Wachet auf

I know no more perfect artistic representation of male orgasm than the soprano-bass duet, "Wenn kommst du?" from Bach's famous cantata, "Wachet auf" (BWV 140). Here is the German (no umlauts, though, as I don't know how to do them) with the male line in italics, and a typical translation.

Wenn kommst du, mein Heil?
------Ich komme, dein Teil.
Ich warte mit brennenden Ole.
------Ich offne den Saal,
Eroffne den Saal.
------zum himmlischen Mahl.
Komm, Jesu.
------Ich komme, komm liebliche Seele.

When are you coming, my savior?
------I am coming, your share.
I wait with oil-lamp burning.
------I open the chamber,
The chamber is open.
------for the heavenly feast.
Come, Jesus.
------I'm coming; come, dearest soul.

'Heil', translated here as 'savior', also means safety, well-being, goodness, satisfaction, fufilment; it is cognate with the English word 'whole'. The core meaning of 'Teil' is 'part'. No pair of English words can do just the work that 'Heil' and 'Teil' do - certainly no pair of words that rhyme. The woman longs to be whole. She will be whole when the part she is missing comes to her, enters the chamber, feeds her heavenly food. He announces he is coming to fulfil her, to make her whole, to open up and feed her. The music rings with the words 'come', 'coming', 'whole', 'part'. To me, it is straightforwardly pre-orgasmic and orgasmic. And clearly some translators agree. One, for example, has this for the sung English:

Come quickly, now come!
------Yes, quickly I come!
I wait thee with lamps all alighted.
------The doors open wide,
The doors open wide.
------I come for my bride.
Come claim thou thy bride! Come quickly!
------Forever in rapture united.

'Come, Jesus!' has here become 'Come quickly!'; the duet is entirely secularized and sexualised. I assume that Bach intended and enjoyed the parallel between the impatience of the woman waiting for her lover to come and the impatience of the Christian awaiting Christ. Of course, many women want the man fucking them to come quickly just to get it over with, and perhaps this was true of Bach's own wife. But the impatience in the duet is not that of a woman who wants to get sex over with in order to get back to the business of life - not, therefore, at all like C's politely expressed desire, once she has come, for my own orgasm. To me, it reads rather as the longing for simultaneous orgasm - she cries 'Come quickly! Come now!' as her climax approaches, and the man adds his own imperative - 'Come, dearest!' - as he himself comes.

Still, it would be quite reasonable to interpret the duet as involving only male orgasm. Most fucks involve only male orgasm, according to the data. For a perfect representation of female orgasm I would choose the final chapter of Joyce's Ulysses - surely the most amazing masturbatory episode ever committed to paper, and one of the most affecting.

I like work: it fascinates me.

There is not much in the world more pleasing than a good oxymoron. Even hackneyed examples - military intelligence, folk art, social science, popular culture - are worth a smile. Sometimes oxymorons rise to the level of art - perhaps the best instance here is the etiolated richness of The Who's '5.15'. But some oxymorons are so deeply embedded in the orthodox conceptual scheme that they pass by entirely unnoticed - inconsistencies that are so central to a culture that it is impossible to imagine that culture surviving once the inconsistency is revealed and addressed. The culture therefore moves to restore the self-contradiction to its central place, shedding what is incidental, but retaining what is essential. And that is how, forty years on, the sexual liberation movement has ended up as a struggle to win for gays and lesbians the right to enter into the same stultifying 1950s sit-com set-up that the 1960s were supposed to free us from altogether.

The oxymoron occupying me at the moment, however, is 'work ethic'. I think there used to be just one of these, the Protestant one, and though Protestants who espoused it were admired for their industry, they were also regarded as in the grip of a rather particular, and peculiar, set of values. But in the United States (and sadly, this is true increasingly in other countries as well) this work ethic is now construed ecumenically and even secularly. Work is an ethical activity, underpinned by ethical motivations, hedged about with ethical constraints. Someone who works to live rather than lives to work is a dangerous amoralist.

If life cannot be all work and no play, then the work ethic requires that play be turned into work, a transformation that is almost complete. The gym is not a place to play, but to workout; lying out on the Sheep Meadow, I can work on my tan. Sex is one of the last holdouts, a site of play. This blog records my playtimes, times when I am playing with other people sexually. Nothing is achieved, no growth is accomplished, the world is not altered or enriched or bettered by this play. After the play is over, things are just as they were before, for playing (like philosophy) leaves everything as it is. I think it is for this reason, and not to do with that other (perhaps allied) oxymoron, sexual morality, that the acts and emissions recorded here incite distaste, disgust, and disapproval. All play and no work makes Jack a dangerous boy. I do not particularly mind working when I have to, but I do not think that people who really enjoy their work are luckier than I am. Poor sods, they work harder than they need to, and for longer, instead of spending time playing. The response that, because they love their work, they are playing while they work, is nearly always crap. Banking or lawyering is not playing, because it is not pointless, as play is. Derek Jeter doesn't work at all, though I am sure he works out a lot; he is paid to play. If I could be paid to play, that would be great, but it wouldn't make my playtimes times when I was at work.

