The Retreat
by Estragon, circa 1995
A camp in which girls learn to rule and boys learn to
like it.
Dearest Kristen,
I know, I know. It's been ages. But I had to get your approval on
something. Somebody recently posted to one of the newsgroups on the net a
vivid description of a summer-camp in which mothers and daughters
dominated and disciplined their sons and brothers. For a minute I
thought....Well, of course, it turned out to be a fantasy, and I had to
smile, because I never really entertain the possibility of my real life
being somebody's fantasy. But why shouldn't I? When I need to daydream
about sex, mostly I only have to remember. Yes, Kristen, maybe I don't
write or call that much, but the very sound of your name is enough to
make my knees bend and my penis harden. Believe me, I still go crazy when
I remember the first time we met. I was six and you five, so maybe you
can't even recall it. But it meant a lot to me. Mom introduced your
mother and you as "Aunt Bonnie and Cousin Kristen." For a long time I
really thought Bonnie was mom's sister. I only found out it was a figure
of speech years later, when I started feeling guilty about wanting my own
cousin to tap me. Mom eased my mind on that matter. Do you remember that
first time at all? "Bobby, honey, be a good boy and undress for Aunt
Bonnie and Cousin Kristen." Can you imagine what that sounded like to a
little boy who wanted nothing more? "Be a good boy!" Mom made being a
good boy sound so easy. I never figured out why the boys in the 'hood had
such a hard time with it.
I know, you're probably wondering why, at six, I wanted to be
naked for you and your mother so much. I can't say, really. Just that it
already seemed the best thing in the world to "unhide" yourself to girls.
(That was my mental word for it, "unhide." And, actually, it's still my
private word.) Dad was around then, and I remember walking in on him and
mom a couple of times and seeing him kneeling in front of her stark
naked. My appearance in the doorway didn't bother mom at all, but dad was
embarrassed and probably would have skulked off if mom didn't make a
point of ordering him to stay put. I was impressed, believe me. I was a
really small child then, maybe only five, but something in me made me
think that dad was crazy to want to hide. To be kneeling like that before
"a lady," even if the lady was my own mom, seemed the greatest thing in
the world for anybody who wasn't a lady. And I knew that much - I mean,
that I wasn't a lady. I think I took in dad's erection, but I didn't
know quite what to make of it. I had a little one myself, but at that
age they hardly increased the total size of my tiny emblem of future
slavery. Do you remember? I had one that first day, right in front of you
and Aunt Bonnie. You probably don't even remember, but I do - and how you
giggled and gaily jogged it about with your little-girl hand. Your mom
said to mine, "He's absolutely adorable." And mine said to yours, "So is
Kristen, so is Kristen."
Anyhow, anyhow....back to the internet. Naturally, this other
fellow's fantasy differed in many ways from our reality: there was a lot
of leather and lashing in it, for instance, and the girls were a bit on
the mean side. (Including, as I recall, a youngster named Kristen. I've
already mentioned, dearest "cousin," what that name does to me.) But the
story spoke to a real need and lots of readers felt its eloquence. Well,
as it happens, I had written up some time ago a little account of our own
experience, but I've been too shy to publish it. Now I'd like to. I want
people to know it can really happen. But I don't dare do it without your
okay. Would you mind looking it over? When you have the chance? I'll do
nothing without your permission, of course. (Can you believe it makes me
hard just typing those words to you, Kristen? Are men hopeless, or what?)
I apologize for my long silence. I'm sure you're breezing through
med school, though. As for MY career, well, there's an old saying, "The
law is an ass." You hear it all the time and never really understand it.
Let's just say I'm finally getting the point. I see your mother's poems
in The New Yorker. My mom's photos are showing up all over the place and,
to judge from the postcards I get, so is she.
You were the girl who tapped me. I'll always be yours, you know.
Here's the article:
Back in the seventies, my feminist mother and a bunch of her friends
decided to take strong measures to prevent their own kids from having to
struggle with the popular myths about gender. They felt the best approach
was to nip male attitudes of superiority in the bud. So they started a
program among themselves involving frequent weekend gatherings throughout
the year and a big summer retreat at a camp they refurbished for the
purpose. No wonder I remember my childhood as paradise. No wonder I
worship the female sex.
