There was no trading with girls, no negotiating. Not really. That
stinginess of theirs again. They were always ahead, they already
had what they needed from you - your obsession with them - and so
they never ran any risk. Sure, obviously they could resist you
and reject you and play with your feelings and what could you do
but hope they'd turn nice. But it actually wouldn't hurt them to
BE nice. They'd lose nothing by that.
The game was set up so that they couldn't lose, no matter what
they did, no matter what the boys did. (The only edge males had
was in physical strength, and even though that could get pretty
ugly, it wasn't really an edge at that, because nine times out of
ten a girl who wasn't brainwashed into fear could still get
control of a guy with a few easy moves.) So it was nothing but
stinginess, gleeful stinginess, if girls kept boys begging or
just yearning inwardly, as was the case with Benjie. For
instance, Benjie sometimes had the idea that it would be
gratifying to start a collection of well, locks of hair freely
bestowed by girls and women.
Let's be totally clear about this: locks of okay, PUBIC hair.
Locks of pubic hair. Little samples of the secret growth females
have where their legs meet. He'd have to request them, of course.
That would not be easy, given that old stinginess. But why
couldn't he plead meekly for this small favor? It would mean so
much to him, and ask so little of her. The hair , it would grow
back just like that. Anyhow, her triangle wouldn't miss it: he
wouldn't expect a large donation. A favor a girl could do him
without much cost to her, and no real need for embarrassment. He
wouldn't make the snip himself. He wouldn't even watch, if she
didn't wish him to. It would be enough to know that she was doing
it, gathering the sample, pulling it taut, carefully shearing it,
so near the moisture of her lips and clitoris.
He'd keep each girl's hair in its own air-tight plastic envelope,
with her name and maybe her age, and the date, printed in the
tiniest letters on the label. It would be for him alone: he'd
have this duty to his benefactress. Eventually he'd collect quite
a few, in all colors, and what harm would there be in that? He'd
study them, lovingly imagine the demure patches from which they
came, the soft, concealing muffs, the elusiveness of girls. Was
providing a boy with a permanent reminder of that such a bad
thing? But just imagine proposing it to any girl whatsoever!
And Benjie had a feeling that, even with all this power girls
knew they had and which they carefully conserved, they still
didn't come close to realizing its full extent. He remembered
hearing his mom say something to this effect to some
woman-friends years before. "I don't think we have a clue," she'd
said. The others listened with interest, nodded thoughtfully,
tentatively. "I think," she'd said, "that for every man whose
eyes we know we've caught, for every man we know we've made a
little goofy, there are probably dozens and dozens we don't even
know are there. Poor, enchanted men - don't ask enchanted by
what? that's my point, girls - men who know we haven't noticed
them, who're going to spend the rest of the day doing in fantasy
what they're too shy to offer us in person."
All the women shook their heads. They couldn't fathom it. They
were just typical women, not glamor-pusses. But his mom must have
been right, because little Benjie himself thought she and her
friends were awfully pretty, especially in their lip-stick and
their stylish hair, and he loved to plant himself, as if absorbed
in something else, in a corner of the room they sat in, where he
could steal glances freely. (A couple of them had seen him naked
when he was smaller, and he was sure when they looked his way the
recollection of that sight was the reason they smiled.) "Men
don't require as much perfection as we think," one of the women
sagely concluded.
So a roomful of girls, plus of course Miss Ashley and whoever was
going to assist her, were going to see him naked. See him, touch
him, observe how he reacted when they swatted his penis and
jolted his balls. Why did people, including himself, make such a
thing of situations like that? He was a boy-person willing to
help a bunch of girl-persons out. That was it. Yes, he had mixed
feelings about it, but the biggest thing in the mixture was that
he had to admit (though he'd never do so, as he now felt, to
another living boy) he wanted to play this role. Why ARE people
so ashamed of being seen naked? He had always been - ashamed and,
if the witness was female, despite himself glad. Everyone knows
what everyone has. But we don't act that way, we don't DRESS that
way. We treat it as a great secret, one that gets out once in a
while but somehow still basically stays a secret. We cover
ourselves-that's the big fact.
