Three Nine Six: Vibrations

 I've been looking at emails sent to me from one of the higher-end sex toy boutiques. It's midsummer, and they're having a sale. They're offering their products specifically for summertime, with all the romantic and alluring touches they can add. It's odd, of course, or at least odd for me. I can look at their products and feel nothing at all. Everything they make is alien to me.

I'm a mere cis-het male of a certain age. Toys from Good Vibrations or Lelo mean nothing to me. I understand that their products are mean for pleasure, but self-pleasure isn't for cis-het males. There's nothing there that might be pleasure, let alone empowerment. 

There are always arbitrary social rules, and those rules are rarely if ever successfully defied. Males aren't meant to receive pleasure. Cis-het males aren't meant to give pleasure. The male body has no aesthetic potential and isn't designed for pleasure either given or received. That's what the rules tell us, and I've internalized those rules.

Here in the age of The Discourse, there are clear social punishments for any male who believes himself capable of either giving or receiving pleasure. I've spent time these last few years wondering what sort of sex I'm permitted to have as a cis-het male. The word to focus on there is "permitted". To whom do I have to look for permission? The answer is...The Discourse. There are whispered voices out over the aether that let me-- that let us all --know what's acceptable.

We know from The Discourse that cis-het sex is boring by definition, that any sort of cis-het sex is boring and retrograde, and that the sexual performance of any cis-het male is by definition "mediocre". We know that. The whispered voices tell us that. 

I suppose it's not only cis-het sex. I'm hearing over the aether that gay male sex is no less boring these days, and that male performance, either straight or gay, must be disappointing to all parties. 

The Discourse also tells us that there's no escape from that. Learning techniques won't help. Having any of a wide range of fetishes won't help. Fetishes themselves are being re-branded as retrograde and boring. We live now in an attention economy, and what can be worse nowadays than "boring"?

If you scroll through the posts and videos that make up The Discourse, you won't find anything that cis-het males might do or enjoy that can ever be worth a partner's interest, or that might be regarded by the whispered voices as acceptable...or permissible. Nothing new can be learned, and any efforts to play with transgression or exploration are pathetic at best and some cocktail of disgusting and ridiculous at worst. 

Make a list. Make a list, if you can. What kinds of sex are still treated as exciting or worthwhile? What fantasies are you allowed to have that won't mark you as mediocre, unimaginative, un-hip, retrograde, boring?

I've spent a lifetime trying to acquire the skills to please a partner. I've spent a lifetime learning to construct fantasies and scenarios for myself and my partners. I've spent a lifetime exploring kinks and persuading partners to join me. All those things have been cancelled and erased. I no longer believe that anyone experienced any pleasure with me or while experiencing any of the things I had to offer. I no longer believe that I can (or should) have any sexual interests. 

Sex toys aren't for cis-het males. Fantasies and kinks aren't for cis-het males. Sexual skills are beyond the reach of cis-het males. The Arbitrary Social Rules have no patience for ordinary cis-het male sex, and less and less patience for the idea of fantasies and kinks altogether.

There's nothing on the aether or in the quotidian world this summer that says that people like me have social permission to have sex or seek pleasure. There's nothing that makes me think that in all the years I've been with lovers I ever gave or received any pleasure, whether via the flesh or via what goes on behind my eyes. All those things, all those beliefs, have been erased. 

Three Nine Three: Swans

 There's a novel I read some years ago-- Elizabeth Kostova's "The Swan Thieves" (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2010) that I picked up again the other day. I'd read her "The Historian" when it first appeared, and I was looking forward to her second novel.

The novel itself is about the art world, psychiatry, and what constitutes beauty. It's also about age, desire, and loss. I hadn't thought about "The Swan Thieves" in years, but I half-remembered one particular passage and wanted to find it again.

The setting is simple. The hero, a fifty-something psychiatrist who's also a failed painter, goes to the National Gallery to look at a particular painting, one that's prompted one of his patients to try and deface the canvas. He's talking to one of the workers at the information desk when he notices a twenty-ish young girl who works there as well. The girl, he notes, has dyed-obsidian hair and green eyes...and then he's launched off into fantasy:

I found myself staring at her, unexpectedly stirred. Her gaze was knowing as she stood there behind the counter, her body lean and flexible under a tight-zipped jacket, the smallest curve of hip showing between that and the top of a short black skirt-- that would be the maximum glimpse of abdominal skin permitted in this gallery full of nudes, I speculated. She might be an art student, working here in her spare time to get through school, a gifted printmaker or fashioner of  jewelry, with those long, pale hands. I pictured her up against the counter, after hours, no underwear under that too-short skirt. She was just a kid; I looked away. She was a kid, and I was no catch, I knew...

I do love that brief glimpse of the girl. Well, of course I do. Short skirt, no underwear, emplaced in the worlds of art and academia, in her early twenties-- those things are all on my list of criteria for a perfect fantasy girl. Especially the idea of her up against the counter after hours, skirt up around her waist, one leg hooked around me. How could I not like that? The paragraph might've been written specifically for me.

I recall that when the novel came out, Ms. Kostova was attacked online and in reviews for that paragraph. Far too many self-described feminist reviewers were appalled that she gave her male main character such thoughts. How dare a character have such thoughts in a novel, especially a character in his fifties?  

I was annoyed and amused at the attacks. Once again, here we are-- assigning real-world blame to an author for the thoughts of a fictional character. I was amused, too, since I'd have had the exact same thoughts there at the gallery information desk. The issue of age would never have occurred to me, not then and not now. 

We're not supposed to have fantasies these days. We're not supposed to feel, let alone admit to feeling, physical desire. Sexual fantasies aren't for anyone male these days, let alone males of a certain age. I'm not sure what the Arbitrary Social Rules say about female desire and female fantasies these days, but I do suspect that the Purity Culture of the Year Twenty-Five opposes such things.

Let's be clear. I'd certainly have the same thoughts the character in the novel had. I wouldn't act on them, of course, and these days I'd never admit to anyone that I was having such thoughts. I'd certainly never admit to anyone female that I had sexual thoughts about anyone, ever-- not even if I was talking to a lover.

I'm a person of the male persuasion and of a certain age. I know better than to have fantasies. Fantasies are thoughtcrime. We know this in the Year Twenty-Five. To have fantasies as a male, let alone fantasies about anyone younger, only enhances the thoughtcrime. Male sex is itself suspect, since all male sex is "mediocre" by definition. To be male and feel desire is to be actively harming the object of desire, even if that person never knows she's being desired. 

