Three Three Eight: Borderlands

 This is how it is. The girl talks and I sit across the table with my drink and listen. She's lovely, bright, bookish, and twenty-three. She tells me that she's non-binary, and we talk about how that's different (or if it is different) from her being bi. Her first and middle names are androgynous enough, and she likes that.

She's in skinny jeans and deck shoes, a mostly-unbuttoned men's dress shirt, a silver necklace with a pendant. Her hair is messy and looks like a pixie cut that's gotten away from her. She's strikingly lovely, yes, and I'm fortunate that she's there with me. She likes "androgynous" as a word. She asks if I think she'd make a beautiful gay boy, and I tell her yes. 

The way she's dressed at the bar is...what? Eve Babitz died a few days ago, and I'm thinking the girl could pass as a California gay boy in the mid-1960s...or at least as the film version of one. I can place her in my head as a boy in a gay bar in some imaginary movie from the 1960s or early 1970s, as a gay boy on some black-and-white late-night-cable rerun of an episode of "77 Sunset Strip". That would make her a memory of a memory, wouldn't it? She's not dressed in 1920s gay Oxbridge undergraduate drag-- like Donna Tartt at Bennington c. 1980.  She has a period California look, an air of effortless hedonism. 

What she's telling me is that she likes having boys in her bed that will role-play with her. She can't decide what makes her more hot-- being with a gay boy who'll treat her as a boy to be topped, or being with a straight boy she can persuade to act as her gay boyfriend or-- better --her girlfriend. She enjoys being topped like a boy, but she likes dressing straight boys up and making them beg to be topped and taken, too. She probably likes that more. 

Non-binary, she says, but she doesn't know how to get outside the terms of binary sex. Being with another girl is wonderful,  she tells me, but dressing up and using strap-ons with another girl is just...Lesbian Classic. What she likes, she says, is making boys, gay or straight, lose any sense of their own boundaries. 

She asks me if I know the word autogynephilia. I do know it-- it's a word used as an accusation in the Trans Wars. The angriest of the GC brigade use it against trans women. It's used to mean that trans women don't really see themselves as wholly or "actually" women, that they're simply fetishists excited by the idea of sex as a woman. The trans brigade reject the word absolutely. I've read some of the arguments around the word and don't know what to make of them. If you see yourself as a woman-- as "really" a woman --wouldn't you by definition be excited by the idea of having sex as a woman? And both GC  and TRA types reject and despise anything that might be "just" a fetish. 

The girl across the table tells me that she likes the idea of fetishes. She likes exploring fetishes, of focusing desire on things that have a kind of magic to them, of turning partners into someone and something new. Nair and make-up, she says. Depilate a  boy, do his make-up, teach him to "rock a miniskirt" and beg to be fucked-- there's nothing like that, she says. Make him into a hot teen girl, she says, then be inside him while he begs to be your rag doll, to have his holes stretched-- there's nothing like that. Make him love the look and feel of dressing up, teach him that it's magic. And the same thing works the other way, too, she says: wear a suit and tie, have a gay boy top her while he tells her what he'd tell a straight boy he was teaching to be a gay bottom. 

I  raise my drink and grin at her and ask if what she wants isn't a kind of meta-autogynephilia. I know that there's a "forced feminization" thing that some dommes do, and there's something of that in what she wants to do with boys. I'm just not sure whether she sees the "humiliation" part of that as actual degradation for the boy or just as pedagogy. Does she want to teach straight boys that they can be excited and aroused by what it must feel like to have sex as a girl? Does she want a waxed, mascara'd boy in a miniskirt to fuck her not as a trans woman with a cock or a "trans-lesbian", but as a boy who's learning to derive pleasure from pretending (or being made to pretend) that he's a girl? When she gets topped herself, she says, she loves it that the boy thinks she's good enough at pretending to be a gay boy for him to fuck.  I'd love to be a boy, she says, and have an older man make me dress up and be his girl. 

She can tell me these things because...? Because I'm older and could never be the beautiful boy her fantasies require? Because I'm someone who looks like he can talk about these things with her and not be shocked or appalled? Because I'm quiet and I'm doing my own Freudian Analyst fantasy-- letting her pour herself into my silence?

I do like listening to her. I like it that she says she sees herself as "non-binary", but that she wants to live on the border of binaries. She doesn't really want to be someone/something who's neither male nor female. What she wants is to turn from one to the other and back at will, to have the sensations of sex as each...and to take others into a land of sex in funhouse mirrors.  I like listening to her, and I want to hear more of her stories.

Three Three Seven: Learning Curve

I saw today that the singer Billie Eilish told an interviewer that she deeply dislikes porn because she blames porn for the bad, or at least deeply unsatisfying, sex she had as a teen. 

She's a fine singer, mind you. I quite like Billie Eilish's music, and she's an attractive girl. But...I will have to disagree with her on this. 

Teens have been having bad sex-- or just unsatisfying --sex since, well, forever. There's no way around that. Sex is like any other learned skill. There's a learning curve involved. Short of classes that actually teach sexual technique, sex is a learn-by-doing skill. When you start having sex-- or move on from the Solitary Vice to sex with a partner --you're starting with no experience and very little knowledge. I'll also note here that even the most thorough sex-ed class at school won't be able to give you more than academic knowledge of what you're doing. There's no way around the idea of a learning curve.

No one expects that you'll be a good driver or a good writer or a good pianist the first time you take up any of those things. I'm sure Ms. Eilish spent years working at becoming a musician. If you want to be good at sex, you need to do exactly what you'd do to be a writer or a chess player. You practice. You learn. You get better over time. 

We expect something-- romantic love, maybe --to magically make you able to enjoy sex, to please a partner, to feel pleasure. But there's no magic available. At sixteen you just stumble through a learning process-- all the physical awkwardness and bad timing and awkward conversations. You learn to get over being uncomfortable with bodies. You gradually acquire a sense of what your own body wants, of how to use your body to give pleasure to a partner. There's no way to get around the awkwardness and clumsiness of being new to sex. 

I completely fail to understand Ms. Eilish's dislike for porn. She seems surprised that "real people" don't look like they do in porn and that "real people" don't reach orgasm the way they do in porn. All I can say is that using porn to teach yourself about "real sex" is pointless. It's probably more pointless than using noir detective novels to teach you about criminal procedure. 

What did I learn from porn? I remember being in my teens and reading porn novels (oh, yes, I go back to a time before porn video and anything like PornHub) and...making notes. I do mean that literally-- making notes about things I wanted to try. I didn't expect that things in my own life would ever go exactly like they did in porn novels, but I knew that I was writing down things that I could try-- places and positions. I knew that one day I'd ask a partner about those things. They wouldn't work exactly like they did on the printed page, but they were things I could experiment with. Porn gave me things to try, things that might-- might --be useful as I acquired partners and lovers.

The same was true when I finally did see porn on video. I knew I wouldn't likely be with girls who looked like porn actresses, and in truth my own aesthetic preferences weren't for the porn actresses of the day. But I knew that what I was looking for was a set of possibilities. I wanted to see what was possible during sex. What were the positions that looked useful? What was there that you could try? I didn't expect to learn much more than that-- a range of possibilities, a list of things to experiment with. And of course I wanted to get a sense of what I'd be expected to know about if more experienced lovers questioned me. 

Porn let me know that certain activities were available to try. Porn gave me ideas about places where I could have sex, about places that I could turn into the settings for stories, about what things ( library stacks! a graveyard! an office desk!) could go on my checklist and could become part of stories shared with lovers. I didn't expect porn to be didactic, or even to be "true". I did expect it to serve as raw material that I could re-vamp and re-work and use. 

I've always been suspicious of any advice about bringing a partner to orgasm. I'm not sure that any advice really works. Or more exactly-- there's advice to be had about not being completely awful, but all the relevant advice is just defensive: not being awful at things. Being good at sex, though...that's something else altogether. I've taught myself over the years to assume that any signs of orgasm by a girl I'm with are polite social fictions. I will always try to give pleasure to a partner; I will always ask what pleases a partner. But I will also take as a given that any results I see or hear about are simply courtesy...or a way to provide closure to what we're doing.  Which is fine. I'll do what I can do, and I'll take any individual advice or suggestions a lover offers. But I don't expect-- I've never expected --orgasm in "real life" to look like it does on video. 

