Three Seven Four: Notes

 Once upon a time Liberty and I were sitting on the porch steps of a weekend cottage we'd rented by a river in the hills. It was an autumn morning, and we were drinking coffee while there still mist outside. She was wearing nothing but one of my pullover sweaters-- I remember that -- and leaning back with her legs stretched out. I traced a finger along her leg and she laughed.

Her last older man, she said, had always liked her in anything that showed off her legs. A beautiful young girl, he'd told her, should always sit in one of two ways in a skirt-- legs crossed to show off how long they were, or else slightly parted so that she'd be a bit on display, so she'd be aware that strangers could tell she wasn't wearing underwear. I remember kissing her knee and telling her that I agreed with that. 

She sat up and kept her legs apart. No problem, she told me. She disliked ever wearing underwear anyway, and she liked having me look at her. What she wondered, she said, was about why her last older man had wanted her on display for strangers. It wasn't that she minded that so much, but she questioned whether he'd wanted others to see her to show them that she was there as his sex toy or that he wanted her to be aware of and excited by being on display. Older men, she grinned, all had very precise interests. She raised an eyebrow and looked at me for comments.

I told her that I understood. I liked being able to look at her, and I liked knowing that she was available to be seen and touched. And if she was sitting there, legs a bit parted, she'd be aware of how vulnerable she was. She nodded-- older men liked her to seem vulnerable. She was twenty-two that autumn, and she laughed about that. Maybe two or three more years, she said, maybe two or three more years when she could still be a young girl who could be corrupted and violated. After that, she said, she'd have to act like a grown-up woman, and she had no idea how sex and sex play went with adulting.

Older men, she said, had always been something she'd liked, all the way back to the kayak shop owner when she was a teen in the Pacific Northwest. Older men were something she could learn from, and she liked that-- learning things, having someone teach her things. Kayaking, rock climbing, art, books-- she wanted to learn about things and try being something or someone new all the time. That went for sex, too. Older men were the sounding boards who showed her all kinds of pleasures and games and things to explore. That, she told me, was what I was there for.  I had to be flattered by the vote of confidence. 

The older man before that, before the one who'd taught her to sit open-thighed, was a foot fetish devotee. She grinned and told me that she pretty much believed that older men were always into feet. Not that she minded, she said. It was an easy fetish for her, since she'd grown up barefoot half the time anyway. Her foot fetish man had paid for lots of expensive pedicures for her, too. And having her toes sucked and her feet and ankles licked felt nice. Foot jobs were fun to do, she told me, especially with uncircumcised men. The only thing she didn't understand, she said, was why a lot of foot fetish play that she found at places like PornHub seemed to be about submission and domination. She didn't think her older man was creepy about the fetish, and she didn't feel like she needed to play the domme and order him around. He enjoyed it, she liked the way what he did for her felt, and just asking for something was always better than ordering someone around. 

I remember her looking at me with a raised eyebrow then. She told me that when I wanted to blindfold her or tie her wrists, or play with a riding whip, I should just ask. Or she could ask me to do it to her. Neither of us needed to play at domination, let alone humiliation. She was much more submissive than dominant by nature, but while she liked being a bottom, she never understood humiliation as sex.

She asked me if I ever wanted to suck her toes or lick her feet, and I just shrugged. If she asked, I told her, I'd do it. I was, after all, her current official evil older predator, and I was open to whatever she wanted to try. Good, Liberty said. She expected her older men to teach her things and she expected them never to be afraid or ashamed to explore things with her. 

She opened her legs a bit more and grinned at me. What she liked, she said, was that attitude. I'd been good at creating scenarios for us, and she liked that. I'd been good at playing faux-nonconsensual games, too. She liked that about older men-- the being able to understand about faux-nonconsensual sex. Boys her own age, she said, knew nothing about games and irony. Sex, she said, was about pleasure and having fun. She didn't need people who were grindingly earnest about sex, or about anything else, in her life. 

I make notes about you, Liberty told me. You're in my journal. I expect you to show me things.  I remember that, and I was proud of it.  

Keep sitting like that, I told her. Especially in public. Keep avoiding underwear. And I'll think of things. I will work at that. I know my role. 

Liberty is someone I do still think about. I remember the stories she told me and the things she and I explored. I do have to write about her more.

Three Six Zero: Brushstrokes

There's a story I've told my friends for years.

Once upon a time, I was talking to a lovely, long-legged co-ed at the bar of a favourite pub. We'd been enjoying the conversation, and we'd been flirting shamelessly. She arched an eyebrow, looked at me over her wineglass, and asked, "So...are you grooming me?" I looked back at her and said, "Like a show pony." She burst into laughter and shook her head. "Oh my God," she said, "now I pretty much have to sleep with you, just for that line."

