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.

Two Seven Zero: Threads 5

A few more adventures from my lovely blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud--- tales from her twenties in Wellington...

In March 2011 she wrote me about this. She'd have been twenty-five that spring--- or NZ autumn ---and back at university, getting an accounting degree after her English Lit degree:

i had a delicious older man's cock in my mouth this morning. i love starting the day with a mouthful of cum. i missed my first class, i was having so much fun...

She did tell me more about him. His name, she said, was Shane---


...he's around 45. he's tall and strong. he has short dark hair and a cute, stubbly face. he owns a sand blasting and spray painting business and is a client. i'm not sure if its common practice in the US, but here young lawyers and accountants have to spend quite a bit of time out on secondment, getting to know the way their clients businesses work etc. so, thats how we met a few years ago. we ended up at the same function at the marina a few nights ago and one thing led to another.

 the first time, he bent me over the bonnet of his car and fucked me from behind. it was so hot. he came in my mouth then carried me inside. he lives by the beach. his bedroom had big windows overlooking the sea. he had a beautful cock, big and thick and hard. it felt so good in my mouth and hands. he licked my cunt and i came so hard. he fucked my ass and cunt and told me i was beautiful.

i must have fallen asleep around 3, and had a terrible nightmare, because i woke up screaming and shaking. he pulled me towards him and whispered 'its ok, its ok' over and over in my ear. he ran his finger through my hair and spooned me for the rest of the night.


in the morning he was so gentle and lovely. i sucked his cock and he came in my mouth again. he made us both smoothies then fucked me in the shower and drove me to class. i'm meeting him for a drink after work tonight. he's gorgeous and funny and i want him.  

Was I jealous? Oh, certainly. He had a house on the beach in a hip suburb called Seatoun, and she more-or-less lived there during the affair. A few months only, but ones she still wrote about years later. 

There were always other older men in her life. In November 2013, she wrote to say---

I did think of you on Friday night, drinking Makers that seemed to set my blood on fire. Lying naked in a strange bed, all I could think was this isn't really me. i'm not really here.

I stayed until the morning and walked home in the dawn light.

Drinking bourbon feels like coming home.


He was a lawyer. I was Alex the florist, sexy & uncomplicated.

"Drinking bourbon feels like coming home..."  That's a brilliant line, and one that I'll be passing on to lovely friends. It's one I want my friend Ash in Bo'ness and London Town to use.

A couple of nights later she wrote me to say that---

The lawyer asked me out for dinner Friday night! I am tempted to say yes, as he made me come about 5 times and had a very impressive collection of books.

I wonder if she kept up her identity as Alex the Florist when she was with him---  blonde Alex, simple and easily bedded, with no complications of intellect. That he gave her five orgasms isn't the buried lede here, of course. What matters is that she created Alex the Florist, a blonde girl I was wild to meet. I very much wanted to get to know young Alex, to see how well she brought the character to life. And of course I wanted to sample Alex's oral sex skills in some dark corner of a Wellington bar (the Bangalore Polo Club was her favourite in those days)--- in a dark corner, or in the alleyway behind the bar, where she notoriously would take handsome bouncers on midweek nights...

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.

One Eight Nine: Holmes

Downtown on a Saturday morning, watching sleepy-eyed co-eds and young twenty-somethings drift into the coffeeshop by the river. Bright and surprisingly hot so early--- a morning for iced coffee rather than anything hot. The girls I'm watching are on their way home, threading their way through older, empty streets and construction zones back to their own rented rooms or to the new condos in reno'd buildings along the river streets. I can sit at a corner table with my own iced coffee and a stack of books from the tiny downtown library branch and try to read faces. I suppose it would be a novelist's feast, watching the faces of Saturday morning Walk o' Shame girls--- so many stories in those expressions.

Twenty-odd years ago, there was a Zalman King "version"--- a very, very free "version" ---of "Delta of Venus". It actually wasn't so bad on its own terms, and it's worth watching. It just wasn't Anais Nin in any way--- take that judgment however you wish. There was a fun scene where the two leads walk through Paris streets in that odd Phony War autumn of 1939 and try to construct stories for passers-by. They sit in cafes and do the same--- watch the other tables and construct whole lives for the couples who flirt or bicker or sit silently. Well, I liked the girl who played the lead in the film; I'll admit that. I did like the idea of sitting with a lover and constructing stories. That's one of the things I've loved, and one that I wonder if ever I'll do again.

