Three Eight Five: Fears

 This isn't a podcast, and so I don't have guests to interview. That may or may not be a good thing. I'm not sure how I'd go about acquiring guests for a podcast, and I'm too far away from any major metropolis to have a deep pool of potential guests in any case. I can't think that any FMTY girls would be willing to be an interview subject, and of course the same holds true for any authors or scholars.

I have however been having long conversations with an old (and older) friend. We've known each other for decades now, and I've come to be the person he goes to when he needs a listener. What he's really longing for is the chance to be a classical Freudian analysand, but that's too expensive a thing, and these days classical Freudian analysts are hard to come by. He would, he says, settle for a Lacanian analyst, but those are only found in Paris and Buenos Aires, and he hates to travel.

My friend signs all his letters (and he is a devotee of the dying art of letter writing) as "Sir Francis Meerkat"-- a wonderful name, but one whose semiotics I haven't unpacked. I'll call him "Sir Francis", though. I sign my own letters with my actual name, by the way...though these days the closing of my letters is always the Targaryen "Fire and Blood". And why not? 

In any case, Sir Francis has had a recent birthday, and he's been agonizing over it for months. It was a zero-year birthday, and Sir Francis is terrified. He doesn't, he says, know how to be a septuagenarian. There's no checklist, no set of rules for him to follow. I can understand that. Life is always better with a checklist. I've stood in front of classes and improvised ninety-minute lectures, but I'm a post-modernist of the old school, and having a list (no matter how random the bullet points seem) is a key part of life. So I can understand Sir Francis' fear about that...and, yes, about age and mortality as well. That's all understandable.

He's afraid of women, mind you, and he's become something of a misogynist over the years, even though he despises incels on aesthetic and political grounds. Years of reading semi-scholarly books on evolutionary psychology and anthropology have given him distinctly misogynist tendencies. I've told him that he's walking disproof of the old saying that no one was ever ruined by a book. He loves classical Freudianism for its Oedipal structures and he wants to do a Freudian analysis, but he reads lots and lots of Jung (and far too much Lacan), and reading Jung is as dangerous for someone like Sir Francis as reading Nietzsche is for undergraduate males.

He and I have long phone conversations where he calls to tell me that his flat is in an area populated by what he always calls "beautiful lesbian vampires" who are waiting to tear out his soul...and this has nothing to do with either writing a screenplay or creating awkward metaphors. It's a literal belief and a literal fear.

He does tell me over and over about how bitter he is over his lack of sexual success when he was in high school...which must be fifty-odd years ago now. Sexual success in high school would've meant that he had some social status. It would've meant that even if he wasn't given status for anything academic, he'd still have had status among his male peers. 

I'm never quite sure how to take that. My own high school years weren't pleasant, and I didn't have a great deal of sexual success-- there was some, but not a lot. Status among other males might've been useful, but I spent four years in high school planning and striving to go to university far, far away from my hometown. Whatever I was looking for would be found a thousand miles away, and I knew that. Where I grew up meant very, very little to me. That suburb still means very, very little to me. I'm not about to agonize over things that happened long ago and far away.

Sir Francis Meerkat also tells me that he's given up on any physical contact with women. He's terrified of being seen naked, and he's terrified of, well, gastric upsets. He's utterly terrified of being with a woman and realizing while undressing that he's had...problems. Does he have something like Crohn's Disease? No-- not to my knowledge. But he says he won't go to dinner with a date in case-- just in case--he has to dash to the bathroom. He obsesses over eating cartons of steamed white rice in an effort to seal such problems away.  

I can understand body fear. I'm not especially comfortable having my body seen by a lover. There are easy and obvious things I can be judged on. But I tell myself that by the time we've reached the point where we're undressing, a young companion knows what I'm like and what I very probably look like under my clothes. No girl in all these years has ever pointed and laughed or made a face in disgust. That does mean something. I tell myself that, and it does provide comfort. Sir Francis, though...Sir Francis tells me that he'd rather stay home in the dark than have a woman see him and judge him. It's all, he says, about assortative mating and sexual hierarchy. I'm becoming very, very tired of the term "assortative mating". 

He hasn't reached the Red Pill level yet. Even if his disdain for incels and Manosphere types is based purely on aesthetics, that has at least kept him from doing Red Pill things. 

