Three Examples Of Male Arousal Without Desire For Intercourse

I stop at a place called the Angel Share.  The girls out front pull aside the black velvet curtain and I can see that there are plenty of men here, which is a good sign.  On stage there are two Thai girls, one dressed as a man, acting out the song, "You Can Leave Your Hat On."  I take a seat and order a ginger ale.

I always feel a bit ridiculous when I sit down at a girlie bar or a strip club.  I'm not coming here to get laid.  I'm just here for the show.  But what's the point?  What is inside me that makes me want to just look at women?

I remember the first time I noticed that I was really enjoying the look of a woman's body in a different way than I might enjoy, say, the look of a flower, or a well-made sandwich.  I'm on the afternoon bus home from Gibbon's Hall School for Boys and St. Genevieve of the Pines School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina.  It's the second grade, or early in the third grade, and the weather is warm.  We live near the end of the route, so the bus is mostly empty, and across the aisle from me is a girl who I know pretty well by now, but only from all those bus rides.

For some reason this day I notice her bare thighs there, lined up next to each other on the seat of the bus.  I can't remember now if it's one of those year-end special days when they let you wear whatever you want to school, or if it's just a short dress she's wearing, but her thighs are definitely bare.

I look at them for quite a while, probably looking away from time to time in order to appear nonchalant.  Something new is going on.  Those thighs look really good, somehow.  It's not that I want to touch them or to run the tips of my fingers up and down them, I just really like something about those thighs.  What's that about?

I knew that I liked girls.  I'd even had a couple of "girlfriends" in one way or another, but I'd never felt this way about any physical aspect of them, their hair, their hands, their thighs, certainly not their bottoms or their crotches.

Another time I remember something of this sort must have been that following autumn, when I was eight.  I was playing in a pile of leaves with Cheryl McBreyer, the girl down the street.  Cheryl was a good playmate, my age or one year younger.  She was a bit of a tomboy, which was helpful, especially when we'd play together with my best friend, Michael, who also lived on the street. 

Cheryl and I are throwing leaves at each other late one afternoon, and rolling around and whatnot.  She tackles me.  I tackle her.  We wrestle, and I start to notice that it feels really good to tumble around with Cheryl.  And it feels good in a different way from how it feels when I wrestle around with Michael.

It feels so good, in fact, that I eventually suggest I spend the night over at her place.  She's not so sure about that idea.  It takes quite a lot of pressuring, in fact, but I eventually get her to go ask her mom if that would be OK.

When Cheryl comes back and says that her mom said no because girls and boys aren't supposed to have sleepovers together, I suddenly feel like an ass.  What?  No, no, she's got the wrong idea.  For hell's sake, I'm not interested in THAT kind of thing.  How could she even suggest!

Was I interested in THAT kind of thing?  No. I had no intention of kissing and hugging with Cheryl or anything of that sort.  That would be gross.  But yes, I was thinking about Cheryl in that boy-girl kind of way.  That feeling was still pretty deep inside me, and it took a while for it to crawl out of the depths and make itself known, but it was there, and even though I wasn't ready to accept it, I knew it at the time.

It's entirely possible to ask the girls at the Angel Share if they want to spend the night.  And their mama-san will probably let them, if you're willing to pay.  But like I said, I'm not here to get laid.  I'm just here to watch the show, and by this point I've seen several acts that are a notch above the usual Bangkok girlie bar program.  I'm feeling like I've hit the jackpot.  I order another ginger ale and settle in a bit.

For the next act, the music is a heavy metal number with that hoarse, ultra-serious voice proclaiming his familiarity with the evil in hell and how he's going to take you there with him.  Then suddenly it's as though a wild creature has swung in from a tree through an open skylight.  Everyone in the place recoils and looks around to see if there might be others like her.  But it's just her.

From the looks of her feet, you'd say she's never worn shoes in her life.  Her toes are strong and animal and her toenails are claws.  Her skin is darker than usual for Thailand, and the look on her face is nothing anywhere near "cute."  But this isn't a monster.  This is more a living work of art in a woman's shape.  A gorgeous woman's shape.  One that happens to be supercharged by lightening bolts.

They have her in a red lacy corset thing that's clinging onto her for dear life.  But it's clearly only a matter of time before it flies into shreds from structural fatigue. 

I've never seen anyone devour a stage like this.  It's like the poles are just part of her cage.  And her favorite position seems to be upside down.  She climbs one pole, or maybe two, up to the ceiling and then flips around like a monkey, dances a bit more upside down like that, then maybe slides slowly down until only her legs are still in the air.  All in synch with the music.  And I begin to suspect it was she who wrote the music.

She owns the pole, she owns the stage, she owns the room, she owns my cock, and every other cock within a half a mile.  That's scary enough, and not only because I really doubt she'll be returning them intact.  What's really scary is that what she wants is beyond that.  My soul?  Not even.  Nothing about me, in fact.  What she wants is beyond me, beyond us men, and unfortunately for us, we're standing between her and that thing. 

What is that thing?  I don't presume to know.  Freedom?  Hegemony?  The key to the gates of hell?  The answer is probably "all of the above" and more than I even know about.

The more I say about this wild woman, the farther I get from the truth.  But I have an image that might convey what I'm trying to say.  Kali; the Hindu Goddess of destruction. Black hair, blue skin, tongue out and dripping with blood, naked but for a necklace of the skulls of men and a belt of the arms of men.  She's usually depicted standing upon the corpse of Lord Shiva.

I love Kali, by the way.  She is part of the universe and I love the universe.  And although the idea of a night alone in the jungle with Wild Thing is enticing, of course, it's absolutely terrifying.  She would eat me alive.  I couldn't even imagine where to start.


This might have something to do with how Cheryl might have felt about me spending the night.  It's not about hugging and kissing and all that mushy stuff.  But what it is about isn't in the friends realm.  It's in that boy-girl realm.  The lovers realm.  The rules are different in that realm, and my friend Cheryl has a whole different role to play in that realm.  Of course she's not going to just leap into it like a pile of leaves.

I'm sure I'm putting too fine an edge on all of this, and maybe if you were to ask Cheryl McBreyer whatever-her-name-is-now about that encounter in the leaves way back then, she'd have a different story to tell, assuming that she has any recollection of it at all.  But what happened there is a big deal.  It's like the first sighting of a tiger in the jungle.  Suddenly it's not all orchids and birdies and mangoes.  From that point on, the jungle will never feel the same.