She’d leaned in close, clearly no longer wanting to only listen to records that evening in my college dorm room. Her lost-kitten eyes intent, she airily half-whispered, simply, perfectly, “Love me…”
My first naive thought: “But… I already do!!!” As I rejoiced to imagine my deepest secret feelings actually sought, perhaps even shared, her gaze held fast, unreleasing. Suddenly, her meaning crystallized…
A surreal rush flooded me, equal parts disbelief, anticipation and full-on anxiety. In that singular moment, I knew I had to confess. Even if it changed her mind.
“But,” I hear myself blurt out, “I’ve never made love to a woman before.”
I’m death-groaning inside, aghast at how supremely stupid I’d just sounded, beyond certain I’ve disappointed. Undistracted, she smiles gently, then sure and matter-of-fact, replies:
“Just do what comes naturally.”
Still 40 years later, it almost echoes in my mind: “Just do what comes naturally… Just do what comes naturally…”
Here’s the thing. I’m still trying to figure out what that even is… entirely.
What comes naturally to someone culturally socialized since childhood to know that, owing to gender alone, he’s sexually valueless and suspect? What springs naturally from a once-young, budding psyche, trained and pained to feel somehow innately awful, clearly designed the far less worthy gift than the fairer sexes and better halves?
“Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another,” Madonna purrs in Justify My Love. For all its ring of truth, Madonna’s “poor” man, in my case, wears an indoctrinated, unnatural poverty, lacking illumination to honorably shed and transcend. Just where was the inhibition exit again? It’s all but lost in the shadows.
I recall like yesterday feeling so shamed by an otherwise kindly old kindergarten teacher. Lying on the floor, I’d shifted a bit for a peek up a classmate’s dress in natural curiosity of any possible physical differences (since confirmed).
Teacher’s automatic shock and revulsion were fully in sync with the times, perhaps still. But I, deeply sensitive, couldn’t for the life of me fathom the horror unleashed, just being my innate, curious self. I certainly felt “taught.” But what?
Any boundaries memo I’d apparently missed was no part whatsoever of my teachable moment. Just a silent, piercing glare of disgust in the fading echo of her Defcon threat response. I rose, reduced and downcast at what to me had felt simply inquisitive and innocent.
Later in grade school, a girl at my lunch table gleefully touted proof that males were comparative shit. “Boys hafta go to war and DIE! Ha ha! Girls don’t! Ha ha!,” she taunted me to near tears. As other boys launched kernel corn artillery or snorted milk out their noses, I digested my male existence as throwaway.
Still grade school age, I waited obediently in the car one day as my grandmother took far too long inside a five-and-dime. Bladder desperate, I sought sweet relief fairly hidden behind my open car door with no one else near. Her dire panic and distress to find me “publicly” exposed seared into me the grave offensiveness of my penis.
The emerging paradigm? Girls, special and valued; guys, vile and abhorrent. Later to include: Women, nature’s sexual reward; men, nature’s sexual liability. Her sexual interest: charity, a favor. His: fully taken for granted, burdensome. He gets “lucky;” she only gets fucked. Angels, animals.
One small problem: I wanted—needed—my sexuality to simply be a natural, wonderful gift, too. No gimmicks, no inflation. Just as created, expressing the exact same divine spark and truth. As if, just maybe, God truly made no mistakes. Y’know, (sigh…) As if.
By the time Starlight Vocal Band’s Afternoon Delight dared suggest, “…and the thought of lovin’ you is getting so exciting,” my gender dregs identity was a second skin. I recall thinking, “Wait; no. That can’t be right. Some delusional guy penned that, while some gal got conned to sing it, regardless.”
Meanwhile, in my bible belt (yay!) American Midwest, media messages of the late ’60s and early ’70s painted men as essentially loathsome and damaging by nature. Guilty by gender association, my inherited male rap sheet ranged from systemic oppression to direct physical and psychological human ruin. Hell, we’d damage anyone: Women, children, or other men—not even choosy.
