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 had 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 questions 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 power girls 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 happier still, 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
the atrocious 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.