QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Part of the 'Butt Monkey' series of stories by Robert Furlong
===
I arrived at my office the next day to find an envelope on my desk with my name written on it in neat, if rather florid, handwriting. It read "Robert" which was slightly odd because everyone at work calls me Rob.
My ex-wife used to call me Robert, although it was invariably done sarcastically, and occasionally Jake might continue his mother's tradition by using my full name as a punctuating barb on the end of an already prickly sentence.
I opened the envelope and found a wad of photocopied papers inside. There was a brief note, in the same ornate handwriting, which read, "From a fellow butt monkey".
I felt the blood drain from my face. What was this?
I glanced around, to make sure nobody was close enough to me to see what I was looking at, and quickly leafed through the papers. They seemed to have been photocopied from various magazines, although one was obviously a copy of a health leaflet aimed at gay men, similar to the one my doctor had given me.
The theme throughout was mouth-to-anus contact between men. There were diagrams showing different ways of rimming; information about how to do it safely; articles on its biological significance and cultural history; plus a list of websites -- some of which I recognised from my own explorations -- giving further information for newcomers to the field.
I quickly put the papers back into the envelope and stashed it into my jacket pocket. I would go through them, but not here.
I looked around again to see if anyone was watching me, hoping to assure themselves that I had retrieved the papers. There was Matt bending to retrieve something from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet -- Jesus his arse looked hot in those dark blue trousers -- and Lance munching on a muesli bar as he flicked through his e-mails. Neither of them showed any interest in me.
I switched on my computer and mentally worked through other possible contenders while I waited for the operating system to load up. The note read, "From a fellow butt monkey," so whoever had sent it clearly shared my interest in other men's backsides. In any case, to have amassed such a collection of articles on the subject showed that they were, if anything, even more fascinated by rimming than I was.
Perhaps someone had noticed me checking out his arse and had seen the effect that it had had on the front of my trousers. It was a long shot, but I guessed it was possible that someone might have been astute enough to put two and two together.
Or perhaps someone had seen me peering at the men who exposed their backsides while they urinated in the gents at the end of my corridor. Could it be that all the time I thought I had been discreetly checking out arses through the wash-basin mirror, someone instead had recognised his own fetish in me?
The computer loaded up its desktop and a small speech bubble appeared with a popping sound from the taskbar. One of the toner cartridges hadn't been properly installed in the printer. It had been doing this ever since Bradley, the technician from the IT department, had scrambled around beneath my desk trying to fix it. Ever since I'd had my face pressed against his backside while he was on all fours.
Ever since I'd been caught --
I suddenly realised who my fellow "butt monkey" was.
It was Cameron. It had to be. At the time he'd caught me nose-deep in Bradley's butt cleft, I'd wondered why he hadn't reacted to what he'd seen me doing. It turned out that it was because he was just as heavily into it as I was.
Straight-laced, family-guy Cameron liked to get his face stuck into other men's arses! Wow!
I felt a rush of excitement that I had found a fellow rimmer right on my own doorstep. I had a strong urge to take a wander around to accounts to flash Cameron some kind of acknowledgement that there existed a bond between us. I wanted to let him know in as subtle way as I could how much I appreciated the hand -- or should that be tongue? -- he had outstretched towards me.
But no: I decided I wouldn't. I'd make no response but instead would wait until I'd looked through the material he'd given me. Then I'd think about what I wanted to do.
===
That night, while Jake was occupied upstairs on some of his college assignments, I got to work looking through the papers in the envelope.
The line drawings depicting different rimming positions didn't teach me anything I hadn't already seen on the internet or constructed my own masturbatory fantasies about. They seemed to have been photocopied from a gay variation of 'The Joy of Sex' and showed a bearded man outstretching his tongue towards the backsides of other men who were variously bending forwards, squatting over him, standing up and lying down on their backs with their legs widely splayed.
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."
