Chapter 1

Cal was late and it wasn't like him and he didn't want Aunt Paula to be mad. It was Tuesday too, his lesson-day, and Paula had promised that today's would be important. He was already apologizing to her as he came through the door.

"It's okay, honey," his aunt said. "No harm done. Today's a biggie, though."

As he unbuttoned his shirt, still catching his breath, Cal realized that Paula was dressed up in what she liked to call her feminine best. Short black dress, nylons and heels, make-up, ear-rings. Her long dark hair was radiant and she smelled citrus-like and sweet. Cal knew that she was staying home with him, but this was certainly the costume for an evening out. He laid his shirt over a chair and quickly undid his belt. In his haste he was fumbling a bit. But Aunt Paula didn't seem impatient at all. She nestled in her chair, relaxed and beautiful. She pronounced his name gaily several times as she watched him struggle to pull his jeans off over his shoes. He was still used to the baggier clothes of a younger boy. But Cal had recently turned ten. His jeans lay at his ankles as he bent to unlace his shoes. Aunt Paula was enjoying his balancing act, which was taking many minutes. He looked boyishly clumsy and adorable, she thought, with buttocks high in the air, stretching his white briefs, as he stumbled about.

When the job was done, Cal stood up proudly and faced his aunt with exaggerated triumph and the burlesque suavity of a magician. She laughed at the stiff little bow he gave her, and at the theatrical way he rose up on his toes and flung out his arms. Then, in one curt movement, before Paula was quite done laughing, Cal snapped his briefs almost to his knees, wiggled a bit until they fell to his ankles, and stepped free. Naked as a nail and ready for business now. "What's up, auntie?" he said.

Paula tried to sound serious, but couldn't help her laughter. "Cal," she said, "you are going to have to be less charming or Aunt Paula will never get to the lesson." Cal beamed. He had loved Aunt Paula all his life. Even before he lost his mom (Paula's elder sister) and dad, nephew and aunt had shared a tender delight in one another that was not unlike the love of parent and child. Paula was very young, a few years out of college, when her sister died; but neither she nor anyone concerned for the boy ever doubted that she must be his guardian.

She invited Cal to sit beside her on the couch. She put her arm around his shoulder and drew him against her. Cal loved the feel of Paula's dress against his skin. The crepe was slightly raspy and he was still boyishly smooth. Cal appreciated the contrast: a woman's dress, a boy's exposure. He squirmed against his aunt in the hope of being chafed. Aunt Paula allowed it, encouraged it even. Free though she was in showing Cal her solicitude toward him, she normally limited his modes of reciprocation. For Paula, it would be inexcusable to blur the line between her nephew's acts of deference toward all women, including herself, and mere greedy incest. The woman controls these things, she alone has the power to strip away ambiguity, decide the significance of every intimacy, ordain what she must never show and what her boy must never think. Paula's every desire toward Cal was indeed maternal, even this long-established insistence on his naked humility. It was for his own good.

But she was being strangely lenient today. So Cal thought, until she asked him to stand facing her once more. "Cal," she said, "I want to ask you some question I know you know the answers to."

"I hope I do, Aunt Paula."

"They're questions about boys, Cal. About ladies too. You'll know how to answer. For instance: why are you standing naked in front of me like this?"

Cal was relieved. "Oh, I can answer, Aunt Paula. If that's the kind of question you mean. I'm standing naked in front of you because that's how a boy shows ladies his respect." There was no guess-work here: Cal had often repeated, for Aunt Paula and many of her friends, the tenets of her feminist catechism. "Because a boy mustn't keep secrets from ladies... , " he continued.

"Secrets, Cal?"

"Things happen to a boy sometimes, auntie, when he sees or thinks of ladies or girls. I mean... "

"Things, Cal?"

"Like to his penis, auntie. It stands up... "

"IT stands up, Cal?"

"I mean, the girls, the ladies, they MAKE it stand up."

Paula nodded her understanding, as though she had never considered these matters before. It was a game she liked to play with her nephew. She had taught him everything, but it was lovely to ruffle him. "Why would the girls want to do a silly thing like that, Cal?"

"So the boy will know they have power over him. So he'll be respectful and obedient, auntie."

