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 Six Two: Regimentals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Five Six: Damals und Heute

 I've been watching David Cronenberg's new film "Crimes of the Future", and I'm deeply impressed, It's an alluring and disturbing film, and I will be acquiring my own DVD of it. 

There's a moment in the film where Kristen Stewart's character says that "surgery is the New Sex". That's a lovely line, and as good as "long live the New Flesh!" from Cronenberg's "Videodrome". That of course is the basic element of the film-- that body modification is the New Sex, and its results are as powerful and unsettling as anything sexual can be.

I'll note that Viggo Mortenson's character responds to Ms.Stewart at one point by saying that she might be right, but that in any case he was never very good at the Old Sex. 

I once read a horror thriller where the heroine has a nipple cut off during sex and I remember sitting there with the book feeling disturbed, appalled, and yet thrilled at the scene. Yes, fine, that's a tribute to the author's skill, and it means that the author did succeed at the 1990s game of transgression. But creating something alluring and disturbing at the same time is a dangerous move. "Crimes of the Future" left me with that same uncanny feeling. The surgical scenes are graphic, oddly distanced, powerful, and highly erotic. There's a moment where Lea Seydoux drops to her knees not to give head to Viggo Mortenson, but to slide her tongue into and along the open surgical cut he has across his stomach. It's a stunning scene, and her face is as beatific as any blowjob scene in a porn film. I don't know what to make of the scene, and I don't know how to analyze my own response to the scene and to the film as a whole.

Odd thing. I know what my response to Mlle. Seydoux is, of course. In the film, she's had her hair cut to a short pixie cut, and she (like Ms. Stewart) dresses in tailored slacks and tops-- a very alluring garconne look. She's naked a fair bit in the film-- maybe more so than in "The French Dispatch" --and while Google tells me that her bra size is a 32B, she has very large ("Oreo-sized") areolae and nipples. Large areolae have always been a particular favourite of mine, but I've never known how to just say that, or (again) how to analyze that. 

I've stayed away here from discussing my personal preferences. In 2022, and if you're a straight, cis, white, over-thirty male, discussing your personal sexual tastes and interests simply isn't done. No cis-het male in 2022 could write a sex blog or do a sex podcast where his own personal experiences are part of the conversation. 

If I say anything, I'll note that my tastes run to the tall and slender-- lithe, lanky, lissome, long-legged. Always long-legged. And underwear-averse. Yes, sharp hipbones and collarbones. Yes, a dark tan-- something that Gulf Coast co-eds still favor. I do not like the current fashion for tiny waists and big hips. I do not like the idea of Big Butts. I do like short haircuts-- see Mlle. Seydoux in "Crimes of the Future"; see Ms. Stewart in several earlier films. Big areolae, yes. But that's as much as I'll say. I'm sure I can be attacked just for having preferences at all.

"Crimes of the Future" is stunning. David Cronenberg's body horror films have always been stunning and stunningly erotic, all the way back to "They Came from Within", down through "Naked Lunch" and "ExistenZ". I've just  had the local library get me a copy of Cronenberg's novel "Consumed". I read it once long ago, but after seeing "Crimes of the Future", I need to read it again. I need to see if Mr. Cronenberg did make cannibalism and underground surgery sexualized. 

I do note that Ms. Stewart is described in the film as "sexy...in a bureaucratic way". There's very little of her flesh on view-- her tailored blouses are buttoned to the neck, and she's clearly wearing a bra. But she has a very thrilling look-- messy hair, a look of starved obsession and compelling desire. That look of inner compulsion is very sexy. 

I do need someone with whom I can discuss the film, and all the lovely Young Companions I've relied on seem to have vanished over the past few years. If you're reading this from out over the aether, do comment. I'd like to hear what my Imaginary Reader-- a young, over-educated comparative lit major with concealed dreams of transgression --has to say about David Cronenberg. 

Three Four Seven: Morning, Rain

 I've posted this before. It is one of my very favourite stories from Jill in Wellington. It's been eight years or so since she first wrote me about all this, and the story is still amazing and shattering. It's been a major fantasy image for me ever since. I want it saved, and I only wish Jill could be here to tell me more.

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 shakey. 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, 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. 

Amazing story. I fell in love with it as soon as she sent it to me via email. I always loved stories from Jill's Slutty Party Girl past. Caitie, by the way, was Caitlin, the girl Jill was dating at the time.

It floored me a couple of years ago when she started backing away from stories of her past. It wasn't that she was rejecting having had promiscuous, often random, sex with strangers and Older Men in her teens and twenties, it was rejecting the stories themselves. She was crossing the bar into her early thirties, and she saw herself as a serious professional, as a chartered accountant at a high-powered boutique firm in Wellington-- and someone like that wouldn't have stories like that. Stories about sexual adventures and encounters, however powerful, however hot, weren't something she should be telling people. She didn't want to be tagged as a Posh Slutty Party Girl now that she owned a house and was trying to be made a partner in her firm. 

I live through stories-- my own and others'. Stories are the way we present ourselves to the world. I liked Slutty Party Jill, Jill who could sit at a Wellington bar or lie next to you in a hotel bed and tell stories of adventures and encounters. I could understand her not devoting her nights to drinking bourbon and sleeping around now that she had a professional life to build, but I couldn't (and still can't) understand her redacting her past. 

I do miss her, and I miss her stories. I miss her telling me stories that would become shared fantasies for us. I miss the sound of her voice taking me into her memories. Right now, here in my flat, I miss the days when lovely, long-legged, underwear-averse girls would share stories and lives with me.

Three Four Four: Boxes

I have been going through Escort Twitter these days. It's springtime, and the FMTY Girls are going on spring/summer tours. I do envy them: a working vacation in a posh resort or a four-star hotel is still not a bad thing. I suppose I do wonder, though-- is it hard to enjoy yourself when part of your job is enjoying yourself-- being seen to enjoy yourself  --in a swank setting? 

