Brazilians (Mouseover)

Alas, it looks like my vacation post will have to wait another day. I somehow managed to upload only about half of the pictures that I thought I had uploaded. Plus, I'm really tired because I was up until 2:30 this morning caramelizing onions. It doesn't usually take that long, but I kept getting interrupted by guys who came over to have sex, so I had to keep turning the flame off: onions burn easily if you don't watch them carefully. Also, these pictures were all captioned as pictures of Brazilians. I have my doubts, but at least the guys are pretty.

Anyway, not last night, but the night before, this guy who's been wanting to suck my cock for some time came over all the way from Baltimore, and he was a stand-up guy, so he was up front about the fact that he didn't kiss, but he really wanted to suck me off, and I'm a stand-up guy, so I told him that he was welcome to try but that most guys don't have the endurance to finish the job. And he said that he'd give it his best shot as long as my cock was rock hard, and I said that he could certainly make it rock hard, so he showed up at my door, and since I couldn't kiss him, I said hello, and he asked about my vacation, and I pointed upstairs, and we went up, and he was still talking, so I unbuttoned my pants, and I wasn't wearing any underwear,and he said, "Oh, okay," and I lay back¹ on the bed, and he stood next to the bed and sighed and said, "It looks just like it did in the pic...," but then he stopped because it was soft and so looked nothing like it looks in the picture, so he bent over and started to suck it, and after a couple of minutes, he stopped and said, happily, "Now it looks just like the picture," and then he returned to sucking, which he did well, and I started to play with the nipple closest to me, and he dropped his pants, and I gave his cock a few strokes and then started to lightly finger his ass, and when I started to fondle his balls, he said that I'd make him cum, so I went back to playing with his nipples, and he went down on me for about ten minutes -- fifteen tops -- before admitting defeat, so I told him to lie next to me, and I sucked on his nipple and stroked his cock, and he came about a minute later, and then he thanked me for being a stand-up guy, and then he cleaned himself up a bit, and, as he was dressing, we began to chat, and he happened to mention that he has a wife in Brazil.

"Oh, really?" I asked.

"Yeah," he replied, "I like to suck cock, but I'm mostly into women."

"No, I didn't mean that I didn't believe you. I was just a little awed. Brazilians are probably the most beautiful people on the planet. Especially the men, but even the women." And it's true, right? I mean, I have no sexual attraction to women these days, but you'd have to be blind not to recognize that Sonia Braga was (and probably still is) pretty hot. I haven't had sex with nearly enough Brazilian men, but the ones I've played with were all smoking. And they were all hung, but I tried not to hold that against them. I'm not immune to the visual charms of a huge cock, so long as no one tries to stretch my ass or jaw with it.

Anyway, the guy left, after extracting a promise that I'd let him come back and try again. (And, hell, why not? He lives in downtown Baltimore, and it's almost an hour for him to get to our house, but if he wants to make the trip, I'll let him. He's a decent guy.) But our discussion of Brazilians got me thinking about what I find attractive. Eric² quotes Alain de Botton who paraphrases Wilhelm Worringer:

We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient.

And, certainly, that statement would explain why I find Asian men to be the sexiest men on the planet: they're entirely smooth, they're not white, they're generally shorter and often look underfed, and they have small, uncut cocks.

On the whole, though, I'd have to say that Brazilians look more like me than Asians do, so I'm not sure that it makes sense (under the regime of the Worringer-de Botton-Sore Afraid axis) that I find them slightly more beautiful, though slightly less sexy, than Asian men. In fact, if I look at most ethnicities, and at most other physical traits, and I attempt to plot them on a graph where one axis is how different from me they are and the other axis is how beautiful I find them, I'm afraid we don't get anything that would indicate a meaningful statistical relationship between what I lack and what I find attractive. (As just one example, I find full lips almost unbearably attractive, and I have very full lips, especially for a white guy.)

I might, of course, be an outlier. I'm a big slut, and I like guys of almost every type, so maybe I'm not representative. But if we look at some major sub-groups of the gay population, we find many men who purport to find men who are most like them most attractive. There are certainly twinks who are bear chasers, but there are also many bears who want nothing so much as another furry chest to rub up against. And there are plenty of white men who only find other white men attractive. In some cases, that may be bigotry, but in other cases it's simply like liking like. I hear there are even Asian rice queens. Go figure.

And, of course, there's the issue that a lot of gay men (myself included) find men more beautiful than women. It strikes me as likely that women have more of what men are deficient in than other men have. Perhaps the explanation here is that historically oppressed minorities are more likely to turn inwards as a means of self-preservation, but that still leaves us with a somewhat modified version of M. de Botton's premise: we find what we lack most beautiful, except for when we don't. I can see why M. de Botton wouldn't go with that version: it's closer to the truth, but some people might say it's pretty damned obvious and wonder why they'd bought the book.

I obviously haven't read The Architecture of Happiness. I'd probably agree that people will, all other things being equal, be happier in a well-designed home than they would be in a hovel, but, here again, that seems a little bit obvious. I'm prepared to admit (in all sincerity) that I'm a lesser person because of my near-total inability to read non-fiction books that are not cookbooks, travel books, or sex manuals³. B&c, for example, reads non-fiction all the time, and he's much more of an intellectual because of it. I'd buy him a copy of The Architecture of Happiness for Christmas and then hang out in the living room, reading porn, while he reads it so that he could tell me the good bits, but a) I hate it when he interrupts me while I'm reading porn, and b) I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't want to read The Architecture of Happiness, though if there's ever a biography of Alain de Botton, he might well read that, especially if M. de Botton has ever had male lovers or received a Nobel prize in one of the hard sciences.

I'm inherently skeptical of books that carry any whiff of popular philosophy, and I'm even more skeptical of anyone who tries to sell guidance: I believe that true prophets always give it away. In the age of capitalism, though, you probably can't be anyone's role model without a revenue stream. Still, the concept of reading a whole book to figure out how happiness works and how architecture affects happiness probably only makes sense to people who have more spare time than I have. (Maybe when I'm retired, I'll find a copy at the used book sale at the local library.) I'd probably tell people who want to be happy not to worry about feng shui and instead to do things that make them happy, but then I'd be accused of oversimplification, which is a bad thing, though probably not so bad a thing as making something unnecessarily complicated (unless that thing is a sentence, in which case unnecessary complication is a virtue). So I pondered the matter for a few minutes, and I came up with my own rules for happiness:

1. Seek out people who share your fundamental values but who are not exactly like you.
2. Be good to people, and be especially good to your family, your friends, and yourself.
3. Have more sex.

Not necessarily in that order. Now, where the HELL is my book deal?

¹This conversation happened mostly via email, and I had a very uneasy night during which I thought that I had told him that I would "just lay back" and let him suck me. Fortunately, before he came over, I checked the email record and discovered that I had, in fact, said "just lie back," so all was right with the world. That particular mistake would have haunted me for days, had I made it.

²A note to favored reader J: there is no need to email me and ask whether this is a dig at Eric. It is not. I have nothing but respect for anyone who strives to learn languages with non-Latin scripts and who speaks French better than I do; who wrestles with the difficult questions of spirituality, public manners, or proper attire; or who attempts to resolve the eternal struggle between The Pines and The Cherry Orchard. (And, yes, that very last phrase was a dig, but more at Manhattanites generally than at Eric specifically.) Email me about something else, like maybe the sex lives of apple trees.

³If anyone could point me towards a book -- with recipes -- about the use of chocolate as a sex aid in major European capitals, I'd be ever so grateful.