Three Nine Six: Vibrations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Eight Three: Receptivity

I've always liked the idea of S/M. I've always liked the aesthetics of S/M. I've liked those two things much more than the praxis. I know that S/M is supposed to be "the intellectuals' kink", but I've never much gotten anything from reading manifestos or essays about the politics or theory of S/M. All those articles in the 1980s and early 1990s that tried to ground S/M in critical theory or tried to present it as something political never did anything for me. Yes, by the way, I am distinguishing idea from theory.

I've always liked S/M because it's sex that lends itself to creating stories. I've liked it because it's about role play and crafting and wearing masks. People have told me all my life that sex is something where you lose yourself (and lose your self) in what you're doing. But that's never worked for me. Sex has always been something in which I couldn't lose myself. I've always remained far too self-conscious during sex. It's hard (and just maybe impossible) to experience pleasure if you're aware of everything you're doing, or if you're busy critiquing what you're doing.

Last weekend I found a You Tube channel called Kink With Kitra. It's a very well-done channel, and I'll offer it up as a recommendation. Kitra is a professional domme. She seems to own a dungeon in L.A. or Las Vegas, and her You Tube channel is in interview/podcast format. She also films fetish videos. She has guests on-- people she's known and worked with --and they talk about the world of S/M.  

I'd like very much to say that Kitra is very articulate and thoughtful and fun. I'd like to say that, but it's a hard thing to say these days. Saying that someone in sex work is articulate is too much like saying a person of colour is articulate-- it can be taken to mean that you're surprised that anyone like that is capable of using language well. 

Nonetheless, I have enjoyed listening to what Kitra and her friends and colleagues have had to say. Her interviews have given me things to think about.

One of her guests was a fetish/kink actress called Sonny McKinley. I'd never heard of Ms. McKinley before, and I'd never seen any of her videos. She and Kitra had worked together before, and they had a lot of rapport. Good discussion and some fun stories.

One of the things they agreed on is that being a bottom allows you, whether male or female, to be receptive-- to receive sensation and experience. They both recalled hearing that from male clients who were switches-- tops who were experiencing or experimenting with being bottoms. For once, these men told them, they could just feel something. They didn't have to worry about anything other than feeling. They could experience unmediated and immediate pleasure.

There's something very arresting in that. I'm almost invariably the older partner in a relationship, and while I don't expect to have more power in the relationship, I am expected to be the one setting up stories and providing the script for what's happening. And that's fine. I'm an academic and a writer. It's expected that I can craft a storyline, and I'm glad to do it for a partner. Doing that makes me feel like I have a skill, and that I can be proud of using it to thrill my young companions. 

But I've never taken physical pleasure in it. I've almost never taken physical pleasure in anything. I have no idea what physical pleasure means, and I can't recall ever having a girl do anything for (or to) me as a gift (or grant) of pleasure. 

Kitra and Ms. McKinley talked about the idea of receptivity, and how it defies and subverts conventional gender roles. They talked about men needed to be able to receive pleasure-- to be open to sexual sensations. I understood what they were talking about, of course-- strap-ons and penetration --but the idea of receptivity goes beyond that. It goes (or, I think, should go) to being able to receive pleasure, of having sensation wash over you without self-awareness getting in the way. 

Immediate and unmediated pleasure is something that's always eluded me. I know better than to think that being a bottom for a while would help. It wouldn't. I'd end up trying to top from below in a very precise way-- meaning that I'd still be trying to craft scripts and worrying not about whether the scripted activities "worked" but rather about if they could be presented as something wicked, elegant, stylish, literary-- whether they'd be things that would make good stories. 

I don't have anything in the actual way of fetishes-- I don't have any needs or longings to which I can just surrender volition and control. I have kinks, but a kink is something crafted, something that takes conscious thought. I've never been given pleasure as a gift, and I'm very much unable to feel it on my own. I wouldn't understand pleasure  if someone did take the time to offer it to me. I have no ability to be receptive to anything. I don't experience the world like that.

Three Seven Eight: Numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Three Eight: Borderlands

 This is how it is. The girl talks and I sit across the table with my drink and listen. She's lovely, bright, bookish, and twenty-three. She tells me that she's non-binary, and we talk about how that's different (or if it is different) from her being bi. Her first and middle names are androgynous enough, and she likes that.

She's in skinny jeans and deck shoes, a mostly-unbuttoned men's dress shirt, a silver necklace with a pendant. Her hair is messy and looks like a pixie cut that's gotten away from her. She's strikingly lovely, yes, and I'm fortunate that she's there with me. She likes "androgynous" as a word. She asks if I think she'd make a beautiful gay boy, and I tell her yes. 

The way she's dressed at the bar is...what? Eve Babitz died a few days ago, and I'm thinking the girl could pass as a California gay boy in the mid-1960s...or at least as the film version of one. I can place her in my head as a boy in a gay bar in some imaginary movie from the 1960s or early 1970s, as a gay boy on some black-and-white late-night-cable rerun of an episode of "77 Sunset Strip". That would make her a memory of a memory, wouldn't it? She's not dressed in 1920s gay Oxbridge undergraduate drag-- like Donna Tartt at Bennington c. 1980.  She has a period California look, an air of effortless hedonism. 

What she's telling me is that she likes having boys in her bed that will role-play with her. She can't decide what makes her more hot-- being with a gay boy who'll treat her as a boy to be topped, or being with a straight boy she can persuade to act as her gay boyfriend or-- better --her girlfriend. She enjoys being topped like a boy, but she likes dressing straight boys up and making them beg to be topped and taken, too. She probably likes that more. 

Non-binary, she says, but she doesn't know how to get outside the terms of binary sex. Being with another girl is wonderful,  she tells me, but dressing up and using strap-ons with another girl is just...Lesbian Classic. What she likes, she says, is making boys, gay or straight, lose any sense of their own boundaries. 

She asks me if I know the word autogynephilia. I do know it-- it's a word used as an accusation in the Trans Wars. The angriest of the GC brigade use it against trans women. It's used to mean that trans women don't really see themselves as wholly or "actually" women, that they're simply fetishists excited by the idea of sex as a woman. The trans brigade reject the word absolutely. I've read some of the arguments around the word and don't know what to make of them. If you see yourself as a woman-- as "really" a woman --wouldn't you by definition be excited by the idea of having sex as a woman? And both GC  and TRA types reject and despise anything that might be "just" a fetish. 

The girl across the table tells me that she likes the idea of fetishes. She likes exploring fetishes, of focusing desire on things that have a kind of magic to them, of turning partners into someone and something new. Nair and make-up, she says. Depilate a  boy, do his make-up, teach him to "rock a miniskirt" and beg to be fucked-- there's nothing like that, she says. Make him into a hot teen girl, she says, then be inside him while he begs to be your rag doll, to have his holes stretched-- there's nothing like that. Make him love the look and feel of dressing up, teach him that it's magic. And the same thing works the other way, too, she says: wear a suit and tie, have a gay boy top her while he tells her what he'd tell a straight boy he was teaching to be a gay bottom. 

I  raise my drink and grin at her and ask if what she wants isn't a kind of meta-autogynephilia. I know that there's a "forced feminization" thing that some dommes do, and there's something of that in what she wants to do with boys. I'm just not sure whether she sees the "humiliation" part of that as actual degradation for the boy or just as pedagogy. Does she want to teach straight boys that they can be excited and aroused by what it must feel like to have sex as a girl? Does she want a waxed, mascara'd boy in a miniskirt to fuck her not as a trans woman with a cock or a "trans-lesbian", but as a boy who's learning to derive pleasure from pretending (or being made to pretend) that he's a girl? When she gets topped herself, she says, she loves it that the boy thinks she's good enough at pretending to be a gay boy for him to fuck.  I'd love to be a boy, she says, and have an older man make me dress up and be his girl. 

