The Perfect Body

"You write about women with lots different bodies," a reader emailed me, "but what's your idea of a perfect body?"

Easy: a shameless, horny, confident, self-loving, pleasure-seeking, generous body that smells nice. I hear you groaning: Yes, yes, guy wants to sound all sensitive and crap, but translated into guy terms that means big tits, small ass, long legs, no brains. But no, I'm not being all wishy-washy about this. I'm being as truthful as I possibly can, because the question cuts to the chase of what it means to fuck women for money. You can't have hard and fast prescriptions about what a body should look like. Why? Because if you're going to get it up for a woman, you must find something there to be aroused by. In my case, I think it's the simple and miraculous variety of bodies, and of the ways of inhabiting them.

The easily offended skip this paragraph, please: I've seen flab, bingo wings and bulging bellies; I've been with fat (but not disturbingly obese) women; (rarely) women older than my mother; I've seen stretch marks, sagging breasts, cellulite in all its countless incarnations and in places I'd not imagined it existing; caesarian scars, appendix scars, surgical scars, and (once) a disturbingly recent scar left by a stab wound and the resulting trip to the ER. The last one, a vivacious big-boned blonde in her mid-30s, got straight down to business over drinks, and asked me very bluntly if I got easily grossed out. Her ex-b/f had caused the wound, but in the year since she got out of the hospital she'd twice found herself undressing in front of men who, at the sight of her scar-crossed belly, had promptly gone out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. How could she not begin to wonder if any man would ever desire her body again?

Marie, my first real lover, had small, flat breasts that had been perky once, but shrunk after breastfeeding, and her stretch marks reached from belly to the back, and down her buttocks. She joked once, as I maneuvered into position over her prone bottom: "I'm easy to fuck - just follow the stretch marks." Whatever, those marks pointed to a tight pussy and a highly sensitive asshole that she'd often beg me to poke, prod, lick, and occasionally bugger while she stuffed a vibrating dildo up the other way. She was indisputably a sexy woman, and she probably still is at 42, but no one would ever hire her for a skin-cream advert and plaster it on the side of a bus.

Are we losing our sense of acceptance, because the exceptional has become the norm? Advertising, TV, movies feeds us this neverending stream of identikit bodies none of us could ever really measure up to. Doesn't it do something to our shared sense of beauty seeing the bodies of models (exceptionally proportioned to begin with) photoshopped to flawless perfection at every turn?

Maybe, but the glut of those digitally corrected images shows us something else: They're boring, those coldly perfect bodies, and so is that fixation of the sexually frustrated on that perfection. The scars, the flab, the sag - I won't say I love them, but they don't stop a sexy woman being sexy in her very own way...

...but I won't compromise on smell.

I can't sleep, but I think I'll go to bed and have a hearty wank reminiscing about Marie, her sagging breasts, and the utterly fantastic blowjobs she'd give me while sitting on my face...