These things are beyond me. I take no pleasure in travel, since I'm likely to be traveling alone these days and of course since I'm a gentleman of very limited means.  I have to wonder if I'm even capable of pleasure when traveling with a lovely young companion. I'd probably spend my time being far too anxious to experience pleasure. If I were with a lovely, long-legged, panty-free young companion, I'd compulsively worry about all the things that could go wrong while traveling. I'd worry about whether she was having anything approaching a good time, about whether I'd reveal myself as a provincial-- a rube --in my choices for a hotel, for dinner, for wine. I'd be far too likely to paralyze myself with those anxieties. 

The FMTY girls post photos of gifts clients and patrons have given them. So many of the photos show the gift boxes as well as the gift. I can recognize some of the brands-- usually expensive lingerie. I understand that Agent Provocateur is an expensive line of slinky lingerie, although lingerie is never a gift I'd choose. I'm not fond of girls in lingerie. I prefer girls panty-free, after all. The stockings-and-garters look hasn't appealed to me since the start of the Nineties. Long, sleek, taut, tanned bare legs attract me more than silk stockings. I'm far more attracted to a girl in just a man's dress shirt than in lingerie, and of course I prefer my young companions to sleep naked. All I can do is look at the boxes and try to gauge what the price might be and what statement each gift-giver is trying to make. 

I'll admit that I do like some of the boxes-- elegant things. 

I have limited resources, so I'm not likely to give Agent Provocateur lingerie or jewelry. Books-- I do give books. And I have been known to buy my young ladies men's shirts or pullover sweaters. My gifts have been hand-delivered in New Yorker tote bags, but never in boxes from exclusive boutiques in NYC or London Town.

One of the FMTY girls did hint at her fee schedule. A gentleman admirer, she noted, was flying her somewhere for a long weekend. The fee, she noted, would pay her rent for two months. Based on rents for the city where she makes her home, that's probably half again my salary for that same period. Far and away out of my league. 

Well, I wouldn't know what to say to a high-end escort anyway. I know nothing about business-- and so many girls at Escort Twitter do say that they love talking about "entrepreneurship". Many are basketball fans, too. I know nothing whatsoever about sports. And I'd be far too scared to attempt anything with a menu or a wine list. 

These days, I'd feel the same about some young companion here. I'd be too anxious to go anywhere outside of a few small, hip places. I'm not even sure I'd risk a good sushi bar. I'd certainly never risk anything with a wine list. Doing anything where I can be seen to fail in public, where I could be seen to fail at being the person I used to believe I was, is far too much of a risk these days.

Three Three Two: Muse

 Just as a follow-on to last night's entry, I'll say that I do love the idea of a Muse. There's something deeply attractive about it. Having a Muse would mean that a lovely young companion would be in my life as an inspiration, as a confidante and advisor, as an aspirational symbol. A Muse would be someone I could write for or about, someone who'd urge me to actually accomplish things.

And yet...I have no idea what I'd do if I found myself with a Muse. I'd have no idea what the rules of the relationship would be like. I'd have no idea how to behave around her-- no idea how to show her that she was appreciated in her role, no idea how to demonstrate that I'd be worth her time. 

I feel the same way around the various Escort Twitter sites I visit as a flaneur. I would have no idea how to play the role of the gentleman client. Professionals provide services, yes. But any professional that deals with clients one on one-- and I'm thinking about accountants and lawyers and psychoanalysts as well as escorts --has expectations of the client.  Anyone can pay an escort and offer up periodic gifts of expensive lingerie and gift cards for high-end shopping, but there's also an expectation that the client will know how to behave and how to present himself. And I'm convinced that I couldn't do that. 

One of the girls at Escort Twitter wrote today about someone she described as an ex rather than a client. She wrote that he was older, alone, and somewhat lonely, and that she'd suggested to him that he consider "some form of paid companionship". He was, she wrote, somewhat hesitant to try that, since he had no idea what the rules were, no idea how to behave. I do sympathize with that. 

I'll note again that I lack the finances to utilize the services of a paid companion from Escort Twitter. That's a limitation that isn't going away. I am polite, courteous, and can make decent conversation within certain areas. But I'd have no idea how to present myself to a paid companion. One of the high-end girls at Escort Twitter might be like a $500 bottle of wine. I can tell the difference between a $15 pinot noir and a $50 pinot noir, but I lack the knowledge to fully appreciate a $100 bottle, let alone a $500 one. Her talents would likely be wasted on me, and as a professional, she'd have to know that-- know that I couldn't properly appreciate her. I of course would feel deeply guilty about that. 

The same is true of someone who'd be styled as a Muse-- paid or unpaid. She could offer encouragement or inspiration, but my fear would be that she'd feel wasted. One Escort Twitter biography offers this: business, stilettos, laughter, witty banter, sensual exploration, exquisite wine, culinary intrigue, spirited company as the girl's "great loves". Business, of course, means nothing to me. I know nothing about the worlds of business and finance. The other things, yes, certainly. But I'd still feel unable to appreciate what I was being offered. And no one professional likes feeling as if their skills are being wasted.

I would be as uncomfortable talking with an Escort Twitter girl and trying to explain my interests and wishes as I would be talking to a $1000/hour lawyer and asking him to handle a traffic citation. Even asking for the things that appeal to me would likely leave a GFE Escort bored to tears. I wouldn't fit. I wouldn't know how to behave, wouldn't know my part of the script. 

That's perhaps the worst of it for me: I wouldn't know my part of the script. I wouldn't know how to enact the proper rituals of appreciation and I wouldn't be able to fully appreciate what I was being offered. 

A lovely Muse would be a brilliant thing to have in my life, as would an elegant paid companion. I'm just afraid that I could never appreciate either. 

Three Three One: Companions

 I have discovered Escort Twitter, and I've been following along with various accounts there. I want to be clear that I'm not communicating with anyone at any of the accounts. I'm just...an observer. The quiet figure at the next table. I will not be sliding into anyone's DMs. At most, I click "like" on some of the more elegant photos. Finding a photo stylish or alluring isn't a personal approach. It's about the photo, not about the person. I'm all too aware of the dangers of the parasocial here in the social media age.

