Jizzywhip

This is a little mortifying - I remember writing up a post about this, and I mentioned it in a relevant online community, replying to a post about cheese - and then when I went to find it, there's no post.

Oops. 

It was a series of tweets. Like this one. Or this one. Or this one.

And maybe this one. It's a theme I enjoy. Churning up frothy crema. 

It's gotten to the point where the blog has over seventy posts - many of them quite long - and I forget which bit of writing went where. A lot of the time, something like this gets folded into a long post, a rambling aside that supports some bit of action. If there's something that intrigues me enough to want to mention it, but if it doesn't tie in to a particular long evening of fuckery, sometimes they get a tweet instead. And, when I've made a video clip and written out a short paragraph, in my mind it's a "blog post" - but no, not always. 

So - a quick post about smegma.

I wasn't circumcised when I was born. It was mostly because I didn't have much foreskin; there was really not sufficient skin to justify slicing part of it off. Growing up, I had just enough that when I was soft, it would curl around the head of my dick like an acorn cup, but the head of my cock was never covered unless my dick was shriveled up from cold. I remember my Mom, who has always been a stickler for hygiene, admonishing me to wash it, every day, with soap and water, peeling back the skin and making sure it stayed really clean. I remember health classes, those awkward ones taught by some defensively hypermacho coach, where the boys and girls separated to learn things we would never, ever discuss with one another - and there was a slide about circumcised and uncircumcised penises. Mine didn't look like either of the pictures - I was halfway between the two options that I saw on the screen. It looked like what I've heard gay friends call a "French Cut" - a style of circumcision that removes about half the skin. I had kind of a floppy collar, never a hood. 

As an adult gay man, I learned that having an uncut dick was a big deal for some guys. Some really hot guys. When I first started realizing this, I decided to capitalize on it - in my twenties, I had an AOL chatroom name (any of y'all remember those?) called UncutSeven. I think I was twenty-four? Maybe? And get this... I thought I was SO fat. I'd never been this big. OMG, you fucking wallowing cow. Now... I just laugh and shake my head at that clueless kid, because I was still having plenty of fun. I had a buddy who took some sexy pictures of me. He would take them to a special friend of his who did film developing (this was ALL before digital cameras, y'all) and he would print a set for me and a set for my friend FC, and a set for himself. I'm pretty sure it was his private collection - I don't think he was doing anything nefarious. But, what I'm aiming at here, is I would take those photos, and scan bits of them on a scanner, and make a computer image file that I could send to guys that I was flirting with on AOL. I was pretty slutty, sometimes. I liked showing off my dick. Still do. But when I was looking for a "before I stretched my foreskin bigger" picture, I ran across these. And I was reeeeeallly stretching it, to get it to stay that far over the head... he'd shoot like one shot and my dick would flex, and it would pop back, and I'd have to rearrange it again. And if I got hard enough that my dick was rampant, it's not pointing anywhere near horizontal here... when it got any stiffer than that, it would flip up, because I'm twenty-whatever, and the extended length meant there was never a chance of coverage. I was really WANTING to be as uncut-looking as possible, in some of these. My photographer - he was French Cajun, and I spent part of a summer working in his iris farm helping him propagate and pull orders. He would come over and we'd spend an afternoon taking pictures, and some of them were fucking beautiful, but I haven't run across those yet. Like very artsy, really intense. He was shooting something like a Nikon with a lens six inches long, all this beautiful glass, and he taught me a few things about how to use it, and then I'd shoot for him. Here, spread your legs and lean toward the lens, so that your cock looms larger than your whole body, and squeeze... and squeeze, and see if I can get just that DROP of nectar drooling off the end of your dick... that kind of artsy shit. Somewhere, I have photo prints of most of that, I mean, not that they're High Art, but modeling for them was fun as fuck, and I felt sexy. I'll probably do a whole long post on it, but I need to see if I can get in touch with him first. 

