Three Nine One: Housewives

 I've mentioned erotic art before-- specifically, the graphic novels of Michael Manning, which began to appear in the 1990s. Manning's stories (e.g., Tranceptor, The Spider Garden, Hydrophidian, Cathexis) are...gender-fluid cyberpunk goth erotica. Something like that, in any case. The artwork itself is excellent, and it does remind me a bit of Matt Howarth's sci-fi work. 

Manning's work is hard to get these days. There aren't very many publishers of erotic graphic novels left, and credit card processors are refusing to process payments these days for erotica of any kind. The new century is a place where Gen Z "influencers" look with puritanical disdain on erotica, a place where sex scenes in novels (especially in "romantasy") are (non-ironically) called "smut" and dismissed as politically suspect. 

It's really very hard to find good erotica these days. I've been told that there's at least some new trans and queer erotica being written or drawn, but those are alien genres for me. And even in those genres, visual erotica seems to be suspect-- if only because beauty itself is now suspect, and no one wants to be accused of "fetishizing" bodies or preferences. 

Having said that, I'll note that I found a series of rather good erotic graphic novels from the early Noughts. The series is called "Housewives at Play", and it seems to have appeared from c.2000 through c. 2008. I've found a website (joinforjoy.com) that has several issues posted, and they're worth looking at. As best I can tell, the issues form a more or less ongoing story. The posted issues begin with Nr. 4 in the series, and form a (largely) connected story up through Nr. 18. I haven't been able to find the first three issues, and the story wasn't complete by Nr. 18. The website has most, but not all, of the issues between Nr. 4 and Nr. 18. I can infer how the storyline began, but I have no idea how (or if) it ended. I do wish it was still around.

The artist and creator of "Housewives at Play" is supposed to be "Rebecca". I have zero idea if "Rebecca" was actually female, and I know nothing at all about the person behind the name. The series was published by Eros Comix in Seattle, and I don't know whether the publisher is still in business. If anyone out there over the aether knows anything about the publisher, please do pass it along.

What is there to say about "Housewives at Play"? Well, the art is much better than usual. "Rebecca" did have an eye for lovely women, and her "My Girls" special issue does some excellent pen-and-ink portraits of her main characters. The body types are very much to my taste-- tall, toned, slender, and leggy. The characters don't wax, but they do neatly trim their pubic hair, so we're not stuck with a 1970s Land of Bush O'Plenty look.  The stories began in black and white, but seem to have transitioned to colour at some point. Rebecca's art is at least as good as anything in mainstream comics art.

The stories? Well, semi-comic suburban/pop culture lesbian BDSM is probably the best description. (I couldn't bring myself to use "tongue-in-cheek" here. I just couldn't.) The main character is a bored, 40-year old suburban housewife named Catherine Mitchell. One day, out of nowhere, Catherine is violated by her best friend Patty and turned into a lesbian sex slave for Patty and Patty's newlywed neighbor Beth. Catherine then acquires her teen daughter's best friend Jennifer as her own sex slave, although Jennifer and Catherine's beautiful daughter Melissa (both carefully and repeatedly described as eighteen) are themselves secretly a couple. Hilarity ensues, as does lots of transgressive sex. 

At some point, Catherine, Melissa, and Catherine's incestuous younger sister Lynn are kidnapped by the staff at a local Victoria's (errr..."Veronica's") Secret and sold to teen pop princess Bratty Sneers (Brittany Spears, obviously), teen idol Kandy Korn (Mandy Moore?) and country music idol Fate Will (Faith Hill, I assume). There's also Catherine's ex-lover Stephanie, a Native American stripper/escort who dances under the name Princess Poke-My-Hiney...plus random beautiful guest stars of 18-21 who are all seriously sapphic, blithely promiscuous, and open to trying pretty much anything involving lesbian BDSM. Males rarely appear, although there is a subplot where Fate Will orders a dozen of her ranch hands to impregnate Melissa so that Fate's husband Grim (Tim McGraw) will return from touring and think Fate's given him a child...and Fate won't have to risk her looks and figure with a pregnancy or allow anyone male to have sex with her. 

The stories are hot, yes. They're also fairly funny, and all parties, top and bottom, enjoy the BDSM. Even the subplot where Melissa is being bred by the cowboys is only an excuse for Princess Poke-My-Hiney to rescue her and have hot sex with Melissa ("Gosh, her taste reminds me of Catherine...I wonder where Cathy is these days!"). Everyone loves (extremely) large plastic strap-on dildos, and all actual males are mocked for having tiny penises. All the girls have foot fetishes, too-- which may or not say something about "Rebecca", or at least say something about fashionable fetishes in the Noughts. 

If I have any real criticism it's that the various girls who are topping Catherine or Melissa or Lynn or Jennifer do a lot of sexual humiliation based on slurs ("Get over here, you cunt-loving little lezzie slut pig"). That part seems...unnecessary and mean-spirited. I wanted Melissa and/or Jennifer to tell the older characters that they were all "lezzie sluts" and that there was nothing at all wrong with that...and that they were proud bottoms, but not "pigs". I also had to wince a bit when Fate Will hires Princess Poke-My-Hiney as an escort and makes her talk in 1930s cowboy movie-stereotypical "redskin" dialect. Beyond that, "Housewives at Play" is fun.

Amazon does have some collected editions of "Housewives at Play", but they're asking something like $140 for a collection of issues Nr. 1-4. I like the series, but I'm not going to pay that kind of money for a paperbound graphic novel that's nearly twenty years old. 

If any of you out there over the aether know anything about the publishing history of "Housewives at Play" or about its author/artist, I hope you'll let me know. I'd like to know if "Rebecca" ever finished the story, and I'd like to see more of her art.

Next time I post here, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into why it's no longer possible to have any sexual preferences and why kink-shaming is now seen as perfectly okay. I want to write about why I can't imagine ever asking a partner to do anything specific or ever telling a partner about any particular interests I might have. I once heard a gay acquaintance described as "so far deep in the closet he can see Narnia", and I want to write about how that phrase can be applied across the gender-orientation spectrum these days...and about how we seem to be losing any sense that sex is worth doing, let alone exploring.

Three Eight Nine: Smut

 There's a 1993 book by a Valerie Kelly called "How to Write Erotica". I recall having a copy of it back in the Nineties. The book itself was well-done, and it had a lot of advice about the craft of writing that was very well-taken. Very good advice, really. 

The book had lots of suggestions about writing erotica and had a long list of places where aspiring authors could submit manuscripts. All those little magazines are gone now, replaced for a while by websites, and nowadays simply...gone. Erotica isn't in favor these days.

Some 1993 suggestions-- writing copy for the boxes of VHS porn cassettes (and DVDs?) --are almost funny now. I don't even know that 2025 porn is put on DVD at all. And even in 1993, the publishers of paperback porn novels were mostly gone. Literary porn? Where would you go for that these days? There are no more sites like Nerve.com or Filthy Gorgeous Things.

On Booktok people have taken to unironically referring to any book with sex scenes as "smut". Maybe that's just a way of dismissing what's called "romantasy" out of hand, or maybe Gen Z really doesn't have any use for sex and erotica. I really dislike that use of "smut". "Smut" back in the 1950s-1990s had a connotation not just of graphic sex, but of self-conscious irony and amused transgression. The Gen Z types don't seem to have any sense of humor about sex and don't like irony and especially don't like transgressive fiction. My God, there are twenty-somethings on Booktok and YouTube that are terrified that sometimes characters in YA novels actually have sex. I just want to facepalm about that. They're actually afraid that high schoolers will be corrupted by knowing that people do have sex.

