A close-up showed the bearded man's tongue reaching forward between his friend's buttocks, with curved arrows to show he was making circular motions around the anus. The diagram reminded me of something from one of my old Physics textbooks. I wondered whether circular motions in the clockwise direction were found to be more stimulating in the Northern hemisphere while anti-clockwise ones were preferred south of the equator.
I thought that if I were rimming the man in the drawings, I'd prefer him to be bending forwards so that he could fully expose his arse to my face and I could sniff and lick his nuts as they hung between his legs. I'd certainly enjoyed that position with the lad in the public toilet, even if he'd been frustrated that his cock wasn't being given enough attention.
If I were being rimmed, though, I thought I'd probably like to squat over my companion so that I could masturbate myself comfortably while he tongued my hole. That position had worked well for two of the men I'd had intimate contact with so far, and I looked forward to experiencing the same sensations myself.
The brief description accompanying the drawings described rimming as a "mainstream fetish". I found it a little disappointing that my one and only claim towards sexual aberration was considered mainstream.
Folding the pictures away, I went on to read a letter from a 'Questions and Answers' column which looked as if it had come from a page in a women's magazine. The letter had been highlighted with a yellow-green marker pen to distinguish it from others ranging across such topics as the best month to transfer dahlias from one's greenhouse into the garden and to whom a complaint should be addressed regarding the amount of litter left in bus shelters.
The highlighted letter, from a Mrs Watling of St Albans, read: "I heard a reference to 'rimming' last night on the Graham Norton show on BBC-1. At the risk of sounding awfully fuddy-duddy, may I ask what exactly 'rimming' is? Is it similar to 'tweeting' which my nephew sometimes mentions, but about which I confess to being similarly in the dark?"
Miriam, the lady who had been assigned to respond to such diverse questions, replied: "Dear Mrs Watling, I can't enlighten you about 'tweeting', but I do know that rimming is an important part of jam making. While the fruit is boiling, the scum that rises to the surface has to be removed by decanting it over the rim of the saucepan -- hence the term. Having missed the programme, I am not sure why one of Mr Norton's guests might have referred to this process, but I'd wager it was done in a tongue-in-cheek way."
I chuckled as I put the article back in the envelope. Tongue-in-cheek, indeed. Miriam knew rather more than she was letting on, the sly old bird.
The next photocopied page speculated about the incidence of male-on-male rimming throughout history and cited decidedly spurious allusions to the practice in historical documents. It claimed, for example, that the church had condemned the brutal medieval king William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, as "dissolute" on account of his interest in the effeminate male courtesans he had populated his royal residence with. While that much may have been true, I thought it stretching the case somewhat to suggest that ecclesiastical records which stated that he "fed on that which is depraved and vile" and had "tasted such ungodliness which man should not know" could be taken to mean that the king was a notorious butt-licker. I skipped through the rest of the largely implausible claims, spending a few moments to smile at some of fourteenth century poet Geoffrey Chaucer's supposed references to homosexual rimming in his 'Canterbury Tales' ("the landowner's tongue had peculiar itches/ for what his manservant hid 'neath the seat of his britches") and excerpts from old admiralty records which showed that the practice was apparently rife among sailors.
The last of the articles was far more interesting and had been taken from a fairly respectable scientific magazine. It proposed that, in our murky evolutionary past, men had started taking an interest in each other's backsides around the same time that we had started walking upright. Monkeys, it noted, are agile enough to lick their own bottoms and in doing so exploit the antiseptic properties of saliva to clean an area which is vulnerable to infection. When humans started walking on two legs, changes in our spines and pelvises meant that we lost the ability to reach our own behinds with our tongues and so we started to lick each other's instead. "Such a potentially unpleasant activity between early hominids required a biological reward to ensure that it was regularly performed," the article continued. "In males of the species it is likely that this reward took the form of sexual excitement. Previous studies have found this sexual response to still be evident in modern human males very soon after mouth-to-anus contact is made between them."
The author went on to quote a series of experiments which he called the "Baltimore study". In this, pairs of heterosexual male volunteers, mostly undergraduate students, were placed in a room, told to undress and then filmed as they were instructed by the experimenter to perform various sexual acts on each other. In all cases, the men involved had expressed no interest in homosexual sex and indeed some of them had stated that they were repulsed by the idea of sex with their own gender.
