To what extend has your desire shaped your body? How much do you work out so that you can 1) have the kind of body you’ve always fantasised about, and/or 2) have the kind of body that others will desire? What have you done to your body to make you attractive to others? Dieted? Pumped iron? Starved yourself? Shaved your chest and back? Lasered your whatever… just because you belive that that’ll get you who you want, or just because it makes you feel better about yourself, a self that on the whole you’re not, on the whole, very fond of? And often – more often than not – that body you’ve worked hard on, or denied so much from, does help you get the kind of guys you want.
Some time ago I came across a video on x-Tube of a guy who fists himself. The clip opens with him naked, outdoors, leaning against a wooden fence on a country lane. That sort of scene. The setting was rural, though what he did next – bent over and shoved his arm up his own backside as if he was helping to inseminate a cow – seemed anything but a snapshot from a pastoral idyll. I’m often shocked by the things men do to/with their bodies. And by men I mean gay men; by men I do not mean, not in this instance, human beings in general. (Am I just more aware of gay men doing these things because gay men hide it less? Have we learnt over centuries to eroticise the pain inflicted on us? Am I being judgemental? Should I be looking in other places for the diverse/perverse things everyone does to their bodies in the name of pleasure and sexual gratification?)
The guy was German, or he may have been Swiss – him and the landscape had that look. He was blonde, bronzed, slim, hairless. He was not an attractive man. He looked as if he’d stuck his arm up his arse and ripped his soul from its vessel. Meditate on that! To watch him was terrifying, deeply unsettling. It was like he’d gone past the point of no return, like he’d killed himself once, but would keep doing it over and over again. I think I might have revisited the video a couple of weeks after that first time, but no more after that. Every once in a while I remember the scene, but I am not tempted to go back.
Last week my neck went into spasm and the pain that ensued has been so extreme that I have lost my appetite, I feel nauseous, and at times I’ve found it hard to breathe. I say to people it’s because of cycling, or I tell them that I just don’t know what it is, that it happens every six months or so. But that’s a lie.
After the guy in the fisting video has bent over and inserted his arm into his rectum, effortlessly, his arsehole as floppy and loose as if you were putting your hand into a top hat with no top, or a wide pipe. Nothing. No resistance. So after he does this for the camera, the scene shifts to him naked on a single bed. He is supple, agile, and he repeats his party trick. I can’t remember if he was smiling. Grinning, perhaps? My question, besides the puzzle of how, devoid of sphincter muscles, this guy can shit, is whether the body ever heals from such an invasion, such an alteration.
Someone who recently read my book emailed to ask if the stories actually happened or are they fictional. I said they were real, that everything in the book actually happened, that the only things I changed were the names of people and where they’d come from. Sometimes I changed their professions. But although everything I put down might be the facts (the Truth!!) there are things that I don’t record, don’t confess. Can we ever confess to everything, tell everything. Each moment is an impossibility to recount. Every moment is like a dream: a multiplicity of things happened simultaneously. I want to be truthful, to be honest, to make this a true confession. It’s not just about self-exposure – what is the confession box but a way to expose our souls to another in the hope that we will continue to be loved – so, yes, not just self-exposure, but a genuine desire, and that desire keeps growing (though at some points it disappears altogether) to get to the bottom of what I do, to understand, to make sense. To change.
Now, as I type, the pain is there. A throbbing. A ripping. My osteopath (or is he a chiropractor – I always forget) says it’s a trapped nerve and in time it will become untrapped. But I have an ex who had a trapped nerve in his face and even now, four years later, it is not fully untrapped, unpinched. He is not, and never was in pain. My body is telling me something.
In other videos I have seen men fill their balls with saline liquid and cum, as they say, buckets. I have seen men take load after load of cum in their arses. I have seen men punched, kicked, slapped and spat on, the looks on their faces: sublime submission. Homophobic bullying transformed into erotic delight. I knew a man once, a black man from South Africa, who loved going to the sex clubs in London and having men fuck him while they said things like take my white cock, nigger, or you love that, don’t you, nigger. He laughed when he told me this, as if triumphant. Back then I was shocked, though I can understand his desire more now. In all my years of phone sex, that has never been one of my scenarios. Racism has never been sexy to me, even the subversion of it not. Being spat on, slapped and choked is something I do like.
There have been moments with The German when I have wanted to bring The War into our sexplay, especially when he has told me to do this or that (eat my arse, suck my cock) or had his hand around my throat. But I have kept that to myself, not so much because I am afraid to say those things, but because I am afraid to witness his willingness to play along.
I have injured my neck because of too much phone sex.
So the one voice says: Well, buy a different type of phone, then. The other voice says: Stop. Enough.
Michael Wynne 