Everything has a learning curve. Ms. Eilish seems to assume that practice isn't needed, or that artifice isn't just as much a part of sex as it is of any other social interaction. Porn is useful as a source of raw material: ah, yes-- her legs over my shoulders! Ah, yes-- sex in the rooftop infinity pool! We should try that!  Porn isn't there as a textbook. It's there as bricolage, as a set of things to pull out and try in new configurations. 

Porn was good for me, back in the way. It did give me ways to enhance the learning curve. It gave me things to try, some of which turned out very well indeed. It helped me believe that so many things were possible. 

There's always a learning curve. Whatever talents you possess on your own, you'll need to practice, to work through all the awkwardness of the new. If you're having sex, if you're starting out on your sexual history, the first year or two will be awkward and not particularly about massive pleasure. But you learn. And porn? Porn can help. It can at least suggest things that are worth trying and show you that people can do...those things.  

And that's important.

Three Three Six: Carpet

 I've brought the story up here before.

My friend Jill in NZ told me once that she'd once been naked in the passenger seat of an Aston-Martin Vanquish going at speed up the coast highway along the Tasman Sea. I don't find that wholly implausible. She grew up in a moneyed family, she works with successful businessmen and wealthy shareholders in her corporate life, and she tends to sleep with men who are substantially older and wealthy. So I can see her in that Aston-Martin, bare feet on the dashboard, stretched out naked and tanned while her older lover tested how fast his car could go. Or see her curled up naked next to him while the sea is there on one side and she bends to take him in her mouth.

That's not implausible. How likely is it? That I can't say. But it is plausible.

When I told a certain friend in London Town about that, she countered with her own tale of having been naked in the cabin of a (married) lover's private jet, bound for somewhere in the Mysterious East. Nothing, she said, could quite top being naked and drinking champagne in a private jet. 

Plausible? Maybe...just. She has entree to the worlds of art, law, and Oxbridge academia in Britain. She also has a history ("has form", British detectives say on TV) of older, married lovers who pay her rent and fly her places. One of her lovers, she told me, was one of the leading global figures in international arbitration law; another was a notorious and famous art auctioneer. Private jets aren't out of the question. Though I'm not sure how one handles the logistics of having a mistress naked in the cabin while remaining undisturbed. Would there have been an aide or two to dismiss to...somewhere? Would you get on the intercom to the crew and tell them not to leave the cockpit? So-- just plausible, but much less likely than Jill's Aston-Martin adventure. 

You'll note that I'm not assigning percentages here. As someone who's never seen an Aston-Martin in real life, let alone been a passenger on a private jet, all of that is as alien to me as the FMTY world I've been writing about.

I conveyed the story of the private jet back to Jill, and she snarked that being naked thirty thousand feet up on the way to Dubai or Singapore was all well and good, but what about the cabin decor? What if you had to walk barefoot or kneel to give head on...shag carpet? How...Seventies! How...bad Shopping & Fucking Novel! How, Jill asked, could any girl maintain her self-respect if there was shag carpet there?

Now I do love the idea of a response born from envy, and maybe she has a point. Though I can't recall what airliner floors are covered with. Not something I ever paid attention to. I can call up the visuals of Jill in the car seat fairly well, but the private jet cabin remains just out of imaginary reach. I can't even imagine what kind of plane a private jet would be. I'm sure that Lear Jets are passé; I don't even know if they're still made. The same is true for Gulfstreams. In my head, I take it for granted that the window shields would be raised. What would be the point of covering a window at thirty thousand feet? But imagining the cabin, let alone the carpet, is beyond me.

It is Christmas season, and the FMTY girls at Twitter are posting photos of the gifts their clients/patrons have given them. Lots of elegant gift boxes. Lots of gift cards to very high-end shops in London or Paris or NYC. Lots of photos of hotel lobbies and elegant dinners. The photos of gift-boxed lingerie do nothing for me, of course. I've never been a fan of girls in lingerie. I prefer girls to sleep naked and to wear nothing at all under dresses or tailored trousers when out with me. I understand lingerie as a class marker and as a symbol for high-end sex, but it does nothing for me as an erotic lure. A girl in just one of my dress shirts is far sexier than one in the most expensive Agent Provocateur or designer lingerie. 

The Aston-Martin, the private jet-- those things do belong in some "erotic thriller" on late-night cable or a Shopping & Fucking novel bought in (of course) an airport bookshop. Question-- here in a time of global pandemic, global economic uncertainty, and a new, critical attitude towards late capitalism, are there still Shopping & Fucking novels? We're a long way from the days of Judith Krantz or "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" here in 2021. "Champagne wishes and caviar dreams" doesn't sit quite so well when you live in a country that survived an abortive armed coup not even a year ago, a country where the pandemic has killed something like eight hundred thousand people since early 2020.  It's possible that, as a good leftist, I can't see the erotic possibilities of an Aston-Martin or a private jet any more.

I can still see the erotic possibilities in places, mind you. Being naked in an office after hours. Being naked in a classroom after all the teachers and students have gone home. Being naked in a university library. Or (like Liberty and Levin) in galleries and studios. Those are all things I can imagine having a beautiful girl do. Some of them I have done with lovers in the past. 

Places still have their own rank-ordering. A beautiful young companion being naked for you in a hotel pool is good, but only really counts if it's a rooftop pool. Extra points if it's an infinity pool cantilevered out over the city. Sailboats and private pools? No real points. Girls skinny-dipping off sailboats or in backyard pools is something very ordinary. Ditto girls like Liberty being naked while camping. Though I suppose a girl standing naked at sunrise (or just in hiking/climbing boots) on the slopes of some famous mountain would have some point value. Jill in Wellington hinted once that an older, moneyed lover wanted to take her to Everest Base Camp and have sex there. Some hip magazine-- Outdoor? Wired? --noted once that Everest Base Camp had become "a real sausage-fest" as soon as it became a tourist draw, with tech bros bringing their latest model/actresses there. But in general...the outdoors isn't really a place for nakedness, or for beautiful girls to have sex. Nature, at least in my mind, has never been erotic.

Though I will note that I've seen a couple of very, very alluring fashion nudes shot in the desert. I haven't quite figured out why deserts are sexy and forests or hillsides aren't. That bears thinking about.

I try to think about the sound of the Aston-Martin going north along the eastern shore of the Tasman Sea and I can't. I can't imagine the cabin-- let alone the carpet --of a private jet. I haven't even seen porn with a private jet cabin as a setting. I certainly can't imagine what champagne my friend claimed to be drinking.

Trains, now. Just as a passing thought, there's always point value in sex aboard trains. That at least has been proven in both porn and film noir.

 

Three Three Five: FMTY Part Two

 A lovely Young Companion tells me that she's in a band these days, something post-punk. She plays bass guitar, and she strikes a pose on stage. Her band members all have a stage persona, and hers is a pretty gay boy named Lou. She slicks back her hair and wears a suit and tie on stage, something very tailored, very early-1960s with narrow lapels and a narrow tie. The effect is amazing. She looks like...well...a more aggressively sexual version of the young Donna Tartt. She and I were at dinner the other night, and she asked if she should dress like that to go out with me some evening. Well, of course. However not? I'd love to go to some elegant restaurant with her and raise eyebrows. She's deliciously queer in any event, and I love her ability to play with gender and fluidity. 

She and I had a long conversation about things while we drank Japanese whiskey and held hands. She looks brilliant in a suit and tie (and, yes, I will give her one of my good neckties very soon), but she also rocks a miniskirt and has excellent legs-- which I caressed with two fingers all through dinner and drinks. 

We talked about the world of FMTY escorts on Twitter. She agreed with me that the FMTY world is something alien. She and I both have spent our lives in small, hip enclaves. We're not Michelin star people. She understood my own fears of trying to book time with an FMTY escort. I told her that I'd feel like someone with an ordinary car crash case taking his legal problem to a high-end law firm-- I'd be wasting their time and skills. She agreed with me on that. 

