Image by the brilliant Stuart F Taylor
Remember a while back when I wrote about how great it is to have tits? This week’s blog post is on a similar theme, but with a different incredible body part. It’s a post I have desperately, eagerly, fervently hoped someone might write, because I want to experience and feel the perspective on genitals I do not have myself. So please give not just a warm welcome but a standing ovation to Kara, who has written a guest blog about the joy of having a cock that is so evocative and descriptive I almost felt myself getting a ghost boner as I read it. Take it away Kara…
Why I love having a cock
I love the feeling of having an erection. Inside clothes it’s this tightness pressing out against the fabric, like a coiled spring waiting to leap out. Naked it’s very different: a feeling of freedom, like shaking your hair loose when it’s been tied up, fresh cool air after a muggy day, or just standing and holding your arms outstretched to the wind a la Rose in Titanic.
I love the weight of it, hard; the feel of it slapping against my palm or thigh – or against someone else’s palm, or arse, or face. Like saying “look, you turned me on so much my arousal took on physical form and it can literally jump up and hit you in the face.” I love the feeling of power that that weight brings with it. Not just in a sense of “I’m powerful and I’m going to dominate someone by fucking them!”, but that the cock itself has power – sometimes over a partner, sometimes over me, or over my underwear’s ability to keep it in check – but always there in some way. It’s like picking up an electric drill, feeling the heft of it, giving the trigger an exploratory squeeze: the feeling of ‘wow, I can do so much with this thing!’ But there’s also that sense that you need to be careful with it, to respect its ability to hurt someone if you aren’t.
I love that it can make me feel powerful.
I love that it can make me feel powerless.
I love that it’s such a ridiculous organ. Of course part of that is just that every taboo subject becomes a joke, but it’s not just that. When it’s soft you can roll it up, spin it round like a helicopter rotor, or wrap it up in its scrotum so it looks like one huge testicle. And then it just transforms – what other body part does that? – into this state that we call ‘hard’. But not like bone is hard, more like how a beach ball feels hard when you try to submerge it, that firm resistance of the ocean pushing back at you. Like the ocean it can give, but it also has a strength, a hardness to it. And then: it just hangs there, or waggles about if you move your hips even slightly, pointing right out at the world as if daring you to find it anything less than 100% serious and erotic.
I’m pretty confident that would be hilarious even if it wasn’t connected to pissing or fucking. Like, imagine if your liver would swell up like a balloon and bulge out of the side of your torso every time you had a bunch to drink – or even thought too hard about drinking. “Anyone for a quick pint after this?” “Well, looks like Adrienne’s in – she can hardly keep it in her shirt!” Yeah, we would for sure find that funny.
I love fucking someone else who has a cock because it’s like theirs is an extension of mine. And if they sit on my lap facing me I can lean down and suck their cock while I’m fucking them, as if I’m sucking my own cock: every time I thrust my hips up into them it pushes them upwards and I end up fucking my own mouth with their cock, with both our cocks together. They’re under me and on top of me and inside me, and I’m inside them too, all at once.
Just, fuck.
I love being with someone who doesn’t have a cock and letting them explore it and just – hang out with it. Bodies are weird and fun and funny, sex can be playful and silly, and watching someone get to know something that’s so familiar to you can be a really nice, comfortable sort of feeling. I love when a partner I’ve been with for ages knows it really well, but I also love watching a new partner’s reaction to seeing it, touching it, for the first time. Watching them pull it out of my pants, or seeing it swing out into their hand or onto their face, and trying to read the look in their eyes as they take it in. Are they excited? Eager? Even a little intimidated, sometimes? I love trying to work that out; but I also love it when they straight-up tell me. And though it might sound like cheesy, cliche porn dialogue, I also love hearing them say “God, this thing is huge!”
I love how, much more than any other body part, it acts like it has a mind of its own. I can’t just decide whether to get an erection or not, and sometimes it even takes me by surprise. “Oh, I’m getting hard? I hadn’t even noticed I was turned on!” I love that it can’t easily be faked, too: I was once on a first date which we’d both agreed wouldn’t take us anywhere more private than the pub, but at some point our making out got me so turned on that she couldn’t help but notice my hard-on – and that got her so turned on we both agreed on a quick change of plans so I could go round to hers and bury it in her.
