There’s a special secret sin to desiring an ugly man. I don’t mean someone mediocre with a few too many pounds around the middle. I mean someone truly ugly. Bones that refuse the grace of symmetry. Skin ravaged by early acne or one of those fevers one hardly ever hears of any more. Or scars that pull unintentional expressions, cut through eyebrows, pucker muscles into novel crevices. Burns that leave their shiny, lacy traces. Ugliness beyond the reparation of make-up or surgery.
There was a curious thrill in the fact that this man would never be cast in a television show or a film. Not even in a reality TV show about ugly people. His ugliness was beyond the garnering of sympathy. He’d never grace the page of a magazine or a website as an example of ‘everyman’ or even as marginally ‘unfortunate’ man. Although Dario Argento might have, at one time, hired him for the minor role of the nameless undertaker who’d fucked one too many corpses.
He was medievally ugly. As if that ancient belief that the sins of the soul really did reveal themselves on the body and this man had spent his entire life committing indescribable atrocities.
I wanted him instantly and beyond reason. I wanted to kiss that face so wrong that no sane person would kiss it. I wanted those wrecked hands on me. Each knuckle misshapen from too much work and too much breakage. The skin on their backs riddled with tendons and veins. I imagined them on my skin, on my hips, on my breasts. Gripping and tugging and clutching. Those crippled, bent fingers sunk into me.
I looked at him and immediately I was wet. And then, in a blink of an eye, he was gone.
“Never mind,” I thought. “I’ll find you again.” There are so few of you left in this world.
This reminds me of a story I read, ages ago, in the Olympia Reader about a girl who lusted after a hunchback (sorry, can’t remember title or author). The story was told from the hunchback’s point of view (or so I remember) – yours might be the mirror narrative.
Strange perspective. Kind of threw me on this one. Dont know what to think.
“Bones that refuse the grace of symmetry” – love that line.
The role of pure aesthetics, or in this case an anti-aesthetic, in our desire is one that has always interested me, but not one I have been able to explore in my art. You nailed it rather effortlessly here.
Thank you.
I’ve desired physically ugly men before, numerous times, and it has felt particularly fierce and heart thudding and intimate inside. It was never the physicality itself, though. I didn’t have a special desire for ugliness. And I wasn’t thinking along the thoughtful lines you describe, sins written on the body.
I think the attractive ugly men revealed extra…life force? Intelligence and wit and sense of irony and sensuality? Maybe they’d been granted more of these things when they were made; maybe the physiognomic challenges they faced over the years forced them to cultivate and use their inner strengths more effectively.
I’d choose an ugly man with a twinkle in his eye over a blank-faced handsome man.
extra…life force
Yes, that’s an interesting way to describe it.
I have never been a big fan of erotic literature, even as a young horny man. My writing, much to the surprise of those who know me, contains very little sex or erotica. But, your writing has a wonderful descriptive quality to it that is remarkably compelling. I intend to read more of your work. It is fascinating in its perspective.
Best regards,
Charles Coker
I felt that thrill – but I couldn’t hold it for long. He turned out to be beautiful.
I am struggling with a comment here and yet so many thoughts whizz through my brain having read this. I don’t desire ‘ugly’ but I do desire truth and in perfection there is no truth for me. Don’t think those words make any sense to anyone else but me but they are they best I can do for now on this subject
Mollyxxx
No, they make a LOT of sense to me.