Interruption

Writing to D, I became very aroused, so I signed off with a promise to jerk off in my hand and then swallow the resulting pool of come. After logging out, I freed my cock and began to fulfil the promise. A key in the door, a premature return from the gym with news of importance, put an end to that. I put my cock away. My arousal diminished and then disappeared.

A promise made to oneself can be broken. But I had made my promise, in writing, to D. So, later, I kept it. Stoned, and with my pants at my ankles, I came in my hand, at the climax - the first climax - of a wonderful jerk-off session in a bathroom at the gym. Lowering my face to my hand, I gulped the pool of seed down, licking off the residue. Because I had feared overshooting, I had held back a little at the point of ejaculation; the seed thus reserved I soon released in a second climax, this time into the sink.

If I were to write a sex-column, the advice I gave would be extremely simple: make sex your religion. Treat its promises as covenants, its paraphenalia as relics, its acts as rituals; treat your lover as an object of devotion. This advice is not aimed at the maximization of pleasure, but it will, I am sure, result in it. What is does, I think, is invest meaningless sex with meaning, or at least disguise its meaninglessness convincingly. Without this cover of seriousness, pointless sex not merely is pointless but also appears so, even as it happens.

This is not, unfortunately, good advice. It will lead, very often, to the end of meaningless sex. Nothing is more human than to succumb to religion, and so end up believing that the promises really are covenants, the paraphenalia relics, the acts rituals, your lover truly a god or goddess. We should make sex our religion, then, only so long as we can remain religious hypocrites.

The advice is bad advice for a further reason: few people are in a position to make use of it. Most non-religious people are utterly ignorant of religion. Not knowing how to be religious, they cannot make sex, or anything else, their religion. Those who are already religious presumably know how to be religious, but they already have one religion and do not need another. So the advice is of use only to those who are not religious but know how to be. There are not many of us around.