We cover ourselves to...what? To pretend that there's nothing
down there, or that we're all the same down there, or at least
that there's no way except stripping someone naked to know for
sure what they have and what they are. Sex organs are so weird. A
boy's are truly weird; they seem tacked on and totally awkward.
Like they don't really belong anywhere and are put where they are
just to make them parallel to a girl's. But then a girl's are
weird because they're nothing like a boy's; they're sort of not
there at all. Boys are weird for having them, and girls for not
having them.
In some magazines, they go to so much trouble to make it look as
if girls have big, raucous organs just like men. They have to
spread them apart and bend them upside-down and backwards to do
this, and usually the women have to keep their vaginas open by
hand, and then maybe it does look as if girls' organs are THINGS.
But it's total distortion, it's not true: you don't see girls in
school or out in the world doing contortions.
The girls in Playboy are truer to life where poses are concerned,
and they look much more like the girls at school, except for
their tits in most cases, and that's the better way, although
Playboy goes too far in the other direction, shaving pubic hair
into silly little spikes and generally leaving girls looking like
they're made of polymer. Anyhow, Playboy doesn't show much vagina
at all, which is really too bad. The pictures Benjie liked best
were:
1. The girl in her panties, the fabric (simple cotton was just
fine) stretched clean and smooth over her mound, maybe a hint of
indentation, maybe not, but the wonderful round protrusion itself
silently scorning all the jut and dangle he and every other boy
had down there.
2. The girl just standing there naked, looking at you, looking as
comfortable as if she were clothed, that neat triangle of hair on
her otherwise bare torso keeping her privacy, except maybe for
the scant shadow of her slit, or maybe not even.
3. The girl comfortably reclining, as if alone in her room, with
her thighs parted just enough to give one a gentle glimpse, amid
her soft lower tuft, of her delicate minor lips just emerging for
some air. As for her clitoris, Benjie would welcome a clear view
of that, but all his pictorial prowling had left him quite
uncertain about whether he'd ever caught sight of the mercurial
organ or not.
He didn't understand why anyone would like to imagine girls as
gluey bundles of flaps and folds. You could look in the mirror
and distort your familiar old face until you looked like a
gargoyle, but even though there'd be nothing there besides your
face, it wouldn't be your face either. And that's what some mags
did with women's cunts. Made them into things nobody, looking at
a pretty woman walking down the street, could really imagine
concealed there between her long, lank legs. Benjie had an
opinion as to why males might imagine girls this way: it made
them feel a little better about truly having the most
embarrassing and vulnerable things in the world hanging down
there between their own legs, "protected" (if that was the word
for it) by nothing more than a swatch or two of thin cloth.
Sometimes, MOST times, he thought that the difference between
girls and him had to be the most important thing in the world.
Not just the difference you'd express by saying they have this
and I have that, but the big difference that I have things they
don't have, things that they can see and touch and cause to
change (even without touching), even when I have my clothes on,
while there's absolutely nothing like that I can do to them. What
could be more important than this embarrassing difference? But
then, sometimes, he told himself that it hardly mattered at all,
that it was just the way things were and people were just people,
whether they were boys or girls, and the difference between them
shouldn't be made any bigger than the sex organs themselves,
which were pretty small compared to our total size. This position
didn't usually remain convincing for long, however: one of his
thousand daily erections, more often than not in public
circumstances (read, "teeming with girls") would always make him
forget its bland arithmetic.
Even though officially your penis went along with other features
that were supposed to be advantageous, it had always been pretty
clear to Benjie that girls felt superior for NOT having one. (Why
even get into what it meant NOT to have balls? They were an
unmitigated handicap, no matter that we made them a symbol of
virility.) He thought he would never in all his life forget a
certain afternoon when he was five, an episode of horrid
humiliation as far as he was concerned, though he could see that
nobody else present found it anything other than humdrum.
