Two Nine Two: Procedures

I was looking through Alexander Maksik's "You Deserve Nothing" yesterday evening--- a rather powerful teacher-student romance. Yes, I know, we're not supposed to read those any more, or consider teacher-student romances as anything other than nonconsensual and exploitative. I rather like the genre, or at least the possibilities in the genre. I've been fortunate, too, in knowing girls who've been attracted to the same set of fantasies and have been willing to construct scenes in the genre with me.

My lovely friend in Montreal always told me that she'd gone to McGill as an undergraduate specifically to have affairs with older and knowledgeable men. She wanted to be someone's dangerous muse. The problem, she told me, was that she didn't know the procedures involved.  If she found an older admirer, how was the affair supposed to progress? Who was supposed to make the first move? What were the recognized ways in which she could make it clear that she was available as muse and mentee and bedmate? What she needed, she said, was a checklist. Or at least access to a covey (coven?) of co-eds who shared her tastes and could impart secret knowledge to her.  She showed me her notebooks with drafts of checklists she'd assembled, largely based on novels like Maksik's "You Deserve Nothing" and lots of memoirs by young female French writers who had tales of affairs with teachers and professors. She was--- and is ---like me in some things: checklists and rituals always matter.

Levin told me that the affair with her painting instructor had opened exactly like she'd expected it to--- lots of long conversations about art, lots of tales over coffee at the student union about the man's past in the art world, eventually a flask of vodka in the painting studio one night. She said that she was used to boys at school who never knew how to ask anything directly, and when her professor looked at her that first night and casually asked, "Why aren't you naked yet?" she just laughed and pulled off her singlet.  What she liked, she said, was that he had a whole checklist of his own in his head: things to do with and to her, places to do things in, a list of things to show her. She liked it when he asked her to model for him--- that was so very clearly supposed to be a sign that he wanted her for more than just a night or two ---and she knew that it was a sign that she was doing well.

Liberty was always a direct girl, and her procedure was to just ask for whatever she wanted.  She ended up in that sleeping bag with her instructor on that kayak trip by just asking, by putting down the joint she was smoking by the campfire and asking him if he wanted her to ride him or wanted her on bottom. That's the same kind of directness she'd used at sixteen with the kayak store owner. I admired her directness--- admired her ability to just be direct. Her own set of procedures worked on me, mind you. I liked watching her take charge of starting the affair. That first night at the oyster bar when we met, we'd talked for a while and then she very casually asked if she'd be sleeping over at my flat after she got off.

Sometimes these days I think that I've lost my own ability to work through a checklist or even know where I am among the items. I miss the sense of self-confidence that Liberty had, and I miss thinking that I had the ability to craft the checklist points and guide a young companion down the list: places, positions, discussions, games. I miss the idea that a lovely girl could intuit the key checklist points and enjoy the idea of ritual and procedure.

One night during their affair, her painting instructor painted on Levin herself--- outlining her areolae and nipples in blue, tracing red along the sharp lines of her hipbones. She told me that she'd had a hard time not laughing--- that he was willing to be playful rather than simply mentor-mentee with her meant that he trusted in her not to mock him after he'd put some of his authority aside. I do like that image.

Liberty I'm sure knew that I wanted to do certain things in certain places with lovers, and she was willing to work my list with me so long as I understood that she was someone who liked simple, direct questions and straightforward answers.

I suppose I could leave examples of a checklist here, but somehow I don't feel quite comfortable or safe doing that.  Lists tell others what you want, what you desire, what you think you need. That's information that's never safe to have lying about.  It's so easy to be mocked for those things, whatever they might be.  And it's just no longer simple to ask anyone to work through a list with you, even if you're more than willing to work through hers with her.

I suppose it's harder, too, to know what you should put on the list--- harder to know what you actually do want.

Two Eight Four: Lithography

I'm thinking tonight of a girl from my past, from far back in the last age. She and I knew knew each other casually when I was at grad school, and there was a brief affair back in my clubland days.

Her name was Levin, and I did like that name. I can't recall how she ended up with the name. I've known posh families who gave daughters first names that were family names--- a girl might end up with her mother's maiden name. That explained the Schuylers and Mackenzies and Hunters that I knew at university. Levin's name may have come from that. But there's also "Anna Karenina", isn't there? Remember that Kitty and Levin were the other couple, the couple of whom Tolstoy approved. I suppose that back in those days I'd have hoped she was named after a character in "Anna Karenina", even if the name came from a male character. I'll note that I've always liked androgynous names on lovely girls. You're free to make of that what you will.

Levin was doing fine arts at the university here--- lithography. She was five-four or five-five, I think. Pixie-cut blonde hair,  very slender, tanned.  I can't recall the colour of her eyes, though I want to say blue or green.  Soft voice, I recall. She'd learned Portuguese at uni and spent a year studying there. She had a signature look, I remember: white singlet, skinny jeans, ankle bracelet, espadrilles. Sometimes cotton drawstring trousers.  She bought the singlets in packs of three, sized for young boys. Always worn next to the skin, of course. I laughed with her about air-conditioning and how she was always the girl with erect nipples.  She had a barbell piercing in her right nipple--- the first girl I'd ever seen with one.

I remember her rooms at university--- sketches and lithographs tacked to the wall, the smell of chemicals from the lithography process. No idea whatever happened to her, though I think she wanted to go out West. I do remember sitting on her sofa and watching her work on her sketch journals (was the brand Pentalic?) and drinking vodka-limes with her. I wish I'd kept some of the sketches she gave me.

Levin always told me that she liked my bookshelves and liked it that I'd listen to her talk about art. She had good tastes in music, I thought. We both liked New Wave and synth-driven dance music, and we spent more than a few nights dancing at the local clubs near the university. I can remember standing behind her on the balcony at a place called Options on spring and summer nights, arms around her, kissing her shoulders, feeling her press back into me, knowing that she was all bare flesh under charcoal linen drawstring trousers.

It was a brief affair, and casual.  There was a time back in the last age when it was still possible to have casual affairs. I'm not sure that people-- at least people under thirty --have affairs any longer. And from what I'm reading in late-Millennial and Gen-Z literature, sex in these later days seems to be more about apologies than passion. Anyway--- Levin and I had a few months together off-and-on and parted friends. We even had goodbye drinks when she went off to do an MFA on the other side of the continent. We spent a last night together in her empty rooms on a tree-lined street, her art supplies all in boxes. I remember that her wardrobe all fitted into a couple of duffel bags. She'd be leaving the next day with her whole life in the backseat of a compact car. I did give her a couple of my  shirts as a goodbye gift, along with a couple of sketch journals (if not Pentalic, what was the brand?). That wasn't a bad way to part. I kept the sketches she'd done for me for rather a while; I think I had a favourite framed.  The sketch was one of a bedroom with light coming in through French windows. The room was one we'd rented one weekend in a city known for wrought iron balconies and genteel decay. I always told her that the city outside those windows could've been Alexandria or Charleston or Lisbon.  There was a hint of someone on the bed, and she told me to imagine it was her, face down over the bed, looking out to the city while I took her from behind. I did like that, liked the idea that she'd turned that hint of shadow on the bed into something I'd remember.

