Ian Dodd (8:29)
I'm standing in front of a veil or a curtain of some kind and I can't see what's on the other side, but there's a place that I can reach through it and I take hold of a pair of horns and they're attached to something Big, something powerful. And it's moving and stretching like it's just waking up. And it starts snorting and stamping its feet and shaking its head from side to side like it's trying to throw me off, but I'm not letting go. And I say in my sternest voice, listen, you may be bigger and stronger than me, but I'm the master and you're here to serve me. When I woke up from that dream, I had that weird wobbly feeling like, was that real or is this real? And it was so vivid that it has stuck with me every day for the last couple of years. Now, the meaning's probably really obvious to a Freudian analyst or a sharp audience like you, but it actually took me until just a couple of weeks ago to figure it out for myself to understand it. I want to walk you back in time with me about 40 years to the fall of 1978. I'm a freshman at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I'm in my tiny little third floor dorm room and I'm cramming for my pre calculus final exam the next day with my study buddy, Mary Beth. Mary Beth is kind of the quintessential girl next door. She's got that Jennifer Garner kind of face, and she's got the thick, muscular thighs and the perpetual tan of a Colorado ski bum. Well, after a couple of hours of hitting the books together, we decide we deserve a break. So she looks at me with this kind of mischievous grin and she says, I know a great way to relax. She flops down on my bed and she invites me to join her. Now, as desperately as I had tried to get laid all through high school, I had only felt up a couple of pairs of boobs and maybe got my hand past the waistband of one pair of panties. But now, now there was an honest to goodness naked woman spreading her legs in front of me. So, needless to say, there wasn't a lot of foreplay. In fact, there wasn't even any two play or three play. In no time at all, off comes the pink Izod polo shirt, the camel tone corduroy pants, and after I made a couple of really awkward attempts at pushing my dick toward her pubic bone, Mary Beth, who had done this before, gently guided me into where I needed to be. Oh my God, I thought, this feels so fucking amazing as I slid into her, which was immediately followed by, oh shit, because I was so unprepared for this moment. And I pulled out and then I slid back in. Oh shit. What if we get A venereal disease. And I pulled out, and then I slid back in. Oh, shit. What if she gets pregnant and I pulled out and then I slid back in. Oh, shit, I think I'm about to come. And I pulled out, and that's when I splooged all over her belly. Oh, shit, I said. I am so sorry. In that moment, I felt smaller than my now shriveling cock. Don't worry about it, she says. It happens sometimes. But I can tell she's disappointed as she reaches over and grabs a Kleenex and starts wiping my cum up off her stomach. We get dressed, we go back to studying, and we never mention it again. Well, over the next couple of years, I avoid my shortcomings by only dating girls who wouldn't fuck. Which was probably a good thing, because every time I thought about what happened in my dorm room, I would just have that sickening dread rise up inside of me, kind of like that part of my body that I couldn't control. Fortunately, though, I learned a little something along the way that was new to me. Turns out a lot of women like to get their pussy licked. And when I learned that, I thought, okay, I'm gonna set out to make this my signature move. So when I transferred to the University of Arizona, I met this girl named Margot my first week on campus in Tucson. Now, a lot of guys would like to say, oh, my girlfriend, she looks like Scarlett Johansson. But in her case, it was actually true. She had this sort of round, Nordic face and this long blond hair, and she has the air of an art major, like she sees the world in a whole different way than the rest of us. So we start having coffee, skipping classes. Pretty soon, I work up the nerve to ask her out by saying, I've got an extra ticket to the Emma Lou Harris concert, and you're welcome to use it if you want. When that failed to convince her that I was a complete douchebag, she invited me to a party at her place. We get a little tipsy, we start making out in the kitchen, and pretty soon we head upstairs. And that's when that panic starts to rise up inside of me again, because I know what's about to happen. So I try to put off the inevitable as long as I can by using the workaround that I've been trying to learn the last couple of years, because I figure if I can get her off this way, she won't be quite as disappointed when we head for the finish line and she discovers that I'm a hare, not a tortoise. So I get my face down between her thighs, and that's when I feel her tense up. And I look up like, what's up? And she's