Why Skating is Like Looking at Naked Guys

Those who may have been looking forward to this since January 5 will probably be disappointed. Sorry, no pictures.

Until recently, I had no idea how to enjoy looking at naked guys. My appreciation of naked men did not come naturally like my love of food.* It was sort of accidentally cultivated. Huh?

The break-through occured a few years ago when I was taking a drawing class with live naked models (not my first nude figure drawing class**). For some reason, while I was drawing this guy who you probably wouldn't look at twice if you passed him on the beach, I figured out how to fully appreciate naked guys.

Suddenly, the meeting of line between neck and shoulder was both physically and aesthetically pleasing. For an instant, I experienced a unity of the senses. Maybe most people can take this kind of thing for granted. For me, it was a revelation. I wish I could fully dissect the process, when personal experience and socialization (is taste the right word?)united with a kind of physical prowess--an advance in perception and coordination...oh forget it.

It was like the moment I figured out how to skate, only hot.

GETTING ACROSS THE RINK
The majority of people teaching me how to look at naked guys have been other guys. I used to think this was an obstacle that caused a detour in my development. Unlike the time when I learned to ice skate by watching some boys playing hokey, a masculine example wouldn't do. It's okay for a 4-year-old girl in white figure skates to zip across a rink in a running swagger, but when she hits 14 a little more grace is expected. I wanted to feel confident that I was looking at guys like a girl, whatever that meant. I'd learned from a few surveys in women's glossies what ladies were looking at when checking men out, I asked my peers, but I never felt like I was doing it right. I just wasn't seeing as many attractive guys as the other girls claimed to see, and I sort of gave up.

After years of gradual, fitful progress, I realized that it was fine to look at guys "like a guy" or in any way, as long as I got across the rink, because appreciating naked guys is pretty much like appreciating naked ladies. The difference is that they're guys.

**********************************************************************

HOW I GOT TO THIS PLACE (THE RAMBLING PART THAT YOU CAN SKIP)
Here I ramble on the theme of naked guys and present a bunch of ideas that I think are related.

NAKED RULES
Of course I was rarely exposed to nudity as a child, yet I learned a few things from the Love Boat, Benny Hill, rumors and such. Here are some of the rules I learned about looking at naked people:

Rule 1: Everybody wants to see naked women. Nobody wants to see naked men.

Rule 2: Women aren't supposed to get excited looking at naked women.
Women get excited looking at men, but not naked men so much.

Rule 3: Looking at penises is like watching horror movies. They are supposed to be interesting to look at, yet they are terribly frightening.

NAKED REALITY
When puberty hit, these rules confused me. Rules 1 and 2 contradicted each other, and all the rules ran counter to my feelings. For many years, I found pictures of naked women more exciting than pictures of naked men, even though I was more attracted to real males than to real females. Since images of naked women were more plentiful, well-done and sexier than the few available pictures of naked men, I had more opportunities to appreciate them. It was easier to recognize a beautiful female figure. With guys, I didn't know what to look for below the chin. I also had little interest in looking at any penises. Why I couldn't get with the program?

THE FIRST REALLY NAKED GUYS
In junior high, we girls all looked at pictures of various hairless "Coreys" in Tiger Beat and such, but these images were relatively tame.

The first overtly sexualized images of men that I remember were some strange airbrushed greating cards of dangerously exposed firemen that I saw in an Uptown stationery store and the copies of GQ in hair salon mom and I patronized. This was in the early 1980s. Back then, the typical model in GQ was extremely pumped, hairless as a baby, and did nothing for me. (There was much grumbling in the salon when the publishers of GQ figured out that the sleek models were scaring away straight and wanna-be straight men, and started to use more "regular guy" models.)

COLLEGE LESSONS
**When I took my first figure drawing class with live naked models, I was never excited by anything I saw, male or female. I figured it just wasn't possible to be aroused by a model while drawing, because I was so focused on depicting what I saw. But I did notice that students were less likely to draw what they actually saw if the model was female, particularly if the model was "beautiful."

*A roommate and I got into one of those arguments you can only have in college. She, who enjoyed sex, said it was a source of pleasure comparable to eating. I, who only enjoyed food, argued that the pleasures were completely different. (Before I graduated, experience proved me wrong. So I guess she won after all. Fine.)

Once, during my junior year, Quiconque and I embarked on a doomed quest to find some decent porn for straight women. The best thing we found, some book by Nancy Friday, was also the worst. Forget about anything with pictures.

During a college communications class screening of a film called Hermes Bird, which is basically an 11 minute close up of a dick, I realized that the people most interested and frightened by the image of the penis are people who actually have them.

This kid showed me an erotic magazine for gay men. He was was very proud of this publication. He saw it as an empowered celebration of difference. I thought it was more of the same in that the poses were similar to those I'd seen in in straight men's porn--the vacant expressions, the offered bottoms.