Work gets its mucky hands everywhere, spoiling play and pleasure, and the US is undoubtedly the worst place in the world in this regard. I know of no other country where a waiter or waitress will ask, of a plate of food that is not entirely consumed, whether the diner is 'still working on that'. No, I am not still working on it, I never was working on it; if I was working on it, wouldn't I be getting paid? You might as well ask me, towards the end of three hours with D at the Kew Motor Inn, when I take a little break from fucking and am just idly fingering her ass: 'Are you still working on that?'

One reason why sex is limitless is that it is not work. The job is never finished because it is never begun; it is not a job at all. Because it is not work, effort is unregulated. Physical exertion in play is a delight. In work, while it may be enjoyable, exertion is directed towards an end. In sex there are no ends, and if there are goals, they are like goals in soccer - occasions for cheering and uproar, perhaps even a way of keeping score (in which case, if it is orgasms we are counting, D usually crushes me 10 - 2).

The playfulness of sex is under constant assault from that oxymoron, sexual morality, but also from the insistence that physical intimacy and emotional intimacy are correlated and connected. This is not a stupid idea, unlike sexual morality. But it is nevertheless used continually to lift sex out of the category of play and place it somewhere else, where it can then be regulated by therapists and counsellors, or by those with whom (hey! check out the 'whom') one is emotionally intimate. Playing with another person is necessarily intimate, and trying to find someone to play with, asking them to play, requires courage, and can be very difficult. It is easy to read Craigslist's 'Casual Encounters' as a vast playground where the kids are trying to find others to play the games that they like to play, or trying to join games already in progress, or at least to keep loneliness and exclusion at bay by asking, again and again: 'Can I play with you?' And like any playground, there are mean girls and popular boys, kids who get off on saying 'No', and kids who are just hopeless and you don't want to end up on your team even though you know it is not their fault and you feel sorry for them.

I enjoy playing, though sexual play is one of the few kinds of play that I do enjoy. I also find ways to play while working - the other day, for example, I wore D's thong to work. I can't think how I could easily work while playing, given my kind of play - I don't think, for example, that anyone would pay to watch me fuck D (but if anyone is out there who would, do get in touch). The trick in life is to reduce the worktime and increase the playtime, not because work is bad or evil or pointless, but because work, unlike play, is not done for its own sake.

Fortunately for me, most people do not put play ahead of work, as the world might cease to function if my advice was followed. I am not sure that makes it bad advice, but it does at least put a question mark beside it. Meanwhile, I can play hard, and others can work hard, and it averages out nicely.

[Ok, too much thinking and not enough fucking in this post - I will try to redress the balance in the next.]

Who's counting?

The first time I fucked D was in my office, and since then we have fucked there often. I say 'my office', but in fact I have two offices. The one we were in today has, besides a desk and desk-chairs, a couch.

I had written to D a couple of days ago, saying how much I liked eating her out on my desk, but that I preferred even more to sit or kneel on the floor between her legs while she sat in a chair. So today, dressed in a white cotton short-sleeved shirt and a short black skirt - no bra, no knickers - she placed a chair facing the couch, I sat down in front of her, and she then lifted her legs and rested her feet on the couch. I moved the chair a little closer to the couch so that I could rest my back against it. In this extremely comfortable position, I set to work with my tongue on her clit.

D unbuttoned her shirt so that I could get at her nipples. Pulling and pinching her nipples is not quite enough by itself to bring her to orgasm, but there are times when it seems as if stimulation of her clit is barely required. D came once, and then came again very quickly - and then she pushed my head back a little to let me know that she needed a break. We talked, my mouth barely grazing her cunt-lips, and then I began licking and sucking at her clit again, until she came for a third time.

D's fourth and fifth orgasms came while I was sitting on the couch and she was sitting on my cock, grinding away, while I worked on her nipples with my hands. She then lay down on the couch and I got on top and fucked her while we talked and kissed. Then I went down on her right armpit and she came again.

