The Life Model

I was – if I remember correctly – 23 years old when I first started modelling. It was for art classes, back then. I had read about life modelling in a magazine article, and since I had exhibitionist tendencies, the thought of being the only naked person in a room full of people appealed to me. I made a couple of ‘phone calls round the colleges and art schools, looking for vacancies and got my first job at Telford College. Another model had to cancel, so I got a call one Sunday evening, asking if I was free to work the following morning.

I was glad I didn’t have so long to wait, because right away, I started feeling nervous. It’s one thing to imagine taking my clothes off and letting a lot of strangers look at me and draw me, but something completely different to face up to the imminent prospect of it actually happening. Obviously, since the moment I had first thought about this kind of work, I had been coping with various fears and paranoid fantasies. But those had been – until that point – just abstract thoughts at the back of my head, to be dealt with only when the situation arose. Well, now that the situation was not only real, but mere hours away, the abstract suddenly became very concrete and those fears and paranoid fantasies suddenly became a lot harder to just push aside and ignore.

Being a young male, the focus of my concerns was typical and embarrassingly predictable. Sometimes it seems that just about very thought at that age is located somewhere in the groin, and this was no exception. The biggest of all the fears was one that plagues virtually every male on the planet at some point, anyway – that of the unwanted, uninvited, unwelcome erection.

Now, in many cases, this isn’t such a devastating event. It’s generally not too difficult to make a discrete adjustment, so that as long as the erection is snug against the body, there is enough room within the clothing to conceal its bulk. The problems usually start when a penis is pointing downwards before it gets hard, because then it has to rise – and that’s where the tenting effect usually comes in. So long as it’s pointing upwards, however, there is less “shifting” involved. There’s a bit of a debate about the various merits between tight and loose underwear, but I’m personally in favour of tight boxers for this very reason. I know that tight underwear is being held responsible for a potential drop in sperm count, but when I weigh that factor against a less obvious erection and comfort – I like my penis to have a bit of support, rather than slipping about all over the place – I’ll cope with the lowered count.

Anyway, the following morning saw me in the art department of Telford College, waiting to speak to the art tutor, who duly turned up and showed me to the room I was to pose in. There was a screen in the corner of the room, which I was required to get changed behind. I was very tense by this stage, because I’d had a persistent erection all morning. In an effort to plan ahead, I had started the day off by masturbating before I got out of bed, but that had obviously not worked. Fair enough – it’s always a pleasant way to start the day, but the desired effect had its roots in practically, more than pleasure. And that had obviously failed. There was always Plan B – although I was starting to sweat about what would happen if Plan B didn’t work either.

One problem at a time, however. Now I wanted to make sure that there had been absolutely no room for misunderstanding anywhere along the line, so it was important to make sure that this work definitely required nudity. And since the tutor had told me to go behind the screen to get “changed” rather than “undressed”, I suddenly worried about his choice of words. Christ, what I was to get undressed and walk into the room naked, when I was supposed to be wearing some kind of costume – what kind of weirdo would I look like? The fear of the unwanted, uninvited, unwelcome erection was briefly replaced by the fear of being branded a streaker or a flasher and possibly even being arrested. My imagination truly was working wonders that morning.

The tutor assured me that I was required to be naked and then asked me if I had brought a robe along with me. I could have slapped myself in the forehead at that point. How many times had I seen adverts and TV programmes where the life model had casually dropped their robes to the floor and assumed their pose in front of their intent students? It was the most basic of props and I hadn’t even thought about it. On the surface, it seems simple enough – no big deal, really – but in my heated imagination, it meant a bit more than that. It was the difference between slinking into the room without that one final barrier to be discarded and striding in confidently, knowing that full nudity would only happen when I was ready for it to happen.

Itwasn’t that big a deal really, and I realised that when I stepped behind the screen and thought about it for a few seconds. It was a prop – nothing more. The only benefit it could give me was a psychological one, and if I still had this erection that was going to be a tenuous benefit at best.

Now, I’m not exactly carrying a monster between my legs, but I have been told by various people that I’m gifted and should be proud of it. It might be a shallow thing to be proud of, but shallow or not – I’m still happy to have been blessed with enough inches that I can describe myself as “fairly big” – though generally I prefer to say “slightly above average”. That’s not so much a lingering sense of modesty, as an acknowledgement that there are still people who would look on my penis with disdain. I still feel smug when I see a cat and modest when I see a horse, so it’s all relative, in the end.