She can tell me these things because...? Because I'm older and could never be the beautiful boy her fantasies require? Because I'm someone who looks like he can talk about these things with her and not be shocked or appalled? Because I'm quiet and I'm doing my own Freudian Analyst fantasy-- letting her pour herself into my silence?

I do like listening to her. I like it that she says she sees herself as "non-binary", but that she wants to live on the border of binaries. She doesn't really want to be someone/something who's neither male nor female. What she wants is to turn from one to the other and back at will, to have the sensations of sex as each...and to take others into a land of sex in funhouse mirrors.  I like listening to her, and I want to hear more of her stories.

Three Three Zero: Complications

We've talked about this before, but I'll just note that I've always distrusted the idea of authenticity or the idea of an essential self. One of the things that makes me distrustful of the whole current idea of being trans is the idea that there is some kind of essential self, a "real" self that can come out of hiding or finally break free of social impositions. I'm old-school postmodern, and I believe in the idea of reinvention, the idea of  transformation, the idea of becoming someone or something new. Needless to say, I'm always a fan of literary impostors and of people who've gone off to new cities and new worlds to reinvent themselves.

Right now I'm watching someone tangle himself up in that-- or watching two people tangle themselves up. I know both of them, though I know her better than I know him. They're not a couple, or not yet, though I think they'd both like to at least have an ongoing, off-and-on affair. They're both in their early thirties, educated, hip, articulate, successful. Members of the meritocratic class. 

As best I can tell, here's what's happening. He is trying desperately to tell her that he's bisexual, or gender-fluid, or whatever. Watching from the outside, I'm not altogether sure that he actually is. He may well be, although she tells me that sometimes she thinks his hints are very much like some haute-bourgeois sorority girl announcing that she's "spicy straight", whatever that is. 

She is very bisexual, and very open about it all. Let's take that part as a given. She's also very lovely and adventurous. She tells me that he's been trying to tell her that he's bi and femme at heart. He won't come out and say it, though. He hints and talks about things in the abstract and dances around actually admitting anything. What he wants, she tells me, is to have her ask the direct questions and ask for stories. He wants her to do the work. Her instinct, she says, is to tease and withdraw, to entice-- or force --him into saying the things he's trying to say, to make him admit to whatever past and preferences he has. 

I know her better than I know him, and I'm not about to just ask him what he's doing. I'm not about to ask him about his past. That's not something that I can do as a cishet male. She tells me that she's not sure he's even bi at all. She wonders if he's creating a bi persona and past  just to entice her into bed.  Which makes her consider the option of seeing how far she could push him into being a femme bottom. She'd quite like that, I think.

 She wants to encourage him to tell her stories, true or not, because they'd feed her fantasies just as much as they feed his. Last week she raised a gin & tonic at the bar and told me she'd like to take him to bed, but that it's much more fun just to see what she can get him to say or do. He might well like to go to bed with her as a femme bottom or dressed up as a girl. She'd be up for either. Or for sleeping with him as a cishet male. She's confused about what he wants. As much as she'd like listening to whatever fantasies he's creating-- or memories he wants to recount --she's unsure what role to play: confidante, domme, garçonne,  girl-boy to his boy-girl. She's unsure whether she's dealing with someone coming out or someone who's developed a really intricate seduction plot or a complex kink? Whether or not autogynephilia exists for political purposes, she has no problem with the idea of it as a kink in men with whom she has Encounters. 

The issue here is how she should handle this. She'd be okay with whatever persona he's creating or revealing. The only question is how to coax him into taking the last step, into actually saying what he wants and who he wants to be when the two of them do finally hook up.

Two Nine Four: Masks

I've been thinking about desire and enticements, about what we see in what we desire.

I've been reading about the Los Angeles club scene in the 1960s, reading books by Eve Babitz, who was the chronicler of that world. I've liked Babitz's stories and memoirs for a long time. Her "Slow Days, Fast Company", "L.A. Woman", and "Sex & Rage" have been favorites of mine since my days in grad school. She was always a better It Girl than any of the Manhattan scenesters. The Warhol girls may have been cool, but none of them got naked to play chess with Marcel Duchamp.

I suppose it was a combination of things that made me want to re-read Babitz. I'd seen the new documentary about Joan Didion and I'd just read Taylor Jenkins Reid's "Daisy Jones and the Six". And I'd seen "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". All of that made me want to go back and re-read Eve Babitz, especially "Slow Days, Fast Company". Lovely short pieces, a lovely invocation of a Los Angeles I'll never see. Please call this a recommendation. Let me know what you think of Ms. Babitz.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fantasizing about the young Jane Birkin and the young Francoise Hardy-- two of my key Sixties Girls. I suppose reading "Slow Days, Fast Company" and "Daisy Jones and the Six" has made me fantasize about mid-Sixties California girls. I don't know what that means, and of course I haven't given up my dreams of being in Paris and London 1965 with Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy. But I am going through a phase of L.A. girls in miniskirts and big sunglasses as images for desire.

How do desires and fetishes change? There are underlying points in all my fantasies; that much is always true. A certain age, long legs, a disdain for underwear, dark tans. a certain height and angular slender build. Those things are part of the definition of desire for me. But if some things are necessary for me to feel desire, periods and costumes and styles do change. Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy are leggy Sixties girls, but they're not quite girls you can imagine partying with Eve Babitz at a party in Malibu. The trick, I suppose, is to find out what's behind the shifts in the precise forms of desire. And let's be  clear--- it's all as much about sets and settings as it is about the girls themselves.

Yesterday I walked from my office to a small burger joint to lunch. While I was waiting for my order I noticed a girl standing on line to pick up a take-away. I was struck very much coup de foudre with her.

Probably nineteen or twenty, tallish, slender. Streaked light-brown hair to her shoulders, light eyes, a seriously dark tan, perfect legs. A very tiny khaki miniskirt--- a look I haven't seen much of this spring and summer ---and cute sandals. And...a mask. She had on a black face mask. Somehow the mask made it all work. Somehow the mask made her desperately desirable. It is the season of the Red Death, and we're still in the midst of the pandemic. The mask may be the new normal for the rest of the year. After all, I was wearing one myself. But the mask and the miniskirt were a trigger for serious desire. I may have imagined her in the mask, those long legs over my shoulders. I may have imagined her gasping in orgasm through the mask.  I may have imagined those things, but I have no idea why they came to mind.  I'll certainly never know who she was, but it was the combination of mask and miniskirt that instantly made her a fantasy girl. So I suppose that Red Death face masks will become a fetish for me, the same way that ankle bracelets on lovely girls once did.

I've always needed the idea of sets and settings--- places, architecture, lighting, fashion ---for any fantasies to work. Right now it seems that I need the image of a certain kind of Sixties scene...and I may need lovely girls to wear face masks and tiny skirts. Or just the face mask.

But in any case, I have no idea where these images and fetishes come from.  I have no idea when and how they'll mutate or shift.  I'd still love to take the girl in the mask to a party at Ms. Babitz's house in the Canyons in some imaginary 1967, though.

Two Four Seven: Handbags

I do have that SXSW story to tell. My friend did send me her handwritten account--- good stationery, good ink. We'll think of that as a gift to me. After all, paper and fountain pen ink have always meant a lot to me. The story itself is worth saving and recounting, and she writes well. It's something I'll try to get to over the weekend. It's something I would like to find comments on, too.

Let's go back to an entry I posted here not a few months ago, and entry about what girls I've known carried in their handbags on nights when encounters and adventures were a possibility. I began with this:

A lovely blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me once that from her teens into her later twenties, she habitually carried a flask with her. She'd have it in her backpack or her messenger bag, and it would be filled with Belvedere vodka or Maker's Mark bourbon. The flask itself was engraved, though I forget the exact motto. It may have been Ad Alta, To the Highest, the motto of her posh school, or Semper Paratus, Always Ready, which I suppose goes with the flask. I always admired her for that, and I rather envied her the flask and the party girl life it went with.