"And can the girls and ladies observe what happens to the boy?"

"Oh, yes, auntie. Very often they can. But... "

"You mean right through the boy's clothes?" Aunt Paula sounded incredulous.

"Oh, yes. That is... "

"Then why does the boy have to be naked, Cal? I'm not seeing this."

"That's what I was going to say, auntie. Many boys, when they realize what powegirls and ladies have, well, they get frightened of it and they try to hide. And if they can't actually hide, they can still pretend that their penis isn't because of the girls at all. But when a boy is naked, he can't hide and... and... this is something that I think, auntie... "

"Tell me, Cal."

"He can't hide and he doesn't feel like it either. He doesn't want to any more. It's just what you've always said, Aunt Paula. My body doesn't lie even when my clothes do."

"Why is that, do you think, Cal?"

"I can't explain, Aunt Paula. I mean, you'd have to be a boy to understand... "

"I can't help you there, sweetheart, I'm happy to say."

"I mean, when you're a boy and you're naked and your penis is just out there like that, I don't know, auntie, you just have to go with it. If it was just there for you, it would be hidden inside you in private. But it's out there, auntie. So when you're naked you feel that means something."

"Isn't there something else, Cal?"

"Oh, there is. Do you mean... ?"

"No, Cal. Don't ask me. It has to be something you already know."

"Yes, auntie." Cal lifted his penis toward his stomach to give Paula an unobstructed view of his balls and pressed two fingers of his other hand between his testes. "It's these," he said. "Do you see how delicate they are, auntie?"

"I do, Cal. I see."

"Do you think that these things - they're called testicles, auntie... "

"Thank you, Cal. I'll remember that. They're very delicate indeed."

"Do you think that these testicles ought to be just hanging here like this?"

"What do you think, Cal?"

"I think that they should be, auntie. Because they're so easy to hurt this way. You can see that. So no lady or girl has to be afraid of a person with testicles on him. Because she can always teach him a lesson. It's so easy."

"What kind of lesson, Cal?"

"Her power over him, auntie. That's what I mean."

"Let me ask you, Cal: didn't you say a boy doesn't really want to hide his penis from a lady?"

"Yes. I mean, once he realizes... "

"Wait, though. Does it feel good when a boy's penis is hard?"

"Yes, auntie. Because it feels good to be honest and respectful to ladies."

"And it's honest and respectful also to let ladies know about these testicles you showed me?"

"Oh, yes, it is."

"I mean, to let them know about how easy they are to hurt?"

"Yes, that's what I meant to say."

"But tell me, Cal: do you think a boy would secretly like to be hurt that way, just as he secretly likes to get hard? I mean, if you're right and it IS the respect these things allow him to show to ladies, there shouldn't be any difference, should there, just because hurting is involved?"

"A boy could be more frightened of being hurt, though, auntie."

"Of course, darling. Of course. That's why you wait until he's a big boy... "

"How big, Aunt Paula?"

"Say, ten. I'd say, by the time he's ten a boy is ready. His penis and those testicles you were mentioning are big enough by then. And when he's ten, if he's had a good upbringing, he's already had a lot of training in showing his respect to ladies. As you are, Cal, as you are, my ten-year-old sweetheart. You impress everyone. All my friends, and their daughters (and you know how hard it is to impress young girls) - they always compliment me on your exemplary behavior. I know being so good at it keeps you busy, darling. But it makes Aunt Paula so proud of you, you know."

Busy was an understatement. A long story, which begins here:

Cal was six and had been living with Paula for a year when his aunt's life-long faith in the supremacy of woman began to evolve into a concrete plan for raising her nephew. She knew in her heart that a worshipful man is a happy man and an adored and well-served woman happierstill, and she wanted for her sweet nephew as much happiness as a life of early sorrow could still afford. Cal was her great love, and now she would make him her work as well.

Perhaps it was as well, then, that Cal's parents had gotten it into their heads that circumcision is traumatic to an infant, and had refused to permit the procedure to be performed on their newborn son. Paula's gifts to Cal begin with that.

