A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Depending on your perspective, I’m either lucky or tragic enough to have lived alone for the last three years, and to have been without a ‘serious’ partner for the vast majority of that time. That’s partly down to circumstance, but is also the product of conscious choices that I’ve made, some of which I may explore in more depth in a future post. It affects my day-to-day life in all sorts of ways, of course – some good, some bad – but in a blogging sense it means that, for the most part, the photos that I post for memes like Sinful Sunday, or to accompany my writing, are ones I’ve taken myself, using a combination of the timer on my mobile phone, various bits of furniture, and stacks of books to adjust the height or angle of the shot.

It can be a bit fiddly and time-consuming, but overall I enjoy the challenge of setting up photos like that, especially on sleepy Sunday afternoons when I don’t feel like leaving the apartment. However, as well as both limiting the range of photos I can take, and reducing the quality of the finished product, it will also never be as much of a turn-on as having someone else train a camera lens on my naked body.

Perhaps it’s just that I’m an exhibitionist by nature – or an attention-seeker, if you’re feeling less charitable – but being photographed in such an intimate way always makes me incredibly horny. It doesn’t matter whether the camera is a silent observer, snapping away as I masturbate or just lounge around naked; or whether it’s in the hands of someone who wants to direct the action, or who has specific shots in mind; either way, I get a real thrill from the act of laying myself bare like that, and giving another person unfettered photographic access to my body.

I don’t know that I’m so unusual in that respect. I do know that my feelings about being naked in front of the camera are linked in a pretty direct way to one of my earliest sexual experiences. It came in February 2003: I was 21, still a virgin, and sufficiently scarred by the fairly disastrous attempts at sex with my first girlfriend three years earlier that I hadn’t dated anyone – been naked with anyone – in the time since then. Thanks to Karolina, a silly bet, and a Polaroid camera, that was all set to change.

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I knew Karolina from university and we were good mates, although there’d always been a slight edge to our time together. She was curvy, flirty, a demon on the pool table, and very openly sexual. I viewed the last of those qualities with a mixture of fascination and outright terror. Late one night during my last year at Oxford, she appeared in my room after a boozy LGBT Soc dinner, stripped down to her underwear and dragged me into my bed with her. She was so drunk that she fell asleep shortly afterwards (I discovered that night that carrying a woman down four flights of stairs and up another two is harder than firemen make it look), but it’s fair to say that I wasn’t the only one who thought there might be some kind of spark between us, even if I was too clueless to know how to act on it at the time.

Karolina knew how shy and inexperienced I was, and although she was merciless in the way she exploited that information, she also encouraged me to come out of my shell a bit and to be more confident about my body. A few months after I graduated, and with a view to doing something about the second of those issues, she asked me how I felt about the idea of posing naked for her.

I’d been curious about having ‘candid’ photos taken for a while – I wanted to know what I looked like through someone else’s eyes  – so to have someone I knew and trusted offer to hold the camera felt like serendipity at work. She invited me over to her college room the following weekend. I dressed smartly, and stopped on my way to buy a Polaroid camera; these were the days before point-and-click digital devices were widely available, so Polaroid felt like the perfect format for what we had in mind that day. I was nervous, but excited; it was a completely new experience, and one that I instinctively knew would turn me on in some way.

Her room was small but airy, and looked out over the meadows. We stood for a long time staring out of the window and chatting, neither of us quite sure how to proceed. To my surprise, when she finally took the lead and told me to strip off, I found it easy to do so, draping my clothes over a desk chair until I was left standing in only my boxers. She wanted to take a photo of me like that, but I stopped her; we only had ten exposures and I didn’t want to waste any. She smiled and told me that in that case, I should probably get rid of the underwear too.

There was the briefest moment of hesitation, of self-doubt, then I did it, sliding them down over my thighs and letting them fall to the floor. She was sitting in the chair next to me, her eyes level with my cock; I could feel them on me, studying my body, and I looked down to see my cock begin to harden, slowly rising in front of her face until it stood fully erect.

Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been awkward enough. However, a few weeks earlier we’d been together to the cinema to see 40 Days & 40 Nights, a deeply mediocre film about a guy who’s challenged to go that long without an orgasm. Karolina had never been one to pass up an opportunity like that, and it took her less than 24 hours to goad me into attempting the same feat.

By the time I faced her on that Sunday afternoon, naked and hard, I’d abstained for 23 days; it had been agonising, a nightmare of seemingly permanent erections, made worse by the endless teasing she’d inflicted upon me by email. She reminded me of how long it had been as she placed a cool hand on my hip and guided me towards the bed. I relaxed a little as I lay down and made myself comfortable on top of the soft duvet; music played quietly in the background and I tried to concentrate on it, on anything that would get rid of the insistent desire to come.