It's  good story, and one I like. The girl herself is still a dear friend, and we do have dinner or drinks once in a while. I know that she tells people that story, too.

The once-upon-a-time in the story wasn't that long ago-- five or six years, maybe. But I think it would be an awkward thing to have it happen today. There are far too many people out there who wouldn't take "like a show pony" as a fun line. The word "grooming" itself has been twisted into other, and (I think) grotesque political definitions.

As an aging roue, I've always had long talks with Young Companions about the word. We've sat at the bar or at coffee house tables and discussed the word endlessly. I've been known to argue that since my Young Companions are of legal age, the word means nothing more than "seduction".  Let's quote one Young Companion: "Does this mean that you'll be buying me lots of French s/m novels and showing me films about French girls and older lovers?"  Well, yes, it did mean exactly that.

The word itself was once a term of art. It meant the ways sexual predators or neighborhood pimps slowly enticed underaged girls into sex or sex work. It means other things now, and I don't understand some of the newer usages.

The new meanings seem to have come from the Trans Wars-- specifically, from the right-wing opponents of the TRAs, though I've been seeing the word used more and more by the GC side as well. There's a group called "Gays Against Grooming" that seems committed to stopping things like Drag Queen Story Hours. For the Gays Against Grooming group, having children around drag queens at all is regarded as "grooming". 

The group-- and others like it --seem to think that any exposure of children to the presence of people in drag, or any lessons indicating that some people are trans and that it's okay to be trans is "sexualizing" or "grooming" the children. Those attitudes set my caution lights flashing. It's a very, very short step from there to the right-wing / Evangelical goal of saying that children should not be told that gay and lesbian people exist or that it's perfectly fine to be gay, lesbian, bi.

That's all a part of the Trans Wars that I don't understand. I've no problem with drag queens reading children's books to young children. (I had no problem at all with porn stars like Sasha Grey doing reading outreach with kids, either). Small children will think the drag queens are cool or funny, since to them it'll all be dress-up. And I think that Miss Penis Colada won't be doing the same bit she does at the club on Saturday nights. And it's bad tactics for the GC types, many of whom are themselves LGB, to stand next to right-wingers who'll use "protecting the children" or "safeguarding" as a way to attack LGB people next. 

I should note that the right is upset that children are "sexualized" (whatever that means in this context) by being taught that gay couples exist when so many ordinary children's books center on the standard heterosexual family. 

Be clear here. I do not believe that trans women are women, nor do I believe that trans men are men. I believe that they're trans, and that they deserve full civic and employment rights and the full and equal protection of the law, including protection from violence. But I believe women have a right to sex-based protections and single-sex spaces.  

I also don't believe that sex and gender are the same thing. One is about plumbing and architecture, the other is about social presentation. I saw a post at Twitter once that showed someone holding a sign that read "Gender Is A Performance". Well, yes, of course it is. Culture is a performance. All culture is a performance. What we do in society is cosplay. We act out our assigned roles-- class, gender, nationality, ethnicity. There will always be people who are gender non-conforming or trans (and those are very different things), people who fill the role of trickster and fill a niche for people who can bend the rules about social presentation. Yes, being GNC is an assigned role, too. Someone is Odin, someone is Loki. There's a niche role for everyone. All social life is cosplay, for better or worse.

And I'll reiterate something I've said before. There's nothing wrong with cosplay. If a male wants to wear a dress and make-up in public, fine. But he's not a woman. Biology matters, architecture matters.

I lean towards the GC side in the Trans Wars, and I refuse to accept the TRA assertion that anyone who doesn't instantly accept "self-ID" as the way to designate sex is guilty of attempted genocide. But I find the whole "grooming" panic dangerous. It's far too easy to manipulate "safeguarding" into an excuse for despising anyone who doesn't fit some right-wing myth. 

The Trans Wars have to be hard for transvestites (remember them?). Anyone who gets some psychological or sexual satisfaction from knowing, avowed cosplay is regarded as a traitor by TRAs and as some AGP perv by the GCs.  Too many GC writers seem to be rejecting sexual pleasure and sexual experimentation; too many TRA types seem to be rejecting the idea that someone can be lesbian or gay at all.  

I've snarked here before that we're all at the mercy of what I call Authenticity Fetish. We can't enjoy cosplay or experimentation. Any social presentation has to be real, permanent, and reflect some inner true identity. It's no longer possible to simply act out a role for a day, or act it out in certain spaces. Identity can't be provisional, and it can't be tried on, worn, and taken off.  

