I Love Foreskins and Body Hair

TNG co-founder Zack's loins were left all giddy by last week's taste of spring. This week, he continues his semi-regular series of things he loves by writing about sex.


My boyfriend likes to tease me about my all-abiding love for bacon. Whereas I just consider it a tasty breakfast treat, or quick on-the-go snack, he sees it as the chosen people's forbidden fruit. There might be some truth to this. Though I was not brought up kosher, many of my Jewish friends mark their first foray into pigskin (or "Bacon Rebellion," as my friend Shelley called it) as the beginning of a break from family and culture that defines growing up.

While bacon (and its hippie cousin, turkey bacon) were never out of reach to me, my Jewish upbringing did leave me eternally fascinated with something I could never have: a foreskin. The way that some guys wish they could have boobs for one day, just to play with, is the similar to my infatuation with a little piece of skin. Sexual connotations aside, I don't have one and some people do. It's crazy to think about- my religion, and most western culture, snip off a piece of our most sensitive body part and we've all come to think its normal. What would it be like to have the flap? Unless I want to invest a painful series of weights and pulleys, I'll never know.

Foreskins are more of a curiosity for me than a turn-on. If I get close enough to see one I'm probably turned on already, so its hard to gauge their effect on the whole mating process. Body hair, however, is a whole different story.

80% of my body hair is relegated to my legs. The rest is a scant smattering that collects around my nipples and leaks into a thin arch between my pecs. But for as long as I can remember there are few things that I find as attractive as a "happy trail." Known in some regions as a "treasure trail," it is the thick line of hair that leads from one's belly button down to parts unknown. When creeping out the top of one's jeans it is a strong visual suggestion of what else a guy has to offer and, as such, it is one of my favorite things.

But like some of my other favorite things - dignity, the ability to practice moderation- I will never have a hairy stomach. So I have to appreciate from afar... and on some lucky occasions, from a-close. My desire to pursue the things that I myself don't possess can be disconcerting. At its most romantic, it fulfills Plato's (and Hedwig's) origin of love, the myth that humans are just half-entities trying to find their missing piece. More realistically, it's an odd slice of hetero convention in my gay dating pie. Isn't the definition of straight desire the pursuance of that which is unlike you?

I guess I could theorize all day, but this was supposed to be a piece about beauty. The whole reason I'm writing it is because of someone I saw in the showers at my gym yesterday. I know I write about that place a lot, but it's like a museum for lovers of the male form. You look, you don't touch, and maybe later in the day you tell someone else about what you saw there. What sent me running home to describe to my boyfriend was a guy with a thick fog of black hair that crept up his legs onto his ass, curled over onto his belly and came to rest on the length of his torso. No matter what you like, its hard not to read the poetry of the male body.