What a great wingman.
But I even love it when it’s causing me awkwardness instead of getting me laid. It doesn’t know or care that I’m on a first date that could potentially be upgraded to a first fuck, as opposed to awkwardly half-opening the front door after the bell’s just rung at the worst possible time. It doesn’t even care, I can officially confirm, if I’m sitting on the train home from work thinking about what to write in this blog post.
(Brief aside: I’m aware that awful people use this kind of sentiment to justify rape culture: “sometimes it feels as though it has a mind of its own” becomes “it actually does have a mind of its own, so you can’t hold me responsible for what I do with it”. Which is bullshit. I may not be in conscious control of my erections, but I am of course in control of how I treat other people.)
And then there’s the classic scenario: standing in an unfamiliar bathroom at one in the morning trying to conduct a sort of hostage negotiation with my own dick.
“I just need you to go soft so I can have a piss, OK? Just for a minute! Please, it’s very important that you go soft now. Yes, right now. Why is it so important? Well, because as soon as I’m done pissing I can get back in the bedroom with the person I’ve come home with and start – oh shit, and now you’re rock-hard again.”
Now I’m not saying I actively enjoy those awkward-boner moments or want them to happen – and I’m certainly not going round showing off my bulge to any postmen or fellow commuters. But there’s something about that uncontrollability – that powerlessness – that I wouldn’t trade in. It’s like – running for cover in a sudden rainstorm with your best friend, screaming and vainly holding a soaking backpack over your head. In the moment you might not be thinking “this is great”, but when you look back over your life, at all the strange little things that make up being human, this is the kind of thing that stands out, that you can’t help but feel grateful for on some level.
The idea for this post came to me about four years ago. I pitched it to GOTN, and she loved it. I wrote pretty much all of the above – and then never sent it to her.
Why was that?
Partly just because my ADHD, and chronic illnesses, get in the way of finishing things. But I think there was also part of me that felt kind of ashamed at wanting to write this, because who the hell wants to read some cis man talking about how great his dick is? It’s not like there’s a shortage of that in our culture, after all. I guess on some level I didn’t really feel like this kind of body positivity was something I was allowed to participate in.
Well, quite a bunch has happened since then. For one, I realised I’m not some cis man after all; and that caused me to think a bunch about what having a cock means to me, and reminded me of this nascent post. So at some point I dug the draft out of my notes app and decided to actually finish it off.
Now to be clear, I’m not saying “it’s OK for me to talk about this now because I’m trans, so talking about my cock is woke and empowering instead of basic and cisnormative.” Rather, I’m saying that realising I’m trans helped me to accept that it’s always been OK.
I love that I can be a woman with a cock, and nobody gets to tell me that’s not OK. I love that there are people who can find me sexy, and feminine, while having a cock. I love that sex and life and everything else keeps on turning out to be so much more complicated and interesting than I had ever expected.
When I first realised I’m trans, I had a lot of doubts and imposter syndrome feelings. “I can’t be a trans woman,” those thoughts would sometimes say, “I literally wrote an essay about how much I love having a cock!”
But, counterpoint: fuck that.
My gender isn’t determined by the body I happen to have, but neither is it determined by what body I want. The trans experience isn’t, and shouldn’t be, defined solely by dysphoria. There are definitely things about my body I dislike, but I’m allowed to like – to love – the things I do.
I love my cock because it’s a woman’s cock, and fuck anyone who has a problem with that.
And finally, I love it because I might not always love it. Life is strange, being trans is strange. People change. HRT, in particular, changes a lot about people’s bodies and their minds and their feelings about the relationship between the two. And I’ve already found my feelings changing since I Realised, even without the help of hormones. It’s perfectly possible that in a few years I will realise that having a cock isn’t for me any more, that I want to have it removed or altered – or that I’ll simply feel neutral about it. Either of those outcomes would be fine, and neither of them would invalidate how I feel now.
After all, the fact that something might not last forever makes it more precious, not less.
I don’t know who I’ll be or how I’ll feel five years from now. But what I do know is that, right now, right here –
I fucking love having a cock.
