The Pleasure of M

by Michel Farnac

  The abdominals are beginning to enter the fray as the balls have begun shifting the load into the pump at the base of the cock. The contractions which were up to now very much internalized become muscle spasms combined with the thrust of the pelvis. The first of these is the official beginning of the orgasm though the ejaculation begins only at the third or fourth. It is always a surprise to feel the hot semen flowing, no, pulsating through the shaft in the sense that everything seemed to indicate it was already happening. The testicles remain a pure locus of dislocated pleasure, still unattached to the body, but now irradiating it with waves of pleasure.

  This is where I take a path quite different from most of my colleagues. Soon, there will be a dislocation of spirit and body: the little death. Exerting control over the body at that point not only immediately ends all true pleasure, it is also so uncomfortable as to be painful.

  The macho ones will choose to regain physical control before this happens, get up, go have a cigarette or something to stimulate sensation into the wanting-‐to-‐die nervous system to counteract the orgasm.

  The others will place themselves into a position of stable equilibrium usually not involving physical contact with their partner. This is like dawning a primitive armor, retreating into a cave to pass the little death.

  Me, I go surfing. Surf the wave. Make it last. Make it roar. Amplify everything, make it resonate until I explode. The waves emanating from my groin turn into contractions of my muscle groups each in turn, shoulders, arms, legs, feet… Usually, one foot is oscillating at high speed (think Thumper in Bambi), I am punching a pillow, a wall, or a mattress with one fist, my breathing gets faster and louder… I can see nothing, hear barely a thing as the blood rushes through my ears, pounding in joy. And finally, my abs seize in violent contractions, every few seconds, in decreasing intensity over a couple of minutes, my breathing slowing down as I gradually bring my heart rate back to ‘normal’. When almost all the contractions have occurred, I let out all the air in my lungs in one, long breath. There is a point of balance there that I reach. When I resurface for air, it feels as though that very air is thick, strong, powerful. Not hard to breathe, just slow to breathe, more potent. My spirit is at peace, radiating, slowly coming back into my body as said body rids itself of the last few minor contractions. Every inch of my skin is hypersensitive and will be for a few minutes. Contentment pervades. Motion is undesirable, as would be contrast at this point. Soon, time will coalesce again and space will retake its shape. Until then, my universe fills with the presence of the one who has created this bliss: you. My hand reaches out…

  Yours,

  Michel” As it happens she had several days before having to write an answer as Michel was going on vacation for a week away from electronic devices, and this allowed her to digest his latest message. The first reading of it left her a bit bewildered. Luckily, she very reluctantly yielded to her husband’s advances that night and she found herself observing him as he reached climax with incomplete recollections from a single reading of Michel’s description hovering in her mind. She felt the pulsing as his orgasm began and heard him faintly yelp as the discharge started in earnest. When he quickly pulled away thereafter, rather than feel her usual annoyance the words “primitive armor” made her giggle, and her husband smiled at the sound of her laughter from the depth of the cave where he lay. The next day she reread Michel’s note several times and each reading made the text more familiar and more mysterious, drawing out her curiosity. She wrote thoughts and questions down on a pad in preparation for her response which led to an amusing incident involving her boss nearly taking the pad saying “I need your notes from this morning’s meeting.” That night she pleasured her husband of her own initiative and as he slept she crept downstairs to pour herself a glass of wine before going out into the warm air of a beautiful summer night in her garden. She had to admit that she had never had so much pleasure watching her husband have an orgasm. Of course, early on in their marriage she had enjoyed given him pleasure, mostly because of the feeling of power she derived from it, from knowing that she could do this, accomplish this seemingly at will. But when the novelty of it died off, his orgasms turned into something quite different for her, mainly a signal that their lovemaking session was at an end, most often leaving her frustrated to the point where it had in her mind almost become a nuisance, either something she did to “make him happy” in the sense of “make him go away” or something that came too soon after too little foreplay. Her façade of impeccable propriety as an outstanding member of the community to which she was so devoted precluded her having the type of friend with whom by confiding she would have understood that when it comes to marital sex, hers was a rather common plight. Michel’s words were powerful and she wanted to somehow feel the orgasm he was describing, but with her husband she lacked the kind of empathy it would have required and so was reduced to observation. Regardless, she realized that since her husband tended to stop halfway through what Michel wrote of, she would have to turn to the author to get a deeper understanding of the much more interesting second half of the text.