Nonetheless, I can sympathize with his fears. They do derive from fear of age and mortality, and we all fear those things.  Of course...sympathy isn't agreement, and I do find his constant agonizing and bitterness exhausting. 

If I did have a podcast, I'd be telling lots of stories about Sir Francis. I'd probably read out passages from Jung or Lacan or some evo-psych monograph (maybe even from "The Red Lamp of Incest", one of his longstanding favorites) and ask him to comment and just let him go. He'd spin out hours of tales and rants. Hours, yes. Many hours.

I do have my own fears, but I tell myself that at least I'm not Sir Francis. Which is rather comforting to know.

Three Two Three: Mediation

 I have noted this before, but I take very little direct physical pleasure in...well...anything.

That's not just a statement about sex. It applies across my life, to pleasures both sensuous and sensual. It applies to food and wine and travel as well as to sex. 

I do not experience direct pleasure. I have never really have, or at least not since early childhood. Everything I do is mediated.

I had a new single-malt whiskey at lunch today. The whiskey itself was a recommendation, and one that was much appreciated. It's not that I didn't like the whiskey-- it's not that at all. It was everything I could've hoped: deliciously peaty, with just a hint of something like sea salt.  I sat at the bar and sipped at my drink and realized that I was abstractly aware of the taste and the scent, but that what I was focused on wasn't the whiskey in my glass. What I was thinking of, what meant something to me was the idea of what I was drinking. I was imagining being inside a novel or a film, imagining where and how and with whom my character would be having a drink. What mattered wasn't the drink. What mattered was the story I was living inside.

It's been like that with sex, too. It's been like that with sex all my life. Sex is only good for me when I can turn it into a scene in a novel or a film. Whatever it feels like in the here-and-now, whatever physical sensations I'm experiencing--- those things aren't important. I want to please my partner, yes. But I can't say that I feel very much-- if anything --physical myself. What I'm focused on is the setting and the symbols. Where we are, how the girl I'm with has been dressed... I'm focused on how my character in a novel or a film would be having sex, on what the backstory would be.

Sex for me has been something that matters in terms of social validation, in terms of being part of the kind of story I'd want for my character in a film or novel. The setting matters, and costumes matter, because those things help shape the story. They help define the class and social markers for what I'm doing. 

I have never been able to just be a body experiencing pleasure. Is this part of a good story? Is this a story that puts me into a better world, into a better social and class and style milieu? Those things matter. Touches on skin matter only insofar as they're part of a story, part of something happening in a better world, to the better character I want to be. Sex has always been a way of getting outside my body and into a different, better world and life.

I suppose I should note that I don't have sex in pursuit of orgasms. I very rarely have them-- almost never. Now I've told myself that not having orgasms can be a useful thing. No girl can accuse me of being one of those men who's over-and-done in two minutes. They may be able to accuse me of seeming distracted or distanced, but never of finishing too early. I'll also note that men can in fact fake orgasms. It's not difficult to do if you're inside a girl.  I'd never want my partner to think that she couldn't make me reach orgasm. (What does it say about me that I couldn't write "...that she couldn't make me cum"? I have never liked "cum" as a word; I can only write "reach orgasm".) I can fake orgasm to show that I'm enjoying myself with my partner, but I'm far too busy thinking about what I'm doing as a scene in a novel to feel anything physical.

This is true about having sex or drinking good wine-- everything is mediated through the prism of what kind of story it would make. It's true about travel, too. A new city or a new experience in a city or place can only mean something to me if I imagine it as a chapter in someone's travel memoir. Walking through a new city isn't about the city or about what I'm seeing, hearing,  experiencing. It's about whether this is the kind of experience a favourite travel writer might have. The same is true about sex. If I'm sliding a hand along a girl's bare thigh while we drive,  what matters isn't the warmth and sleekness of tanned, silken-smooth flesh, it's comparing this to a scene in something like "Story of O" or the two "Emmanuelle" novels and trying to make sure that what I'm doing and feeling is as good as a scene in the book. 

It gets harder and harder to experience anything directly with a partner, and it gets harder to feel anything that isn't a reflection of a book or a film. I don't have orgasms with a partner, and I'm not about to risk the Solitary Vice in a world where male sexual fantasies are regarded as pathetic and/or creepy. 

I can live inside my head-- that's something I've done most of my life.  But it is a melancholy thing that no matter much I like a whiskey or a lovely, long-legged Comparative Lit co-ed  I can't feel anything like pleasure. Pleasure for me exists only as a symbol. 