It got a lot of attention. Later, I read about foreskin restoration - a way of making the body generate additional skin. Some kind of tension system puts gentle traction on the foreskin, and mechanoreceptors in the skin cells cause the creation of more skin cells to relieve the strain. The benefits of a healthy foreskin are many - it keeps the skin of the glans moist, allowing it to be more sensitive. It provides lubrication. It slips and slides, feeling AWESOME. It also shelters a microbiome - and just like the microbiomes that inhabit every part of our body from eyelids to assholes, this community of microorganisms plays a part in keeping the dick healthy and happy. So, I did a lot of reading, and bought myself a TLC Tugger [see also: Hardwood] and started stretching out my dick skin. As the skin grew longer, it got more and more likely that I would detect a little whiff of that distinctive "uncut" smell - a little fishy, a little tangy, VERY penisy. I had always been told, growing up, that any smell "down there" was shameful, disgusting, a thing to keep away with diligent scrubbing, a constant worry for an awkward adolescent that somebody would smell something and KNOW. So, I didn't have any experience with smegma; the only times I'd ever experienced any, was when I'd go to something like a boy scout camp where daily showers weren't always available. We would get to a point we called "grunged out," where the black dirt under your fingernails from making and working with fire all weekend was so ground in, that handwashing with soap was no match for it. Eew, gross, disgusting, etc. Times like those, I'd notice the occasional little smear of white stuff, a little whiff of things not being April Fresh... but I'd always wash thoroughly as soon as that option was available. Over the past couple of years, just like how I learned that an uncut dick has a devoted audience, I've learned that a cheesy dick has its fans too. Some of them are remarkably hot freaks. And, I've learned a LOT about dick cheese. 

And that's the after stretching fairly-hardon. Still, as I was standing there, it was a back-and-forth to keep my dick JUST hard enough, but not too hard, because then it pops off and the boy needs to suck it back over the head with his throat. (Unfortunately, there was no boy. I was masturbating and manipulating the dick with one hand and holding the phone with the other, standing in leaf-filtered natural semi-sunlight, in the bedroom window upstairs. She fancy.) I occasionally get a wild hair to tug again for a few days; I haven't gotten to the point that I'm consistent, and it needs consistent... but I'd love to cover that little pink tip and have my hard cock have a dripping snout. But, you know, it takes time and attention to it, to change it. It's not horrendously LONG time... I remember when it made most progress, it would be within a couple of months, of wearing the little thing at least three or four days a week for at least a few hours at a time - you have to set up the right mechanical traction to trip off that growth reaction. It has to... linger. 

Anyway. Back to smegma. Head cheese. Kopfkaese, because I don't feel like digging to find the fucking umlaut, even though I know how to use the umlaut. The Other Sticky Icky. Man-gurt. 

It's a secretion. The body slowly builds up this stuff. Both men and women (and dogs, and horses...) get smegma. You hear a lot of nonsense about what it's composed of - this meme post was what started the conversation in a gay Facebook group: 

But the thing is - like so many memes, this is pretty much total crap. It's mostly dead skin cells, shed in a process called desquamation. You're constantly desquamating, all over your body - but while cells will flake off most of the body, turning into dust or falling on your dark-colored shirt, or mostly going down your shower drain, you exfoliating devil you... the cells that shed in these regions mix with our old pal mucin and some sebum (skin oil), making a sticky paste-like layer. Motion of the foreskin rubbing against the glans as the body moves around tends to push the developing smegma into folds and crevices - for men, this means up under the corona of the glans, tucked in under the covering collar of skin. This warm, moist habitat is perfect for fermentation, and several kinds of bacteria and the occasional skin fungus will set up camp. The other thing it's made of, and it can be the majority contributor in some situations - is semen. 

When I first started noticing that my grown-out foreskin had more of a tendency to develop a funk, I was grossed out by it. Cultural conditioning for the win! (Or, well, for the lose.) You can be made ashamed of your body in so many ways, and this is just another of those. After a while of it growing on you, though, it grows on you. The smell is distinctive for each individual guy, and mine can vary a lot depending on how healthy I'm eating, how much I'm sweating, how much sunshine I'm receiving, how much sex I'm having. It's usually a little bit like tuna fish - although, what it's really like, for those of us who went through a strong bisexual period - is pussy. "Dick smells like pussy" is not exactly a brilliant revelation - but the skin types, the chemistry, and the microbiome are all pretty similar, and yeah, uncut dick and pussy often smell much like one another. I'm sure that there are gay guys reading this and vowing to never find out. On either count. There are many men who won't have ANYTHING to do with an uncut penis. Ever again. After, OMG, I just can't speak the words. And he seemed like such a nice clean boy, but there was so... MUCH of it, and I couldn't stand the taste, and it got in my beard.... These men... for the most part are over-dramatic and extremely prissy, and you're likely as not to find some bleached-and-perfumed powder-puff of a pussy... so, it's fine by me if they skin-o-sort. "Wow, you'd be so hot if you weren't uncut." Ummm... thanks? You'd be so hot, if you were less of an asshole? I mean, I totally get, "I think you're a really attractive guy, but that's just a thing I don't enjoy, so thank you for sharing, but we're not a good match." That's decent. That's human. But you starting acting like I'm gross, when you asked to see my dick after it's all really clear that I'm uncut - bink, that block button is just less trouble than trying to deal with somebody's almost exclusively white boy problem with my natural penis. We're incompatible, because I have a big dick, and you are a big dick. Buh-bye. 