It's better to do and feel...nothing. To do anything else is to be open to both anger and mockery. To have thoughts about beauty and desire is to show oneself as pathetic, ridiculous, and dangerous. Better to avoid all crimethink, to do and feel nothing at all, lest you be held in contempt for your irrefutable failings. 

Three Nine Two: Hands

 I'm still on the mailing list for several high-end sex toy boutiques. I've written about that before. There was a time when I might have used their catalogs to buy gifts for lovely Young Companions, but at the moment I have no one for whom I could buy such things. 

That makes me by definition an incel, and I'm not happy with that. I have no lovely Young Companion in my life, and there's no one with whom I could be involved in what seems to be called a "situationship". I'm currently celibate, and I don't want to be. This makes me an incel by definition, and I hate that word. I dislike the aesthetics and politics of the so-called incel community, and I refuse to be part of that.

Nonetheless, seeing the email adverts from places like Good Vibrations makes me all too aware of my current status. Now I have nothing against Good Vibrations or the wares the company sells. Their sex toys are elegant enough, and girls I know give them high marks. I've bought vibrators and dildos from them as gifts, and my young ladies have been pleased.  My unhappiness is based on how pointless and uncomfortable it is for anyone of the male persuasion  (me, that means me) to look at their online catalogs.

Their latest ad campaign was "Give Your Hand A Hand", and they were marketing sex toys and sexual aids for men. I can't deal with that.

Self-pleasuring is just not something men can do and retain any sense of self-respect. I looked at the Good Vibrations catalog and could hear derisive laughter in my head. Being male cuts you off from any ability to find pleasure on your own. To be male and "give your hand a hand" makes you pathetic and contemptible. It marks you out as a pathetic failure who's engaging in something creepy and shameful.

Think about a high-end Lelo vibrator or one of the classic "rabbit" vibrators. Young ladies have been using those for the last twenty years and more to discover their bodies and discover pleasure on their own. No one male can do that. No one male can risk being known to do that. Having sexual fantasies at all (especially about an actual individual) is a red flag if you're male. It's a marker for being sad and disgusting and probably threatening all at once.

My friend Jill in NZ, or any of the girls I've written about here-- Liberty, Levin, my vanished ghostgirl here --can use a high-end Lelo and be proud of it. They can discuss self-pleasure with other girls as something that's a Good Thing in their lives. They believe that they have a right to seek pleasure, and that there are tool that are useful and acceptable for doing that. Their bodies can serve them. I can't imagine applying any of that to myself.

I'm male, and the male body is an object of contempt to begin with. Even a gym-toned male body is regarded as contemptible. The act of male self-pleasuring is seen as laughable, sad, and disgusting. I would be almost breathlessly proud to have a lovely Young Companion tell me that I was a fantasy image she used while pleasuring herself. At the same time, I'd never under any circumstances tell a lover or potential lover that she was my fantasy image. I'd rather take a bullet to the knee than tell a lover that I fantasized about her. I know deep in my bones that she'd be disgusted and appalled and would stalk out of my life in a cold rage. No lovely girl would ever be thrilled or pleased that she was someone's fantasy. 

Long ago, the vanished Ketzie wrote in her blog that she kept a note on her bathroom mirror as an incentive to go to the gym: "Remember-- You Are Someone's Reason To Masturbate". There is no way that anyone male could ever put up a note like that. There is no way in hell, no way here under God's green sky, that I could imagine doing that or even thinking it.

I will not allow myself to have fantasies, let alone engage in the Solitary Vice. I will not allow myself to do something that would mark me out as risible, contemptible, disgusting. 

If you're male, the Arbitrary Social Rules say that self-pleasure isn't for you. The male body isn't for pleasure. Male sexuality, and especially straight male sexuality, is something that's snickered at these days as mediocre and vaguely sad at best, and as disgusting and threatening at worst. 

I'd rather just withdraw from the whole thing. I will not do something that's so widely mocked these days. I will not be judged as a disgusting failure for pleasuring myself, and I will not engage in the Solitary Vice when I'm well aware that lovers or potential lovers would shudder in derision at what I'd be doing. I've read many an article or blog post these last few years pointing out that all straight male sex is mediocre at best and that anything anyone male might do with his body is both repulsive and an admission of failure. 

At my age, it's better just to walk away from things. It's better to do nothing and think of nothing that would mark you out as a failure. I cannot imagine buying (let alone using) a male sex toy. I'd rather give up the idea of pleasure altogether. In this life and this world, a lovely girl pleasuring herself is regarded as a thing of empowerment and aesthetic beauty. No one male can be seen the same way.

It's better to just keep your hands away from yourself. It's better not to think of pleasure and sex at all. It's better to just be invisible. Always. 

Three Nine Zero: Blue

 A young friend in the English Home Counties told me once upon a time that she had no problem with men using what we call the Blue Pill. The Blue Pill, she said, was a tool, a solution to a physical problem. In the course of her life, she'd been with boys and men from sixteen to their sixties, and many had used the Blue Pill either "recreationally" or to solve a problem. The Blue Pill for men, she said, was no different than a girl needing extra lube. 

I can't disagree with her on that. If there's a problem, you look for a way to solve it. And yet...I'd be too afraid to use Viagra or any of its sister drugs. Today I read that Viagra had a number of off-label uses that men needed to consider. It's a vasodilator, and it's supposedly good for heart health and longevity. I have no idea if that's true or not, or what the medical research actually says. It doesn't seem implausible, at least on the  face of things. The idea was advanced that men, and especially males over forty, should take one or two Blue Pills a week as a medical thing, a health thing. Again, I have no idea what the research says on any of this.

I've never taken the Blue Pill or any other Sildenafil-based drugs. I could say that I've never needed it, but that does sound too much like bragging. My luck has been good-- that's all I'll say. My body hasn't betrayed me...yet. I've always told myself that if I had systems failure, I'd remember that I'm not a one-trick pony and that I've had years of expensive post-graduate education. I could figure out a back-up plan. I told my friend in the Home Counties about that, and she just laughed. She pointed out that I had fingers and a tongue and that she expected that I knew how to use toys-- from Corona bottles to high-end Lelo vibrators --on a partner. 

I do trust her on these things, and I know that I'm not a one-trick pony. And as I get older, I remind myself that one of the good things about BDSM play is that there are ways to give pleasure that don't require that all male systems be operating the way they did at twenty. Nonetheless, any intimations of mortality and decay do leave me depressed and unwilling to do anything that reminds me of my clock ticking down to zero.