Levin is easy to remember tonight--- kisses on her ankle bracelet, kisses on that nipple piercing (still shocking in those days), Pet Shop Boys playing and her hands always smelling of lithography chemicals. I've reached the time in my life when I spend time remembering girls from the last age, when melancholy becomes the dominant mode in my thoughts. Easy enough to remember Levin's hipbones and ankles and the pale gold fuzz on her upper thighs. Easy enough to remember a time when art and desire and the taste of vodka-lime all went together.

So let's think of that tonight, and a couple of lines from Cavafy:

These things are all so very old---
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.

Two Seven Seven: Threads 11

A few more stories from my archives, from memories of long ago loves...

The girl in these notes was a co-ed at McGill in those days, a fiercely bright and lovely blonde girl, Polish and French, who styled herself on line after Nabokov's Ginny McCoo. She liked the idea, of being "the alternative nymphet", the alternative story in "Lolita". We both liked that idea, mind you. I wrote her part of a short story once, about Nabokov's Ginny McCoo at nineteen, a co-ed at Barnard at the start of the 1950s, a girl with a cane and the trace of a limp, a girl studying French lit and seeking out her own older lover. Ginny--- my Ginny ---loved that and told me that we must write a novel-length version of it some day.

I don't know where she is these days, my Miss Ginny. When last I heard from her, she was preparing to defend her doctoral thesis--- on the idea of exile in the works of Nabokov and Mavis Gallant ---and thinking of running off to Vancouver or London. I miss her desperately.

I once wrote her to tell her about a girl I saw on a bus here, a girl I sighed over one summertime Saturday morning. Miss Ginny replied to say that

Darling,

I did find the description of the girl on the bus (Deepest South, tanned legs, iPod) incredibly erotic. I think I may have replaced the bus setting with a train. That's very Japanese, isn't it? The other passengers read their papers, airport fiction paperbacks etc while you seduce the Deepest South girl. I have visualized this in my head. It's unbearably erotic. The iPod figures in this as well. Why would a Deepest South girl be so alluring? It's an abstract thing I can't put into words but there is the divide between us...she's miniskirts or shorts and Baby Tees and Mall Shopping and slightly vacant. There's something about the long, slender, darkly tanned legs. Perhaps it's the carefree nature of youth. In the Deepest South, girls still prize tans. Elsewhere, this would be slightly vulgar perhaps. But these girls still cultivate tans with baby oil. I think so, anyways. It's like smoking - there's a carefree decadence about it that only the youthful can enjoy.

That next winter she sent me a wonderful email one morning:

On your recommendation, I went to class panty-free a few days ago. Not denim (too cold in the Ice Block That Is Canuckia) - I wore wool checked (boy's style) trousers... although I must  admit I was terribly worried that the zipper might come down when I was least expecting it.

And that, I assure you, was a wonderful thing to find  before I went off to my office.

I once wrote her to ask

If you and I were ever out for drinks or at a party, and I tended to address you not just as "darling" (my usual form of address to lovely companions) but as "darling incestuous sibling" in a languid 1920s voice...how would you respond? 

Her reply was simple enough:

I think that would be a fun party trick...we would certainly scandalize our fellow party goers. There's a beautiful scene in a film by Bertolucci (Novacento, I think) in which the decadent 20s socialite rides a white horse in a forest named "Cocaine" - gift from her rich and decadent uncle.

Miss Ginny loved the idea of being transformed into a beautiful boy and being swept away by a very wealthy, literate, and wicked older man. She wrote me about that one night--

I've always been boyish, darling...one evening you will have to cut off my long locks and give me an impromptu pixie cut. Turn me into a Beautiful Boy for you. I'll wear a neck tie and a school boy's shorts, if you like.

I've always liked slender, lithe, lovely girls in neckties and Borsalinos and man-tailored jackets. How could I not like playing gender games with Miss Ginny?

She used to sign her letters and emails to me as "Your Incestuous Sibling" or "Your Euro-Film Correspondent". She would lie back in my arms and watch 1960s French and East European films with me. I do hope, very much hope, that she's Dr. Ginny these days, wherever she might be.

Two Seven Six: Threads 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Five Six: Threads

I need to find more essay topics for this blog.

When I first started writing here, I wanted to devote myself to writing about issues of sex and its social penumbra here in these latter days. I wanted to write essays about what sex, romance, and all the associated rituals were like nowadays. My idea was to write as myself, as a gentleman of a Certain Age looking at the new world. I wanted to do social commentary, or at least record my own thoughts about things. I'd hoped when I began that I might attract comments and responses and find interlocutors with whom I could have long, rambling discussions about the subjects in my posts.

I still hope for that--- for followers and civil yet in-depth discussions. But I need new essay topics. My hope is that lovely readers will offer up suggestions, that they'll suggest things I might write about. Over the last three years we've all moved away from writing about sex and romance and begun writing about the nightmare of American and global politics. I can understand that: we live in a nightmare time. Yet sex and romance do still exist, and they remain as major topics in people's lives. So I hope that my readers out over the aether will leave suggestions. What should I write about? Are there books, articles, films, events that should become the topics of essays here? I am open to suggestions.

There are still stories that I want to use here, to save here, things I want to remember. There are stories that follow a classic narrative arc--- stories whose endings I know, stories I can see as a story. And there are stories whose full arc I'll never know, whose endings remain elusive. Let's look at a couple. The first one is something a friend wrote me four or five years ago.

The guy with the yacht was Jonny. He lived on his boat at the marina. I really liked him, and wanted him to be an 'official boyfriend'. He was smart and funny and cute. He had a science degree, and had worked all over the world as a boat builder. I desperately wanted things to work out between us, and at the time really thought he would make a great partner (maybe this was just compared to the other men in my recent past). But...he did have a few issues -- alcohol abuse, depression. He drove his car into the harbour in a suicide attempt a year or so after we broke up/stopped sleeping together. He was ok, but got sent to the psych ward and charged with dangerous driving. We are still friends and catch up for coffee now and then and I only want the best for him. 

We went on a few sailing trips together - down to the Sounds, each time in the summer. The Cook Strait crossing was a bit rough for me at some parts. But it was beautiful...we saw lots of dolphins, and it was just incredible to be out on the open water. Two of the trips we booked a house to stay at, and one trip we slept on the yacht. He loved going down on me, and was fucking good at it. For years after I wished we had become something more, and I was convinced I could have helped him. But I think sometimes you just have to help yourself and let people go.

She noted that on New Year's Day of 2013 she'd woken up in bed with him on his boat, and that four months later he'd tried to kill himself. I'm trying to decide if the story is a sad one. She ran into him again last year--- discovered he was project managing the renovation of a big house in her new neighbourhood. She said hullo--- they hadn't seen each other around in a while ---and everything was cordial, but she didn't discover whether he was still boatbuilding or still owned/live aboard a boat. I suppose I felt a twinge of jealousy reading about that (did they sleep together again, even if just for old times' sake?), but the other thing I felt was a kind of emptiness. Am I someone a lovely girl would remember years later? Would she say hullo to me? Am I--- have I ever been ---someone's story? I do want to have been important enough to be remembered, but I suspect I haven't been...and won't be. And of course I'll never know the full story of her adventures at the marina or in Marlborough Sounds.