The circumcision question was one of the few occasions on which Paula had doubted the judgment of her capable big sister, the only one on which she'd thought her girlhood model silly. Becoming Cal's guardian, bathing the little boy daily, Paula found herself scandalized by the indecency of his "in tact" look. Uncircumcised men put her off. She couldn't say exactly why. A matter of aesthetics, she imagined. But for a long time she tried to reconcile herself to Cal's condition. This was her nephew, this was her love. Wanting nothing to compromise her tenderness for Cal on any level, even the bodily, Paula tried for a year and more to dissolve her repugnance. She adored the boy and reproached herself for the grief she felt at every sight of his innocent little watercock looking, after all, only as nature had intended. She tried every means to banish her revulsion - argument, fantasy, self-reflection. All the same, when the boy stood smiling as his aunt undressed him for his bath, this moment of intimacy which should have been one of the day's sweet interludes became for Paula a mine-field of ambivalence. It horrified her that she turned away from the boy's benign nudity. But her resolutions and brainwashings inevitably failed, and day after day, as she lowered the boy's white briefs, no beautiful miniature of a human organ appeared, but an obscene spigot, a pizzle waiting to grow great.

How could her sister have been so wrong? Why this stupid anomalous loyalty to so-called "nature" - and on the part of the woman, too, who had taught Paula the arts of make-up and feminine style and had assured her of their importance. How could she not have recognized the disservice to her sex in keeping her boy-child uncircumcised. Even if you rejected questions of hygiene, there remained deeper ones, of aesthetics, of humanity.

Paula did fear that she was on shaky ground about all this and she tried every gambit to rid herself of indefensible ideas. One device was concentrated self-analysis, a practice in which several years of Freudian shrinkage had made her proficient. The result of her self-analysis wasn't cure but resolution. For in a moment of compelling insight Paula saw how circumcision merely completed the paring away of man's disguise. No wonder the permanent uncloseting of that over-sensitive glans delighted her eye and mind. It denied a man even that whisp of covering allowed to him at birth. From girlhood on, Paula had helped many boys and men pull down their vanity along with their trousers. Now she would help her nephew to a deeper humility, one that would truly get under his skin and endure there. It thrilled her now that he hadn't been done as an infant. She apologized to her sister's memory for her rash disapproval of that decision. Cal was six now. Conscious, intelligent, with a definable personality and many of boyhood's customary traits. But at six the shell of the ego is still fairly thin: it takes ages, Paula knew, to build up trocious crust of false masculinity that women like her were dedicated to rupturing. Cal, happily, would never have the chance. Circumcision - not in private, not at the surgery, but in public, at a lively ceremony with Cal at the center and all ages of women to witness it, almost the way religious people do it, really - circumcision would demolish the little fortress of reflexes and instinctual pride which is the only defense a boy of six has yet had time to build. And the memory and the effect of that lovely catastrophe - at a woman's hands quite literally, for Paula had already selected the doctor who would crop the boy - would rule Cal's heart forever.

As Aunt Paula had expected, his belated circumcision had a deep effect on Cal. Of course it did. But not for the pain alone, though this lasted many days. Yet its reverberation went deeper and would indeed last a lifetime. On that day Cal truly became a man, at least in Aunt Paula's unorthodox sense of the phrase. That trace of girlishness a young boy is still permitted, that purity he may pretend to while his male rgans are immature, in a single hour deserted him. The humiliation Cal experienced was irreparable, and even as small a boy as he, too young to have developed masculine ways, had to reel beneath its shock. This wasn't the humiliation of unmasked pretense, nor even of exploded pride. This was something closer to the bone, a physical truth, a wound still awaiting the birth of the ego it would lodge in. Yes, Paula had foreseen it all.

There had been ladies present. Even the doctor was a woman named Barbara. No men, no boys, only ladies. And girls. Children like himself - but also not at all like himself, not women, not breasted yet, still narrow-hipped, but more like women than like Cal, penis-less beings, smooth and silent and concealed where he was all stick-out and dangle. Paula had invited them right along with their moms. And their moms had thought it a splendid idea, a lesson their daughters would thank them for. They had watched with delight as the boy removed the hospital-gown his aunt had required him to wear and shed his briefs, climbing naked from a chair to mount Aunt Paula's dining-table, over which a crisp white sheet had been placed. They had seen Cal spread his legs as the doctor instructed and watched her swab his penis with cotton soaked in chilly antiseptics which made him flinch. Two older girls had even been invited to come up to the table and hold Cal's legs apart. It pleased them to wear the sterile masks and gloves the doctor handed them. Cal felt a particular humiliation in their rubberized touch as they seized hold of hi legs and stretched them wider. There was fear and shame in the pit of Cal's stomach.