Walk o' Shame stories for sleepy-eyed co-eds--- always a lovely chance to see what you can do with imagination and deduction. I won't refer here to all those moments in Sherlock Holmes stories where Holmes deduces a whole life from details. I hated those moments, really. Far too arrogant, and I was never a Holmes fan. I'll always admit to using imagination more than deduction. I'm turning the girls at the coffeeshop tables into characters in a story, not assessing them as potential clients or criminal suspects.

Sleepy-eyed, I always say. If they've been with lovers, they should be sleepy--- they should've been having sex 'til not long before dawn. Hungover a bit, too. What's sex without vodka shots or bourbon on the rocks? Pensive, sometimes--- you can see the girls thinking about whether last night was a mistake or a disappointment, thinking as well about whether last night was a one-off or whether there's an affair beginning. Sometimes you can see them wondering about how to explain to roommates that they slept in a new bed last night. Once in a while you do see smiles--- they liked the guy, liked what they did, enjoyed the sex. Sometimes you see them looking at cars parked on the street, or at couples, and wondering why they're walking home alone, without their new young gentleman escorting them. That expression leads to all kinds of interesting speculations about social rules here in the new age, right?

It's all different if you're male, I suppose. The walk home is less thoughtful, less a contemplative time. More triumph, less analysis---- unless that's an image that we've decided to reject here in the new age of equality and diversity.  My own experience has been that the walk home is a victory march--- proof of my own value, proof that for one night I've won a battle against time and decay and my own body and past.

But it's still a fact, I think. Male stories on mornings-after are much, much less interesting, and they're so much less complex.

Well, a morning that's all summer sunlight. You can sit and sip vanilla iced coffee and watch girls with stories in their eyes and try to imagine what their lives are like. Surely there was a third Holmes brother who was a novelist---- surely.

One Five Zero: Callers

I found a meme on-line not so long ago that showed a girl sleeping on a couch and clutching an empty liquor bottle. The text was in the voice of a guy sleeping on the floor by the couch. It explained that the girl had drunkenly come by his rooms and wanted to have sex. As much as he wanted to, and as much as she asked, he refused, since she couldn't give actual consent, and enthusiastic, knowing consent was the requirement any decent human being would demand before having sex.

I looked at the meme for a while and thought about something. The last two times young companions have come by my rooms, the scenario was exactly that: a young companion who'd had a few drinks, there at my door with the intention of being taken to bed. The second time, the last time, the girl had very literally climbed a gate to come up and surprise me, bottle of Jameson's in her hand. Did I take them to bed? Yes. It would never have occurred to me not to. 

I do want to be very clear about that. It would never have occurred to me not to. A lovely girl who's put some effort into getting here, who's summoned me down to the gate or actually climbed over? Let's not be ridiculous. I felt...honoured. Amazed, too, that the second one had climbed that gate. I'd done that once myself when I'd misplaced my keys, and it took a bit of real effort. Needless to say, there's also the obvious saying about gift horses. And wouldn't saying No to a girl who'd made the effort to get here be taken as a dismissal, a rejection that she'd remember and hold against me later?

Let's be clear. The mornings-after weren't awkward or filled with recriminations or regrets. Hangovers, yes. There was instant coffee (the instant Cafe Vienna that a bachelor gentleman has in a half-empty pantry) and Tylenol, but nothing awkward. 

In the age of the gender wars, what does it say that I never for a moment considered saying No to either girl? 

I grew up in an era when much (maybe most) sex seemed to involve drink or drugs. From my later high school days through graduate school, sex in my own life usually involved drinks or something like designer psychedelics. For both people involved. Sex in those days was something that happened after parties, after dance club nights. It was part of nights spent in places with drinks and people doing drugs in the bathrooms, part of the progression of the evening. It's hard for me to come up with an exact analogy here, but in those days I'd have thought that separating sex out from the party or club scene was like...separating out a course from a dinner? Why would you want to? 