The Baltimore study had found that, while activities such as kissing, fellatio and mutual masturbation had elicited mixed responses from the men, the act of anal licking had, in spite of an overwhelming expression revulsion at the prospect of performing this act at all but especially on another male, produced "a dramatic lengthening of the penis" in every case. "The man performing the act of anal licking," it noted, "became far more sexually excited by what he was doing than the man whose anus he was licking, and their penile reactions were invariably reversed when the two of them were told to change places."
"In most cases," it went on, "licking another man's anus triggered such an intense arousal in participants that they had their partner bend lower and parted their buttocks in order to maximise the area of contact. Many of the men felt compelled to rhythmically stimulate their lengthened penises while their faces were so positioned and in some trials, this penile manipulation was taken as far as issue. Furthermore, one pair of volunteers became so aroused that the men attempted penile penetration even though they had not been instructed to do so by the experimenter."
The thought of these lads licking each other's arses and wanking themselves off had brought on a rather dramatic lengthening of my own penis and I fumbled with my underwear through my trousers to conceal it as well as I could in case Jake came down from his room.
Oh, to have been able to volunteer to take part in such an experiment! And to have been paid for it! I thought I would probably have been the guy who'd wanted a taste of the "penile penetration", although in my case it wouldn't have been "attempted" -- I'd have been in there like a shot and rogering his arse as quickly as I could!
The article went on to extol the virtues of rimming between men as a means of engendering healthy emotional relationships. "It is an important part of our evolutionary past and we should embrace it as such," the article recommended. The author was especially keen, for some reason, that men should be taught the art of "concurrent mouth-to-anus intercourse" -- science-speak for an anal sixty-nine, I figured -- to promote fraternal bonding and unity.
The author envisaged a distant past in which tribal men spent weeks together on hunting expeditions, leaving the women and children back at the encampment. He proposed that the men would pair up to lick one another's backsides, and would embrace in a sixty-nine position with their heads between each other's legs. "Finding themselves sexually excited by the act they were performing on one another, they would no doubt rub their aroused penises between their entwined bodies and move back and forth against each other until they had achieved mutual climax. Thus, this act of anal licking would have provided a dual function during periods when the men were separated from their females. On the one hand, it would have promoted good sanitation, while on the other it would have provided the men with a means of sexual release, avoiding the need for homosexual penetration which brings with it issues of dominance and hierarchy."
The article concluded by suggesting that it would be natural and healthy for brothers to pair up together to encourage intimacy between them and to curb their adversarial competitiveness.
I thought of my own brother, Richard, who was a few years older than me. We'd never got on well and perhaps adding a sexual dimension to our relationship might have done us the world of good. I couldn't see it happening though: he'd always been so self-righteous and judgemental, acting as a spy for my parents as I'd been growing up and only too ready to grass on me for doing anything which he saw as a sexual impropriety.
He'd enjoyed telling me that my own large genitals were abnormal and regularly repeating my oft-told mother's advice that I shouldn't play with myself. If he caught me or heard me trying to discreetly masturbate, he'd tell my parents and he and his equally pious friend Aiden Pratt (prat by name...) would snoop around my bedroom looking for girlie magazines and semen-soaked tissues.
He always seemed too pure to masturbate himself and was very guarded about showing his own penis which I assumed was of more "natural" proportions. So I grew up thinking that, not only was I some kind of freak in the trousers department, but that I had a peculiar sexual appetite as I seemed to need sexual release so frequently.
He used to say, "I know you can suck yourself! If I ever catch you I'll tell mum, because that's the worst thing you can do! She'll probably have to take you to the priest or something."
While it was true that I could suck myself -- my cock was certainly long enough and my back flexible enough -- I didn't really like the feel of it and so I hardly ever did it. But I couldn't understand how Richard knew I could do it and thought maybe he'd been spying on me at night when I'd been experimenting sexually.
I seemed to spend years in constant fear that he'd catch me with an erection or, worse still, in the middle of gratifying myself. If I stayed in the bathroom too long, he would be knocking on the door, making insinuations. If I woke up with a morning hard-on, I'd have to carefully conceal it before I left my bedroom lest my brother had some spiteful quip to make about my "deformity" or my "fat bell-end".