From October 2012---

 It's much less gloomy today.It has really brightened up actually! and i just had a lunch date, which was very fun.i Today I 'm wearing black tailored pants, a blue and white striped shirt, and a black cardigan...very officey. And he is a friend of a friend, up & coming young lawyer. I will probably fuck him, but i do think i like him more as a friend. Very funny and cute.


I never heard about her lunch date, never heard about the lawyer again.

She wrote me a year later about another lawyer, this one much older:

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 & simple & uncomplicated.



She saw him again a bit later:

After our wonderful wicked exchange, I ended up in town until 3am, then ended up at the apartment of the lawyer with the impressive library, got an hour of sleep then washed my face and went to work. Was asked to attend a meeting with the partners...I almost had a fucking breakdown.

I do wonder what became of him. She wrote that he'd made her reach orgasm five times one night and that his library was impressive. I have to know what "impressive" means--- if he really collected books or it that was a euphemism.

And I need to know if Alex the Florist is her usual club nights alias. I need to know how she created Alex the Florist and what personality she constructed for her alter ego.

She told me this fragment back in 2011, a story from when she was 17, back in 2002-2003:

I slept with this guy I met at a club...he was in his early 30s. He gave me E and took me back to his apartment. After we fucked and he fell asleep I stole 2 books and snuck out...


One of the two books was a Steinbeck; she remembered that. "Cannery Row", she thought, though she wasn't sure. Somehow it does matter to know what the other book was.

Stories here with loose ends, with endings that remain unclear.  I hate story arcs that go nowhere. I wish that I could sit with her and pour drinks and ask her about these things. I love her stories, and always have. I just wish I knew more about contexts and settings and the way things played out in the long run.

Two Five Two: Beliefs 2

I have this from the same girl I wrote about earlier in the month, the girl who was supposed to be going to Pitcairn Island and Patagonia and Lhasa and Victoria Falls this year.

She told me this back in June 2016--- three years ago now. She'd vanished for a while at the end of 2014 and stayed amongst the missing pretty much all through 2015. And then she messaged me one night to tell me this:

I  have a few stories to tell!  I decided this morning that, fuck it, it's time!  I have a confession for you. I got married last year... It was such a whirlwind, running into him in Auckland when i was there for a long weekend, then spending every waking moment together, a proposal in Taupo, then married a month later!

It really was crazy... I didn't tell anybody. No one in my family knows, a couple of friends, that's all. It was never going to work long-term. and i knew that. he was a brilliant first husband though.

I was amazed at the story. She'd told me before she vanished that she'd flown north on a concert weekend and run into an old flame at a hotel bar. I'd thought she might be living with someone. But this was a confession worth following up. I did raise an eyebrow at the initial message--- a whirlwind marriage was one thing; a secret marriage was another. Just how would that work? How would she avoid telling family? How would she avoid telling HR at work? Wouldn't there be tax forms to change? How would she keep friends from spreading the story?

She told me more later--- that she'd recognized very early that the marriage wouldn't work, and they hadn't lived together for much of the time. She'd kept the house she was renting (or owned...which is another story) and went back and forth with her Golden Retriever from one house to the other. I might've have understood if she'd leased out (or sublet) her old house, but she was clear that she'd kept her house all for herself.

She never did tell me about any divorce. I looked up divorce law in the Land of the Long White Cloud, of course. It's a simple procedure, and inexpensive. You can get an order of dissolution if you've been separated for two years and apply for an order. The fee is something like $NZ 215.00. Which raises the question of whether she ever got a divorce and, if so, when? If they'd agreed to count the start of living separate and apart sometime early in 2015, one or the other of them could've applied for a dissolution order in 2017. She never mentioned it, never mentioned any divorce or any proceedings. I did think about so many questions. If he did indeed have (as she insisted) $10 million in the bank, wouldn't there inevitably have been a pre-nup? Were there community property issues? The purported husband was a successful businessman,  which to my mind means that there would've been lawyers telling him that he needed to protect himself. But she never talked about any divorce or any aftermath.

So here we have another story, and one that strikes me now as deeply suspect. Moving in with someone after a whirlwind romance is one thing. A marriage where one party has ten million ($US? $NZ?) in the bank is something else altogether. And a divorce, however amicable, isn't just something one forgets. She'd have been twenty-nine or thirty when all this supposedly happened--- and a chartered accountant. She'd know how these things work, and known the legal and tax ramifications...and so would any husband's lawyers.

My blonde friend in Wellington is like me: we both grew up living inside books and stories. We've always wanted our lives to be crafted and shaped like stories. I can understand her longing for a doomed whirlwind romance and marriage. A bittersweet tale to tell later. I can understand all that. But what if she can't escape the stories she's crafted in her head? What if she made up a brief marriage just as I believe she made up trips to Buenos Aires and Mt. Fuji and Shanghai? How do I ever ask her?

I'd like to think that someone reading this out over the aether will have thoughts....

Two Four Six: Readings

I may have told this story before. As a gentleman of a certain age, I have to worry about that. Memory, the old joke runs, is the second thing to go. If I've told you this before, my apologies. The issue does haunt me, though.

Now I'd want to be clear--- I'm using one experience with one person as a hook for the story, but that person, that individual, isn't herself at issue. What happened is only a point d'appui for launching off into something more abstract. I do hope you'll keep that in mind.

Some years ago I was exploring on-line erotica sites, and I found a site (stories + blog) by a writer who called herself Remittance Girl. Her site bio and some of her blog entries indicated that she was based somewhere in southeast Asia, that she worked (or had worked) as some kind of teacher. I liked that. I probably have a romanticized version of teaching English in Asia in my head, and that seemed like the sort of expat life I'd be leading in a better world.  In any case, I liked her site and her stories. The writing was very good, and the tone was dark and transgressive and had a goth-s/m kind of focus. The first story I read was about some sort of sex vampires, and the opening scene in a Moscow aerodrome was very hot. There was a serialized novel, too, a very dark thing about an American hostess in Tokyo kidnapped and used/trained as a sex slave by a Yakuza boss. Again--- excellent writing, all very hot. I thought she was a fine writer, and I enjoyed her essays on expat life, erotica, and the culture wars around sexuality in the new century.

Be clear.  I was never friends with her, nor did I try to be. I read along at her blog and left a handful of desultory comments. Again, this was never about the person.

What happened is that one day there was a discussion about the issue of product placement in novels. I forget how it all came up. I had to grin at the topic. I was remembering the so-called "sex and shopping" ("shopping and fucking") novels of the Eighties. Was the lead author of the genre Judith Krantz? The underlying appeal of the genre was that the novels were all about brand names. Not only were the male leads impossibly handsome and impossibly wealthy, the female leads all moved in a world of Rodeo Drive or Upper East Side boutiques. They wore lovingly-described designer dresses and shoes, wore specific kinds of make-up and perfume. The hotels where they conducted affairs all had specific names and well-cataloged amenities. I wasn't a fan of the genre, although the small bookstore where I worked in those days sold a lot of them. What I liked about the genre was the world-building and attention to detail. That's how things went bad,

I think that Remittance Girl was angered by the materialism in books like that. She may have disliked the late-capitalist shopping fantasy or the equation of shopping with orgasm. Anyway, I did comment that I liked details like brand names, that I liked erotica that was set in well-defined upper-class settings. Let's remember that back in the days of the Long Ago I bought copies of "The Official Preppy Handbook" and "The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook" and pored over the lists of class markers--- clothing brands, vocabulary, accessories. One of the great attractions for me in "Story of O" was that the novel required a hidden chateau as a set and moved its characters through elegant Paris townhouses. I commented that I'd always seen class as an essential part of sex. Part of the sexual allure of something like "Story of O" was the idea of life inside a better, more elegant world a few thousand miles from where I grew up. I expected sex, I wrote, to come with the chance to move into better worlds. Sex was always better if the accessories were right--- what the parties wore, what the wines and decor were like, what kinds of hotels or bars or residences were used. Sex itself might be good, I wrote, but it needed sets and settings to make it really work.