I'd still like to write erotica, but I don't think that what excites or arouses me would be commercially viable. As I've always said, any erotica that I'd write would probably have footnotes and a bibliography. (Please note that I mean "footnotes" in the academic way, not in any fetish sense) And my characters would...talk. They'd talk a lot. They'd talk before, during, and after sex. 

I mean...that's always been my own experience of sex. Lots of talking, and very much lots of talking during the sex itself. The girls and women who've been with me down all the years have been adventurous and experimental and willing to try lots of transgressive things...and we've always talked while doing things. My young companions and I have always narrated what's happening and done lots of serve-and-return badinage during sex. I suspect that most audiences wouldn't get that.

I also suspect that most audiences wouldn't see s/m as an occasion for social climbing and/or irony. They wouldn't get the idea of the two very different people (yes, sometimes age-disparate, too) talking themselves into bed or into new and untried experiences not so much out of lust as out of a sense of the excitement and sheer fun of trying something outrageous. I think, too, that Gen Z would dislike the idea of pushing past limits just to see what's out there. 

One day, maybe. Maybe one day I will write something that would've gone on a slightly louche erotica website back in the Noughts. All I have to worry about is that the sort of people who become self-righteous about "smut" on Booktok aren't going to like stories about exploration.

Three Eight Six: Wellington, Rain

 You must've read this before. This is a story the leggy Jill in NZ sent me long ago-- maybe as long as a dozen years ago. I may have posted this before, but I'll post it again. 

As stories go, this is wonderful. Very powerful, very erotic, very shattering. It's a story that evokes jealousy and envy both. I'm hard-pressed to find stories in my own life that can match Jill's adventures in her mid-twenties.

I have no idea where Jill is now, but let's go to a rainy night in Wellington NZ back in the 20-teens--

rain was pelting on the windows. i woke up on the floor, naked under a kid's toy story blanket. dry mouth, pounding headache, very shaky. i sat up, and looked around for my clothes. an asian girl was snoring quietly on the couch. there were bottles strewn everywhere. i felt sick and dizzy. my black jeans were in the corner of the room, covered in mud. my keys and $650 were scrunched into my pocket. weird, i never carried that much cash. i pulled them on, no underwear, then vomited into a pot plant.

i couldn't see the top i thought i'd been wearing, so i grabbed a men's shirt that was hanging on the back of a chair and buttoned it up. i had no idea where i was or what i'd been doing. i wandered through the small apartment. there were three men asleep in one of the bedrooms. in another bedroom was a few weed plants. i looked in the fridge and took out a beer. one of the men woke up and asked me if i wanted a smoke. 

we stood on the balcony, under the eaves, and smoked in silence. i have no idea who you are, he said. i just shrugged. you're wearing my shirt, he said. i just looked at him. i was feeling too dazed to put a sentence together. you can keep it, he said. 

he flicked his butt off the balcony, and offered me another. he lit it for me. can i see your tits? he asked. i nodded, and he undid the buttons on his shirt. can i take a photo? he asked. i nodded. he took out a battered iphone and took a few pictures, then started slowly sucking my nipples. he was tall, and dark haired. he had a beard and green eyes. i fucking love your tits, he said. do you want to suck my cock? he asked. i undid his jeans and took out his cock. i got on my knees and took him in my mouth. i was still feeling sick and almost vomited once or twice, but i loved the feeling of him in my mouth. 

do you want me to fuck you? he asked. i nodded, with his cock still in my mouth. i stood up and he bent me over the balcony and slowly peeled down my skinny, muddy jeans. he kissed my neck and fucked me in the rain. the motion of it made me vomit over the balcony. i moaned at him not to stop. it felt so fucking good. his hand was rubbing my clit and his cock was deep in my cunt. i had purged and felt light and pure as air. he came, and rested his body against mine. he pulled my jeans back up, and buttoned my shirt. he put another cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me.

 i walked to caitie's apartment in the rain barefoot. i wasn't so far from there, 4 or 5 blocks. 

Caitie, just as a note, was the girl Jill was dating in those days.

I really do love the story. I wish there were still lovely, wicked girls out there over the aether who wanted to tell stories about their Adventures. I don't even know if there are still girls out there who want to have Adventures, let alone craft them into stories to excite future lovers. 

If you're reading this, what are the Adventures you'd like to have? What are the Stories you'd like to be able to tell? I know that 2024 is very different from 2012-- in this time of holy war and holy dread --but why do you think we seem nowadays to avoid adventures and transgressions and experiences?

Three Eight Two: BookTok

I've been thinking about erotica. I understand that the world of online self-published books is filled these days with what Book-Tok reviewers call "smut". I understand that Book-Tok itself is filled with reviews of (usually sapphic) novels that are called "adult romance" or even  "erotic romance". But what I don't see is...erotica. 

I'm old enough to remember when there was a clear category of "erotica". Yes, I know the old joke that "erotica" is just porn with literary pretensions, or maybe just porn with a better (i.e., university-educated) vocabulary. But once upon a time there were publishing houses (Eurotica, I think, and maybe something like Blue Moon) that tried to do sexually explicit books that had aspirations to some literary skill. There was an early webzine called LitErotica that tried to do the same thing. And, no, I have no idea whether it's still published. (Grove Press tried to do the same thing in the 1950s-1960s, but that's another, more complex, story.) "Erotica" existed, and so did porn.

Yes, I'm old enough to remember spinner racks filled with overpriced paperbacks in bus stations and sketchy convenience stores, books with titles like "Hot Pants Weather Girl" or "Lesbian Librarian". As best I can recall, porn novels disappeared sometime in the mid-1980s. Video killed the genre, of course, but so did changes in what you could actually display on the spinners. No more incest-themed stories ("Humping, Pumping Family" or "Daughter Without Panties" or "Mom Spreads for Her Boys"). No more stories with underage themes ("A Teasing Twelve", or "Junior High Oral Slut"). And, yes, no more animal-sex tales ("Schoolgirl and the Stallion" or "Donkey-Raped Co-Ed"). Those sub-genres vanished altogether. 

There are, I'm told, a couple of Russian websites where such 1970s and 1980s American porn novels have been scanned and posted, but the Russian web is full of scammers, hackers, and supporters of Vladimir Putin and his dictatorship. I'll be staying far away from such places.

I have no real idea here in 2024 where actual erotica is to be found. There was a website called The Kristin Archive that carried literally hundreds of pieces of amateur erotica. Most were really awful-- poorly written, poorly plotted, often painfully obvious celebrity fantasies or revenge porn. There were a few gems, though-- well-written, well-thought out, very explicit but still plausible. That site seems to have gone down a year or two ago. We are, it seems to me, on the verge of losing written erotica as a viable genre.