What have I learned from Escort Twitter? If nothing else, I've learned the term FMTY-- Fly Me To You. That's simple enough. You can make arrangements with an escort to send her an airline ticket and arrange a meeting. Far, far out of the realm of my financial possibilities, but a straightforward enough idea. You contact an escort, establish your bona fides, and once you're vetted, you pay her way to a rendezvous at some elegant hotel or resort. 

I do like the way many of the escorts describe themselves: private paramour, luxury companion, libertine in search of adventure, provocateur, fine dining enthusiast, hunter in the forests of desire. And of course muse. Always muse. Lovely descriptors, mind you. The little Twitter biographies never say escort or sugar baby or courtesan-- there's  a fine line the girls get to walk. I'll assume that The Algorithm searches out accounts that are a bit too obvious. The girls creating the biographies have to be able to say that they never promised or offered transactional sex, that they were just describing themselves as affluent travelers or devotees of high-end food and wine and hotels. Well, that's understandable. They're marketing to an upscale clientele and trying not to be kicked off Twitter.

And...please. I wish all the girls at Escort Twitter well. I wish them professional success and lots of elegant gifts from gentlemen admirers. I have no intention of mocking anyone or treating her with disdain. I'm just there as a flaneur at Escort Twitter-- I'm just there passing through and nodding. My aim is to leave not even footprints and to take away only memories.  I have no wish to interfere in anyone's profession. 

The world of Escort Twitter is marketed as one of fine restaurants and elegant lingerie. Given my own thoughts on what I prefer my Young Companions to (not) wear under dresses and jeans and tops, the lingerie is superfluous. As for the rest, whatever happens at Escort Twitter happens in worlds I'll never see. I suppose I do regret that. I'd like to be able to afford both the services of a Luxury Companion and settings-- the restaurants and hotels and resorts --that go with the FMTY world. I'd like to think that I could be at home in those places. I'd like to have the skills and confidence to be an acceptable escort for an Escort Twitter girl. I'm afraid that I don't have those abilities, though.

I know how to be polite and courteous. I do know that. I can tell halfway decent stories, though in these latter days I don't seem to be adding many new ones to my repertoire. But despite many years of post-grad education and an Old New Orleans upbringing, I have a deep-seated fear that I'd lack the skills and confidence ever to be an acceptable client for an Escort Twitter girl. 

And of course I'm terrified of the idea of being vetted. Not just at Escort Twitter, mind you. I'm terrified of potential dates polling their friends on my value just as I'm made deeply uneasy of anyone at all looking at or my social standing. I'm a Gentleman of a Certain Age, but one who has no social standing. If I somehow contrived to have an FMTY experience with someone from Escort Twitter-- or arranged a rendezvous with an Escort Twitter girl while she was "on tour" --I'd feel shatteringly anxious about whether I was good enough to be a client. I'd worry that being seen with me would erode her own professional standing. 

This is all I suppose face-pressed-to-the-window regret-- standing outside the expensive restaurant or shop and realizing that you can't go inside-- or that you could, but you'd only make a fool of yourself and embarrass the Muse or Luxury Companion you'd be with.

There is a girl at Escort Twitter who's based in NYC and advertises herself as Over-educated and under-satiated. Your next dinner companion and co-conspirator. I do find the tag amusing and appealing. But I'm all-too-aware that I'm unlikely to know what to do with anyone over dinner these days. I lack the confidence these days to know what to say to a potential co-conspirator. 

My thought is that if you're dealing with a professional companion, you have two kinds of obligation. You pay for her professional skills and services. Obviously. You tip well, too. But you also have an obligation to fit into the world she's trying to create for herself and clients. I no longer know how to be a co-conspirator, and I certainly don't know how to be a worthwhile client. Melancholy thoughts.

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 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 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.

Three Zero Zero: Debriefing

 I wrote here earlier in the summer that:

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)... or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things... but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

I'd love to see Liberty's journal and its "Older Men" chapter. She always saw affairs as learning experiences, and she was very earnest about that. It mattered to her that each lover, male or female, left her with more knowledge about the world. And, yes, I'd love to know what all those things were. I'd love to know what categories she put experiences into. I think I'd especially like to read the very early entries, to read the entries were Liberty was deciding what she wanted to learn and what avenues she wanted to explore.

I wrote this, too--

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

I do wish I knew how each of them defined "experience". The stories Levin and Liberty and my NZ friend Jill told me were often extremely hot, but what I'd like to do is get at the underlying structures, to get at the decisions each of them made to seek out and be open to experiences. Why this particular lover, this particular thing? I'd very much like to know what Liberty's chapter on Older Men says--- what makes someone worth/not worth being a learning experience. I'd like to go through her checklist of things she did to manage Older Lovers, to properly utilize them. 

Backstories matter, just as details matter. The why of something is as important as the thing itself. 

I'd also like to read the letters another friend has been sending out during the season of the Red Death. You know the backstory:

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do. 

I'd love to read those letters, to read what she thanked them for teaching her. One of the letters I know would be to the much older man who told her when she was sixteen that she needed to stop being afraid and actually make the effort to be admitted to Oxford. That affair re-shaped her life, and I'm taking it for granted that she wrote to tell him that. She told me once that what she has now--- a business of her own, a resume that includes political consultancy, a couple of terms as a town councilor ---owes so much to the older lovers who told her that she was capable of doing anything, who took her to bed and talked about the world. I'd very much love to read those letters with her memories. Yes...I wish I was a recipient of one of those letters. I do envy anyone who was worldly and knowledgeable enough to be chosen as one of her mentors. 

Bildungsroman, Erziehungsroman... and whatever those things are called in French. I'd like to know how Levin and Liberty and Jill constructed the tales of their lives--- my friends in Montreal and Edinburgh, too. How have they structured what Older Lovers taught them? What things in particular did they want to learn, what things did they learn, what checklists and outlines have they drafted...? 

Experiences have to be crafted into stories, into essays, That's always key for me: taking experience and trying to make it mean something. Liberty's journal, maybe whatever was in Levin's Pentalic sketchbooks and notebooks--- those are all things I'd love to know.

