Awkward Pornography, or Licking Maureen Dowd

A few weeks ago I began to feel a strong impulse to lick Maureen Dowd in a private place. I’ve yet to masturbate to this fantasy of the nasally columnist with her mysteriously tight facial skin and faint speckling of liver spots and freckles. I rarely read her in the The New York Times and, while I admire the radical spirit of having written 350 pages about whether men serve any positive purpose in society, her heavy use of jargon and one-liners that sound like  Sex & The City quips usually leave me me disappointed. But still, I want to lick her, and a big part of it is age.

The outward effects of age are the easiest to judge other people by. While indulging in a few minutes dive into Internet pornography, it’s easy to imagine myself as the vessel through which a small city of tattooed twenty-two year old women have orgasms of a magnitude they’ve never before experienced. With the laptop battery warming my thighs, I imagine each eye-roll inducing thrust to be the product of my doing, my modestly curving sex wand imbued with the mystical power of eliciting ecstasy through the mere act of insertion.

When I was nineteen there was a fair symmetry to this inane fantasy. I felt license to amuse myself with fanciful bullshit because I was still young and had a rightful claim to not knowing any better. At 33 it’s probably unwise to rely on that excuse, which, even if true, would be an indictment in itself. Finding an externally manufactured sex fantasy appropriate for a 33 year-old man is alarmingly difficult.

I now find the only parts of pornography that really interest me are the few seconds of awkward bodily adjustments that happen in between positions, or the unwelcome interruption of a man’s penis flopping out of the vagina. I’m less interested in imagining myself as the provider of some mystical golden thrust, and more interested in mining the archives of sexual awkwardness, the oops-inducing moments of an otherwise heroic performance. I have as of yet to discover this kind of pornography, where the woman says, “Hmm, why don’t we try something else,” rather than asking if her partner likes her “tight little pussy.”

My friend C once told me she used to masturbate while reading. She would have some weed, open Ulysses, and begin rubbing herself while the stumbling melodies of Stephen Dedalus leapt across her synapses, reverberating in her throat, shaping and reshaping her tongue like a dance partner discovering invisible movements with which to agitate the air. When I compared this to my own self-pleasure, those few minutes of single-minded ascension, like the climb up the first big hill on a roller coaster, I felt like I was missing an awful lot.

I remember feeling that same sense of missing in high school when, still early in my career as a self-flagellator, I’d wished I could trade my penis for a vagina. After a few years of impulsive stroking in every location I could safely manage (the living room floor, the pool, the empty lot next to our house, on a bathroom break during 5^th period History class), I’d hit a plateau. So I fantasized about what it would feel like if my genitals went inward instead of out. It seemed to me a beautiful idea, the feeling of being entered, stretched, and sounded while at the same time catching snatches of lucidity that always seem to accompany the careful stimulation of a cluster of nerve endings. I wanted to feel every inch of it, and the familiar up-and-down automation that made my penis come to a quiver seemed like a superficial consolation prize.

It’s hard to imagine sex without that overreaching sense of something missing. And maybe that’s why at this point in my life, Maureen Dowd more closely resembles the direction my libido is going than does a twenty-two year old woman with a star tattooed on the small of her back. I don’t have any fantasies left about nubility, and I find it hard to muster attraction to those idealistic young people who still aspire to some defurred version of sex, shaving themselves the way an Olympic swimmer will before a meet.

It’s startling to see how much my looks have changed over the years. In my earliest memories, crawling in the Tanzanian dirt, waiting for the neighbors to come over so my 3^rd birthday could begin, listening to my friend M’s parents talk about their jobs over an after-dinner glass of wine, I feel an inner sameness that connects straight through it all. Outwardly, I have never stopped changing.

When I think of Maureen Dowd, licking the loosening skin beneath her jaw line, connecting the enveloping ends of her thin lips with a stroke of the tongue, she is a new kind of pornography with which to rediscover a sense of what’s still missing. And with that fantasy an opportunity to push even closer towards the edge without falling completely over, never again to return.

I’d masturbate to that.

Image via Wikipedia.