My friend told me about the flask, but I never asked her another party girl question. Did she carry condoms with her? She may not have. She once told me that she'd had so much unprotected sex in her teens and early twenties without any complications that she was afraid that she wasn't able to become pregnant at all. It is something I should ask her, though. I've known girls her age who carried a couple of condoms with them at all times--- just in case, they'd say, or you never know what you never know. I've known other girls who always regarded a condom or two as something that was an essential thing for going out. An ID card, $20 or $30 in emergency cash or taxi fare, a debit card, a lipstick, and a condom or two--- those things would be all they'd need for a night at their favourite local bar. 

My friend in Wellington did get back to me to these issues. She agreed that her basic list, her basic Hook-Up Kit in her purse on a Friday night, would contain

--1 travel pk. of condoms (3)
--1 travel pk. of wet wipes
-- Small tube of lube
-- Travel toothbrush/toothpaste

That seems very minimalist but functional.  I'm assuming she'd already have basic make-up (lipstick, at least) in her purse. She almost never spent the night at a hook-up's place, so minimalist would work: she'd be on her way home well before morning.

Those things would work for her on a night out downtown in Wellington. I did wonder what someone a bit more professional would carry, though. If ever you do wonder what escorts carry in their purses, well, there are lists to be found on-line.

Karley Sciortino at the Slutever website once interviewed a former high-end escort  in Montreal whose carry list included:

-- 1 pr. clean underwear 
-- A good book
-- Dry shampoo
-- Lube
-- Condoms (multiple sizes)
-- Phone and charger
-- Band-aids (in case you've been wearing stilettos all night)
-- Toothbrush and make-up
-- A sex toy (bullet vibrator or butt plug)
-- $US 500 cash

Other articles about escorts and their lives point out that the phone has a dual purpose--- enabling an escort to check up on her bookings  and offering a way to be safe when with a new client. One article suggests chewing gum as well as a travel toothbrush; another suggests latex gloves.

Of course, escorts have to have a much more professional set of concerns than someone like my NZ friend on a night where encounters might happen. She wouldn't have the problem of using cash so as not to leave a paper trail of any locations or deposits. I can see my Wellington friend carrying a small dry shampoo, though. She has always liked the concept of dry shampoo. I know her well enough to know that of she carried a bullet vibrator, it would be a Lelo Mia. She is always brand-loyal. A Dutch website for escorts also lists something called an "action tampon"--- something I wasn't familiar with. It's basically a sponge, designed to allow a woman to have sex during her period without ruining the sheets. The website suggests it's also useful in case there's any bleeding after rough sex or a more well-endowed client. Again, the lists for professionals tend to be much longer and more problem-focused than the Hook-Up Kits I've been asking girls about.

I do have to smile, mind you, since there's no equivalent for men. I suppose a gentleman could carry a condom or two, but that does look a bit predatory. Also, there's the problem familiar to teenaged boys throughout the last sixty years or so: where to keep a condom? I've never really dealt with condoms, but be damned to keeping one in a wallet like some hopelessly optimistic Grade 10 boy. And a condom case (yes, they do come in brass or sterling silver) is far too 1970s for words.

In any case, I do want to find out more from girls I know. I love checklists and inventories. I'll always go through any list of what's in purses, wallets, backpacks, briefcases, travel bags. Details always matter, and there's nothing like looking at lists and inferring lives from them.

Two Two Six: Cold

There's some kind of Arctic weather phenomenon happening this week: sharp winds in from the north, temperatures falling into danger zones. I can sit in my window seat and see the winds whip the water in the courtyard swimming pool. Oh, I have some expensive artisanal hot chocolate with a heavy shot of dark rum, and I'm wrapped up in black merino wool. But I still feel deeply empty.

This afternoon I discovered that several websites for fetish enthusiasts have agreed that the actresses Emma Stone and Emma Watson were tied for the honour of being the most sought-after foot fetish photo girls on the web. I wonder of course how the two Emmas are taking the award. I hesitate to speculate on the trophies.

I'll admit that I've always found Emma Stone attractive, all the way back to a film she did called "Easy A". Very lovely, very good comedy actress. Yes, excellent eyes and excellent legs. And it does occur to me that I might--- albeit shyly, politely ---pay her either compliment in person. But even if I were a foot fetish person, I'd never, never say anything like, "Congratulations on your foot fetish award." I'd certainly never say, "Pretty feet!" I've no idea why there's an absolute line between complimenting her on her eyes and complimenting her on her arches, but there it is. Some compliments are beyond the pale.  Lovely collarbones, lovely legs---- those things are acceptable. Cute toes--- no.

All fetishes, all sexual preferences, all sexual interests come with a set of social rankings attached. I think that's just a given. Some kinks are socially acceptable, some are instantly dismissed as lower down the rank-order. Your fetishes define you--- isn't that just something Edmund White said thirty years ago? They define you not just in terms of what your desires are, but in terms of where your desires fit in a social hierarchy. Desires can evoke all sorts of responses--- disgust, amusement, fascination, arousal ---but they always make a statement about where you fit in a rank-ordering. BDSM is the intellectuals' kink, thanks to French erotica. It's a bougie kink, too--- equipment and accessories are expensive. Role-play outranks cos-play. (Query: does voyeurism outrank exhibitionism, or is it the other way round?) Age-play is no longer acceptable. Gender play was briefly edgy and cool, but nowadays it's lost itself in the hellscape of the Trans Wars.

There's a always a rank ordering, though. Telling a girl you want to blindfold her with silk and whip her with a riding crop can be spun as sexy and stylish. Telling her you want to suck her toes will never be read as stylish; you'll get no social points for dark elegance.

It's cold tonight and I'm thinking of how I've lost the ability to tell a girl about any desires I might feel. I'd certainly never ask for anything these days. I'd certainly never tell a young companion that I had any preferences or interests, and I'd never tell a girl that something in particular gave me pleasure. There's always the risk of being laughed at--- at, not with. There's the even greater risk that you'll be regarded as pathetic or low-status.

The risks seem all the more daunting these days. Pleasure and the things that give lovers pleasure are too fraught these days. Revealing oneself to a lover---  and very possibly to her social media circles ---is too risky.

Once upon a time, I had no problem talking about desires and hopes and kinks and pleasure with young companions as part of the process of seduction,  as part of the process of opening oneself up to a new lover. Not any more. On a cold night with hard winds outside, all I can say is that there's no way these days that I'd tell a lover about anything I liked about them--- let alone anything that might give me pleasure, or be something for the two of us to share.

Two One Nine: Kink

There is such a thing as kink-shaming.

Kink-shaming is not something I know much about, mind you. It's not something I've ever done to any of my young companions, and it's not something I can imagine doing.

The circles I moved in for most of my life took experimentation and certain recherché tastes as a given. Now I'm not naive. There were certainly social rankings and unspoken rules. It couldn't have been easy for many friends to be gay or bi back in the days of my lost youth. There was always that. But I remember being in my twenties and taking it for granted that certain things--- a taste for at least s/m fashion and poses, say ---were perfectly ordinary. I took it for granted that girls with whom I was involved were fine with blindfolds and candle wax and riding whips. I took it for granted that most of the girls I knew at university or in grad school had at least tried three-ways. I certainly took it for granted that part of sex and romance was adventure and experimentation--- risky places, new positions, new roles, new toys, new costumes. I remember that seductions and flirtations were very much about exchanging fantasies and seeing how you'd fit into one another's fantasies. There was a certain thrill in seeing what each of you might think about trying.

That feels gone these days.

In my university days and into my twenties and thirties I had no problem at all telling girls what I liked. I had no problem with that, and certainly no problem listening to a lovely young companion explain about her own tastes and interests.

Not so very long ago, a friend said off-handedly that she couldn't imagine me ever being shy about telling a lover or a potential lover what gave me pleasure. Well, not with her. That much is true. But it's harder and harder for me to admit to any particular tastes or interests.