Two Nine One: Stage Sets 2

Stage sets matter.

I said that last time, and I'll stand by it.

I can't do a vacation or a trip of any kind without a lovely Young Companion at my side. There's no point in travel to new cities, new locales, without someone who'll use those places to create stories of adventurous or risky or well-crafted sex.

There is a question, though--- what kinds of places make the best stage sets?  What kinds of places would you want to be having sex in? There's always something to be said for hotel beds, since hotel sex has something wonderfully louche about it. But...where else?

My friend Marta in Houston had the gym of that cruise ship off Alaska.

I'd love to be with Jill in a Pure Pod somewhere in the Otago hills. There's something very sci-fi film set about Pure Pods--- great architecture that suggests waking up in a film set c. 2035. I need to ask Jill about that, about what sex in a Pure Pod calls up in her mind's eye.

I suspect that for Jill, sex in a Vancouver hotel elevator with her faux-uncle ("second cousin once removed") is a stage-set memory that she does treasure. Or maybe her favourite locale was the backseat of that Range Rover with the two water-polo boys when she was sixteen.  Both would make very good sets for a film version of her adventures.

For Liberty, the kayak shop always mattered. I do imagine her there often...and imagine her on that field trip where she hooked up with her professor, imagine her naked on the dock, a sleeping bag draped round her, watching the lights of boats in the distance.

For Marsha, maybe the hills above Thessaloniki, there in the parked MG convertible with the Greek boy.

For Levin, her painting professor's studio. Or a shadowed bedroom in Charleston.

I have my guesses about Miss Ginny, but she was always very canny about how much of the details of her past she revealed.

For a girl named Morgan, one of the bartendrix girls I flirted with a couple of years ago.... Maybe an Amtrak sleeper car, or maybe (oh, yes) the catacombs in Paris. She told me once that the cost of the flight would be worth it if she could have sex in the catacombs.

Well...if you're reading this, tell me about your own favourite locale-based stories. Tell about the cities and buildings and hotels and sailboats and rooftop bars where you've arranged encounters.

I won't say anything about my own past and the places that have meant something to me. After all, I'm a gentleman of a certain age. Males don't get to tell stories like that. Accounts of adventures and locales are either taken as pathetic bragging or pathetic lies. All I will say is that there are places I'd love to have as stage sets--- places I'd keep on a list, however unlikely it is these days that I'll be checking anything off it.

One of the Pure Pods? Oh, certainly. I can go to the website and find a favourite.  One of the two remaining sleeper trains in Japan? Again, certainly. Though surely there's a way to do something on a shinkansen from Tokyo to Hokkaido...yes? A seaview villa in Rabat? A cabin on the Skeleton Coast? Yes, of course.

But I suspect I won't be adding any new places to the list I've kept in my paper journal all these years.  I have visions, but no time or money or energy--- let alone a Young Companion. So I'll just keep a list of what-should-be places. And hope that you'll send me your own lists of places where your encounters and adventures were amplified, valorized, shaped by architecture and decor.

Two Seven Six: Threads 10

Let's begin tonight with a poem by C.P. Cavafy. The poem has been a favourite of mine for a long time, though in the last few years it's begun to mean more and more to me:

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice -- and some
chance obstacle made them futile.
Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too -- remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.

I've been writing about stories lovely young companions from my past have told me--- tales of their adventures and encounters, accounts of their experiences and the things they learned. I do note that while these are all girls I've known, the stories are never about me. The stories are never about adventures and encounters I shared with them. If you're thinking that I'll ever write about those moments, those nights, then you're bound to be disappointed.

I won't be writing about any encounters and adventures of my own--- or at least I won't be writing about details. I was brought up to believe that a gentleman, even an aging roué, is bound to certain rules, and discretion is a key rule.  I'll also note that as a straight male of a certain age ("pale, male, and stale") recounting my own adventures seems unpleasantly like bragging. Boasting about one's long-ago conquests--- let alone one's current bedmates ---has something both distasteful and sad about it. Well, I say that as a general proposition, but of course I'm applying that only to males, and to myself first of all. This is the age of the gender wars, after all. Male sexual desire is seen as always having a subtext of creepiness. So don't expect anything like details about my own life and adventures. Being male (and being of a certain age)  means that any recounting of one's own adventures leaves you open to contempt and derision. I'll recount stories lovely girls in my life have told me about themselves; I won't talk about the details of my own encounters.

I wrote back at the end of 2018 about a lovely girl I'll call Liberty. Not her name, of course, but she did remind me a bit of a younger version--- a younger, strawberry-blonde version ---of a British actress/model named Liberty Ross. I wrote about her adventures in a kayak shop--- her first encounter with an older man.  She'd told me the story while she and I kept company that summer and autumn. She was a delight, and her stories were brilliantly exciting. I do remember the first time she told me about the kayak shop adventure--- the two of us out at a rooftop bar, Liberty sitting cross-legged in skinny jeans, telling me about how she first discovered older men and grinning at my obvious fascination. She was a bartendrix girl, and she knew how to tell stories. She had that hippie girl earnestness, too--- her stories were always straightforward and detailed. Once at the bistro where she tended bar she wrote something on a notepad and pushed it across to me. NSNL, it said: No Shame No Limits. She pointed at me with the pen she was using. Remember that, she said. Live it. 

I don't know where she is right now. She always did have a habit of vanishing suddenly. Back to New Mexico? Back to the Pacific Northwest? All I can do is wonder if she'll re-appear here downtown, or if one day I'll get a letter in violet ink, postmarked Santa Fe or Vancouver.  Or Dharamsala, for that matter. She wrote me letters back in the day--- something of which I approved very much indeed. She wrote me about wicked things she'd done and told me to keep the letters safe and think about her years later. Sometimes, too, after she'd fallen asleep here, I'd sit up with my notebooks and try to set down the stories she'd told me. I wanted to keep them in my own archives, wanted to be able to remember her and the things that made her so amazingly alluring.