just staring at the ceiling and she's going, nobody has ever done this to me before. So while I'm trying to control the panic inside of me on the outside, I'm trying to play the worldly, debonair lover who says, hey, you just lie back and enjoy what I'm about to do for you. Which she did. So we kept hanging out. And after graduation, we moved in together. A few years after that, we moved to Los Angeles. We've got a marriage license, a mortgage, in a minivan with a couple of kids in the back. But that whole time, I've been dogged by what happened to me that night in my dorm room. Because, you see, it's one thing to blow your load early when you're 18, but when you're 28 and 38 and 48, it kind of beats down on your masculinity a little bit. Now, over that whole time, of course, I kept working on my ways to overcome that. I mean, I guess it's kind of like if you lose your sight, they say that your other senses become more acute and you learn to compensate. And while that was true, I always figured there was a part of Maru that wondered what it would feel like to run a marathon instead of a hundred yard dash. And inside of me, there was that big hulking beast that whenever it threatened to wake up, it just felt like that same thing feeling in my dorm room. That dread would come up in my body and I just wanted to push it down until it went back to sleep. Which it mostly did over those couple of decades that we were putting our energy into our kids and our careers and our sex life ended up on the back burner. We'd look at each other every couple of weeks and say, well, that was fun. We should try that more often. And of course, we meant it as a poke at ourselves, but it always kind of jabbed that slumbering beast inside of me and threatened to wake it up. Well, the wake up finally came in 2012. When I came home from work one night. Margo had received a phone call that my dad had died. You know, your parents are always there for you throughout your whole life. You never really think about them dying. I think I was more stunned and sad. Well, a few months later, we got another phone call. Only this time it was about Margo's mom. You know, when you face the mortality of your parents, you kind of have to confront your own, too. And we looked at each other and said, if we're lucky, we've got 30, maybe 35 years left on the planet here, and what are we going to do to make the most of it? So for most of that previous year, Margot had spent 10 days out of every month traveling back and forth to Denver to be with her mom during a losing battle with cancer and to fight off the boredom of hours spent in hospital waiting rooms and doctor's offices. Before each trip, we'd load up her Kindle with a small library reading material, including a bestseller that came out around that time. I'm actually embarrassed to even tell you what it was. I'm guessing some of you have heard of it. Yeah, 50 Shades of Greg. But I gotta tell you, she tore through that book like a tornado through a trailer park. Now, I'm a slower reader than she is, so I was scrambling to keep up while she was devouring the two sequels, the Sleeping Beauty trilogy by Anne Rice and the Story of O. So one day over breakfast, I said, so what part of 50 Shades did you like? And she was like, whoa. When he put her over her knee, hiked up her skirt, and yanked her panties down to her ankles and started spanking her, that was hot. How about you? I'm like, oh, yeah. I liked when he put the nipple clamps on her breasts. But I got to ask you, which character did you identify with? The Anastasia or the Christian Grey? And that opened up a conversation that we'd never imagined having. Because, see, up until then, we couldn't even spell bdsm. But pretty soon, we're looking over our shoulders as we're sneaking into dungeons, we're signing up for rope bondage classes, and we start going to these things called munches, which is where kinky people go to a bar and a restaurant and they talk about mundane topics like 247 master slave relationships or really edgy stuff like consent and negotiations. And they were pretty. They were pretty welcoming to us newbie vanilla folks. Vanilla is what kinksters call us. Muggles. And we also started working with a sex and intimacy coach to start dealing with all the stuff that had been holding us back for all those years, including the baggage I'd been dragging around since 1978. And through working with her, I finally discovered the key to controlling my own physiology. For the first time in my life, I was in charge of my body instead of the other way around. There I was in my early 50s, and for the first time in my life I started to feel like a sexual, masculine animal. Something inside of me was starting to wake up. And the interesting thing is, just as that part was rousing, the universe started directing all kinds of erotic attention to me, usually when I least expected it. Like, we went to a Halloween party at a local dungeon put on by this meetup group that we had joined. And