He was at the beach with his mother and two of her
"girl-friends," young women who didn't yet have kids of their
own. They were lazily getting ready to pack it in for the day
and, as she always did, his mother was towelling Benjie off,
brushing away as much sand as she could before dressing him for
the ride home. He hated this moment, because of the abrasive
effect of the sand as his mother rubbed, but also because he knew
that at a certain point his mother would pull down his
bathing-trunks and briskly continue the process over his buttocks
and front and her woman-friends would see all of him. Apparently
this shouldn't matter to him, since it didn't seem to matter to
anyone else - the two women didn't even look away - but all the
same it did matter, vaguely, though he'd learned to accept it and
swallow his chagrin when his mother actually seemed to put him on
display, boy-parts forward, and a little mutinous stiffness might
form in his penis. (From the very first time mom had done this,
Benjie lived with the idea, I have been seen by ladies, the fact
that I have a penis has been seen. A shameful knowledge that
nonetheless could cause arousal now and then.)
On this particular afternoon, a trio of young girls, probably not
a lot older than Benjie, came ambling by just as his mother was
lowering his trunks, and the sight stopped them in their tracks.
They stood a few feet off and simply stared. No disguise, no
apology. Benjie's mother saw nothing in the arrival of an
audience to warrant modifying her activity. She went on
burnishing the boy. She even smiled at the visitors. Benjie gave
her an importunate look, whined a wordless plea, but this only
brought a chuckle in response. "Benjie," his mother remonstrated,
"you can't blame girls for being curious." She smiled once more
at the girls. "This is Benjie," she said. "He's a little
sand-magnet." "Okay," one of the girls said, and all three began
to giggle. "Girls!" his mother said tolerantly, addressing her
two friends.
The towel, guided by two fingers within its folds, descended into
Benjie's groin, nudging aside his testicles and making them and
his little acorn penis jig. This humiliation could never happen
to a girl. That much was clear to Benjie in his submission. Each
girl's bathing-suit plumped her young labia into a smooth,
tapered cushion of poised penislessness. "They know I'm Benjie,"
Benjie thought. "They know it's Benjie's things they've seen.
They'll always know." It was a thought to make him wretched - and
to make his mischievous member fill.
Being seen, having been seen, having been seen long years before,
in another world, at a younger age - to be male is to be male, at
five, at fifteen, at fifty too no doubt - this was the defeat,
but also the origin of the desire FOR defeat, that Benjie, in
honesty with himself, had recognized for a long time as the
essence of sex for him. To be seen is to be known. To be seen is
to lose that little bit of ambiguity that clothes and masculine
manners (which means, of course, the absence of manners) provide.
To be known unambiguously, to have it shown beyond the shadow of
a doubt (and not merely by a fair preponderance of evidence) that
one is a boy, a male, with the vulnerabilities peculiar to boys,
the visible needs that weaken them and make them ready zanies and
thralls to girls.
Simplest was to be stripped naked. But in the course of time
Benjie had begun to appreciate all kinds of virtual bareness, the
subtler nakedness of being known beneath one's camouflage. Wasn't
the external, not to say protruberant, nature of the male parts
designed for just this kind of round-the-clock, anywhere-at-all
stripping? Weren't the thousand-and three erections they casually
launched in the course of a day the very thing girls got such
amusement from? All those manifest disturbances in men's pants?
And then there was the universal fact of gender that made one
man's nakedness every man's. Often, in museums, a nude male
statue before him and a cluster of girls or women nearby, Benjie
would feel the quick connection of his maleness to that of the
exposed man of stone - and be certain that the smiling females
were observing the same fusion. How could they help thinking,
"That boy over there, we might as well be seeing through his
clothes"?
If Benjie ever heard a woman or girl mention the male body-parts,
he'd take it personally, he'd feel personally exposed, found out.
The girl who said "penis" knew everything already. There was
almost no point in keeping his clothes on after that. She knew
what he was smoothing over by wearing them. Her knowledge
undressed him. To think of those girls who saw their dads or
brothers naked regularly - they had x-ray vision, as far as
Benjie was concerned.
The shame of feeling denuded in this way was exquisite. Can there
be such a thing as wonderful shame? Heady and dazzling shame.
