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.

Two One Two: White Lines

More archive materials from the past. I am posting these as messages-in-a-bottle, as memories from other days, from times when I was regarded as a good listener, as an interlocutor for lovely, sometimes self-destructive girls.

These notes are from a girl named Alessandra, someone I knew in another world, someone I knew when the century was still young. Some of the notes are about her friend-and-lover Alys--- yes, Aless and Alys. Red Alys, if I remember, with striking red hair. I have no idea where she is now. I'd heard that she finished university, taught English for a couple of years in Japan, and went on to law school and an MBA. I have a vague sense that she's doing something corporate these days, something in a high glass tower near open water, something that sends her overseas a lot.  I have no idea what she remembers about her past. The last time we spoke, we talked about Heath Ledger's death and a film Ledger had once made about drug life in Australia, a film from an Australian novel called "Candy".

I remember these stories, though, remember them from another, better summer long ago.

Oh, I wasn't happy with where my life was taking me in 2007. I spent half my time dreading going to class when I wanted to change universities anyway, and the other half actually in class and miserable.  I was isolated and doing tremendous amounts of coke alone-- in my private dorm room, in changing rooms at boutiques, in cubicles at the school library. I was in my first serious relationship with  a girl, one who had previously mainly been my best friend, and it was long distance. She (Alys, obviously) had been in a relationship with some Russian pre-med, eight-language-speaking genius, and I broke them up/she left him for me. She had a pretty bad coke problem at the time as well, and I was entirely emotionally dependent on her-- this accounted for MONTHS of being at one another's throats. 

While physically thrilling and fascinating to many, our relationship was beyond emotionally tumultuous, whether it was our age/immaturity, the distance, or the fact that we were two people who were already prone to anxiety who were strung out on coke 24/7, I don't really know. But it was a series of mind games and changes in voice tone resulting in both intentional cruelty and despair on both sides. I remember one night when we were actually together in bed, her becoming cross with me about something and saying that she wished her Russian genius boy would love her again-- I promptly took an x-acto knife and put gashes in my inner thighs. I hadn't been a cutter before, and I haven't been one since, but it was practically an automatic form of release.

My behavior lost that bit of exhilaration at being young and pretty and turned into a very bitter, very deliberate form of destruction that took its toll quickly. One acquaintance commented that when he saw me in Toronto in December '07, I was "electric"-- I hardly weighed anything, but was mercurial and alive, my eyes were huge and always darkly lined, and I was just burning with frustration.  By the end of my freshman year in May '08, all of that had taken a toll. I no longer looked electric as much as I looked completely haggard-- completely drained. 

Also, that particular highly-charged emotional restlessness made me emotionally dependent on others in a way that I generally try very hard to avoid. I'll always be a little reckless, I'll always be a little too daring, but I find joy in the balance of being those things as well as self-contained. I prize my ability to detach and withdraw more than anything.

Alys and I are still very good friends-- best friends, actually. She has a tendency to spoil me wildly, and we only recently (well, I say recently, but within the past, I guess, 6 months) have actually begun sleeping together again. It's easy to fall back with her--- it's easy and it's not fruitless, because I care about her more than anything else, and she's bright and very powerful in her own way. We just work at keeping things separate--- and who knows how well that goes, but so far (recently) we've managed.

Those notes are almost a decade old now. I have no real idea where she is now (Toronto? Vancouver?), and only hints that she's very corporate and flying to take meetings in cities filled with silent glass towers.  I'd love to sit with her over drinks in some neutral city and listen to her tales of her life over the last dozen years.  In the last exchange of notes we had, back years ago, she noted that Alys was returning to Halifax from Bermuda aboard a racing yacht with one of her father's friends, following up on the inappropriate glances she and her father's friend had been exchanging since Red Alys was in high school. I have no idea how that played out or whether there was any truth in it. I'd like to think it was true. Sailboats and posh girls and inappropriate affairs are perfect ingredients for stories.

Two Zero Three: De Bourgh

It's been a sombre year. So very little good has happened, and many of us here in what used to be the American republic are emotionally exhausted. In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, in a post-Weinstein world, it's harder and harder to write about sex. We no longer see sex as something that's exciting or fun. Sex is no longer wicked in the fun way. Everything I've seen in the past few months has described sex only in terms of power and coercion. Every single article I've read about the future of sex has been written by a woman who's taken it as a given that flirtation and seduction, especially if done at any location vaguely connected with work or school, is inherently oppressive and disgusting.