These days, I'm far more anxious about things physical than I was even ten years ago. I've never been really afraid of systems failure before, and I've dealt moderately well with poor body image. Nowadays, though, I'd be terrified of a young companion feeling insulted if I needed the Blue Pill. I'd be terrified of her seeing me take the Blue Pill and having it remind her of my age and the idea of decay. Remember, I'm the one who read a novel where the ingenue suddenly thinks that her older lover "smells old" and leaps out of bed. That led to months and months of showering and using two or three applications of the strongest and most severe body wash I could buy before ever coming to bed with a partner...even if she already knew my age to the day. 

I can't decide what I'd be more afraid of-- systems failure (I'm far too anxious not to use some euphemism for "impotence"-- here we are with magical thinking) making a partner feel unwanted or not desirable or systems failure highlighting all my other failures (age, looks, social status, wealth). 

In my life, I've been with girls who took MDMA before sex as a "recreational" thing. But I can't quite believe that taking a Blue Pill before sex would make my partner think that I was doing something to make things better for her. These days, I'm far too anxious and afraid to do anything "recreational"-- anything that's about giving and receiving pleasure. I'm far too anxious and afraid of disappointing whoever I'd be with...and, yes, afraid of being seen as an object of mockery. 

And...yes. I still use a severe body wash whenever I might be anywhere near (and not just in bed with) a lovely young companion. My life these days is about masking decay in so, so many ways.

Three Eight Seven: Gifts

 Today is the day after Christmas, and here we are in the last week of the year. The last week of December is always a dead, empty week-- a time for watching the last embers of the year fade to ash. It's a week for pessimism and a sense of loss. There seems to be no way of escaping that.

Christmas gifts are rare at my age, but this year I did receive one gift worth noting. Someone with the best intentions in the world gave me the gift of a spa day. I have a lovely and expensively-produced gift card for a day at a hip local spa.  I was duly appreciative. The gift was unexpected, and it was given in friendship. So please be very aware that I'm not saying anything bad about the person who gave me the gift card. I was thrilled to be remembered at all. But the gift will never be used, and there's no way it can be.

This is the second time in my life I've been given a spa day, a "self-care" day. The first time was years ago-- back in the last age, back in the last millennium. Again, it was intended to be something enjoyable. I didn't use that first gift certificate, either. There was no way I could use it. I did tell the person who gave that first spa day to me that I loved the gift, and I did tell her that I'd used it and had a wonderful time at the spa. There was no way to tell her the truth-- that I'd put the gift envelope in a desk drawer where it would be forgotten forever.

No one like me can ever have a "self-care" day. No one like me can ever use a spa day. There are always social rules-- yes, arbitrary rules, but rules nonetheless. I'm a straight, cis, white, middle-class male of a certain age. Spa days aren't for people like me. Any day involving care of the self-- care of the body --isn't for people like me.

I've been in saunas before, and sitting naked in a steam room isn't something I can do. I found myself barely able to breathe in a sauna once, and I knew why. I knew that it was about anxiety rather than any physical issue. I'd seen horror films and thrillers where someone gets trapped in a sauna...so that was certainly on my mind. But most of the anxiety was that I had to be unclothed. The sauna towel around my waist did nothing to make me feel secure. I was aware of my body, and that's never  a good thing. 

I've never seen any reason for the male body to be exposed. I've never seen anything attractive or aesthetically pleasing in the male body. I've certainly never seen anything attractive in my own body...let alone when covered in sweat and gasping for breath. I didn't want to suffocate in the sauna, but what I was most afraid of was being seen by anyone else. I remember being desperately afraid of anyone else using the sauna while I was there. I was terrified of being seen-- terrified of having anyone else see what my body was really like. 

Now, I'm a  trained historian. I know that in Classical Greece, upper-class men exercised naked and took pride in making their bodies fit to be seen. That Greek attitude is utterly alien to me. I can read about Japanese or Korean spas-- elegant, hi-tech, sleek, with robot-serviced cold and hot baths and future-coded steam rooms --or watch videos demonstrating their technical wonders. I can do those things and marvel at the facilities...but there's no way here under God's green sky that I could go to one.  For all that I've obsessed over cyberpunk visions of Japanese style, I couldn't go to a Japanese or Korean spa. Not even the idea of having a Wm. Gibson experience could get me there.

I've spent my life suggesting to young ladies of my acquaintance that all beautiful girls should sleep naked. I'll stand by that position, but I've never been able to sleep naked on my own. It seems wrong for someone like me.  If I can't be naked in my own bedroom, I certainly can't do that at a spa.

The spa day I was gifted included a full-body massage. I almost grimaced at that. I've never actually had  a massage, and there's no way it can happen. There's no scenario for me in which  getting a massage ends well.

If the person doing the massage is female, there's nothing but shame awaiting me. I understand that a trained masseuse sees human bodies as a set of muscles and nerves, that she'll have been trained to be a professional. But I'll still be utterly ashamed to have anyone female (and presumptively attractive) see my flesh. And in a post-#MeToo world, other, horrible things can happen. I'd be on the massage table and there'd be a touch on my back and shoulders and...well...what if my body began to respond? What if I did start to become, you know, aroused?  I could stay face-down to try to hide what was happening and try to get away from any touch. It wouldn't do me any good, though. 

One of two things would happen. The masseuse would be disgusted or enraged. Not all the apologies in the world for the involuntary physical response would be enough. She might recoil in disgust and/or point and laugh with contempt. That would be bad enough. But she'd be even more likely to immediately for the manager...or call for the security guards. I can so easily imagine myself being shoved out of the spa and told never to return-- and I can imagine the police being called. I can always imagine that-- the police coming and me ending up in handcuffs. No matter how professional and clinical the setting was, I couldn't risk having a masseuse touch me-- or even see me.

And having a masseur instead? That can't be allowed to happen. I know how that would play out. I'd be Geo. Costanza from "Seinfeld", fleeing a massage in self-loathing horror because he thought that "it moved!" when a male massage therapist touched him. I know that we're supposed to laugh at Geo. Costanza and his fears, but I nonetheless have the same fears. That knowledge does me no good at all-- if anything, it makes me feel worse. That I could have homophobic fears makes the whole self-loathing thing worse. Being afraid of being touched at all by anyone male is the kind of fear that should leave you angry at yourself. Homophobia and low-key gay panic aren't socially or politically acceptable, and I agree that they shouldn't be acceptable. Discovering my own fears is disturbing and calls up waves of self-loathing. 