Implacable desire combined with a wish to be swallowed whole by
the genderless earth. But later, alone in his room, Benjie would
lower his pants and masturbate to the recollection of the girl
who'd said "penis," who'd said "balls," or who, even more
triumphantly, had inserted the killer pronoun into the phrase.
And the sound of that light, feminine voice addressing him with
"YOUR penis, Benjie,...YOUR testicles, yes, I'm talking about
YOURS, boy" - the sound would echo mercilessly in his mind's ear
and Benjie would masturbate in a fever of remembered shame,
wretched and excited by a conviction that the girl had intended
his total humiliation from the beginning and must have taken
pleasure in the ease with which she'd achieved it.
To some extent a boy could do the same thing to a girl - Benjie
loved the thought of saying "vagina" or even "cunt" within a
female's hearing - but the effect couldn't, he thought, match
hers on him. At most, some embarrassment, he thought. Girls were
very stingy with their bodies. They didn't want you to see up
their skirts or down their shirts - unless they DID want you to.
They liked to tease boys, and that involved keeping things back.
But that wasn't the same as being in danger, like a male, of
being mortified by a knowing word.
Oh, how much Benjie wanted to see a real vagina! He'd give
anything just to be allowed to stare quietly at the bashful slit.
He dearly wanted to know what the hair looked like around it,
what it looked like when it wasn't shaved into rabbit-ears. And
what it felt like: it must be much softer than his own, he
thought. He would be grateful to know this for sure. Benjie was
obsessed with female pubic hair, which he never thought he'd seen
in its honest form. He thought it must bother girls a lot when it
started to grow on their bodies. It must feel like a cheat. Here
they were, becoming women, expecting to have fine, smooth womanly
skin all over, with nothing masculine about it, and then, all of
sudden, there's a puff of hair on your bump, wiry, curly hair. If
he were a girl, he'd feel tricked, he thought: I'm smooth here,
and here, and here, but wait! Not here! On the other hand, real
pubic hair made this perfect triangle on girls, and helped keep
their private parts private and mysterious. So girls must be glad
about that; otherwise, wouldn't they shave their mounds the way
they do their legs and underarms?
And the famous smell of a woman - it was supposed to be like
nothing else, and he couldn't imagine what it was like, and he
desperately wanted to learn. But what made these needs so awful
was his belief that a girl could satisfy them, give him the long
look he wanted, and the other sensations too, without any great
trouble to herself. He'd see her naked, sure; he'd see her cunt.
In the most respectful way he'd bring his finger-tips to her
pubic hair, just for one or two gingerly seconds. He'd allow his
reverent nostrils one shy sampling of her girl-scent, say thanks
for the good time and go.
None of this could hurt her at all. She'd still keep all her
secrets. He'd have nothing on her. No power over her. Why?
Because he couldn't make her dick stand up, and he couldn't make
her spurt - and, also, he couldn't break her balls. She'd leave
the scene as well-off as she came. So you couldn't get more out
of saying "vagina" to a girl than you could out of seeing the
thing itself. Because "vagina" was something hard to expose: as
much as anything, it meant "no penis here, everything tucked
away," and that was the secret most likely of the imbalance of
power between females and males.
Benjie was startled from his revery by the sound of the
locker-room door being unlatched several aisles away, and by
young female voices getting nearer. For a moment he forgot his
situation and called out in alarm to the still unseen females,
"No, wait! This is the boys' locker you're in."
"Benjie?" one of the voices replied. "Where on earth are you?
This place is so complicated." Laughing, she addressed the second
girl, "Are we going to have to go down every row of lockers, for
God's sakes? Benjie, speak up!"
"Yes, I'm here. I'm Benjie. You're coming to get me, I guess,
huh? For Miss Ash ." The girls appeared at the end of the aisle.
A blonde in a short plaid skirt and crisp white blouse, and a
very long-haired brunette in a t-shirt and bluejeans. Benjie's
heart chilled to see them. They were classmates of his: Megan and
Amanda, ninth-graders like himself. Somehow the fact that they
were older than the girls in Miss Ashley's class, and had known
him for years in other settings, deepened Benjie's mortification.