Sex in those days seemed like something still half-forbidden and all the more exciting because of it. It was connected with adventures, with defying rules and norms. It was connected with losing one's daytime, superego self. It was connected with places and times--- bars, dance clubs, parties, risky locales ---that were about losing control and just seeking out experience. Being drunk or high was a way to do that--- lose control, shut down the hectoring parental voices in your head. 

We're not supposed to do that any more, though. We're never supposed to lose control, and the superego has been rebooted to be about ideology rather than morality--- its voice now warns of power and patriarchy rather than sin. Sex, we were once told, was about carefully-restricted social and religious norms, not something done for excitement and adventures. Now it's that sex is something that has to conform to fears about power and "privilege", something that has to be grudgingly indulged in only after tedious negotiation between robot lawyers. It still can't be something about adventure and excitement, about living in films or novels.

So...where are we? Yes, I let both girls in and took them to bed. That they showed up a bit drunk was...part of the game, part of being inside a film or novel, and part of what made the two nights fun. It made the one girl climbing the gate even more impressive. Was there ever a moment on those two nights when I'd have considered saying No because they'd been drinking? That would never have crossed my mind. I suppose I'm fine if that makes me Evil. That's part of my charm, after all.

One Four Five: Debriefing

A young companion left here a little while ago. I walked her down to my street gate and we kissed goodbye. I watched her go up the hill with her backpack to the next cross-street and tried to decide whether the morning was awkward. No--- it hadn't been. I was glad of that. Whatever the night had been, there hadn't been that: no why-am-I-here awkwardness.

Well, she knows my first name. I'm not sure if she knows my last name. I know her nickname, and I know the name (cover name? work name? what's it called?) she uses on tickets at the place where she tends bar.  I don't know her actual name, though the nickname makes her first name fairly obvious.

I know where she works, of course. That's where I met her. I know...what else? I know her age--- just old enough to be tending bar ---and that she lives up at the south edge of the bohemian part of the old downtown.  She's not the usual run of young companions--- the black-clad girls in Comparative Lit or Critical Theory who've been my niche companions and niche prey all these years. She was admitted to the interior design program at the university here. Our first conversation at the bar was all about apartments. Not just the usual urban fascination with rents and locations, but about furnishing what she called "transitory spaces". She wants to design hotel rooms, she said. Hotel rooms and student housing. She was impressed that I'd stayed at the Pod Hotel in Manhattan; we both sighed over some day staying at capsule hotels in Japan. She wants, she said, to design spaces for people who'll be moving through and don't want to bring history with with or leave history behind when they go. That was fascinating.

What else? She has a brother in the Pacific Northwest who works in craft beers. She says she'd love to learn that, too, learn brewing  and how breweries are run. I can't disagree. Though I did have to grin when she told me that. That's one of the prizes of being her age--- there are  multiple futures and future lives still waiting, careers and worlds to explore and all the time in the world.  I envy that.

Last night's debris was still on the counter in my kitchen. Two shot glasses and a mostly-empty bottle of Jameson's. We'd been outside  with those, sitting and drinking and looking at the shadows and lights on the lakes.  The conversation hadn't been bad--- mostly me encouraging her to talk. Hearing all about design and what rooms could be like in hotels and dorms and what the designs would mean. I miss conversations like that when I'm away from them--- a lovely girl telling me all about the things she's learned or wants to learn,  telling me all about the new things in her world. I miss learning from someone else's excitement.

She's dark-haired, dark-eyed. Good legs in the inevitable short-shorts. Likes biking, doesn't like basketball. And went home with me...why? That's the Most Dangerous Question, but I did ask it. Asked it before seriously kissing, asked it before bed. She just shrugged in a half-apologetic way and told me that Well, you're nice. And I want to see what it's like--- someone like you, I mean. Not a bad answer,  though I understood what someone like you means. Not someone with a doctorate in History, not someone who lives by the lakes. It certainly doesn't mean someone handsome in a dangerous way. It means someone much older. I'm a learning experience. That's not the worst answer in the world, I suppose. Being a learning experience, being a kind of wicked adventure--- how long have I been marketing myself as that? Isn't that the whole point of being a roué ?