She told me that being an escort at that level would be something she'd love to do for a year or so, and she sighed over the stories I'd told her about my NZ friend naked in the Aston Martin and my London friend naked aboard the private jet. She'd love to do both things, she said. But that all seemed like something that could only happen in some other, alien world. Though she opened her shoulder bag and took out a Moleskine I'd given her and  made notes-- a list of cities she'd love to go as an FMTY girl.  I took her pen and wrote down my own list under hers-- cities where I'd love to fly her if she was my FMTY escort. She took the pen and wrote: Anytime, darling. Good cities! Love, Lou. I hope she'll keep the notebook and open it in a few years and remember me...and remember why I'd love to fly her to Dunedin or Rabat.

One of the FMTY escorts at Twitter did a thread the other night about how simple it really is to book an appointment with an escort and have a cultured, charming companion for an evening. I had to disagree with the thread. Even if I could afford an escort, I wouldn't know how to book an evening or an overnight. I could certainly understand how to use an online method, but I remain afraid that I'd never pass the screening. I told my Young Companion about that, and she shook her head. I'd passed her screening, she said. Despite my age and my being male, and despite her friends and housemates all telling her that it was just "too surreal" to imagine her out with me, let alone staying overnight, she was there at the bar with me and enjoying the things we did. She kissed me and said, Surreal is my favourite real.  That matters a lot to me. 

She did tell me that I just needed to go on line and book a companion. Maybe not a FMTY experience, she said, but so many of the girls of Escort Twitter seem to go on tour-- I could see which ones were coming through the city where my Companion and I live. I'll come along and be your advisor, she said. I had to laugh at that. My Young Companion is twenty-three and fearless. I'd love to have her along...either as Lou or in a tailored miniskirt. 

The FTMY world is still beyond me, though I certainly see a role-playing adventure coming up. But on a night where my Companion brought me a belated birthday gift (a memoir by Patti Smith) and shared Japanese single-malts with me, I did feel better. I'm not flying someone from Manhattan to Vienna or from L.A. to a Pure Pod in the Otago hills, but at least someone lovely and wicked found me worth driving across the city and staying the night.

Three Three Four: Companions

 It's been a while since I've heard from my friend in London Town. So much since the spring of 2020 is just lost. I know she spent lockdown time at a friend's house near Oxford, and that she was doing virtual lectures for a university in the States.  There are so many things I'd like to talk about.

She is the closest thing I know to an actual FMTY person. She has spent time on the edges of the demimonde, and men, meaning older admirers, have flown her to hotels and villas in Europe and Asia. She understands envelopes of crisp new bills left on a bedside table, and she understands how to fly in Oligarch Class and deal with bookings at Michelin star restaurants. She is the person I should talk to about my FMTY fears.

I had lunch last weekend with a very lovely girl here. She's young, tallish, deliciously queer, bookish, and bright. We sat outside at a hipster ramen restaurant with drinks and talked and shared ramen. A very lovely autumn afternoon, crisp and sunny. I enjoyed the whole afternoon, and I never felt out of place. I'm sure a few people raised an eyebrow at the age difference, but I'm used to that and she's indifferent to it. It took me a while to process you, she said once, but I'm okay with it all.  I suppose that's all I can ask from any young companion and any affair. Sitting there with her and holding hands and talking was wonderful. More to the point, I felt very much like I belonged where we were. I felt...safe. I knew how to order drinks, I knew how to deal with the menu. I never felt like I was being judged. 

I could never do that with any of the FMTY girls whose Twitter accounts I follow. 

I scan over the FMTY girls' biographies and note the descriptions: charming dinner companion, upscale dinner date. One NYC girl's biography reads Art student, lingerie collector. Take me around the world, and let's start with dinner. Another one reads: Over-educated and under-satiated. Your next dinner companion and co-conspirator. I can read those things and feel my interest stirring...and becoming overshadowed by my fears. Discreet, seductive thrill seeker. Passionate for dining, art, music & culture, London and beyond. I would have no idea what to do or say around any of these women.

Sitting at the hipster ramen bar or at the little South American-inflected restaurant where I spend so many afternoons with starters and a drink, I feel like I fit in. Aging, genteelly-impoverished roué is a role that goes with both places. They're places where twenty-somethings and the inevitable Comp Lit co-eds go. They're places where there's no expectation of being on stage.

I have no idea how to perform at a Michelin-star restaurant. I have no idea how to deal with the menu or the waitstaff. I know how to do gallery openings; I know how to sit at a concert. But fine dining remains beyond me. I enjoy wines, but I'd never dare go through a wine list with an FMTY girl. 

I have to wonder whether part of what I'd be paying for with a high-end escort would be her skills with a menu and wine list. I'd have to hope that she'd be willing to be the guide, the psychopomp. I'd have to be able to smile and say that I was placing myself entirely in her hands. I couldn't be self-confident or be the self-assured client they'd be expecting. I'd have to be able to give up my fears that she feels her own professional status is being questioned because she's with a client as hopelessly provincial and inept as I'd be. I'd never be able to do that, though. I'd never be able to feel I was good enough to be a FMTY girl's client. 

Sex is aspirational or it's nothing. I wrote that here a long time ago. It's something I've felt since I was in my teens. A key part of sex for me is the set of class markers attached to it.  Classy international companion based in Brussels. Speaks 5 languages and loves cocktails, fine dining, dark humor and books. You see how easily I respond those a description like that-- it offers access to (or at least proximity to) the world I always wanted to live in. 

Perhaps I should re-focus. What I need might actually be a muse, someone who's using her own undoubted professional skills to show me how to handle a menu or a wine steward. What I know I need to do is to not let the world of FMTY girls become the world behind impenetrable glass that reminds me of all my failings.

Three Three Three: FMTY

I am still unsure about the social rules at Escort Twitter. I understand that "luxury companions" go on tour these days. They set up a list of cities and book appointments with clients in each. And of course there's the FMTY idea-- Fly Me To You.  I understand the basic idea, of course. Just not the attendant procedures.

The client is screened, and then he provides an airline ticket (first-class or business class, obviously) and the escort flies out to see him in his home city. The assumption is that the girl will be staying at a high-end boutique hotel to joining the client at a resort. Several of the Escort Twitter girls have posted photos of airline gift cards sent them by clients. A couple have shown photos of gift books they've been sent with $100 bills placed at random between pages. I do like that latter idea, although it's not something I'd ever be able to do. One girl did tweet: "FMTY deposits tucked inside cloth-bound art books *chef's kiss*." The idea is lovely, but forever out of reach.

Gift cards seem quite efficient, mind you. They keep the airline tickets from appearing on any married client's billing statement, and I'm assuming they can't just be cashed in.At least I'd hope they couldn't be cashed in. What could be more humiliating than waiting at the aerodrome arrival gate and slowly realizing that your Muse & Luxury Companion has flown off to Paris or Tahiti by herself...on your gift cards? 

I do wonder about the screening process. How would you as a client be vetted? What would the escort actually do about that? I'm aware that there are blogs in the escort world  where escorts talk to one another about clients both good and bad. Is there a Red Flag List for escorts-- men whom no one should meet?  Would a potential FMTY girl use a credit rating service? I have no idea if individuals can sign up to check creditworthiness with the various credit bureaus, but again...that's a scary thing: sorry, but your credit score is only a 710... Worse, would a FMTY girl insist on your real name and run a Google search? I'd like to know how the vetting works. I remember the anguish I went through the last time I purchased a car. That was only allowing a Honda dealership to examine my life and judge me. Having a lovely, high-end escort do it would be much, much more terrifying.

I've written about my hotel-room door fear-- the moment when an escort would knock at my door, then recoil in anger and derision when she saw what I looked like. That's a nightmare that always includes hearing what angry things she's telling her booker over her smartphone as she stalks away to the elevator. Wouldn't it be worse at the aerodrome arrival gate? And wouldn't it be worse still to get a text or an email from her curtly denying your FMTY or dinner date application?

I have always thought of myself as a gentleman, and as at least marginally cultured. I was brought up to the standards of a very old-guard city and educated at a university with a reputation stretching back to the early 1700s. I do know which fork to use, and for a long time I thought I was capable of making conversation with elegant and charming companions. I haven't believed that in rather a while now, mind you. A very lithe and leggy and clever escort in London Town posted a photo of where she'd gone on a dinner date and commented that: Wonderful evening with the best company, at The Wolsey. Thank you, Sparkling Heart! I of course had to look up The Wolsey. It seems like a restaurant worth trying. And yet...and yet...I wouldn't know how to order, let alone dress to London Town standards. I can't imagine what I could do at The Wolsey or its equivalents in other cities that wouldn't mark me as unfit to be seen with a high-end Escort Twitter companion. 