Now I have a list of novels that I've found erotic. I've probably mentioned those before. Obviously "Story of O". Alec Waugh's "A Spy in the Family". Emily Maguire's "Taming the Beast". Marguerite Duras' "The Lover" and "Black Hair, Blue Eyes". Georges Bataille's "Story of the Eye". Anne Rice's "Exit to Eden".  Joyce MacIver's "The Exquisite Thing". Elizabeth McNeill's "Nine and a Half Weeks". You know the list. Those are all things I've liked and found exciting. But I'm not sure we can get novels like that any longer. They're harder-core than BookTok "smut", and many of them are written to appeal to a very niche audience. And times do change. Emmanuelle Arsan's two "Emmanuelle" novels and her later "Laure" have too many issues in 2024 with topics that range from colonialism and race to age-disparate sex to Consensual Non-Consent. 

I can't think of anything new in the last few years that struck me as exciting. I tried to re-read Anne Rice's "Sleeping Beauty" books and found them far too precious and twee. I can't imagine reading any Billionaire/Alpha Male "erotic romances". I can't imagine reading any BookTok "smut", either. What passes for erotic on BookTok is very much the decaffeinated coffee (or the mocktails) of sex.

I've also begun to worry that my own tastes skew too much towards S/M and what that might say about me. There's a strain of neo-puritanism out there in the Gen Z and Millennial worlds, and it has nothing good to say about the sorts of books I've found exciting in the past. A young lady of my acquaintance told me that she's lost the ability to read scenes that excite her-- some terrorist-hostage non-consensual sex scenes in David Benedictus' "The Rabbi's Wife" and the notorious last scene in Susanna Moore's "In the Cut" --because she's afraid of being judged, something that never bothered her before. 

I can understand her concerns. She's always liked the concept of S/M, and S/M these days is increasingly treated as unacceptable. And I agree with her that it's harder and harder to talk about fantasies, let alone present them in detail to a partner-- no more reading passages from novels aloud as, well, bedtime stories to lovers. 

So...are there still ways to have fantasies? Can they be discussed? I'd ask for recommendations as to scenes in books, but that's just far too risky these days. I can't even ask for titles that I might explore for myself. I don't even know what's out there-- if the genre(s) that interest me exist any longer.

Three Seven Zero: Domme

 I've been spending a great deal of time at YouTube, and the other night The Algorithm delivered a recommendation that I needed to see a particular video. Well, fine. The video was an hour-long interview with a woman who calls herself Eva Oh, and I was intrigued.

Eva Oh is a very high-end domme. She seems to be based mostly in Australia, though in the interview she mentioned moving to Britain. She claims very straightforwardly to charge $10,000 a day for her services and to have a very exclusive (if not "closed") book of clients. She also does online classes teaching both potential dommes and potential clients about the procedures and etiquette of the high-end BDSM world. 

I have to say that I quickly developed a crush on her. She's Eurasian-- she describes herself as Anglo-Burmese-Chinese-Irish --and she's very lovely. She seems to have moved around a lot as a girl, and her accent is a delight. It sounds like American English overlaying Australian English with dashes of British Received Pronunciation and what I think of as Singapore English. She has an amazing voice-- smoky, alluring, throaty, precise, measured, confident. It's a voice with command presence-- very much so. It's a voice that would never need to be raised to seem powerful. I immediately thought of it as a voice Tywin Lannister would've appreciated. Eva Oh  was in a very elegant , body-conscious silk slip dress and heels, and she has long, amazing legs...but it's her voice that caught my fancy. She's very coolly distanced, very precise, very elegant, very aware of irony. I like all those things, but...ah, that voice!

I'll note that she's also starred in a film called "Grief Encounter", about an enigmatic woman who attends strangers' funerals in order to seduce grieving men. I like that as a premise, and I like what the trailers show about the psychological dynamics of what her character does.

Eva Oh's biography online says that she worked as a researcher for a couple of human rights organizations in Asia. I'd probably end up letting my academic side take over and spending much of my $10,000 a day asking about where she went and what her research was about and how it was conducted. I've never been able to get away from being an academic. Even trying to discover if she wore anything at all under that silk slip dress (God, I hope not) would take second place to asking about her methodology in research. That's the way my mind works, alas.

I've always been attracted to BDSM, all the way back to reading "Story of O." when I was far too young. S/M for me has always come with a whole set of class markers, and it's always been what Andrew Holleran called "the intellectuals' fetish". It's a fetish that requires literary references and expensive accoutrements. It's a fetish that requires the ability to create and tell stories. What's S/M without a script, without a set of character backstories? 

My relationships have usually involved S/M overtones. I'm older than my young companions, and I was the eldest sibling in my family...so I'm used to having my way. I spent much of my life as an academic, so I'm used to crafting and telling stories. My young ladies are often comparative lit or French lit majors, and they're used to seeing the world as a set of stories...and used to being mentored by older admirers. So affairs for me have always been very much a sort of creative writing seminar. And Eva Oh seems to be someone who has the ability to do be part of stories and scenarios and character play. 

I've never had any particular interest in being submissive, and I'm not someone who feels the need to be "broken down" or punished. So I'm not sure that Eva Oh-- who seems to enjoy psychological games and shaping psychological dynamics --would be a good real-world choice for me, even if I were some tech billionaire or forex trader who could regard $10,000 a day as just a rounding error. Though let's say that I did admire her own accounts of scenarios she's created with her clients, and I am fascinated with her ideas about how to create "headspaces" for clients. My own wish (not quite a fantasy) would be to sit with Eva Oh in some elegant, tiny bar in Melbourne or Singapore and work with her on creating scenarios.

Though let's be honest. I'd probably have the same fear I had about the FMTY girls at Twitter. Would my particular interests seem good enough to her? Would I be good enough to be her client-- to be worth her time and effort, even if I paid in advance? Would I be a project worth her time?

The scenarios wouldn't involve the usual BDSM things, but they would involve complicated scenarios and a fluidity of control. In my own life, as I've said before, my pleasures happen behind my eyes. It's always been very difficult for me to pass control over from my thoughts to my body. It's never been easy to release myself and just experience sensations. I always have to have a script (or at least an outline), and I always have to have a very literary ambience. I could never afford Eva Oh, and I could likely never explain myself properly even if did have the ability to move funds over the aether to her offshore accounts. But the idea is there. Maybe a domme has the auxiliary skills to let me finally feel something outside my own head-- the necessary skills at character creation, scriptwriting, and finding out what's actually going on behind my eyes.

I also found a platform called Soft White Underbelly that had an interview with a young (twenty-five or twenty-six) domme who called herself Monique. She's not anywhere near Eva Oh's price-point, and she's very...American: Los Angeles by way of Minnesota. Very tall (six foot two), very slender, very pretty in a kind of angular way. I liked her interview a lot, liked her attitude and laugh. Monique is very like many of the girls I've sat with at off-campus or hipster-enclave bars down the years, and of course I loved the idea of how long her legs were, and I loved the way you see her hipbones just above her low-rise jeans. Very, very kissable legs, and the sort of dry humor I like. 

She did talk about how it mattered to her that her clients were able to feel a sense of freedom around her and how she was open to adventures and experiments. I could imagine her as someone I could talk to about my needs and hopes and interests and not feel that I might be...boring. I'd have a drink with Monique and simply...discuss prices and services without feeling like someone trying to hire a top-end DC or Manhattan lawyer to represent him in a minor car crash. Monique might be someone I could talk to and feel like I might be an adventure rather than a psychological experiment or corporate project for her. No wire transfers to banks overseas, but I would be happy to bring cash.  I suspect she wouldn't be as coolly precise about things as Eva Oh, but she might be less likely to judge the decor in my flat. 