The girls were trying to act low-keyed and businesslike, but an
air of superiority and privilege came through, and sometimes they
broke out of their pose entirely to enjoy their adolescent
importance unabashed. Their arrival made the events ahead
grippingly real. In his imagination, Benjie could mitigate the
embarrassment of being naked for the seventh-graders with a bit
of condescension. He was the big boy giving them a look, maybe a
feel, maybe even cluing them into the fact that, as a boy, he had
vulnerable parts. But how could he maintain that rationalization
with girls his own age, girls with unmistakably womanly bodies,
with breasts, with hips - his equals if not (given the greater
maturity of girls) his superiors? Now he was getting an inkling
of how far actuality would differ from anything he'd anticipated.
He knew deep down that all the days of trying to see ahead, all
the rehearsals and contingency-planning, had been far in spirit
and content from the waiting reality.
Benjie was uncertain what move to make, so he remained seated
across the bench. Amanda, the girl in the bluejeans, straddled
the bench and casually planted herself on it, facing Benjie with
not many inches between them. The bench was low and anyone seated
on it was bound to spread his or her knees. Amanda let it happen:
her legs were as wide open as Benjie's own, though girls,
normally so protective of their secret regions, so quick to cross
their legs or tuck in their skirts, girls will make an exception
when they're wearing jeans. The soft blue fabric clung smoothly
to Amanda, forming a wide, supple triangle which tauntingly
displayed the sweet, empowering lack between her thighs. She knew
the effect on Benjie: try as he may, he could not raise his eyes
from the manifest evidence of Amanda's birthright over him.
"Benjie, up here!" Amanda said. When the boy lifted his guilty
eyes he saw that Amanda was pointing to her own. "I know I'm
fascinating down there, but head up now," Amanda said. "We'll be
taking you upstairs soon. Are you - pardon the expression - up
for it?"
I could be sullen or I could be tractable, Benjie thought, in so
many words. It could go either way. But he was wrong once again
to think himself free. "I think I'm ready," he said softly, a new
wave of erection-prompted obsequiousness having demolished his
pride.
"Did you prepare the way Miss Ashley ordered?" Amanda asked.
"Shaved your pits and cockatoo?" Megan added.
"And your wrinkly little sperm-bank?" Amanda said. "And you
remembered not to wear a jock, right?"
Red with shame, Benjie nodded miserably, feeling his genitals
shrink in futile flight from the girls' knowledge of them.
Now Megan asked him to stand. He was appalled to be given orders
by a girl, but of course he craved such humiliation as well. He
started to lift a leg over the bench but Megan told him she
wanted him to straddle the plank. Benjie's legs were necessarily
parted as he stood. He faced the girls. Amanda remained seated
while Megan, standing beside her, moved closer to the boy, who
tried by lowering his eyes not to meet her forward stare - only
to see Megan's hand, a long string looped around her finger,
approaching his thigh. Before he understood what he was seeing,
Megan had slipped her hand up Benjie's shorts and seized his
penis, which, despite its previous case of nerves, had erected
for her instantly. Her cool, lithe fingers imperiously chilled
his kindled organ. Sexual clouds were bursting in his head.
"Oh," the boy squeaked, "oh, Megan, God, oh, please, how can you
."
"Not 'Megan,'" the girl chided coolly. "Miss Ashley prefers that
you address us all as 'Miss.'"
"Miss," Benjie pleaded. "Help me, miss," he whispered
desperately. "Your hand ." His voice fell and rose and fell
again. He was Miss Megan's slave.
"It's nice to be appreciated, Benjie," Megan said, "but get a
grip, will you.."
"You know what I think?" Amanda said.
"What's that?"
"I think Mr. Benjie's Bean-Stick has never been touched by a girl
before."
"I think you're right," Megan said. "Is she right, Benjie?"
Yes, it was Benjie's first time, this muddled moment in the
locker-room, the first contact of his penis with a female hand -
and how firm that hand was, how commanding its grasp, how
deliriously overpowering as it fiddled inside Benjie's shorts,
joined now by Megan's other hand, somehow getting the loop over
his penis and tightening it, lasso-fashion, just behind the rim
of his glans.