I'll be re-telling some of her stories here. Suitably redacted, of course. But always honest. Liberty wouldn't have had it any other way. We did share that, the belief that all our lives are made up of stories, that stories matter. So I will be telling stories about her life, about older men in her life and about girls she loved, too. There are stories about threesomes in sleeping bags and in her environmental science labs late at night.  Stories about hotels in Vancouver and art galleries in Taos. I just have to find ways to tell them that would catch her voice.

It does occur to me that I'll be telling stories about Marsha, too. She did spend time in my bed when I was young, telling me about her own adventures. The two stories I've told about her have both been about cars. I just realized that. The Greek charmer in Thessaloniki had a classic MG, and she ended up being groped by a small town cop in a police cruiser. The stories I have in mind are mostly about cars, too. There was someone here who had a sports car, too--- a Triumph, I think. She always loved sports cars. The man here was older, too, maybe twenty-four when she was sixteen or seventeen. I remember that she was impressed by the Triumph and by the fact that he was a diver, an underwater welder on offshore platforms. There are stories  she told that will be spun here as threads.

Her stories--- like Liberty's, like stories from my leggy blonde friend in New Zealand ---are worth recounting and preserving. My own stories, well...not so much. Liberty was in my bed and life for months. Marsha and I were off-and-on bedmates for much of my senior year, and we saw one another sometimes over our respective semester breaks. My stories with them, though...those tales aren't for me to tell. Their stories, though... Their stories are worth presenting.

Two Seven Four: Threads 8

My lovely, long-legged, posh blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud wrote me once upon a time to answer questions about her adventures in her teens. Her life as a posh bad girl has always fascinated me, and I did send her a master list of questions about the things she did when she was a self-described wicked schoolgirl.

I asked her the obvious question about encounters and adventures with teachers--- something that's the stuff of any number of coming-of-age films (right now I'm thinking of Mischa Barton and her teacher in "The O in Ohio" or Kat Dennings in "Daydream Nation").

This was her response to my question about whether she'd ever had sex with one of her teachers back at her posh private school in Lower Hutt:

I slept with a teacher a few times...but he was sort of a family acquaintance. But he was also my science teacher, so it totally counts! (I was sixth form, so 16 when I did it) 

She also wrote me to say that

At 15, i sucked a maori trainee-teacher's cock behind the school gym... just sucked him that one time...i would have loved to fuck him though!

I'm wild to know all the backstory for each encounter--- how it happened, what she thought and felt during and after, if she discussed doing either thing with her circle of close female friends. I'd love to know if she was ever discovered--- by parents or staff ---doing schoolgirl-teacher things. 

I'd like to know much, more about other stories she's mentioned in passing. One of her close friends was a girl named Sarah who was a competition fencer--- good enough to have competed on a national  level and to have gone abroad to study sabre. Sarah is supposed to have gone to some kind of high-level fencing camp in Shanghai at 16/17 and had a notorious affair with a well-known and much, much older fencing coach. My friend tells me that Sarah is now a physiotherapist in Sydney, but the two girls are still in touch and still remember the volleys of emails they sent one another about their exploits when they were 15-18.  

There was also mention of a girl called Kelly, who my friend looked up to as a role model for wickedness with Maori or Islander boys:

Kelly at 14! She was so advanced for her age...and she loved all the islander boys. She was very hot...tall, blonde, skinny. I think she got pregnant to an islander at 17 or 18 & moved to Australia.

I'd love to know so much more. There are two questions here, of course. 

1. How much of her past is real? Her stories over the last dozen years and more have been deliciously hot and wicked, but how much of any of them can I believe? 

2. What happens if ever she becomes monogamous and domestic-partnered? Will she stop telling stories from her past? Will she reject her Bad Girl days? Will she regret them. And...will she regret telling me stories?

Two Six Zero: Threads 4

In February 2011 my lovely, long-legged friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud emailed me to say:

darling,

its a rainy night here, and i'm texting a gorgeous girl who i'm meeting for a drink in an hour or so. i'm hoping to bring her home with me, and pass on some of my wisdom about corona bottles and pool cues. i shall share all details tomorrow!

She emailed me from her iPhone later that night to follow up---

her name is caitlin, she's 22. she's studying english lit & philosophy at uni. she drinks vodka tonics and smokes menthols. she carried 'the sun also rises' in her handbag.  

In May 2011 she wrote this:

caity pissed right in my mouth when i was licking her cunt one time. she told me it was coming, she moaned 'i'm going to piss' and i just opened my mouth, i so wanted to taste her. i swallowed twice! a couple of small-ish mouthfuls.

By June 2011 she was writing to tell me that

Caity has a bright pink strap on, she loves fucking me with it. It's not huge, it's about 6 inches, but it feels amazing in your cunt. I love the look on Caity's face when she has me tied to the bed and just fucks me.

There were men involved, too--- most notably an ex of my friend's, someone with a beach house in a Wellington suburb called Seatoun, someone she described as "cute and stubbly" ---with whom my friend and Caitie had a few threesomes.

It ended badly, though. Caitlin/Caity was much more gay than my friend, whose tastes centered on older men. Caity wanted my friend to commit to the relationship, and while my friend enjoyed the sex and thought Caity was beautiful and bright, she wasn't going to be openly gay and/or monogamous. She'd had flings with girls since she was fifteen or sixteen, and she took having bi affairs as just part of being a posh party girl. But she wasn't ready to be as gay as Caity. Caity was heartbroken and bitter, and blocked my friend's phone number. As far as I know, they haven't seen each other since 2012. A sad ending, I know.

They had something just under a year together. There were stories in there--- the two of them at Wellington Sevens, adventures with Scottish and Kenyan rugby players, a 21-year old boy who claimed to be a virgin,  possibly one of Caity's professors. Those are all stories I want to follow up on, threads I've needed to follow all these years. I'm jealous and envious, of course. Though perhaps more envious of the stories than of the adventures as such.

And I do wonder what other novels Caitlin / Caity kept in her handbag.

