulthood and a heterosexual relationship with a female partner.

[sebbie]

Part IX

Every guy struggles with a version of the same problem. The circumstances are most obvious past puberty but before a guy has reached adulthood, when opportunities for experimenting with “real” sex with a sexual partner are very limited if they exist at all. The dilemma basically revolves around the fact that once a guy reaches puberty, episodes of feeling horny and having an orge to ejaculate occur on a very frequent basis, perhaps even as frequently as every day, yet opportunities to do so in privacy are much rarer.

This sets up a dilemma of sorts, a dilemma every guy must somehow resolve. The dilemma is further complicated by the belief a lot of guys have that their situation is somehow unique and that peers are not trying to solve the same problem in some reasonable and acceptable way.

The movies have long used this dilemma as the basis for a host of different coming-of-age movies that have storylines involving horny young males where the storyline is eventually resolved with the guys, even the shy, nerdy ones, seeking sex with and eventually having sex with young ladies, and that somehow everything turns out fine at the end of the movie because of this resolution of finally getting to have sex with a female partner.

Very few movies have ever even attempted to reveal what guys actually do to and for themselves in order to cope with their adolescent urges. Male sexuality often does not work at all how it is depicted in the movies—there is a lot more interesting stuff going on that the typical story line where a boy wants to have sex with a female who initially tells him no but eventually gives in as the movie draws to a conclusion---but to reveal how this all actually works for males day-to-day would be considered too “racy” to ever show on the big screen. Besides, what movie director would ever want to burst the myth that has always surrounded how sex works for adolescent and young-adult males and has sold a lot of movie tickets over the years.

So, guys are individually on their own in this regard and what they see in movies is often a long ways from what they are observing from other sources. Worse, male peers are stuck with the same dilemma in that what they can observe does not actually coincide at all with what they are doing day by day, normally to and by themselves.

What the guys are doing, of course is masturbating, probably as frequently as every day, and the real dilemma is finding a time and place with enough privacy in order to not draw attention to oneself from anyone. After all, masturbation is surely an inferior form of sexual release according to peer males, the movies (that usually do not mention the option at all) and to females their age. Females at an early age are taught that the female is the center of sexual pleasure for a guy, and they simply ignore the possibility that things in this department might be more complicated than that.

So all of this comes down to exactly how a guy can find ways to masturbate if for whatever reason he doesn’t want to or is not yet ready to engage in sex with a partner. Perhaps a snug-fitting garment such as a swim brief would be useful and helpful in this respect. But what if such an idea works too well and I like what I am doing with and too myself too much? What if I end up finding ways to do this that I like so much that I do not want to abandon them if and when I find a real sexual partner? In this respect I have often thought that gay guys face a much less daunting dilemma than straight guys do, but more of that later.

To be continued…

[sebbie]

Part IX

Every guy struggles with a version of the same problem. The circumstances are most obvious past puberty but before a guy has reached adulthood, when opportunities for experimenting with “real” sex with a sexual partner are very limited if they exist at all. The dilemma basically revolves around the fact that once a guy reaches puberty, episodes of feeling horny and having an orge to ejaculate occur on a very frequent basis, perhaps even as frequently as every day, yet opportunities to do so in privacy are much rarer.

This sets up a dilemma of sorts, a dilemma every guy must somehow resolve. The dilemma is further complicated by the belief a lot of guys have that their situation is somehow unique and that peers are not trying to solve the same problem in some reasonable and acceptable way.

The movies have long used this dilemma as the basis for a host of different coming-of-age movies that have storylines involving horny young males where the storyline is eventually resolved with the guys, even the shy, nerdy ones, seeking sex with and eventually having sex with young ladies, and that somehow everything turns out fine at the end of the movie because of this resolution of finally getting to have sex with a female partner.

Very few movies have ever even attempted to reveal what guys actually do to and for themselves in order to cope with their adolescent urges. Male sexuality often does not work at all how it is depicted in the movies—there is a lot more interesting stuff going on that the typical story line where a boy wants to have sex with a female who initially tells him no but eventually gives in as the movie draws to a conclusion---but to reveal how this all actually works for males day-to-day would be considered too “racy” to ever show on the big screen. Besides, what movie director would ever want to burst the myth that has always surrounded how sex works for adolescent and young-adult males and has sold a lot of movie tickets over the years.

So, guys are individually on their own in this regard and what they see in movies is often a long ways from what they are observing from other sources. Worse, male peers are stuck with the same dilemma in that what they can observe does not actually coincide at all with what they are doing day by day, normally to and by themselves.