I'm not sure what I'm afraid of. That I might horrify a young companion with the sheer depravity of it all? Probably not that. A girl with whom I'd discuss those things has already decided to be close to me, and just in being with me at all she's shown herself to be willing to defy most of the usual strictures against depravity.

Maybe I'm afraid that male desire is now regarded as shameful tout court. Maybe I'm afraid that any male sexual interests, even the most vanilla, are regarded as gross and disgusting and threatening. That's always part of it, I suppose.

Maybe it's that I'm afraid that if you say you like a particular kink, that'll define you permanently. I may be afraid that you're not allowed under the current social rules to experiment, to try things and then move on. So much nowadays has to be authentic--- interests and kinks have to speak to some underlying permanent truth or identity. You can't say you really like X on Thursday and then prefer Z on Sunday.

Maybe it's that I'm afraid that there's a social rank-ordering of kinks, that certain kinks are regarded as more pathetic or lower-class or less stylish than others. That might be it--- fear that any kinks or fetishes or preferences won't be good enough, that they'll mark you not so much as depraved but as a loser. That may be  a real fear on my part.

You'll note that I rarely talk here about the details of interests and adventures in my life. That at least in part is based on a fear of having the wrong interests, having ones that don't fit with the life and image I've constructed for myself.

If I had to guess, I'd assign most of my fears to the idea that desire, male desire, is now regarded as dangerous and gross rather than alluring or passionate. It gets harder and harder to imagine telling a young companion what I like or what gives me pleasure. I'm always willing to try whatever pleases my companions. However not? That goes with being the Older Lover, the roué. But I'm now increasingly uncomfortable with talking about my own desires and increasingly unwilling to discuss what gives me pleasure. I'm afraid of being kink-shamed on any number of fronts, and I do find myself becoming increasingly silent and withdrawn around lovers.

Two One Three: Prologue

Read along with me for a while.

What I'm quoting here is the beginning of something, a prologue. It's from the spring of 2012. The girl who wrote it is...well, names don't matter. And these days she's no longer the girl who wrote this. This is from a previous life, a previous iteration.

But read along with me.

I can't explain this accurately or in a way that makes sense. I only meant to tell you I'm obsessed with pageantry. I choose my running routes or the tube carriage I sit in because of the men. It's like, I orbit around them or they're orbiting around me and the gravitational pull increases the closer I get. I'm approached and talked to and whistled at all day. All day. All day. All day. It exhausts me and fuels me and then I exhaust myself...

Now I'm teeth biting the concrete. 

Now I'm face shoved into the pillow. 

Now I am back against the alleyway wall. 

Now I am ass-up and torn. 

Now I am searching for my next hit.

No room for love.

I'm not the kind of girl you'll be seeing in the morning.

Nobody controls me, but I am under control.

No one writes like this any longer. The girl who wrote this erased  seven or eight years of her life, erased her life from something like 2007 to 2014. She's someone else now, someone whose life is about upward mobility and professional-class domesticity. She doesn't write like this any more; she doesn't recognise herself in her stories.

No one writes like this any more. There's no dark allure, no sense of late-night confessionals, no sense of the power of desire and dark exhilaration. I really have no idea of what stories are being told late at night these days.

Read along with me. Tell me about what's being confessed in the dark nowadays. Tell me about what the nighttime city is like these days. Tell me what happened to the stories from other times and other lives.

One Eight Eight: Smile-Mask

When I was young, I read a lot of Marxist theory. I was good at it for a while, and I knew all the arcane definitions and analytical techniques that Marxism had developed on its own or absorbed from critical theory. I knew the terms of art--- interpellation, ideology, alienation, comprador capitalism. I'm having problems these days with something more personal: the idea of "emotional labour".

 I do understand that there's a difference between "emotion work" and "emotional labour". One is, I think, more about presentation of the self at work, and other is more domestic. I don't know the dividing lines. What I do know is that the underlying concept--- when it's applied to domestic, personal concerns ---leaves me even more depressed and exhausted than the labour-market application.

My understanding--- based on reading any number of the more political sex blogs ---is that "emotional labour" is used to mean male demands on women for emotional support in a relationship. It's a male demand, of course. The male half of the relationship demands that the female half provide emotional support and help him through emotional downswings. This is regarded as evil, since it's a male demand. I suppose I'd always thought one of the desirable things about a romantic relationship was that you had someone there who would offer you emotional support, who wanted to raise your spirits and help steer you through depressing moments. Oh, of course you did the same for them. That goes without saying--- loyalty and support in return, always. Always. But the hope-- for both parties ---would always be that in a romantic relationship you'd have someone who would see it as worthwhile, or as part of the relationship itself, to be there for you, to say the small romantic things you need, to offer solace and congratulations and care.

Reading the blogs about the evils of "emotional labour" in a relationship, all I can think is that there's no longer any room for such things. Once again, it's better--- best ---to remain silent. Never ask a lover for anything, not support, not solace, not kind words. Never ask, never expect. Never hope. The new rules call for silence and distance. No one--- and especially the male half of the relationship ---should ever display any emotional needs or ask for any emotional support. Never ask for anything that could be spun as a demand. Never offer anything that could be spun as condescending or smothering. Simply enough, never ask for anything.

There was a time when I believed that lying back in a lover's arms would be safe, that I'd feel safe and supported and loved. A relationship could be a haven in a heartless world--- a phrase Marx supposedly used about the bourgeois family. Haven in a heartless world---- a kind of blanket fort against the outside, a place where someone believes in you and supports you, where someone sees it as part of their role to make you feel better, to make you feel desired and loved. For the record, and to stave off ranters, I'll be clear: you do all that for your partner, too. Ride or die--- you give that to them just as they give it to you. Those days are over. The new rules make it impossible to look at a romantic relationship as a haven, or to think you might get--- or seek ---any support.

There are things I'd hope for in a Young Companion, and things I'd like to tell a lover I'd need. There are things I'd like to ask for.  I can't, of course. I can't even begin to say anything. I can't even hint. All you can do in these latter days is stay silent. Never ask, never hope, never expect.

One Eight Six: Found Objects

I asked a favourite young companion a simple question a few nights ago. If you dropped dead tomorrow, I asked, what would you be most worried people would find in your house?

She laughed about that. Not anything silly, she said. Not the sex toys. She just shrugged about that. She was, she told me, an upper-middle-class, educated white girl in the year 2016. Of course she had sex toys. All girls like her did, everyone knew it, and no one would think anything about it.  The vibrators (the USB-connected Lelo models), the dildos, the anal beads and penetrators--- she was wasn't the least worried about having those found by family or friends clearing out her rooms. After all, she'd never worried or been the least bit fazed when customs agents or theTSA found her travel vibrators. She just gave them a cool, grey-blue, posh girl's stare and went on her way.

What she'd be worried people would find would be her notebooks and journals. She pours her heart and secrets out onto paper, and she has a locked box filled with them. Those are the things she'd worry about. That's why she burned a lot of her teen years journals, too. She wouldn't want her family and friends knowing about her teen Bad Girl adventures, for all the obvious reasons--- starting very young, doing risky things, having bad things happen, having encounters with her parents' (mostly married) friends, sex with some of her father's employees, sex with friends' boyfriends or girlfriends. And because of her emotional issues from those days, things that she may be more worried about than who she was having sex with. She didn't want her family knowing how she felt about them when she was fifteen or sixteen, or that she'd done things deliberately to defy them and their beliefs and values.

She and I are total opposites about the question. I kept notebooks when I was young, and I've diligently kept paper journals since the middle of the 1990s. But I was trained to always look to archives and documents. I believe in the idea of History, in the idea of a life preserved in archives. Everything must be documented and preserved--- I spent most of my years at university and grad school being taught that, and I believe in it.  I wouldn't be ashamed of anything I'd actually written down, not if I told it as a well-crafted story. I have the historian's kind of vanity, the idea that someday, someone somewhere would go through my journals and notebooks and find small bits of data that could be useful social history. I'm male, too. Having people know I'd had encounters in risky places or with unexpected girls would count in my favor. But all that only applies to things written down, to documents. Not to anything tangible.