But here we are. I can't be anyplace where I'm outside my armour-- i.e., anyplace where I'm a body, where I'm flesh rather than a set of constructed masks and costumes. I certainly can't be touched. I very much like holding hands with a lovely companion, and I love tracing a fingertip over a beautiful girl's thigh or collarbone. But I dislike being touched myself. Being flesh is unsettling and far too risky. Physical pleasure is far, far  too risky these days.

The old year is ending, and I've taken no pleasure in 2024. I don't expect to feel anything pleasurable in 2025. I have a gift card for an expensive spa day that I can never use. The gift card itself I can't even re-gift. I don't want to giver to know that I  couldn't use her gift, or that I gave it to someone else. The card will end up in my desk, buried under old bank statements. 

I appreciate the thought behind the gift, and I very much like the giver. But anything that involves the self as a body-- I can't use that. I can be a lot of things, but I can't be a body. I can never accept pleasure as a gift.    

Three Seven Eight: Numbers

I had a long conversation with an old friend the other night. I've known him since grade school, and so we do know all about each other's lives. The other night he was talking about the incel  obsession with women's body counts. He despises incels on both aesthetic and political grounds, as do I. But he did tell me that he could understand the obsession with body counts, with how many sexual partners (or at least male sexual partners) a woman has had. 

It's not a moral thing for him. Not at all. It's fear of judgment. It's fear that a woman will immediately compare him to the male lovers in her past and that he'll be found wanting. He's competitive, and always has been. He and I have competed with one another over things like books read and films seen since ever we were schoolboys. And so he's always deeply anxious whenever he's involved with a woman who's had more than a bare handful of lovers in her life. He's terrified of being judged as incompetent or (worse) just mediocre in bed.

I can understand that. There's something soul-killing about the idea of a lovely girl in bed with you who's actually just recalling old TV shows in her head so that she won't seem too bored with you. There's something soul-killing about the idea of a girl sitting with her female friends the next day and dismissing you as mediocre.

Yes, I'm competitive. I always have been. I was brought up to believe that making a 95/100 was good, but not good enough. Even 100/100 might not be good enough. And what was worse was being seen to only get 95/100. Being seen to fail in any way would end with your social status being destroyed. 

I've been lucky. No young companion in my life has ever mocked me face to face. I've never had a girl yawn or fumble for the TV remote during sex with me.  I'm bright enough to know that it's possible that girls have been telling me soothing lies all through the years. I know that. But I haven't been mocked for failure. I haven't been mocked (so far as I know) for mediocrity.

But it does get harder to think of myself as worth anything in bed. Far too many Twitter feeds are devoted to sneering at "mediocre men" for their inability to induce pleasure in their partners. I do live in fear that somewhere girls with whom I had affairs years ago are using me as an example of an incompetent lover. 

Now there are other (if related) reasons for being concerned with body count numbers. I'll agree with Muriel Rukeyser that our lives are made up of stories, not atoms. And every affair, every encounter, spins off stories. If a girl has far more stories, or better stories than I do, then I feel my social status crumbling. If she has stories about being with a lover or a hook-up in cool places ("There was that time in the stacks at Sterling Library at Yale" or "There was that time in the back seat of the Aston-Martin") and I don't have similar tales to tell, well then-- why should she bother with me. Sex with me won't generate any stories worth telling.

There's envy here, too. There's always envy. Envy is the Deadly Sin that's always been my companion. If a girl has really good stories to tell about sex and adventures, I'll feel my old friend Envy making his appearance. I'll obsess over doing the things she's done, over having sex in the places that have enlivened her stories. We're not talking so much about the actual numbers in anyone's body count, we're talking about the stories derived from those numbers. We're talking about the fear that I won't have stories of my own that are good enough. We're talking about the fear that she'll have more and better stories than I ever will.

And we're talking about the way that I've always seen stories as social currency, as things that can be exchanged for social status. Good stories can be used to seduce, too. Good stories can build up a world that lovely young companions might want to visit with you.

I have no moral comments to make about a girl who has a high body count. But I do get anxious and envious when I'm afraid that her body count is the raw materials for stories that will only emphasize my own failures.

Three Seven Four: Notes

 Once upon a time Liberty and I were sitting on the porch steps of a weekend cottage we'd rented by a river in the hills. It was an autumn morning, and we were drinking coffee while there still mist outside. She was wearing nothing but one of my pullover sweaters-- I remember that -- and leaning back with her legs stretched out. I traced a finger along her leg and she laughed.

Her last older man, she said, had always liked her in anything that showed off her legs. A beautiful young girl, he'd told her, should always sit in one of two ways in a skirt-- legs crossed to show off how long they were, or else slightly parted so that she'd be a bit on display, so she'd be aware that strangers could tell she wasn't wearing underwear. I remember kissing her knee and telling her that I agreed with that. 

She sat up and kept her legs apart. No problem, she told me. She disliked ever wearing underwear anyway, and she liked having me look at her. What she wondered, she said, was about why her last older man had wanted her on display for strangers. It wasn't that she minded that so much, but she questioned whether he'd wanted others to see her to show them that she was there as his sex toy or that he wanted her to be aware of and excited by being on display. Older men, she grinned, all had very precise interests. She raised an eyebrow and looked at me for comments.

I told her that I understood. I liked being able to look at her, and I liked knowing that she was available to be seen and touched. And if she was sitting there, legs a bit parted, she'd be aware of how vulnerable she was. She nodded-- older men liked her to seem vulnerable. She was twenty-two that autumn, and she laughed about that. Maybe two or three more years, she said, maybe two or three more years when she could still be a young girl who could be corrupted and violated. After that, she said, she'd have to act like a grown-up woman, and she had no idea how sex and sex play went with adulting.

Older men, she said, had always been something she'd liked, all the way back to the kayak shop owner when she was a teen in the Pacific Northwest. Older men were something she could learn from, and she liked that-- learning things, having someone teach her things. Kayaking, rock climbing, art, books-- she wanted to learn about things and try being something or someone new all the time. That went for sex, too. Older men were the sounding boards who showed her all kinds of pleasures and games and things to explore. That, she told me, was what I was there for.  I had to be flattered by the vote of confidence. 