I miss the days when "grooming" could be taken to mean "seduction", and I miss the days when there were daylight identities and night identities, when life could be about social cosplay. 

 

Three Four Five: Senses

Tonight I'm thinking of Jill in Wellington. I'm thinking of the stories she'd tell and the long conversations she and I would have about our Pasts and our experiences. I do miss those, and I do miss her.

I told her once that I was a creature often beset with what I call JED-- Jealousy Envy Depression. That's a cocktail of things that aren't good at all. I've noted before that Envy is the sole Deadly Sin that gives no pleasure while you're indulging in it. And tonight I am thinking of things she told me that leave me envious and dejected.

Envy is my own Deadly Sin, the fault that I've never been able to escape. I'm not sure what exactly I want from it. The ability to tell good stories, certainly. The ability to amass stories that are as good as those other people have to tell. The belief that I'm as good as others. I certainly want those things, and Envy haunts me every day.

Let's consider a small story Jill told me back a couple of years ago. This is Jill discussing self-pleasure:

If i wait til late in the night, i get lazy and just use a Lelo on my clit...if i have more time then yes - fingers in my ass, too...  

honestly...i was so fucking drunk, i didn't know what i was doing. i just needed to feel so full, i had a Corona bottle in my cunt and fingers in my ass, i was alone and drunk and high and i came so hard, over and over. my sheets were a mess in the morning. but at the time, i needed it. i think i needed to prove i was all i needed, i could make myself feel everything i needed...

i filled up the Corona bottle with water from the bathroom and sat drinking it, tasting my own cunt and rubbing my clit, even though i had just cum.

i remember that night so well...

I do envy her that story. It's powerful enough, and it makes a lovely fantasy vision. And there's no equivalent for anyone male. She has her selection of Lelo vibrators--- charges them via USB port on her iPad 2 ---and her Corona bottle, carefully cleaned and wrapped in silk in her bedroom dresser. There's no male equivalent for that. She's able to have powerful and shattering moments all on her own. There's no male way to experience anything like that, no male way to be able to give oneself the belief that you could make yourself "feel everything I needed". 

There's certainly no way for me to feel sexually self-sufficient--- or sexually equal to someone like her either in terms of sensations or experiences that can be the raw material for stories. 

She writes that  I have quite a few Lelo toys - and these come in nice, plain black boxes -- so i usually keep my toys in the little bags they come in, in the original boxes -- stacked at the back of my bedside drawer. I'm male, and a gentleman of a certain age and background. I can't say anything equivalent or have any of the same kinds of experiences. 

And I'm eaten up with Envy that my experiences will never be as good as anyone else's.

Jill and her Corona bottle, Jill and her Lelo. One key part of what I envy her is just the ability to experience pleasure. I've said her before that I don't experience unmediated pleasure, that anything I feel is filtered through books and films...or filtered through all those years of academic analysis. Jill can listen directly to her body. She can let her body give her pleasure. She can be all she needs for pleasure.

I never feel any of that, mind you. I never feel anything that's directly physical, or that isn't filtered through a lifetime of reading. I know about pleasure from descriptions in books. I just never feel any of it myself.

I know about the accoutrements of pleasure. I know about crafting tales and scenarios to give pleasure. I know about critical theory and pleasure. What I don't know is how to feel pleasure, or how not to believe that nothing I feel is as good as what others feel. At my own advanced age, I have no idea whatsoever what pleasure feels like.

Three Four Three: Preferences

 I may have mentioned this, but I'll recount the story again.

Once, long ago, I took a test found in (I think) Playboy. The test was something like "What Your Tastes in Women Say About You". I can't recall how old I was, but certainly very early in my teens. I ranked photos of actresses and models, and I chose my favourites out of drawings of body types. At the end, I added up my score and was told that the total meant that I must be gay. 

After all, the women I chose were very much not the body type that was in favor in those days. My choices were clearly all for tall, very slender, very long-legged and small-breasted women. "Buxom" or "curvy" never crossed my mind. No woman that I fancied in adolescence-- or now --would ever evoke something like "va-va-voom!" as a comment. 

I thought even then that the authors of the article were idiots. I stand by that judgment. Even at that age, I was clear about my preferences. For women, yes. And I like to think that society's beauty standards caught up with my own. The age of the "bombshell" was replaced by standards I liked-- tall, leggy, taut-bodied, thin. I'd have always chosen the young Audrey Hepburn over Marilyn Monroe. I'd have always chosen a young Jane Birkin or a young Marisa Berenson over the standard Playmate of those days. Those were my preferences then, and they remain my tastes. Karlie Kloss and Anja Rubik and Aymeline Valade are all examples of what I find to be beautiful. I have no use whatsoever for the Kardashian look.