What the guys are doing, of course is masturbating, probably as frequently as every day, and the real dilemma is finding a time and place with enough privacy in order to not draw attention to oneself from anyone. After all, masturbation is surely an inferior form of sexual release according to peer males, the movies (that usually do not mention the option at all) and to females their age. Females at an early age are taught that the female is the center of sexual pleasure for a guy, and they simply ignore the possibility that things in this department might be more complicated than that.

So all of this comes down to exactly how a guy can find ways to masturbate if for whatever reason he doesn’t want to or is not yet ready to engage in sex with a partner. Perhaps a snug-fitting garment such as a swim brief would be useful and helpful in this respect. But what if such an idea works too well and I like what I am doing with and too myself too much? What if I end up finding ways to do this that I like so much that I do not want to abandon them if and when I find a real sexual partner? In this respect I have often thought that gay guys face a much less daunting dilemma than straight guys do, but more of that later.

To be continued…

[sebbie]

Part X

So guys enter puberty thinking that the way to deal with the urge to ejaculate is to find that allows a guy to get this all over with in private but as quickly as possible. Indeed, a guy is a better male if he can go from feeling only slightly horny to a full-scale hard-on followed by a strong ejaculation in a record-setting time, a couple minutes or even less from start to finish. Part of this is tied to the old problem of fear—fear of discovery, mainly, and being accidentally discovered by anyone else could bring on a host of difficult issues to try and deal with. And then there is always the problem that traces of what has happened may be readily apparent, and that becomes another problem of concern and potential embarrassment.

What is a guy to do, anyway? Most guys probably deal with this problem (and it is a problem) by “training” themselves to go through the processes as quickly as they can, the faster everything happens the fewer risks are involved. They delude themselves into thinking that getting off in a record-setting time is somehow the most masculine way to be!

This is all fascinating in part because adult sexuality and particularly sex with a partner is really all about unlearning being super speedy about all of this. In the adult world, the slower the better, not the faster the better. So once a guy reaches young adulthood, what matters is learning how to sustain arousal and an erection for as long a period of time as possible not set some new world record time-wise. What guy in this world would want to be in a date with a girl and be at the point where she is ready for real intercourse and the guy is so hot and bothered that he ejaculates into his underwear long before he could engage in actual intercourse (entry). Talk about embarrassing!

This problem often haunts couples right into marriage. The medical term for all of this is “premature ejaculation” which is highlighted when the woman says that her male partner invariably ejaculates long before she is ready to have an orgasm. Premature ejaculation can often be categorized as a “learned behavior” that is learned in part by growing up with a deep-seated fear that for a host of reasons, a guy needs to move from initial arousal to ejaculation as quickly as possible and somehow in a male-female relationship the female will see the guy as being “more of a guy” if he can get off very quickly. The problem of course is that what seemed to work at age 14 is probably what doesn’t work at all in a serious relationship at age 21.

Indeed, even if you are not engaging in partner sex, learning how to masturbate slowly can be a useful skill to have as even masturbation is a lot more fun if you are not trying to set any time records. I realize that a lot of guys spend a lot of time worrying about what it means to get horny inside a snug-fitting garment such as a jock strap or a swim brief, and a lot of guys deep down worry that some items might end up inadvertently make them feel horny, and how they will cope if they somehow find themselves in a situation like this.

Yet, at the same time, the right (not wrong) snug-fitting garment (you tell me what specifically you like that “does” this for you), can be a useful aid in learning how to get your mind and body to get off, but at a leisurely pace, and in particular, if you are setting about what you thought were skills that you learned at age 14 about how to go from initial arousal to ejaculation in record setting time, the very skill you do NOT want to have in a sexual relationship with a partner.

A lot of complicated stuff comes up here. The sex therapists might regard any guy who likes to get off inside a snug-fitting garment of any sort as having some sort of a clothing fetish for that garment and something of an abnormality of sorts that needs to be “beaten back” through some sort of counseling labeled as sexual therapy. I would argue that doing this is quite normal to have happen for most if not nearly all guys. But then these same sex therapists traditionally have placed male-female intercourse on a pedestal as being superior to any other way of getting off, and prior to the 1970s even deemed gay partner sex as an abnormality that should be treated as a health issue if not a disease of some sort.

One of the neat things about being a gay male in a relationship is that your partner will have grown up facing much the same set of issues with respect to dealing with arousal, orgasms. If you are lucky your male partner will have dealt with an array of what I call snug-fitting garment issues as well and the two of you can run some experiments together. In a sexual relationship with a female partner the male is constantly dealing with a completely different and at least a complicated sexual universe which is at the core of how females experience sex versus males. Worse, the poor guy is constantly dealing with what the female learned from her mother about how male sexuality works, and a lot of this stuff is not right at all or correct in only a very limited way.

