Three Five Five: Interlocutrix

 The phone sex worker I met last month and I have been exchanging emails and texts. I'll note right at the outset that I haven't engaged her professional services, and that I don't intend to raise that subject. 

She is a professional, and apparently a highly regarded one in her field-- the equivalent of an FMTY Girl. It would be disrespectful to ask for freebies. I don't ask friends who are chartered accountants to do my taxes for free, and I don't ask doctor friends to treat me for free. Professionals are paid for their skills, and to ask them for freebies is a sign of disrespect. I know her per hour rate, and she'd certainly be worth it. I know that she treats her regular clients well and does empathize with them, but there's always (as there should be) a certain professional distance with clients. I'd much rather be a friend.

She asked if I have either Zoom or Face Time, so I expect we'll be talking via our laptops. It's easy to sit up late at night and just exchange emails. We've talked about our lives and about films and music and places we've been. It's easy to tell her things, and I have missed the idea of email as a way to actually correspond. I've been saying here that I miss things like letters and long telephone conversations in my life, and talking to her has been a throwback to the days when people did exchange information and stories. That's the part of friendships and relationships I've missed most in the social media world. I'm a long-form sort of person, and I can't tell anyone anything important in 280 characters or whatever the text/Twitter limit is.

I can see why her clients-- mostly older, mostly monied --are willing to pay her rates. She is an excellent interlocutrix. That's her key skill. She can make a client feel safe. She listens, asks questions, is sympathetic. Phone sex, she told me the night we met is another world, and a fantasy world should not only have No Shame, No Limits, it should be...comfortable. 

Being good at phone sex is a rare thing. Being good at ordinary sex-in-the-flesh is probably a rare thing. It takes thought. Passion, yes, but it also takes thought. Anyone good at phone sex has to make his/her partner feel not just desired, but comfortable inside that desire. I've always been someone who talks during sex. I want to exchange information with a partner-- about how each of us is feeling, about what each of us is thinking, about what the physical moment reminds us of. One lovely young co-ed in my past laughed and said that what it all made her think of was a space mission and Mission Control. Yes...we may have done NASA voices the rest of the evening. Voices are lifelines, even during sex (or maybe especially during sex).

Phone sex isn't just two people masturbating while holding their iPhones. It's about world-building, about building worlds the partners feel comfortable inside. It's about creating and sharing fantasies and knowing that you're able to be safe and still explore No Shame, No Limits. My friend has those skills, and she's made a very successful career out of them.

I don't expect I'll ever find out about her skills first-hand, but I love the stories she tells (names and identifying details all omitted, of course) about fantasies she's been part of. And I do very much enjoy being able to talk with her about our lives. Voices matter, details matter, being valuable enough to be someone's interlocutor matters. 

Three Five Four: Sundress

There's a phrase I've been hearing this summer: "getting railed in a sundress". It's something girls on social media say-- a small summertime fantasy of sex in a stylish little sundress. 

Here in this particular summer, that may not be something to aspire to. This is one of those heat-dome summers that makes you realize that Wm. Gibson is right about the Jackpot arriving. In half the country it's too hot to go outside, let alone have sex outdoors. 

Still, I like the idea of railing a girl in a sundress. There are some interesting markers encoded in the phrase. Sundresses go with a kind of J. Peterman World or an L.L. Bean catalog world-- picnic hampers, bottles of wine, pastel skies, a kind of idyllic summer afternoon. Sundresses themselves, now? They're designed to call up dreamy summer days, to make a lovely girl look like she's floating along, light as air. 

That perfect sundress is light, airy, evocative of leisure and a kind of innocence that's so deeply erotic. If the fabric is gauzy, it calls up lots of David Hamilton photographs from the late 1970s. There are often straw hats and strappy sandals involved. And of course any lovely girl knows that sundresses are worn next to the skin. As well they should be.

My friend in New Zealand wrote me once about being in the perfect sundress at some sort of cricket championship in Wellington. She wrote about walking barefoot back to her Older Admirer's Range Rover, sandals in her hand, a bit tipsy on Martinborough sauvignon blanc, feeling the summer air under her dress on waxed, bare skin, and knowing that she'd be having sex very soon on a picnic blanket somewhere in the hills above Wellington. Blue and white, the dress was, and just below her knees. And Jill never, never wore anything under a dress like that. A perfect look for being a posh Kiwi girl getting railed after a cricket match. I did sigh over her letter. I did want to be the one sliding that sundress up over her hips and feeling her legs-- long, slender, dark-tanned --over my shoulders. 

The woman I met at Peychaud's, the phone sex woman, told me that she shared fantasies like that. "Getting railed in a sundress" meant not only the idea of summertime sex and posh picnic hampers, it meant getting to buy and wear dreamy dresses as well. I do like that-- sex and romance in a J. Peterman kind of world.

I have to email the woman from Peychaud's. She did give me her email address and her personal cell phone number. She was lovely, fun, and able to be a very good interlocutrix. I have no objection to arranging telephone appointments with her. She'd be worth the fee. And she likes dreams of J. Peterman World and Breton beaches as much as I do.

Getting railed in a sundress... That's an image I do fancy. It calls up all the sorts of settings I like with beautiful young companions, and it involves fashion that I like to see on lovely girls. J. Peterman World is always about a certain class image, too: let's not forget that. 

Wm. Gibson's Jackpot may spoil summers, but we do still have the dream of cool breezes, pastel blue skies, and a view of the ocean just off the bluffs. And we have the dream of lovely girls naked under feather-light fabric, smiling at the thought of the afternoon.