The older man before that, before the one who'd taught her to sit open-thighed, was a foot fetish devotee. She grinned and told me that she pretty much believed that older men were always into feet. Not that she minded, she said. It was an easy fetish for her, since she'd grown up barefoot half the time anyway. Her foot fetish man had paid for lots of expensive pedicures for her, too. And having her toes sucked and her feet and ankles licked felt nice. Foot jobs were fun to do, she told me, especially with uncircumcised men. The only thing she didn't understand, she said, was why a lot of foot fetish play that she found at places like PornHub seemed to be about submission and domination. She didn't think her older man was creepy about the fetish, and she didn't feel like she needed to play the domme and order him around. He enjoyed it, she liked the way what he did for her felt, and just asking for something was always better than ordering someone around. 

I remember her looking at me with a raised eyebrow then. She told me that when I wanted to blindfold her or tie her wrists, or play with a riding whip, I should just ask. Or she could ask me to do it to her. Neither of us needed to play at domination, let alone humiliation. She was much more submissive than dominant by nature, but while she liked being a bottom, she never understood humiliation as sex.

She asked me if I ever wanted to suck her toes or lick her feet, and I just shrugged. If she asked, I told her, I'd do it. I was, after all, her current official evil older predator, and I was open to whatever she wanted to try. Good, Liberty said. She expected her older men to teach her things and she expected them never to be afraid or ashamed to explore things with her. 

She opened her legs a bit more and grinned at me. What she liked, she said, was that attitude. I'd been good at creating scenarios for us, and she liked that. I'd been good at playing faux-nonconsensual games, too. She liked that about older men-- the being able to understand about faux-nonconsensual sex. Boys her own age, she said, knew nothing about games and irony. Sex, she said, was about pleasure and having fun. She didn't need people who were grindingly earnest about sex, or about anything else, in her life. 

I make notes about you, Liberty told me. You're in my journal. I expect you to show me things.  I remember that, and I was proud of it.  

Keep sitting like that, I told her. Especially in public. Keep avoiding underwear. And I'll think of things. I will work at that. I know my role. 

Liberty is someone I do still think about. I remember the stories she told me and the things she and I explored. I do have to write about her more.

Three Six Two: Regimentals

I haven't yet seen "Tár", though I very much want to. It's the sort of film that does intrigue me-- the Creative Genius under stress, a world with its own arcane skills and rituals. 

And of course there are film stills of Cate Blanchett in black tie and severely tailored suit. That's a look that's held my attention for years. I'm rather an admirer of garconne style, all the way back to my lost youth. I remember sighing over photos in old magazines of Swinging London models in man-tailored suits, and I recall being at university and seeing some of the more daring girls going to parties and proms in severe suits and expensive neckties. 

I would've given a lot to have been able to take the young Jane Birkin or the young Marisa Berenson dancing in Sixties London or Paris while they were dressed in garconne look. And tonight I'm thinking of a Sixties actress/model named Merle Lynn Browne, who wrote a comic "expose" of "jet set" sexual adventures called "The Ravishers". The paperback edition of the novel showed a lovely photo of her in a tailored suit, light brown hair in some Sixties style falling over her shoulders. I saw her once on (I think) the old "Tonight" show in the days of Johnny Carson. She was there to talk about her novels ("The Ravishers" and its sequel, "The Arousers"), and she was in pin-striped suit and tie. That's a memory that's stayed with me since boyhood. 

These days, now...are we allowed to find lovely long-legged garconne girls attractive? Are we still allowed to...gender-bend? What are the semiotics of girls in man-tailored suits these days? I suspect that the image of a girl in a man-tailored suit is regarded these days as being about anything except sex.

Some months ago, I read about a literary-world scandal involving Donna  Tartt. I've been a fan of Ms. Tartt since ever I read "The Secret History" when it first appeared. It seems that some podcast or other had interviewed some of Tartt's Bennington classmates about her life as an undergraduate, and somehow the podcast had become part of the gender wars. 

There were ex-classmates who argued that Ms. Tartt's signature elegant suits and ties were part of her whole design to "have sex like a young boy", and that (shock! horror!) her love life at Bennington was all about boys who were gay or gay-adjacent. I wasn't sure why any of that was supposed to be shocking...or the least surprising. From the first magazine photos of Ms. Tartt I saw, I'd taken it as a given that her boyfriends would be at least gay-adjacent. And I assumed that her own social pose would be "handsome gay boy at Oxford 1925".  I did laugh at one of the shock-horror types who went into gender wars mode and sniffed that there was no such thing as "having sex like a young boy"-- showing that here was someone who either being deliberately obtuse or had zero imagination.

I'd known girls all through my undergraduate days who desperately pursued arts-and-literature gay-adjacent boys, and who loved pretending to be pretty gay boys in some "Brideshead Revisited" fantasy world. I looked at the photos of Ms. Tartt in her suits and ties and knew exactly what was going on. It wasn't about the Trans Wars at all. It was about sex and class, or at least sex and aesthetics. After all...the whole "Dark Academia" thing always incorporated lots of sexual role-play and visions of academia as a setting for gay aesthetics. 

Whether it's Lydia Tár or Donna Tartt or the young Jane Birkin, the garconne look attracts me. It's sleekly elegant, which I always love, and it's very deliberately artificial. It's role-play, and that's always better than the current obsession with "authenticity". 

Even here, in the autumn of my days, I like the idea of a leggy co-ed in a tailored suit, and I like the idea of sharing my necktie collection with her.

Three Five Nine: Repetition

 There's a question that's been haunting me lately. 

In its simplest form, it's this: how do you acquire fantasies? How do you create new fantasies? How do you re-program your dreams and desires?

There's the old Freudian term repetition compulsion, and it bothers me.  What do you do when you realize that your fantasies never really change, that you play out the same scenes over and over?

There may be some minor changes, some tweaks-- slightly different furniture, slightly different clothes, slightly different time of day. But that's all minor editing, no more than tweaks. I was brought up to be an academic, and I'm used to going back and polishing things I've written. A slight change in adjectives, a slight rearrangement of paragraphs, streamlining a sentence. But that's all minor, all in the service of telling a given story. The underlying story itself never changes.

These days there are a couple of ongoing fantasies that play out in my head. The basic plots are the same-- the couple that should have no chance of meeting or interacting happen to end up encountering one another and talking themselves into bed. Lots of dialogue, of course. Always lots of dialogue. Talking is always a key part of sex for me. And the dialogue is always polished up, always tweaked. 

In the ongoing films-in-my-head there's always a speech delivered by a particular, very tall, fashion model. She's explaining what's about to happen, explaining it to my character. Look, she says, this is a big city. Every night lots of people who are just totally random, who you'd never think could even be in the same places, happen to meet  and end up going home together. It's just odds. Sometimes the odds fall out one way.  I've worked on that speech a long time. Some things matter to me. That explanation for a meeting matters to me.