I have faced down my PhD exams and the Bar exam. I have walked alone at night through cities where the local werewolves are afraid to go out after dark. I have lectured to classes filled with military officers and foreign officials. I have done those things. But standing at the aerodrome waiting for a FMTY arrival is beyond me. Surviving the vetting process for an FMTY encounter is something that's very probably beyond me. 

Here in the latter part of my life, I have come to fear that certain things are beyond me. Ordering and discussing an elegant dinner, making flirtatious and intriguing conversation, knowing how to first take an FMTY girl's hand or brush a fingertip over her bare leg-- I really can't do any of that.

Three Three Two: Muse

 Just as a follow-on to last night's entry, I'll say that I do love the idea of a Muse. There's something deeply attractive about it. Having a Muse would mean that a lovely young companion would be in my life as an inspiration, as a confidante and advisor, as an aspirational symbol. A Muse would be someone I could write for or about, someone who'd urge me to actually accomplish things.

And yet...I have no idea what I'd do if I found myself with a Muse. I'd have no idea what the rules of the relationship would be like. I'd have no idea how to behave around her-- no idea how to show her that she was appreciated in her role, no idea how to demonstrate that I'd be worth her time. 

I feel the same way around the various Escort Twitter sites I visit as a flaneur. I would have no idea how to play the role of the gentleman client. Professionals provide services, yes. But any professional that deals with clients one on one-- and I'm thinking about accountants and lawyers and psychoanalysts as well as escorts --has expectations of the client.  Anyone can pay an escort and offer up periodic gifts of expensive lingerie and gift cards for high-end shopping, but there's also an expectation that the client will know how to behave and how to present himself. And I'm convinced that I couldn't do that. 

One of the girls at Escort Twitter wrote today about someone she described as an ex rather than a client. She wrote that he was older, alone, and somewhat lonely, and that she'd suggested to him that he consider "some form of paid companionship". He was, she wrote, somewhat hesitant to try that, since he had no idea what the rules were, no idea how to behave. I do sympathize with that. 

I'll note again that I lack the finances to utilize the services of a paid companion from Escort Twitter. That's a limitation that isn't going away. I am polite, courteous, and can make decent conversation within certain areas. But I'd have no idea how to present myself to a paid companion. One of the high-end girls at Escort Twitter might be like a $500 bottle of wine. I can tell the difference between a $15 pinot noir and a $50 pinot noir, but I lack the knowledge to fully appreciate a $100 bottle, let alone a $500 one. Her talents would likely be wasted on me, and as a professional, she'd have to know that-- know that I couldn't properly appreciate her. I of course would feel deeply guilty about that. 

The same is true of someone who'd be styled as a Muse-- paid or unpaid. She could offer encouragement or inspiration, but my fear would be that she'd feel wasted. One Escort Twitter biography offers this: business, stilettos, laughter, witty banter, sensual exploration, exquisite wine, culinary intrigue, spirited company as the girl's "great loves". Business, of course, means nothing to me. I know nothing about the worlds of business and finance. The other things, yes, certainly. But I'd still feel unable to appreciate what I was being offered. And no one professional likes feeling as if their skills are being wasted.

I would be as uncomfortable talking with an Escort Twitter girl and trying to explain my interests and wishes as I would be talking to a $1000/hour lawyer and asking him to handle a traffic citation. Even asking for the things that appeal to me would likely leave a GFE Escort bored to tears. I wouldn't fit. I wouldn't know how to behave, wouldn't know my part of the script. 

That's perhaps the worst of it for me: I wouldn't know my part of the script. I wouldn't know how to enact the proper rituals of appreciation and I wouldn't be able to fully appreciate what I was being offered. 

A lovely Muse would be a brilliant thing to have in my life, as would an elegant paid companion. I'm just afraid that I could never appreciate either. 

Three Three One: Companions

 I have discovered Escort Twitter, and I've been following along with various accounts there. I want to be clear that I'm not communicating with anyone at any of the accounts. I'm just...an observer. The quiet figure at the next table. I will not be sliding into anyone's DMs. At most, I click "like" on some of the more elegant photos. Finding a photo stylish or alluring isn't a personal approach. It's about the photo, not about the person. I'm all too aware of the dangers of the parasocial here in the social media age.

What have I learned from Escort Twitter? If nothing else, I've learned the term FMTY-- Fly Me To You. That's simple enough. You can make arrangements with an escort to send her an airline ticket and arrange a meeting. Far, far out of the realm of my financial possibilities, but a straightforward enough idea. You contact an escort, establish your bona fides, and once you're vetted, you pay her way to a rendezvous at some elegant hotel or resort. 

I do like the way many of the escorts describe themselves: private paramour, luxury companion, libertine in search of adventure, provocateur, fine dining enthusiast, hunter in the forests of desire. And of course muse. Always muse. Lovely descriptors, mind you. The little Twitter biographies never say escort or sugar baby or courtesan-- there's  a fine line the girls get to walk. I'll assume that The Algorithm searches out accounts that are a bit too obvious. The girls creating the biographies have to be able to say that they never promised or offered transactional sex, that they were just describing themselves as affluent travelers or devotees of high-end food and wine and hotels. Well, that's understandable. They're marketing to an upscale clientele and trying not to be kicked off Twitter.

And...please. I wish all the girls at Escort Twitter well. I wish them professional success and lots of elegant gifts from gentlemen admirers. I have no intention of mocking anyone or treating her with disdain. I'm just there as a flaneur at Escort Twitter-- I'm just there passing through and nodding. My aim is to leave not even footprints and to take away only memories.  I have no wish to interfere in anyone's profession. 

The world of Escort Twitter is marketed as one of fine restaurants and elegant lingerie. Given my own thoughts on what I prefer my Young Companions to (not) wear under dresses and jeans and tops, the lingerie is superfluous. As for the rest, whatever happens at Escort Twitter happens in worlds I'll never see. I suppose I do regret that. I'd like to be able to afford both the services of a Luxury Companion and settings-- the restaurants and hotels and resorts --that go with the FMTY world. I'd like to think that I could be at home in those places. I'd like to have the skills and confidence to be an acceptable escort for an Escort Twitter girl. I'm afraid that I don't have those abilities, though.

I know how to be polite and courteous. I do know that. I can tell halfway decent stories, though in these latter days I don't seem to be adding many new ones to my repertoire. But despite many years of post-grad education and an Old New Orleans upbringing, I have a deep-seated fear that I'd lack the skills and confidence ever to be an acceptable client for an Escort Twitter girl. 

And of course I'm terrified of the idea of being vetted. Not just at Escort Twitter, mind you. I'm terrified of potential dates polling their friends on my value just as I'm made deeply uneasy of anyone at all looking at or my social standing. I'm a Gentleman of a Certain Age, but one who has no social standing. If I somehow contrived to have an FMTY experience with someone from Escort Twitter-- or arranged a rendezvous with an Escort Twitter girl while she was "on tour" --I'd feel shatteringly anxious about whether I was good enough to be a client. I'd worry that being seen with me would erode her own professional standing. 

This is all I suppose face-pressed-to-the-window regret-- standing outside the expensive restaurant or shop and realizing that you can't go inside-- or that you could, but you'd only make a fool of yourself and embarrass the Muse or Luxury Companion you'd be with.

There is a girl at Escort Twitter who's based in NYC and advertises herself as Over-educated and under-satiated. Your next dinner companion and co-conspirator. I do find the tag amusing and appealing. But I'm all-too-aware that I'm unlikely to know what to do with anyone over dinner these days. I lack the confidence these days to know what to say to a potential co-conspirator. 

My thought is that if you're dealing with a professional companion, you have two kinds of obligation. You pay for her professional skills and services. Obviously. You tip well, too. But you also have an obligation to fit into the world she's trying to create for herself and clients. I no longer know how to be a co-conspirator, and I certainly don't know how to be a worthwhile client. Melancholy thoughts.