Two Five Nine: Threads 3

Another loose thread left from stories I've been told over the last few years---

Afterwards, i spent my nights with younger boys, drinking cheap bourbon and listening to loud drum and bass. Younger boys were the cure for the heartbreak caused by the older men in my life. They were wild but easy. We would drive drunk and do burnouts in their crappy cars at Skid Alley, an empty lot in an industrial part of town. We had tactical vomits together in carparks halfway through the night on our way between bars. But we spent most of our time at house parties or at the beach. Bars and clubs didn't give us enough freedom to smoke, for their scuffles, for our endless drinking games. The end goal was always to get as fucked up as possible. The day after our parties we smoked weed and and cuddled under blankets watching 90s kids' films. We would fall into bed together, drunk and high. sometimes we just slept it off, sometimes we would just talk for hours and trade movie quotes back and forth, sometimes we fucked. No matter how we spent the last part of the night, everything would be the same in the morning.

A lovely friend sent me this once upon a time when we were talking about our younger days. Her younger days--- the days she's writing about here ---would've been at the turn of the century, in the very early Noughts. She'd have been sixteen in December of 2001. My own younger days would've been much, much farther into the depths of the Long Ago. Her stories, the stories implicit in the quote, might've been anytime between 2001 and 2005 or 2006. Boys--- "younger boys" ---wouldn't have had cars until 2001 or 2002. She graduated from her posh school in 2003, and the stories might well have gone on through her years at university. I've no idea how easy it was for teens to get into clubs and bars and drink where she lived in those days.

As for my own life, I don't think I went to more than two or three house parties in my high school days, and even at university I never really went out in groups. I wasn't amongst the excluded or ostracized, but I was someone on the edges of groups, someone at a party who was there with a drink in his hand, but not part of conversations. I have never done a "tactical vomit"--- I will note that. Needless to say, I wish I knew more about her stories. I wish she'd given examples of the adventures she had in those days. And I envy her those days with the consuming envy of someone who thinks his own life and past (at least in the days that really count for purposes of stories years later) was never as good as my lovely friend's.

Two Five Eight: Beliefs 4

My lovely long-legged blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me this story over a long period. She'd always hinted at having a dark secret, a shadow from her teens that carried over into her late twenties. This is what she finally told me, back in 2012:

I can't stop fantasising about my uncle (for clarification - he's my mothers cousin, but I shall refer to his as my uncle for convenience). He must be...62ish now. He's tall and tan and solid. He owns a pub in the outback in Australia. I first met him when I was in my mid teens, he taught me how to blow smoke rings, we drank sambuca and we fucked. Now I can't stop thinking about the last time I saw him...it must have been 2008? Or 2009? It was at a family funeral. When I saw him after the funeral I went up to him and hugged him. Brushing my hands around his waist, I felt something like an electric shock. 'Hey there, beautiful' he whispered in my ear, then kissed my cheek. An hour or so later I noticed him watching me, and nodding his head towards the bathroom. I swallowed the rest of my gin & tonic and walked ahead of him. I was wearing black heels and a black skirt. After he shut the door, he ran his fingers up my thigh, lifted my skirt and kissed my bare cunt. 

I need him again.

And again,  another story, some months later, in the spring of 2013---

it has been years. but there will never be anyone else. i met him when i was 17. not so young, i suppose. but give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. cards on the table, right from the beginning. first cousin once removed is the technical term. and thirty-odd years between us. our first night together i was drunk. sambuca flowed through my veins. but it was electric. i knew at the time it was different to anything i'd ever felt before. i didn't know that i'd never feel anything like it since. it was a cheap motel room. we fucked countless times that night, then the next day he flew back to australia. a month later he flew me to his pub in the outback. we had a whole month together. to date, that was the longest time we ever spent together. i started to understand that it was love. we'd pour drinks at his bar all night, then take a bottle upstairs with us. we would drink and talk until dawn. the sex was amazing. he went down on me for hours.  i'd had men before...but not like this. i felt so powerful, so needed, and so loved. 

we've been together all over the place. vancouver, tokyo, auckland, sydney, the outback, fiji, wellington. we steal long weekends. we fly each other wherever, whenever we have the chance. for a long time i wouldn't let him cum in my cunt. my mouth was fine, preferred. i got over that though. its been ten years now. and nobody touches me like he does. nobody looks at me like he does. he is the only man i want, and i can never have him. 

“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.” 


and i have tried to not let it consume me. i slept with men his age. boys my own age. girls. there is only him. i've had long-term boyfriends, who thought nothing when i flew to fiji for a 'girls weekend' and spent four blissful days with his tongue in my cunt and his arms around my waist. when i flew to vancouver with friends he arranged to be there for a weekend too...i told them i was catching up with my uncle, and had his hand in my cunt in the lift up to his hotel room. another time we were together for four nights in auckland. we stayed at a house in devonport, and it was like this 'what we could have been' experience. we cooked for each other, and read aloud to each other. we played cards, and mixed each other drinks. we walked around naked. we bathed together. we came together all week. it was agony to catch the plane home after that. 

he is my addiction. we're a chemical reaction. 

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” 

some nights i stay up late, drinking straight bourbon and smoking. habits i learnt from him, of course. they aren't my only bad habits. on those same nights i might cut and purge. i didn't pick up those habits from him, but i'd say he inspired them. it would kill him to hear me say that. what we have together chokes me. it annihilates me. it is everything, yet it can never be anything. how did it end up like this? i was young and drunk, our first night together should have been just that, a drunken regret. not the start of an affair which would come to both doom and define me. 

and a few weeks ago i got a text. i will see him soon. 

this is my secret. 

I told other, trusted girls about the stories, and they always doubted it. It was too pat, the said, too cliched. That my Wellington friend has always liked older men isn't open to doubt, but her "uncle" ('first cousin once removed') as the key affair in her life? Well...it is a bit too much like a soft-erotica novel, isn't it? And certain things don't quite hold up.