Two Nine Nine: Tasks

 Tonight is a midsummer night where I feel a sense of foreboding and a sense of exhaustion and hopelessness. There are things in my daily life that are going very badly this summer--- even beyond this endless Red Death season of quarantines and limbo ---and there's also a sense of impending mortality. 

Last time I wrote here, I wrote about preludes, about wondering how affairs and encounters and adventures begin. Those things have always intrigued me--- how and when people make the decision to have sex, or to have a particular kind of sex, or to have sex with a particular person. I've lost any real sense of those things. I've no sense any longer of how these things happen, and it gets harder and harder to imagine being part of those decisions.

I can't recall tonight whether it was Sophocles or Aeschylus who gave thanks to the gods for freeing him from desire--- a cruel taskmaster ---in old age. Sophocles, I think. You're free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think it was Sophocles.  I'm not sure tonight what to make of the saying. Desire can be a cruel master, no question about that. And it's ever more cruel as one grows older and watches desire fade.

At some point, desire becomes a mockery. You know that you're no longer thought of as entitled to feel desire, let alone find any satisfaction. At some point, acting on desire, even feeling desire, makes you an object of derision. 

It's easy tonight to think that I've run out of time for desire, run out of time to have desires. 

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

I keep thinking that my usual haunts have less and less appeal for me. There seems to be less and less reason to be out. Certainly flirting with lovely girls at small bistros seems to be something I have less and less social standing to do. And I can't really decide whether that's based on fear of being mocked or treated with derision or on fear of being seen to fail at desire. 

I do walk through downtown on summer evening--- properly masked, mind you, here in the time of the Red Death ---and think of myself as a ghost. I will not, now or ever after, look at myself in a mirror or allow myself to be photographed. I certainly won't look any photos of myself.  I walk along not looking into shop windows, not going in to any of the few places open, and knowing that I'm less and less likely to be speaking to anyone again. I've spent my life telling stories, flirting, trying to be an interesting figure there on the edge of things. Those parts of the story seem to have come to an end.

Desire drives, desire obsesses. We know that. But seeing desire fade away is a cruel set of moments.

Two Seven Three: Hearts

The weekend began with Valentine's Day. In other circumstances, in other worlds, that might've been a good thing.

Of course, for those of us who were solitary at Valentine's, there was that nagging sense of social failure--- failing at one of those arbitrary but nonetheless important social expectations. Being solitary on Valentine's leaves a dull, heavy sense of failure around one's neck. However manufactured the holiday itself is,  the sense of failure remains. No partner, no one taking part with you in the rituals of romance, no formalized and formal kisses.

Throughout Valentine's Day, there were social media posts by women announcing that, for them, V-Day stood for Vibrator Day and not Valentine's Day. Girls I knew via social media posted entries saying that their vibrators were fully-charged and ready, and that they would be their own lovers that night, that Lelo had given them the ability to find pleasure alone--- pleasure that was certain, authentic, and probably more intense than they could find with a date. Vibrator Day as a meme was passed along from girl to girl, and they cheered each other along.

Needless to say, that's not an attitude anyone male can have. Any male announcing that he would be celebrating Solitary Vice Day in lieu of a partner would've been mocked mercilessly as pathetic or creepy. It's simply a social fact. No one male can indulge in the Solitary Vice and be regarded as doing anything positive. The Solitary Vice, for males, is always a sign of failure and lack of social value. Only sad losers or creepy perverts indulge in the Solitary Vice, and anyone male doing that deserves shame and mockery.

The girls whose social media posts I was reading chatted back and forth about their favourite vibrators and discussed their performance stats--- USB chargeable! longer battery life! perfect texture! choice of colours! Most, just as a note seemed to favour models by Lelo--- apparently the brand of choice for hip, educated twenty-something girls all over North America and the Anglosphere. There's no male equivalent for that, of course. No males at social media were discussing the relative merits of different artificial vaginas. No males at social media were discussing which make or model of inflatable doll was best. No one was saying that he had photographs of favourite actresses or models to tape onto his choice of doll--- at least no one not at some dark web site for wannabe serial killers was saying that. (See how easy it is to instantly assign mockery and contempt to any male admissions concerning the Solitary Vice?)