And I suspect Monique might be someone with whom I could be more open. She'd be easier to just look at at say, "Well, I've always wanted to be able to just feel something, or just lose myself in something other than books and movies." Maybe. Maybe.

Well, these days I lack the money and the ability to do anything FMTY...or to be on an aeroplane to anywhere. And I'm really not sure just what I'd say to either Monique or Eva Oh. Monique, though...I'd love to hear that laugh while I was kissing her hipbones and thighs. 

 

Three Six Four: Ghosts

 I haven't been here in a while, and I do apologize for that. This blog is a project I do want to keep up, and I hope to write here often enough to attract comments and questions.

I'm thinking tonight about ghosts. Not the ghost girls who've been part of my life and still haunt my dreams, but about the ghosts of erotica past.

I've been saying for rather a while now that erotica seems to be fading as a genre. There seems to be less and less erotica available. Porn clips at streaming services, sure. PornHub and its fellows are readily available. But actual erotica-- written or drawn or painted, not put on video or conjured up via AI? The boundaries seem to be shrinking.

I hadn't gone to Literotica for a while-- well, yes, several years --and my thought when I did go back this week was that there seems to be a dearth of new stories. And there seems to be an utter drought of inventive stories. No one seems to be writing anything elegant, transgressive, stylish, powerful. 

The boundaries of erotica seem to be collapsing towards the ordinary. What erotica I can find is flat and dull. The link between the erotic and the darkly elegant seems to be broken. Even S/M stories are just...boring. There's no longer an association between S/M (I dislike BDSM as a term) and style and elegance. Where there is any attempt to be transgressive, it veers towards urban punk and not towards decadence. And for me, decadence-- rooted in class and style --was always key.

Tonight I'm thinking of two figures from my past-- Michael Manning and Olivia de  Berardinis. Both of them erotic artists whose work meant something to me in the days of my lost youth. Olivia began work in the l970s doing her "O Cards"-- greeting cards with wickedly clever and highly erotic art based in decadence and dark elegance. Michael Manning appeared in the mid-1990s. His work combined goth, manga, cyberpunk, and gender fluidity. I miss both artists.

Olivia's work came under attack in the early '90s, if I recall correctly. A lot of her '70s and early '80s work had references to s/m, certainly, but also clever references to drugs. By the '90s, cocaine was no longer a chic quirk or erotic accessory, but a Social Menace. She was pressured to discard much of her early work, and her work became ever less explicit throughout the '90s. Once upon a time, I'd buy several dozen O Cards at a time, some for my own collection, but most to be sent to lovely young companions during correspondence. That's all gone, now. I have no idea what happened to the O Cards I saved, and there's nothing out there today from her that has the wicked and elegant darkness that her '70s and '80s work had. I've seen interview snippets where she apologizes for the explicitness of her paintings and cards. That's deeply sad.

Michael Manning's graphic novels-- "The Spider Garden", "In a Metal Web", "Hydrophidian", "Illuminagerie", "Tranceptor", etc. --were amazingly erotic and engrossing. His heroines crossed through boundaries of gender and sensation into some very dark and elegant places. He incorporated cyberpunk and biomechanics motifs as well as lovely Oriental architecture. For a while, late in the 1990s, he was with a now-vanished publisher called Eurotica, which is where I discovered his graphic work. But in the world of the Noughts and beyond, he found it increasingly hard to market his work. 

The Culture Wars caught up with Michael Manning, I suppose. His version of gender fluidity was based on sci-fi and fetishism rather than trans ideology-- he had characters who were self-described "androgynes", fabulous creatures whose "trans" status meant "trans-human". His androgynes were languid, willowy, goth-Heian, cruel in their beauty, and eerie. That didn't help Manning in the current age. And late-capitalism caught up with him, too. It became harder and harder for him to get credit card transaction companies to process orders. In a world of on-line marketing, he was hamstrung.  I haven't seen anything new by him in years. I can look at his "Cathexis" collection and feel like I'm looking at lovely art and wicked stories from a lost age.

There's less and less erotica out there that wants to take chances. There's less and less erotica that wants to link class, style, and darkness. Experimentation is frowned upon, fetishism (either in the anthropological or the private club sense) is rejected. There's less and less out there that I find erotic. 

And so here we are, in the spring of the Year Twenty-Three, focused on politics and economics, and with no interest in the possibilities of the erotic.  

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 One: Flavors

 Jill in Wellington wrote me once upon a time with a story from her teen years, a story about Julia, the first girl she had sex with. I miss Jill's stories, and miss the spirit of adventure she brought to her stories:

I have quite a bad memory in general, but especially when i've been enjoying drinks & drugs. but i remember one night with julia, an old friend from school. i was about 15 and staying at her apartment in town while her mum & her mum's lesbian lover were away. we raided the liquor cabinet and were really drunk. we were out on the balcony and i was licking her clit and had my fingers in her cunt. she came and pissed at the same time, and a bit got in my mouth. i was not into it at all, i grabbed our bottle of tequila and had a few big gulps. Julia apologised several times...but also said how good it felt to cum and piss at the same time. i'm always very open to new experiences so i gave it a try...and it felt amazing. it made my orgasm so much more intense. Julia loved it too...

Later i discovered pissing while purging which is also amazing. 

I do feel sad that she abandoned her past. It's always sad when a beautiful girl who has a Slutty Party Girl past filled with wicked stories decides in her early thirties to pretend those experiences never happened. It's always sad when a beautiful, wicked girl decides that she now needs to be a Grown-Up and put sexual adventures aside. 

Jill told me once that Julia left school a year or so later and now lives in a council flat with two half-Maori children by different (and unknown) fathers. That could be (and probably is) a sad story-- all the more so since Jill hasn't seen Julia in years. 

Nonetheless, Jill has a good fifteen or twenty years worth of stories in her diaries and memories. It's sad that she's tried to erase them.

Three Three Six: Carpet

 I've brought the story up here before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Three Two Six: Vintage

Erotica ages badly. 

I think we can agree on that. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Three One Seven: Salle D'Armes

 My lovely long-legged blonde friend Jill in Wellington NZ told me once about her high school friend who became a nationally-ranked fencer. The girl was good enough to get invited to fencing competitions and fencing master classes all around the Pacific. The girl's name-- I think --was Sarah.  My NZ friend knew at least two other girls named Sarah when she was at her posh private school, so I may be wrong about the name.

But what I do know is the fencer girl (we'll call her Sarah anyway) went off to a fencing training camp in China and had a very hot, fairly public affair with a "much older"  and rather famous German fencing coach. Some things remain unclear in the story. Was the man her coach or just one of the coaches at the camp? I can't decide which would be hotter--- having a torrid affair at 16 or 17 with her mentor at fencing (foil? épée? sabre?) or meeting and hooking up with an internationally-rated German coach while in the Mysterious Orient. So-- I know she was sixteen or seventeen (Jill was just turning seventeen when she and Sarah were emailing about Sarah's adventures in China), but I don't know if she was in Shanghai or Beijing. I don't know what "much older"means here, although given Jill's own tastes in those days, I'd suspect that "much older" means that the man would've been in his forties. 