  There will be no better or worse time than now to point out that not all was always perfect between the two of them, but rather that the occasional moment of friction was always easily overcome with openness and effusive reciprocal apologies in subsequent messages. She would volunteer that she had “annoying female characteristics” while he admitted to being “a man after all, with the many nasty things this can imply at times,” but both made every effort to not annoy the other in the same way twice. She had thus learned to not ask ‘too many’ questions at a time and to then wait for an answer without badgering him about it. In the end, he always did answer though he sometimes had to remind her of the question given the time elapsed since it had been posed. Mostly.

  “Dear Michel,

  I just realized that you are the only ‘M’ in my address book. It is quite fitting that I only have to type in “M-‐i…” and you magically appear at the top of the queue, and as I do I often say it out loud, and it sounds like ‘Me’. Our knowledge of each other has grown to a depth we could never have imagined. In some ways, you know me better than even my husband, just as you have told me things that you have shared with no-‐one else.

  I have read and reread your ‘orgasm’ piece. As we’ve discussed before, our perspectives on previous words, stories, movies, etc. are never static (at least for people like you and I). And so my thoughts on this missive are of course very different from the reactions I experienced upon the first reading just a few days ago. Now a few questions:

  Do you like to have your balls touched during orgasm or is that distracting? Do you prefer that motion cease as of that moment? Does additional friction (either in your partner’s mouth or vagina) enhance or detract… or does it vary with the circ
umstance?

  Can you really feel the hot semen flowing through your shaft? (I envision this as hot lava shooting up from the volcano!)

  Is this description of your orgasm true for all of your orgasms, or is this just what the “ultimate O” feels like? I know, too many questions… but I want to seize the day!

  Fondly,

  Catherine”

  It would be another couple of days before Michel returned and responded. He took great pleasure in answering her inquiries. He was proud that he made her want to seize the day.

  “Dear Catherine,

  Your questions make me realize that my description was perhaps a tad esoteric, and so it is a pleasure to provide some answers. And first, indeed we can feel the semen flowing as it does. It is propelled by uncontrollable and orgasmic contraction at the base of the shaft. But the first few contractions are blanks, in a sense, and only at the third or fourth does the lava flow. Anything other than a gentle cupping of the balls can be distracting, but gentle cupping pressure, especially to the back of the testicles, rather enhances the experience. As to motion, it is quite essential during the orgasm itself, but shortly thereafter, things get a little more complicated. Here again, circumcision makes a big difference. The tip of the cock becomes very sensitive in the aftermath of ejaculation, and stimulation at this point can become uncomfortable, even painful, but much less so for circumcised men. I think that might explain some of the more striking differences between European and American porno flicks. Finally, while there are better and worse orgasms, what I described is pretty much the template for what I experience, with the caveat that you know about masturbation versus sex with a partner.

  I trust that this begins to answer some of your questions on the matter, but I know that you will have more, which is something that I look forward to. No, really, I do. Yours,

  Michel”

  When next they spoke, she admitted to him that her own pleasure seemed to her very meek in comparison with his, and how would she react to being present at such an event? He laughed and told her that he could only judge from his wife's reaction to this: a good deal of satisfaction and the occasional unsuppressed giggle. He described himself as a cross between a penguin walking on a waxed floor and a puppy dog being scratched a little too vigorously, and thought she would probably find it amusing and hopefully a little endearing. His breathing pattern kind of freaked his wife out the first few times because there was a point after orgasm when he stopped breathing for a few seconds, but she got used to it. It was all a matter of letting the pleasure resonate to its fullest. Catherine again questioned him about the intensity of it and he tried to add some nuance to his answer. The way he felt it, there had to be essentially a gradation in the pleasures that could be had from ejaculation. He had been caught once in the unpleasant situation of needing to cut short ill-‐timed self-‐pleasuring only to find that the point of no-‐return had been reached, and this seemed to mark the minimum amount of pleasure that he could get from an orgasm: “It was as if the duality that is usually resolved at the time of orgasm between the locus of pleasure in the testicles and the rest of the body was suddenly restored with the body pretending that the orgasm was not happening, adrenaline pumping through the veins, sweating with fear, hyper-‐alert, and at the same time waves of pleasure completely contained to the testes, barely finding their way into the brain because unable to overcome the sympathetic nervous system’s reluctance to cede way to pleasure.”

