As much as possible, I'd worked to forget the past. And so for the last several years I'd been trying to live my life in the now. Unfortunately, it was not much of a life. I'd become mostly an island. I'd become self-contained. I reached out to others as infrequently as I needed to. I viewed change as my enemy.
Ian Fleming wrote: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
For me, the enemy was anything that forced me to remember. Men made me remember and for a long time I'd tried to have little interaction with any.
But then a while back, I briefly overheard two young women about my daughter's age talking about blowjobs and the problem of gagging while giving them. That same week while sitting in a waiting room, I picked up a women's magazine and it just happened to open to an article about size and sex. Then, days later by an odd bit of chance, I came across an old Word document, a journal of sorts I had kept some ten or twenty years ago, and there were a few scattered places where I'd expressed my thoughts about men's erections.
And though I'd settled into an uneasy détente with memories of my past, the enemy, this confluence of events, caused me to reminisce, manifesting in my occasionally vague, but mostly precise memories about guys and their role in my life.
But, this time, it was guys and their sizes.
Not sure what that was about, but there it was.
I gave my first blowjob more years ago than I care to remember. I was so naïve that my boyfriend had to explain to me there was just a bit more to it than blowing on his dick. I thought I loved him and that I'd found Mr. Right. I wanted to please him. He taught me some more things to do with my hands, mouth and tongue. It made me feel more mature to learn how to give a better blowjob so I was a motivated student.
The next guy I blew seemed to me to be much bigger than that first guy (who, as it turned out, was not Mr. Right), but it was more than a year later and I might have misremembered the first guy. After him there were two other men who were briefly sexual partners, but we didn't have oral sex. OK, to be honest we didn't have much oral sex. I have no recollection of what sizes their cocks were. In fact, I have little recollection of almost anything about them.
Not long thereafter, I met my to-be-husband and in short order we were married. He seemed to be even bigger than that second guy. He told me that I was beautiful and that he loved making love with me. He looked to be the perfect man and if he was actually bigger than the others it didn't seem to be a problem for me. As far as I was concerned, if he was satisfied I was satisfied.
Fewer than five years into the marriage I don't think either of us was satisfied. The fun had gone, the sex had pretty much gone and I later learned in many ways my husband had gone too. And so it was, ten or fifteen years later, I was a divorcée. I was in therapy and considering whether I even wanted to start dating again - ever.
Juggling a job, a child, aging parents, a house and a philandering husband took its toll. I couldn't find time to exercise and I'd lost interest in it. (I sometimes wondered if there was a cause-and-effect relationship between the two, but I never did figure out in my situation which was which.) In any event, I gained a bit of weight - more than "a bit" to be honest. Wrinkles appeared where they'd never been and even more to my chagrin it seemed that gravity began to have an effect on some of my body parts.
Once my lawyer, in negotiations with my ex's lawyer, explained that the divorce was nearly a sure thing, I hit bottom. I couldn't get out of bed for almost a week. I internalized the whole thing. Even though my husband admitted to much of the womanizing he'd been doing for years, I bought into the feeling that the demise of the marriage had been my fault.
Anti-depressants helped after a while. So did counseling. And some months later as I found the counseling had begun to make me perceive what had happened more clearly, I began slowly to feel better. Eventually I actually saw the whole event as an opportunity. (Glass half-full...)
After a reasonable time for grieving, I began an assiduous modification of me: I worked out religiously and rigorously. I diligently watched what I ate. To lower my stress levels, I reduced my hours at work and even pampered myself occasionally.
It took some time, but I felt that I had begun to rejoin the human race. Maybe I could let go of the crap of the past and not let it control my present.
That was a good sign.
One evening recently I was at a local watering hole with two close friends. The alcohol seemed to loosen our lips. Somehow one thing led to another and the discussion moved into penis size in general. But more specifically, erection size. After some immature and inappropriate - but nevertheless occasionally hilarious - back and forth about men and their equipment (I know, it's au courant to say "their junk", but that seems so crude to me.) we had pretty much exhausted the pros and cons, the ins and outs and the ups and downs of dicks.
My extremely limited intimate experience with men and that small, but occasional, nagging feeling that I'd missed something in my youth, combined to put a dampener temporarily on my evening. I mostly just listened to my girlfriends chatting. Eventually, when the topic returned to size though I perked up. I felt that, limited as my experience was, the few erections with which I had been intimately involved still seemed to be relatively broad ranging: They must have doubled in length from the shortest to the longest. As odd as it may have seemed at the time, it helped to boost my confidence and I reengaged with my friends.
The discussion topic moved to vaginal vs. clitoral orgasms, with a difference of opinion among our trio.
It was then that my friend Shelly revealed that she'd recently made a private porn video. Lucy and I were stunned, although it took me longer than Lucy to get over the shock.
"Porn? Shelly, really? Porn?" I almost cried, aghast.
Shelly nodded with a rather smug smile.
"You mean you had sex with some guy and you were recorded on video? Some guy you didn't know?" I followed up. "And someone was going to sell that video?"
Shelly nodded again.
"What do you mean by 'private'?" said Lucy.
Shelly explained that she had met a man who was in the adult entertainment industry and that he'd tapped a relatively large market of wealthy people who would pay for personalized porn made just for them. These folks, even with their money and the ability to purchase almost anything, still enjoyed watching porn. But given their resources they were more than willing to pay to get their porn their way. And, since most porn devotees tire of their porn regularly, his company had a great deal of lucrative repeat business.
"So what did you have to do?" said Lucy.