Three Three Zero: Complications

We've talked about this before, but I'll just note that I've always distrusted the idea of authenticity or the idea of an essential self. One of the things that makes me distrustful of the whole current idea of being trans is the idea that there is some kind of essential self, a "real" self that can come out of hiding or finally break free of social impositions. I'm old-school postmodern, and I believe in the idea of reinvention, the idea of  transformation, the idea of becoming someone or something new. Needless to say, I'm always a fan of literary impostors and of people who've gone off to new cities and new worlds to reinvent themselves.

Right now I'm watching someone tangle himself up in that-- or watching two people tangle themselves up. I know both of them, though I know her better than I know him. They're not a couple, or not yet, though I think they'd both like to at least have an ongoing, off-and-on affair. They're both in their early thirties, educated, hip, articulate, successful. Members of the meritocratic class. 

As best I can tell, here's what's happening. He is trying desperately to tell her that he's bisexual, or gender-fluid, or whatever. Watching from the outside, I'm not altogether sure that he actually is. He may well be, although she tells me that sometimes she thinks his hints are very much like some haute-bourgeois sorority girl announcing that she's "spicy straight", whatever that is. 

She is very bisexual, and very open about it all. Let's take that part as a given. She's also very lovely and adventurous. She tells me that he's been trying to tell her that he's bi and femme at heart. He won't come out and say it, though. He hints and talks about things in the abstract and dances around actually admitting anything. What he wants, she tells me, is to have her ask the direct questions and ask for stories. He wants her to do the work. Her instinct, she says, is to tease and withdraw, to entice-- or force --him into saying the things he's trying to say, to make him admit to whatever past and preferences he has. 

I know her better than I know him, and I'm not about to just ask him what he's doing. I'm not about to ask him about his past. That's not something that I can do as a cishet male. She tells me that she's not sure he's even bi at all. She wonders if he's creating a bi persona and past  just to entice her into bed.  Which makes her consider the option of seeing how far she could push him into being a femme bottom. She'd quite like that, I think.

 She wants to encourage him to tell her stories, true or not, because they'd feed her fantasies just as much as they feed his. Last week she raised a gin & tonic at the bar and told me she'd like to take him to bed, but that it's much more fun just to see what she can get him to say or do. He might well like to go to bed with her as a femme bottom or dressed up as a girl. She'd be up for either. Or for sleeping with him as a cishet male. She's confused about what he wants. As much as she'd like listening to whatever fantasies he's creating-- or memories he wants to recount --she's unsure what role to play: confidante, domme, garçonne,  girl-boy to his boy-girl. She's unsure whether she's dealing with someone coming out or someone who's developed a really intricate seduction plot or a complex kink? Whether or not autogynephilia exists for political purposes, she has no problem with the idea of it as a kink in men with whom she has Encounters. 

The issue here is how she should handle this. She'd be okay with whatever persona he's creating or revealing. The only question is how to coax him into taking the last step, into actually saying what he wants and who he wants to be when the two of them do finally hook up.

Three Two Nine: Status Check

 I've been watching the endless, grinding campaigns and punitive strikes in the Gender Wars-- TRA forces arrayed against the Gender Critical armies. Part of it I find almost hilarious. It is like watching 1930s intra-leftist battles ("Stalinist! Revisionist! Neo-Trotskyite!"). Endless fighting over tiny matters of nomenclature, endless attention to purity of thought, heretic hunting, a breathless and near-hysterical sense of drama. I've tried to stay away from the whole issue here. But I have noted something in the polemics that I decided to look at.

One of the accusations that some old-school Second Wave feminists throw at Gen Z gender-fluid and pansexual types is that they're only doing it for the attention. There's the ongoing idea that young people (usually described as having "blue hair") are only proclaiming themselves "queer", "gender-fluid", or "pansexual" as a way of garnering hipness points. Announcing oneself as "gender-fluid" is depicted as a way of showing that you're not...boring. In a social media world, the argument goes, there's nothing worse than being boring. Being "gender-fluid" or "pansexual" is far less boring and ordinary than saying that you're bisexual. 

I've seen some comments out there over the aether about that. Someone in a blog whose name I've since forgotten commented that one reason people (the Youth!) insist on being "queer" is that somehow we've all come to take it for granted that straight sex, cishet sex, is by definition boring and unsatisfactory. Endless blog comments and Twitter posts are  already out there with that as a given. Who, the premise runs, would choose dull, vanilla cishet sex if they had any intelligence or aesthetic sense at all?

I do remember a moment a couple of years ago when I was looking at TRA/GC polemics and felt a twinge of annoyance with trans-activists and the use of "trans". I thought about how trans is used as a prefix: transcontinental, transatlantic, transmontane. The prefix could be read as having a kind of arrogance to it. Trans is about crossing over, about going farther on-- over the mountains, over the sea. Transcending. Transubstantiating. Wasn't there something arrogant in using the prefix? We've gone beyond, gone farther, we're the future, you're left behind...  

So I did see a comment-- left, I think, by a GC or GC-adjacent type --that noted that the blue-haired Gen Z  brigade might not be so quick to define themselves as "queer" if some kinds of sex weren't defined from the outset as boring. Who, the commenter asked, had simply written off straight sex as necessarily dull, useless, Philistine...vanilla? 

I'm vaguely recalling a long-ago John Barth novel here. I can't recall which novel, though the one scene has stayed with me. A well-known academic and his equally accomplished wife have spent a couple of decades engaging in the most adventurous, arcane, experimental kinds of sex with a host of partners. And they realize that this has all been deeply exhausting and unsatisfying. They realize that what they want is to simply be with one another and have very ordinary straight sex. The realization horrifies them and drives them into near-hysteria. They're convinced that they've failed, that they are secret Philistines who can't appreciate the more intellectually adventurous kinds of sex, that they're boring people at heart. 

I do understand the feeling. I take it for granted these days that as a straight, cishet, white middle-class male of over twenty-five or thirty, any sex I have must be intrinsically flawed-- morally, politically, aesthetically. I take it for granted that as a white cishet male of over thirty, I must be incapable of pleasing a partner. Whatever kinds of sex I might like, asking for them would signal that I'm vanilla, un-hip, socially unaware. Straight sex? Always unlikely to please a cishet woman. Sex with blindfolds and riding whips and candle wax? Obviously vanilla and boring if it's in a cishet context. 

I've always been attentive to class markers, to social status. I'm well aware of all the disjoints in my own life and the cracks in my armour. So I suppose I would notice this. I've lived my life worried about my place in the status world. I won't deny that. I will just say that I find this exhausting and dispiriting. Being boring is the worst fate I can imagine that doesn't involve dying of severe burns or dying alone in a cardboard box under an overpass.  

Asking for sex, participating in sex, discussing sex with a partner or would-be partner... Those are things I find I just can't do right now. I can't risk being dismissed out of hand as vanilla, Philistine, unadventurous, unsatisfactory, inept, and...boring. I am convinced these days that I'm out of the loop, that I'm not capable of doing anything to please a partner...let alone demonstrate that I'm worth her time.

Three Two Eight: Embarrassment

This afternoon I drove past a restaurant where I used to spend almost every Friday and Saturday night at the bar. I spent six years doing that. I always refer to the place as "the steakhouse bar" and yes, they did the best Porterhouse and the best martini in the city. I miss being there.

I haven't been there since September 2017-- almost four years now. As much as I love the food, I haven't used a delivery service to order anything, and I haven't sent anyone from the office staff to pick up any of their signature tamales. There's no way I'll ever go back there. 

The reasons are simple enough. In September 2017 I hooked up with one of the bartendrix girls there. We were outside in the parking lot making out in her car and someone complained to management that we were doing that. I stress that she was not on the clock and that we weren't doing anything too terribly (or at least visibly)  advanced. However...the unknown person did complain and, yes, the girl was in fact married.  So I can't ever go back there. I don't know that I was officially banned, temporarily or permanently, but when I heard that there had been  a complaint made and that the manager (whom I knew) wanted to speak to me, I just never went back. I have no plans ever to go back. I was far too embarrassed for that.

The same is true about the hipster cafe downtown where I met the girl who came back to my flat to swim this June. The two of us had a fun time that afternoon at the bar, ordering cocktails and flirting shamelessly. Some dancing together at our bar stools may have been involved. But we did tell stories to one another about our lives, and I don't know who may have heard those things. I'm foggy on what exactly I told her. I'm foggy on what people who work at the cafe may now know or think they know about me.