  “Ok,” she giggled,” you have to tell me what in the world that was all about.” “I figured that would tickle your curiosity. I must have been twelve at most, and I had only recently discovered my father’s stash of men’s magazines. The occasions were rare for me at the time to get a few minutes alone in my parent’s room to peruse at them and masturbate. One weekend afternoon, my father is away with my brother and my mother leaves to run an errand which I misinterpret as requiring at least an hour. She leaves, I wait a few minutes, enough for her to realize she has forgotten something and come back, and then I venture into my parent’s room and extirpate the magazines from their hiding place. I felt the pleasure coming as I heard my mother return. Just putting the magazines back required quite some work, but doing so one-‐handed while the other hand prevents the phallus from spraying the walls with semen was quite a challenge, then getting out of their room and into my bathroom without being spotted, very difficult.”

  “So you had the stuff in your hands while running around?” she managed to ask between two laughs.

  “No, not at all, that’s what the prepuce is for. You gently squeeze the foreskin shut and it works like a condom. No mess. Very nice. But doing that while running around is non-‐trivial.”

  She had never known intimacy with an uncircumcised man and had long held this very American view that the circumcised version is the more natural one. Upon learning that Michel was not, she had done some research and had arrived at a more nuanced position on the topic and now was rather fascinated by what the other version was like. He, of course, came from a world where this was a condition generally considered a religious feature or arrived at by accidental medical necessity. This last is why Michel’s cousin had been circumcised at the age of twenty four subsequent to the tearing of the foreskin due to a very unfortunate encounter with a hastily closed zipper. Michel had explored the topic with his cousin and with a close childhood friend of Jewish faith, and had come to hold some pretty firm opinions on the topic of circumcision, the main one being that one is better off as one is born, whether male or female. He understood well that this view would have been simpler to hold in a world where certain ills did not exist but felt strongly that latex was the only real answer to unbridled behavior (this un-‐poetic aside was intended only to illuminate his effusive championing of the uncircumcised cock).

  “So is that why you so like your foreskin?” she teased, “No mess?” “Oh good heaven, no! Well, since you decided to get me started on the topic, here goes. It’s all about pleasure, you see? I mean, look, I’m a hedonist and an atheist, so I can only view with suspicion any religiously mandated mutilation. And sure enough, the main effect of it is to reduce pleasure, its potential and its intensity. You can view that as a coincidence if you want and talk about hygiene until you are blue in the face, but it will be hard to convince me. First of all, as anyone who remembers it will tell you, it is painful. And by the way, all of this so far holds for both males and females. It is very painful, and for several weeks, in fact, months. For the male, it is bad enough while you scar, but after that the second ordeal begins, once they take off the bandages. Then, the tip of the cock is exposed, typically to the gentle friction with your underwear normally engendered by standard motion, like walking. Well that is enough to give you an erection, which in turn makes the top of your cock more sensitive, which eventually makes t
he erection painful. And I mean really painful. It can be months before the penis is numb to the sensation. This is like priapism. We are talking real pain here, especially since there is fresh scar tissue there. So the notion that it is OK to do that to babies is really strange to me, you know? I mean, obviously the discomforts are greatly multiplied for an adult, but still, it does not strike me as a nice thing to do. But he point to be made much closer to our main topics of preoccupation is the obvious long-‐lasting aftermath of the procedure, which is that it desensitizes the male’s most erogenous zone. It is a pity. There is no other word. A pity.”

  “No redeeming features?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It depends for whom, I guess. It has one perverse side effect. Since it makes pleasure harder to procure, it can make the erection last longer, and it can make it easier to start up again, because the tip needs much less time to shed it’s oversensitivity after the orgasm.”

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, “is that what you meant about the porno actors?” “Yes, exactly. They seem to be able to put up longer and more physical performances than their European counterparts on average. Mind you, there are guys that hold their own on both sides.”