The story (or as much as I know of it) really is hot. And I would love to know more. Backstories matter, mind you, just as Details Matter. Context and setting are always key. It matters how they met, and how the flirtation began. It very much matters who made the first move. 

My friend at McGill in Montreal told me that she'd gone to university very much in order to have affairs with distinguished and literary older academics, but she was always brought up short by the feeling that she didn't know the correct procedure for initiating an affair with a distinguished Older Man. Was she supposed to look young and vulnerable and wait for him to be predatory? Was she supposed to drape herself on his desk in something slinky and offer herself up as muse and sacrifice? What, she asked, were the procedures in these matters? Who was supposed to initiate? What costumes and poses did she need to know about? Importantly-- which of her female friends should she tell, and how dramatic should her announcement be?

The athletic world-- and especially something like fencing, which strikes me as a fairly incestuous community --might be a place where physical affairs were carried on fairly openly. After all, as an athlete, everything you do is about your body: you're focused on the flesh, and on competition. It may also be a place where mentor-mentee relationships are common. Maybe. I have no idea how age-disparate relationships are seen in China, or what age gaps are regarded as acceptable. And...what are are rules for overseas training camps? Remember the old naval saying: No sin below the equator? Did something like that hold true? If you're a few thousand miles from school and home, training and competing amongst foreigners, are all the usual rules suspended? My Montreal friend laughed once and told me that at Comparative Lit conferences in New York or Vancouver or London, the accepted thing was that quick affairs and gender experimentation were perfectly fine. Distance made everything seem permissible...and hotter.

I do wonder about whether Sarah and her coach spent whole nights together, or whether they sneaked off to dorm rooms or offices or showers for sex. What were the mechanics of the affair. Jill in Wellington had given up underwear by seventeen, but had Sarah? Could she be wickedly panty-free in a fencing costume? How easy would it be to get out of fencing togs for impromptu sex? These are the things I wonder about, after all. And...was the man married back wherever home was? Did he laugh over drinks and tell other coaches about Sarah?  How did Sarah tell her fencing companions...and what did they say? She fired off dozens of emails to Jill about what was happening, but did the fencing authorities in Beijing or Shanghai know what was happening? I'm under the impression that Sarah's affair with the coach was fairly open, that she loved being on the man's arm in public, or at bars. Jill's circle at school did love shocking their audiences, so there may have been some of that.

I have no clue as to how long the affair lasted, or if Sarah ever saw the man again. All I know about Sarah is that she lives in Melbourne these days and has a practice as a physiotherapist.  Before the pandemic, Jill would fly over to see her once or twice a year. 

I wish I knew more, and that I had photos of both of them from those days. There's a very hot tale to be crafted from the story of Sarah and the fencing coach...and a very hot film to be made. I might suggest casting Kenna James and Mick Blue in the video...or maybe Riley Reid and Mick Blue.

Any thoughts?

Three One Five: Sleep-Out

 My lovely posh blonde friend in New Zealand, my long-legged Wellington girl, once spent a long night telling me stories from her past. I've written about some of those before, and you can go back a year or so and read over some of her adventures. 

I've always found her stories to be amazingly hot, although I have developed serious doubts about some of her stories--- the ones about foreign travel, or being swept away by millionaires, or about adventures and encounters in risky or exotic places. 

She did write one brief note, though, that I find believable. I asked her about her introduction to anal sex, and she wrote to say it was with a Maori boy she knew, one who was slightly older. I'm not clear whether he went to her posh school or whether she knew him from her feral party girl life. The story she told me was:

I was 15, both of us drunk as fuck, we'd been at a party together, then went back to his house, he lived in a sleep-out at the back of the garden, we'd fucked a few times before this night, but never in the ass....he was big, and he just went for it, tiny bit of spit for lube...i screamed...he almost stopped, and i screamed at him to keep fucking going!...i was crying and screaming and moaning and loving it...he spit in his hand, then rubbed his dick with it... he came in me and i moaned and cried as hard as i could.  Tama-te-rangi, I still remember his full name...he was gorgeous.

A sleep-out in New Zealand is "a single-storey detached building up to 30 square metres", or "typically a building separate from the main house which is used as extra accommodation. It does not contain cooking or kitchen facilities and usually shares facilities with the main dwelling. Its used in association with the main house and isn't a standalone/ self-contained accommodation option." So there's that. 

I do wonder whether they did the Jill's Introduction to Sodomy experience in the garden or in the sleep-out itself. It does matter where exactly it happened. I'd like it to have happened outdoors, or maybe on the porch of the sleep-out. A risky place, anyway. My friend claims that she always enjoyed the idea of risking being discovered having sex, whether by parents (hers or the boy's), friends, or strangers. And she's never been shy of being naked outdoors.

It matters, too, that the boy was Maori. Jill told me once that the posh girls at her school loved the idea of exotic partners, whether Maori or Islander, and that she loved the whole golden-brown skin tone thing. Telling me that story fifteen years after it happened, she was proud that her first anal experience was with someone exotic.

The sleep-out reminds me of the girl in Baltimore having sex in the carriage house in Silver Springs. Which of course makes me think of where that girl is today--- somewhere in South Brooklyn, I believe.

My one shred of doubt here is that Tama-te-rangi is a fairly famous name in Maori culture. It's also it seems a name given to a fair number of Maori boys, so it's possible that it was simply a common Maori name there in Lower Hutt and Wellington. But I'll never quite be sure.

It does leave me saddened that she didn't tell me the extended story, the story of how she met him, of how they started having sex, of what her girlfriends at school thought, of what happened after he finished that night. How long did they keep up a FWB relationship? And how much older was he? All those things matter... 

I'll always remember her for having amazingly hot stories. I only wish I knew more of them.

Three One Four: Shadows

 Long, long ago I found a short story with an image that's stayed with me ever since. I can't recall the name or the author. That's long gone. The story was in a paperback anthology of  "modern horror" stories I bought at a used bookshop in Tampa. Ten cents-- I do remember that. I bought a dozen paperbacks there at ten cents each.  Mostly sci-fi, since that's what I was very much into in those years. I was in Florida with my parents, and I needed books for the beach or to read while they drove from St. Augustine down to the tip of Florida on A1A and then back up the Gulf side. 

The stories were all "modern horror", which meant (I suppose) that there were no monsters and no demons, or at least no external ones. No creatures in the swamp and nothing supernatural.  All the monsters were human--- isn't that the definition of "modern"? 

Anyway, the story...  I don't recall the author or the title. That's all long lost. What I do recall is a scene where a character--- a teen girl, maybe the daughter of one of the other characters ---comes into the darkened library of a vast old tumbledown house and spends time going through the shelves and reading by a single small lamp. She does that while naked, though I don't recall if she undresses in the library or walks naked through the dark house. I don't recall what happens, and I don't recall what she was reading. But I do recall being stunned and thrilled by the image--- a beautiful young girl reading naked at midnight in some library with a second level and a balcony and huge bookshelves. Well, I was thirteen or fourteen. Of course I was excited by the image. But of course--- of course ---what meant the most to me was the idea that she'd chosen to be naked with books. I do wish I had a copy of the story. I'd like to know what went on before and after that scene and what the story was actually about. I suppose I never will know, but...that image of a girl naked in a shadowy library has been with me all these years, and it's not something I'll give up.