That got me blocked and banned. I was never sure why--- whether I was taken as defending late-capitalist materialism or taken as seeing my partners as no more than stage props. Well, it's been years now--- five years, I think. The event stays with me as a symbol. I'm not sure if Remittance Girl is still writing and blogging or if she's on social media--- not that those things matter, and here in 2019, erotica is the last thing people are worried about. Politics in what used to be the lands of liberal democracy has killed the idea of erotica and sex blogs.

I do see the world as made up of stories, not atoms. Details matter to me; they always have. I read to escape into other worlds, worlds that are crafted and shaped. The stories I'd like to be part of take place in a better world than the genteel poverty of my own. The idea of sex for me will always require not flesh as much as it requires sets and settings. Sex in my rooms here can never be as good as sex in stories, sex in a rooftop pool high above Shanghai or an alcove in the Great Hall at Trinity College Cambridge. Or even by a campfire on the Wainuiomata shore. I suppose I have always been attracted to s/m because it requires accessories and accoutrements.  I rank-order the places, of course, and I ache with envy when a lovely friend tells me she's had sex in some setting (a hotel pool, the front seat of an Aston-Martin, the office of a distinguished faculty member). Sets matter, settings matter, costumes matter. I want sex to be shaped into a narrative arc, into stories I can tell, into films I can replay and relive in my head.

When I do read erotica, I want details. What did the girl wear exactly? What school or regimental tie did her male partner wear? Which hotel in Melbourne or Manhattan were they at? These things matter. If there's no crafted tale that can be told or relived later, what's the point?

Two Three Five: Identities

Now's here's a complicated and odd tale I heard today--- a long email from an old friend in a distant city. She has a long-term friend there, someone male, someone of a certain age, someone whom she's known professionally and quasi-romantically for years. Quasi-romantically meaning that she's slept with him a few times over he years. I've never met him, though I've heard her mention his name before.

She'd written me about him back a couple of years ago to say that she was amazed, that her friend had taken her to a very expensive restaurant, ordered the kind of wine I'll never be able to afford, looked at her with grave intensity, and told her that all the time he'd known her, all the way back to high school, he'd had a Secret Life. She was amazed. She prides herself on her gaydar, and while the circles she moves in socially have a substantial number of gay men, she'd never guessed that her friend was among them. Well, he told her about all the byzantine details of his Secret Life: adventures, encounters, older (and moneyed) lovers when he was quite young, haut-gay clubs and parties. She didn't know the name, but I'd have said it was all very like early Andrew Holleran, very "Dancer From The Dance" (the Seventies novel that was tagged as "The Gay Gatsby"). Great stories, apparently. She was entranced by it all, and spent hours on the phone late at night listening to his memories, commiserating with him about older men he'd loved and lost as a boy, sighing over his memories of a time thirty-odd years ago when being gay still had an air of the forbidden.

There was just one small thing, she told me. She'd found out this week that...well...he'd been lying all along, that he'd never had a life amongst the gay demimonde. She wasn't clear that he'd ever been gay or had a gay (or bi) life at all. As best she could tell, it was all a complete imposture.

The question she had was...why? Why had he done it? Was he hoping she'd introduce him to a chic gay world he'd been too afraid to join on his own? Was it some ploy to get her (or other girls) to sleep with him to, well, reclaim him for the Home Team?

My own understanding is that he's gone to ground: blocked her number, vanished from social media, disappeared from the places she thought she might find him. That's almost as strange as the imposture. My friend and I have both known people who pretended to be rich, or Ivy-educated, or British, or artists. We've certainly known gay men who pretended (even now, in the Year Nineteen) to be straight. But this was new.  I'd known girls who pretended to be lesbians to ward off unwelcome male advances, but that's only tactical and temporary, not like creating a whole life, complete with named lovers. And I'd never run across anyone male pretending to be gay when they weren't, even in the here-and-now.

I've always been a fan of literary impostors (Fr. Rolfe, Kurban Said, Sir Edmund Backhouse), but I don't understand quite what his pay-off would've been. Party invitations? He already had those professionally. Entree to chic events? He had those, too. A baroque way to leverage presumed gayness to get girls? That would just be awfully complicated. Some weird fetish about imaginary gay sex? That would be even more complicated, although he did spend lots of time telling her all about the details of encounters and adventures back into his early teens. Maybe it was just boredom and frustration with a  haut-bourgeois life edging its way into his fifties.

Maybe--- maybe ---it was a life he'd longed for, or one that he'd created and come to believe. That happens, I suppose, with lots of complex impostures.  There's a question--- how far did he take the imposture? Did he ever take a male lover? Was there ever someone on his arm--- and if so, did his companion know or suspect what was happening?

My friend told me that she thought I could tell her something, that all those biographies and thriller novels I read about people who've taken up masks and new lives would give me some clue as to why her friend had done this. She's hurt as much as anything else, hurt and puzzled and halfway afraid that her friend is having some sort of dissociative breakdown.

My own questions here are probably self-evident. How did he craft the stories? Where was he getting the names and places? And, too...how did my friend find out? How and when did she see through the imposture? I'd really like to know that. Did he tell her? Did she find out on his own? Did friends of them both reveal something to her? What gave the game away?

I am perplexed  by it all, and saddened for my friend. If you're out there anywhere over the aether, read this and tell me what you think. Why this imposture? What does it mean? What would the backstory be? I'm hoping someone out there has thoughts on this.

Two Two Seven: Ink

I have been trying to imagine writing a love letter again. It's not an easy thing. I've always had a good eye for ritual, and I've always been able to lose myself in rituals. It's hard tonight, though, trying to imagine writing a love letter.

I've told you how it should be done. On good paper, always. At the very least, you should use hotel stationery, preferably a good hotel in some city far away overseas. Good paper, though, is always best. Something purpose-made for serious correspondence.  Heavy envelopes, too. And a wax seal.  There are people who'd tell you that a wax seal is pretentious, but I think they're wrong. The seal is archaic, but deliberately so. It says that something is personal and private, that whatever's in the envelope is private and valuable. There should be something satisfying for the recipient, too. When she breaks that seal, she knows that she's seeing something that was for her and her alone.  You should always use good ink. That's a given. A fountain pen and good ink. It should be a pen you have to think about, a high-end tool for something important. You need to feel the pen when you write, to feel a sense of doing something that matters. The ink itself should be, well, not just black or blue. I do mix my own--- blend inks to get a colour that means something to me, a colour that reminds a lovely girl of me and what I am.

I can imagine those things. I can imagine laying it all out--- paper, pen, ink. You can write a love letter at a cafe, or in the reading room of a good library. Home is best, though. Easier to have the right music when you're at home. Easier to feel a sense of intimacy, too.