What I'm saying is that I'd panic at the idea of people finding any hypothetical cache of sex toys. Not the riding whips or the riding crops, mind you. Those I'm rather proud of. They go with my reputation, with the self I've constructed since my early teens, with the interests I've clearly made part of my life. I could have riding crops found; that wouldn't change anything anyone things of me. But I could never have sex toys found. I've said it before, and I'll reiterate it here. There are no sex toys as such that a male can own that will allow him to keep his self-respect and social standing.

Vibrators and dildos for girls are associated with empowerment, self-discovery, sex. Things like Fleshlights or dildos or prostate massagers or inflatable dolls for males are associated with failure, creepiness, derision. I think the Arbitrary Social Rules are very clear on that. Male masturbation is regarded as a clear sign of social and sexual failure. Haven't we talked about that before? If you're found with sex toys in your nightstand drawer, the people finding them will hold you in contempt.

Part of that is something predicated on how porn is structured these days. If a girl has a collection of dildos, people will think about sex, about how hot it would've been to see her use them. If a straight male is found with dildos, he'll be tagged as closeted gay. If a gay male is found with dildos, he'll be mocked for being too much a loser to find a partner. Sex toys are an invitation to think of a girl as highly sexed, but an invitation to think of males as sexual failures.

The fact is, I told my friend,  I don't care what you read about in my journals so long as you think I'm a good writer and have a good eye.  What I'd be afraid of is being thought a sexual failure and sexually contemptible.  My paper journals are neatly archived and dated. I'd never hide them. But I'd never have a cache of sex toys because I would have to hide them,  because I'd agonize over what people would think about me if they found them.

And that, I think, is extremely sad.

One Eight Two: Thrill Rides

The other night I went back and re-read a blog entry from three or four years ago--- an American expat girl writing about her life in London. I know the girl a bit, or knew her once, when she was shuttling between the Pacific Northwest and DC, a self-destructive, hyper-aware, ghostly-beautiful co-ed. The entry itself is an  account of her No-Names-Please encounter with an English guy she picked up at a club in Camden Town.  I can't tell you much about the setting or the club life she wrote about.  London's not my town. I'm a creature of cities out on the Donau and not the Thames. Anyway, the story did call up memories of my own.

When the expat girl took the English guy home, she shook off the warning of a girl with her at the club not to do it: I never heed warnings.  When he fingered her in the taxi (a £35 ride? Bloody hell--- a long way back to her rooms at LSE) and told her very graphically what he's going to do to her, she thought---

You're thinking this is horrible, but the horrible part is that I only smirk. I'm not offended or scared. I feel calm and cool...

In bed, he did hurt her, and when she was loud he bit her nipple hard enough to draw blood and said, Stop making noise, you fucking slag.  What she thought was---

I'm terrified but I'm enjoying this.

I'm terrified that I'm enjoying this.

Oh, the story never goes very much farther into anything dark. Don't think that. There's rough sex all night, and some fairly gentle sex and conversation the next morning, and then he charged his phone (nice touch), dressed, told her that he did have a girlfriend, and left. She wasn't even really annoyed about that; she liked being hot enough to entice a stranger to cheat on his girlfriend. The next day she was too sore to walk much, sore from no-lube anal, and her left breast was bruised and the nipple erect with a smeared ring of dried blood all around it. No regrets, though, or only the dim and tired awareness of how much she likes courting danger. It's a very hot story, and I'm...well, envious of her for having it to tell. I can't wish I'd been the guy, though. She likes her men tall and handsome and with the whole rock-hard abs thing. And she always did strike me as a girl who's harsh enough to comment on a male partner's looks and...ummm...endowment to his face. Not anything I'd risk. There's no point at all in wanting to be the guy. I meet none of her criteria, and probably never have or will.

What I am thinking about tonight is her  whole elision of arousal and terror:

I'm terrified but I'm enjoying this.

I'm terrified that I'm enjoying this.

I envy that--- I envy anyone who has that said about them, who can evoke that in an attractive girl.

I have no idea if anyone has ever thought that around me. Or thought those things in any serious way. I've always been the Theme Park Thrill Ride for a certain kind of co-ed. They can do things that they've been taught were Bad, or at least risky, and they can do them with someone like me, who really does meet all the criteria for a Lifetime Movie of the Week villain. They can do those things--- go home with the much-older man who's certainly a predator of some kind and just might be dangerous ---and still know that it's like getting aboard the much-hyped thrill ride at the theme park. Faux-danger--- you get the adrenaline rush and get to pretend to be terrified, and you know that in a few minutes you'll be able to walk away from the ride and feel like you've had an adventure, like you've done something, like you have a story to dine out on for weeks.

I've played to that image, of course, the image of being dangerous and depraved. It's all part of roué-hood, isn't it.  I used to laugh about it. Work the creepy, I'd say. Tell the girl that, yes, you are everything Lifetime Channel and her parents and Dr. Drew and Women's Studies 101 told her to be afraid of, and is she up for the risk? It works a fair amount of the time. It really does. Faux-danger is an alluring thing. Horror films and theme parks make piles of money off the idea.

And people do dine out on stories. I've done it myself for years--- sought out experiences specifically for their value as stories. I've known many a posh girl, many a girl with a professional degree and a serious career, who's deployed stories to suggest that she had a wicked, interesting, intriguing past, one that got pretty heavy, one that endows her with a hint of danger still, one where her tales of escape will leave friends and dates begging for more.

It's still a bit exhausting for me, of course--- being the dark lover. And unsettling, too. A lovely, vodka-fueled co-ed stretched out on a bed late one night, back arched, thrusting sharp hipbones up at you and begging you to hurt her raises problems. There's always the morning-after regrets issue. There is always that. And as incredible as it is to have some lovely girl yielding herself up to you and asking you to go further, to not have any limits with her, it does put you in an awkward position. You have to be pitch-perfect at things. The girl can be telling you to do all these things she's read about or fantasized about or seen in films, and you have to get them exactly right. There's no room for error. I've said no to things, which has surprised girls. I've said no to choking girls when they've asked--- that's not something where you can make a mistake. (Scarves. I might do it a bit with a scarf, if a girl asked, but never with my hands. Not that way. Never.) There was a flat no to the one seriously MDMA-dreamy girl who asked me to cut her. That I wouldn't do; that I won't do. That's not something I ever want to have to explain to anyone later. That particular girl had faded scars on her hipbones and thighs--- she'd cut herself in high school ---and she wanted to have a lover do it for her. That was her fantasy, she said. Be clear, now: I had no moral objection. It wasn't even that I distrusted myself or thought I'd turn into Patrick Bateman. But I wasn't going to become the target and the Bad Guy if she had morning-after regrets.

I do suppose there's another kind of Thrill Ride that's easier. It's one that girls I have loved wanted. I don't have to be faux-terrifying. I only have to be older and attentive and literate. There are girls who want the experience of an Older Lover, who want what an Older Lover can offer: booklists and conversations and an introduction to things they've wanted--- being part of a world that's mannered and bookish and intellectual. They want an Older Lover who can show them things, teach them things. A lovely girl at McGill in Montreal wrote me once to say that the exchange seemed perfect to her: youth and beauty and sex exchanged for knowledge and instruction. That's easier to do. I have no especial problem with the idea of whips and candle wax, of masks and silk scarves around slender wrists. I have no problem slapping a girl at the moment of orgasm. But this latter way is just...simpler. I can be the kind of Greying Lover that my Montreal friend always wrote about. I don't know that I can teach a lovely co-ed anything about Life, but I did work in a bookstore all through grad school, and I stood up in front of classes and lectured for years. I can always talk about books and ideas. That's easy to do. A different quality of Thrill Ride. I could do it for the girls I have most loved over the years. It's not something I could do with the expat girl in London, though. It's not even something she'd want.