I liked the idea of her waiting 'til the house was asleep or until everyone (parents? hosts? relatives?) had gone out and then wandering naked through the hallways, feeling deliciously daring. Miss Ginny in Montreal said to me once that she'd done that at the lake house her parents used to rent in the summer, and that once--- on a family trip to the Tennessee mountains ---she'd waited for her parents and siblings to drive into town and then spent a morning wandering the big rented vacation house, peeling off her white bikini and dancing through the rooms and out onto the dock, naked except for headphones, a big glass of white wine in her hand. Beautiful, beautiful image--- Miss Ginny petite and blonde at sixteen or seventeen, whirling and pivoting, listening to British Northern soul, feeling wicked and daring.  What lovely teen girl wouldn't like that feeling? Being naked in the house, she said, was like having her hidden cigarette case or flirting online with older men. Transgression, she said, made her feel alive.

The first time Miss Ginny followed my advice and went to class at McGill in a skirt with no underwear, she called me at eleven in the morning, breathless and exhilarated. She felt, she told me, so alive, so vulnerable and daring. She felt, she told me, like Jane Birkin in 1964. I had to laugh at that, and I had to tell her how perfect that thought was.  

I've always encouraged lovely Young Companions to avoid underwear and to sleep naked. I've always told lovely girls that there's an official dress code if they're involved with me. Miss Ginny of course adopted all my suggestions--- I was the older man who was corrupting her, and she knew exactly how to play her role. 

The girl in the story... I have zero idea how the story developed. I have no idea if anyone was watching her or what happened. But I do recall being there in the car reading and thinking that this image was perfect, that one day I'd ask a lovely girl to be naked in a big, dark house and be in and out of the shadows while we flirted and played.  Levin (of course) slept naked, and I loved seeing her stretched naked on afternoon beds making notes and sketches in her journals or curled up naked in a big chair, reading on an autumn night.

I've kept that image with me for all these years, now--- the girl naked in the library, looking over the rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves,  finding one book after another. So breathtaking to imagine her in a big overstuffed chair, turned to hang her bare legs over the chair arm, naked except for reading glasses, reading something antique and amazing by lamplight.

I'll never know what the story was, or how it developed. But that image will be with me forever.

Three Zero Eight: Lessons

 I'd thought that I might be writing tonight about sex in hotels, but I decided in the end to write about what I'd learned in my life from porn. I suppose we can include written erotica in that.

I've been reading things on line about people's sexual problems, and one of the recurring themes in the comments is that people--- meaning of course cis straight white males ---have to stop learning about sex from porn. That immediately sent me to PornHub to do a random tour of categories. I spent a while looking through PornHub clips and trying to recall what I'd learned from porn.

I know that I learned some things. Though in my long-ago youth, it was harder to do. That was before the web, of course, long before there was anything like PornHub or its sister sites. To see porn in my youth I had to sneak into actual backstreet cinemas to watch movies. I was probably in my twenties before I saw porn on satellite channels, and I never had much of a porn collection on either videotape or DVD.  But I did learn things from porn. 

That makes sense for me, of course. I learned about so much in my life from books and films.  Novels and films shaped who I am. I read books to learn about what to wear, which wines to drink, how to behave at dinner parties. So why not porn?

I learned from porn (yes, from a book first, from "Story of O") that there were beautiful girls who didn't wear underwear. I learned that there were girls there in the ordinary world who were deliciously bare under skirts or shorts. I learned that I could suggest to lovers that they be panty-free. I learned that I could whisper to a lovely girl and tell her to wear nothing at all beneath a sundress while she walked with me down a beach or a city street--- learned that this could be an adventure. And it has become a signature thing for me--- asking girls with whom I'm involved to give up underwear, at least while out with me.

I learned that there were beautiful girls who slept naked.  I may--- may ---have learned that first from the early James Bond films, but certainly it was porn where I found that sleeping naked was something beautiful girls seemed to do everywhere. I watched that and knew--- even in my early teens ---that this was something I'd be asking lovers to do lifelong. 

Porn showed me new positions to try. Porn showed me new places for risky and thrilling encounters. Porn showed me that, yes, oral and anal did happen...and showed me how to do both. And the same is true for various kinds of s/m. Until I read about something, until I see it on a screen, it isn't real. 

Porn gave me an incentive to try things, to think that certain kinds of adventures were possible. It gave me the courage to offer up ideas and suggestions to lovers. Were the things that I asked about or found fascinating "unrealistic"?  Maybe. Or even probably. But "realistic" has never been what I was after. 

Porn offered me raw material that I could shape into things I could share, things that I use as guides to adventures and to creating stories for myself and a lover. Porn showed me what I could like, showed me things that I didn't know I'd like. 

I never thought that porn was a guide to what a girl looked or sounded like while having orgasms. I never thought that porn showed how large or how hard a male was supposed to be, or how often a male could perform. But then I wasn't interested in those things anyway.  I did think that porn showed me how sex should be lit, and how bodies can be posed for maximum visual effect. Porn taught me how sex could look. And I'll always be grateful to certain porn directors (e.g., Andrew Blake) for that.

Three Zero Four: Balconies

 I still have my crushes, even at my own advanced age. 

Last time I spoke about Kenna James and Kristin Scott and the crushes I've developed on the two of them from watching their interviews on YouTube as much as their video clips on PornHub. 

Right now I'm listening to Duran Duran do "Come Undone", which seems like a lovely song to listen to on an October night while you're thinking about crushes on distant girls.

Every crush has its speculative side, of course. You sit at night with a drink and you wonder how the crush would play out in real life. How would you meet? How would you interact? How would you make the transition to flirtation and seduction? What would you say afterwards?

Somehow my visions of all that always involve balconies. Somehow the initial meeting is random enough. Usually we turn out to be neighbors whose apartments had adjoining balconies, and we end up talking to one another in the afternoons. Eventually one of my crushes will come next door and we'll get used to spending time on my balcony with tea or a glass of wine. We'll...talk. It always comes down to talking. She--- Kenna or Kristin ---will tell me that I should be in a good mood, that an actual porn star is knocking on my door to come hang out. And we'll laugh about that. 

There are apologies involved, of course.  When in my visions there is flirtation and kissing involved, I'm usually apologizing for my age and my looks. There's no way around that. In real life, I'd be doing exactly that. What I can't decide is whether either girl would be amused or a bit exasperated by my apologies. I'd like to think that the girl would put a finger to my lips and tell me to hush, that she'd made a decision and was well aware of my age and looks and wasn't really bothered by either. 

I'd like to believe that could happen. In my own life here these last few years, I've had girls tell me that there was nothing wrong with me. I've never believed them, but I have been grateful to them for saying that.  

I've always said that the two hardest genres to write in are biography and erotica.  To do biography well, you have to know not just your subject but the whole world around him, the world that produced him. And erotica...? Well, you have to know how to present a set of fantasies that don't devolve into either slapstick or obvious narcissistic wish-fulfillment. That last part worries me. The best I can do is imagine that the girl chose me because the things I said were interesting or that she had her own wishes and fantasies and just found me...potentially useful. I still have to parse out what "useful" might mean. Ambiguous and dangerous word, really.

My fear with either Kristin or Kenna wouldn't necessarily be fear of systems failure, fear of performance. It would be fear of trying to talk to either girl and making a fool of myself. I'd like to think that I can carry on a conversation, that I have things to say. Having that come crashing down would be far worse than systems failure.