Holding Cal's penis between thumb and forefinger, the doctor described the operation she was about to perform. She spoke in a way that made it clear to Cal that she was determined to help the younger girls understand. "Boys are born, you see, with a little more skin down here than they'll ever need." She pulled Cal's prepuce back to reveal his glans. The sensation was not pleasant, but he tried to lie still as the doctor lightly tapped her finger on his exposed part. Several times she stretched and released his foreskin. Girls leaned in to see. They tugged at their mothers' sleeves. They had urgent questions but seemed to think they'd better whisper. Some moms leaned over Cal too. One of them said, "You know, I've never actually seen a circumcision."

"I've been to a couple," another offered, "but, you know, they're only eight days old. There's not a lot of boy there to see."

Cal closed his eyes, ashamed. The doctor went on, still mindful of the puzzled girls. This day was more about girls than boys. That much was clear to Cal. "I am simply going to take a scalpel - that's a special sharp knife we doctor use - and cut this silly skin right off of Cal's penis."

"That can't be fun for Cal," one of the girls said.

"Not right now, maybe," the doctor said. "It will hurt a little for a while, but Cal will be brave." She smiled down at the patient and pressed his arm reassuringly. "But almost all boys are circumcised nowadays, you know. It's better for them, better for their health, and better for their attitude as well."

Nobody appeared to have any trouble understanding this last, obscure remark. Even Cal, lying nervous and exposed as women and girls stood all around him, awaiting an event which Paula had said it was normal to celebrate, though one which the doctor herself admitted was going to be painful for the boy - even Cal vaguely intuited why Doctor Barbara had mentioned "attitude." When the doctor exposed Cal's glans to all those female eyes, Cal truly understood what Aunt Paula had meant by her funny words, "extra naked." That skin the doctor said Cal didn't need: it was a little covering on a boy even when he was out of his clothes. Paula was always explaining that boys and men are always naked, even with their clothes on. So how could things get so backwards? How could a boy have a little covering growing right on his naked organ. Of course it had to go.

But that's what made circumcision so humiliating too. It was as though ladies were taking away your clothes and then saying, That's not enough, little fellow, we need to tug a little more of you out into the open. Make you, yes, "extra naked."

Cal felt the utter femininity of the room. Women and girls and, on the other hand, his solitary self, naked, on display, a single specimen of boy spread out on a sheet, his penis awaiting in fear the doctor's special knife. The rest was women and girls: long hair, smooth cheeks, reddened lips, jewelry. And dresses. Absolutely everyone skirted. His baby-sitter, a young teenager whom he'd only seen before now in well-worn jeans: in a kilt today, and under it white tights. His friends, his schoolmates - everyone in party clothes. Their beautiful dresses would always be a central part of Cal's memory of this day. Even much later, as an adolescent, Cal would regard their clothes as a truer revelation of women's essence than anything concealed beneath. Cal knew that women had their own kind of organs, tucked inside them. But even after puberty he would rarely imagine them. For him, women would always be what they seemed on the outside: smooth, imperturbable bodies, more like serene goddesses than pliant flesh and blood. What if they did have secret parts? No man could control them with a glance. Never would they spring and live for him, or humbly swell beneath his careless power. Nor did they offer to amuse him with their easy pain: Cal had only to think of his testicles, daintily suspended in their tenuous sack, to feel anew the vast distance that separates man from woman.

"I'm going to spray you now with some stuff, Cal," Doctor Barbara said. "It'll feel cool and make your dicky get numb." Despite the warning, the icy liquid startled the boy and made him shake. The anesthetic was watery and Doctor Barbara had used lots of it. It soaked Cal's scrotum and dripped plentifully onto his belly and thighs. Wherever it fell, a frigid cold set in. Cal's penis frosted over. The numbness constricted and stiffened his innocent organ. This thing, his circumcision, was truly about to happen. Cal's heart pounded and his eyes filled with tears. "Can I have someone to hold his shoulders down, please," the doctor said. "Cal, sweetie, let your head lie back now." He had trouble giving in, but even when he did, his shaking continued. A woman appeared above him, gloved and masked, and leaned on his shoulders. He smelled her perfume and noticed through his clouded gaze her long ear-rings and shadowed eyes.