And yet one of the problems of the current day is that physical preferences are themselves subject to increased and hostile review. Having preferences, let alone talking about them, is becoming a Bad Thing. I do not like the current emphasis on butts. I look at photos of the FMTY Girls at Twitter or of current social media celebrities and just have no use for a look that emphasizes butts. My gaze focuses on long, slender legs and flat, hard stomachs and butts. I do realize that saying that I dislike big butts and fail to grasp why women pay for butt-filler injections puts me on the wrong side of current taste...and leaves me open to accusations of racism and "misogynoir". I do realize that. 

But my tastes remain what they've always been. The Young Companion of my dreams is very tall, very lithe, very leggy. She has never needed to own or wear a bra. (She dislikes underwear, of course). In tailored linen slacks and a very tailored, dangerously unbuttoned silk blouse, she's all legs and erect nipples and has that slouch-down-the-runway look that I've loved since I was a teen and first began charting out beauty and its implications for class and style. 

Well, so many things that I like are becoming unacceptable. That may be inevitable, since I'm a gentleman of a certain advanced age and very much out of step with social rules. And those rules do exist. Make no mistake about that. 

Bodies matter. I take that as a given. Bodies always matter. So do the stories bodies tell. My preferences, whether for lithe and leggy girls or for some s/m games, always suggest stories or films I want to live in. I suppose I do look at girls and see myself as a casting director for the films in my head. I like bodies that suggest certain things about class and settings, and those films are not going away.

It's not just that my particular tastes in female bodies are now seen as obsolete and regressive (or maybe even oppressive). It's that I read these days how having any tastes at all is morally flawed because any preference by definition excludes. And we're not supposed to exclude, these days.

It gets harder to discuss what does attract and excite me, and it gets harder to talk about the why of what I like. I have to say that I do miss the days when matching bodies to stories was something to talk about with lovely young companions.

 

Three Four One: Connections

Tomorrow is Valentine's. That's always been a troubled day for me, and tomorrow will be no different.  I'll be alone, of course, and any connections I make will be with lovely friends I've known online.

This is the third calendar year of the Red Death. Whether or not the pandemic is winding down, we've had two full years of putting off social life.

When the Red Death began, I watched PornHub develop a whole "Covid Lockdown" genre for porn clips. The idea was simple enough. Two people-- roommates, step-siblings, neighbors --found themselves trapped into close proximity by the pandemic and ended up having unexpected sex just because of cabin fever, boredom, and availability. Some of the clips were unexpectedly hot-- I will admit that. There were a couple of step-sibling scenes that had actual thoughtful dialogue about why things were happening, and at least one clip that had a face mask and social distancing version of the classic pizza delivery trope. And, yes, a face mask can be quite hot. 

I'd thought that lockdowns and social distancing would lead to a revival of phone sex. I mean-- you'd have a voice on the other end of the line, and the storytelling nature of phone sex would help relieve the tedium of WFH. That doesn't seem to have happened, though. Maybe it's only that even the Red Death wasn't enough to make Gen Z  actually talk to people by phone. Maybe. But even if camgirls were able to make decent money during the pandemic, that's not the same as phone sex.

I do miss phone sex. I miss telling stories in the dark. I miss establishing a connection with a girl and building up layers to our fantasies. I miss the parts of phone sex when you move back and forth between a shared fantasy and just talking to one another late in the night. 

Memory says that back in the early Noughts, you made connections via email and then moved on to the telephone. And phone sex was something that played to my strengths. I always feel better as a disembodied voice-- let's take that as a given. Girls have told me over the years that I'm good at telling stories, and that I'm good at making them feel they can do or be anything. My NZ friend used to say that I'd done a good job at making her feel like she could live in a late-night world she called NSNL-- No Shame, No Limits. Hearing her say that to me all the way from Wellington meant a lot.

I have no clue whether there was an upturn in sexting statistics during the worst of the Red Death. I of course was never good at sexting. I'm a very, very bad typist, and I text with one finger. And text messages aren't a good format for complicated fantasies. 

In those awful years of 2016-2020, right up to the first lockdown orders, phone sex had faded away. I suspect it was also seen as problematic by Social Justice types. Phone sex has never escaped the taint of being an "obscene phone call", and the idea of shared fantasies by telephone seems to strike many of the gender warriors as somehow exploitative. 