Well, she was at least open and blithe about it, which I appreciated. I'm a chance to experiment with something, to see what something's like. I don't mind being a research project. It's not like I haven't seen the world as a set of explorations and experiments all my life. And I know how to do this.  There's a set of unspoken things to check off, and I'm good at checklists.

As nights go, not bad. She didn't mind talking during things, didn't mind my suggestions or requests. She was good at phrasing things for her own requests, too--- I've heard that's what guys like you like to do, so... She didn't object to the music I had playing. Well, no disappointed looks or sullen conversations this morning. I even went out to bring two large lattes back. I trust that well-brought-up lovely girls have been taught to hide all disappointments if bed partners bring them large lattes. Courtesy gets us all through many small social moments.

Well, she has my phone number, and I'll see her where she works. I won't trespass beyond what the subject of an experiment should.  I'll be polite and no more flirtatious than usual. That's my place.  I hope she'll be back, but it's not my place to ask, or even to expect anything. I'd like to hear more about her visions of rooms and hotels and transient housing.  I'd like to offer her more data points for her experiment. Watching her walk up the street wasn't a bad way to begin a Sunday. And I did have the latte and a goodbye kiss.

Ninety-Six: Caveats

There's an article I ran across not so very long ago where the author talked about the horror of contemporary dating life.  The article struck a moralizing and morally-panicked tone--- how horrible, that men might ask their dates for the kinds of sex they'd seen in porn! and on a first date! ---and I dismissed the bulk of it with a contemptuous flick of my hand. I don't find it horrible at all either that men might watch porn or that they might ask a partner to try things from films.  I certainly don't find it worthy of outrage that one might ask that on a first date, either. I really do find such articles deserving of contempt.

Still...it is true that dating life here in the teens of the twenty-first century is fraught and often frightening. There was one brief passage in the article that did catch my eye, and it did leave me deeply uneasy. There was a throwaway line about all the things morally-corrupted males ask girls to do, and ended by imagining girls crying afterwards amongst themselves over the disgusting, pathetic things men really wanted to do. There's something in that to make one's blood freeze. What I imagined when I read that was simple enough. Not girls crying, but girls laughing at the things males wanted or liked or asked for. Not, mind you, laughing with affection or delight, but with mockery and disdain.

One of the most fraught parts--- the most frightening parts ---of any affair is making the leap from flirtation and seduction to actual sex. That leap from words to flesh is always dangerous. All the things that sound romantic or erotic, that sound alluring or exciting when they're spoken or hinted at, can go bad when translated into the concrete. Flesh and physics are tricky things, and it's so easy for imagination to fail, for things imagined to fail abysmally in practice. More than that, of course, there are social fears at hand.

Let's not talk about body fears, about the fears of not being attractive enough, not sleek and toned enough. That's not what this is about.  The fear, I think, comes from something else. If you--- as a male ---have any particular sexual interests, anything not wholly vanilla, then there's always that fear of being unable to reveal them with any kind of safety. When you make the step from the bar table to the bed, you will have to finally tell a new lover what it is that you fancy. This is what I like, you'll say. Which is also saying This is what I am. And in that moment you're wholly vulnerable--- undefended against derision and mockery, against that look in a girl's eyes that says pathetic and disgusting.

This is a gendered thing, I think. It's simply not something I can imagine--- being male and looking at a girl with disgust when she tells you her fetishes or preferences. A lovely girl willing to come into one's bed--- and you'd mock her sexual interests? No. That's not something I can ever imagine doing, not something anyone male is likely to do.

But if you're male,  to express any non-vanilla interests is to take a very real risk. My Young Companions know that coming into my bed involves being with someone much older, and they know that there will be games that involve silk blindfolds and ice cubes and candle wax and riding crops. They've known that all along. But that's something that I do always present as a kind of abstraction, as something almost literary, as a chance to be part of a story, as something to be expected with an older lover, with a self-described roué. I haven't had to express anything that was too concrete, too fleshly....and at least the things I tell Young Companions that I want to do involve them and not me. What I tell them about are rituals that offer them literary pleasures. Those things are abstract enough to offer some kind of distancing from the words pathetic or disgusting.