To be continued…

[sebbie]

Part XI

Every guy quickly learns that it is great fun just to feel horny. Clearly, orgasm and ejaculation represent a great release with profound pleasure, pleasure that can be and often is overwhelming, but I have always thought that the sequence of events that may or may not conclude with orgasm, though a more subtle form of male pleasure, have their own unique place in a guy’s world.

And, of course, orgasms have their own complicated issues to deal with that can be mostly avoided when you are just feeling horny. For starters, it is possible to train your mind and body so that you can merely feel horny for hours on end without rising to another level, so to speak. As any young man knows, there are a lot of ancillary issues associated with ejaculating that require some practical thought and planning. For starters, are you ejaculating with a sexual partner or alone? If with a partner the problem quickly becomes as much a relationship issue as it is of simply enjoying your own body. And sexual relationships have ways to get very complicated very quickly. I do not need to list the issues and concerns here.

If you are doing this by yourself, what exactly are the circumstances you face? What planning has gone into finding a way such that any others are not privy to what you are doing and then perhaps create a situation for you that is embarrassing? A central part of growing up seems to be that being discovered having a solo orgasm leads to teasing and bullying related to the idea that you therefore must be gay. And some guys, perhaps in an effort to cover up their own insecurities in the sexual orientation to relentlessly tease and bully, if not the more familiar “you were doing this because you are too unattractive a person to be able to find a female to do this with!”

Here is the problem. If you want to ejaculate by yourself, you probably are in a situation where you think you need to get aroused and to the ejaculation part quickly for a bunch of different reasons. If you keep doing this regularly, your body and mind quickly gets conditioned so that you can come in a hurry. The problem with this is first, that in doing this at 90-miles an hour, you miss out on nearly all of the neat stuff that leads up to getting to the point where you can then no longer resist the urge to ejaculate. Further, if and when you do get into a relationship with a real sexual partner, you have done an excellent job of making certain that you are an expert at “premature ejaculation” as in getting off long before your partner does.

Any coming-of-age movie almost invariably involves horny teen males who are observing what they believe desirable sexual partners but from afar. Then, toward the end of the movie one of the nerdy guys manages to go on a date with an attractive female. Horny and aroused, the guy thinks that now he is finally going to get to see what real penis-vagina sex is like, only to discover that he is so aroused that he ejaculates into his underwear while still completely in his jeans. The encounter ends and the guy has blown off without ever getting his penis near the girls vagina, let alone into it.

At this point the girl doesn’t quite know what to say or do, but secretly she is more than a little amused by the sequence of events that took place. Every girl likes to think she is the one who can make a guy hard instantly. Perhaps she was willing to engage in penis-vagina sex with the guy but was to a certain degree was relieved that this all did not take place at this particular place and time. The guy has gotten an important lesson in the need to develop better ejaculatory control as being critical in any relationship close enough involve sets of bodily parts fitting together.

Which brings me back to the original theme of this story that says being horny is great fun, and instead of focusing on getting to the ejaculation part as quickly as possible, guys should focus their efforts on training their bodies to keep the embers of sexual arousal burning without going into a full ejaculatory phase for as long as possible, say an entire afternoon.

To be continued…
 

[sebbie]

Part XII

What does all of this have to do with options for men’s clothing? Interestingly, quite a lot! For example, take a look at the wide range options in male underwear, all of which come in contact with the male penis. There are situations and places where a guy is so distracted by the other things he is doing that feeling horny is not something that can be accommodated very easy. But there are other situations, maybe a leisurely Saturday afternoon without work or school to intrude, where a guy would like to be in and can maintain a semi-aroused state without distraction.

Look at the wide range of men’s underwear in the store. Some of it fits really loose, some of it fits snug and tight, some, like maybe a Spandex®-laced thong, fits really snug and tight. A guy might buy loose fitting cotton boxers for wear in situations where being sexually aroused would simply be a distraction, or perhaps as an undergarment to be worn in a gym locker room where the guy does not wasn’t to call undue attention to himself and that he even has male body parts.

But, the same guy’s wardrobe might also include snugger, tighter undergarments, garments that are more likely to press the male arousal buttons. These are regularly worn in situations where a guy would welcome feeling a little horny, because of the fit and feel of wearing something that fits snugly around all those super-neat nerve endings in a guy’s penis.