So of course I can't go back. I have no idea whether I'm welcome there or whether the bar staff are laughing at me. I have no idea whether anything I may have told the girl will come back to haunt me or was overheard by random other customers. So that's one more place I can't go.

Embarrassment is like some razor-edged coral reef shaping all the travels of my life. I won't go back to any place that I associate with embarrassment or humiliation. 

Now-- embarrassment is always there for me-- embarrassment and fear of embarrassment in public. I wrote someone this morning to say that one way in which courtship rituals in 2021 have become far scarier and more exhausting than they were in, say, 2011,  is the enhanced potential for both embarrassment and public shaming. Ten years ago, I'd have had no problem saying to a Young Companion that, "These are the [insert list of things] I like. Do you like any of them? Would you be interested in any of them?" 

At any point since my undergraduate days, I'd have just said that-- please see list, shall we negotiate? I could never do that now. I'd be far too afraid of being mocked and treated with derision-- or worse, treated as some sort of aggressor. I don't think I could ask for a Young Companion's own list at all. I mean, I'd probably be open to most things, even to wearing plastic reindeer antlers in bed. But I'd never ask. Asking-- offering to negotiate her list --would almost certainly be taken as something Bad on my part. 

I can no longer risk being seen or heard to flirt with anyone. And in the current sexual climate, courtship rituals are dangerous. I can't deal with the risk of being seen to want someone or some particular thing. I certainly can't ask for anything any longer. 

I'm not talking here about rejection. I'm talking about embarrassment and humiliation-- something that has to do with shame, with failing to do the correct thing socially. I won't go back to any place, or speak with any person, that was part of social humiliation for me.

 

Three Two Seven: Scandals

 There's a new scandal on line around the 2017 Kristen Roupenian short story "Cat Person". Another author, Alexis Nowicki, has published a piece at Slate.com saying that Roupenian drew on the details of Nowicki's own affair with an older man as the basis for "Cat Person". So there's an argument on line about authorial voice, integrity, and who has the right to tell someone's story. That argument is exhausting enough. What makes me anxious, though, is how the person-- called "Charles" in the Slate piece --is being portrayed.

When I was an undergraduate, I ran with a circle of people who planned on writing things-- novels and short stories as well as non-fiction. We took it for granted that one day we'd all be published. I expected that I'd have a career where I'd publish four or five academic history volumes. 

And we all took it as a given that we'd make appearances as at least minor characters in friends' stories and novels. I thought that was a fun idea, and I looked forward to being thirty-five or forty and running into friends and raising a glass and grinning over how we'd appeared in print--- hey, look, I'm the detective's sidekick! I'm the ex-husband! I'm the girl he meets in the airport bar! 

But here in the age of the gender wars, no one gets to feel any delight at being in a story. When Ms. Roupenian used Nowicki's real-life relationship for "Cat Person" she made the affair much darker and unpleasant. The older male in "Cat Person" became the villain of the story. Ms. Nowicki wrote in Slate that the real relationship was nothing at all like what Roupenian depicted. Here in the age of the gender wars, though, no older male can be portrayed in fiction as anything other than creepy and incompetent in bed.

The new "Cat Person" scandal has left me anxious and self-loathing. Any depictions of ex-lovers, and especially older ex-lovers, have to be scathing and savage. The older lover-- Charles --in the real life affair isn't able to defend himself. The Nowicki essay concludes with the discovery that Charles died in 2020. On first reading I thought he'd died of Covid-19, but the essay's insistence that he died "suddenly" leaves me thinking that he committed suicide. Not over the story-- Nowicki never implies that. But nonetheless, Charles isn't able to defend himself in a world where all fiction is taken as auto-fiction. 

So now I have a new anxiety. I still move in circles where people write and blog, and I keep thinking how easy it would be for some ex-lover, a Young Companion from days past, to turn me into the villain of the story. I've been the Older Admirer in relationships for a long time now, and while there are ex-lovers who stay in contact and seem to have fond memories of what we did when we were together, I know that anyone with a laptop or a smartphone can make me into someone distasteful. 

I style myself as roué, and that of course makes me an easy mark as a villain. It would be all-too-easy to portray me as the bad guy. It would be just as easy to portray me as useless in bed. And it's all-too-easy to sit in my flat and assume that somewhere in the city, a faceless, nameless girl is telling an audience that I'm mediocre (at best) as a lover and creepy and disgusting in person. 

"Cat Person" itself made me wince at how the older lover was presented, and the new scandal leaves me convinced that someone somewhere is re-writing the past I believed in. I always thought that most of my past encounters had ended with fond memories on both sides. I can't risk believing that any more.

Three Two Six: Vintage

Erotica ages badly. 

I think we can agree on that. 

Erotica from past decades has bad fashion, bad music, and body choices that feel...somehow wrong in the present. 

Last night I watched a c.1978 French-Italian film called "Laure", supposedly written as a novel and then adapted for the screen by Emmanuelle Arsan, the nominal author of the "Emmanuelle" novels. The lead actress was called Annie Belle-- a French actress with platinum-dyed hair cropped as short as my own Russian-gangster haircut. She'd have been twenty-two when the film was shot. A rather pretty girl, but my tastes have been shaped by fashion and bodies from later days. My thought was immediately was that she should've been taller and more aerobicized. Waxed, too. Beautiful blue eyes, and I do like girls with garçonne hairstyles, but while she managed to be suitably panty-free during the entire film, she was just a bit off from what popular culture in the last twenty or twenty-five years has favored. 

Odd note-- Annie Belle does remind me of the 2021 porn star Skye Blue. Same platinum-dyed 1922 boy's haircut, same lovely eyes, same large areolae. Though Skye Blue is taller, with good abs and a sense that sex is based on irony and transgression.

I think-- think --that I did once own a copy of the Arsan novel Laure, or at least a German translation of it. Something purchased at an "alternative" bookshop in Vienna, back in the days when porn, Marxism, and New Age books were all thrown together. I bought it only because it was by Emmanuelle Arsan, and the two novels (Emmanuelle-- L' anti-vierge and Emmanuelle-- La leçon d'homme) attributed to her had been the sources for the classic Just Jaeckin films with Sylvia Kristel. So I bought Laure and...puzzled my way through the German before giving the book to some long-forgotten girl in my past. 

Laure and the two Just Jaeckin films still have hot scenes, true. But the horrid, syrupy French soundtrack music kills anything approaching arousal. So of course do the hairstyles and the costumes. All the films are set in a quasi-imaginary Asia (Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong), and while there are some elegant white-linen colonial looks, the women's outfits are so painfully 1970s-- bad platform sandals, lots of patterned Qiana blouses, hiphugger bell-bottom slacks --that you break into laughter even when the actress is busily shedding the Anne Klein knock-offs she's wearing. We won't talk about the male looks and costumes. Let's just say that both things are...tragic. Or tragicomic. 

The films were all shot in the Orient-- not Asia, mind you, but an imaginary Orient filled with languidly decadent expats and willing natives. Pretty much everything that has any trace of political, social, or ethnic/racial issues will set your teeth on edge in the year 2021. 

Underlying the storylines of all three films is the belief in some kind of Free Love. Not the grindingly earnest polyamory of our own day, but a belief that sex is something beautiful people do when they're bored, or when they've just found someone interesting. Jealousy exists just as a plot device to give characters an excuse to have sex with the partners of people who've been having sex with the main characters' husbands or wives. Older, wiser expats give long lectures about how "monogamy is dying" and how sex is an avenue to a higher state of consciousness, or at least to higher aesthetics. It's taken for granted that all lovely teens will acquire older lovers, and that while bisexuality is taken as a given for all expat females from fifteen into old age, male bisexuality is solely between fey young native men, never for any expat who isn't rich and sixty...and who prefers gazelle-like native boys. 

Everyone of course speaks in long, complex sentences filled with justifications for giving up monogamy and for membership in relationships that are as complex as DNA chains. Lots of theory, but...nothing taken from Foucault. There are no earnest and moralizing looks at power dynamics, no sense of self-righteous political analysis. Well, everyone Laure or Emmanuelle meets is rich, at least by 1970s Manila or rural Thai standards-- so politics never has to intrude into the Arsan world. 