There were eight women and thirteen kids at first. Somewhere in
the middle three more women joined and brought three daughters and two
sons with them. When the retreats began, the youngest of us was a
five-year-old boy and the eldest an eleven-year-old girl. I was seven.
The retreats, as well as occasional get-togethers during the year, went
on until I was sixteen. There were seven of us boys at first, later nine.
The oldest boy was about two years older than I. But most of the mothers
had been friends at school, so their kids couldn't be that far apart in age.
The boys would be expected to go naked all the time we were at
the camp. At first, when one of the fathers or a male friend of one of
the mothers visited, he was expected to be depilated to some extent
around his genitals, and to "empty" himself of semen several times a day
to reduce the chances of arousal, since some of the women worried about
the effect on the younger girls of seeing grown-up males naked. But when
the older boys began to show signs of puberty, the policy was abandoned
as no longer relevant. Some of the women thought it was misguided anyhow.
I remember hearing my own mom say that in her view it was good for girls
to see the pubic patches of men since it showed them how impossible it
was for a man to hide, even with nature's help. She and others also felt
that there should be nothing intrinsically scarey about an adult erection
to a girl who understood that it was an acknowledgement of HER power and
not the man's.
But for a couple of years the policy held. Adult males weren't
actually around all that much, but when they were they followed protocol.
The adult males were required to ejaculate privately at various points in
the day, whether they felt like it or not, in order to "wear their
penises out," as one of the women explained to us younger boys. Two
ejaculations were required in the morning, when testosterone runs high,
and one at lunch-time and another in the late afternoon, and maybe
another after dinner - I don't actually recall. The grown-up men were
given privacy to do their "emptying." They weren't even allowed the
company of their own woman-friend, since the point was to reduce all of
their sexual feeling. Of course they obliged. They WERE the men our
dominant mothers had chosen for themselves. Their privacy during
ejaculation was the only privacy any male enjoyed at the retreat.
Otherwise we were expected to do everything within the sight of women or
girls - even toilet things. Once you became accustomed to it, it was
wonderful to go about your business naked all day. To walk outdoors
without a stitch of clothing, to run, to play, to hike in the woods,
scratching your skin on the brush and brambles, risking abrasion to your
penis and impalement of your balls - it's pure heaven once you really
accept the fact that you're a male.
After a year or two, the women introduced a slight refinement to
the practice of having boys naked all the time. Boys in puberty were made
to wear a simple black strap-and-belt, a little like an elastic
posing-strap, except that the somewhat thickened lower end fitted under,
not over, the scrotum, lifting it and pushing the testicles forward. The
belt circled the stomach just below the rib-cage and the support-band
descended from its back, coming down over our haunches. The straps were
as slender as those of a woman's bra. When we left the retreat on outings
we had to dress, of course. We would wear this black truss under our
clothes - very loose shorts and a white t-shirt were mandatory - and its
outline was visible beneath our shirt. I can testify that a boy got from
this contraption a strong impression of being in a state of constant
offering.
Once you were old enough to wear the belt, it was considered very
rude not to and women and girls were thought within their rights if they
took it as an insult, a sign that a boy was not willing to please. Of
course, we boys weren't all that rebellious. But we WERE boys. We had
something in our blood, a bit of aggression, a bit of mulishness, and,
especially when we'd been away from the community for a while and back in
the chaos of the "real world," we'd pick up truculent ways from other
kids. Every week-end get-together and, God knows, every summer retreat,
began with much discipline and lecturing as sullen boys who had kept bad
company were dragged out of backslide.
But these things are relative. We never slipped to the level of
louts, we never even dreamed of repudiating our servile state. It was
small things, obstinate little points of pride, petty signs of shame at
being ordered around by girls, things that eyes less acute than our
mothers' and sisters' wouldn't even see. Let's just say that the lectures
and punishments worked overtime to clean up fairly minor testosterone
spills. The women wanted nothing left ambiguous. And the girls learned to
want no less. That was the point. That was why a boy who'd been even a
little lackadaisical, or maybe ever so slightly peevish, had to endure a
serious thrashing (by real-life, American standards anyhow - things might
get a lot worse in pornography or Singapore).