Then of course there are the items that a guy thinks fit so neat that they would almost instantly send him into an arousal/erection/orgasm frenzy, particularly if the guy has never owned one of those before. A related issue is finding the ideal underwear for a guy to wear if he is going on a date with a female which might end in penis-vagina sex and how the particular female might “react” to seeing him wearing each of these options. A most interesting puzzle! A particular style of underwear makes ME feel horny but will it have a similar effect on HER when for the first time she sees me wearing it? What a dilemma!

The thought has occurred to me that underwear manufacturers somehow understand at least some of what I have just told you. There may be some guys who always wear loose-fitting cotton boxers, and some guys who always wear skimpy bikini briefs, plus lots of guys in between the two options for which full-cut briefs or boxer briefs become the underwear of choice. One could easily get the impression that underwear sections of stores are attempting to cater to all these different customers.

But then there might be a significant share of customers who keep wardrobes with underwear options in a variety of cuts and styles, knowing fully that some of these are better suited for wear when a guy wants to feel horny and feeling horny will not be a distraction versus what the guy might wear when his mind is preoccupied with other non-sexual focused stuff he might be doing that day. Personally I tend to solve this puzzle every morning on a daily basis.

I find it interesting that the reading I have done on this subject suggests that most sexual therapists and psychiatrists (usually female it appears) seem to think that any guy who gets aroused simply when he wears underwear of a particular cut, design or style must somehow have a fetish to that particular clothing style, and further, this is somehow an abnormal sexual condition that needs to be treated with psychiatric therapy. But then it is not that many years ago that the entire group of medical-trained psychiatrists seem to think that being gay was abnormal and a “disease” of sorts that could be treated with the right therapy as well.

Having lost that battle over the claim that gay guys were somehow sick in-the-head in the 70s, the therapists quickly moved on to the idea that any guy who got aroused while simply wearing snug-fitting underwear was now clearly sick and needed help. This is all pretty funny if you stop and think about it, all going back to mothers teaching daughters that the only thing that can arouse a guy is the right female and that the daughter can use that information to her advantage as leverage in getting a guy to do nearly everything the female wants. The sex experts merely adopted the same idea the mothers were teaching their daughters. The idea that normal, decent guys can and often do get aroused in the absence of a female partner simply does not compute in this female fantasy world of make believe..

Meanwhile you have all these underwear manufacturers who realize that there is a large market for underwear designs that guys secretly think will make them feel quite good “down there,” and this market has exploded in recent years, particularly with the ability to purchase items in private on line. Guys no longer need to have the embarrassment of buying something snug, tight and slick by making a purchase with a (usually female) sales clerk.

Then there are the jeans. The current trends in men’s where everything is low rise, and with a form-fitting cut, happened once before in my lifetime in the years 1962-1968. Back then I was in high school and then in college, and I thought there was nothing so much fun to wear as a pair of very narrow-cut sand-colored denim jeans over a pair of snug-fitting tighty whitey briefs. That combination made me feel really good, merely thinking about wearing it sometimes soon sent me into an uncontrollable orgasmic frenzy which unfortunately I somehow knew I had to keep secret.

All of this also predates all the snugger-fitting bikini brief underwear and men’s thongs that showed up in the decade or two to follow. Oddly enough it has only been in recent years—the past 10 years maybe, that the really snug-fitting men’s jeans became popular again. I find the resent trend most interesting in that previous to that jeans had gotten really wide legged and sloppy fitting and I presume normally covered the bodies of guys wearing very loose fitting cotton boxers.

The stylish skinny jeans now simply do not work well with loose-fitting boxers and a style of underwear needs to be snug-fitting and usually a brief of some sort not a boxer brief with longer legs. Plus the now Spandex®-laced denim gives a tighter fit than was available in the 1960s, almost like a second skin of compression gear made of what looks like denim.

At this point I could go into a discussion of compression gear and swimwear for guys but I am going to hold off on that for now. I am going to end this discussion by saying that guys wearing the latest skinny-jeans styles are probably covering underwear that fits quite snug and tight while at the same time dealing with the some of the feelings of being constantly horny and a bit aroused just by wearing what they are wearing. I have difficulty given the designs seeing how guys can avoid that. But keep in mind the current trend is a strong reaction to the loose-fitting clothing almost designed to assure that the guy would not feel horny unless he was with a partner who wanted sex with him.

And the so-called sex experts understand almost nothing of what I have just told you about what goes on with guys. For guys just discovering all of this, don’t be embarrassed by what you have just learned. The best thing to do is just roll with it and also recognize the other guys your age around you are trying to cope with the same or very similar set of issues with respect to their own bodies and the associated feelings and sensations.

For guys, it is all as normal as sunshine, and most of the sex educators and therapists who claim to be experts are in fact clueless on a host of things they think they understand.

To be continued…