The relevance of that last paragraph might escape most readers, so I should get to the point now – it’s connected with what I previously said about the benefit a robe could give me being psychological at best. I was recently told that the size of a man’s penis has a crucial effect on the appearance of his erection. Apparently, when a man is on his feet, while “small” penises tend to point straight up in the air, “large” ones succumb to gravity much more and tend to point forward, instead. When he’s sitting down, however, they invariably point upwards. Mine has always pointed forward, so without anything to strap it against my body – back to the tight underwear again – a robe would have done nothing at all to conceal it. Hence the tenuous nature of the psychological advantage. Incidentally, that bit of information did wonders for my ego, since I had previously worried at my inability to produce an erection that pointed in the desired direction.

So, by this stage I was behind the screen. There was a chair there – nothing more – so I sat down and pondered my situation for a moment. The erection had been intermittent until this point, but now it was definitely there. After a moment, I too the next step and got undressed. I sat down again, and glared at it, but it showed no signs of wanting to go down at all.

I couldn’t imagine stepping out from behind the screen like that. In fact, there was no way I was going to. I was more scared at that point than I had been since I first got the ‘phone call – not of the erection, but of the prospect of my having to put my clothes back on, admit that I’d made a mistake and slinking past a room full of art students and escaping. I fretted about what they’d think, I fretted about whether they’d know that it was an erection that had defeated me, I fretted about whether having worked that out, they’d assume that I was just a dirty little pervert who couldn’t even work up the guts to flash the room, or streak properly. Most of all though, I fretted about what my defeat would imply to me, personally. I had set out, not only to enjoy the sensuality of my own exhibitionist nature, but to conquer the nudity taboo that was holding me back from appreciating it. If I couldn’t do this, then I would have lost a vital battle with my own inhibitions, and this was a battle I really needed to win. It’s hard to believe now, but at that point I was a very introverted person and what I was really doing that day was taking the first step at dragging the extrovert into the spotlight where it really belonged.

Plan B was all about misdirection. I knew exactly where the unwanted, uninvited, unwelcome erection was drawing its power from and it was time to cut that power off at the source. I stood up, gathered my discarded clothes together and concentrated on folding them up very neatly and packing them inside my bag. I focussed on that job completely and rigidly. And then, while I was ignoring it, the erection realised it was unwanted, uninvited and unwelcome and gradually wilted. There was a brief pause in its downward journey when I took note of the success of Plan B, but immediately I focussed on the task at hand once more and it wilted further.

I kept adjust and packing my bag until the tutor called on me to join the class. I stepped out from behind the screen and nervously paced across the room, in front of the students. Even while the tension threatened to overwhelm me at the thought of being seen naked by so many strangers, part of me rejoiced at the very same thing and my penis noted that second emotion and tried to rise again. But I was prepared for that and immediately countered the rising before it managed to get too far. I started reciting a poem inside my head. It was a poem I was trying to memorise, for precisely this reason. The first, second and third stanzas of Robert Burns’To a mouse, because I was having difficulty with the third one and so long as I was struggling to remember the words, I wasn’t thinking of my penis. And if I wasn’t thinking about my penis – or anything else sexual – then it had no reason to rise. OK, so it was semi-erect when I entered the room, but I could cope with that. There are lots of points between flaccidity and erection, with varying degrees of social acceptability, depending on the environment. Although I figured that my self-control was just about variable enough that mine might raise a couple of eyebrows at some point, I was finally starting to be fairly confident that it was going to be on reasonably good behaviour, now.

It’s ironic, really, that I never got into any serious problems for another few months…

That first day was a bit of an ordeal, but it wasn’t long before I really got into the swing of things. In fact, once the first week was past, it all became disappointingly and depressingly mundane. I never really wanted life modelling to become something sexual – for reasons that should be abundantly clear by now – but I thought that there would be a persistently sensual element, at least. But there were too many other factors at work for that to happen.

Most of the poses were uncomfortable and a lot of them were downright painful. The various tutors would invariably start off by telling me to get comfortable, before walking round me and critically looking at me from all angles, before suggesting changes to make the pose more “interesting”. An arm would be raised, a leg extended and ultimately, I would be in some spiteful caricature of the position I had started off in. Every so often, I would get a good pose, but even the most comfortable of positions require some minor adjustment after a while, to prevent limbs from becoming stiff.

With all the concentration that the poses tended to require, the novelty value and the pleasure of actually being naked quickly and inevitably began to wane. There was no way that the sensuality could survive for long. I never quite lost the enjoyment of that moment when I would drop my robe in front of the whole class, but that enjoyment was short-lived at best. There was a definite charge to the moment. Not quite sexual, but definitely a sensual one – but afterwards, there was never anywhere for that charge to go. Truthfully, it wasn’t like I ever thought I had an appreciative audience. The artists always seemed that bit too clinical for that. Well, of course, they had their minds on a higher purpose. Still, I could never get used to the editing process they always seemed to use. I would take a look at the pictures during my breaks and invariably find either a strangely blank spot, or a quickly sketched, generic set of genitals that bore no resemblance at all to my own. It was all very disheartening.