I may watch the two Sylvia Kristel films again, though. Not for the plots, of course. Just for a couple of Ms. Kristel's scenes with lovely girls, or in unexpected settings. There is a scene in Emmanuelle 2 where Ms. Kristel reaches orgasm via acupuncture needles that I've found hot for years and years. But it's too hard to avoid laughter when considering the plots.

Erotica is built what we find arousing in the here-and-now, in the present moment. Watching Laure in the Land of Bush A-Plenty (as a friend calls the 1970s) sets off so many aesthetic and fashion warning signs that it's barely possible to see the film as sexy at all. And whenever the characters talk, they pontificate about beliefs we all find ludicrous if not sinister here in the age of Default Friend and other neo-Victorian blogs.

Maybe porn clips are the only way one can approach visual stimuli these days.

 

Three Two Five: Panic Mode

No, I never did go back to the hipster cafe. 

The lovely girl I met there ghosted me. She still has my shirt and my necktie.

Being ghosted happens. It's part of life, I suppose. 

But I still can't go back to the hipster cafe. I'm still afraid of being laughed at, or held in derision, or told that I'm not welcome there. I'm afraid that the wrong people, or too many people, heard the stories the girl and I were telling one another. I'm not going back there.

Now I may have mentioned a policy decision I made long ago. The policy is simple enough. I do not meet the families or friends of girls I'm involved with. That's simple enough. 

I do not ask girls to give up friends or family for me. I'm not interested in controlling their lives like that. I only ask that I be kept apart from their friends and family. I ask that I not be placed in proximity to people who'll be horrified by me. Any time a girl's friends see me, I know what they're thinking. They're listing all the things wrong with me-- age, looks, finances, social status, career, lack of any skills. I know full well that a girlfriend's friends will mock me and treat me with derision and pressure the girl to drop me immediately. It's  a lot easier to just avoid them. I'm not bad one-on-one. I'm polite, courteous, reasonably good at conversation, a good listener, and I have reasonably good stories to tell. One-on-one, I'm not a bad companion. But nothing that I am, nothing that I do or can do will survive hostile scrutiny by a girl's friends or family.

It's better to just stay away. That's the only way I can retain any sense of value in a young companion's eyes.

Once upon a time, some years ago, I was at a girl's flat for dinner and drinks. We'd ordered food to be delivered, and I was expecting an evening of Szechuan food, wine, and flirtation. And then her phone rang-- four of her friends were on their way over with bottles of wine. They wanted, my young companion said, to finally meet me. I went into panic mode. 

Just before the friends arrived, I dashed off to the bedroom and-- quite literally --climbed out a window and went down the outside stairs to the street. Four floors, I think. I ran out into the night and hid. Again, I mean hid literally. I kept my phone off for days, avoided my usual haunts, and kept lights off at my apartment so that no one would think I was home. 

The girl herself had been lovely and kind and charming. She was someone I did like. But I panicked. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want her friends to see me. I didn't want to see the girl's face when she realized that her friends could all see that I had no value. I didn't want to face derision and angry contempt from the friends-- why was someone like me taking up the girl's time? How dare someone like me be sleeping with their friend?

That's how things work. I very literally ran down four flights of stairs to avoid meeting a lover's friends...to avoid meeting people I knew would instantly despise me. I do recall the sheer panic of it all, the feeling that my life was disintegrating around me, the way I knew all the way down to the street that I was never coming back there. I knew that I had to leave, though. No one's friends or family will ever have any use for me or think that I have any value.

No friends, no family. That's a policy, however self-destructive, that I'm very, very serious about. 

Three Two Four: Fears

 Sometimes I do take counsel of my fears.  

Right now there's one more place downtown where I'm afraid to go.

One recent Saturday, on a bright summery afternoon I went to the hipster cafe downtown for a drink, and I met a lovely co-ed, a girl of twenty-two who'd just graduated university here, We chatted, flirted a bit, ordered cocktails. Towards dusk she walked home with me-- yes, holding my hand --and went swimming with me. We swam, kissed, went back upstairs to my flat. The next morning I drove her back to her car.  All well and good.  She had lovely legs, amazing blue eyes, and a mass of chestnut hair. 

I gave her my number, and while she was attentive and flirty and talked about borrowing books, I haven't heard from her in two weeks. So she ghosted me. Well, it happens. I'm supposing that I was an experiment, something out of the ordinary, something outrageous, that she was doing in that strange liminal space between graduation and going into the corporate world. Okay, it does leave me a bit melancholy. She was very bright and fun and adventurous, and I was hoping for a small summertime affair.  Well...alas.

But now I am afraid to go back to the hipster cafe. I'm not sure which word to use-- afraid or ashamed. The girl and I flirted shamelessly at the bar, and we told each other stories. Going back with her on my arm would be one thing, but going back alone is another. The flirtation, the semi-dancing up against one another--- it's not so much that.  But it is the stories. The girl-- Avery was her name --was very open about her tastes and fluid gender preferences and her adventures. But she's a beautiful girl. She can get away with those stories.

I of course am male and of a Certain Age. I'm of a different generation, and I am embarrassed and anxious about the stories I told her. Who heard them? What effect might they have had on how the bar staff regard me?  Did the bar staff believe the stories? Is it worse if they thought I was making some of it up? If they thought all of it was true, would they look down on me? What exactly am I afraid of-- reputation? Being told I'm not welcome at the bar? Did random customers complain about the stories Avery and I told? 

There are things I've done in my life that do make for good stories, but I've suddenly become anxious about my reputation and how I'm regarded downtown. I want to be the flaneur, the quiet figure who sits and has a drink or two and occasionally has a conversation. The stories I'd tell a lovely girl as part of a seduction or a flirtation-- those seem increasingly likely to marginalize me. 

I  spent a lot of weekend mornings at the hipster cafe. Very good fresh croissants, very good flat whites, very skilled bar staff. But I can't go back now. I'm afraid of what the staff might think of me. And, no, this is not about any age difference. Avery asked my age early on and thought the number was irrelevant, or at least amusing. It's not about that at all.

I will miss the hipster cafe. Just as I miss the oyster bar on the plaza. But right now I can't face what the staff might think of me. 

Three Two Three: Mediation

 I have noted this before, but I take very little direct physical pleasure in...well...anything.

That's not just a statement about sex. It applies across my life, to pleasures both sensuous and sensual. It applies to food and wine and travel as well as to sex. 

I do not experience direct pleasure. I have never really have, or at least not since early childhood. Everything I do is mediated.

I had a new single-malt whiskey at lunch today. The whiskey itself was a recommendation, and one that was much appreciated. It's not that I didn't like the whiskey-- it's not that at all. It was everything I could've hoped: deliciously peaty, with just a hint of something like sea salt.  I sat at the bar and sipped at my drink and realized that I was abstractly aware of the taste and the scent, but that what I was focused on wasn't the whiskey in my glass. What I was thinking of, what meant something to me was the idea of what I was drinking. I was imagining being inside a novel or a film, imagining where and how and with whom my character would be having a drink. What mattered wasn't the drink. What mattered was the story I was living inside.

It's been like that with sex, too. It's been like that with sex all my life. Sex is only good for me when I can turn it into a scene in a novel or a film. Whatever it feels like in the here-and-now, whatever physical sensations I'm experiencing--- those things aren't important. I want to please my partner, yes. But I can't say that I feel very much-- if anything --physical myself. What I'm focused on is the setting and the symbols. Where we are, how the girl I'm with has been dressed... I'm focused on how my character in a novel or a film would be having sex, on what the backstory would be.

Sex for me has been something that matters in terms of social validation, in terms of being part of the kind of story I'd want for my character in a film or novel. The setting matters, and costumes matter, because those things help shape the story. They help define the class and social markers for what I'm doing. 

I have never been able to just be a body experiencing pleasure. Is this part of a good story? Is this a story that puts me into a better world, into a better social and class and style milieu? Those things matter. Touches on skin matter only insofar as they're part of a story, part of something happening in a better world, to the better character I want to be. Sex has always been a way of getting outside my body and into a different, better world and life.

