Mark Simpson snaps on the latex gloves and gives men’s prostates a thorough probing
‘Movember’ is upon us again, and so are the ironic and perhaps not so ironic upper lip pubes, reminding us of the important, worthy – and until recently overlooked – issue of prostate cancer. A disease which affects 42,000 men in the UK each year and kills 11,000.
But this is also a good time to remember that prostates don’t just get cancer – and they’re not just for November, or for producing an alkaline secretion which helps sustain ejaculated sperm in the vagina. They can also give a great deal of year-round pleasure.
Mind blowing, leg-shaking, eye-rolling, neighbour-panicking pleasure.
While the very existence of the female G-spot remains a matter of hot debate, the male G-spot is mighty real. Situated just below a chap’s urinary bladder, wrapped around the urethra, the prostate is a walnut-sized button conveniently placed about a finger’s length from the anal opening – proof positive of ‘intelligent design’.
And more and more are being reached regularly – not just by medical practitioners looking for ‘enlargement’. The 21st century is shaping up to be the century of the prostate.
‘Reach’ it and you – and possibly your bedroom walls – will be left in no doubt as to its existence. As Seann Scott William discovered in the college comedy Road Trip – released in 2000, around the time Movember was just getting bristly – when his arrogant frat-boy character ‘EL’ attempts to make a sperm donation and is ‘helped out’ by a slightly sadistic, latex-gloved female nurse.
“That was awesome!” he says, dazed-amazed afterwards. And by the film’s end he’s instructing his girlfriend to “use three fingers”. Probably provoking many a young man’s interest in his own prostate.
2000 was certainly a busy year for that ticklish gland. In Me, Myself & Irene another comedy released later the same year, Jim Carrey plays a split personality Jekyll and Hyde character – his obnoxious egoist half also turns out to enjoy anal insertion: this time in the form of an eye-wateringly XXL dildo during a night of passion with Renee Zellweger.
Yes, the male anality on display in these Millennium movies was largely at the expense of the males concerned, but because the men being prostatically pleasured were straight, both movies effectively told their audiences that in the new century men enjoying their rears being played with was not specifically ‘gay’. Just ridiculously intense.
Which seems to have been all the permission that straight men needed. A decade or so on from its Hollywood ‘outing’, that hitherto hidden gland definitely has no sexual orientation – and little or no shame. “I’m going to stick my whole thumb up your ass this evening” says a newly engaged women fairly randomly to her lucky boyfriend in the TV drama Fargo. [And a couple of months after this piece was published, the sit-com Broad City featured an episode in which a man asks his female date to use a strap-on on him – after some initial uncertainty, she kindly obliges.]
‘Prostate massagers’ of all shapes and baffling sizes (vibrating and non-vibrating) fill the pages of on-line sex toy stores. Men’s mags such as Esquire and Men’s Health interrupt their guides to the mysteries of the female body to give advice on how to get your girlfriend to massage your prostate just right while giving you a blow job. Entire books are devoted to the subject, promising you ‘The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure’.
And a giant green butt plug was inflated in Paris last month – the city that in another epoch was famous for Mr Eiffel’s phallic Gallic tower.
Not wanting to be, ahem, behind the curve, Harvard University is now offering seminars on anal sex titled: ‘What’s What in the Butt: Anal Sex 101’, where you can learn ‘anal anatomy and the potential for pleasure for all genders!’
The back bottom is the new front bottom – as a peek at straight on-line porn will confirm. It’s not without significance that the orifice that straight men seem most interested in women these days is one they share themselves. After all, ‘anal sex’ is a highly reversible concept.
This was graphically and noisily demonstrated in the leaked vid of the pro footballer a few years back which appeared to show him being ‘scored’ by an ex female partner with a ‘strap on’. The tabs talked then of course about how ‘bizarre’ and ‘kinky’ his private past-time was – but as with William’s Road Trip, his loud enjoyment of it will have just made many football fans wonder what they’ve been missing by always playing up front instead of at the rear.
Certainly, the possibility of male passivity is advertised everywhere you look now. After all, spornosexuality, hard-core, body-centred, second generation metrosexuality, is as much about the lunge-sculpted ass as it is the tits and abs. Straight Essex boy Dan Osborne kindly offered the readers of gay mag Attitude his naked muscle butt recently in a generous double-page spread – with the strap line ‘Sex is fun. Be safe and enjoy it.’
Posh boys are also at it. The male rowers of Warwick University have just released their latest nude charity calendar, aimed at women and gay men, and ‘fighting homophobia in sports’ – rammed with plenty of arse shots (because there’s no penis in their nude calendar, they’re all bottom). In these prostatic times the male derriere has been thoroughly sexualised. Mostly by the men attached to one. Or as one of the rowers puts it in their promotional video: “Regardless of gender or sexuality we are inviting you into that moment with us.”
Some stick-in-the-muds will of course harrumph that male anal play and passivity is ‘unnatural’ and ‘sodomitical’. To which I always reply: If God hadn’t intended men to try anal play, he wouldn’t have given them prostate glands. Unless he just wanted to really mess with their heads.
And He – or naughty, naughty She – gave them to all men, whatever their sexual orientation and whatever their sexual hang-ups. Your prostate gland doesn’t care whether you’re straight, gay, bi or homophobic – just whether or not it’s loved.
But then, that quaint old homophobic rallying cry ‘Backs against the wall lads!’ was always a bit of a give-away. Ever so slightly hinting that if ‘the lads’ didn’t press their rears against something solid they wouldn’t be able to resist impaling themselves on the ‘poof’.
Yes, of course, despite some of the prostatic propaganda – including this article – not all men enjoy their prostates being massaged. Whether they are straight or gay. But the outing of the prostate gland as a potential organ of (passive) male pleasure – of male versatility – regardless of sexuality, frees gay and bisexual men from the very heavy burden of representing all male anal pleasure. And straight men from having to be full-time ‘studs’.
So next time you see a Village People moustache in November, remember that the prostate is a gland men should be proud of. And in touch with.
One way or another.
(Originally appeared in a shorter, more tasteful form in The Daily Telegraph, 12 Nov 2014)