The only person I know of who's still enjoying herself having sex is my friend in London Town, who wrote me about her Christmas plans while visiting family in the States:

Had a nice visit with my former professor (including naughty sex on the floor of an empty classroom at my old university while he was supposedly administering the final exam to a class of his students) en route and am now in the hills of New England deciding if I want to take either of my out-of-the-blue marriage proposals seriously. I'm leaning towards no. Though I am making plans to visit the very wealthy, powerful, never-married (and really not at all bad-looking) 70-year-old at one of his houses before I head back to London. But I honestly think it would probably be a disaster.

She also had this to say about the social hierarchies of air travel:

Regarding air travel, first class is better than business class. However, many airlines only have either first OR business class these days. British Airways is somewhat unusual in having four classes on many of its flights: economy, premium economy, business, and first.

That was in response to a note of mine speculating that one of her Older, Moneyed Gentlemen would've paid for her first-class flight from LDN to BOS. I'd wondered if first-class or business class was the more exclusive these days. That's not something I'm likely to know.  I have the idea that she once flew to some kind of rendezvous in Singapore (professional? romantic?) in one of those 0.10% masters-of-the-global-economy quasi-cabins that airlines like Emirates and Singapore reserve for the global elite. Now of course I saw the first "Emmanuelle" film many a year ago, so my only question is whether she did the Young Sylvia Kristel-on-the-Concorde thing in joining the Mile-High Club. The in-flight amenities and cuisine I couldn't care less about. It's only the carnal uses of the flight time that I care about.

Anyway...I do wonder if she'll give me a call from wherever she is in New England. I like her, and of course I enjoy hearing her stories. But I forever feel utterly de bas en haut around her. Socially, intellectually, sexually. I mean, she's never played Lady Catherine de Bourgh around me, but I can't help imputing condescension on her part. I have a very keen sense of class distinctions and rank-hierarchy, and a very heightened sense of self-loathing. Let's be clear. I could never be part of any of her Encounters or Stories on the grounds of my looks, poverty, social ineptitude, and possible sexual incompetence. Even if I had an invitation, I'd never take the risk of total humiliation.

I used to think that I was rather good at creating fantasy scenarios via telephone. I was actually quite proud of the craft. I think it was listening to my  friend in London Town talk about men and their fantasies--- her even more than listening to Ms. Flox do the same thing at her various blogs  ---that persuaded me that anything I might create or fancy would be trivial, jejune, and pathetic. So that's just one less thing I can risk doing, and certainly one less thing I can believe gives me any value.

Two Zero Two: Events

Now, then... my ex-Bloomsbury friend wrote me from London Town today to say that:

When I was an undergrad, I had an enormous crush on one of my classics professors. An ancient historian, he was about thirty and good-looking, as well as funny, brilliant, and charismatic. I often thought about trying to seduce him, but I was inexperienced (an 18-year-old virgin when I met him) and I wouldn't have known how to begin.

Finally slept with him--nearly two decades later. He arranged to give a talk in the UK to see me. Apparently, he had a crush on me back then as well, and he's been sexually obsessed with me ever since. He had lots of photos of me on his phone, including ones that I hadn't realized he took when I spoke at BU several years ago. How funny. Anyway, I can highly recommend decades of sexual tension as an aphrodisiac.

Spent last night in a suite at the Ritz with a different lover.  We went down to the private club and casino in the basement just to check it out, but it is horribly tacky so we left and went to Brooks's around the corner for champagne in chilled silver tankards. I have a serious thing for champagne in chilled silver tankards. We actually forgot to pay on the way out (though it's a club and they have his info so it's not really that big a deal because they can bill him later) but he popped into today to pay only to find out that some old codger had paid for our champagne on the basis that he thought we were so sweet and young and in love and it reminded him of his courtship back in the day. His eyesight must be truly terrible. If only he had known that he was watching a middle-aged married man with his mistress who is 17 years his junior. Anyway, we had a lovely four-course meal in the Ritz dining room, with a truffle course, and I picked a fantastic Amarone. Jacob Rees-Mogg was dining at the table next to us and he and his companion had crepes suzette for desert. Fun to watch.

This lover has been approached for a rather high office, which he doesn't think he wants, though he did say he would take it if I would be willing to marry him and be Lady X. I don't think I am, though.

And I didn't mention that I spent the night before that with a different lover/friend: the 76-year-old retired senior judge I've known for eight years. I tell him about all the other lovers. He actually managed to come twice in under an hour (without any pharmaceutical aid). Mind you, the Ritz man managed NINE times between 4PM and 10AM...he says it's never been like that with anyone else. I'm deeply relieved that I have two nights off before my next date on Friday, which is with a well-known architectural critic.