There's a strange lull in life these days, a strange kind of exhaustion in my life. There's maybe one girl in my life right now who'd appreciate both poses--- who'd ride the thrill ride, terrified as part of being wet-and-breathless, but who'd want the long conversations later, who'd never worry about rock-hard abs and how many miles one could run. Alas, though--- she's eight thousand miles away, living on the beach at Wainui. At the moment, the best I can do is put ink to paper and offer her tales of books and ideas alternating with thrill ride scenarios. I'd like to think that she'd say what the expat girl told the English guy:

I'm terrified but I'm enjoying this.

I'm terrified that I'm enjoying this.

I want her to say other things, too--- Have you read this? What do you see out there in the dark, in the waves? Let me tell you all the things I see in my city.  That's part of being older, I suppose: fear that you can't evoke either thing in lovely girls any more.

One Seven Five: Risk

I've written before about how it's become too risky to talk about one's fantasies or fetishes or preferred scenarios. I stand by that, mind you. These days, here in the age of the gender wars, it's far too risky to tell a partner or potential partner what it is you like. It's become too easy to be shamed all across the web, and in the call-out culture, there's a social premium on outrage and finding reasons to attack others' preferences.

I do remember long conversations with girls back in the days of my lost youth--- conversations across tables or over late-night phone lines, conversations in the dark across beds in residence halls or off-campus apartments. I recall talking with lovely companions about dreams and fantasies--- sexual and otherwise ---and offering up visions to one another: I've always dreamed of this? Have you thought about doing this? What would you do if you had the chance, or if this could be the right place? I remember the nights of girls looking at me and whispering, Show me. I remember girls looking shyly across the table and saying, I've always wanted to do this, I just didn't have anyone to trust. I can remember the two of us laughing about suggestions and clinking glasses: And why not? I mean, let's just try it.

I wouldn't do that now. I'd never risk revealing myself, even to a lover I'd been with for a while--- let alone to someone I was trying to seduce. I really never thought it would come to this. I grew up in an era that had discovered experimentation, where art and music and film celebrated transgression and crossing boundaries. And I've spent much of my life marketing myself as someone with whom girls could cross boundaries, as someone with whom girls could experiment.  My own experiences with suggestions and shared fantasies had been largely successful. Girls had seen me as a partner who wouldn't judge, who'd be willing to follow them into their own dreams. As the well-read older lover, I was useful--- a resource for girls who needed or wanted encouragement to feel free to try things.

I wonder if it's as simple as a generational thing, as the new century passing me by. The culture no longer encourages fantasies and fetishes. It no longer encourages role-play or scenarios. We no longer valorize experimentation, and we certainly no longer valorize the idea of transgression, of pushing past boundaries just to see what's on the other side.

There are people with whom I used to share stories and fantasies who I feel deeply uneasy about talking to these days. I no longer trust anyone not to secretly be feeling contempt for me. It's not the particular content of my fantasies that might be contemptible, it's that I'd have (or need) fantasies. I've always lived in fear that my fantasies and kinks are boring--- there's always that. But I especially hate the nagging fear that even having fantasies marks me for judgment.

Perhaps it's that I no longer trust potential partners. I've been burned during the last few years in ways I hadn't experienced in a pre-social media world. I hope that I've always been discreet and trustworthy around girls' dreams and fancies, and I'm certainly not given to divulging secrets. But I have developed a gnawing fear of being held up to public (or social-media) ridicule.  I have developed a gnawing, paralyzing fear of seeing contempt or derision in a girl's eyes when I talk about what I like and what I'd like to try. I have a gnawing fear that what I might like is no longer regarded as wicked and alluring, but as politically/socially unacceptable and contemptible.

I've spent a lifetime regarding fantasies and scenarios as stories, as roles one can step in and out of. I never saw them as saying anything about my "authentic" self. We live an age of authenticity fetish now, and any games, any stories, any preferences are unacceptable unless they're part of something essential to the self. It's no longer acceptable to sample and explore identities and interests, and I'm very old-school PoMo about that. Nowadays, though, I'm paralyzed.  There's less and less chance that a potential partner will accept kinks and fantasies as purely menu items for play rather than a statement about one's value and social rank.

Let's just say that all of this makes it harder and harder to flirt or play with lovely girls, even ones with whom I have a history.  It can't just be age and flagging enthusiasm. It's a fear that keeps me from saying anything about what I might like, and it keeps me from asking lovely companions what they might like.

I used to offer up new experiences, and I used to be someone who could persuade girls that it was safe to explore things with me. I won't do either thing now.

One Six Eight: Graph Lines

When I began writing here, I positioned myself as a Gentleman of a Certain Age, an aging roué, someone of certain old-guard attitudes. I'm still all those things. I do look in the mirror in the mornings and list the things that go into how I define myself, and those things are always there. What else? Well, having grown up one of the older cities in America, one with its own very carefully-curated personality.  Having left here to go to university at a place in New England that trades on its own carefully-curated image. Being a native of a region that habitually inspires a complicated and often painful relationship to its culture and past. Being someone who has lived his life inside books. Having spent so many years in academia, I define myself by that. And by being someone who tells stories. Being a raconteur is a key part of being a roué.

I told you at the beginning, I live in genteel poverty in a flat on the edge of a lake, in a bohemian neighborhood in a city on a river. I define myself in part by memories of cities where I've lived, by memories of downtown streets and shopfront reflections.

What I've been wondering tonight is about how my life can be graphed. I'm not sure what axes I need to be plotting, though. Wealth and career success? I won't fare too well on those. Cultural capital? Well, a bit better.

I'd like to graph factors of attractiveness, of course. The result might well be very disheartening, but on any seriously complex graph I might be able to find enough axes to move along to shift myself into desirable regions. The question remains--- what to graph? What are the factors to be graphing for attractiveness as a male? And how are they to be balanced against one another? How do you compare, say, age versus cultural capital versus social status?

Here in the new year, sitting alone in my flat, with Carnivale season beginning, I do wonder what the factors should be for the graph. If you're reading this, I'm open to thoughts. What are the factors for male attractiveness here in the new year? What are their exchange rates and relative buying power? What should be part of my graph, and how should I read it?

One Four Two: Objects

There are articles that I find on line that I wish I could discuss over coffee or drinks with lovely friends-and-correspondents. Flat whites or vodka-limes, the trick would be to sit back at a table on a street side patio or a rooftop garden and talk about the ideas behind the articles. I write here, of course, in the hope that people will discover these entries, read them, and then open discussions. I've always been a believer in messages in bottles, in exchanges of thoughts and ideas. One reason I do sit some mornings and search out articles on various topics is the hope of having things to discuss. I was an academic for a long time, and I think the key thing I miss from that world is the idea of discussions, of talking about ideas.  Down all the years, the one thing I've enjoyed most with my young companions has been talking books and ideas late into the night.  My bedroom wall is lined with bookshelves, and there's a reason for that. Nothing is as powerfully intimate and enticing as talking about ideas.

Yesterday morning on line I found an article by the disgraced Hugo Schwyzer. I know that six or seven years ago he was a voice in the world of the gender wars, but I've no idea what happened to him after his very public implosion. When I was an undergraduate, we'd have said, Sucked out of the universe like a watermelon seed. Well, he went to wherever those disgraced on social media in the gender wars go. Rehab, possibly, but more likely dragged to the edge of a stagnant urban river some moonless night and shot in the back of the head by the Social Justice Cult enforcers. Something like that, anyway.

