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.