He owns a pub in the Australian outback? Okay, fine. But her stories include tales of him taking her off for weekends--- or weeks ---in Fiji, Noumea, Japan, and every major city and beach resort in Australia (ten days in a rented villa in Noosa Heads, a week in Cairns), as well as a rendezvous in Vancouver and that rented house in Devonport, an Auckland beach suburb. He owns a pub--- a perfectly respectable social status, but how does he afford to fly her everywhere or fly to meet her? Three nights at the Fairmont Hotel in Vancouver? How did he--- and he is supposedly married ---afford that, or explain just suddenly needing to jet off to the States and Canada?

The affair has, according to my friend, lasted since since she was seventeen. That's almost half her life. No one has never discovered the affair. Not his wife, not her family. A month after they first fell into bed, he flew her to Australia for a month. How did she explain that--- at seventeen or eighteen ---to her parents? How did he explain to his wife that a blonde teen distant relative would suddenly be arriving and staying? How did she hide it from all her various boyfriends (and her supposed first husband) for sixteen or seventeen years?

She calls him B., though whether that stands for Bryan, Bob, or Bill I'll never know.  She was claiming as recently as last summer to still be calling him frequently, to still be longing for him and planning or hoping to go with him to Mauritius or the Maldives. Nonetheless, it doesn't hold together. Too many security risks, too much time and money involved. As much as I care about my NZ friend, I can't believe the story. Her "uncle" B. would be almost seventy now. I don't know that he was ever real; I don't know what to think of any of this.

Two Four Four: Alcoves

A girl now in London Town wrote this to me once long ago, about her days at Cambridge back in the mid-Noughts:

And after Formal Hall in Michaelmas, we snuck into the alcoves of Great Court, Trinity College Cambridge. Sex was made, not love, for surely we were fighting then. All around, scholars moved and drank and laughed, and below in the court boisterous Blues yelled to one another.

But we, alone, in the alcove...

That's a lovely image, a lovely fragment. So many things implicit there, so much hidden backstory.

I know the college she was at--- the newest full college at Cambridge, though it dates its own history to 1768.  So I am wondering--- was her lover at Trinity, or did they just sneak in to use the shadows?

If you're a creature of the present year, you'll ask if the lover was male or female, though I'm fairly sure that in this case the lover was male (I almost qualified the word with poshly or boringly).

I wish I knew more of her story here. What did the stars look like above the Great Court, what songs did they hear from the festivities below? How high up in the building was she? What wines could she taste on her lover's lips?

More to the point, what was she wearing? What was she wearing under her dress? I always ask whether a lovely girl is properly panty-fee for adventures and encounters;  that's very much my particular interest.

For surely we were fighting then... What does that mean? Was this purely hate sex--- something I've never understood?  What were she and her lover fighting about? What became of the affair, and of her lover?

So much to know here, so many pieces to fit together to make a complete story, to be able to see her story as a film in my head.

She's in London Town now, successful in her career, quite the young professional. I just wonder how she'd tell the story herself, almost a dozen years on.

Two Four Three: Azure

I found this story in my archives. A friend from the mid-Noughts, someone who's now a successful professional in London Town, told me this story more than a dozen years ago. Worth saving, I think:

Nice 2005

I was inter-railing about Europe alone. You have to be able to travel alone before you can properly travel with anyone else. It was the summer before my A levels. I spent a day sunbathing on the beach, topless as was the custom. My breasts were milky white in comparison to the golden tan that a week in Paris had given to my limbs. 

After a while looking out to sea I noticed a man swimming who had been watching me for some time. He was blond and tanned in that European kind of way and he was 35...38 maybe. I wandered down into the water, plunging in quickly so my tits were covered in some show of false modesty but they popped up out of the water as I swam. I smiled over at him, a few metres away now.

"Anglaise?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"No no no, en francais s'il vous plait."

"No, I can't... I can, I don't want to."

"Okay."

There was instant chemistry. The kind that makes the air feel electric, you need to be grounded, you need to touch something. He asked me if I was on holiday. I affirmed and asked the same. No, he was working in the city, this was his lunch break. There was a platform in the sea a little way out where young teenagers were diving into the ocean. "Come out there and swim with me?" I asked. Strangely, he followed.

I climbed up onto the platform and he behind me. He mocked at pushing me in and when I sat on the edge he straddled my waist from behind, his legs spread around me. When I leant back I could feel his organ pushing into my back. He pushed and I laughed and he shoved and into the sea I toppled. I came up laughing but pulled him in by the legs.

He caught me in the water. "Two options..." He eyed me. "Kiss or drown."

I leant forward and kissed him then. A gentle shy kiss. He held onto the platform with one hand and pulled me up with the other, kissing me harder. Before I knew it his fingers were inside my bikini bottoms, pushing and probing. He dipped a finger into my cunt before finding my clit and rubbing me hard. My stomach was flipping and he laughed. "Come over there to those rocks, there are less people."

We swam over to a little enclave in the rocks. There were people behind us on the beach and far out to sea, but they couldn't see over the rocky ridge which surrounded us. "Your sex. Show me." It was a demand, not a question. He reached forward and pulled my bikini to one side, spreading my knees with a tap on the thigh and opening my cunt lips wide. He exposed his cock and I leaned forward and touched it. He pushed me back and rubbed my clit, not gently but harshly and roughly. In seconds I was cumming to his hand. He reached for my hand and put it on his cock. I inexpertly touched him as he made me sit with my legs spread for him looking at my dripping sex. Within a minute or two he gasped and said "Look!" as cum spurted from his cock. He kissed me then. "I must go back to work. Enjoy the beach."

I nodded, feeling nothing but post-orgasmic calm. He walked over the rocks and I hopped into the sea and swam back to where I had been sunbathing, lying on my front. A few minutes later a tap came on my shoulder. "Don't get burnt!" he said mockingly and strolled off, laughing kindly.

And that was it. I did not even know his name. 

Tell me what you really think.

Of course I wish she'd done more with him--- on those rocks, out off the platform. I wish she'd taken him into her mouth or ridden him on the platform. Nonetheless, the story is worth saving.

