On hand jobs (or: I just want you to touch me)

On the long list of super-hot things someone can say to me in bed, “show me how you touch your cock” slots in somewhere pretty high. It’s hot for various reasons:

• It implies you enjoy watching me, and as an exhibitionist I love being watched
• It means you’re curious and can ask for what you want, both of which are really sexy
• Most excitingly of all, it suggests that at some point shortly afterwards, you’re going to touch my cock, and that makes me very happy indeed

I thought about the last of those today, when I read this very enjoyable – and impassioned – ode to the ‘lost art’ of fingering. I was chatting about it on Twitter afterwards and had the following exchange:

@hurricane_ros @notsosexintheci Ditto a good hand job, though it’s one area where a lot of women lack confidence, I think.

— Exhibit A (@EA_unadorned) March 4, 2016

 

It’s rare that I encounter a partner who isn’t enthusiastic about sucking cock. It happens, of course, but experience has taught me that most women are perfectly happy to get down there and give it their best shot when it comes to oral, with or without guidance on how I enjoy receiving it.

That’s not always a good thing, and probably deserves a blog post of its own, but it does throw into sharp relief the relative lack of confidence with which a lot of women approach hand jobs. It’s not hard to figure out why that might be the case. Using our hands to get ourselves off is something most of us guys have been doing day-in, day-out since our mid-teens.

We’ve spent literally thousands of hours stroking, tugging, squeezing, and rubbing our cocks, and if the main thought going through your head as you curl your fingers round it is ‘I won’t be able to do this as well as he can do it himself’, the chances are you’re probably right…

…and at the same time so, so wrong. Because here’s the thing. Maybe you can’t make us come as quickly as we could do it ourselves. Maybe you don’t know just how much pressure we like, or what to do with your thumb, or how much time you should spend focusing on the head of the cock. Even after we’ve told you those things, you might not be able to grip as firmly as we can, or develop that instinctive feel for when to speed up, or slow down, or keep doing it exactly what you’re doing it right now because please don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop.

But – BUT – so fucking what??

Going back to that finger-banging post, I can say with relative certainty that every partner I’ve had has known her clit better than I have. Known how to touch it, whether to be gentle or firm, when to apply direct pressure and when to tease around it. Same goes for her cunt.

When I push my fingers inside someone, it’s not my nerve endings being stimulated and not my brain receiving pleasure messages. I can read body language, I can fall back on experience, and I can respond to spoken or unspoken guidance, but I will never be able to feel the effect my actions are having, and as a result there will always be tiny missteps. Moments when she would stop thrusting if she was doing it herself, and just clench around her fingers, but instead I slowly force mine deeper. Moments when the rhythm is good – maybe even great – but not quite right. 95% right, 98% right even. Just not perfect.

That will never change. Sure, there might be days when I do give the A+, 100%, nine-dart hand job, exactly how she’d have done it herself, and if you don’t think I’m mentally jumping for joy on those occasions you clearly don’t know me very well. But even with a partner I know really well, and have been with for a while, it won’t happen every time. Not because I’m not fucking great at it, or because I don’t listen when she tells me what she wants – because it simply can’t.

Still, lots of women LOVE being fingered. Those I’ve spoken to about it have different reasons for that. Nostalgia. The power dynamic. The prioritisation of their pleasure. How easy it is to do it in public, or somewhere you really shouldn’t. Just the basic care and attention it involves.

There’s a physical side to it too. In most cases, my fingers are longer and thicker than my partner’s, and feel bigger inside her. I’m stronger, so I can thrust and pump more vigorously. I can also do it from different angles. From behind, with a pillow under her pelvis and her legs together, so it’s really tight and intense. Kneeling between her legs with a hand on her stomach, pinning her down, holding her still as I slowly squeeze three fingers inside. Standing up, my face buried in her hair and my cock pressed against her arse through our clothing; my hand slipping up under her dress and into her knickers – down between her arse cheeks and over her cunt.

From what I understand, women love being fingered – those who do love it – for any/all of those reasons and more. It’s not just the act of having their clit stimulated or their cunt filled, and it’s definitely not a direct proxy or substitute for something they could do themselves. There’s a wider context, which is often where the hotness comes from.

And y’know what – the same could not be more true of hand jobs. I generally try to avoid speaking for all men, but in this instance I’m happy to say that we don’t expect – or indeed necessarily want – you to touch our cocks in exactly the same way we do it ourselves. It’s not that we’re too lazy to wank and would like you to do it for us, please – nor that we see the end goal of your endeavours as an efficient, fault-free orgasm, complete with perfect dismount and landing.

We love hand jobs – or I love hand jobs – because of everything that goes with them. It’s that wider context again.

I love that you want to touch me, and to give me pleasure.

I love feeling you explore my cock with your lubed-up hand, and that discovering all the different ways of playing with it makes you happy.

I love that sometimes you’ll do something to it that I wouldn’t have done myself, but in a really good, surprising way – and I’ll file that in the back of my brain for future reference

I love the way you talk dirty to me as you do it – or maybe how you stay completely silent, focused only on listening to my breathing and responding to my body.

I love that every now and then your other hand will wander down to touch your clit as you stroke me. That you massage my thighs, or brush a finger over my balls, or pay attention to parts of me that I never think to focus on when I wank.

I love the delight on your face when I spurt all over your hand. The sense of achievement and the horny joy of watching cum shoot everywhere.

I love when you put your hand down my jeans on the bus to circle your thumb and forefinger around my stiffening cock, or when you pull me into an alley, spit on your palm, and roughly jerk it till all I can think about is fucking you.

I love the power dynamics, of course I do, and the way you can use your hand to control me; to edge me closer, closer, closer to that orgasm I really want, but can’t have.

Pretty much everything I love about hand jobs has very little to do with their mechanics. Yes, there are definitely things you shouldn’t do – I don’t really want to feel like I’ve got my cock caught in a mechanical vice, for example, and nor do I want you to try and pull it off my body – but it’s up to me to tell you what those are, or better yet to show you.

I’ve got 20 years’ experience of making myself come, and unsurprisingly I’m pretty fucking good at it. If all you want to do is replicate how your partner does that – right down to the nth degree – you are probably going to fail. However, once you realise that there’s so much more to a hand job than its basic parts – that honestly, sometimes we really just want to be touched – it becomes one of the absolute best things you can do to, for, or with a man. Trust me on this one.