What's Your Type?

What kind of man do you lust over?  Is it a smooth, buff gym bunny, or a hairy bear?  Do you like twinks or daddies?  Or does your type not fit easily into any one box?  You like a hairy twink?  Well, I think those are called otters.  So what would you call a smooth, hairless daddy?  When I hit the bars, I tend to go to the leather bars, under the (usually true) assumption that these men will be kinky.  But what of the college jock who likes to be tied up?  So often I judge a man’s sexual tendencies by his outward appearance.  But, perhaps that’s a fox in sheep’s clothing that you’re looking at.

I’m finding that my so-called type has more to do with what’s in a man’s head than the body that head is on.  Meaning, are we on the same page sexually.  But when I watch porn, it’s so often of the thirtyish year old muscle bear variety.  Coincidentally or not, that is the type that I would fall into.  And yet...

Today I took my sister to a theater production celebrating International Woman’s Day.  I wouldn’t have thought that there I would find myself sitting behind a startling attractive man, sitting alone.  He was not a muscle bear.  He was a clean cut jockish type who frighteningly reminded me of my first love.  In high school I’d fallen for Jack.  Jack was straight, voted MVP on any sports team he was on.  He was also extraordinarily nice, and we developed a slight friendship, though he was a grade ahead.  The man in the audience today threw me back to high school with a velocity that bit me like a snake.  I felt lust mixed with two other emotions: a need for love and a sense that I would never have it because I was somehow unworthy.  I felt both propelled toward him and away from him at the same time, because my heart sensed danger.  In that moment, I wanted the pure lust of my pornographic muscle bears where sexually I was free and emotionally I was safe.

I began to wonder how I would behave sexually with a man like the one I saw today.  I began to wonder if I could fuck the one I love, or are the two notions divided for me in much the same way some straight men suffer from the Madonna/Whore syndrome (ie. they want the mother of their children to be pure and chaste, and to have a hardcore slut secretly on the side whom they would never marry).

The trouble for me is that when love begins to enter this heart of mine, I begin right away to fear its loss, leaving me feeling ungrounded.  How then, could I play the dom and sexually assert myself with a beloved when it would appear that he holds all the cards due to my ingrained insecurities?   And at my age, without a true relationship already under my belt, just a few short affairs, has the chance for love passed me by?  I tend to see myself as a lone wolf, but that house of cards comes tumbling down when I see a man like the one I did today.  But let’s be real:  I don’t know the man.  Perhaps he is a jerk, perhaps he has kinks that would never click with mine.  What I felt today was what our culture refers endearingly to as love at first sight.  How is it that the molecules that make up that person can cause my own body’s molecules to frantically start rearranging themselves?  How do we develop a type in the first place?  I try to ape the type of guy that attracts me (again, the muscle bears).  What of the men who are interested in types directly in opposition to their own?

“He’s not my type.” “What’s your type?”  Statements and questions such as these are short.  The answers are not.