I've known all my life that girls do talk amongst themselves. I have tried very hard to avoid any activities or needs or interests that can be turned into derision.  My own tastes run to the abstract and literary, and my Young Companions tend to be girls who are bookish.  Those things are a kind of defense.

The contemporary dating world is fraught and frightening. There's no question about that.  There's the ever-present fear of being found sexually contemptible and disgusting. A girl might be thought too slutty if she asserted certain desires, but to be male is always to risk being thought pathetic and disgusting. Those things are worse--- or have worse consequences. I've always thought of myself as sexually open, as adventurous, as open to experimentation. I'm not sure the risks are worth it these days.  Having any fetishes, any particular or non-vanilla needs or desires, lays you open to being thought contemptible. Yes, I think pathetic is found far worse than slutty, if we're weighing these things on a contemporary scale.

The step from table to bed, the moment when you have to say that you like these things--- the level of risk here in 2014 is higher than it was twenty years ago, and the level of fear is higher whenever you need to explain or justify yourself. Sexual experimentation, sexual tastes, sexual fetishes--- the whole thing becomes ever more terrifying. Looking at a new lover and waiting to see derision in her eyes... That fear is always there, now.  Unless you're willing to stay well inside the lines of the most anodyne and inoffensively vanilla tastes, you can never admit to wanting anything particular. That's the way it works in contemporary dating. Never admit to what you might really like. Whatever happens, admit nothing, ask for nothing, try nothing. It's probably best, all things considered, to say nothing at all, to shut down your imagination or longings altogether.

Fifty-Five: Suspects

There are parts of the new culture that I find distasteful and cruel. The world of the gender warriors on line embodies what seems to be known as the "call out culture"---  a culture of deliberately and specifically "calling out" people for anything "problematic" they may have said or done. It's an arrogant culture, and one of bullying. "Calling out" is no more than bullying. It's about finding any perceived flaw in someone's writings or beliefs--- even the most minute or inadvertent vocabulary slip ---and attacking them with a full-on self-righteous fury. It's designed to enforce the most rigid ideological conformity, and it's intended to silence or drive away anyone who might disagree with the most ideologically pure faction. It's not new, of course. Marxist groups did it in the 1930s in Europe and America, and again in the New Left during the later 1960s. The Maoists in China made it into a ritual of criticism/self-criticism and self-immolation during the Cultural Revolution. I'm sure that the Jacobins did it, too, and radical Protestant groups during the Reformation. It's only and ever bullying, though. It's about finding even the tiniest flaw and then destroying or silencing someone.

The woman at the heart of the Dublin elevator scandal last year--- "Elevatorgate", it came to be called ---has apparently done an article wherein she asserted that no one who'd been drinking could ever give meaningful consent and that anyone who'd ever had sex with a partner who was drunk was guilty of rape.

This goes alongside another column I saw on line. Some woman from the Social Justice Mob "called out"--- by name ---a girl at the university they both attend. The author wrote that a male friend of hers had broken up with his long-term girlfriend, but had turned down offers from friends to set him up with someone or find him a girl who'd sleep with him to get him over his depression. He told friends that he only wanted sex in a long-term relationship. Then at a party one night, he took Ecstasy for the first time and ended up having one of those long, X-fueled conversations with a girl and ended up in bed with her. The author wrote about how this was a terrible thing, that she'd spent months convincing the guy that he'd been...raped. She called out the girl by name  in the column and ranted about how the girl had manipulated her helpless male friend and how the girl was no better than a frat dude-bro who violated an unconscious freshman girl. The girl, she insisted, should be punished--- not just thrown out of university, but prosecuted and jailed.