She pressed him gently at first but bore down more firmly when he failed to stop shaking. Aunt Paula was staying somewhere in the background. Held down like this, Cal had no hope of seeing her, but he thought he heard her voice on the far side of the room. Aunt Paula sounded agitated, choked up. Cal thought he heard her say, "My baby... , " in mournful syllables. Another woman seemed to be comforting her. "For the best," Cal heard her murmur, and "Really, Paula, he'll be okay."

Doctor Barbara was gripping Cal's penis between her fingers again. Her touch was far away, just on the edge of sensation, but it mingled strangely with the cold. "It's time now, Cal," the doctor said. "Be as still as you can be. Everybody, assistants, it's time," she announced. Even guests who had not been peering at the patient before now moved closer to the table. Cal shook and sobbed and began to heave.

"I'll need another for his middle," the doctor called. "Someone?" A teenage girl came forward and quickly donned the sterile gloves and mask. The doctor planted the girl's two hands squarely on Cal's stomach. He heaved against them but the motion was no longer communicated to his pelvis. "Excellent," Doctor Barbara said. She held her scalpel high for a moment, then quickly circumcised the boy. "It's nothing," she said. She was already dressing the wound.

The guests let out a communal sigh of relief and turned to the refreshments. Aunt Paula rushed to the table and lifted Cal into her arms. "Oh, my darling, my good, brave darling, you have been so strong today." Aunt Paula's eyes were glistening. "I love you so, my wonderful boy. Oh, look at your poor, sweet penis. How I wish that boys weren't born like that. Then we wouldn't have to do this awful thing to them. But we have to, Cal. We have to. Don't we?"

Cal nodded weakly. "Do you see, everybody? Do you see, ladies? Girls, do you see? Cal knows that we had to do this thing to him. My sweet baby understands."

But Cal was crying now. The cold was leaving his penis and the pain that replaced it was beginning to radiate. He begged to go to his bed, but Aunt Paula explained that he had to stay near her and the doctor for an hour at least. Besides, he was the guest of honor. A cot had been prepared for him in a corner of the room and Paula carried him to it. He lay propped up, softly sobbing. Pain was in flower all through his groin. All about him women and girls were laughing. Sometimes, he thought, he himself must have been the object of their mirth, he and his ordeal and the manifest horrors of being a boy, because girls would look his way and whisper into one another's ear and laugh. For very much longer than an hour Cal watched this female gala through his tears.

Not the smallest thing in Cal's small life escaped the lessons of that day. The way he donned his clothes, how he felt once in them, the way he shed them. The way he played when he was alone with his miniature vehicles, or with other boys, mimicking the sounds of sirens and guns, the gruffness of fearless men. In the midst of the most boisterous adventure Cal would flag. A sadness fell for him like a concealing shadow over the virile game. To his friends it was as though a companion invisible to them had taken him aside. To Cal the vision was always near. He would see himself on the white sheet, a woman delicately exhibiting his penis between her gloved fingers, girlwomen studying his pinioned nakedness. He would feel the cold, the sickly wetness - antiseptic, anesthesia, blood - his naked belly heaving against a young girl's hands, the benumbed edge of the scalpel feeling deceitfully blunt against his undervalued organ. As he propelled a tiny race-car or launched a tiny rocket, as he made war-like noises in unison with other boys, a sense of shame and imposture would betray him, draining his energy, stunting his roar, wrenching him half-circle to show him the truth of his life in slighted tears and shivering humiliation.

Cal had learned what he was. Such a lesson forms the prelude to desire. Not to ordinary wishes, of course: except for his hope of pleasing Aunt Paula, Cal had never wished for anything he was subjected to that day. What boy wishes to have his nakedness made a spectacle for the amusement of women and girls? What boy wishes to be held down on a table by them and forced to show his fear, to cry and shake uncontrollably, and in the end have a knife drawn by a woman across the organ that he alone in this roomful of females possesses?

