Three Zero Nine: Catalog

 I'm on the mailing list at several high-end sex toy boutiques. I've used their catalogs to buy gifts and accessories for young companions. Well, I use a couple of old-school equestrian shops to buy riding whips, but I suppose many such shops stay in business because of s/m far more than dressage. 

I'm had young companions thank me for the gifts I've bought them. And I've had FaceTime conversations with lovely young companions who were shopping in high-end sex toy boutiques in distant cities. I'm glad that the gifts were appreciated (and, yes, sometimes used together), but I remain out of the loop when girls tell me that they've been online shopping for sex toys or that they have a whole drawer in a bedroom dresser devoted to vibrators and dildos. I like the idea of accompanying a lovely girl while she shops for dildos, but there's something very alien about that. It's not something I could ever do on my own. I've seen lovely twenty-somethings earnestly consulting with sex boutique clerks over designs, colours, brand names. I can't imagine asking a clerk for advice in even the most gentrified sex boutique. That's not something straight males can do. My leggy posh blonde friend Jill in New Zealand lives in Wellington, where there's a rather famous sex toy boutique that delivers--- that has its own cadre of uniformed young women who deliver elegantly-wrapped sex toys to posh customers late into the night. I'd be far too afraid to open the door.

Over last weekend I found all the catalogs I had from sex toy suppliers and threw them away. They somehow seemed...pointless. I won't be ordering on line any longer. That really does seem pointless. There's no one in my life currently to buy bedroom gifts for, and I'm...worried that someone might find the catalogs and think that I used them to shop for myself. 

A male buying sex toys is seen as pathetic at best, creepy and disgusting at worst. And always a figure of mockery. I have no problem using toys on young companions, but I can't imagine using any myself. Girls in the past--- Levin, Liberty, my NZ friend, a certain lovely girl in the Home Counties, a Juilliard girl who was once a pro domme and who's now with the Vienna Philharmonic ---have asked to use toys on me. I've always refused--- gently, firmly, clearly. But you'd love it, they've told me. Just give yourself over to the sensations, give yourself to pleasure. No. No. That's not something I can do. There's always the fear that I'd be hearing the derisive laughter of the invisible audience in my head.

Sex toys are for lovely girls. Sex toys are ways they can find  pleasure or amplify it. I can't do that. Pleasure isn't something for straight males, and certainly not straight males of a certain age. Pleasure isn't something I can understand, and it's certainly not something I deserve.  Asking for pleasure, and especially asking for aids to pleasure, is a terrifying thing. I hate my own fears, but they're there.  Levin called across the boutique to the girl at the counter: do you have this in other colours? do you have ones that are shaped like uncut cock? uncut and with balls?  I of course froze and tried to will myself into invisibility. 

I can imagine talking about blindfolds and riding whips; I can imagine talking about candle wax and nipple clamps. I cannot imagine talking about any of the sex toys "for him" in the catalogs or at the upscale websites. Any sex aids for men seem designed to humiliate, to make the male user into an object of derision. And yet I feel envious of lovely young companions who can blithely buy toys to help them with orgasm. I've seen a girl look at a half-empty Corona bottle and suddenly laugh. This! she said. I so have to try this!  There's no male equivalent of that laugh. There's no male equivalent of the look that says that something is worth trying for fun. 

Well, the new year, the Year Twenty-One, is almost here. I won't be getting the sex boutique catalogs any more. No one to buy gifts for, of course. And it's impossible to think that I could ever be part of a world where using sex toys--- even with a lover I trusted ---would be safe. Pleasure isn't something that I can ask for, let alone seek on my own. There's nothing in the marketing plans of sex toy manufacturers for someone like me. Not this year, and not any other.

Three Zero Eight: Lessons

 I'd thought that I might be writing tonight about sex in hotels, but I decided in the end to write about what I'd learned in my life from porn. I suppose we can include written erotica in that.

I've been reading things on line about people's sexual problems, and one of the recurring themes in the comments is that people--- meaning of course cis straight white males ---have to stop learning about sex from porn. That immediately sent me to PornHub to do a random tour of categories. I spent a while looking through PornHub clips and trying to recall what I'd learned from porn.

I know that I learned some things. Though in my long-ago youth, it was harder to do. That was before the web, of course, long before there was anything like PornHub or its sister sites. To see porn in my youth I had to sneak into actual backstreet cinemas to watch movies. I was probably in my twenties before I saw porn on satellite channels, and I never had much of a porn collection on either videotape or DVD.  But I did learn things from porn. 

That makes sense for me, of course. I learned about so much in my life from books and films.  Novels and films shaped who I am. I read books to learn about what to wear, which wines to drink, how to behave at dinner parties. So why not porn?

I learned from porn (yes, from a book first, from "Story of O") that there were beautiful girls who didn't wear underwear. I learned that there were girls there in the ordinary world who were deliciously bare under skirts or shorts. I learned that I could suggest to lovers that they be panty-free. I learned that I could whisper to a lovely girl and tell her to wear nothing at all beneath a sundress while she walked with me down a beach or a city street--- learned that this could be an adventure. And it has become a signature thing for me--- asking girls with whom I'm involved to give up underwear, at least while out with me.

