The Ultimate Guide, Chs. 1-4

I've started reading The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure, by Charlie Glickman and Aislinn Emirzian. I know a fair bit about the topic, but, as they say in the Introduction (p. xviii): "We thought we knew a lot before we started writing this book—we were surprised to discover how much more there was to know." I'm sure that's true, and I've already learned a few things.


So far I've read the first four chapters. The first chapter addresses some common questions about prostate play, including the ubiquitous "Aren't only [insert derogatory term for gay men here] into that?" The main discussion of that question, though, is deferred to Chapter 13, which I'm looking forward to reading. It seems to contain a lot of the same sort of excellent material on masculinity that one can find elsewhere on Glickman's site.
Chapter 2 introduces some of the benefits of prostate play, mostly drawing upon the results of a survey that Glickman and Emirzian did. Their own comments are interspersed with those of the (mostly) men who responded to that survey. I say "(mostly) men" because, as Glickman and Emirzian are careful to point out, transwomen usually have prostates as well, and there is a sidebar on pp. 18-19 devoted to that topic. I was not aware myself of how hormones and testosterone blockers affect the prostate.
If anything comes across clearly in Chapter 2, it is how varied people's experience of prostate stimulation is. Many people describe having ejaculatory orgasms very soon after the stimulation begins, whereas other men describe what Glickman and Emirzian call a "full-body orgasm" but that I tend just to call a "prostate orgasm". My own experience is more of the latter than the former, but I tend not to do penis stimulation at the same time as prostate stimulation.
I think it would have been worthwhile for Glickman and Emirzian to publish the results of their survey in some other form. Books like Shere Hite's The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality and The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality were extremely important, but the latter did not contain much on prostate stimulation. So the truth is that we still just do not know very much about people's experience of prostate stimulation.
Chapter 3 provides the necessary anatomical information about the prostate and includes a nice discussion of the similarities and differences between the "p-spot" (prostate) and the g-spot. It has always struck me, too, how similarly people describe g-spot and p-spot stimulation, and, in fact, that similarity has always been part of what attracted me to p-spot play. I tend to think of prostate orgasms, myself, as my feminine orgasms. (So, yeah, I'm a gender queer.) Here again, though, the main lesson seems to be how little we know about what, exactly, is being stimulated during p-spot or g-spot play and why it feels so good.
Chapter 4 talks about hygiene, which is a major concern for a lot of people. The truth, as someone once said, is that if you're going to engage in anal play, you're going to run into a bit of poop eventually. There are things you can do to make that less likely, the main one being cleaning yourself out. And Glickman and Emirzian give good advice about how to do that.
So far, then, so good.