there were floggers flying everywhere and the sound of hands smacking bare asses. And women are dressed up like dark angels and men like perverted priests. Me, I'm wearing the obligatory black jeans and a white T shirt where I've glued on a bunch of those square paint chips from Home Depot in every shade of gray I could find, about 50 of them. Anyway, I'm making my way past the bar. I wanted to go check out the action in the back room, and this woman I've never seen before steps in front of me and says, hey, your name's Ian, isn't it? Yeah. Hi. Hi. My name's Gail, and I was looking at your profile on meetup, and I decided I wanted to meet you tonight. Okay. Now, Gail's got this crazy mane of Sarah Jessica Parker hair that you just want to grab by the fistful. And she's wearing this white, gauzy dress and this brown leather bustier that's pushing up her shapely boobs. And in about five minutes, I learned that she's got young adult kids like I do. She's a sex therapist. She's been married for 30 years, like I have, and for the last eight of those, they've had an open relationship. That's cool, I think. And in the next five minutes, I also learned that she identifies as submissive and kinky and had recently had an 18 inch metal chain stuffed up her pussy. That's really cool, I think. And that's when she asked me, so, what's your relationship status? Well, just about that time, Margo, my wife, comes up to us. She's trying to escape the bad first date that she's come with. And we explain to Gail that we're just now exploring polyamory. So at the end of the evening, Gail goes to give me a hug, and she whispers, find me sometime. So the next day, I look up her profile on meetup. I shoot her a message that begins a conversation that quickly goes from flirty, from friendly to flirty, to having coffee to having dinner to having hot sex. And the first time Gail and I got together, I'm kissing and nibbling and working my way down her neck and her shoulders and her breasts and she's enjoying it. But when I get to her belly button, she slaps the mattress with both hands and she scrunches up the sheets in a white knuckle death grip as an orgasm shoots up through her body. I have never seen anything like this before. So I keep tickling her navel with my tongue while climax number two and then number three quickly rock through her body before I start heading south. Now, realistically, I got nothing to do with this, but it makes me feel fucking powerful. So when she asked to take a break after, like, number eight, I roll her over on her hands and knees and I say, okay, pick a three digit number. She's like, what? I said, pick a three digit number. As I reached over and I grabbed a condom. She's like, okay, 300. Okay, you like? 300. Great. Because the choice is entirely up to you right now. But here's the way it's going to work. You're going to count every single stroke out loud until we get to 300. You lose track. We start over. You got it? Whatever had been asleep inside of me was now entire was completely awake. Right after Gail and I got together that first time, I found myself standing in front of a veil or a curtain. And I reach in and I grab these horns that are attached to something really big and powerful. And just about the time I had that dream, Margo's and my relationship is in the best place ever. We're having the best and the most sex of our lives. We're enjoying all kinds of crazy new adventures, and she's finally experiencing what it feels like to run a marathon instead of a hundred yard dash. We also discover a love of traveling together. And a few weeks after I had that dream, we were in France. And we're walking through a plaza and we go past this bronze statue and I stop because I realize what I've just seen. And I turn around and there it is. There's a nude man wrestling a bull by its horns, muscling it under his control. So I run back and I start snapping pictures of it from every angle with my smartphone. And Margo is standing there like, what the hell has gotten into you? And I said, no, no, it's just like that dream I was just telling you about. It's just like it. And it's given me some ideas for something I've been thinking about Those of you in the front row might be able to see. I've got a little white bandage going on here under my shirt that May not be visible in the back. That's because I spent four hours this afternoon lying on a table at a tattoo shop about a mile and a half from here. See, for most of my adult life, that bull slept unconscious behind. Slept behind the veil of my consciousness. But now that he's awake, I'm going to take him with me wherever I go. I used to think that that dream was about embracing my raw animal power. But I've come to realize recently that it's more than just about the sexual energy centered on one part of my body. Now, when I look down on my chest, I'm going to see the symbol of my real masculine power. The power to deliver pleasure. A power that I have been working on mastering all along.