I learned that there were beautiful girls who slept naked.  I may--- may ---have learned that first from the early James Bond films, but certainly it was porn where I found that sleeping naked was something beautiful girls seemed to do everywhere. I watched that and knew--- even in my early teens ---that this was something I'd be asking lovers to do lifelong. 

Porn showed me new positions to try. Porn showed me new places for risky and thrilling encounters. Porn showed me that, yes, oral and anal did happen...and showed me how to do both. And the same is true for various kinds of s/m. Until I read about something, until I see it on a screen, it isn't real. 

Porn gave me an incentive to try things, to think that certain kinds of adventures were possible. It gave me the courage to offer up ideas and suggestions to lovers. Were the things that I asked about or found fascinating "unrealistic"?  Maybe. Or even probably. But "realistic" has never been what I was after. 

Porn offered me raw material that I could shape into things I could share, things that I use as guides to adventures and to creating stories for myself and a lover. Porn showed me what I could like, showed me things that I didn't know I'd like. 

I never thought that porn was a guide to what a girl looked or sounded like while having orgasms. I never thought that porn showed how large or how hard a male was supposed to be, or how often a male could perform. But then I wasn't interested in those things anyway.  I did think that porn showed me how sex should be lit, and how bodies can be posed for maximum visual effect. Porn taught me how sex could look. And I'll always be grateful to certain porn directors (e.g., Andrew Blake) for that.

Three Zero Seven: Permission

 As this grim and sullen year counts down to a close, I am wondering about the cartography of desire. I've been writing about this for a while, but the questions remain.  What are we still allowed to desire? What fantasies are we still allowed to have?

I have spent much of my life inside books (and not only erotica) looking for worlds where I'd like to live, looking for adventures and experiences I'd like to have. I've spent much of my life constructing fantasies--- about cities,  about lovers, about new lives. And I am increasingly worried about those things. Social media has made us all aware that we live at others' mercy. It's made us aware that anything we say or think or feel can be mocked and derided by strangers, that the disdain of total strangers can cost us jobs, respect, social standing. We've all had to become aware that the aether is haunted by people looking for excuses to be outraged, for excuses to attack and humiliate.

When I first began reading blogs--- twenty years ago, now ---the blogging world felt safe, felt like a place for building friendships and communities, felt like a place where you could talk about your thoughts, hopes, dreams, fantasies, desires and feel safe. Back in those days, I'd imagine blogging as being like sitting in a PurePod or some Wm. Gibson converted shipping container somewhere in the high desert, broadcasting out into the night. I imagined talking late into the night, telling stories, interviewing people by phone, getting emails and phone calls from distant cities.  It's all so much riskier now--- you're so much more vulnerable just for having thoughts and hopes and preferences.

I'm thinking that the time of blogs about sex is past. Given everything we've been through in the last few years, writing about sexual fantasies seems wretchedly self-centered and pointless. In a time of global pandemic, in a time when the American republic seems to have only very narrowly escaped a descent into right-populist authoritarian rule, sexual fantasies seem to be a dangerous distraction. And in an age of gender wars, desire (especially straight male desire) seems to be the enemy of social justice.  Sex, as any good revolutionary will tell you, is a distraction from important work. Sex is irrational, or at least a-rational, and fantasy worlds often embody images and tropes that represent parts of the current order that need to be swept away. As someone who subscribes to much of Marxism, I can't even disagree with that reasoning. 

But I will miss sex blogs and escort blogs if they vanish. I will miss knowing about adventures, costumes, scenarios, and  skills out there in the world. I'll miss checklists of what escorts have in their purses. I'll miss tales of which hotels in major cities are best for affairs and encounters. I'll miss reading tales of romantic and sexual adventures and learning about what's possible, learning about things worth trying with lovers in my own life. I'll miss knowing what beautiful Young Companions out over the aether have done in their lives and what they might (in some alternate timeline) do with me. I'll miss stories. I'll absolutely miss stories. And I'll miss sharing fantasies with lovely correspondents. I'll miss feeling like my own fantasies are worth something to someone. I'll miss feeling like I'm allowed to have fantasies at all.

These days... These days, whenever I think about erotica and fantasies, I find myself freezing up. I find myself paralyzed by fears that any fantasies I have are either repetitive and boring  and/or politically wrong. I can't imagine any fantasy as being judged only by a Young Companion with whom I'm sharing things. I can only imagine fantasies as being dissected and deconstructed by an invisible and hostile audience. I imagine harsh despotic voices telling me that I'm not allowed, now or ever, to want those things. It's not just the Freudian superego, either. It's the babble of voices out on the aether, telling me inside my head that I should be ashamed, that what I want unfits me for being part of any society. 

The days when fantasies and scenarios and fetishes could be offered up to lovers and would-be lovers as gifts and enticements, when you could share dark dreams with someone over drinks--- those days are gone.

I no longer know what thoughts I'm allowed to have, I know that in an age of "authenticity" and gender identity and  power analysis we're no longer encouraged or expected to experiment with sex and its components. Experimentation is looked down on as sharply as ever it was seventy years ago. It's been years now since strike the pose was a valid idea. It's been years since it's been seen as permissible to ask anyone to try anything new. I do know that I'm terrified of being cast out of the social pods where I live, and that kind of shame and fear is something new to me. I didn't have any of those feelings twenty years ago. But right now I'm totally paralyzed by them.