Eventually, though, came the day when my hard-won self-control finally fell apart on me. That day started off like every other that had gone before, with the exception of those earliest days when I was so nervous. I went behind the screen, got undressed, put on my robe and entered the classroom as normal. On this occasion, it seemed like I was going to get an easy pose – there was even an arm-chair in the room, with all the artists gathered in front, where they would be able to see me clearly, when I was positioned. The tutor was even satisfied with the minimum of adjustments, once I was settled and those adjustments merely had me sprawled even more luxuriously and comfortably. I was nestled into the corner of one of the arms, half-lying and half-sitting, with one leg sprawled over the other arm and the other settled on the floor. I was happily contemplating the prospect of even getting some sleep while I “worked”.

The first stirrings of my erection caused no real concern. I had, by then, lost count of the amount of times I had felt that familiar sensation, even during fairly arduous poses, so I merely started mentally reciting To a mouse to myself. The whole poem, by this stage – I had long since memorised the rest of it. Plan A had long since been discarded except as a pleasant start to the day, so Plan B had turned into the new Plan A. It worried me – but not unduly – when for once, this ploy didn’t have its usual full effect. The rising slowed slightly, but didn’t stop. My penis had started off nestled between my legs, but suddenly it was now lying across my right thigh – still twitching and still rising, albeit slightly more slowly now.

I had developed the strategy over the intervening months, however, and merely switched tactics at that point. Poetry is a good focus, but it doesn’t have to be about words – numbers are probably better, since they’re more clinical. I counted, very slowly, from one to ten and tried very hard to fill my head with nothing but numbers. Don’t think about my penis. Don’t think about my imminent erection. Anything but that. Somehow, though, it wasn’t working.

My penis was now starting to rise against my stomach. I was starting to panic now. At this point I was deluding myself that it still hadn’t risen too far – that nobody was going to notice that I was practically erect. I was hoping that if anyone cared to look, then they would see nothing more than mild stirrings. Of course I was kidding myself. I wasn’t fully erect, but the distinction was an academic one. It was something more than a semi.

I switched tactics again. It was my belief, at that point, that there wasn’t an erection in existence that could stand up to a sustained attack of German numbers. If counting was already clinical, then counting in German was clinical squared – or so I reasoned. Perhaps it was, but it wasn’t clinical enough.

I had forgotten a cardinal rule, though. The entire point of the poetry and the counting was about distraction, but my panic had taken over. The best way to fight an erection under those circumstances was to ignore it completely, but I was trying so hard to get rid of it that it was filling my mind now. I could feel it pulsing and throbbing and that was what provided the next problem. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of a stirring penis. It feels pleasant and exciting. It doesn’t necessarily have a sexual origin, but by its very nature, it just can’t help provoking sexual feelings – or sexual panic. There shouldn’t be an automatic compulsion to masturbate and chase down an orgasm – that brings a conclusion to a sensation that could be savoured, instead.

And now those confused feelings were flushing through me and multiplying my problems. There was no longer any denying of what was happening. The erection was full-blown and complete and by now everybody had noticed it. My own exhibitionist nature was my chief enemy here – there was definitely a part of me that was very turned on, despite my discomfort. I was surprised that most of the artists seemed completely unconcerned and carried on with their work. I was somewhat less surprised that the only two who did seem to be responding were the two teenage girls who had positioned themselves directly in front of me from the very start. As they stared directly at me, giggled and nudged themselves, I tried to maintain my composure by staring straight out the window and giving the impression of completely ignoring my own condition. The only response left to me was maintaining the last remnants of my own dignity.

The tutor noticed the problem, but even she ignored it. When she eventually said it was time for a break, I had been erect for so long, that I was practically beyond embarrassment. I had given up on trying to lose my erection. There was no longer any point, when it had been noticed by everyone, so I just grabbed my robe and hurried behind the screen, enjoying the tactile sensations as my penis bounced in front of me as I hurried for safety and privacy.

There was a final disappointment at the end of the day, when I was fully dressed and took my opportunity to take a look at the pictures. Not one artist had taken the opportunity to draw me in my full glory. I contented myself with the possibility that perhaps the female students had been too embarrassed and the males too intimidated. Well, it was a possibility.