I have no idea what to say about these people and their attitudes. The ranting columnist is easier to deal with. It doesn't take very much in the way of cynicism to just raise an eyebrow and detect more than a hint of jealousy there. She wants to call in the lawyers and the SVU team? Hmmm... Is that because she lacked the nerve to seduce the boy herself? Beyond that, of course, the author knows nothing about Ecstasy. It's easy enough to recall the days when X (X, yes. It was only called E long after my day) was the club and party drug of choice, when long, intense conversations were the currency of the night. I remember how many conversations like that ended up in bed, for me and for others. If you're old enough, you'll remember the joke--- people on X announcing to a bar that "you're all my very best friends!"  The author made no showing that the girl who'd slept with the male friend had done anything other than talk and talk and end up in bed with the boy. She made no showing that the girl wasn't X-ing herself. Or even that the boy hadn't gone to the party after deciding that he did need someone, that maybe it was time to just take X and open himself up to something new. She took months hammering at the guy to admit that he'd been taken advantage of--- she was proud of getting him to see the light...or see things her way. There's no allowance in her story for the boy's point of view, or for the thought that maybe he went home with the girl because of the X, yes, but that he'd taken the X to help him be able to go home with someone.

As for the Elevatorgate woman, well... Her assertion is, well, fanatical and foolish. Can she possibly be serious? Is everyone who's had sex with a partner who'd been drinking a rapist? Can she be serious? If she is, well...how many million people out there are now declared to be rapists? If she's serious about that, then...well...I'll join the ranks of multiple offenders. All through my youth and my university days, some very high percentage of the girls I took to bed had been drinking or taking party drugs. I had, too, of course. In those days, if memory serves,  drinking was regarded as key to any courtship or mating rituals at my university. Girls drank so that they could have an excuse for going home with boys they'd met at parties or at clubs. Boys and girls both drank to lose their insecurities and inhibitions. To go home with someone, to go to bed with someone, while sober was regarded where I went to university as a serious statement, as something that had serious implications about a relationship. In those days, to get drunk a bit and make out at a party or go home with someone was a kind of free pass. It couldn't be held against your reputation, and it wasn't regarded as being something that counted the next day.

I suppose the Social Justice Mob dislike the idea of sex fueled by X or vodka not so much because of the issue of consent, really, but because those things made it easier to have sex just out of desire and play rather than sex being seen as something fraught with ideological meaning.

The columnist called out the girl who took the columnist's male friend to bed as being overtly a rapist.  Called her out by name, which in this case is inexcusable and vile. The Elevatorgate woman called out--- what? Everyone who'd ever had drinks with someone before taking them to bed. I have no idea what to make of it, really. The gender warriors want sex to be stripped of anything that might be thought of as play and ritual, of anything that allows people to let go of inhibitions and insecurities. It's not even danger that concerns them, really. What enrages them is that there might be some area of life that isn't all about fevered structural analysis, or where pleasure itself trumps ideology.

I hate that, and I hate "calling out". Oh, yes, if the Elevatorgate woman has her way, then I'm a multiple offender, just waiting for the SVU enforcers to arrive. If she has her way, then almost everyone from the last couple of generations can be indicted as evil agents of rape culture and the patriarchy. She can call out a whole world--- meaning that she can assert her own moral superiority and enforce her own ideological agenda over and against the morally corrupt rest of the world.

Forty-One: Mornings

I think back to mornings when I did awaken next to a lovely young companion. The places change--- dorm rooms, apartments, hotel rooms ---but the moment is the same. There's that grey-violet pre-dawn colour to the light, and there's that sense of stillness in the room. I've always liked those moments, liked seeing my young companion's bare back half-draped by the sheet, liked the way her hair falls across bare shoulders. Watching a lover sleep is one of the more romantic images out there. And I've always leaned across to brush my lips over one shoulder or one hip and--- often ---awakened my young companion with caresses and kisses. Lovers have done that for me, too, awakened me with mouth or fingers, brought me up out of sleep and into lovemaking. That's always been part of mornings-after for me. Last night's sex becomes morning sex, and a prelude to showers and coffee and brunch. My practice has always been to offer up that dawnlight caress, the kiss on the spine or the edge of a hipbone, to begin the morning-after as an extension of the night-before. I've begun mornings-after that way for a lifetime. I'm told that that's no longer romance. It's all supposedly evil--- and probably illegal in certain countries. It's clearly enough to find oneself regarded by a whole faction of gender wars types as a monster. I've no idea how matters have come to this.

I've always been someone who talks during sex. I tell stories, and I encourage my young companions to tell me stories as well. This is who we are for the night, these are the masks we're wearing, these are the things we're doing and the films we're living inside. I talk during sex, and of course all seductions are about talking, about words. It's stories that I want from my young companions, too. I want us to construct worlds for each other, to be inside our own novel, our own film.