My mind works like that. I need explanations. I need to know how and why.

I also need to be able to find new fantasies. New things need to happen, characters need to change, characters need to dive into new experiences. I'm given to watching the same films or reading the same books over and over. I'll watch the same film scene over and over just for a particular moment, a particular emotional response. I need to try new things,  even if only inside my head. 

This goes to the issue of how people acquire kinks and fetishes, of how people acquire new desires. Not just new human objects-of-desire, but new stories and new story arcs and plots. 

I like the current films-in-my-head, I like the point of the story, and I like the fantasy girl rather a lot. But I don't want to be stuck forever in a loop. I want there to be new stories.  I want there to be new avenues for adventure, excitement, pleasure.

What I don't how is how to leverage that. I can list things-- activities, places, partners, games --I'm interested in, but those lists don't translate into scripts and scenes in my head. I'm not sure how to look at a description of a kink and then make it something of my own. 

What I need is some incentive to make changes, to try out new adventures.

Three Five Eight: Wars

It's a strange time to be writing about sex and erotica.

I'd thought that the pandemic would generate a new batch of sex blogs and would see a revitalization of phone sex and erotic exchanges via email. I'd hoped that the pandemic might even lead to people sending love letters and erotic missives. After all, there must be some people who'd prefer to lie awake in bed and read over handwritten fantasies from a lover (or even an alluring stranger) than scroll through their texts. 

I know that I for one would rather read a handwritten erotic letter or even an email than scroll through sexts. I've never been able to sext. Text-speak isn't a way I can construct any fantasies that interest me.

Somehow, though, the Red Death did nothing to put new life into sex. If anything, the world after 2020 seems more sex-negative. 

I remember adding "Gender Wars" as a content label here back when I first started writing here. In those days, "gender wars" meant male-female hostilities. It meant things like the Dublin Elevator Encounter and #MeToo. Now it means the Trans Wars, the GCs versus the TRAs. And there's been a spillover from the Trans Wars into disdain for sex-- both the activity and the biological idea.

Look, I do agree with the GC side that humans come in two sexes only, and that one's sex is fixed at birth. That shouldn't be taken to mean that  trans people need to be "erased" or that they shouldn't have full civil rights and access to medical treatment. It does mean that socially presenting as another sex doesn't make you a member of that sex and that there should still be single-sex spaces. 

What bothers me about the GC side is that they've gone from arguing something simple-- two biological sexes, no changing biological sex, gender as socially constructed --to becoming increasingly anti sex-as-activity. There's far too much Second Wave prudery on the GC side these days. They don't like the idea of Pride being a kind of Carnevale, they don't like kink, and they don't like fetishes.  And you might guess that I've been fascinated with kink all my life. I like the idea of sexual adventuring and exploration. Reading GC advocates attack kink and fetishes makes my teeth grind. I also dislike the way they create an image of the "woke" enemy as university girls with blue hair. My clubland days were back in the lost land of the Eighties, and I always liked girls who ran through hair colours every few weeks. I had a white slash dyed through my hair for a couple of years in those days, and I did like that. I hate it that the GC side, much of whose thought I agree with, sounds increasingly prudish.

Now the trans side draws my disdain for other reasons. Look, I do not believe that TWAW. I do believe that socially presenting as the other sex is LARPing. There's nothing wrong with LARPing, by the way. If a certain social presentation feels more natural, then present yourself that way. Wear a dress if you want. Call yourself by whatever name you prefer. Your life may be better that way, and that's all to the good. But you haven't changed biological sex, and the search for "authenticity" will always end badly. 

I do not believe TRA assertions that pansexuality is the only moral or ethical kind of sex. I dislike the way that the TRAs are trying to destroy the idea of being gay, lesbian, or bi--- I dislike that more than I dislike the GC hostility to the idea of "queer" as a category that includes things like S/M or role-playing. 

I dislike the way that both sides are against the idea of sex as adventure and pleasure rather than some sort of moral-political statement. I dislike the way that both sides are so ready to mock cis-het preferences and cis-het sex as either boring or morally bankrupt. Though at least the GC side believes that cis-het does exist, whereas the TRA side believes that it doesn't (or shouldn't) really exist.

2022 is winding down, and there are so many economic and political nightmares hovering just at the edge of our vision. I had hoped that this year there would be new sex blogs with clever tales of adventure. I'd thought that after two years of dealing with the pandemic and its one million dead we'd be ready to explore the possibilities of pleasure. That hasn't happened, though.

It's hard for me to imagine a world without desire and kink and a sense of aesthetic play. But we seem to be coming to that.

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 Three: Couch

 I have been going back to FMTY Twitter. There's a sense of summer there. Some of the FMTY Girls are taking a summer hiatus and relaxing on beaches or next to rooftop pools. Some are accompanying patrons or clients to island villas. I do wish them all well.

I'll never be able to afford an FMTY Girl. Genteel poverty doesn't allow for that. But I have been thinking about what I would try very hard to afford.

Long ago, when I was first in Vienna, I lived not far from the Freud Museum. I made a point of visiting, of course. Freud has always been one of my intellectual heroes. I remember standing in the little museum at Berggasse 19 on a rainy afternoon and looking at the replica of Freud's office-- looking especially at the famous Couch. Probably not the original Couch, but something I'd waited to see for a long time. I thought about all the stories told by patients there on the couch and all the long conversations analysands would've had with Dr, Freud there at his desk. 

The FMTY Girls are beyond my reach, but there's something else I want, and it has more to do with that Couch than with Michelin-star restaurants or hotel bedrooms.

I do know someone who works for one of the few remaining phone sex services out there. Phone sex is a dying art, and the services that have survived are niche services. The woman I know is turning forty soon, and she's worked off and on for the particular service for a few years. She's smart, funny, and she's gifted with empathy. I've sat and listened to her talk about her job and just...sighed.

She does have a perfect WFH job. She has a laptop and a headset, and calls get routed to her wherever she might be. I liked that image. She takes her job seriously, she told me. She keeps notes on what clients tell her and tries to make sure she knows the details they like, or the settings they prefer...or just the things that they enjoy in their lives (a city, a restaurant, a movie, a favorite kind of decor).

She markets herself as a partner in fantasies, and she makes it clear that she believes in NSNL-- No Shame, No Limits. She tells me she's been made uncomfortable a few times by clients' fantasies, but she's never been horrified or appalled. What she's good at is building connections, at getting clients to just talk about their fantasies and about what they'd want their lives to be like. I suspect she's very much worth her fees. 

