That said, Good Cheer is up to 6,866 from 6,192, which is an addition of 674 words. I also started a new story, Like a Brother, and wrote 761 words on it. I’d planned to put it next in the queue (it’s for a call for submissions) but one day it elbowed its way to the top. So 1400 words isn’t bad for a week, but I’m still hoping for more. We’ll see.

Unfortunately, it got mixed reactions from my first readers. Is it good? Is it crap? That deliberation is why it’s here, for free. I can’t honestly say. Comments are invited below.

Also, I’ve added galleries of Laura, Coco, and Trisha, for those interested.

Anyway–I tacked on 1373 words to Good Cheer, bringing it to 6,192. That’s a start back in the right direction. We’ll see what the week brings.

Our eyes were wide, and I can still call up some of those images forty years later. The phrase hadn’t been invented then, and we would’ve been too young even if it had, but “Oh My God!” was certainly the experience.

We got caught, the magazines got taken away and hidden better, and nothing was ever said to us. In fact, nothing was really said about sexuality beyond how the plumbing works for my entire childhood and adolescence. In other words, I had a pretty normal childhood. After all, how many families have an environment where a kid can comfortably walk downstairs and say, “I’m feeling horny. What should I do about it?”

Which is, in my opinion, the heart of the problem of male sexuality in America. Boys get to figure it out with nothing but pop culture as a guide.

Which is pretty shitty. Masculinity is defined rather narrowly and masculine views of sex even more so. I certainly internalized the views that a male was supposed to “want it all the time” and be hopelessly out of control around a sexy woman. We were supposed to be attracted to a certain body time and age range and any deviation from that (much less an attraction to other males) meant we were wimps and pussies and less than men. Guys who didn’t make slobbering sounds of attraction when the hottest girl in class walked by were ostracized. Guys who talked about sex seriously were shunned. Guys who got an erection in the locker room got beaten up.

Porky’s was our guide for what was expected. Top Gun was what we thought we needed to be. When Beavis and Butt-head debuted several years later, it kind of captured our attitude. “Oh… you said *sex*! Heh heh heh!”

There wasn’t a lot of room there, for an honest and healthy understanding of sex. There wasn’t any room for exploring one’s own desires, especially if they didn’t conform to the mainstream. That’s carried over to adulthood for many of the men I know. So many of us are stuck at “OMG, it’s Sex!”

This is largely self-censorship and learned behavior. The men I know are great about suppressing their feelings and not articulating them. They’ve been trained well and have lots of practice. (grin)

This is reinforced because often we’re demonized if we’re honest about our sexual needs, as Clarisse Thorn eloquently describes here and in the posts linked therein. A guy who says “I want this” is a creep, or pathetic, or a pervert. Which means ironically the guys who have the most freedom discuss sex are the ones who are perverts, in the strict sense of that word. The alternative sex communities create the safe space to discuss sex and sexuality that the mainstream world lacks.

Heterosexual non-kinky men have few places to go.

Ironically, one of those places is a “perversion” that’s almost natural: sex workers. Between 15% and 20% of American men have paid for sex at least once in their lives (here). That doesn’t count phone sex, strippers, professional dominatrices, or other types of sex work. One has to ask: why?

In the conversations with the dozen or so sex workers I know and have known personally, the answer is usually that the men are looking for something they don’t feel they can ask for from the “regular” women in their lives. It’s not necessarily all that kinky, either. One women told of a client who just wanted to be able to come in the woman’s mouth–something denied to him by the handful of women who’d gone down on him in the past. Somehow paying money loosened him up enough to actually ask for what he wanted.

One phone sex worker told me that she used to get calls from guys who just wanted to talk about what turned them on. They didn’t roleplay. The guy just wanted someone to not tell him he was crazy, and he didn’t have anywhere else to turn for less than $2.99 a minute.

There’s something very sad about that. Not pathetic. Just broken-hearted.

Obviously, this is where my Compassionate Courtesan universe came from. Also, obviously, not all sex work is anywhere close to the fantasies in my fiction. But it certainly is a fun ideal…

There’s one other area that I think heterosexual non-kinky men can go, and that’s fiction. As much as we look at visual porn, plenty of men read it too. Penthouse Letters is for guys, and I know plenty of guys who’d rather read that then look at the pictures. Hell, once in high school a bunch of us did just that, as we divvied up an unexpectedly gifted porn stash from one boy’s older brother.

But creating that space for exploration requires erotic fiction that goes beyond porn. It has to stimulate the mind and heart as well as the dick. I’m not sure there’s much of it out there, that’s specifically aimed at men. Erotica that’s not pure stroke porn tends to be erotic romance, with a decidedly female audience bent. Perhaps there needs to be more variety, and more that’s truly aimed at men.

Which begs the question–if we write it, will they come? (pun intended). Would there be readers for erotica (not written porn) aimed specifically at men and male sexuality?

I suspect there’s only one way to find out.

Today is not that day. I’m still getting slammed by life.

So instead, here’s a preview of the cover for Old Dogs. I’ll release it as an ebook as soon as I get some other things fixed in my existing ebooks. Yes, I realize the cover doesn’t indicate it’s erotica. Perhaps I’ll market it as literature, now that Amazon is making it difficult to search for adult ebooks.

Writing has slipped to a back seat.

I still added 275 words to Good Cheer, bringing it to 3,760. That stuns me. I honestly can’t recall when I snuck in the time to do even that much.

Fortunately, this too shall pass.

With that in mind, here’s a preview of the art for the new section. Enjoy.

Nonetheless, airports waiting for planes are good places to write. I was on Southwest this time and was pleasantly surprised to discover they’d added work areas with electrical outlets near their gates. That raises them a notch in desirability.

I finished Every Seven Seconds, and it’s now out to some alpha readers. It only needed 266 words to bring it to 2,183. It’ll be part of my Addictive Desires anthology when I finish the rest of the stories for it. I also added 187 to Good Cheer, bringing it to 3,485. Finally, I wrote what will be the introduction to the Addictive Desires anthology (318 words).

Basically, I now have five stories that I’m calling Addictive Desires stories (The Fix, Methadone, The First Taste, Old Dogs, and now Every Seven Seconds). I have ideas for several more. While some of these stories stand alone just fine, others are somewhat short to be an ebook. However, they’d fit together well as an anthology. So my plan is to do just that–release an anthology when I get between 8 and 12 stories that hang together with the Addictive Desires theme. Some of the stories will be unique to the anthology. Some will be available as ebook singles. Some will be free here and other places.

Now I just have to find the time to write them…

Laura
Coco
Trisha

The story, Center Stage, will be released here, sometime in the next couple of weeks (I’m waiting for the art from Tzratzk).