The Perfect Man

In a comment on a recent post, reader Erquirk (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that's a nom de plume) writes, among other things:

Though I've never seen you or your drives-the-boys-crazy dick, nonetheless, I have a feeling that you can do a lot better (in catty gay terms) than this last guy you had tied to your bed. I must, therefore, commend you for not being a gay body discriminator when it comes to dom/sub fantasy and play.

I want to write some about this subject, but I find that I'm having a hard time organizing my thoughts. A lot of the narrative on this blog is simple reporting, which mostly organizes itself. All I have to do is write what happened, and then I make a second run through to make sure I didn't leave out an important detail and possibly to delete some (but never all) of what's extraneous. Other times I'm talking about specific events or topics, and if my thoughts are sufficiently cogent, I'm an experienced enough writer to put it down quickly. But in this case, neither of those approaches will work for me. So I'm going to give myself permission to ramble even more than usual. You can always just look at the pictures, which, by the way, were all among the results when I used "perfect man" as the search term on a popular photo sharing site. That means that each of them is somebody's perfect man. None of them -- except for the last one -- would be my perfect man, but I think all of them -- except for the last one -- are eminently fuckable.


Erquirk and I may or may not be on the same page when it comes to what he calls "gay body discrimina[tion]." I more often read or hear the phrase "gay body fascism" (a term I prefer because it's so much more colorful and over the top), but I don't really think that preferring a certain type of body is either discrimination or fascism. I don't know whether, or to what extent, our tastes in men are hard wired from an early age, self-determined, or subject to media manipulation. I tend to think that the media's emphasis on a certain interpretation of bodily perfection reflects rather than creates public tastes, but I could be wrong about that. And even if I am wrong about that, it doesn't really matter. If you like only certain types of men because Madison Avenue tells you to, is that so bad? It likely limits the men that you want to play with, and it likely makes you spend a lot of extra time in the gym, but unless it makes you actively unhappy, then what's the big deal? And I further suppose that if so-called body fascism makes you actively unhappy and you don't have the sense to reject it, then I feel a little bit sorry for you and hope, for your sake, that you'll see the error of your ways.

I thought twice before I posted the pictures of the guy I had tied to my bed this past Sunday. I know that a significant amount of my readership is composed of guys who come for the pictures, and those guys are used to seeing pictures of which the so-called body fascists would approve. And I know that Mr. Sunday isn't such a person. I also know that, for reasons I don't understand, most guys look better when they're tied to a bed, but Mr. Sunday was cuter when he was standing in my doorway in his boxer briefs, waiting for me to blindfold and handcuff him.


In fact, when I sent some of the pictures to Mr. Sunday, his response was "Cool... more proof i need to spend more time in the gym!" And that response made me a tiny bit sad, but not very sad because he also said that he wanted to come back for more.

It isn't virtue that encourages me to tie guys like Mr. Sunday to the bed: I think Mr. Sunday is hella cute. Now, it's true that I may think that in part because the first pic Mr. Sunday ever sent me was a small face pic that showed his extremely engaging smile¹, or I may think that because we spent some time making up while we were both standing at the toilet and I was holding his cock to direct his piss into the bowl, but in general I have to say that I find the late twenty-something to early thirty-something overweight newly submissive guys to be awesome in the sack, and when I see their pictures, I usually smile. Unless they're wearing stockings or some other item of women's clothing, which is one of my few big visual turn-offs.


On the other hand, if you go back through the archives, you'll see plenty of other pictures of guys tied to the bed, and many of them were guys who are within the standard parameters of hotness, and I much more eagerly posted their pictures because I figured it was what people wanted. And, as I've said countless times before, there's a visual/aesthetic component of my mind that appreciates standard hotness. It's just that my visual/aesthetic response and my visceral response are largely independent. I don't think that's so much the case for a lot of guys, most notably the so-called body fascists.

Another phenomenon that we have to recognize is that while there are pretty clear, generally accepted standards of hotness, those standards aren't universal. I get my share of comments and (more) emails asking me exactly what I look like. I have compelling reasons for guarding my anonymity that relate to my being a parent and a professional and to bad past experiences involving an angry spouse and a divorce attorney. I also like the idea of those of my readers who use the blog as fantasy fodder creating me in their own ideal image. And no matter how I look, somebody would be disappointed. But clearly, if I wanted to, I could post anonymous pictures of myself here, and, also clearly, if I had a body like the bodies of some of the younger gym rats whose blogs I read, then posting such pictures would increase my readership. So I think it's fair to infer from the lack of such pictures that I don't have such a body. (I'll also point out here that it would be an easy matter to put a mask on one of my very hot playmates and pretend that his picture was my own and avoid this whole discussion, but I really do draw the line at outright lies.)


But one of the benefits of not being one of the so-called body fascists is that you get to cut yourself some slack. I guess I have moments when I would like to have a great body, but most of the time, I really just don't care. I would care if I needed a better body to have plenty of sex, but it should be pretty obvious that I get sex almost whenever I want it. When I first came out, around the turn of the millennium, I thought that I would need a great body, or at least I thought that I'd need one by now (i.e., well into my forties). But that just hasn't turned out to be the case. I would like to think that the ready supply of men is mostly due to my attitude and superior skills. It might be more due to the (alert: tiny bit of personal statistical data coming!) six-inch circumference of my cock, but I don't really care. The point is that everybody has something that's attractive to some group of guys, so work with what you have, change something if you really want to or have to, and otherwise, don't worry so much about it. Unless, you know, you want to worry about it: that's okay, too. In fact, it's okay with me if you want to worry about my body, but as long as I can keep finding nice guys to make out with me and let me play with their nipples and eat their ass and maybe fuck them, then I really don't care. I'm able to recognize what the so-called body fascists would consider my shortcomings without caring.

Similarly, I'm ever so slightly pleased when one of my tricks tells me I'm hot, but mostly I just shrug, because I don't care about that, either. I'm more pleased when they compliment my skills.

I'm sure I had other things to say about this subject, but the only thing I remember right now is an amusing illustration about differences in opinions about hotness that I will include when I discuss the fourway that I arranged last night in order to mend fences with Nike. I will note, mostly for Erquirk's benefit, that readers have on occasion sent me their pictures, and I almost always tell them that they're hot. And I'm totally telling the truth, but I'm not sure how much it means coming from someone who finds roughly 95% of all guys under sixty-five to be hot. So send pictures if you want, and I'll appreciate it, but it's unlikely that I'll reciprocate. I'm only likely to send my face picture to my very favorite reader, and as much as I love all my readers, I only have one absolute favorite, and I've already sent him the picture. (He told me I looked tired, by the way. I took the picture at 11 pm, after an extremely draining -- albeit fun -- play date, so I wasn't especially surprised to look tired, but whatever. I suppose I should be glad that I didn't wait until after the 11:30 play date the same night to take the picture: then he might have told me I looked dead.) But whether you want to send a picture or not, Erquirk, you should email me: I have a piece of information that you'll want.


¹In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that there's one physical characteristic of my own that causes some regret: I wish I had a better smile. Alas, my mouth naturally turns down, so people often don't realize I'm happy when I am. On the other hand, I have very full lips for a Caucasian, and I'm happy about that, when I remember to notice.