We sat over drinks and talked and I began to think about the FMTY Girls and what they offer. I told my friend about FMTY Twitter and told her that she-- my friend --would have more to offer me. They'd both be Companions, but my friend would be better at being the mix of things I'd want-- some combination of life coach, coffee shop interlocutor, and classical Freudian analyst. There might not be midnight sex in rooftop pools overlooking Dubai or Manhattan, but there would be a chance to talk to someone lovely. A chance to talk and talk and, yes, listen to what she has to say.

"Coffee shop interlocutor"... Would it be interlocutrix for the lovely girl? I do like the thing that happens in coffee shops sometimes, where strangers end up talking about their lives-- exchanging stories, analyzing one another, sharing likes and dislikes, talking about the things (books, music, experiences, places) that have meant a lot to them. I've always liked that.  And I told my friend that she could very well for herself as a life coach if ever the phone sex company failed. She laughed at that. She'd worked in banking and real estate, she said, so life coach might be a next step.

I remember that we talked about Peychaud's-- a classic New Orleans brand of bitters --and about how so many of her clients' fantasies were about going back in life and just doing the things they wished they'd done. For some it was, yes, having sex with cheerleaders or some particular long-lost girl. For some it was having the nerve to come out of the closet. Or having the nerve to admit that they liked something and didn't want to be ashamed of it. She tried, she said, not just to help them get off inside their fantasies, but to let them know that they had someone to talk to, that their fantasies and hopes weren't as awful as they feared.

Phone sex, she said, is another world. I do agree with that. It's always been something I liked because it plays to my strengths: storytelling, world-building, creating details. I'm sad that it seems to be dying away. Sexting can never replace long stories told late at night, can never replace late-night voices. Sexting can't replace conversations that loop and swerve from erotica to memories of films and places you've lived.

I would pay to have someone like her as a Companion out some night. I think I could sit and talk to her and feel like I was inside a world where fantasies could be NSNL, where conversations could go on across a table late into the night. She did very much have the gift of empathy. We exchanged business cards, mind you. She  wrote No Shame, No Limits on the back of hers. 

The conversation was one I enjoyed rather a lot. She let me walk her back to her hotel and told she that she hoped I'd call and arrange a session sometime. I think we could be creative together, she said. Her fees are nowhere near what FMTY Girls get for a dinner date, and I've certainly spent more just taking myself to dinner and wine on solitary Friday nights. Maybe I will call sometime. I suspect we'd both spend more time talking than doing phone sex itself.

Someone like her would be what I what these days. Life coach, interlocutrix, classical Freudian analyst-- someone with whom I can talk and not have to be afraid, someone who'd listen and not judge, someone who could suggest what my thoughts mean...and share her own.

Surely, now...there must already be services like that already in Japan, right?

Three Four Five: Senses

Tonight I'm thinking of Jill in Wellington. I'm thinking of the stories she'd tell and the long conversations she and I would have about our Pasts and our experiences. I do miss those, and I do miss her.

I told her once that I was a creature often beset with what I call JED-- Jealousy Envy Depression. That's a cocktail of things that aren't good at all. I've noted before that Envy is the sole Deadly Sin that gives no pleasure while you're indulging in it. And tonight I am thinking of things she told me that leave me envious and dejected.

Envy is my own Deadly Sin, the fault that I've never been able to escape. I'm not sure what exactly I want from it. The ability to tell good stories, certainly. The ability to amass stories that are as good as those other people have to tell. The belief that I'm as good as others. I certainly want those things, and Envy haunts me every day.

Let's consider a small story Jill told me back a couple of years ago. This is Jill discussing self-pleasure:

If i wait til late in the night, i get lazy and just use a Lelo on my clit...if i have more time then yes - fingers in my ass, too...  

honestly...i was so fucking drunk, i didn't know what i was doing. i just needed to feel so full, i had a Corona bottle in my cunt and fingers in my ass, i was alone and drunk and high and i came so hard, over and over. my sheets were a mess in the morning. but at the time, i needed it. i think i needed to prove i was all i needed, i could make myself feel everything i needed...

i filled up the Corona bottle with water from the bathroom and sat drinking it, tasting my own cunt and rubbing my clit, even though i had just cum.

i remember that night so well...

I do envy her that story. It's powerful enough, and it makes a lovely fantasy vision. And there's no equivalent for anyone male. She has her selection of Lelo vibrators--- charges them via USB port on her iPad 2 ---and her Corona bottle, carefully cleaned and wrapped in silk in her bedroom dresser. There's no male equivalent for that. She's able to have powerful and shattering moments all on her own. There's no male way to experience anything like that, no male way to be able to give oneself the belief that you could make yourself "feel everything I needed". 

There's certainly no way for me to feel sexually self-sufficient--- or sexually equal to someone like her either in terms of sensations or experiences that can be the raw material for stories. 

She writes that  I have quite a few Lelo toys - and these come in nice, plain black boxes -- so i usually keep my toys in the little bags they come in, in the original boxes -- stacked at the back of my bedside drawer. I'm male, and a gentleman of a certain age and background. I can't say anything equivalent or have any of the same kinds of experiences. 

And I'm eaten up with Envy that my experiences will never be as good as anyone else's.

Jill and her Corona bottle, Jill and her Lelo. One key part of what I envy her is just the ability to experience pleasure. I've said her before that I don't experience unmediated pleasure, that anything I feel is filtered through books and films...or filtered through all those years of academic analysis. Jill can listen directly to her body. She can let her body give her pleasure. She can be all she needs for pleasure.

I never feel any of that, mind you. I never feel anything that's directly physical, or that isn't filtered through a lifetime of reading. I know about pleasure from descriptions in books. I just never feel any of it myself.

I know about the accoutrements of pleasure. I know about crafting tales and scenarios to give pleasure. I know about critical theory and pleasure. What I don't know is how to feel pleasure, or how not to believe that nothing I feel is as good as what others feel. At my own advanced age, I have no idea whatsoever what pleasure feels like.

Three Four Three: Preferences

 I may have mentioned this, but I'll recount the story again.

Once, long ago, I took a test found in (I think) Playboy. The test was something like "What Your Tastes in Women Say About You". I can't recall how old I was, but certainly very early in my teens. I ranked photos of actresses and models, and I chose my favourites out of drawings of body types. At the end, I added up my score and was told that the total meant that I must be gay. 