I'm not sure that I could do it tonight, even if I had someone to send a love letter to. I'm not sure what I'd say. I'd be afraid that any statement of feelings would be considered manipulative or coercive. Something simple--- I want to take you in my arms and kiss you. I want to feel you next to me in the morning. Something simple and basic and ordinary. But here in the age of the gender wars, couldn't it be made to sound coercive or threatening, even if the recipient was someone who'd shared your bed and who'd told you that she felt desire and affection for you? If you tell a lover (or a hoped-for lover) that you'd like to go places with her, do things with her, see the world with her, aren't you demanding her time? I read a piece online not long ago where the author was horrified at the idea of asking someone out. You were asking for someone's time,  he said, and for his generation, nothing was more carefully-hoarded or valuable than time. Asking someone to make time for you, to do something they weren't work-obligated to do, to do something they hadn't thought of themselves...wasn't that coercive and "entitled"? More--- asking someone to do something, asking at any time, was saying that you didn't think their own lives were already filled with important things. It was asking someone to expend time and emotional energy in reading your letter and in having to actually go out and deal with people.

There are other fears, too. A really passionate love letter could seem emotionally overwhelming. And the recipient could all-too-easily read it aloud to her female friends and mock you. I think--- or I'd like to think ---that no well-brought-up young lady would've done that in Jane Austen's day. I'm not sure I'd trust a lovely recipient not to mock me to her friends now, and that fear leaves me empty and sad on two levels--- that someone might do it, and that I'd be the sort of person to imagine her doing it.

In all honesty, I can't sext. The format is just wrong--- it's not a format I'd be any good at.  Texts are too short, my typing too inept. I don't have the room to craft fantasies. And, yes, I think of texts as too easy to spread out to people who'd laugh or be disgusted at what I'd sext to someone. I've always had an imaginary audience judging me, I've always tried to avoid the derision of the imaginary judges in the audience.

Tonight I'm looking at my collection of fountain pens and bottles of ink and wondering how you go about telling a lover (or hoped-for lover) about what you like, or what you want, or what your feelings for her are.  What ways do we still have, here in the age of social media and the gender wars, to do any of those things?

Two Two Five: Paper

I've been thinking about love letters.

In the past few years, I've received a handful of emails that were romantic enough, and a few that were deeply passionate or erotic. I can't recall when I last received an actual love letter.

I do want to say that I miss love letters. I miss receiving them, and of course I miss writing them. I miss ink on paper, and I miss opening a letter from a lover. I miss the days when young companions wrote me and used wax seals on the envelopes.

I may still have one or two of the emails lovers have sent me since the early or mid-2000s. Twenty years ago I probably would've printed them off and saved them, but these days there's something suspicious about anyone who'd do that. Most of the email exchanges I've had with lovers are long gone, though. It's far easier to delete emails when an affair ends than it is to throw out (or ritually burn) letters from an ex-lover.  It's painful to go back and read over letters from lost loves, but destroying the letters or deleting the emails leaves a gap in your life and history.

Love letters were a kind of proof, a kind of archivable evidence that I had value to someone. I did archive any that I received, and one of my regrets is that over all these years and so many moves, the boxes with letters from girls who did once desire me have gone missing.

I know that I wrote letters to girls with whom I was involved, and I can still remember some of the more intense or passionate ones. I can remember choosing the right stationery and sitting up late at night with a fountain pen and hand-mixed inks to write a lover. These days, though, I'm not sure I'd do that. I think that these days I'd be hesitant to risk writing a love letter. These days--- in the days of the gender wars ---I'd be afraid that love letters would be used against me.

When I was twenty or thirty I would never have been afraid of that. That I loved someone, that I felt desire for her, that I imagined ways that the two of us could make love--- I'd have owned those things in a heartbeat.  I couldn't have imagined being ashamed of those things. If a lovely girl and I were involved, I'd have been proud of that, proud of being with someone like her. Even if the affair ended, even if it ended badly, I'd have remembered the good parts.

These days, though, love letters--- even those sent to someone with whom you were deeply, mutually involved ---could be spun to seem disturbing. Love letters could so easily be made to seem stalkerish and demanding and "entitled".  Any declarations of passion could be made to seem disturbing and threatening. Any statement of romantic or sexual interests or preferences could be made to seem pathetic or coercive.  Here in these days of the gender wars, love letters can far too easily become evidence against you--- literally so. At the very least, love letters can be used to show how inept and hopeless you are at writing anything romantic or sexual, or that your sexual tastes are stunted, sad, contemptible.

No one uses telephones for long conversations any longer. Phone sex is a dying art. More's the pity about that, since phone sex allows you to construct long, complex fantasies and adapt to a lover's responses. Phone sex is far more intimate than sexting could ever be. And it has this advantage--- unless someone is actually taping you, it's much harder to use against you than a love letter would be.

It's sad enough that I'm thinking about this.  I miss love letters, miss being able to look through my archives years afterward and remember someone I loved, remember that once upon a time someone felt passion and love and desire for me,  remember that once upon a time I was worth the time it took to write me letters. I'd wanted to talk about how much love letters meant to me back in the days of long ago. I'd wanted to talk about how love letters were archived, and how much they meant to me as part of my history.

Right now, though, I can only talk about how much of a risk love letters seem to be, and how I'd be afraid to send anything that might be taken as a love letter (let alone anything about sexual tastes and hopes) to a girl with whom I was having an affair. Right now, no matter how much, how passionately someone and I were in love, I couldn't risk leaving a paper trail. I couldn't risk the ways love letters could be spun to make everything I like, or want, or feel seem contemptible.

Two Two Zero: Forklift

Long ago--- back in the lost springtime of 2007 ---a lovely friend wrote me an email about her rantan week in Wellington, about a week where she'd partied hard and done things she'd never done before. One of her more intriguing notes was that she remembered being with a Maori forklift operator--- her first Maori adventure, and one that gave her a decided taste for Maori one-night stands ---and riding his face while taking long swigs from a bottle of Maker's. I've been asking her for details ever since.

After all these years, she finally wrote me with the details. I'm definitely keeping this for my records. She does tell good tales of her Adventures. And as I've said these last sixteen years, Details Matter:

I met him at a dive bar. I can't remember exactly how old I was, but very early 20s I'd say. Maybe 19? His name was Tane (tar-nay). A friend was working at the bar, and she told me she liked the look of him. I remember her being pissed off at me later when she found out I fucked him. I actually can't even remember her name now. She was Australian. I went to her flat a few times to drink and smoke weed. I remember the night I first met her she was talking to my friend Fergy about how fast she used batteries in her vibrator. I was out that night with Stella and Libby and a group of their friends from the bookshop they all worked at.

Tane had just moved to Wellington from somewhere up north. He was working at a factory, operating a forklift all day. He was cute and very polite. The type of Maori boy from up north that was raised by his grandmother. Early 30s. He was solid and strong looking. He was at the pub alone. I started talking to him. After the pub closed we all went back to my house - the bookshop guys and girls, plus Tane. We had a few more drinks, the others left, he stayed. I was happy drunk, single, and he was hot. We fucked in my bed.