Three Zero Three: Crushing

 Here in the time of the Red Death,  so much of erotic life has been restricted to the web. I haven't been doing cam experiences or FaceTiming with lovely Young Companions. Life, alas, doesn't work like that.

But I have been listlessly sitting up at night looking at clips on PornHub and its kindred. I feel almost ashamed of that. I'm not one to spend time looking at online porn. The implication of indulging in the Solitary Vice does make me ashamed. The Solitary Vice is not something males can engage in without being held up to mockery. Autoerotic adventures are for women only. 

I'm not bitter about that, really. I understand the politics of self-pleasure, There's a large industry out there over the aether devoted to empowering women sexually, to allowing them to find pleasure on their own terms. Those are good things. But I do have to sigh and note that there's nothing like Good Vibrations or its kindred boutiques for men. Self-pleasure for men is regarded as creepy, pathetic, and aesthetically displeasing. I've said it before here--- once you've heard the word "wank" you can't really be male (or maybe only straight male) and indulge in the Solitary Vice without feeling ashamed and sad.

Nonetheless, I do sit at my work desk and search out PornHub clips. I'm impressed with how niche some of the clips are, and even more impressed with the sheer numbers of things even the most arcane search terms bring up. It probably took less than a month before there were scores of Covid-19 porn videos, with masked scene partners and storylines about Red Death quarantine bringing the most disparate and unlikely couples together (lots of step-siblings, a surprising number of Hot MILF and stepdaughter clips). I'm socially aware enough to wear a mask every day if I go into stores or shops or amongst crowds, but I do have to wonder what sex in a mask would be like. I'd probably start gasping for breath early on, alas.

I have found porn actresses to crush on. However not? I discovered a lovely long-legged blonde who calls herself Kenna James and a petite garconne who calls herself Kristin Scott. They've done a couple of scenes with each other, including some non-sex scenes in a story-driven  coming-out film called "Teenage Lesbian". Both very lovely, both very hot. 

My crushes on both are sexual, of course, but I think that it's their interviews that have fed the crushes. Both have several interviews on YouTube about their lives and careers, and they each have very good long interviews on Holly Randall's podcast. Ms. Randall, by the way, is the daughter of Suze Randall, one of the great glamour photographers (and female porn directors) of the Seventies and Eighties.  Both Ms. James and Ms. Scott are clever, funny, thoughtful, and well-spoken. So my usual track is to look for scenes each has done on PornHub and then see what interviews I  can find at YouTube. 

I do like it that porn actresses are giving interviews.  I like the idea of hearing about their lives in their own voices.  It says something about me that any fantasies I've ever constructed in my head about either Kristin Scott or Kenna James are largely about flirtations and conversations, They're both very lovely girls, and I expect that they'd be good--- adventurous, experimental, kind, open ---in bed...even with a male partner. Maybe--- maybe ---even with an older male partner. Still, now...all my fantasies begin with conversations and explanations by both me and a potential partner. 

I can't imagine sex without talking. I can't imagine sex that doesn't happen in the head long before it happens in the flesh.  I can't imagine sex that isn't about telling stories, about creating stories with a partner.

Two Eight Six: Saint Tropez

Tonight I'm thinking about Levin and the nudes her painting professor did of her. I remember looking at the framed nude portrait she had  in her bedroom and envying her older lover his skills. I can barely draw stick figures, and his portrait of Levin was amazing--- sunlight and shadow, the way her nakedness blended with the room, the way the furniture and windows set off how lithe and alluring she was. I'd seen her naked, of course, seen her naked in all sorts of rooms. But I did envy him the things he must have seen in her, the things he brought out in her image. He could see things in her that I couldn't. I could write about her; I could tell her stories. But I couldn't see her.

I can't decide whether thinking of Levin made me recall a 1991 film called "La belle noiseuse" or whether seeing the film again not so very long ago made me think of Levin and her portraits. If you haven't seen the film, please do take this as a recommendation. I purchased a DVD of it not long ago and sat enthralled with it here in the lakeside flat. I'd seen the film years ago--- probably because Jane Birkin is in it, and Ms. Birkin will always be a major crush of mine. "La belle noiseuse" was released in 1991. A young Emmanuelle Beart is the female lead, the muse to an aging painter. Beart would've been twenty-six, I think, when it was filmed. The film is almost three hours long, and Mlle. Beart is naked through most of it. The story is about Beart and the painter, about her modeling for him as he tries to reclaim the ability to paint. It's deeply powerful--- about obsession as much as desire ---to watch the painter pose her, move her, drive himself as he does figure studies, as he tries to build a painting from an idea he gave up twenty-five years before.  Much of the film is about the techniques of painting, about shots of a disconnected arm wielding brushes or charcoal, doing washes, sketching out lines and curve. It's a film I wish I could've watched with Levin all those years ago, and it's a film I wish I could watch with my blonde NZ  friend--- Jill, we'll call her ---down in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

The act of painting, the act of drawing--- that's an erotic thing all on its own. I've never been able to draw or paint or even sketch.  Once upon a time I did do photography. I spent Saturday mornings at university climbing over buildings looking for architectural moments, and I did spend time photographing girls with whom I was involved, dressed and undressed both. Some of the photographs I took of lovers and companions were good, and my subjects appreciated how I made them look. But no matter what I could do with a pre-digital SLR, it wasn't painting or drawing. In those days I tried to emulate the styles of fashion photographers I liked. I may have been reasonably good at it, but it always lacked the power of a painting. I could do light and shadow, I could pose a girl in some wicked outfit or naked on a rooftop...but it wasn't the same as the painting on Levin's wall or the sketch she gave me of herself in a rented seafront bedroom.

That bedroom sketch, with its shadows and the hint of the girl face down on the bed, did remind me of David Hamilton. Hamilton died in 2016; I only discovered that a couple of days ago. When I was first off at university, Hamilton's photography books were something art-school girls as well as aging nympholepts collected. "Summer in St. Tropez", "Dreams of a Young Girl", "Sisters", "Premiers Desirs"--- I had all of those when I was eighteen or nineteen. I even saw the film versions of "Premiers Desirs" (yes, a very young Mlle. Beart was in that) and "Summer in St. Tropez". Levin had her own copy of "Dreams of a Young Girl"; I do remember that.

I suppose all those books are long out of print. We're long past the days when David Hamilton's photos of young girls were on art-photo notecards and postcards. You know why, of course--- Hamilton's models were are all either in their teens or at least appeared that way (Emmanuelle Beart was twenty when "Premiers Desirs" was filmed). By the time he died, Hamilton must've been on any number of enemies lists and very likely being considered for indictment under British law about "historical offenses" with young models.

Nonetheless, I do remember Hamilton with fondness. You could always tell his photographs--- the long-limbed, coltish models, the way he used sunlight and settings down in southern Provence. Levin told me once upon a time that she knew that there was something very cliche-pervy about Hamilton's work, but that she couldn't stop looking at it and wishing both that she could sleep with all the models...and be one herself.  I haven't owned any of his books in years and years, but I'd like to see them again. I know what I thought of them in my own undergraduate days, and I know what I thought of them a decade later. But I have no idea how I'd see them now. We see bodies and nakedness very differently from the way we did in Hamilton's day, or even in the Nineties. We see the idea of coming-of-age very differently, too.