2005 is almost fifteen years ago now. A whole political and social world away from the grim, bleak years of the later twenty-teens. My friend should be in her early-mid thirties now. She's a successful professional in London Town these days, working at the edge of law and corporate finance with start-ups, spending half her time flying off to Singapore and Shanghai. I have no idea what she thinks of her 2005 self now.

I'm thinking, too, the A levels in 2005 would've made her...eighteen? I can never keep track of British school ages. Oh, she did well enough at her A levels to get into Cambridge, into one of the smaller, newer colleges.  But...eighteen? That her story is about a young girl inter-railing to experience Life and Sunlight makes it all the more alluring. Though I do wonder about coming-of-age stories these days. Are we still permitted to like them, to find them titillating? Looking back fifteen years, is my friend's story hot and alluring or is it a scary #MeToo moment? That's something that I think about these days, even while I'm thinking about leggy English girls and sunlight and open water.

Two Two Four: Lasers

The last night of the year, and I'm thinking  of stories  told me by young companions down the years. I do want to remember the girls who told me these things--- lovely voices and presences gone missing over the years. Well, let's put a few more stories into my archives.

The first one is from a girl I knew back in the lost world of the early Nineties. The tale actually came by letter. I still have the actual letter, complete with a Van Nuys postmark. A letter close to thirty years old now. I have no idea what became of the girl who wrote it--- vanished into domesticity somewhere in southern California, I expect. But the story itself is fun and highly visual, something done in blues and greens and black:

Hi! Mmm-- new tales to tell! I actually had sex in a laser beam! It was basically a starfuck. This band (all black) called Voodoo Posse played at After Hours, the dance club at Magic Mountain where I'm working this summer. So I met the drummer after the show, and we ended up at Mystic Lake (in the park still...) where the fireworks/laser show is. We ended up skinny-dipping and swam out to this one platform where a laser (green) shines down on a plume of smoke that rises steadily. Fortunately, a couple of weeks before,  I'd talked to a tech I had sex with a few times about how it all worked. So I ended up fucking the drummer, surrounded by smoke, in the middle of a laser. Have you ever seen a laser mix with smoke up close? It's really intense! This is the second black guy I've had sex with, and he was so much better than the first--- and he was one of the juiciest guys I've ever felt inside me. The oral sex was amazing! He was just crazy with me! Lots of trying new positions in the water!

I remember that her name was Gen--- Genevieve ---and that she was a lovely, brown-haired girl with soft pale eyes.  I have no idea where she is now, and certainly have no idea how she remembers her past and her adventures.

The second is from a posh girl in Colorado from the early Noughts. She'd gone to St.-John's out west, the western branch of the liberal arts college with a curriculum based solely on the Classics. I remember that she graduated, kicked around Europe for a while, was dumped by one lover in some roadside village in Brittany, and mugged in a railway station in Paris. She was last heard of living in Ireland. I'd written asking her about her adventures, and she responded with a few tales, including these---

Q.: Where and how did you first make love outdoors? What was it like? Was there risk involved? How do you feel about being naked outdoors?

Outside Christ Church College at the University of Oxford.  I was on a school trip and certainly was not supposed to be fraternizing with the locals - inside or outside - so there was plenty of risk.  The campus itself was imposing and lent the whole situation a gravity and drama that I have rarely felt since.  I didn't get completely naked, as I was wearing a short white skirt with no underwear that could easily be thrown up (though it did take some athleticism and flexibility to avoid getting grass stains on that skirt).

Q.: Where is the riskiest/most public place you've ever made love? Whose idea was it? What was it like?

The European headquarters of Opus Dei.  I've always been privately smug about this one and wish I could tell more people because it delights me in so many ways.  It was in the evening, and we were walking back from a movie.  I had been teasing him throughout the movie and on the trip back, and I guess he just couldn't restrain himself anymore.  We jumped over the fence for what I thought might be a quick blow job, but he threw me on the ground.  It was very passionate and rough, naughty and forbidden.  We were collapsed on the grass when someone caught us and we had to run, me carrying my bra and my jeans half on, cum smeared all over my shirt and jeans.  The man was shouting at us, and he said something about our souls being cursed or perhaps he cursed our souls - something rather violent anyway. 

This one is a bit more harsh, but it's also from Maegan, something from when she was sixteen, back in the first year of the new century. She told me the story maybe nine or ten years ago. I've never had any follow-up on it:

Hmmm, most guys I've met are a bit squeamish about their own taste....they're fine with it all over a girl's body or mouth, but seem to prefer it to stay there.

I was at my first ever rave with some friends, and this older college guy kept hitting on me and dancing with me, but I wasn't interested.  After awhile, I went to use the bathroom, dumb little naive girl that I was.  It was upstairs through a dark hallway, and I had no idea I was being followed, but shortly after I sat down to pee, I heard someone else enter.  I assumed it was another girl, but he kicked open the door, slamming my head against the wall in the process.  I fell back and of course managed to pee all over bare legs. I wasn't wearing underwear, or they'd have been soaked. I was rather dazed and didn't quite understand what was going on, but before I had any idea of who it was, he had grabbed my hair and wrenched my head back (I had two french braid pigtails).  He kept hold of them and used them to yank my head forward as well as control what I did the entire time.  Naturally with him forcing me like that, I kept gagging, but he didn't seem to mind.  He nearly gave me lock jaw, and he shoved his cock as far down my throat as he could; I have no idea who he was. After he left, I was shocked, stunned, and could barely walk. I went downstairs as best I could and stood by someone's car in the parking lot. I gagged for a while and cried. I wouldn't tell anyone else this, but I have masturbated to this story over and over since then. I keep remembering the sound of my own gagging and wondering whatever became of him and how he remembers me now. I can tell you, but no one else. 

Four stories, here on the last night of the year. I miss the voices that attach to the stories. I miss a time when stories about adventures were offered up as gifts and introductions, when stories were exchanged over the aether.

My hope is that in the new year, we'll all feel free enough to have adventures again, and to tell stories about both the past and our plans and hopes and fantasies.