Faster, softer, harder, slower

I am quite happy to demonstrate how I jerk off. Z and I first met when she came to my office to watch me please myself. Like those pesky photons that behave differently when observed, and so cannot ever be seen doing what it is that they do when no-one is watching, the way I jerk off when asked to demonstrate how I jerk off is different from the way that I actually jerk off when alone. But I think I can give a good approximation, and it is fun to do so occasionally. I love a good handjob, and over the decades have become very good at administering them to myself. I am, of course, in the ideal position to do well: I have continuous access to my own cock, and so have plenty of opportunity to practice; I sit in the middle of the feedback loop that includes my cock and the hand jerking it off; I have no-one but myself to blame if the experience is in any way disappointing.

But though I give myself great handjobs, I have no desire to be given a handjob by another of the kind that I give myself - for, quite frankly, I can do that better than anyone. If I want you to give me a handjob, it is because I want the handjob that you would give me, rather than the handjob that I would give myself. So I am happy to show you what I do when on my own, even though, inevitably, the fact that I am not on my own makes this strictly impossible. But I am not happy to talk you through the handjob that you are giving me, like some veteran pilot in the control-tower talking a neophyte in the cockpit through her first landing in a 1970s airplane disaster-movie. "A little more pressure with the third and fourth fingers, especially with the middle joint, but ease up on the second finger, and shift the thumb to make a slightly more elliptical ring, will you? Pick up the pace just slightly, but don't shorten the strokes quite yet. Keep it just there for a while, and await further instructions."

There is a deeper point, though. Sitting in the middle of the feedback loop that runs through my cock, my head, my hand, there are certain things that I cannot do, precisely because it is the same person who pleases and is pleased. The obvious comparison here is with tickling: I can do exactly what you would do to the sole of my foot when tickling me, but it can never tickle in the same way (I am very ticklish, and find it almost unbearable). Because the finger that attempts to tickle is my own, it does not tickle. You can tickle me not because of anything you can do with your finger that I cannot, or because you can reach some spot that I can't, but because you are not me - there is no feedback loop of the relevant sort. (Here is one answer to the question, Why can't you tickle yourself?)

A complaint that I sometimes hear from women is that men ask for too many directions, are constantly checking on how well they are doing, need continual reassurance that they are on target, want to know that they are not being too rough or too gentle, too quick or too slow, and so on. I hardly ever ask for directions, but not because I know what I am doing without them. I assume that, just as I want the handjob that you would give me, rather than the one that I would give myself, you want the same kind of thing from me. I will do whatever seems right to me, and you will tell me if I am way off target or entirely out of synch if you wish to. If I am fingering or fucking you, or eating you out, I will work to please you in all the ways that I can, reading and responding as best I can. You want me to finger you the way that I would finger you, not the way that you would. You want to be surprised, just as I do. You want to get what you didn't know you wanted. If all I could give you was what you could give yourself anyway, I would lose heart. And so - turn and turn about - I do not want you to give me anything but the handjob that you find it in yourself to give. Don't ask me for directions.

You need my responses, of course, and so I must embody them somehow - vocally, in the pattern of my breathing, or in the tension in my thighs, the pulsing of my cock, spasms in my ass (so yes, put a finger down there somewhere so you can pick up on that data stream). You need feedback, and as you respond to my responses, registering my pleasure and what heightens it, acting to intensify it, my responses alter, for I am responding to you responding to me. There is a feedback loop formed here, and it is in one way just like the feedback loop that forms when I please myself, for the goal is the same - my pleasure - and the process of registering sexual response and responding to it is also the same. But this loop runs through you. When you please me, and are pleased by the pleasure you give me, my pleasure is magnified by the pleasure that you take in pleasing me; here it makes sense to speak of sexual union. I think this is the deep and miraculous core of sex, and it can be present even in a handjob. But probably not in one in which I am required to give directions.

The loop is drawn tighter and smaller, and the union is correspondingly more intense and complete, when I am pleasing you while you are pleasing me, when we are each of us feeding our own pleasure by pleasing the other, when we are both taking pleasure in each other's pleasure at pleasing. Fucking makes one out of two by drawing the loop so tight that it shrinks to a point, and it is no longer easy, no longer even possible, to distinguish which sensation belongs to whom (or, better expressed - when the notion of a possessor of sensation loses all traction).

As a young man, I found the cult of 'wisdom' absurd. What could the old know that I could not, except how much life sucks - a fact that, from my earliest years, I could easily assimilate intellectually anyway? What I have learned in the last few years about sex, I do not think I could have learned as a young man. If I could have learned it earlier, I did not. But I do wish that I had. And perhaps the core of wisdom is exactly that - wishing that one could have learned earlier what one has learned a little too late, but recognising that one could not have learned it earlier anyway.