by William Dean
(05/19/04)
A shiver goes through me as I feel his cock get hard. I turn my body just enough to look into his eyes, and start stroking him up and down, through the soft fabric. He gets all the way hard in another moment, his eyes locked in mine. I bite my lip flirtatiously and slide my hand into his pants.
He's not wearing underwear. Feeling his naked, hard cock in my hand sends a thrill through me. I wrap my fingers around his shaft and start to stroke him up and down.
--Heather Peltier
"Handjob" -- Good Vibes Magazine
There are women who pride themselves on giving good handjobs to lovers. For some, it may be just another form of safer sex. For others, it's a power play with the man's cock as a kind of living toy to tease, taunt, and eventually choke until it spits. There are even some men, I suspect, who prefer the handjob to any other form of sex which may remind them of their own self-pleasurings.
Like, it seems, just about everything in the sexual realms, nobody knows to whom we are indebted for the handjob. Did early Cro-Magnon and/or Neanderthals sit around in the old cave having a good pud pull? No one can tell us for sure. Did males start it or was there some hirsute hottie with an overhanging brow and prognathous jaw who was, for some reason, a little burned out with primitive blowjobs and prehistoric fucks and thought, "I can just use my hand!" No clues. Not even some cave-wall scribble depicting a hand in the lap.
In the surviving records of the ancient world, male masturbation features prominently in art and religious myth. The ancient Egyptians celebrated the self-pleasuring handjob by which the sun god Atum created the first male and female humans. The ancient Sumerians, inventors of the first written Western language, record that the Mesopotamian god Enki masturbated and filled the Tigris River.
Fertility rites and beliefs, however, eschew the self -- or other -- spilling of semen as a bad thing, and smaller populations usually condemn such practices, often violently. On the other hand, for as far back as we can tell, prostitutes offered the handjob as the cheapest of wares in their sexual repertoire.
While masturbation for males is usually a handjob you give yourself, what do you call it when someone else is doing the stroking? Sex. Circle jerks, jack off buddies, stroke parties, and even, these days, bukkake fit into the general category called "sex with others," so it gets a little confusing, doesn't it? When are you masturbating and when is a handjob taking place? Solo sex is definitely a masturbatory act. On that, we're pretty clear. But what about stroking it in front of another person? Or a live audience? Or on your webcam? Now we start to get into a rather iffy thing. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
But let's get back to the other-induced handjob. Can you remember the first time you stroked someone else to orgasm, or the first time someone stroked you to one? Back in the day, this was considered a kind of staging point along the way to full-on fucking. Heavy petting or touching was first base, mutual masturbation was second base, oral sex third base, fucking was a homerun. Sometimes you never got past second base, but that was okay, too. At least, you figured, "Hey, I got a handjob."
Freud and a few others might consider the handjob merely an infantile activity, a carry-over from when we were too unsure of ourselves to play well with others on such an intimate level, but this, in a way, smacks of patriarchism which says that the only adult and "real sex" is about procreation. I've always thought that was a bit silly myself. And I admit to taking a certain issue about the growing attitude today that handjobs and oral sex aren't really sex. Call me old fashioned, but if someone achieves orgasm through the ministrations, be they by hand or mouth or whatever, of another person, then I say sex has occurred between them.
Modern cynicism has made the handjob into a euphemism, however, that undermines its power as orgasm producer. Politicians give the public a handjob. News commentators give us a handjob as a smokescreen for the propaganda message. Liars, exaggerators, and bigots jerk us off, jerk us around, and we don't get the orgasm, just the feeling we've had our more private parts chaffed raw by the uncaring.
Despite the plethora of toys -- from the Vibrasonic lifelike dildo to the Fleshlight's "realistic vagina feeling," from the RealDoll to the Rabbit -- nothing really feels quite as good as genuine human touch, does it? Nothing replaces that exquisite feeling when someone who isn't you reaches past your clothing or inhibitions and starts the process you know as a handjob.
The folks into domination even play around with the forced handjob these days. Mistresses and Masters "milk" their subbies' genitals in a wide variety of circumstances. And there are fetishists with eloquent and elaborate stylings to enhance the old rub and tug, such as glove-wearing or footjobs, or nurses' costumes for a medical examination role-play game. But still the basic handjob retains a sensual appeal, doesn't it? It's a classic.
