My wife, her friend, and my youngest daughter recently attended a performance of the Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler.  I had heard a little about it and read some too.  I expressed an interest in going with them and was told that this would not interest me and might even inhibit their responses because of my gender.  While I'm not male chauvanist pig, I could see how this might happen.  I relented and hoped that I could at least be told some of the stories when they returned. 

This was not the case, they spoke to each other as if they were sharing a part of life that I'd never understand.  Okay, I am a male and there are many things that I just accept about women and their points of view.  I write them off to the differences that men and women have.  I don't take it personally.  There are many things that women don't understand about men and their sexuality and struggles too.  So, in the interest of better understanding across the gender gap I want to share some of my thoughts about the male sexual experience.  

I've posted this as an open call to bring points of view and experiences other than my own in the hope of showing both the unique experience of the individual and show a certain commonality too.  I call this a dialogue simply because I hope that some civil and enlightening discussion will take place across the gender line.

I have a penis.  It isn't a weapon, a tool, a sausage, a battering ram,  or a means of controlling another person.  It is literally a primary sexual characteristic.  it is an organ that serves a dual purpose.  It is the instrument of reproduction, and a means of comfort and pleasure. 

I didn't really understand what it was until I hit puberty, oh, I knew that boys and girls were different and like most kids had some idea of the mechanics of sex.  About the time I turned thirteen, I started to be made aware of it, my penis that is.  It seemed to have developed a mind of it's own.  With girls nothing shows when they are aroused.  For boys it's decidedly different.  If a thirteen year old boy is experiencing some state of arousal, anyone who happens to glance in the general direction is well and truly informed that this is the case.

I would sit in class and find that for no conscious reason it would spring into a  state of erection.  If I was put in the position of having to stand and face the class I knew that it would be the root of a major embarassment.  Even if I managed to get through a class without being called upon the dilemma was still there.  I mean, I couldn't just sit there after class, I had to move on to the next one.  So it occurred to me that if I carried my books down low that it would effectively hide my erection.  I didn't know then that girls had already figured this out and were keeping an eye peeled for any boy who was doing this.

Now for some reason the more sexually precocious a girl was the more that this applied.  I would be stopped and the girl would innocently ask me a question about one subject or another in an effort to get me to move my books.  See, I liked girls so I couldn't just tell them to go away.  So I'd fiddle around with my shirt or try to face a wall or locker and do my best to force her eyes up.  I didn't know that the whole point of the exercise was to reveal a glimpse of my erect penis.  Nothing worked and they would stare at it for a few seconds and get red and run back to their friends to give details about size and length.

The locker room was another weird place for boys.  We were generally running around in various states of undress and theat for me was embarrassing too.  Some people were totaly at ease with being nude, some of us, were not.  There was a sense of competition about genitals too.  Back to size again.  Some would look and do a little mental measuring.  If the result was not to their liking some would actually become violent.  This is something that happens a lot. 

I've been sidestepping something here,  I am, shall we say, a bit more amply endowed than average.  I hate how this sounds, but to be blunt, it is true.  This caused me a lot of trouble at times.  The girls knew, the boys knew, and I am sure that at least one student teacher knew when I was in high school.  I won't go into details since this isn't about that part of having a penis.  For some reason, the boys who had less than I found that this must make me gay.   I'm not.  The girls were more confusing.  While I eventually learned what was going on in the hallways, they seemed to be a little frightened by it.  

Most thirteen year old boys then were as misinformed as they were uninformed.   We didn't know what any of it meant in terms of real life.  Big, small it was just so confusing.  Personally, I got tired of hearing about it.  It was assumed that since I was bigger, that I would be sexually aggressive, I wasn't.  I'd been through things that made me aware of how horrible unwanted sexual encounters were.  

I wish I could convey just how uncomfortable I was in this stage of life.  I was tall, thin, shy, and blushed so easily.  It wasn't until my own kids reached this part of life that I knew how common it was to be this way. 

That's my story here, the moral being:  Everyone has something that makes them uncomfortable. No one is exempt from the embarassment of puberty.  Coming to grips with sex is a part of growing up that everyone has to do.  We are all sexual beings to some degree.  Now, let's hear from other men who had questions and concerns.