HE WAS UNCIRCUMCISED and the head of his penis was sensitive. He would pull back the foreskin but only so far. Once a doctor pulled it back all the way. This seemed to him a violation, and he made his mother promise not to let the doctor do it again. Once in the bath when he was flicking his penis, small and soft, from side to side in play his mother told him he must not fool with it or he would get sick. At nine he became aware that his penis changed in size and firmness; this struck him as unnatural. On his waking in the morning it was often large and hard and would not soften until he urinated. Urinating was difficult with a hard penis. The stream would shoot off to one side and miss the bowl, or perhaps split into two streams, one or both of which would miss the bowl. If the stream went singly—say, to a half-right—and he compensated by pointing the penis to the left the stream might suddenly straighten and miss the bowl on the other side. A sure way to get all the urine into the bowl was to sit down on the toilet and force the hard penis under the rim of the seat. This would be painful if he didn’t bend forward, and even then the urine would splash off the enamel, wetting his hands and the penis itself. The first time he saw a vulva he was walking along a neighborhood street in early summer. Children of seven or eight were jumping rope and playing potsy. Suddenly one little girl hiked up her short cotton dress, pulled her panties to one side, and scratched her cunt. It was no more than a small hairless crack, but his face burned for a long time afterward. He didn’t touch a cunt until he was twenty, in the army, and about to make love to a whore. After getting into bed with her, he felt around under the sheet for her cunt. He thought it would be in front, like a prick; but it wasn’t. He was unwilling to ask the woman for help because he didn’t want her to know he was a virgin. He remembered the saying that a nice girl was a girl who put it in for you, and, propping himself over her, he placed her hand on his prick, and she guided it in. He was surprised that the cunt was between a woman’s legs, and for some time considered this a fault. Through the first eight years of marriage the only cunt he knew was his wife’s. Although he thought about it a lot, was greatly attracted to it, invented fond jokes about it, his wife made it less and less accessible, and he was returned to a state of constant yearning, as in adolescence. He grew to feel that women tolerated rather than desired a prick in their cunts, so that when he had his first adulterous love affair, at thirty, he doubted that his mistress really enjoyed him. One night she convinced him that she did by telling him that he was a cautious fucker and that he should feel free to fuck her as hard as he wanted. His subsequent experiences with other woman made him feel at home with cunts. He would examine them carefully, play with the lips and fatty mons veneris, lick the clitoris and insert his tongue as far as he could into the vagina. Sometimes a cunt had a different character from its owner. Two women he slept with, although desirous, had cunts that seemed to narrow to a wedge and want him out. Another girl, who always looked angry when he fucked her, had a cunt that held his prick like a treasure. Occasionally a cunt was too large for friction. He solved the problem with one girl by squeezing the bottom of her ass with his hand when he made love to her. Now cunts are less important in themselves; he values them mainly as a means of attaching women to him. Through their cunts he makes women like and need him, and this does much to compensate for his growing coldness toward the world. Most of the cunts he knows in his fifties belong to women in their forties. As he ages, so will the women he sleeps with. In his late fifties he will yearn for the cunt of a girl. He will try to imagine it—round, small, firm, with a full springy bush. Sometimes this will increase his pleasure when he is sleeping with older women and sometimes lessen it. He will pick up a young whore one night, the second and last whore of his life; but a Caesarian scar and her contemptuous manner will make copulation perfunctory. Near the end of his life he will develop a feeling for his penis akin to the faint fondness he felt for it when he was a child, that is, before the onset of the dilemmas and frustrations of adolescence. Except for odd, recollective moments and occasionally in dreams he will lose his attraction for cunts, and when he makes love he will hardly think of them.