I don't know that I'd ever really tried face-sitting before. I remember being a bit self conscious at first. It's an intimate position, especially with a stranger. But he wanted it and was so into it that I just relaxed into it and enjoyed myself. He was so focused on making me cum. He was a good fuck, and he had a nice cock. But what I remember most was his tongue on my clit and in my cunt. I don't remember if I sucked his cock or not. He stayed the night, and I rode his face in the morning. I remember how much more confidence I had in the morning, from tentatively sitting above his face the night before, to moving and grinding, my hands on the headboard and his hands on my ass.

He texted me the next day, and a few times after that wanting to hang out. We never did. I saw him again about a year later, at the same pub. He gave me a kiss and a flower that I tucked behind my ear.

I do love keeping the stories of her Adventures and Encounters from her posh party girl Past. She's been known to tell me the stories and laugh and say that knowing I was trained as a historian and a lawyer makes it so obvious that I'd be asking for lots of stories, and that she loves being part of the histories I'm keeping.

One Seven Two: Story Arcs

I've been thinking about stories I'd like to see told.

You know a few of the ideas I've had in my head about erotica. The web and e-publishing have offered up new opportunities for erotica, though I'm not at all sure that the stories out there have touched on tales I'd like to read.

There's the classic s/m tale, of course--- the one where the lovely and innocent young girl discovers the submissive in herself and offers her body up to experience and pleasure through submission and erotic pain. That's "Story of O", of course, and a tale I've loved since my early teens. I've read it in all sorts of permutations, read variations suffused with all the different levels of consent and ecstasy-through-suffering. "Story of O" remains the classic, mind you.  More than half a century on,  nothing else comes close.

Still...whatever became of the reverse tale? Where is the tale--- one no less dreamy and romantic ---about the young man who becomes a dominant? In s/m novels, the male dominant (at least in hetero-erotica) always appears full-fledged, handsome and implacable, cruel and sexually adept. Usually moneyed as well--- after all, dungeons and accoutrements are expensive. But where's the tale of the young man--- intelligent, literate, educated ---who learns to be the one tightening the blindfold and wielding the whip? Where are the long talks he has with the girls who draw him onward? Where are the interior monologues where he tries to reconcile sexual pleasure with fear of being a cliche or a deeper fear of actually becoming abusive? Where are the comic moments of dealing with recalcitrant knots or trying to buy riding whips while the equestrian-shop clerks look on, smirking? Where's the moment when he has to take a deep breath and risk telling the lovely girl across the table on a first date what his tastes are? Where's that scene--- the boy terrified of terrifying the girl, the girl intrigued and amazed and a bit afraid, the two of them trying to use expensive liberal arts educations to talk it all through? (Yes, it does need Whit Stillman's touch and Greta Gerwig's voice)

Alec Waugh--- Evelyn's brother ---did a forgotten tale back in the late 1960s called "A Spy in the Family". It was a very clever little s/m comedy--- thirty-ish wife of a very grey British civil servant discovers herself as a bisexual dominatrix and becomes both domme and a successful agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service. You might find it in a library somewhere, and it is worth tracking down. It's a story I enjoyed, and one I need to read again. It has some of the conversations I'd want to hear--- the what-does-this-all-mean-about-me discussions, though done in a marvelously elliptical British upper-middle way. I do wonder, though, what those same conversations would be like between two reasonably hip people in America now.

There's a tale I do want to try myself, if only as an exercise. There's a website that archives hundreds--- quite possibly a few thousand ---erotica stories submitted across the last twenty years. The stories are organized by genre and topic, which usually means activities and kinds of partners. There's one genre called "celeb-parody" that gets a fair number of stories--- the author's stand-in gets to have sex with the actress/model/singer who obsesses him, or things happen to degrade/punish the female celebrity for not being with the author.  You get the picture. I've only seen one or two where there's been some attention to background, to the central figure herself. I do think there are possibilities here, though. I don't have any taste for revenge tales,  mind you. I can't see writing one of those.

Yet I would like to try a story where a lovely model ends up briefly with someone utterly alien to her world. There's no plausible way to make it anything more than a one-night or one weekend thing, of course. It's even hard to find ways for someone in her job and career niche to have a night away from her entourage and assistants, to find ways to give her a free night. The challenge is to find some plausible way to bring the characters together and watch them talk themselves into a one-night stand. His motivations aren't difficult, though he'd have to be terrified of getting it wrong, of ending up vilified  and mocked on social media or of having her lawyers calling. She couldn't be presented as vapid or slutty or just drunk or on drugs. It couldn't be like that. She'd have to be someone intelligent and self-aware, someone who'd be able to understand why she's doing this--- and make the reader believe it. I'd want to show the two of them talking, to show the two of them deciding that this was worth doing, and that they could live with themselves.

He'd be older, of course. Yes, he'd be me, or a close approximation. Did you ever think it wouldn't be? The next morning, he'd smile ruefully and tell her how Letters to Penthouse it all was (she's in her early twenties--- she probably wouldn't remember Letters to Penthouse) and she'd shrug and tell him it was only weird because of her job, that in any big city  out there there'd been dozens and dozens of random hook-ups between totally incongruous people the night before. Oh, I know who I want the central figure to be (you're free to guess), and a little research at YouTube makes me think she has the intelligence and the voice to be the figure I'd imagine. I may do the story just as an exercise. The erotica itself is likely to be secondary to the two characters talking themselves into bed. I may well have to try this. Let's see if I can still tell stories somewhere outside of my head.

Seventy-Eight: Mise-en-scène

A friend in the Midwest asked me to write about sex and the imagination. It's easy enough to begin an essay about that.  It's imagination that brings sex to life, that gives it its energy and power and delights. I can't imagine any physical pleasure that isn't filtered through the imagination or fueled by the imagination. Whatever the body does, or wants to do, it's the imagination that shapes it and gives it meaning.

I've always lived inside my head. I grew up scrolling through scenes in books or films in my head, and whenever I walked down streets--- in the city where I was born, in small lakefront towns in my later teens ---I was always moving through some scene in a film or a book. When I was young I inevitably had a book with me, and I'd read in all sorts of unlikely places and then re-tell the stories in my head. I did the same with films, and once I learned a bit about the grammar and vocabulary of film, I'd walk down tree-lined streets or through a downtown still shaded by wrought-iron balconies and envision how to shoot film scenes there.

I live through books and films; I always have.  On any ordinary day when I'm crossing a street or standing at a window, I'm a character in a story. When I sit at a cafe table and watch people at other tables, I'm telling their stories in my head. I'm creating stories for them, and the more details I can insert, the more depth of context I can create, then the better the stories can be.

There's a new sin (or crime, possibly) that the gender warriors have created--- something called "sexualization". That seems to mean something like imagining what a lovely stranger (or anyone, really) would be like as a sexual partner, or at least imagining them in some sexual way. This is all tied up in issues of "dehumanization" and consent. It's another term that the gender warriors use as a term of abuse that I simply can't understand. I've always made the world around me into a set of stories, and I've certainly told myself stories about sex.

That's not just about looking at lovely university girls whisper past and imagining them naked--- or, better, half-undressed in stylish high-fashion outfits. It's not just about wondering what it would be like to have her legs over my shoulders, or what her sexual tastes and previous adventures might be. It's about long, intricate stories, each one filled with details and backstory. It's about what imagining that any moment, any chance meeting could turn into an episode of "Red Shoe Diaries" or some film shown late night on Cinemax. Not porn, really, since the stories I create in my head are more about settings and styles and poses than about the sex itself.  They're erotica certainly--- tales of sudden, unexpected, risky, breathless, no-names-please encounters. It's just that the look and setting matter more than just the connection of bodies.

