FirstMed Consulting Blog

What makes male supremacy so seductive, so pervasive, such an apparently permanent component of all our precious lives, is the fact that erection can be conditioned to it.
I’ve always spent a lot of my time thinking about sex and creaking floorboards, showers, mangoes and condoms. Lately I’ve also been thinking about my sexuality and how my desires have been constructed. Growing up as a man in this culture I repeatedly received the message that dominating women was sexy. I learnt from the women in the movies, or those in the magazines, their legs spread for me in porn. I learnt to objectify women’s bodies and to find that sexy. The message of sexy domination is devastating for the lives of women, and it also affects the sex lives of men. It became difficult for me to simply enjoy sex without imagining my partner and me as a photographic (pornographic) image.

Within the pleasures and pains of our sexualities lie social and political meanings. Lesbian feminists have explored such meanings for many years.

Last year during discussions about sex in our men’s group, I was astonished to hear of the guilt still associated with masturbation. Astonished because for someone like myself, who has taken great pleasure playing with his penis, who has explored every method of male sexuality and invented many more of his own, to hear of other men’s guilt came as a huge surprise.
In this culture men have been taught that to be attracted to men’s bodies is an absolute sin, punishable by death, imprisonment, bashing or all three. We are taught to be repulsed by men’s bodies and to be attracted only to the other, namely women. Thus we are encouraged to be repulsed by our own bodies. This is heterosexism, and it makes sense to me that this may be, at least in part, the source of the taboo of masturbation. If this is the case then masturbation may be the key place on which to work in order to dismantle heterosexism and sexism.

When I hear of how other men masturbate furtively, quickly, harshly, with too little compassion or tenderness towards their bodies, in an end-rush to orgasm with guilt as the repercussion it smells to me of homophobia: of fear of loving our own likeness.

Turn to the mirror, lips slightly parted and kiss your image. Feel the strength of your arms, the smoothness of skin. Hold yourself, see yourself, slow down, a minimum time limit. Feel your scalp, nose, tongue and lips. Imagine kissing yourself, sucking yourself, fucking yourself perhaps. Imagine loving yourself, tenderly, compassionately, wonderfully, hopefully, suddenly, you’ll realize that you are.

I write this because at a time of crisis in my life such an act made all the difference. Cherishing myself led to hours of astonishing pleasure and at the same time enabled me to take the first steps towards loving others again. Surprisingly, it also challenged my very sexual identity.