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She's on a stage, on a dais, naked as a mackerel and ready to go. And I too am naked, twizzle stick in hand, leading the charge of the light brigade. There are three hundred of us, and she's going to fuck us all. I, mercifully, am first. I ascend the steps . . . Shit, it happened again. Snapped out of it a minute too soon. My wank fantasy du jour has been giving me some trouble. It's a far cry from my normal ones, perhaps that's the problem. In most of my scenarios, my gifts are bestowed on a single woman, and I am the lone man doing the giving. But recent events, centered around the unfortunate term "gangbangs" in this case, willful acts of assembly-line sexhave led me to this fantasy, distant though it be from my typical vanilla daydreams.
But let me backtrack a bit and recount the events leading up to my present difficulties. A few weeks ago, I received a query from a journalist who was interviewing Annabel Chong, the porn actress/feminist theorist who, on film, had sex with 251 men in the course of ten hours (we'll be publishing the interview sometime this month). Then I read a draft of an article written by Hooksexup writer Leif Ueland on Houston someone or other who broke the bonk record by screwing over 600 guys consecutively (she originally had billed it as the Houston 500, but then persevered an extra C). Finally, wanting to know what the gangbang fuss was all about, I went and saw an advance screening of the Chong documentary, entitled Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. The next night I saw Annabel herself walking in my neighborhood, and have since heard that another gangbanger, Jasmine St. Clair (who broke Chong's record by doing 300 straight) is in this month's Penthouse. This confluence of events has left me thinking a lot about gangbangs, getting aroused, and finding that I am decidedly uncomfortable about the reasons behind my arousal.
Allow me to explain. For starters, it has to be confessed that the idea of a woman voluntarily having sex with multiple hundred men in an afternoon is not without charms. For me, and probably for a lot of other men, the very anonymity of the guys is a turn-on. The logic goes like this: she's having sex with anyone and everyone, so no matter how insecure and self-hating you may be, none of that matters; it's not you she's fucking, it's just your penis. The fact that I find this anonymity attractive is, in itself, somewhat troubling; like most everybody, I want sex to be about being known, being shared, being opened to another person. Yet still I find the fantasy of not being known compelling. Why? Because to be unknown is to be unjudge-able. And to know that you are not going to be judged facilitates a certain measure of peace that is, for me, often absent during sex.
But beyond the fact of my own anonymity, I am also aroused by the anonymity of the woman in question. If, in the dark, an arm reached out and grabbed me, pulled me into a shadowed corner, unzipped my pants and made furtive, faceless love to me, I would enjoy it. Most men would, I think. (Women, of course, might not; I confess to being a bit in the dark on this one). This too could be seen as an emotional failing, yet the fact remains: the random hook-up is something of a fantasy for most men, and it's not so much a sign of hating women as being scared of them, of not understanding them and therefore not being comfortable with the responsibility of fucking them. The anonymous woman has the virtue of not having expressed needs and preferences: you don't know her, and can pretend that she doesn't exist.
But what about the men in the documentary, what were they actually like? Good god. The camera was merciful in not showing much of them. They tended to be naked, and an average sampling of naked men is not the most savory of images. They were fat and thin, tall and short, of all races, of a range of ages. And they were all standing around like guys at a urinal who had decided to save time by whipping it out in advance.
Thinking about this sizable sampling of the male animal, I ponder the phrase "sloppy seconds" and can't help wonder what the feeling of sloppy two hundred and fourths would be like. Not wonderful, one is assured. But still, what was going through the minds of the men as they were "fluffed" (i.e., sucked off by hired, knee-pad wearing women to make sure they were hard when their turn came up), standing in line to go and have sex with a total stranger? The standard thinking is that for most men the feeling that they're going to get laid outweighs any misgivings about the specifics. Yet still I wondered how many proved unfluffable, how many went home disappointed, how many had new respect for committed relationships, and how many just called their buddies and said they had the time of their lives.
So what's the biggest problem with the gangbang fantasy? Perhaps that fantasy only goes so far. Annabel Chong seemed to be very excited by the idea of fucking the men (perhaps the interview will bear this out); she did it, she says in the documentary, for personal reasons, to have a unique experience, to chart new ground, to challenge existing feminisms, to assert female sexual power, et cetera. But I left the theater with some serious doubts about Chong's underlying motives. In the case of Jasmine St. Clair and Houston, it is hard to believe that they did it for anything more than the media stunt. In Chong's case, I'd love for her enthusiasm to be true, but even if it is, it still betrays a massive, deep-seated need for attention and affirmation.
And thus my fantasy gets a little complicated. Though many therapists will say that we have fantasy lives so we can safely purge ourselves of the amoral dross of our ids, when morality does manages to sneak back into the fantasy world, we feel a little friction. It's hard to think about Annabel Chong without getting excited, but it's also hard to think about her without really thinking about her. About her as a person, about the message of her gangbang, about the porn industry, about sexual desire, and about human need. And when you do that much thinking, you don't do much else.
Jack Murnighan
For more Jack Murnighan, read:
Jack's Naughty Bits
Rooster
Thumping in the Bible: Sex in the Old Testament
Two Cans and a String
Three Shades of Longing
Watershed
A Case for Banning Books
Roots
April letter
What Are We Thinking?
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