The Roper Report - Section 6

Lop and Me

	Index
	Prologue
	The Roper Report
		Cover
		Introduction
		Section 1
		Section 2
		Section 3
		Section 4
		Section 5
		Section 6
		Section 7
		Section 8
		Section 9
		Section 10
		Appendix A
		Appendix B
	Perry's Tale
	Pictorial Record

Case study

Sec.6. (The very first field observation I made after arriving.) I was hospitably received by a family group in Clan 24 and was settling down to the lengthy conversational protocol normally required of a visiting male, the co-mates sitting on their haunches and me on a stump, when the subject of the puberty of the family’s second-oldest resident male twins came up in conversation. The immediately ensuing scene is described in footnote 25, above.

When the co-father "Mark" had held up his son’s scrotum for my inspection, and made his comment about how suddenly the boys seem to have "ripened", as their term for it is, he sighed and tentatively said something over his shoulder in their language (which I surmise they did not know I understand) to his co-mate "Lucas" about "no time like the present–?" The youngster, standing between his co-father’s knees, his tail bashfully wrapped around one thigh, was looking away and making "Aw, Dad" noises of the sort familiar throughout the galaxy in one or another species-specific context. "Opening" is in any case something regarded with both fascination and dread by the young. Prior to opening, they are seemingly quite sexless, so don’t grasp the significance of it or the satisfactions, social and physical, that follow from it. All they understand is that it’s a disorienting experience; that they will never be the same afterwards; that it is probably painful. The latter impression may be ascribed to misinterpretation of the copulatory responses of the adults. (Fn 29)

"Lucas", however, looked ill at ease. Not because I was there–in my experience, wlkon will talk unabashedly about what they are doing and why, even as they are coupling. "Lucas" said, in effect, "Yes–but–I fucked today already. ["Fuck" translates a verb that exclusively to male-female sexual contact; see Sec.Sec.8.1, 8.4] And–look, Mark–if we don’t "make", and soon–"

Fn 29. Wlkon commonly report that ejaculation is painful "until you get used to it". That suggests that climax is an intense experience. On the other hand, no male wlko in my acquaintance ever said anything about having to "get used to" being penetrated anally. It appears that soon after the sphincters reach full dilation for the first time the sensation is apperceived as pleasurable and desirable on several interconnected planes

He didn’t have to finish. The message was that at that particular moment, the act of "opening" the boys–which entails both fathers penetrating both boys, and not just entering them anally but actually ejaculating–so far from being an irresistable enticement, would put the men at serious risk of "going cold", since after "opening" the boys they couldn’t be certain of their phallic readiness for sodomizing one another.

Next "Lucas" approached "Mark" and the boy, hugged the youth and licked his neck, and told him (in Wlko) to go find his brother and tell him that he and "Mark" would open them day after tomorrow, and that they should decide what they wanted for presents (sekshik).

The boy was still being very bashful, but licked his co-fathers in turn, and loped off into the tall grass by the water. "Lucas" then wordlessly approached "Mark" and knelt between his thighs and put his hands on "Mark’s" shoulders as his tail came from between his legs and coiled once around "Mark’s" red-furred scrotum. He licked his brother’s cheek, and even before he said "Link to me?", I could see the yellowish fluids welling out of "Mark’s" penis sheath, followed almost instantaneously by the sudden appearance of the shiny black erection itself. (Fn 30)

Fn 30. "Lucas" was about 65, I’d estimate, and his coat was a light medium brown. But I’d noticed a red band on his tail similar to the red coloration around the groins and bellies of sexually active males, and had assumed it was a marking, genetic in origin. But his foreplay gesture of wrapping his tail around his co-mate’s testicles meant that "Mark’s" sexual exudations got on "Lucas’s" tail, and of course had the same effect on its fur as on the fur of the scrotum, penis sheath, thighs, and belly. I never saw such a mark on another male’s tail, though a number of females had something similar, as remarked above. (But it must be remembered that the reddish coloring would be hard to see in the darkening fur of older males in any case.) As much as male wlkon clearly enjoy male/male sex, there is less in the way of foreplay than when coupling heterosexually. A typical wlko encounter such as I observed between "Mark" and "Lucas" would have entailed nothing more than "Lucas" embracing "Mark" and licking his neck or cheek several times. Some wlkon purr things like "make me a man" or "drill me" or the equivalent ("link to me", because of its vulgarity, implies the speaker is at a fairly high level of sexual arousal). After a moment or two of licking, he will typically feel his mate’s erection between their bodies, if they are embracing tightly; or else see it, and of course sense the pheromones in the sexual discharges; and the two will lie down to copulate, the active partner on the recipient’s chest.

The male approached can refuse (or simply fail to become erect), but that response is rare.

As "Mark" said to me, a month or two after they’d "opened" their sons, "Those two! They’re nothing but animals! Once they got red they’d rather link than eat. The other day, when they were napping, I swear I saw Calvin show black and link to Ilya without even waking up!" ("Red" wlkon, from the stained fur on their bellies and groins, are sexually active. "Show black" is a term for "become erect" which is every bit as vulgar as "link (to)".) "Mark’s" observations were accurate, though there was in fact nothing unusual about the behavior of the boys.

For exactly the same reason, once a pair of siblings are "opened", their sexual contact with their fathers ceases. It is taboo in any case, but it is a matter of practical necessity: the specific sexual needs of adult males are so demanding that any temptation, for whatever reason, to dally with their young sons (or daughters) would mean dividing their coupling three ways–between themselves, their wives, and whatever other party–which would sooner rather than later result in both males "going cold". (Fn 31) No wlko of either sex ever expounded any such analysis to me, but the imperatives of the arithmetic, as it were, are inescapable.

Fn 31. Male siblings are responsible for one another, which (it may be speculated) cements the necessary sexual and social bonds long before procreative mating with females. It is reasonable to question how boys could find room in their activites for adult males in any case: the anecdote in the previous footnote is typical–for a year or two after being "opened", juveniles’ pseudo-homosexual activity may be fairly described as ceaseless. In fact, in the wlko language, "making (or, crudely, linking) like boys" [the word rendered boys actually means "recently-opened adolescents"] is an expression that means, roughly, doing anything single-mindedly or to the point of exhaustion.

When, as sometimes does happen, both co-mates go cold, it is more of an inconvenience than a calamity, somewhat more serious than letting the fire go out (the wlkon are not very skillful fire-makers), but not "the end of the world". The family group has two main choices. The first is to wait for the next wlkatar (see below), to be "made a man" again. The second, most remarkably, is for one or both of the co-mates to seek the services of a male of another species. This "other species" is a monux, that is, M. hipparion. (Fn 32)

Fn 32. See Appendix A. Of course in theory, if there are sexually active younger males in the family group, they could return the favor of "making fire" (as the expression has it) in a parent, but one of the very very few truly unbreakable sexual taboos among the wlkon–even at wlkatar–is a taboo against children copulating with their parents. Henderson speculates that the main value of this taboo (insofar as taboos ever have value) is to prevent sons from impregnating their mothers, and although it can’t be proved, he is probably right. Certainly, there’s no taboo against fathers penetrating their sons, at least in connection with one of the normal duties of fatherhood, as mentioned above: to "open" your sons, or "make fire"–copulate anally with them. But this strictly for the first time only, to "release" their male sexuality, and it is framed by ritual and custom.

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