LOL. Most of this stuff has happened, on Scruff or Grindr or something... but not quite all in that neat a linear progression. But I will call guys on not fucking READING, because that little person ad there would save you a lot of time asking "What are you into?" instead of having the patience to read first instead of just 

The main function attributed to smegma is to provide lubrication of the glans and the foreskin, allowing the dick to slip and slide and especially poke into tight places - but I would be surprised if there's not some health-indicator aspect to it as well, where the smell of a potential mate turns you on or off depending on what the chemoreceptors in your nose tell you about that guy's biological well-being vis-a-vis his dick schmear. If you don't pull your skin back to piss, and you've got enough skin that it covers the tip, there will often be a piss note to the smell. The thing is - it's dick skin. It smells like dick. If it gets pissed on, it smells like piss. For the guys who like it... this stuff is like Essential Oil of Penis. Once you start looking for it, you find a lot of porn where guys will do things like sniff and savor an uncut dick before putting it in their mouths. Sometimes a guy will peel the skin back and roll the head against his nose, inhaling deeply. I like to take a little bit of the funk (and you don't even need the white clumpy stuff, but it's stronger) on the tip of my finger and thumb, and then rub it on the cartilage between a guy's nostrils - it makes a very intense scent impression, and will flavor every single thing he eats or drinks, and any guy he kisses, until it wears off. 

I've learned that if there's some guy who is really into it, and wants me funky, I can get my dick to be con queso overnight. Now, this works because there's always a healthy microbial community - it probably won't work if you use soap all the time, especially if you use anti-bacterial soap (In a word: don't.). I have learned that if I use only water to wash my dick, the skin feels better and gets less dry and irritated. I use soap if I've gotten shit or something else nasty on my dick [see also: Big Dick Privilege, Big Dick Problems]. I use soap if there's a lot of silicone lube that I need to get off me. But usually, I just clean my dick with water, and I often don't peel back the skin and totally hose it out. Guys will say "Oh, that's disgusting, you've got to use soap, EVERY day" - but when's the last time you used soap inside your asshole? Or under your eyelids? How'd that go for you? The inner surface of the foreskin is a mucus membrane; they're designed to keep things moist. Soap dries these membranes out, makes them itch and crack, can even cause chapping. Think of this skin as being like the inside of your eyelid, or the inner surface of your cheek - it's tender. It wants to be soft and warm and slightly but consistently wet. So, if I want to make some cheese, I jerk off. Not quite OFF - precisely - I think of this as jerking up. Edging. I go to the point where my dick drools out some spermy pre-cum as I'm having yet another non-ejaculatory orgasm, and more stroking will froth it up into this stuff that looks like a wet meringue, or insufficiently whipped whipping cream. Tuck this under the head, and in the morning... I'm Captain Cockstink. 

This particular version of smegma is basically sperm yogurt - it's a little more fresh-smelling than the usual, probably because it's not aged as much, and it's practically bursting with DNA. This is the good stuff. It still smells strong, but more manly, less fishy. The guy next to me at the urinal wall can smell my dick when I pull the foreskin back to piss. Not "OMG, that reeks," but definitely "There's an uncut dick within range." I've had a guy ask if he could touch it, and he fingered my dick standing there at the urinal, and wiped my cock cheese in his mustache back and forth, rocking his head back and forth like Hannibal Lecter. With some fava beans and a nice chianti and a pungent dick cheese. And the nice thing - if a guy doesn't like it, I rinse it off with water, and it's gone. And you can still smell it... the smell is baked in there... but there's none of that unsightly stuff that freaks guys out. It's a win-win. My dick stinks of deliciousness. 

Personally, in regards to dicks that I suck, I like them fairly, but not extremely, clean. I do not want a penis that tastes like detergent, or FSM forbid - like cologne. I can enjoy a little funk, but I'm not usually the one who wants to smell it at arm's length. Sometimes smegma is very bitter - again, depending a lot on a guy's health and what his sweat and his semen tastes like - and if it's too much, I just swallow the dick and pull the skin back with my hand while it's inside my throat, cleaning it with my mouth. Glug, glug, all gone. It doesn't taste like anything at all, if you get it past your tongue, and you can't smell anything once it's that far down.