D has had what she calls an 'armpit orgasm' before. Back in the winter I persuaded her to stop shaving under arms, and once the hair had grown in and she starting going easy on the deodorant, her armpits became intensely sensitive. Even though she has now shaved again, they remain so. Fucking on the couch, I can brace my feet on the arm, and so get a lot of pressure from my pubic bone and the base of my cock on her clit. Meanwhile, I licked and sucked and nibbled my way from her mouth, down her neck, across her shoulder and so to her armpit. Then, pinning her arm above her head, I used my lips and teeth and tongue almost as if I was eating her cunt, and quite soon she went over the top into orgasm six. When that was over, I suggested that we do the same on the other side - orgasm seven. D pointed out that several factors are at work in generating the armpit orgasm: she finds it very arousing to have her arms pinned above her head; there are armpit-cunt correlations or connections in terms of hair, smell, position at a place in the body that can be closed up or spread open; the armpit is very close to the nipple.

We had made no use of the desk, so I swept my papers aside and D lay down along the longer axis , with a pillow from the couch under her head, while I sat at the end of the desk in a chair and prepared to eat her out again. I am not sure why, but I got sidetracked into fucking her instead for a while. Then I did eat her out, and after she came - eight - I turned my attention to her asshole, first tonguing it and then, when I judged it open and slick enough, standing up and sticking my cock in. Ass-fucking when standing like that is ideal in terms of being able to watch my cock disappearing inside her, and with hands free I can stimulate her nipples or her clit. Or - and this was what I did today - her right nipple with my left hand and her clit with my right hand. That brought on her last orgasm of the morning, and soon afterwards I came deep in her ass.

All of this took barely an hour-and-a-half. I am not sure D has ever come so many times in so short a period. And yet this by-the-numbers recitation is liable to miss the point. I love to help D come, and because she is insatiable and practically indestructible, I love to help her come again and again. Neither her orgasms nor mine are climaxes in the sense of being endings, but my orgasms do quite often put an end to my erection, and so an end to fucking. But not being able to fuck is no barrier to all the acts that don't require a hard cock, which are many. D is never done, and rarely says 'No', though today, when I offered to let her sit on my face before she left, she was, she said, a little self-conscious about the fact that she was 'messy' - an unsurprising consequence of the fact that I had fucked her very deep in the ass and so she was now leaking a mix of seed and shit. And she needed to get going in order to pick up her daughter and take her off to see some boy-band in New Jersey.

The Problem of Other Minds

Philosophical claims are very often fatuous. The problems that give rise to such claims are, in some sense, pseudo-problems. But though pseudo, these problems are nevertheless deep. The problem of where your lap goes when you stand up is shallow; the problem of other minds, though also pseudo-problematic, is deep.

It is easy to motivate the problem of other minds: surely, I can only ever have access to my own sensations, my own perceptions, my own feelings, my own thoughts. These I know from 'the inside'. Do other people have sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts? Do their sensations and perceptions, thoughts and feelings resemble mine? These questions seem unanswerable if the only evidence I have is how other people appear from 'the outside' - in order to answer them I would have to be able to feel what they feel, sense what they sense, think what they think, and so on.

What is deep here is the sense of the otherness or other people, as well as the knowledge that, by hiding my feelings, I can put others at a disadvantage with respect to their knowledge of me. But in sex, the lack of access to the other can be particularly acute. Is she really enjoying herself? Should I push harder or not, faster or slower? How well does my sense of what pleases her match up with her own? The cult of orgasm is, I believe, a response to this kind of uncertainty: if she comes, the job is done. From this rather crude intuition flows the whole industry of foreplay as a kind of pump-priming, designed to bring the woman close enough to orgasm before penetration so that relatively little fucking stands a decent chance of bringing her to climax. Connected with this is the notion that sex aims at orgasm, and ends with it; also the primacy granted to simultaneous orgasm.

Well, maybe. Certainly, orgasm does function rather well as a measure. I love to help D come, and when I am eating her out and she comes I am very often keen to ride it out and then help her come again. This has been true also with A, though she does not have quite the capacity for serial orgasm that D does. But I do not think that for me this has anything to do with scorekeeping or with elimination of uncertainty. Though D now does quite often come from fucking, that was not true during the first year of our affair, and we did a huge amount of fucking in that time. I never at any point expected or hoped or even fantasized that D would come as result of fucking. When it did happen, it was not aimed at, and the fact that it is possible has, in some minor ways, changed the character of the sex that we have. Oral, on the other hand, certainly did aim at orgasm, and after she has come from oral, D loves to be fucked.

