Two Four Six: Readings

I may have told this story before. As a gentleman of a certain age, I have to worry about that. Memory, the old joke runs, is the second thing to go. If I've told you this before, my apologies. The issue does haunt me, though.

Now I'd want to be clear--- I'm using one experience with one person as a hook for the story, but that person, that individual, isn't herself at issue. What happened is only a point d'appui for launching off into something more abstract. I do hope you'll keep that in mind.

Some years ago I was exploring on-line erotica sites, and I found a site (stories + blog) by a writer who called herself Remittance Girl. Her site bio and some of her blog entries indicated that she was based somewhere in southeast Asia, that she worked (or had worked) as some kind of teacher. I liked that. I probably have a romanticized version of teaching English in Asia in my head, and that seemed like the sort of expat life I'd be leading in a better world.  In any case, I liked her site and her stories. The writing was very good, and the tone was dark and transgressive and had a goth-s/m kind of focus. The first story I read was about some sort of sex vampires, and the opening scene in a Moscow aerodrome was very hot. There was a serialized novel, too, a very dark thing about an American hostess in Tokyo kidnapped and used/trained as a sex slave by a Yakuza boss. Again--- excellent writing, all very hot. I thought she was a fine writer, and I enjoyed her essays on expat life, erotica, and the culture wars around sexuality in the new century.

Be clear.  I was never friends with her, nor did I try to be. I read along at her blog and left a handful of desultory comments. Again, this was never about the person.

What happened is that one day there was a discussion about the issue of product placement in novels. I forget how it all came up. I had to grin at the topic. I was remembering the so-called "sex and shopping" ("shopping and fucking") novels of the Eighties. Was the lead author of the genre Judith Krantz? The underlying appeal of the genre was that the novels were all about brand names. Not only were the male leads impossibly handsome and impossibly wealthy, the female leads all moved in a world of Rodeo Drive or Upper East Side boutiques. They wore lovingly-described designer dresses and shoes, wore specific kinds of make-up and perfume. The hotels where they conducted affairs all had specific names and well-cataloged amenities. I wasn't a fan of the genre, although the small bookstore where I worked in those days sold a lot of them. What I liked about the genre was the world-building and attention to detail. That's how things went bad,

I think that Remittance Girl was angered by the materialism in books like that. She may have disliked the late-capitalist shopping fantasy or the equation of shopping with orgasm. Anyway, I did comment that I liked details like brand names, that I liked erotica that was set in well-defined upper-class settings. Let's remember that back in the days of the Long Ago I bought copies of "The Official Preppy Handbook" and "The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook" and pored over the lists of class markers--- clothing brands, vocabulary, accessories. One of the great attractions for me in "Story of O" was that the novel required a hidden chateau as a set and moved its characters through elegant Paris townhouses. I commented that I'd always seen class as an essential part of sex. Part of the sexual allure of something like "Story of O" was the idea of life inside a better, more elegant world a few thousand miles from where I grew up. I expected sex, I wrote, to come with the chance to move into better worlds. Sex was always better if the accessories were right--- what the parties wore, what the wines and decor were like, what kinds of hotels or bars or residences were used. Sex itself might be good, I wrote, but it needed sets and settings to make it really work.

That got me blocked and banned. I was never sure why--- whether I was taken as defending late-capitalist materialism or taken as seeing my partners as no more than stage props. Well, it's been years now--- five years, I think. The event stays with me as a symbol. I'm not sure if Remittance Girl is still writing and blogging or if she's on social media--- not that those things matter, and here in 2019, erotica is the last thing people are worried about. Politics in what used to be the lands of liberal democracy has killed the idea of erotica and sex blogs.

I do see the world as made up of stories, not atoms. Details matter to me; they always have. I read to escape into other worlds, worlds that are crafted and shaped. The stories I'd like to be part of take place in a better world than the genteel poverty of my own. The idea of sex for me will always require not flesh as much as it requires sets and settings. Sex in my rooms here can never be as good as sex in stories, sex in a rooftop pool high above Shanghai or an alcove in the Great Hall at Trinity College Cambridge. Or even by a campfire on the Wainuiomata shore. I suppose I have always been attracted to s/m because it requires accessories and accoutrements.  I rank-order the places, of course, and I ache with envy when a lovely friend tells me she's had sex in some setting (a hotel pool, the front seat of an Aston-Martin, the office of a distinguished faculty member). Sets matter, settings matter, costumes matter. I want sex to be shaped into a narrative arc, into stories I can tell, into films I can replay and relive in my head.

When I do read erotica, I want details. What did the girl wear exactly? What school or regimental tie did her male partner wear? Which hotel in Melbourne or Manhattan were they at? These things matter. If there's no crafted tale that can be told or relived later, what's the point?