After all, the women I chose were very much not the body type that was in favor in those days. My choices were clearly all for tall, very slender, very long-legged and small-breasted women. "Buxom" or "curvy" never crossed my mind. No woman that I fancied in adolescence-- or now --would ever evoke something like "va-va-voom!" as a comment. 

I thought even then that the authors of the article were idiots. I stand by that judgment. Even at that age, I was clear about my preferences. For women, yes. And I like to think that society's beauty standards caught up with my own. The age of the "bombshell" was replaced by standards I liked-- tall, leggy, taut-bodied, thin. I'd have always chosen the young Audrey Hepburn over Marilyn Monroe. I'd have always chosen a young Jane Birkin or a young Marisa Berenson over the standard Playmate of those days. Those were my preferences then, and they remain my tastes. Karlie Kloss and Anja Rubik and Aymeline Valade are all examples of what I find to be beautiful. I have no use whatsoever for the Kardashian look.

And yet one of the problems of the current day is that physical preferences are themselves subject to increased and hostile review. Having preferences, let alone talking about them, is becoming a Bad Thing. I do not like the current emphasis on butts. I look at photos of the FMTY Girls at Twitter or of current social media celebrities and just have no use for a look that emphasizes butts. My gaze focuses on long, slender legs and flat, hard stomachs and butts. I do realize that saying that I dislike big butts and fail to grasp why women pay for butt-filler injections puts me on the wrong side of current taste...and leaves me open to accusations of racism and "misogynoir". I do realize that. 

But my tastes remain what they've always been. The Young Companion of my dreams is very tall, very lithe, very leggy. She has never needed to own or wear a bra. (She dislikes underwear, of course). In tailored linen slacks and a very tailored, dangerously unbuttoned silk blouse, she's all legs and erect nipples and has that slouch-down-the-runway look that I've loved since I was a teen and first began charting out beauty and its implications for class and style. 

Well, so many things that I like are becoming unacceptable. That may be inevitable, since I'm a gentleman of a certain advanced age and very much out of step with social rules. And those rules do exist. Make no mistake about that. 

Bodies matter. I take that as a given. Bodies always matter. So do the stories bodies tell. My preferences, whether for lithe and leggy girls or for some s/m games, always suggest stories or films I want to live in. I suppose I do look at girls and see myself as a casting director for the films in my head. I like bodies that suggest certain things about class and settings, and those films are not going away.

It's not just that my particular tastes in female bodies are now seen as obsolete and regressive (or maybe even oppressive). It's that I read these days how having any tastes at all is morally flawed because any preference by definition excludes. And we're not supposed to exclude, these days.

It gets harder to discuss what does attract and excite me, and it gets harder to talk about the why of what I like. I have to say that I do miss the days when matching bodies to stories was something to talk about with lovely young companions.

 

Three Four Zero: Education

 I have been thinking more about the idea of paid companions and FMTY girls. There's something to be said for an essay looking at the difference between a GFE companion and the FMTY girls at Escort Twitter. And that's a difference that goes to something in my own life.

GFE girls exist to...what? Well, they exist to make their clients think they're not with a paid companion. Or at least they exist to make people who see their clients think that the client isn't with a paid companion. Does that sound right? 

The bios of FMTY girls seem to stress that they have the social capital to be in Michelin-star restaurants and elegant settings, that they know how to perform the role of someone used to such settings. What they perform is...class. And that does leave me just a bit melancholy.

I have always thought of myself as having social capital. I know that I suffer from what David Brooks called the "income/status disjoint"-- I have advanced degrees and I'm reasonably well-read...but I have no money and I don't have the accoutrements of the monied classes. As someone who has managed to project the idea of genteel poverty most of his life, I've been able to function on the edges of the social world. I can function well at small hipster cafes and restaurants, but I'd never risk a Michelin-star restaurant or a high-end hotel. I'd certainly never risk going to a resort. And I'd never, never risk a conversation with a beautiful woman who knew anything about business, finance, or the mechanics of politics.

A friend asked me the other evening what I looked for in relationships. I wasn't sure how to answer. What could I say? Someone lovely, long-legged, a fraction of my age, and averse to underwear? Someone with a Comparative Lit degree who likes obscure books? Someone who'll call me late at night and talk about wonderfully random things while flirting shamelessly?

What I do know is that I'd be really, really at sea across a table from an FMTY girl. From what I can infer, part of the arrangement between an FMTY girl and her client is that they go out to high-end venues. Part of what she gives the client is the chance to show off his social skills and his knowledge. She markets herself as someone who has the beauty and social capital to be shown off, and part of what he gets is the opportunity to feel like he belongs in her company. I'd be awful at that.

I think that what I'd look for in an FMTY girl would be someone to be a kind of life coach for me. I'd be the one who wants to be taught how to fit in. Look-- I know which fork to use, and I can read the French on a menu. What I can't do is feel like I fit in. Walking into a restaurant with a Michelin star would trigger a massive case of Impostor Syndrome, even if I had on my magical class ring from New Haven. Checking into an elegant resort for a long weekend with an FMTY girl would make me instantly feel like I was adrift in an alien world. 

I'd be asking my companion to...make me feel like I fit in. I know how to hold a conversation at an "Asian street food" restaurant in a hip neighborhood near a university. I know how to walk through a serious museum. But being at any of the places the FMTY girls post on the Twitter timelines would leave me anxious, depressed, and empty. Yes, the terms of the arrangement might ensure that I'd be having sex with a very beautiful, sexually skilled companion, but I'd nonetheless feel that I'd botched the part of the evening devoted to seduction and flirtation. And, yes, I'd feel like I'd failed. I'd feel like I hadn't lived up to the skills my companion relied on in her clients-- like I didn't have social capital enough to understand and appreciate what she was offering me. 

A life coach. That's what I do need-- a life coach. Someone who could make me feel less anxious. Someone who could teach me to appreciate what she's offering. I can read the French on a menu, but I won't understand what the dishes are. I have a couple of tailored black blazers, but I don't own a suit. I have no idea how to hold a conversation with someone who talks about things that aren't obscure books and films. I have no idea how to be with someone like an FMTY girl, and I have no idea whatsoever how to have an evening with someone who's at home in the social world. I have no idea how to perform outside of a very well-fortified niche.

I'd make an FMTY girl feel like she was wasting her time, whatever fee she was getting. I wouldn't even know what kind of gift cards to send her. I'd be a disappointment from the moment she met me at the aerodrome or in the hotel lobby.

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 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 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.