I suppose I should note that I don't have sex in pursuit of orgasms. I very rarely have them-- almost never. Now I've told myself that not having orgasms can be a useful thing. No girl can accuse me of being one of those men who's over-and-done in two minutes. They may be able to accuse me of seeming distracted or distanced, but never of finishing too early. I'll also note that men can in fact fake orgasms. It's not difficult to do if you're inside a girl.  I'd never want my partner to think that she couldn't make me reach orgasm. (What does it say about me that I couldn't write "...that she couldn't make me cum"? I have never liked "cum" as a word; I can only write "reach orgasm".) I can fake orgasm to show that I'm enjoying myself with my partner, but I'm far too busy thinking about what I'm doing as a scene in a novel to feel anything physical.

This is true about having sex or drinking good wine-- everything is mediated through the prism of what kind of story it would make. It's true about travel, too. A new city or a new experience in a city or place can only mean something to me if I imagine it as a chapter in someone's travel memoir. Walking through a new city isn't about the city or about what I'm seeing, hearing,  experiencing. It's about whether this is the kind of experience a favourite travel writer might have. The same is true about sex. If I'm sliding a hand along a girl's bare thigh while we drive,  what matters isn't the warmth and sleekness of tanned, silken-smooth flesh, it's comparing this to a scene in something like "Story of O" or the two "Emmanuelle" novels and trying to make sure that what I'm doing and feeling is as good as a scene in the book. 

It gets harder and harder to experience anything directly with a partner, and it gets harder to feel anything that isn't a reflection of a book or a film. I don't have orgasms with a partner, and I'm not about to risk the Solitary Vice in a world where male sexual fantasies are regarded as pathetic and/or creepy. 

I can live inside my head-- that's something I've done most of my life.  But it is a melancholy thing that no matter much I like a whiskey or a lovely, long-legged Comparative Lit co-ed  I can't feel anything like pleasure. Pleasure for me exists only as a symbol. 

Three Two Two: Celebration

 An email notice from Good Vibrations in San Francisco ("Educate, Explore, Empower") arrived this weekend. The notice informs me that May is "National Masturbation Month". What can I do but sigh in exasperation?

That notice isn't meant for me. I'm absolutely not the demographic for the ad, let alone the celebration itself. I'm male-- cishet male.  Everything that I am falls outside the target demographic. I'm a gentleman of a certain age, of course, and I'm sure that aging cishet white nominally-middle-class males aren't aren't the people Good Vibrations is targeting.

Educate, Explore, Empower... All good things, I suppose. But masturbation is not something that aging white cishet males are supposed to engage in...or even admit to. It's assumed in popular culture that males don't need any education in the activity, since it's something they've obviously been doing compulsively since something like age twelve. It's also assumed that any exploration in the activity by males, aging or otherwise, is by definition creepy and unacceptable. All male sexual fantasies these days are considered to be creepy and tantamount to sexual assault. And male participation in the activity-- in the Solitary Vice --is regarded as pathetic, creepy, and risible, and never as "empowering". 

Male participation in the Solitary Vice is regarded as a sign of sad failure, never about learning about pleasure and what to tell a partner about how your body responds. Sex toys and masturbation aids designed for women are seen as charming, sexy, something to be proud of. Women of the target demographic can talk about favourite vibrator or dildo preferences (Lelo seems to be the choice of hip, late-twenties young ladies in the know). It's impossible to imagine anyone male-- straight or gay --talking about Fleshlight or inflatable doll comparisons.

Consider the moment in "Stealing Beauty" where the young Liv Tyler is almost discovered masturbating by Jeremy Irons, who's in the next room. She's reasonably blasé about what she's doing. Her concern is about being seen three-quarters naked by a stranger, not about what she's doing. Compare that with the moment in "Pulp Fiction" when John Travolta mutters to himself that he won't risk making a pass at Uma Thurman-- his boss' wife --and that he'll just go home and jerk off. The audience is supposed to laugh at him. The very terms used for the male Solitary Vice ("jerk off" or "wank") are regarded as pathetic and open to instant mockery.

At my own advanced age, there isn't a way I could indulge in the Solitary Vice without feeling the instant lash of self-contempt. Admitting that I found physical pleasure in any activity (sexual or non-sexual) would be far too risky. I am not now and will never be in any sort of target demographic for someplace like Good Vibrations. I suppose I might be a target demographic for the Blue Pill or ED clips or penis pumps, but that's yet another reason why I'd never go into any shop that markets sex toys.

Here this May I have nothing whatsoever to celebrate about my body, or about sex, or about avenues to physical pleasure. I wish I could find a good cultural history of attitudes towards male masturbation in the last hundred or so years...or even since the 1960s. How did the male version of the Solitary Vice become so treated with contempt and derision? How did male desire itself become derided as inherently creepy? I'd read about those issues. A monograph with the full academic panoply of footnotes would mean something to me. Educate, Explore, Empower can't (by definition) mean anything to me.

Three Two One: Flags

I had a discussion not so very long ago about the idea of being "non-binary"-- NB or "enbee". A friend told me that she was beginning to regard herself as non-binary, and was considering coming out to her friends and family. I of course will fully support my friend in whatever she does about this, but I, as an aging roué, am very much out of the loop on just what NB is and what one does as a non-binary person.

My understanding is that NB is a gender identity, that it's an identity where someone doesn't identify as either "male" or "female". Well, fine. But what exactly does that mean? Is being NB a way of saying that you're able to move back and forth between social identities as M or F, or that you identify as something that's neither? Functionally, how does it differ from being bisexual or pansexual?

I spent a great deal of my academic life studying nationalism and the idea of nationality--- how nationalities are created and how they define themselves. How do "imagined communities" (Benedict Anderson's famous phrase about nationalities) define themselves? So, yes, any view I have of non-binary / NB people is going to be based on nationality studies, and I have no idea if that'll be a valid sort of comparison.

Any community that forms needs its markers. It needs criteria for who's inside and who's excluded. Any community needs a Secret Handshake or its own On Thursdays We Wear Pink rituals. It needs ways for members to find one another, and it needs ways to separate itself from outsiders. The rituals, the common symbols, help build and cement identity as well. It's more complicated that just thinking that any group creates its own uniforms, though of course they do. And the group's markers need to be recognized as identity markers by the outside world. There's that, too. 

Social identity requires social presentation. That's clear. If you want people to see you as a Serb, you use Cyrillic lettering and you go to an Orthodox church. Believing yourself to be something (anything!) doesn't give you any social position-- other Serbs and the rest of society have to see you as that as well.

Of course the markers are likely to be arbitrary and often trivial. A left ear piercing versus a right ear piercing. Handkerchief colors in hip pockets. Lapel pins. An in-group argot (see, e.g., Polari). Sleeve buttons on a blazer that actually unbutton. Saying zed instead of zee. The markers are arbitrary and often trivial, but all they have to do is mark out some kind of distinction. They give a new community a way of saying we do this, not that. It's a way of saying we're this, not that...and this is how you tell.  Class, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, sexual interest/kink-- the point is to have a distinction.

So...what are the NB markers? What's the checklist for new NB community members? I know that there's an NB flag that can be flown on Pride days, but a community needs more than that. What do you do-- socially, as presentation --to let others know you belong to this group? I asked my friend that question and she was perplexed. Does everyone else need to know? she asked. Can't I just tell the people who need to know?

My first response was that of course you need public, social markers. If you want to have political and social leverage-- a key reason for having  a community --then you need to find ways to make members feel like they have things in common and that they have ways to let each other (and outsiders!) know that here's a community whose interests need to be addressed. A flag is a place to start, but a community will always end up creating a checklist. 

Which brings up the idea of an NB Checklist. What does a potential NB person do, wear, sound like in order to create a distinction. Social distinctions are by definition socially constructed-- arbitrary, often trivial, but often of key importance. 

We're talking about creating stereotypes, yes. But that's part of community building as well. Humans create uniforms for themselves. 

So I will ask anyone out over the aether who reads this... What are the Official NB Identity Markers? This is a web age, and some website, some listicle, some Reddit  board has created checklists for this: clothing styles, bands, slang, accessories and accoutrements.  There's the equivalent of the Official Preppy Handbook out there somewhere on the web. 

We'll get to the other discussion here-- what being NB means in terms of what one does as NB --later. I'll need to discuss with my friend how taking up a new identity affects her sex life or her styles of romance. Does it make any difference at all? She's always been bi as long as I've known her-- will being NB make any functional difference? What's the connection here between gender identity and sex life? 

Well, I'll get to that discussion later. Right now I'll see about what's on the Official NB Checklist.