I wrote once in a notebook that if something can't be crafted like a story, then it's not worth doing. I suppose I do expect that from romances and encounters: a certain formality, a sense of a clear story arc, the ability to turn the world around me into sets and settings, the ability to be a character in a well-designed tale, the creation of a backstory for myself, my young companion, and the encounter itself.  Sex can be deeply, overwhelmingly passionate, but I always find myself standing just a bit outside the moment, thinking about how what's happening fits into a story arc or into a kind of roman fleuve.

Over the years, I've been lucky enough to find young companions who were girls who lived inside books and films themselves, who understood about films-in-the-head and about the art of narrative. They've had their own roles in the stories they'd tell themselves, their own set of backstories for encounters. We've been able to put our separate visions together, or at least to tell stories that complement rather than compete with one another.

I've long thought that bookish girls make the best lovers because they understand the idea of imagination, of creating worlds and knowing how to furnish them and live inside them. They understand the power of narrative, and the power of realizing that there are (or at least should be) no limits to stories and scenarios. I've been lucky about that, about finding girls who were willing to construct new worlds and imagine new tales. There's always been something thrilling about looking in a young companion's eyes and trying to intuit what stories she wants to tell and how she imagines the look, the style, of what she and I are doing.

Sex is always about imagination for me. It's not an end in itself, but it is the scaffolding, the skeleton, for narratives about worlds and times and characters, about style and sets and settings.  I can't imagine any affair, any encounter, that isn't born out of imagined stories and lived out as a kind of tale. Yes, I do sexualize the girls I see on the street or in cafes or classrooms, though it's much less a matter of the flesh than it is of casting them as characters with particular styles or complex backstories in a long and ongoing narrative.  I can't imagine sex or romance that doesn't exist as part of a story, and I can't imagine not re-visioning the world around me for the stories I tell inside my head. I always whisper to lovers, No limits, and I do mean that. I want them to trust themselves to their own imaginations and just fall forward into new worlds and new adventures, to take up new identities and re-make the ordinary world into something well-crafted and visual and stylish.

Seventy-One: Archaeology

There was a review article at Chronicle of Higher Education not so very long ago by Camille Paglia about academic treatment of BDSM. I dislike Paglia, and I want to be clear about that. She's the last person I'd choose to review books on BDSM, and in truth the article devolved into one of her usual rants against critical theory in general and against Foucault in particular. The only good thing about the article was that she included a patronising review of Staci Newmahr's "Playing on the Edge", and I'm having the library get a copy for me. "Playing on the Edge" is an account of the darker edges of BDSM by a writer who immersed herself in that world for a couple of years as both observer and participant. I'll be reading it for the darkness and the more highly-sexual passages--- reading it the way I'd read a novel. That at least came from Paglia's article.

As for the rest of it...well, the only thing I dug out of her rant was that she was annoyed that the authors she was reviewing didn't think BDSM had a history. Okay, yes--- it does have a history. Everything, every set of ideas and beliefs, has its own archaeology...though that may be too much like Foucault for Paglia to admit. If you look at BDSM as a set of specialised sexualised activities, you can trace it back through all those Victorian brothels that dealt in flagellation and back through Sade into the eighteenth century. You can probably trace the idea of the whip as a sexual accessory back to Restoration libertines. Before that, though, I'd think it gets a bit iffy. I'm not sure that what we think of as BDSM really crops up in Tudor or Renaissance times.  Is there anything in Aretino? And medieval flagellation...no. That's something different. If you're whipping yourself or being whipped to actually mortify the flesh for serious religious reasons, that's something altogether different. BDSM abstracts the idea of ritually mortifying the flesh--- this is why BDSM draws so heavily on Catholic imagery ---but empties out the religious content.  There's nothing ironic in medieval flagellants, and BDSM, even (or especially) in its most ritualised forms, is deeply ironic.

I've always been at least intellectually attracted to BDSM--- or to the idea of it. Blindfolds and riding crops and candle wax are accessories to stories, and they have a literary pedigree. They're markers for something, too. Like the double-diamond on ski slope warning signs, those things are markers for a certain kind of literary girl that she's doing sexual things that are beyond just the basic. Blindfolds and silk scarves and candle wax and riding whips are markers for advanced sex, for a kind of postgraduate-level sex. That's always something one can offer to a certain kind of young companion: not just sex, but the idea of sex that's more advanced, more complex, more literary than just fumblings in a backseat or in a residence hall bed.

I've said before that I came across BDSM by discovering books like "Story of O"  when I was very young. And there's no question that much of what I liked in literary BDSM was the idea of class.  Hidden chateaux, elegant townhouses, expensive fittings, beautiful people in distant cities. There's a traditional association of BDSM with wealth, after all. The men who could pay Victorian prostitutes in specialised brothels to whip them had to be at least upper middle-class; it takes money to afford the rent and upkeep at Roissy. Oh, I liked the idea of ritual and accoutrements; I liked the idea of the literary references. But what I think first intrigued me was the idea of beautiful people in expensive settings in distant places doing forbidden things that only made sense in that context. Roissy is a kind of literary idyll. Doing the same things in a tract home in Terre Haute is...well...part of a breaking crime story on cable news.

Paglia's review article never quite gets to the idea of a change in class markers for BDSM over the last thirty years or so, but it's there. In the age of FetLife and fairly open BDSM social organisations, in an era when BDSM clubs have "munches"--- potluck dinners, really ---there's been a kind of embourgeoisement of BDSM. I suspect that at FetLife  or other BDSM organisation dinners in Silicon Valley, people exchange business cards. There are BDSM workshops with credentialed facilitators. That's all so very American educated middle-class, so...respectable. Paglia argues in some kind of Golden Bough way that BDSM is about a kind of chthonic need for order and redemption and a contact with the animal self. But I think she's missing a sea-change in how BDSM presents itself, and what its class markers are.

I've always been a solitary type. I'm not sure my own attraction to BDSM could survive a potluck dinner or a workshop. A single young companion who shares a need to live inside books: that's more what I want for a partner for ritual games. It's always been ritual that I admire in so many things: the formal steps, the symbolic acts, the framework that carries you along step by step. And since I take no pleasure in things--- no physical pleasure, anyway ---that isn't mediated through books, I need a partner and a set of games that carry a literary pedigree.

So, then--- Interlibrary Loan is getting me a copy of "Playing on the Edge". With luck, it'll be like a very dark and powerful erotic tale with critical theory woven through it. Newmahr didn't go to gated chateaux outside Paris; I know that. But I'm hoping that her stories are stylish and dangerous and cleverly told.

There's a history to BDSM. An archaeology, in Foucault's terms. There's a literary heritage, too, and a set of aesthetics. I haven't much use for Camille Paglia, and I'd never trust her on aesthetics or style. I'm just as sure that I'd never quite find anything attractive in a version of BDSM that was...social...especially in that American middle-class way that has "facilitators" and workshops and justifies itself in psychological terms.  BDSM was always the intellectuals' fetish, Andrew Holleran once wrote, because it's something people come to through books. Whatever attraction I've had to it is about style and class markers and books. Whatever games I've played with lovely young companions, the point has always been about books and living inside books. I'm not sure at all that my attractions could survive in a word where the games were justified, or where they only about sex or the physical. And once again...my companions can only and ever be girls who live through books and ideas rather than flesh and the concrete world around them.

