Sarah Recalls Naked Boys
It was a pristine Friday afternoon in the first week of June, which was the final week and indeed the very last day of high school for Sarah, and she was walking home from school feeling upbeat. Two months shy of 19, she was a graduating senior and naturally ready to be done with school. People considered her very good looking. She was lean and tall, with long, warm, blond hair that often swayed below her shoulders. She had striking Nordic cheek bones, large run-away grey-blue eyes, and radiated a sunny confidence.
For a select few, however, among that vast class of boys who at 18 were naturally attracted to females and who at school had discovered the allure of Sarah's feminine grace, to look her straight in the face and share eye contact was sometimes hard to do. She was pretty, after all, which for the naturally-attracted male was sometimes enough to make contemplating her difficult.
The real complication, however, was the cultural advent at 18 of traditional male judging, which most knew Sarah had participated in. Still, she was a favorite among her girlfriends, plus, as some boys knew first hand and many more imagined, substantially more experienced at traditional relationships than most girls.
Just the fact that she, an unequivocally attractive female, had been in intimate relationships with boys her age was enough to cause a small undercurrent of awe to swell in the minds of some of her fellow male students, most of whom had never been in a romantic kind of relationship with a girl, and so had begun to regard her as inherently more mature.
In fact, two boys who had had significant relationships with her would openly melt with embarrassment when she addressed them. They could barely look her in the face in the halls of the school, despite these relationships having ended peacefully, and with their endings the traditional period of obligation for undressing and judging having passed.
By the stipulations of the societal rituals, Sarah had guided them in showing her their penises. She knew and prized this as the reason these boys couldn't help but turn red in her presence. After these two longer-term relationships had gone so far as a judging, she understood the privilege invested in her as a young women by the ageless codes of her society. Sometimes she thought she could detect the same kind of deep humility in other boys whom she knew for a fact had been in relationships long enough to be judged by three of her close girlfriends. She was thankful that she was female and thus the superintendent of one of society's most prized traditions.
She considered herself a normal heterosexual adolescent. She excelled in school, played field hockey, had the usual close-knit group of friends, considered it amazing that she was going to college. She also saw that she had the usual inclination of youth to think mostly about the immediate future, the next hour, maybe an occasional worry about what she would do in life. Her thoughts this afternoon, she was happy to realize, were predominantly focused on how to discuss with her equally intelligent twin sister Alice the idea of introducing her to the deep-rooted ritual of judging hopeful males. When she really thought about it, it seemed strange that girls generally didn't spent much time thinking about it before then, considering how wildly significant to either sex the tradition was.
And she knew by now that the relationship with her current boyfriend Oliver was at the stage when a proposal for judging was appropriate. He tried to spend all his time with her. More than once, he had told her he was in love with her. By all accounts, 18 was the appropriate earliest age for girls, or, rarely, boys, to first make proposals, and was considered a good age for an introduction to the tradition. She determined that it was time to propose that Oliver follow the unavoidable conventions of society and show in front of both of them his willingness to continue with the relationship.
While it hadn't been her intention to end up in a position to cause boys to squirm with embarrassment, she understood now that this would almost always be the case at this late adolescent time of life with boys who stayed in a relationship with their girlfriends long enough to reach the stage where a judging took place. Along with this understanding, she began to appreciate that the ceremony conferred on girls a permanent and profound power over each boy who accepted a proposal. In fact, once a proposal was accepted, but especially once acted upon, she understood that by custom, as long as the relationship between boy and his ceremonial judger continued, it could be requested again pretty much at will by those girls present at the original ceremony.
She knew this to be a fact because she tried it with James, her good friend Leslie's first long-term boyfriend, who was 18 himself, and shortly after Leslie turned 18 had accepted Leslie's proposal in front of both Leslie and Sarah. She had been present at his first undressing, and it left her giddy with ideas.
After that, Sarah tried exercising on her own this societal prerogative with James weekly. This was an educational period for her, and in fact, during one of her own early requests, his was the first erection she saw. This contributed to her awareness of the way the tradition brought about expectations in the male-female relationship because after that she came to expect erections of him consistently, to calmly wait in the chair while he stood in front of her until it happened.
It became evident to her that for males, being exposed before females was likely to lead to erections. For Sarah, however, the tactile sense of wearing clothes, being appareled and thus covered, gave her a feeling of ease, a powerful satisfaction during the periods when the male disrobed. She noted that this differential in clothing seemed to induce shame and even duty. She sometimes found herself running her hands over own clothing, picking up the feel of it with serene satisfaction, while James exhibited himself.
It occurred to her to let James know that not only did she expect him to undress, but also to produce an erection. As far as she was concerned, this was far and away more impressive than just the flaccid naked male. With continued weekly experiments with James, she eventually detected that he was sometimes openly grateful for the opportunity to become and stay erect in her presence. And thus she learned that it wasn't just the obligatory seeing of an erection that gave the women of this tradition enjoyment, but it was spiritually guiding the male into the performance of producing an erection, subjecting them to the role of uninhibited performer, of shamed and willing male, in a manner that instructed the flaccid penis to erect in service of her enjoyment.
She would do this sometimes just by eye contact, expressing a judgmental attitude, showing a mix of encouragement and delight at being presented with a flaccid penis which she knew would swell and rise and extend to an engorged tip before her. Time and again, as Jame's penis throbbed into full engorgement, she would openly scrutinize the ridges and veins popping throughout its glistening skin, and see in his eyes the bewildering way this event subsumed all of his attention -- usually swimming with humility.
She began to accept the presumption of power this setting gave to women, and noted that it was possible and likely for her to have essentially unrelenting expectations governing the undressing of boys. Over weeks of experimentation, she internalized this new awareness. She encouraged him to express gratitude for being permitted to partake in this ceremonial performance.
Once, after several weeks of experimental judging, and with James standing before her, she requested him to lower his pants and underwear to his knees. His bobbing penis was soon straining at the ceiling, and she questioningly said to him, "You like to impress me, James? Don't you?" And then, as if to completely cement her station in his mind, she said, "You should thank me for allowing you to perform a traditional showing." And he did, with the urgent shine of tears forming in his eyes.
On another occasion near the end of her experimenting, with James standing pants down and powerfully erected, she asked him if he felt that he would always want to be like this in her presence. He blanched at the thought, but his straining penis, bobbing with each heartbeat, gave off the true signal of his desire.
She often wondered what scars these performances left in his psyche, and she debated whether they caused him sexual frustration, because once he was erect it became apparent that he had difficulty losing his erection. She tried asking him to pull his underwear up over his upward pointing organ, and simply waited to see if this would be enough to relieve him. But he often stayed erect for some time, his penis pressed inside his underwear against his abdomen, the lump of it incredibly obvious, riding nearly straight up to the bulbous head.
She also learned that when girls proposed a judging, boys had by convention no right of refusal if they wanted to move into an intimate relationship with their girlfriends. Refusing was equivalent to ending the relationship. Explanations given to her about how this tradition had arisen in her society suggested that it dated back to well before written lore, had existed almost forever, and as such was simply commonplace lore to the general population of her society.
The tradition came down to her as having been about the chance for the male to impress the female, much as a strutting male bird-of-paradise, putting on a display for the contemplation of the female. In its beginnings, nudity was natural, not only commonplace. It was clothing that was hardly common, and the male performance was about unrestrained and joyful display in pursuit of a possible mate. For centuries, as ancient artifacts showed, some form of undress remained unremarkable in this performance, fully expected and always complied with by any male hoping to enter a relationship that was more than friendship.