Yet there was something in addition to horror and shame in these memories. Even as he shuddered at them, Cal's penis would stiffen with unwelcome pleasure. His mind might protest, but the hard-on persisted. And if he gently stroked the margin of his extra-naked glans? Like a conditioned reflex, the movement would cause him to picture Doctor Barbara with her scalpel poised high above him - but Cal's penis would not retreat in fear; on the contrary, a ripple of joy would pass through it and the muscle at its base would twitch and strain, as though it were trying to meet the doctor's knife half-way. Even before his wound had healed, women and girls began to catch Cal's eye, in a way they hadn't earlier and don't normally do in the case of a boy so young. Yet what he felt toward them was not ordinary lust, but a deference just tinged with formless yearning.

As for the women and girls who had been present that decisive day: whenever Cal encountered even the youngest of them, he was aware, along with the deference and shy desire, of a powerful but obscure sense of obligation toward her. Would he owe all of these penis-less spectators a life-long duty to keep the memory of what they'd shared alive, to acknowledge in some way at every future meeting forever the force of what they had done to him? It seemed an unfair expectation of a little boy with so much life ahead, but any other view was worse than unfair: it had simply become impossible.

Surely Aunt Paula knew this. Wasn't the "grand idea" she came up with meant to help Cal realize and even exceed his duty toward the girls? It isn't easy to say when exactly she resolved upon the powerful new rule that was to make the sweet dominion of women the daily order of Cal's life. Cal was six: how much longer most of us have waited to taste the privilege of submission. But for Cal the ground was laid on the triumphant day he joined the legions of those with uncapped cocks.

Despite the distress she had felt that day at the sight of her nephew's terror and pain, Paula was convinced that she had been gloriously right about every aspect of his circumcision. It had made him arable ground. He had learned how sure-footed and festive women's power could be, and how pervasive. He had learned that women can hurt and women can humiliate profoundly, at hardly any cost to their own composure. By the end of the afternoon, Paula had regained her convictions. As a farewell gesture to her guests, she'd invited them all - "especially you girls" - to return in a few weeks - "just ring to make sure we're here" - to see how Cal's "new, extra-naked penis" was coming along. Cal could hear girls whispering, "Can I, mom? Can I come back?" and moms saying, "Of course, darling." Anyhow, Doctor Barbara had to drop in and check, and Paula thought it a good idea to have a few of Cal's schoolmates and a couple of older girls on hand for that. It wasn't as frightening as the operation itself, but, like a booster-shot, it raised the titer of humility in Cal's blood. Cal didn't dare ask why it had to be done this way. He knew he had no say in the matter. Girls all around, Cal disrobing in front of them, even having to lie on the table again and have two girls spread his legs while the doctor gave his penis a good, long look. No sheet this time, no masks or gloves, the girls in jeans, not dresses, but more wretchedness, in a way, in this hurried ordinariness. And, in any case, the same cold reduction to a specimen of breakable manhood in the hands of beings whose bodies, unafflicted with penises and testes, made it impossible for them to comprehend, let alone regret, the relentlessness of the shame they were causing.

>From this and the subsequent visits of girls invited to check in on Cal's progress, Aunt Paula in a short time turned his disrobing into a frequent drill and finally a hectic routine.

Girls who had witnessed Cal's submission first hand because their moms were friends of Paula's passed the word along to their friends, who passed it down the girl-continuum to friends of theirs. There was a naked boy to be seen any time you liked - and not just seen, but played with. All you had to do was ask his aunt, who said it was good for him to be girls' slave. She had a rule, no matter what, if there were girls (or grown-up women) visiting, this boy had to go around naked in front of them. That was it, no exceptions. You could ignore him or go off with him. He'd just do it for you, take his clothes off while you watched and never make any trouble. He would kneel down in front of you, girls who had seen it said, just like a real slave, and there wasn't anything you couldn't do to him. You could ask him questions about his boy things and even touch them if you wanted. His aunt didn't mind at all, and nobody even knew whether he did. Nobody asked him. Nobody really cared. The girls who heard all this said it was incredible but they'd believe it when they saw it. Cal had many visitors.