Sunday Morning Questions: Shorn Nuts Edition

Is there any better sensation than a pair of freshly-shaven nuts?

I know from experience that such a seemingly innocent question will raise all sorts of controversy. Is there any deeper divide in our population than over the question of manscaping? No! shouts a vocal chunk of hair-lovin' hirsutes. Keep them nuts natural!

Yes! shout an equally avid proportion of guys who keep afloat the business of porn featuring young guys with bodies freakishly devoid of any trace of follicularity. Hair is icky!

Ordinarily I tend to fall in the middle of the debate. I like a guy to keep his natural body hair. I think it's beautiful stuff. I wish I could grow it. Belly hair, chest hair, small-of-the-back hair—it can all be very sexy. At the same time, I enjoy the sensations of a cleanly-shaved hole, or the flat of a pelvis from which all the public hair's been shorn. The sandpapery sensation of a shaved chest against the flat of my hand can be sensual. I love rubbing my hand over a shaved skull.

It's your body, I say. Do what you want to do with it, and with the stuff that grows out of it.

But I like to keep my nuts clean, generally. Though most of my hair is very soft and very fine, my balls have some genetic throwback to a Viking forebear, apparently; any hair that grows there comes out red-blond and coarse to the point that each strand is roughly the thickness of a small twig. I can picture some ancestor of mine, after a good night of pillaging and raping along the medieval coastal regions, plucking one of his scrotal pubes and using it to pick his grotty teeth, or perhaps employ it as a crude lockpick.

So I shave. Every week or so I grab my razor and have at it, hacking away at the undergrowth like some kind of explorer in the African wilds. I used to use a safety razor, but the results were less than optimal—plus I was occasionally slicing myself, and that one area from which one just doesn't want blood oozing. I tried a very gentle depilatory. While its results were fantastic, the very gentle chemical burn it produced didn't encourage me to use it again. And it left me walking bow-legged for a week.

Now I use a body razor—one of my readers used my wish list to replace the one I had that'd given up the ghost after having to thwack its way through the jungle tangle for several years. When it's done, I feel free. I feel clean. I feel civilized again.

Another confession: I occasionally trim the hair that grows around the ring of my nipples as well. But only when it's so long that I can braid it.

Where do you guys come in on the shaving thing? Do you like it on yourselves? Prefer it on others? Think it's an abomination unto the Lord?

While you discuss, I'll get to some questions rounded up from formspring.me.


First experience with rimming? Doing it and getting it done?

This is an interesting question about which I had to think long and hard. I seem to recall that I was very much resistant to rimming when I first encountered it in the years after I started having sex with men. The majority of the sex I was having in my early teens was in public restrooms and in the woods, and in those situations there wasn't any rimming whatsoever; the guys who occasionally took me home during that time apparently weren't big on it, either.

I don't think it was until right around the time I met my mentor, Earl, that I learned about rimming. Whoever suggested it to me first—I don't remember the name—described it as 'you lick my dirty butthole and I lick yours back'. It did not sound at all appetizing, and I wouldn't agree to do it.

It was several men later that someone explained that it wasn't about dirty buttholes, and then he flipped me over and did it to me. I was kind of amazed that it felt as good as it did. It took a few more encounters with rimming before I tried it myself, though. I'm grateful that I had clean asses to perform it on pretty consistently, because otherwise I would've run feeling from one of life's greatest pleasures.


We know from your blog a broom handle has been used up your butt, was there any other non-traditional items used as a dildo in your youth or today?

I haven't used an anal toy on myself in at least a decade. The last time anyone used one on me was a guy in a bathhouse who had a bookstore's worth of adult toys in his play bag, and who relaxed me enough to get a few finger-sized butt plugs and a very pleasurable inflatable vibrator inside my hole.

But those aren't non-traditional. As a youth I had my broom handle, but I also experimented with vegetables—a cucumber, a zucchini, the narrow end of a summer squash, a carrot. I was afraid to try anything fragile, like a glass bottle, or anything that I might accidentally lose in there, like one of my mom's lipsticks or something similar, because I'd read in one of my parents' sex manuals that homosexuals were always inserting stuff light bulbs up their rear ends and requiring emergency surgery.

That manual was stupid, of course. But then later on I knew someone who was playing with a dildo on cam and lost it up his butt and had to go to the hospital. (He was a dumbass. He should've just relaxed and let it work its way out.) So maybe the author wasn't too far off.


Do you believe bi-sexuality is a choice or do you believe that most people are bisexual to some extent but choose to ignore same-sex or hetero attractions in keeping with their most dominant attractions?

I believe when it comes to sex, we don't get to make a choice about what desires we have, but we can choose whether to act upon them, and with whom.

That is, I don't believe that someone chooses to be bisexual. I believe that people have an innate set of attractions, and that a certain proportion of the human race is sexually drawn to both men and women. Some people will embrace their feelings and sleep with both sexes; others may recognize the impulse, but confine themselves to sleep with one sex while simply recognizing the attractiveness of the other. Someone else might choose to honor a monogamous commitment and forswear the other sex; another person might be frightened of his feelings, squelch his same-sex attraction, and pretend it's not there and never act upon it.

(This also happens with gay men, by the way; I've known many who've been curious about having sex with a woman, but who never act upon it for some reason or another.)

The choice in sexuality, from my perspective, is either to have it, or not to have it. Anti-gay foes would prefer that we not. When they talk about choice, they seem to believe that not having the evil gay sex is all it takes to make someone straight. It does not. Those desires are always going to be there, acted upon or not.

Personally, I don't think that inaction makes one more virtuous, or restrained, or saintly. It is simply a denial of the rich abundance that life offers; it is slamming the door in the face of opportunity, and intimacy, and experience.


Do you think you look more sexy naked or just wearing underwear? Anyone ever tell you one way or the other?

I think generally—and I'm swimming against the mainstream here—men (and women) look sexier naked than in their underwear.

Underwear has been fetishized too much, I think, in the last ten or fifteen years. Ever since Marky Mark posted in his Calvin Kleins, in fact. Guys seem to think they don't have to bring anything to the table other than a photo of them in designer underwear and it automatically makes them super-sexy.

Whatever works for them, I'm happy to encourage. But for me, when I'm lying in bed with someone and we're enjoying that post-coital haze, the first thing out of my mouth isn't going to be, "Wow, your underwear was really amazing."

If it is, it's because they were doing it wrong.


Why are so many obsessed with your home/family life

I don't know that many are obsessed with it. I think some are fascinated by it in the same way audiences were fascinated by strippers like Gypsy Rose Lee, in the golden age of burlesque—she showed her audience quite a lot, but not everything. As a consequence, men were obsessed with what remained under wraps.

I think additionally a lot of people aren't used to seeing someone live his life as he damn well pleases, for the most part.