It didn’t work. She looked down and asked me whether I was ready to begin, saying that she wanted a picture of my cock while it was so hard. I blushed then and nodded, lifting myself up onto my elbows and looking into the camera as it flashed for the first time. I can remember how my dick actually jumped a little when she took the photo and how my balls seemed to tighten against my body. She took two of me like that, prostrate on the bed, then asked me to stand up so she could take a couple more. Each photo got me hornier, and the sight of her nipples stiffening inside her top didn’t make it any easier to retain control.

I knelt on her bed as we took a break and she rummaged around in a cupboard. When I looked up I saw her walking back towards the bed, grinning and holding out a set of cuffs, two for the wrists, two for the ankles, attached to each other by long chains. She’d told me about those, about how she liked to bind men hand and foot, then suck their cocks while they lay helpless, and I knew then that she wanted to hogtie me in a similar manner. I let her pull my arms behind my back and firmly strap the cuffs to my wrists, then felt her hands on my ankles, holding them in place until I was forced to bend back far enough to be fully restrained. As she moved away, she gave my arse a gentle slap and let her eyes linger on my cock, now sticking out obscenely in front of me.

She took her time over the photo, teasing me, letting me suffer. After she’d taken it, she left me chained up and started to talk; she told me that she’d recently fully shaved her pubic hair for the first time, and wanted a second opinion on what it looked like. She was wearing a skirt and lifted it around her waist, exposing her naked cunt to me as I kneeled, unable to move. I’d never seen one so openly flaunted like that, not in the flesh anyway. She stepped closer and I looked at it, the lips full and glistening, her clit visible to my hungry eyes.

The skirt was slowly lowered again, but the image lingered, and as she untied me I felt the blood return slowly to my hands and feet while continuing to pump through my cock. I was desperate to touch it by that point, but aware of how easily I could lose control if I did so. I sat on the edge of the bed and rested my fingers along the shaft, then curled them round it, unable to stop myself. She nodded approvingly, telling me that she’d wanted to take a photo of me masturbating. I didn’t dare move my hand up and down; instead I just held it there, gently squeezing my dick until she was satisfied. While the slide developed, she looked up over the camera, locked her eyes on mine, and asked me how badly I wanted to come. I found it hard to answer, stumbling over my words but admitting that it was torture not to do so.

For the final photo, she sat me in an armchair and told me to spread my legs. A desk lamp shone over the chair and she handed me a bottle of massage oil; I rubbed it into my chest and stomach, then along my arms until they gleamed in the yellow light. “You missed a bit”, she said, and took the bottle from me, pouring oil onto her hand then smearing it over the head of my cock. When I felt her touch me, I almost came all over her fingers, but they danced away just in time. She told me to finish coating my cock, noting dispassionately that she could see the pre-cum oozing out of the tip. It mixed with the oil as I applied it carefully, taking deep breaths and massaging it in as lightly as I could. I felt like I could lose it at any moment, with no way of stopping myself; as if the decision had ceased to become one for me to make.

In that particular photograph I’m staring straight into the camera, one hand on the arm of the chair, the other resting on the inside of my thigh and the base of my cock. It’s a decent enough shot, but what it can never show is the impossible tension that seeped into every muscle in my body, as I willed myself not to come when the shutter clicked. We exhaled together afterwards, and somehow the moment seemed to pass. I dressed a bit shakily and we sat down to look at the photos, as the daylight faded.

I left with a faint sense of regret that things between us hadn’t gone further, but also with a much stronger feeling of satisfaction at having managed to do it. Three years without a girlfriend had left me awkward and self-conscious where my body was concerned, and I felt like I’d passed some sort of test by posing for those photos. Late that night, while fast asleep, I dreamt of Karolina standing naked in front of me, and woke to find my stomach and sheets soaked with 23 days worth of cum. It was the first wet dream I’d had for years.

Some of the photos remain buried in a drawer somewhere. A few were scanned into an old laptop and subsequently deleted. One or two may still reside with an ex-girlfriend: I’d leave them between pages of her favourite books, for her to find unexpectedly when I was away. They look very dated now, blurry, faded, stiffly-posed images that compare unfavourably to the clarity and fluidity which digital cameras afford. Nevertheless, they were an incredibly important part of my sexual development, and retain a clear and enduring impact on the sorts of things that turn me on today.