The article by Schwyzer that I found was about how males in the here-and-now are unprepared to be desired--- how males (or at least straight males) have no ability to believe that anyone male can be physically desirable. The article was filled with too much Good Men Project-style vaporing and moralizing, but it did make a point. I've thought of myself as moderately well-read, as reasonably well-spoken, or as a passably decent conversationalist. I've never thought of myself as desirable or desired. I must've been--- girls have gone willingly to bed with me, and there have been girls who've made repeat appearances. If you'd asked me why they were there, though, I'd have talked about my bookshelves and the stories I can tell.  I'd never have talked about being desirable, and that would've been a topic I'd have avoided. Why take the risk of considering whether I was actually desirable in any physical way?

Here in the latter years of my life, it's a fortiori an issue I'd prefer to avoid. But I do wonder about the issue of being desired. I suppose that I can't imagine how a male body or a male face could ever provoke desire. If a girl tells me that a certain male is handsome, I suppose I can agree or disagree in an abstract way, but there's no emotional connection, no way to imagine that anyone could feel actual, physical desire for anyone male. I've no idea what it feels like to be desired, no idea what it means to know that you're the focus of longing.  I've been told that someone missed my voice or the things I know. I've been told that nights when a girl couldn't hear the stories I tell over the phone she felt empty and alone. That's something, of course--- a kind of being valued and needed. It's not desire, though; it's not physical.

I understand what it's like to feel desire for someone. I understand longing and need. But I can't imagine anyone feeling those things because of me. My own romantic life has been about being useful for the things I know or the things I can say.  Those things have worked well enough, in a way.  But I have no sense at all of being anything physical, and I have less and less faith in my physical self as being of any value, or as being anything other than dead mass.

If you're reading this, tell me about desire. Have you ever felt desired? Do you ever feel desirable? Are you aware of honing those qualities and using them? And when you are desired, what does it feel like? What do you become more aware of about yourself?

If you're out there...do let me know.

One Three Two: Masks

I'm still thinking about the objections to "Fifty Shades". So many of the articles I've found on line seem to take it as a necessity that the makers of the film should've consulted "experts and practitioners" about BDSM and followed their admonitions. Understandable, I suppose. There's a "community" that wants to be "properly" portrayed. Didn't we go through all this with gay groups in the 1970s and 1980s--- the insistence by an outsider group that they have the final word on how others portray them? For that matter, hasn't "representation" been a key issue for all marginalized groups over the last fifty years? The BDSM community is desperate to establish itself as a legitimate community,  desperate to free itself from being taken as inherently about abuse and violence and misogyny. Understandable, yes. But still something that I find utterly irrelevant.

All things considered, "experts and practitioners" would be the last people I'd go to if wanted to discuss how to present s/m on film or in a novel.

I've never been much for "community". I'm not good at any of the things that build community. Whatever interest I do have in s/m isn't about community, and I suppose it's not about what writers on the topic like to call "the power exchange".  I'm not at all sure what I'd ask experts about. I suppose that a skilled practitioner of shibari could tell me how to tie intricate knots and do rope bondage that's as pretty as origami.  I have to laugh about that, though. I've been hopeless at knots all my life. I've always told people that repeatedly failing the knot-tying test kept me out of the Scouts. Asking about bondage itself means, well, nothing to me. The BDSM community, like any other community, must have its own terms of art, its own specialized vocabulary. That doesn't mean anything to me, either.

If I asked anyone about portraying s/m,  I'd ask designers--- fashion designers and interior designers. I'd ask photographers. I'd ask rare book specialists. Really--- those are the people I'd ask. I'm not interested in the politics or ethical debates. I'm interested in the aesthetics.

I know that means I'll never be someone who's part of the "community" or the "lifestyle". My interest is about style and ritual as part of sex. My interest is always in the idea of crafted moments, in the idea of being part of a performance.

Here in the days of the gender wars, there's a part of the trans* world that is openly hostile to people who think that trans* is about sex, and even more hostile to people who are old-school transvestites, people who dress up for sexual reasons, people who are seen as mere fetishists. Authenticity is what's demanded (though authenticity is a fetish and obsession all its own).

By that standard, then--- no. I can't be interested in s/m for "authentic" reasons. I see it not as an end in itself, but as an occasion for performance. The BDSM groups I've read about disdained those who saw s/m as "dress-up" and not as a way of living.  That's fine. What I do with lovely young companions is very much dress-up. It's getting into character. It's learning lines and backstories and finding the right sets and soundtrack. It's about class markers and certain kinds of style. It's a fashion statement and as formal and stylized as eighteenth-century court dances. Yes, it's all about surfaces, about how it looks. It's about its literary pedigree, too...but isn't that tied into style and looks?

I suppose that's why knots don't matter to me. Rope is too material, too...blue collar. Bind with silk, blindfold with silk. Or just cross a lovely girl's wrists and whisper to her that she's to imagine that she's bound with white silk. One more step into abstraction.  Decor matters--- and nothing is in red. I just wanted to note that.

I've always said that there are two choices in sex--- hot or cold. I've always leaned toward cold. That doesn't mean heartless, by the way. But it does mean stylized, ritualized, abstract. It means seeing sex as a kind of performance piece, something where decor and dialogue and fashion matter.  I've asked lovely girls to be part of what really are scripted pieces, and I've been lucky enough to have them accept. I've been lucky enough to have young companions understand that what we're doing derives from literary sources and fashion photography, that we're doing something abstract and formal.

I'd never consult "experts and practitioners". Nothing that I do is about politics or ethics. What I want with a lovely young companion is not community or even the flesh. What I want, in the end, is to tell a story, to be lost inside something worth reading, something that is about surfaces. But then--- haven't I said for years that pleasure for me is never, never unmediated?

One Two Five: Learning Curve

There's a blog called A Faded Romantic at Wordpress that I find myself reading on autumn nights. The author there introduces himself this way:

About and Explanation

A faded romantic Dominant from a time before Dominant became a cliché, with a love of all things beautiful and a taste for the darkly sensual and decadent.

A lover of music, food and wine, literature, theatre, film and art.

A writer. Though not a good one. Of novels, short stories, songs and poetry. The written word is my joy and my curse.

I am tall, silver-haired, slender, athletic, with piercing dark green/blue eyes and long, sensitive hands. I am neither handsome nor unattractive. I am a realistic dreamer, an idealistic pragmatist. I am a sexually dominant but patient and sensual lover.

I adore intelligent, elegant, independent-minded, beautiful, sexually submissive women.

I am not young. I am faded and fading.

But if the music is playing, and the wine is good, and the stars are shining bright in a soft velvet night sky, and the light falls on me just right, then you might see the man who could break hearts.

Well, if you have a very good imagination anyway …

There's  rather a lot there that I can identify with, though I'm not silver-haired and was never athletic. I've never thought of myself as a Dominant, of course. I'm never sure what to make of that word.  Of course I like having my own way; I'd never deny that.  My companions are inevitably younger, and I did spend years in front of classes, with whatever authority that brings with it. I've sometimes been the one holding the riding whip, but I've never been a Dominant in any BDSM sense. The metaphors I apply to sex are less about dominance and submission and much more about ritual, formality, and crafting stories. Asking a young companion to be a character in your stories is about control--- when is a story arc not about control? ---but it's not about submission to you. It's about losing oneself in the story, which is something separate from the two of you.

I'll have to come back one day to the idea of what control and submission are about. All I can say tonight is that I've never seen myself as a Dominant. Roué, certainly. Flaneur, of course. Auteur if I'm lucky, though there's a pretentiousness in that word that puts me off. 

Whoever is writing at A Faded Romantic calls himself "a romantic Dominant, from a time before Dominant became a cliche". I'd like to know more about that, about how he's seen the word change to a cliche. I'd also like to know how he became a Dominant.

