Crotch

Skin Capture Exposure

This is the hardest section to post. It was difficult to take the pictures, difficult to look at them and its very hard to post them. When I was taking the pictures I felt a mixture of furtiveness, shame and excitement. I was worried that I might be interrupted, caught-out, shamed.

Partly, when I started, I just wanted to photograph skin, random areas of skin from parts of my body that might not even be that easy to identify – I wanted them to be, as this is, quite abstract. Its not as good as I want it to be though, not as high a resolution as I want. Just a part of me, just as my fairly sparse public hair starts.

More random crotch, almost so close that its hard to work out what or where this is. That I like, that at the close up level, so close that is hard to work out what part of the body it is, it can’t be obscene because we are so close up we could be looking at an armpit. 

It should be easy to photograph a penis, my penis, it sticks out, its a performing thing. Its not easy though. So much baggage is mixed up with this area of skin, veins and tissue. As a gender we are said to think with our cock and balls, driven by testosterone to fuck and to fight. It is though, mostly, a soft, warm area of skin, hairy, very sensitive, comforting to be held gently, sensual, sexual to be touched.

All that imagery, the cock, erect, fucking. Mostly though they are just soft, hanging, and rather like some internal organ, a section of gut, that has escaped to the surface. Hairy, pink, dark, moist – mine drips just a tiny bit from the end, I don’t know whether that’s just me, I doubt that I am unique, its not piss, its just a tiny bit of lube. It is though embarrassing, I have been ashamed with new partners of that very small amount of usualness.

And, proud symbols of man-hood also our greatest source of self-doubt – is it too small, will it be up to the occasion, will it come too soon. All of these doubts have affected me, they still do and more in this period of my life than at any other. Its not as if society, doesn’t judge men and me in that way, it does – the fear of judgement is real, present in so many jokes and barbed comments. Impotent, normal, not well-hung, men are treated as if they do it deliberately, just to be awkward – wee small cocks haha, hehe. So, here is a bit of it, more to come when I’m feeling more brave further down the page.

As a young child I was fascinated by the line of what looks a bit like stitching where I had been cast-off and sown up in the least visible place. My mum always told me that I had been knitted. The line, hard to see as I bent forward, pulled my bits out of the way, and peered, somewhat revolted at my bum-hole and the line of stitching that went from my bum hole, across my balls and up the underside of my penis. This was a slightly, fascinatingly revolting thing like the underside of a tongue, or a dead cat, or a girl’s vagina that she has shown me in detail as we played doctors under the sheets and drew Xs on our tummies where we would operate and put the hollow tubes from pens up our bums and her fanny so we could see our “insides” but it was always too dark up there.

Now that I am older I have not looked down there for years, I’m 48, I’ve probably not peered down there since I was 4. And now, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t contort my back enough to do so. 

Here, slightly faded now from how I remember is it the stitching line, proof of manufacture by my mother’s sowing needle.

I have though, by this small diversion into foolish memory managed to look at these parts of me sufficiently that I have stopped feeling revulsion, they are just, obviously, skin. That though hasn’t been the point, well not all of it.

Some of the point is to show bits of me as abstract skin, complex, functional, something that I, at least, should grow to love more. Part of this is to challenge myself and anyone else just to look, to notice, one man from top to bottom and to toes and not to deny discomfort with looking at those parts, penis, balls and arsehole that we squirm from – but more or less force, through the ghoulish attraction to the bizarre of the normal, to peek.

Of course I’ve never actually seen myself from these angles either and rather than thinking, yuck, cock and balls, I’m thinking how flabby my face looks.

I rather like this shot though, less genital, more just folds of skin. One to take again though in better focus – these are not easy selfies.