A: she too had never orgasmed from straight fucking, or 'unassisted intercourse', as the Kinsey Report terms it. With A, though, we set out deliberately to see if it could happen, almost as an experiment - one that was, at the first real attempt, a great success. A's interpretation of this was that a mental block had to be overcome: by believing that it was possible, and by setting out after it in a way that was focussed and intent but somehow still low-key and low-pressure, she was able finally to get past the point of near-climax that she had reached so many times before.

Did this elevate sex with A to some new status? No. She had come when I went down on her many times before, and had also helped herself to come around my cock with her hand, so she knew what it felt like to orgasm while being fucked. Did it feel much different because the climax came about without any stimulation besides that derived from fucking? No. Yet it was something that she wanted very much, and something that I was very happy to help her achieve.

Female orgasm is a puzzle from an evolutionary point of view. The various candidate explanations are convincingly demolished by Elisabeth Lloyd in her book, The Case of the Female Orgasm, published by Harvard a year or so ago. She defends the non-explanatory view that female orgasm is an accidental by-product: orgasm is strongly selected for in the male, and the female acquires it by happenstance, just as nipples are selected for in the female, and men end up with up with them by embryological accident. A very pleasing account, in Lloyd's view as well as mine, for if female orgasms are not for anything in evolutionary terms, they cannot be improperly or unnaturally generated. Yet I am not sure that this account can quite capture the delight that I feel when I help a woman achieve climax. That, I suppose, is what is distinctively human - all that outstrips what the best account of our origins can explain. For I do not suppose that evolution will explain our musical ability, or our love of play, or our capacity to do set-theory, any better than it will explain female orgasm.

I have wandered in my topic. About female orgasm I have much more to say. About the problem of other minds, though, I have little more to say. Z, who has no sensation below the waist, and who is despite that sexually responsive - her cunt gets wet, and swells with blood on arousal - has taught me to think and feel more carefully about these matters. She is, strangely, in much the same situation with respect to her own feelings as I am. Being with her, it is natural to describe her state as one of ignorance about what she feels rather than as not feeling it at all. She is so beautiful, so sexy, so desirable; and she is clearly wired to respond to the desire of others for her as well. Yet some part of the circuit is blown.

Z: well, she is not currently nearby. We did have a magical excursion in Central Park after midnight the last time she was in the city, about which I should blog. But this is enough for now.

Alibi drought

In the summer, the stream of alibis reduces to a mere trickle. A precious resource, it is necessary to use them wisely. But what does that mean?

If I were a conquest maven, it would suggest that alibis be saved for new encounters. But I am uninterested in notches on the bedpost, and the new is also the unpredictable and the unreliable. I therefore use my few alibis on D and F, who are familiar, consistent, reliable.

But not too familiar, or consistent. Both D and F have a sexual depth that it takes time to plumb. D, in particular, is remarkable - just today I was with her (alibi = yoga) for a little under three hours, not in the best of circumstances. Yet she managed to amaze me again, marching through a series of orgasms while on top, riding my cock. I am sure she has never done anything quite like that before, not even when stoned. And today she, like me, was not stoned, but stone-cold sober.

D spent many years in a sexless marriage. She had a brief fling, with a trombone player, and then met me. I have been the lucky beneficiary of her sexual awakening, or at least the major part of it, and that has been an extraordinary honour. Over the course of a year-and-a-half, D has discovered or rediscovered her joy in her own body as well as her confidence in her ability and desirability. An alibi used on her is well used.

Addendum: Today I had a decent alibi for the entire afternoon and early evening, and so I saw both F and D.

F: we began, somewhat unusually, with her on top. F is by far the best fuck I know in that position. Over the course of more than an hour-and-a-half we rang the changes on fucking, finger-fucking, oral. Eventually F gave me a handjob while I stuck a finger up my ass, and then we swapped roles, with me jerking off while she probed for my prostrate, triggering an orgasm that produced a very large load of ejaculate.

D: we were in my office. Fucking on the floor, me on top. D then sat on my face. Then more fucking, but I went rather limp. So D then lay back on the desk and I sat in the desk-chair and ate her out. By the time that she had finished coming I was very hard and so fucked her for a good while, at one point helping her to come again by fingering her clit. Then I ate her out again on the desk, and then she knelt on the floor and game me a blowjob. That petered out and we chatted and then lay down on the carpet and fucked. She was extremely wet, and so I stuck a finger in her ass, and then, using her cunt-juice as lubricant, my cock. After a little while I came deep in her ass, with several distinct, delightful spasms. Coming in D's ass is always good, but this was especially enjoyable.

After that, D sat on my face again, as she wanted another orgasm. And then we washed up, and went for a drink.

When alibis are scarce, it is good to make the most of them.

Too busy fucking to blog

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