There were nightly meetings of the entire group. The girls and
women would sit in lawn-chairs facing us kneeling boys. Long, frank
discussions followed. Complaints and proposals for improvements were
voiced. Girls could ask questions about the nature of boys and, where a
demonstration of any kind was called for, some boy would be drafted for
the purpose. In this way the girls got their first view of male
masturbation and ejaculation. But masturbation was a complicated matter
at the retreat, permitted, even encouraged, yet highly regulated at the
same time. The women had their reasons.
The women were determined to change the way males look at their
whole sexual apparatus. They were constantly trying out new conceits, new
metaphors, which held out the promise of convincing us boys that we in no
way owned ourselves. We learned very early that the reason girls and
women don't have penises is that OUR penises are really theirs. It's just
that they're attached to our bodies so that when women and girls are done
using them to control us and entertain themselves, they don't have to
worry about where to shelve them. Male bodies are women's tool-sheds, we
were taught. It would never have entered our heads to think that anyone
who lacked them could envy these funny cocks of ours that danced to
woman's call, let alone the fragile sacks that hung beneath them,
scarcely protecting the tender bulbs within.
We never thought of women's lack of a penis as a defect. It was
more like a privilege, a condition that made them more perfect than we.
We were in awe of their serene smoothness. It perpetually mocked us
males, a steady, unrevealing aloofness and silence. When the women and
girls wore bathing-suits, or even snug jeans or shorts, they looked to us
like angels with pure, miraculous bodies. We gaped in unabashed reverence
at the contours of their firm, impassive mounds. Nine young penises rose
in helpless worship of all that feminine stillness. In later years, one
of the older boys, in a romance with a girl back home, described to us
his angel's pubis. Everything confirmed what we felt and dared to
imagine. He spoke of her coverlet of hair. An absolutely perfect
triangle, he said. We sighed in vicarious adoration. He described the
slope of her mons and its unyielding hardness (some of us nearly wept)
and said that her crack was like an enigmatic smile, kind but
condescending. She had a scent, he said, like nothing else on earth. What
was it like, we asked anyhow. Like honey, he said, and salt. Like linen
too. Like silk.
So women belonged to themselves, and we boys belonged to them as
well. We were discouraged from thinking even that our insides were our
own. Especially our juices, our semen, our sperm. The women spoke of this
substance as though it only came into being when a female "tapped" us for
it. Girls created our semen, and if a girl never invited us to come, we
would go through life dry. That was the fable, that was what they
implied. A half-truth, maybe, but very gripping when it's planted in your
mind early.
So we boys were closely monitored as we approached adolescence.
We had to ask permission to masturbate anyhow (I'll return to this), and
if we stayed true to this practice even at home throughout the year, we
had a fair chance of not spurting for the first time by accident and in
private. Once ejaculation was on a boy's horizon, the women did
everything they could to preempt it and make it their daughters'
achievement rather than the boy's own. His ability to release semen was
treated as a gift a girl could give a boy. If she was inclined to, a girl
could "tap" a boy's "well" and begin a flow of "sperm." This would make
the boy a complete man. It would also make him, in a special way, the
life-long property of the girl who bestowed the gift upon him.
Boys were carefully observed for signs that they were susceptible
to tapping. The women and the older girls were always examining us,
cupping our testicles and, more usefully, examining our penis-tips for
cloudy droplets. If the signs were appearing and you asked permission to
masturbate, a girl would be assigned to direct you. One boy gave false
alarms for many months. He never had a moment alone in all that time.
There weren't many accidents, if what the boys reported was true. Six of
us absolutely swore that we came with sperm for the first time when we
were tapped.
If you were in a romance with a girl, she was likely to be the
one chosen by the women, when the time came, to tap you. I myself was
desperately in love with a girl named Kristen, and she graciously
supervised my first ejaculation when I was twelve. Two younger girls were
present at the time - witnesses were wanted - and the event had the full
approval of the women. "Tapping" didn't require actual effort on the part
of the girl. The boy simply masturbated before her, taking the posture
and performing the supplementary acts that she prescribed.