That's romance, of course--- creating and sharing a fantasy. My reading of certain writers and columnists these days is that the kinds of talk I share with lovers doesn't count, and may only be a screen for evil.

There's a disdain for seduction out there in the culture, and there's a disdain for silence, too. There are writers (and perhaps legislators or would-be legislators) who believe that silence should never be part of sex.

I've never overriden a No; I've never thought of ignoring a No. But those dawn-lit mornings are now regarded not as part of a shared world but as a battlefield or a tense negotiation between hostile states. Is it even not-evil to look at a sleeping companion and see beauty or feel lust? Are we quite to that part yet?    

When next a lovely, long-legged young companion shares my bed, I will want there to be morning-after sex. I'll hope that the morning-after there in bed will begin with kisses and caresses. The morning-after thing that's always there to be said is just, "Hey, you..." That's an acknowledgment that we're there, and that this bed and this hour are still part of what we created the night before. I refuse to regard awakening a lover with touch and kisses and drifting into lovemaking as evil. I refuse to give up the idea of mornings-after as a kind of dreamworld.

Nineteen: A Walk In The Morning Light

There's a small kerfluffle around the web today about an ad from an "upmarket" chain called Harvey Nichols. The ad is simple enough. It shows various girls coming home in last night's party dresses on what's now known as the Walk of Shame. The point of the ad is that in a Harvey Nichols dress, you'll look both fashionable enough to be out at night but still elegant and professional enough to pass as in daytime attire--- thus avoiding the Walk of Shame look. It's a reasonably cute ad, but it has drawn fire both for what's now called "slut shaming" and for "class privilege". The second claim does perplex me, and I'm not sure how its proponents justify it, or just what privilege it is to shop at Harvey Nichols.

There is a difference between the dawn walk home for males and females. That much is true. I've walked home from young companions' apartments in the morning in last night's clothes, but I've never thought of it as a Walk of Shame. I'm more likely to think of it as a kind of victory march, and I'm likely to recite Housman to myself: Soldier from the wars returning, spoiler of the taken town.... I will add here that the victory isn't over the young girl I've left sleeping in her bed. The victory is over time and fate and entropy. Walking home with a jacket over my shoulder and a tie stuffed into a pocket, I do feel like I've won something, or proven something. But never at my young companion's expense. The goodbye kiss as I left her bedroom for city streets was heartfelt and had no small amount of thank-you to it. Walking home, what I feel is elation. If the world and all the passers-by can tell that I'm returning from a lovely girl's bed, all the better. I've defied time and age and social expectations, and I've been given a whole nested set of gifts: pleasure, certainly, and a sense of renewed life and potential.

I'm usually at coffeehouses early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and there's always a steady inflow of Walk of Shame girls at the ones near the university--- hungover, tired, often carrying last night's stiletto heels. I can understand why they're walking. It's a close neighbourhood, bars and clubs and undergraduate apartments all together. (I've never understood girls having to do the Walk of Shame in places like London or New York; you'd think last night's partner would have the grace to offer cab fare.) I'm often amused by the girls--- who avoids her friends' eyes, who sits with other returning girls to share stories or commiserate, who's too hungover to do more than try not to go face down on the table. Amused, but never contemptuous. That's a distinction worth making. I enjoy watching them and inferring stories, but I don't feel contempt. I do feel envy, of course, the standard male wish that one girl or another had been in my bed last night. And there's always the fact that last night's party dress may be delightfully revealing in morning light. I can't deny that, and I'd never think of denying it. I will always turn the Male Gaze onto youth and beauty. But there's never contempt or derision. Why would there be?

Well, I still don't understand the "class privilege" attack on the Harvey Nichols ad. The remnants of the class system in Britain are as mysterious as ever the older system was. Is it only that the dresses sold there are expensive? I'll leave that for readers' comments. I will just say that I like seeing Walk of Shame girls--- though I certainly have no interest in shaming them. And while I think of my own dawnlight returns as a small Roman triumph, there's no reason at all why a lovely girl shouldn't stride home with her own sense of victory.