Being a Boy (2 page)

Sexual orientation, or sexual preference, is quite like gender in that it is a lot more fluid than you think: GAY or STRAIGHT aren’t the only options. In fact these are made up labels. I don’t even know who made them up. I think it’s because humans LOVE labels, whether it is black and white, rich and poor, male and female and so on. We’re obsessed.

Read the first paragraph of this section again. Did I use the words gay, straight or bi? No. There’s no need. There are billions of people on this planet – you will find some of them sexy, so you should attempt to have sex with some of those people.

figure a

Like sexism, homophobia is pretty much ingrained in our society. Being subtly told in lots of ways by TV, films, papers, teachers, friends and family that same-sex couples are ‘different’ may have led you to think that men having sex with men, or women having sex with women, is weird, dirty, shameful or strange.

I’m glad we cleared that up. Depending on which study you read, something like one in every fifteen men is likely to be attracted to other men. (Whether they have sex with them or not is another matter entirely.) That’s actually quite a lot. In a class of thirty-two kids, that means two are likely to be same-sex oriented.

Just because a dude has sex with another dude doesn’t automatically make him gay. It’s up to an individual to decide if they like that label – it’s like wearing Nike or Adidas
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. It’s possible ‘Ted’ mostly likes women, but found that one guy superhot. I call it The Mars
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Bar / Snickers
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Continuum. Regard figure a.

Let’s say that men are Snickers
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– because they have nuts. All men will exist somewhere on that line. Men who fancy only women will be down the Mars
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Bar end; men who fancy only men are down the opposite end. But there will be MILLIONS of men who are somewhere in the middle, too. I suspect a lot of men in the middle of the line DON’T have sex with other men because they think it’s weird, dirty, shameful or strange, which is sad.

Hilariously, women are bombarded with pornographic images of same-sex sex. Because the rich men that rule the world find two women having sex sexy, girls are encouraged to ‘experiment’. Note that when two girls kiss they aren’t automatically accused of being gay.

The world is still waiting on a pop star like Justin Bieber to record a song called, ‘I Kissed a Boy and I Liked It’. It’s probably not gonna happen because our society is fixated on the idea of men being MANLY and a guy snogging another guy is considered GIRLY. So you see, homophobia is very closely related to sexism.

That’s the last time I really need to discuss sexual preference in this book because here’s another thing: it doesn’t actually matter. Young men who fancy other men are having all the same heartbreaks and traumas as boys who fancy girls. Same first love, same first kiss, same first sex, same first breakups. Every word in this book is applicable to both.

S
o we’ve established that biologically-speaking you were born ‘male’. Excellent. Let’s get cracking. Let’s talk about some pubes and winkies.

One last thing you should be aware of: we are going to talk A LOT about sex, but we’re also going to talk about things called emotions.

   
EE-MOW-SHUN:

1. A mental state of feeling often causing physiological responses, laughter, tears, sweat or shaking.
   
2. Collective term for abstract nouns such as love, fear, jealousy, joy, anxiety.
   
3. Something Taylor Swift sings about.
   
4. All the ‘feels’.
   

In many ways it’s harder to talk about emotions than sex and willies because those bits are pretty funny. It’s the FEELINGS about your knob and stuff that you might struggle to talk about with your mates. So let me talk about these feelings so you don’t have to: Result.

T
here’s a guy you know. He’s probably a little older than you. He might not be the best looking guy. He might not have the best body. There’s something about him though. People respect him. You respect him. He’s well liked and has few enemies. He’s a people magnet. People flock to him for advice. He has a certain something. He’s cool.

But how can you feel cool when you’re going through the most awkward phase of your life? Let’s face it, puberty is a tough old time and you might not always feel very cool. Sadly, the pubescent wasteland is a time at which you might even spend hours thinking, ‘I’m not good enough’.

How can anyone feel particularly confident knowing you could wake up tomorrow with a face full of spots and a back hairier than Bigfoot’s? Then throw into the mix the fact that school is more competitive than any fight club with hundreds of boys all vying for the coveted position of top dog. Luckily, even if you don’t feel cool, you can FAKE it.

‘Cool’ is a concept that never changes and never dates. ‘Cool’ existed at the dawn of time when a prehistoric microorganism saw The Big Bang and said, ‘oooh, cool.’ From Mick Jagger to Jay-Z; from Darth Vader to Darth Maul some guys just have it. If you could buy it, I’d sell a kidney to get it. So, how can you be cool without being a tool?

I
t’s a jungle out there. Or more precisely a zoo. Any school is more or less a menagerie of caged animals. Think about it, there’s a feeding time and everyone’s desperately trying to mate.

However unlike any good zoo, in the human habitat no one has thought to separate the species into different enclosures, which leads to the sort of carnage normally reserved for the Discovery Channel. Teeth bared, survival-of-the-fittest, flailing intestines horror. If the RSPCA inspected schools, I imagine they’d shut the lot.

As with zoo animals, there is a food chain in any group of males. Observe table one.

INSOUCIANT LION

Consider our pride leader. He’s not bothered. He basks in the sun while lesser lions tend to his every whim. He doesn’t fight if he can help it. Despite this laid-back demeanour, you wouldn’t put your head in his mouth because YOU JUST WOULDN’T.

HUGELY VISIBLE EAGLE

The high flyers. ‘Why can’t you be more like him?’ ask the mothers of lesser birds. Flash, dynamic and over-achieving. Looks like bloody hard work though. The first to start pecking at their own feathers in self-doubt.

PEA-BRAIN PEACOCK

Looks sexy, gorgeous, confident and impressive until they open their mouths and a dim-sounding HONK is emitted.

JABBERING BABOON

There are a lot of them and they are noisy. When not screaming for attention, they are flinging poo at one another. Inordinate amount of pressing arses against car windows and frequent public displays of overt sexuality.

SHITWEASELS

There is no other name for this type of animal. The shitweasel follows bigger, better animals back to their dens before eating them. Two-faced bastards. Will lie, bullshit and steal to get ahead.