The retired judge approves of this one because he's not married, not especially gay, and age-appropriate and would fit in with my social circle (in fact we have quite a few friends in common). 

I'm reasonably sure she's telling the absolute truth here.

I've known her since...well...since she probably was eighteen or nineteen. I don't doubt that some older faculty person could be sexually obsessed with her for eighteen years. That seems to be something she could induce. Mind you, I'm not jealous here. No jealousy. But there's no small amount of envy regarding the social circles she moves in. I mean...I'd like to go to Brooks's (they'd never let me through the door), and I'm seriously, painfully envious of the whole chilled-silver-tankard-of-champagne thing. Though I might've used a silver tankard to bash Jacob Rees-Mogg in the head just on antifa principle. Or aesthetic principle. Jacob Rees-Mogg really is ruining all my Oxbridge fantasies. Aloysius the Bear would certainly not approve of him.

Twenty-Five: Grisettes

A British journalist I've chatted with once published an article not long ago about the websites that offer to bring together "sugar babies" with "sugar daddies". The article itself isn't bad at all, and she does ask a number of interesting questions. One thing that I wish she'd addressed, though, is the question of how one distinguishes a "sugar baby" from the classic idea of a mistress. 


How do we distinguish between "sugar baby" and the traditional--- meaning the 18th and 19th.-century --idea of the mistress? What differentiates one from the other? Is it that a "sugar baby" is simply given gifts, while the traditional mistress is "in keeping"--- living somewhere supplied by her patron, all (or at least most) of her expenses paid? Is it the level of the arrangement--- the mistress expected either to be on call or to abide by a carefully-crafted schedule for meetings, while the "sugar baby" is more able to set her own schedule? I do think there's a level of display that's expected with a "sugar baby" that isn't expected from a girl taken "into keeping" in Paris or London in an earlier age. A "sugar baby" is given gifts by her "sugar daddy" and she's taken out to be shown off, even if that's somewhere where friends of his wife or his business colleagues aren't likely to find them. I might argue that display is a key function of the "sugar baby", that she's there precisely to be shown off in her new dresses and jewels. The classic mistress was kept more discreetly. What's the old phrase--- "the somebodies whom nobody knows"? The semiotics here interest me. There's a difference between a mistress and a "sugar baby" that says something about display and how wealth is to be seen in the modern day.


There may also be a question of class here. In French or English or even Russian novels, the mistress is the ex-governess, the ballerina, the actress, the grisette. While there are fallen gentlewomen who appear once in a while, the mistress is usually from a lower social class than her keeper. The "sugar baby", though, is something different. The idea of the websites is that the girls are presented as university girls, as students who need financial support to finish a degree and are willing to accept gifts from a "sugar daddy" and offer up sexual favours. The girls may be impoverished at twenty, but the idea is that they are from a class that goes to university and can expect to be financially successful on their own in a few years. The "sugar daddy" who visits the websites isn't taking a shopgirl into keeping. He's making an arrangement with someone who comes from his own social class, and it's the middle and upper-middle class status of the girls that's a selling point.


I've never taken a mistress. I've never taken a girl into keeping or been anyone's "sugar daddy". Genteel poverty hasn't allowed for that. I suppose I'd rather take a mistress than a "sugar baby".  If I had the money, I'd prefer to take a girl as a mistress in the 18th-c. kind of arrangement. It's a more literary thing to do, and whatever I may do in the realms of sex and romance, there has to be a literary reference. It'll never be any other way. Though I will note that I'd want the girl to be someone who'd otherwise be the "sugar baby" type, the undergraduate girl with the bookshelves filled with critical theory and high lit. I wouldn't be comfortable with someone who didn't have the right academic (and, yes, class) markers. 


The article noted that so many of the men presenting themselves as "sugar daddies" were in IT that the question really had to be asked: why were IT or tech types so prevalent? I might suspect that the men who'd made serious money in those fields had devoted their twenties to staring relentlessly at computer screens and had never learned social skills. A "sugar daddy" arrangement would allow them to have a social trophy and be with someone who wouldn't mock them for geekery. Or is that only dealing in stereotypes? It's certainly dealing in stereotypes to speculate that MBA and finance types might prefer escorts to "sugar babies" as more efficient and less likely to make any emotional demands. But am I wrong? If you're reading this, do comment. I'd like to hear what you think.