Sixty-One: Characters

A friend tells me that she's writing what she calls "Dead Poet Erotica". She's writing erotica about the imagined sex life, the should-have-been sex life, of the young Sylvia Plath. The fragments she's shown me have been very hot indeed. She has constructed some very detailed scenarios for the young Plath--- Sylvia in high school, Sylvia at college, Sylvia at Cambridge. Her point is that Plath needed a guide, an older lover, who'd have introduced her to things, shown her how to channel her own passions. I can't really disagree, of course. Plath did need someone much better than Richard Sassoon--- let alone the boys she dated at Smith ---to show her things, to offer her adventures and encounters that would've let her accept herself as fiercely sexual. I especially can't object since my friend has told me that she's used me as one of the young Sylvia's older lovers. I have to be flattered by that.  And Ms. Plath was tall for her age, and leggy enough.  If I'd met her when she was a freshman at Smith or just arrived at Cambridge, I might well have pursued her.

My friend calls what she's writing "Dead Poet Erotica", and I think she may do other stories about a young Anne Sexton. But it needn't be about poets, of course.  I know that there are readers who'd be incensed by what she's writing, who'd find the idea unacceptable. Some would be angry because my friend's stories infringe on the image of Plath that's been held by so many girls over the last forty years--- the Plath who inspires so many Sad Girls, the Plath the Sad Girls so deeply identify with. Some would be angry because they'd see it as a desecration of a feminist icon, or because it would be seen as a kind of necrophilia. Others, I suppose, because it does involve that most evil of all male creatures, the older lover. Nonetheless, I have to like what my friend is doing, and not just because she made me a character.

I suspect that Sylvia Plath erotica raises some readers' hackles only because Plath still seems contemporary--- that we're too close to her. Oh, there is an on-line genre of celebrity erotica, with (badly-done, usually) tales of sex with currently famous models and actresses. And there are certainly tales of the imagined sex lives of famous dead celebrities, a kind of fanfic where writers imagine being with a young Brando, or with Marilyn as an aspiring actress, or with either Hepburn. Those are all on-line erotica, with all that the phrase says about any literary quality. If you go back a bit, though, tales on a similar theme stop being fanfic or slashfic porn and become period pieces or historical novels. A novel about the imaginary erotic life of writers or royalty a century or two ago is treated very, very differently from a story where the author creates a character for himself (or herself) who has sex with a celebrity who's either living or only dead in the recent past.

I can certainly see my friend's attraction to Sylvia, and I certainly would've been interested in being an older admirer for her. I'm flattered that she wrote me in as a character. I suppose I feel a bit depressed that at my age I haven't appeared as even a minor, passing character in a couple of novels. Appearing as the gentleman of a certain age who figures in a co-ed's sentimental education, appearing in some lovely girl's autobiographical first novel--- I very much like the idea, and I have always believed that if one lived in a major city or college town and moved among literary types that one would inevitably make at least passing appearances in novels.

It's possible to dream of being a character in a story, to live one's life as if one were a character in a story. It's possible to look at photographs or at words on a screen and imagine whoever is behind those things as a character in stories you tell yourself. I've imagined myself as a character in a story, and I've certainly told myself long, complex tales about strangers seen at other tables or in faded photographs.

I don't even have to ask what the gender warriors say about that. They dislike fantasy, and they see fantasy as tantamount to violation. My friend will be posting her stories soon, and I know she'll draw fire for them. She'll be attacked for desecrating Plath's legend, or for having her have affairs with older men, or for having sapphic experiences with other co-eds. I'll offer my support, of course. I'm grateful that she did write me into her stories, and even more grateful that she thought I'd be someone who'd have been good for the young Sylvia. And I am impressed with the stories themselves, with the writing and the settings and the ideas of sentimental and erotic education. My friend will very much have my support.

If you're reading this, I'd like to know your own thoughts about "Dead Poet Erotica", or at least about the idea of imagined erotica with figures from the past.  Who would you choose as characters? More to the point, perhaps, do you find yourself turning people you see--- whether or not you know them ---into characters in stories you tell yourself? And what do you feel about it all, about shaping characters, about creating them from people you know, about being a character yourself?

Twenty-Seven: Performativity

There's a great deal of contemporary sexual theory that holds that gender is performance, that one does gender rather than being or having a gender. Gender is defined as a series of reiterated performances that mask the instability of all ideas of gender--- "a copy for which there is no original". I do read things by authors who position themselves in various niche sexual worlds where they talk about how they do gender for a given night, a given lover, a given fetish, a given game.

I do know that on a given day, dressing to go out into public, whether to an office or to someplace where I might find myself flirting with a lovely girl, I stand there in the mirror and prepare for a performance. I do think of it sometimes as an arming ritual. I'll be tying a necktie in the mirror or putting on a jacket and I'll imagine myself being fitted into armour or a matador's costume. I'll imagine being fitted into ritual garb, whether that's a breastplate and helmet or a bishop's robes. Going out in public is assuming a role, taking up a character.

In gender theory terms, I'm taking up a particular variant of being male. I'm taking up a role that is carefully constructed. What's being created there in the mirror is a character, and one with specific semiotics. When I go out into public, I am performing a role. I want to be read, I suppose. I want my performance to say that I'm of a certain class and background, to suggest my affinity for certain places and roles. I've never been a peacock male; that's not what my character would do. I'm presenting myself as educated, as someone of a certain age who still defines himself as sexual, as someone who has a trace of anglophilia and a hint of darkness. I don't do male peacocking, mind you. The goal is understatement, and the sense of security that goes with it. But I am always in character when I go out anywhere. I may tweak things a bit for different venues, but the presentation is always the same.

I also see certain writers about sexual issues and sexual politics talk about how one does sex--- not in the sense of techniques and positions, but in the sense of negotiation and presentation. There's a hint of suspicion in how that idea is invoked, a hint that to do sex is somehow to be inauthentic and attempting to put something over on a particular partner or potential partner (inevitably, a male attempting to somehow defraud a female).

I'll be upfront about it. I do see sex as something one does, as its own set of performances. Though they have their originals--- scenes and lines in books and films. I ask myself, inevitably, whether the kind of character I'd be in a favourite book or film would do something; I ask myself whether I've done all the things my character would do. And, yes, I measure myself against the things characters in books and films do. My goal is always to give pleasure to a young companion, but whatever I do, I'm doing in character, and I want her to construct her own character, her own scenarios as well.

I don't think of what I do as inauthentic. I am what I do. I am the character I create. I am a gentleman of a certain age and a certain background. But the things inside that description are things I've taken up as being what I really am. Sitting at a cafe, sitting at an office desk, talking down the bar, I'm always doing a character. Kissing a young companion, taking her into my arms, I'm hoping that both of us are inside a story with scenes we want to be part of. I'm asking myself what I'd be doing at a given moment if I were my own character in a novel or film. Be very clear: I am made up out of characters and scenes I've liked. Romance, seduction, life--- the narrative arc, the crafted scene. Those are the things I like, that I've created myself inside.