It's so easy for me to imagine Levin at nineteen or twenty as a Hamilton model.  I just wish I could have drawn or painted her myself. I wish I could have taken more photos of her, especially in that city with wrought iron and a seawall--- and saved them down the years.  I wish I could've looked at Levin naked in a deserted Victorian house and painted the passion I always felt in her.

One day I must ask Jill in NZ if she's ever posed nude for paintings. She's had nudes taken of her on camera phones (what posh, wicked Millennial girl hasn't?), but I'd love to know if she ever posed to be sketched or painted--- or even posed for higher-end art nudes.  I can imagine some ghostly figure with a DSLR shooting photos of Jill, but she needs--- has needed since she was the age of a Hamilton model at St. Tropez to be painted. It's only paint on canvas that draws passion out.

Two Eight Zero: Wires

Here during the time of the Red Death, here in the plague lockdown, there's been remarkably little written and posted about sex.

I've seen a few on line posts about how couples who first thought that quarantine sex would be a hot thing are now suffering from cabin fever and too much proximity.  I'm waiting for those entries to turn into a Coen Bros. scenario.

A friend in Scotland wrote last night to say that she and so many of her female friends are burning through packs of batteries for their vibrators and that her male friends had been telling her that their "wanking frequency" was now "off the charts".  My leggy blonde friend down in Wellington NZ tells me that while she swears by her Lelo vibrator, she's always found the Corona beer bottle to be a perfect dildo...but can't use one now. She has bottles, yes, but because the plague is the Coronavirus, she just can't bring herself to use her carefully washed and stored Corona bottle.

I'll note that as a male of a certain age, talking about my own experiences with the Solitary Vice is just not something I can do. The Solitary Vice is something that's aesthetically attractive and "empowering" only for lovely girls. Girls can buy, use, and discuss vibrators and sex toys--- but it's all something that males can't discuss. Girls can self-pleasure, but men...wank. What men do is regarded as inherently pathetic and/or disgusting. So take it as a given that I'd be utterly ashamed to talk about the Solitary Vice in my own life.

That's sad in a way, and all the more so in that I was always a major fan of phone sex. Phone sex was something that played to my strengths--- being verbal, being able to construct stories, being able to make girls feel like they were part of a story.  Phone sex was something I discovered late in high school and remained devoted to for years and years. It was always something I enjoyed teaching my young companions to do and enjoy.

I'm sure that phone sex is regarded as some archaic thing in a world of sexting and webcams, but I miss the nights when lovely young companions would call me late at night and talk and exchange fantasies until dawn. I miss looking at my phone (yes, a landline by the bed) and seeing the area codes for distant cities. I miss the time when girls called me from the other side of the continent or (yes) from overseas. Girls have phoned me from London, Melbourne, Wellington, Montreal, St. Petersburg, and Belgrade to do phone sex. I was always amazed and thrilled by those calls.

Here in the time of the Red Death, though, my phone remains silent. I'm not sure whether phone sex has simply become obsolete and unfashionable, or whether plague quarantine depletes the energy levels needed for phone sex.  My fear these days is that I've lost my ability to do phone sex, lost the ability to construct new fantasy scenarios, lost the ability to tell stories. Are my fantasies ones that mean anything when everyone is suffering from cabin fever? In a world of frayed tempers and gnawing boredom, do I have anything to say that would excite girls?

I can't sext. You know that. I type far too slowly, and the character limits make it impossible to construct complex stories with details and dialogue. I certainly can't do webcam or FaceTime.  My face and body are guaranteed to drive lovely young companions away. My face and body aren't designed for visual presentation.

My own cabin fever is destroying any thoughts of being with a lover by phone. I'd never risk having my body seen, but in a better world my stories would be valuable--- and, yes, they were valuable and valued once upon a time.  I can't believe in my value or my skills any longer.

If any of you out there over the aether are still doing phone sex, let me know what it means to you these days. Let me know whether it feels awkward and unfashionable. Let me know if your own interest in the Solitary Vice has waned during quarantine or whether you're feeling desperate for physical release.

Two Seven Eight: Boccaccio

Early spring, and the Red Death is here. The city where I live is in semi-quarantine, with empty streets and social life reduced to nothing. My understanding is that hospitals here in the city are quietly moving towards a crisis.

It's a grim season, and there's no denying that. My lovely blonde friend in the Land of the Long White Cloud has gone missing. New Zealand is under crisis rules, with its borders shut and businesses closed. I've no idea if she's well or if her employers have shut down altogether.

It's an odd thing, the plague in a social media age. I suppose people are still texting, but no one seems to be lamenting that there are no voices out there over the aether. I'm a creature of a dying generation, and telephone voices do matter to me. I suppose that FaceTime and Skype still count as interaction sites, but somehow that's not the same as long talks by phone late at night.

I've seen a few suggestions that here in the time of the Red Death, writing letters is a key skill to revive. I do agree with that, actually. There's something heartening about actual physical letters. There's something about ink and handwriting that makes you feel like you're actually part of a relationship with someone.

COVID-19 has of course destroyed not just the bar and restaurant industry, it's also ruined sex work and most sexual interactions. Sex workers in Europe and North America are trying to move online, to do webcam and cam-girl sex to stay financially afloat. There are no bars or clubs anymore, and fear has emptied out dating apps. In a world of N95 masks and using Clorox wipes on everything anyone touches, sex is fairly out of the question. Even s/m is hard to do if you're Social Distancing--- whipping a lovely young companion at a minimum distance of six feet (two meters?) is a difficult thing.

Now I will assume that the online sale of vibrators and dildos has spiked.  The Solitary Vice is the one sexual release left...so long as Amazon Prime continues to deliver. I could note that while Lelo and Hitachi are still bringing pleasure to women, there's no equivalent for men. Or at least no equivalent that anyone male can discuss. Women can tell clever, amusing stories of getting through quarantine and Social Distancing with their vibrators, but no one male can preserve any self-respect if he admits to wanking his way through the plague season. Of course, that's a story for another day.

Tonight I'm thinking about Boccaccio and the Decameron. You know the backstory for that, I'll presume. Somewhere in Italy during the Black Death, a group of wealthy and cultured refugees from the Plague assemble in a country estate and fight off boredom by telling one another stories--- usually scandalous, lascivious, and wickedly clever tales of adultery, seduction, and complicated affairs. I think that there was an updated version in the late 1960s, an Italian film called "Boccaccio '70". But in any case, I am thinking of Boccaccio's characters telling tales of lust and passion while the Plague hovers just offstage.  I'm thinking that we need a Decameron 2020. We need to tell one another tales of encounters and adventures, tales of the things we're all prevented from doing by COVID-19 right now.

My thought is that I'll spin out more threads here, that I'll tell stories from the Pasts of lovely friends, and just possibly a few tales from my own past. I hope you'll read this and respond with your own tales. If phone sex is a dying art, and no one actually writes letters any longer, then at least we can tell one another tales here.

I'm expecting that there'll be very little "normal" happening through the rest of the year. The Red Death may not be just outside the window, but it is out there.

So if you are reading this, do write. Do let me know about the stories I'll be posting...and let me know your own stories. This may be all we'll have for a while.