Boys not yet at puberty and boys already tapped were also
permitted to masturbate alone, but only after we'd gotten the okay from
our "training-mom." Your "training-mom" was not your real mother. Each
boy was made the "servant" of some other woman. She was your
"training-mom," you were her "boy" - as distinct from her "son," who
might have been your own mom's boy. Each year you got a different
training-mom. The idea was to get us used to the general government of
women. Your training-mom could do whatever she liked with you, and your
own mom couldn't make a real protest. Not a public one anyhow. The women
felt that this limitation on their maternal prejudices, not to mention
the occasional sight of their sons being treated as generic males, would
be liberating to them once they got used to it.
They must have gotten used to it, since nobody ever suggested
abandoning the practice. On the other hand, this was not a scene from
Victorian pornography. This was the real world. We boys were humbled, but
not brutalized. The women knew what they were doing - and they WERE our
mothers, after all, not heartless witches. Boys were subjected to a
certain amount of quite tolerable pain, either in the way of punishment
or as tests of their submission. Punishment for the younger boys usually
took the form of spanking. For boys in puberty it took the form of
face-slapping. Given our up-bringing, we boys usually reacted to
punishment with erections. The girls were told that these were signs of
our gratitude for being given what we deserved. Mothers or training-moms
normally did the punishing, but daughters often administered the tests,
because the theory behind them was that the girls should lose all their
fear of the male body and see its vulnerability as a thing to control it
by. My training-mom one year had a daughter a year younger than I, so I
was taken care of by her. It was also generally recognized that boys had
to be put to a certain amount of completely pointless exertion, just to
teach both them and the girls that a female's word is law even if it
makes no sense. Random exercise-drills, absurd forms of physical-jerks,
made the point and reinforced it with a certain amount of natural
humiliation.
We lived with our real moms. But each morning a boy was expected
to go to his training-mom's cabin and present himself for service on his
knees. What she did with him after that was entirely up to her. The group
did many things together, of course. But boys really were expected to
learn that service to women is no mere ceremony. Once you were old enough
to go to school, you were old enough to work for women in some capacity
and you spent at least a part of every day doing so. You learned to
garden, to clean, to mow the grass. Boys were assigned to launder their
own clothes - never the women's and girls', for obvious reasons. I also
learned to iron clothes, and to this day I still get a kick riding
rough-shod over a wrinkle. A man needs an outlet now and then.
Boys got erections pretty often and learned early never to hide
them or show even the slightest impulse to do so. They were just signs,
we were taught, of our instinct to please females. But among ourselves we
did make fun of a boy whose erections seemed notably frequent when a
particular girl was around. We'd tease him just the way all kids do when
they see evidence of a crush: "Jimmy likes Laurie, Jimmy likes Laurie."
Romances did start occurring among some of the older kids. If a girl
learned that a boy had a crush on her (maybe because she did notice what
happened to his penis when she was around), and wanted to pursue it, she
would ask his training-mom for privileges with him. Of course, all the
females had privileges with the whole lot of us, but this formal request
was considered the polite thing, and the training-mom would often go out
of her way to make the girl her deputy where lessons and discipline were
concerned. AsI've said, the girl was likely to be the one who "tapped"
you when the time came.
For nine important years in this boy's life the retreats and
weekend get-togethers continued. They began to dissolve when several of
the women moved across country, and a tragic death the winter after the
ninth season took the spirit out of the group. By then, however, we were
bonded forever. Our mothers are in their forties now, busy women who have
remained true to their feminist ambitions. We kids are doing pretty well
too - the girls AND the boys. Given society's wear and tear, we've held
to our childhood faith remarkably well. The girls are strong and the
boys...well, we're strong too, in a way that makes us serviceable and
interesting to women. As it happens, I'm still madly in love with
Kristen. She was just informed of the fact in the last sentence. There's
no way I would have published this account without submitting it to her
judgment first.
end