"Circumcised," Megan reported.
"Miss Ashley said so," Amanda said.
Dark-eyed Amanda watched it all with amusement, her cunt's smooth
secrecy still patent. She pointed to the place where the tip of
Benjie's penis would be palpable beneath his shorts. He'd
released a droplet of early sperm and it had seeped unhindered
through the threadbare fabric, forming a rich, dark circle which
wouldn't dry soon.
"That's a nice touch," Amanda said, pointing to the stain.
"Oh, isn't it," Megan said, withdrawing her hands - "No, please,
please leave it," Benjie whimpered, unable to repress a request
he knew to be absurd - and with it the free end of the string
she'd tied to Benjie's cock. Benjie was mortified to have begged
for her touch.
"You probably know, Benjie," Megan said, "that we girls
menstruate every month . You knew that, didn't you?" The puzzled
boy nodded minimally. How could she be mentioning this intimate
thing? Because. He thought, her power over him couldn't be
compromised now.
"Well, when we do," the girl continues, "we have to put these
tampons into our vaginas, you know. And the tampons have these
white strings hanging from them, right down from our vadges . I
imagine you've never seen a real girl naked, huh?"
"Pictures, magazines," Benjie said.
"Yeah, well it's not the same. Anyhow, this string is so we can
pull the tampon out again. But what I wanted to point out is that
this string running down your leg, it looks like a very long
tampon-string. And my good friend Amanda has another one for you
just like it. Your turn, Mandy."
So Amanda - and it turned out she'd been holding a similar
miniature lasso - reached both hands up the ample leg of Benjie's
shorts. But it was his balls she was after: she meant to rope
them into her little loop, and she achieved this with remarkable
alacrity for a young girl working blind. With one hand she nudged
his hard-on upward and found the hinge of his scrotum, over which
she closed her fingers so that the entire sack formed a firm
little parcel. Then she slipped on the loop and, keeping it
securely above the boy's testes with the fingers of one hand, she
pulled it tight with the other, and Benjie's balls were snared
and softly aching. Amanda's hands left Benjie's shorts, drawing
the free end of the second string with them, so that now the
girls had the exhilaration of seeing what appeared to be two
innocent lengths of string descending well down Benjie's legs,
and there, like a bull's-eye in his shorts, were the pushy
remains of his erection and a deep, viscous stain.
"I think we're ready," Megan said. "Time to march, dear boy."
Benjie lifted a leg over the bench and stood at what he hoped
would pass for attention without making too irreparable a show of
his subordination. Facing him with a faint smile, Megan reached
down for the end of the string she had installed on his dick.
With this movement, Megan snappily raised Benjie's shorts-leg and
jerked his organ up and outward. The string held sharply to the
rim of Benjie's glans.
By now Amanda had posted herself directly behind the boy and was
reaching between his legs (her hand carelessly brushing his
thighs in a way that thrilled him despite himself) and taking
hold of the string she looped around his balls. Up went a second
leg of his shorts, this time even more disconcertingly for being
lifted behind him - and Amanda was gamely stretching back his
balls so that Benjie had to part his legs slightly to accommodate
them up against his perineum, the merciless length of twine
cutting in between his testes and filing its way between his
buttocks before finally taking some air.
Now he was marching like a prisoner between his classmates, one
girl in the lead, one girl at his back, his female guards.
Submissiveness notwithstanding, he didn't like the prisoner
feeling. But he could do nothing to break out of it; the girls
weren't hurrying, and they were crowding him besides, and their
string-work was making certain that he would not assume anything
resembling normal gait. He was shuffling, despite himself,
like...yes, like a prisoner, with a distended, semi-erect penis
fore and clinched and cramping ballocks aft.
They passed single-file, a fifteen-year-old boy and his
fifteen-year-old girl escorts, through a small door that opened
on the staircase that would take them to the gym above.
"Dead man walking," Benjie thought.
BACK