One of the standard arcs in BDSM tales is how the girl learns to be a submissive, how she comes to accept herself as a submissive and learns the arts of yielding up control. Name a classic s/m tale, from "Story of O." to "Fifty Shades" and you'll almost inevitably focus on the heroine's learning curve, on her initiation. There's almost never a story of how the male lead grows into being a dominant, let alone a romantic one.  There's no Bildungsroman about becoming a male dominant that I've ever seen. (Is that true of the world of gay male literature as well? Does anyone know?) And it's a story that has so many questions about learning techniques, about recognizing and accepting oneself. Would a story about a young man becoming a dominant need an older heroine to be his guide, to offer herself up as a learning experience? Is there a romance out there about a romance where two new lovers of seventeen or eighteen teach one another BDSM--- with or without the internet?

I do wonder what it is for the author at the A Faded Romantic to look back on his life to something like twenty and ask how he became what he is now. I'm using him as a particular example, but there's a wider issue here, something beyond s/m. How do we learn to desire what we desire? How do we learn what we are as lovers? And when we do learn, when we've finally ridden out the learning curve, is it too late to use the things we've learned? 

If you're out there reading this, darlings, write and tell me about learning curves. If you are a lovely young submissive, tell me how you learned that about yourself. Tell me about whether you think desires are innate or something acquired. Tell me what you think about when you look over what you've learned about being a lover, what you've learned about desire.

Ninety-Five: Grey Silk

A lovely friend in the far snowlands of upstate New York told me once that having a lovely, bright, clever Young Companion as a sexual submissive would be very like trying to own a cat. I had to laugh at that. After all, long ago a very lovely girl in a plaid uniform kilt looked at me over her glasses and dryly told me that she was complaisant rather than submissive--- a perfect line, and of course she won my heart by knowing the word complaisant.  I do have to agree with my friend out there above Rochester somewhere. "Owning a cat" makes perfect sense as a metaphor here.

It's always worth remembering that any bright, clever, bookish Young Companion who plays the submissive is far more likely to simply be complaisant, and that it's inevitable that she'll be topping from below. After all, as a clever and bookish girl she's almost certainly chosen to be there with her wrists tied and a blindfold fitted as part of her sentimental education, as a knowing and very self-aware part of an exchange of youth and beauty for experience.  Letting herself experience everything--- ice cubes and candle wax, blindfolds and riding whips ---is something she wants, but every girl I've known in that situation has done more that just letting herself fall headlong into raw experience. They've been willing to offer themselves up to the experience, but they've never not wanted to have a clear voice in how the experience is played out. Not something that I can ever really imagine minding, of course. I'm not someone who finds topping from below in a girl to be a problem. Of course, remember, too, that I find the idea of being addressed as "Sir" or "Master" to be boring. I don't mind being addressed by my academic title (I did earn it, after all), but my preference is always for either my first name or "darling". I am reasonably skilled with a riding whip and with ice cubes and candle wax, but my role is always to provide experience, to offer up my part of a sentimental education.

Remember the girl--- the heroine in the erotic romance I talked about writing? That key moment on the steps of the hero's brownstone, when she stands up and takes his hand and pulls him to the door. Show me, she says. Show me. That's always the key moment. Someone like my hero understands his role, of course. A beautiful, much-younger girl is giving herself to him because he's an opening into a new world. I'm not denying or minimizing any romantic connection, any passion--- don't think that. But for a bright and bookish and clever girl having an affair with someone older, one of his attractions is always that he represents a gateway to things she'd like to know--- things she'd like to have done. She's been topping from below from the first moment of the affair, and of course the hero knows it. How could he not? His own pleasure will be bound up not in asserting power or dominance, but in providing her (and himself, yes) with well-crafted, very formal scenes. She's very much seeking pleasure in having the experiences, in knowing all the literary and film sources, in knowing that she can be part of the kinds of experiences her older lover can provide.

Someone in the London exurbs reminded me not so very long ago that she was tired of having to defend herself and her choices--- that she liked being slapped around a bit in bed, that she liked very rough, intense sex with much older lovers. What you like in bed, she said, doesn't say anything about your value as a person. Not at all. Not what you like, not how many people you do it with. Not whether you're a dom or a sub. That's just in bed.  People assume far too much about her from what she likes in bed, and they never see that she's collecting stories and experiences, that what she likes in bed isn't about her essence or her value.

I like the London girl rather a lot. Having her in my bed with her hands tied with silk would be a major delight. But I'd expect her to be shaping what happens every step of the way. I can't imagine it any other way.

This may all be the long way round of saying that what I like about the idea of s/m has very little to do with the fact of dominance and submission, and a great deal to with a exchange of stories, with creating very formal scenes. And that, I think, requires seeing dominance and submission as simply self-conscious poses, as abstract concepts that are just part of the decor. It requires that a lovely Young Companion be complaisant, that she be willing to let me create stories she can walk into, but it  only requires that her submission be purely formal and notional. I suppose it might mean that she regard herself just for the night as a kind of canvas or screen, but that's not quite right, is it? She understands that she's there to accept experience, to be the recipient of experience. But if she's aware of that, then she'll always be part of shaping how those experiences are offered and delivered. My Young Companions are a bookish lot, and they know what they want in terms of scenes and crafting and literary references. Which is why I like them, after all.

Owning cats? Maybe...or just maybe a bit more like being a director and working with a skilled actress--- that may be a better dynamic.

Sixty-Seven: Filters

I've been engaged in a sporadic discussion about on-line dating this past week. My interlocutor has been a woman who's an alternative-press journalist. She's based out of the one of the larger cities in the American South, but spends much of her professional time in Manhattan. I know very little about her personally. I know something of her politics (progressive), and I know that she's active in local animal-rescue groups where she lives.  At a guess, I'd say that she's in her later thirties. That's really all I know. Our exchanges on line have been very polite, which I do appreciate.

We've been discussing on-line dating. It's not something I've ever done. I still see a certain social stigma attached to it, even among groups who do spend most of the their lives on the web. Lots of people may be using sites like OKCupid these days, but there are lots of sites set up specifically to mock OKCupid and its ilk. Some are merely funny, but far too many have a hostile (and often ideological) edge. I feel the social stigma, or at least can understand it. I'd feel just a bit desperate using a dating site. The ideological hostility is another matter, and something I'd prefer to avoid.

My interlocutor tells me that she's always good luck with on-line dating, that it gives her the chance to maximize her own strengths and present herself well. We've disagreed on that. On-line dating strikes me as something that wouldn't end well for me. The sites are designed, I fear, to keep people like me outside.

All on line dating profiles are filters. That's a given. A user constructs her profile to talk about what she's looking for and to wave away those who don't meet her specifications. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. Everyone has specific tastes and desires. Mine are very specific, and I know that. I suppose that what puts me off is knowing that I don't meet anyone's profile requirements. On-line dating sites also require suitors to produce photos and possibly speak via webcam--- two things designed to cancel out any chances I may have.  To be seen outright--- seen outside of context ---is not something I can risk.

My young companions have met me...where? Almost always on terrain where I feel safe: bookstores, cafes, museums. They've met me in places where I can lead with my own strengths, with what I know and what I can say about things that are important to me. I don't lead with anything visual; that's not what I am. I lead with what I have to say, with what I have to say about certain specific things. I present myself as someone who has knowledge to offer, and a passion about knowledge. That does allow my age to seem like it might be a positive thing. I'm safe on terrain where it can seem like I might be part of a sentimental education, where a young companion can listen to me and think that I could be a part of a learning experience. I'm not like to be able to pass the filters at an on-line dating site. My task is always to encourage a lovely young girl to consider an exchange of beauty and youth for knowledge and passion about knowledge.

Despite what my interlocutor says about crafting on-line dating profiles, I know that I can't present myself well there. What I have to offer has to come in context. I lead with a voice, with things I can say. The trick is always to make my own appearance fade away into the background, to be the voice talking about books or art or ideas. If I'm to be seen, it must be mediated not via webcam, but through a girl's view of what's been on her bookshelves, on her visions of other worlds. I can lead with that. I can be an introduction to things--- that's what I have to offer. Just as a face on a screen,  or as a set of answers to profile questions, well...I have so very little value. I can be...Virgil to her Dante? Something like that, I think.