With my Master Baytor 02
The week passed slowly, but Thursday came at last. I would meet Dr. Thierry that evening and, if all went well, begin to work with him. I still had no real idea of what I hoped to learn or gain. All I knew was that I was a chronic masturbator - addicted to that practice, if I was honest - who mostly enjoyed his solo sex life, but hoped to make it less monotonously habitual and more creatively interesting, if possible.
I was in my late twenties, at that point. I had just passed my 28
th
birthday several weeks ago. After more than a decade of casual experience with girls, a few older women and some attractive men, and after encountering the concept of 'autosexuality' on a Web page several years ago, I had decided that this cap fit me, and that I should learn to wear it. I liked other people as friends and as sexual partners too, sometimes. But I had learned that pleasuring them and taking pleasure from them was more difficult and, on the whole, less satisfying than pleasuring myself.
Part of my problem (if it was one) with partnered sex was the worrying about what would and would not be acceptable. These negotiations of intimacy tended to kill its spontaneity. As for love, in my mind and makeup, it occupied a different compartment - quite apart from sex. I had loved my parents, before they were murdered by terrorists in India who had planted a bomb on their tourist bus. I loved my older sister and the twin nieces that she and her husband had given me. I got along well with my brother-in-law when they had me visit. I had felt a kind of love for a few teachers and several close friends. But sex was no part of any of these relationships, while the friendship and liking that I shared wih a few of my sex partners was not to be confused with love. As I was at that time, sex was not about love, but about using and being used for pleasure. I had learned to use my own body that way - and also the bodies of attractive women and men. I enjoyed giving myself for their use. But this had no connection at all with love as I had learned it it in my family. I knew that sexual love, erotic love, meant more to many others than it did to me, but had no sense that I was missing something. On the contrary, for me, the freedom gained in using sex just for its own sake more than made up for the lack of real depth in any of my sexual connections.
However, I did sometimes Rosie Palm and her five daughters a tad monotonous, and a long time fantasy of mine had been to caught, called to account and disciplined for incorrigible masturbation. All this had been in my mind when I filled out Dr. Thierry's questionnaire and wrote a few paragraphs on what I wanted from his mentoring. And it was in my mind when I used the brass knocker on his front door, wrought to resemble a strong male hand spanking a plump bottom of ambiguous gender. The door opened and I found myself standing before a distinguished-looking man in his early sixties who smiled a welcome. When I opened my mouth to introduce myself, he interrupted me. "You must be Dan Jacobson," he said; and when I nodded, and said 'Yes, sir,' he invited me to come in.
Standing in his large living room, I looked around uncertainly, noticing especially the large, upholstered armchair with a small rug placed before it, a flogging pony in one corner of the room with implements of bondage and corporal punishment arranged decoratively on one wall, and a beautifully executed oil painting of a twinky youth on his knees, masturbating avidly with his eyes closed and a strange expression on his face as he were in pain. Under it, someone had painted on the wall, "A dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste!" in a handsome calligraphic font.
For a short while neither of us spoke. Then Thierry said, "I can see you're wondering what the protocol is. It's just casual for now. We're new acquaintances and equals until that changes. You've just met me and I've not accepted you as a client yet. Nor have you accepted me as your mentor. So we'll just talk, get to know each other a little and see what happens. Please sit down, and make yourself comfortable." He gestured to another chair, off to one side of his, placed for easy conversation."
He continued, "I'll start by saying that I've gone through the questionnaire and the application letter you sent me. So I know much more about you than you know about me - which gives me too big an advantage. You must have lots of questions about me and what we might do together. Why don't you start by asking them, and I'll promise to answer as fully and frankly as I can."
"Well... If you invite my questions - Who are you sir, and how did you become a masturbation 'coach,' if that is the right word? A mentor of self-pleasuring?"
"I'm sure Peter told you some of it - that I'm a retired professor of sexology and a still-active sex counsellor?"
"I gather the sex counselling is what you were advertising in the ad I saw. Do you deal only with masturbation or with other sexual activities too?"
"I deal with all types of sex - but masturbation is a specialty. It's really the core of sex when you get right down to it. For the male of the species, all sexual activities are masturbatory in the last reckoning, whether it's a toy or another person or our hands that we use to get ourselves off. Women know, and many enjoy that their bodies are being used for that purpose, though they are often ambivalent on the subject."
"It's more complicated because men can be fuckees as well as fuckers - passive as well as active participants in a sexual act - but purposed arousal is what it's all about, whether you're working yourself or someone else, or be worked by another."
"For women too, although their sexuality continues on after mating into lactation, nursing and childcare, ultimately their sex life too is about the pleasure and the transmutation of pain into pleasure. And about putting themselves out like flowers to attract sexual interest.
This was becoming too deep for me, and I changed the subject. "Peter said that he was once your graduate student, and then your private pupil; that the formal relationship is over, but that you still see him from time to time."
"Yes, that's right. At his store, he helps me out (as he did with you); and he still visits me to play and talk."
"By the way, I liked that you were calling me 'sir' without my telling you. Please don't stop. I was enjoying it."
"Yes, sir. In brief, sir, can you describe what it is you teach? As your pupil, what can I expect to learn? How does masturbation become a teachable skill?"
"That's an impossible question, I'm afraid. I don't know what you will learn. That will depend on you more than on me. I can only describe what I offer. What desire from me and what you make of what I can give will be up to you."
"I don't like to speak of 'masturbation.' It's a pejorative word, employed to make acts of self-pleasuring seem ugly, or sinful. What I teach is auto-eroticism and self-love, both for its own sake, and as an entry point to love with others. Some of it is specifically sexual - focused on the genitals and leading to orgasm. Some of it is more sensual than sexy - concerned with finding, or giving yourself and then receiving physical pleasure - not just through touch, but all the body's senses. Some of it is quite abstract - cognitive, intellectual, spiritual - religious, even. My pupils come to me thinking about their sex organs. Eventually, they go their own way - or, like Peter, stick around as friends."
"What do you mean by 'spiritual,' sir? I'm not religious. I don't believe in God. Does that disqualify me as your pupil?"
"I don't believe either, Daniel. Not in the sense most people mean. I use 'God' as a short, convenient word for the over-arching context of Life (in general), and of one's own life, as it is. God in that sense is not something that you 'believe in.' It's something that you can try to understand. It's something you can love. It's a short word for the focus of your own spiritual life, whatever that is."
"Doesn't have a lot to do with jerking off, does it sir?"
"More than most people think," he answered sharply. I think the gutter language is crude, but it doesn't scare me. Auto-erotic sex can be an entry point, first to pleasure but then to love and wisdom. As a young male of the species, you have a needy cock. Part of its function is to give you pleasure; but pleasure is, or can be, the beginning of love. And love is the way to knowledge and wisdom - 'the astrolabe of God' as a Persian poet wrote."