I think I will be acquiring a copy of Marcel Mauss' "The Gift" and David Graeber's "Debt" as reading for a next note here. I find articles out on the web that discuss the idea of "sexual economics" or an "economy of sex", though usually in terms of attacking the idea. I'll have to think about that. I hope you'll comment on that, too. It's a discussion I'd like to have.  

Fifteen: Exchanges

A friend in London tells me that she'd dined late with an older admirer at someplace discreet and semi-private and, on the way to her admirer's car, some drunken lager lout staggering by pointed at them and called out, "So how much is he paying you, then?" They ignored him and walked on, but he kept calling after them, demanding to know how much she was being paid and adding the usual epithets. She wrote me about it this morning in a dark mood--- hungover a bit, but also depressed and unable to get the drunken chav's voice out of her head. I told her to remember that the fact was that, there the morning after, she was still fiercely bright and lovely and well-educated and someone who's done academia and the gallery world both, and the guy on the street was still a drunken yobbo.

My friend responded that she was depressed about her life. The man she'd been with had been older and moneyed, and she was angry both about being harangued on the street and about the fact that the insult was dual-pronged--- she'd been called a whore, and her admirer had been mocked as someone who could only attract her because he had cash. She was, she said, more angered by the insult to him and to the relationship  than by being called a whore.

I've never called a girl a "whore" as an insult. That's not something I've ever thought to use as an insult. I've never looked down on girls who are escorts or courtesans or who supplement a deficient income by accepting occasional clients. That never struck me as anything to look down on. But I do very much dislike yobbos (or anyone else) who'll use "whore" as an attack on a girl beacuse of her sex life, her attire, or her partner. There may be self-interest there, true. I'm always the older partner, and while I'm certainly not as moneyed as my friend's admirer, I'm nonetheless vulnerable to the assumptions behind the insult.

I've had friends who did the demi-rep or part-time escort or domme thing while doing university or postgraduate degrees. I've never had any moral objections to any girl who works as "professional companion". I liked the girls before ever they told me what they were doing, and all I've said is that I wanted to hear their stories and that I hoped the money was useful. I can't speak about girls who work the street or who work in brothels; I've never known any. It may be that I'm only supportive of the girls I've known because they shared educational and class and aesthetic backgrounds with me. Or it may be that to some degree I feed off their stories. I recognise that I'm vulnerable to criticisms like that.  All I can say is that the girls I've known who exchanged favours for money were (and are) friends, to be supported as friends.

Someone I knew once upon a time came to me and made a simple enough offer--- she needed money for rent and she was willing to either sell me one of her paintings or spend the night. I wrote her a check and pointed to the bedroom. The next morning at coffee she took the check out of the pocket of one of my shirts and looked at it and asked if we were still friends. Of course, I said. She started to laugh and told me that the one thing that bothered her was the thought that I'd chosen sex instead of the painting because I thought her art was bad. I had to re-assure her--- very honestly ---that I liked her paintings a lot, and that my choice was strictly based on my predatory tastes in much younger girls. We stayed friends, and over the next couple of years I did buy a painting or two. Did I pay for her favours again? A couple of times, yes. Did she ever buy me drinks or dinner? Yes, she did. I've always wondered how initially serious she'd been, and whether she'd only made the offer because she thought I'd never choose sex. Why did she go through with it? And why come by again? I suspect that a fair amount of that was being nineteen and proving to herself that she could do it, about striking a pose. I'd like to think that she found me to be a useful character in the stories she was telling herself. We neither of us ever asked if the sex would've happened if I hadn't written the check. I've always thought that the idea of taking the money was what made the sex work for her.  I never presumed--- I'll note that. I never assumed that the exchange meant that she and I were involved, or that I could count on sex outside of an exchange. We did hang out sometimes, and there was some drunken making out at bars, but we only had sex again the few times when I wrote a check. I don't know if she'd have been interested, or if that would've ruined the story she was creating, or if it would've ruined the friendship we had.

It's Halloween night, and a night for ghost stories. There are ghosts in my past who've been part-time escorts, or been in keeping, or turned the occasional trick to pay rent or pay for airline tickets--- in one case, to pay for a signed first edition. Well, I do want my friend in London to know that she has my support and belief. I have no idea whether her older admirer is paying her rent or offering up envelopes of cash or gifts that can be readily converted to cash. If he is, then...well, fine. I do want her to remember, though, that she has nothing to apologise for, and that whatever she has or hasn't done, she's still far superior to any drunken yobbo.