Missing from public discourse seemed even a will to hint that the problematic male hat didn’t potentially fit every male alive. And I, being the sensitive one, couldn’t help caring, the thought of harming another, unbearable; ever wondering at the mirror, “How is it that sexual desire, which heaven itself surely engineered, makes me defective?”
I hungered to not be just one more problem in the parade of whatever problems men reportedly were, absent restraining orders. And so, the tender, conflicted soul invited that night of sweet initiation to “just do what comes naturally” little knew what faithful references to absolutely trust. If clumsily, amid so much breathlessly sensual and new, I trusted the one thing I’d ever most deeply known and been: love.
Curiously—or not—every actual, real-world intimate relationship in the decades since has soundly defied and denied my early-learned, formative notions that, by some gender necessity, I lacked balancing worth, acceptance, or appreciation. And yet still…
Still, I too easily can get pulled back into that sense of shame. Still, I can too readily withdraw my masculine sexual self as an imagined affront, void of worth to share. All it takes is the right trigger—a sitcom line or conversational aside reasserting presumptive, inborn gifthood versus hapless, inborn excess—to leave me loathe to initiate or even imagine deserving physical intimacy.
No matter her loving patience, understanding and support, my wife deserves better, deserves to deeply feel, undiluted by ghosts, what I deeply know: exactly just how much she rocks my world. And surely no less, my life deserves better, too.
I tried talk therapy for this and other social esteem concerns. What a joke. I bared my soul for a harrowing process and clean return to square one. I tried the men’s weekend training adventure gig. My desperation to simply somehow die comfortable in my own male skin supposedly made me a great program fit. But any new clarity about old worthiness stories remains ineffective to disempower this past. Next up: The shamanic path calls. Perhaps spirit guides privy to my soul’s intention can impart healing wisdom upon my journey?
I can’t remember ever not loving women. Simply even the archetype of the feminine feels profoundly sacred to me, intuitively key to any chance of our species’ illumined survival. Perhaps it’s just my sensitive and expressive core, being artistic, musical, the poet, the dreamer. I didn’t get the invulnerability gene, just the honest one; the unshielded, seeking, restless one.
Did my earliest, formative years of mother seeming so fragile and vacant, often bedridden between psych hospital shock treatments, play a role? Or my silently strong-but-gentle, socially docile, fundamentalist father make a bigger impact? Or simply the larger world’s agreement that my male nature needed fixed, tweaked, or manicured?
I’m seeing articles of late from women shining genuine compassion on the issue of male sexual shaming and its impacts. Perhaps mindful of their own sons’ nurturing or men they otherwise know. Some women comment that they couldn’t be happy with a man so broken, a man too inhibited to be driven fully wild with primal lust to let them feel irresistibly desirable.
In a world of other truly deep wounds and traumas, sexual shame is surely a minor blip on the radar. I easily hear my late father-in-law’s all-occasion adage, “If that’s as bad as life gets, you’re doing pretty damned good.” I totally get that I would die this very moment unthinkably blessed. Still, what I don’t get is freedom to live, thrive and share authentically—if I choose to ignore what is mine to access and heal.
For me, that need, that purpose, that work and that unconditioned love—no less for myself than any other—does call naturally. In the vision that I hold, I see my childhood’s retrial jury, deliberations done, reconvene smiling. So help me God…
…it nearly brings tears.
Photo/Pexels
Thank you, Tim.
Although brought up under rather different circumstances, I feel this could in large parts have been the story of my life. Not being the artistic, musical person you are, I was still given a sensitive core from very young age.
And what do I have that is worth sharing?
Worth sharing in my view? Your courage TO share and the illumination it brings to a vulnerable area—just for starters! Thank you, Kal. Just yesterday, I came to realize how, very early in life, I began equating “properly” accepting and wearing various devaluing gender labels and a diminished sexual identity to “properly” caring for others. To not wear was to not care, and I simply couldn’t allow myself to be “that” uncaring person. So I feel that my work will at least include growing at a deep identity level to trust and own my sexuality’s absolutely natural, created integrity, independent… Read more »