Years and years ago, I did see a Seventies horror film where the creepy male main character had some kind of doll that he'd fill with water. He'd tape photographs of girls he'd stalked onto the doll's face and have sex with it. At the climactic moment he'd inject a syringe full of blood (his own? some hapless victim's?) into the doll, and he'd have some version of orgasm while the blood swirled through the water in the doll. The film was, I think, from sometime in the early 1970s; it may have been called "Private Parts". In any case, the film was a perfect depiction of social attitudes regarding any male who indulges in the Solitary Vice. The film was disturbing enough when I watched it a lifetime ago, and the memory of it still leaves me deeply uncomfortable and shamed.

Socially, males can't admit to any need for solitary pleasure, and the act itself is regarded as shameful and some mix of sad, disgusting, and risible. This is something one simply has to accept. Even phone sex or chat sex with a lover is regarded as pathetic and shameful, and webcam sex is regarded as obviously shameful and easily-mocked, at least for any male participant. On a day devoted to the social rituals of romance--- or on any other day of the year ---you are socially policed against admitting that you need to give yourself pleasure. Pleasure for anyone male must come from external validation--- being seen in public with a lover, having a lover make time for you in her life and bed. There's no male equivalent for "empowerment" by solitary pleasure, and there's certainly no acceptable way for anyone male to pursue pleasure for its own sake rather than pleasure that's set by arbitrary social rules.

One Three Eight: Fears

I'll put this out to you, wherever you are. If you're reading this, take a moment and leave a comment with your answer.

I'm interested--- I really am.

Tell me what you're afraid of.

No--- not spiders or clowns or mysterious robot insects writhing under your skin.

Not those things at all.

I've been writing here for the last few years about things sexual--- sex itself, sex as a concept, sex as a battleground in the gender wars, sex as aesthetics. But always about sex and its derivatives and social grounding. So that much should be obvious. Tell me about sex--- sex and what you're afraid of.

I'm a gentleman of a certain age. I do define myself as an aging roué.  My own fears begin with those things. I'll certainly admit that. Age and entropy and decay. I live with all the fears of anyone male of a certain age. Hair falling out, eyes and teeth going bad,  my body--- my companion in so many campaigns ---turning on me. It's not all about performance failure, though that is a key fear.  I'm afraid of my body these days--- not just of performance failure, but afraid of being inside it, and certainly afraid of letting anyone see it or be near it. Sometimes it is hard to see even a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Sometimes I think I smell of death, or of something worse. I'm afraid these days of what a young companion would discover if she touched my flesh with fingers or lips.

Those are my fears these days.

Tell me about yours. What terrifies you more--- death or the mirror? What leaves you more paralyzed with shame and fear---- what you might see in a potential lover's eyes or what you might see if you examined your body all on your own? What fears do you have when you think of love and romance or of being next to someone else in bed?

Tell me what goes through your mind on nights like this.

Thirty-One: Originals

Judith Butler famously described gender as "a copy for which there is no original". Gender is now described as purely a performance. One does one's gender.

I'm fond of the phrase--- "a copy for which there is no original" ---though not because I'm fond of Dr. Butler and her work. I like the phrase just for itself. It's wonderfully Borgesian, and I'll always like for that reason alone, without relating it to Butler's ideas of gender. How can you not be fascinated by something that's a copy with no original?

I know that I perform a role when I'm with young companions. The Older Admirer, the gentleman, the figure who talks about books and ideas while flirting. I can do that without thinking; there's no difference between mask and face.

Now I will admit that I don't always feel so secure in being simply male, in performing that role. I suppose no one male ever does. Being male, being "a man" is about being judged and accepted both by other males and by desirable women. There's no definitive moment when you're given the title, and it's never once for all. The criteria change over time and across societies, but every society has them. I suppose there's something inevitable there. There's no clearly physical moment to become a man, no menarche or childbirth. It's something that has to be shown over and over. It can't be achieved; it can only be lost.

I do think about that. A sense of social recognition as "a man" is always temporary, and no one keeps it into his later years. Age takes away all the things that enable you to have that temporary victory. The list of criteria here in this decade and this culture isn't long; you can't miss more than one or two.

I suppose I'm a bit gloomy tonight. I have been reading about what gender is about, and I've been following discussions on the web about what it means to be male, about what it implies--- and requires. I have been thinking about mortality and about the sense of possibilities being foreclosed.  I'll go on performing as long as I can. There's really no choice about that.