But I do miss voices in the night. I miss creating shared fantasy worlds with lovely young companions. When we've all given up masks and social distancing and gone back to whatever  a post-pandemic normal may be, I suspect no one will be doing phone sex. After all-- we're all too exhausted to have the orgiastic post-pandemic Hot Girl Summers or revived Mardi Gras parties that were predicted back in 2020. 

I don't expect any late night calls, and I miss them.

Three Three Seven: Learning Curve

I saw today that the singer Billie Eilish told an interviewer that she deeply dislikes porn because she blames porn for the bad, or at least deeply unsatisfying, sex she had as a teen. 

She's a fine singer, mind you. I quite like Billie Eilish's music, and she's an attractive girl. But...I will have to disagree with her on this. 

Teens have been having bad sex-- or just unsatisfying --sex since, well, forever. There's no way around that. Sex is like any other learned skill. There's a learning curve involved. Short of classes that actually teach sexual technique, sex is a learn-by-doing skill. When you start having sex-- or move on from the Solitary Vice to sex with a partner --you're starting with no experience and very little knowledge. I'll also note here that even the most thorough sex-ed class at school won't be able to give you more than academic knowledge of what you're doing. There's no way around the idea of a learning curve.

No one expects that you'll be a good driver or a good writer or a good pianist the first time you take up any of those things. I'm sure Ms. Eilish spent years working at becoming a musician. If you want to be good at sex, you need to do exactly what you'd do to be a writer or a chess player. You practice. You learn. You get better over time. 

We expect something-- romantic love, maybe --to magically make you able to enjoy sex, to please a partner, to feel pleasure. But there's no magic available. At sixteen you just stumble through a learning process-- all the physical awkwardness and bad timing and awkward conversations. You learn to get over being uncomfortable with bodies. You gradually acquire a sense of what your own body wants, of how to use your body to give pleasure to a partner. There's no way to get around the awkwardness and clumsiness of being new to sex. 

I completely fail to understand Ms. Eilish's dislike for porn. She seems surprised that "real people" don't look like they do in porn and that "real people" don't reach orgasm the way they do in porn. All I can say is that using porn to teach yourself about "real sex" is pointless. It's probably more pointless than using noir detective novels to teach you about criminal procedure. 

What did I learn from porn? I remember being in my teens and reading porn novels (oh, yes, I go back to a time before porn video and anything like PornHub) and...making notes. I do mean that literally-- making notes about things I wanted to try. I didn't expect that things in my own life would ever go exactly like they did in porn novels, but I knew that I was writing down things that I could try-- places and positions. I knew that one day I'd ask a partner about those things. They wouldn't work exactly like they did on the printed page, but they were things I could experiment with. Porn gave me things to try, things that might-- might --be useful as I acquired partners and lovers.

The same was true when I finally did see porn on video. I knew I wouldn't likely be with girls who looked like porn actresses, and in truth my own aesthetic preferences weren't for the porn actresses of the day. But I knew that what I was looking for was a set of possibilities. I wanted to see what was possible during sex. What were the positions that looked useful? What was there that you could try? I didn't expect to learn much more than that-- a range of possibilities, a list of things to experiment with. And of course I wanted to get a sense of what I'd be expected to know about if more experienced lovers questioned me. 

Porn let me know that certain activities were available to try. Porn gave me ideas about places where I could have sex, about places that I could turn into the settings for stories, about what things ( library stacks! a graveyard! an office desk!) could go on my checklist and could become part of stories shared with lovers. I didn't expect porn to be didactic, or even to be "true". I did expect it to serve as raw material that I could re-vamp and re-work and use. 

I've always been suspicious of any advice about bringing a partner to orgasm. I'm not sure that any advice really works. Or more exactly-- there's advice to be had about not being completely awful, but all the relevant advice is just defensive: not being awful at things. Being good at sex, though...that's something else altogether. I've taught myself over the years to assume that any signs of orgasm by a girl I'm with are polite social fictions. I will always try to give pleasure to a partner; I will always ask what pleases a partner. But I will also take as a given that any results I see or hear about are simply courtesy...or a way to provide closure to what we're doing.  Which is fine. I'll do what I can do, and I'll take any individual advice or suggestions a lover offers. But I don't expect-- I've never expected --orgasm in "real life" to look like it does on video. 

Everything has a learning curve. Ms. Eilish seems to assume that practice isn't needed, or that artifice isn't just as much a part of sex as it is of any other social interaction. Porn is useful as a source of raw material: ah, yes-- her legs over my shoulders! Ah, yes-- sex in the rooftop infinity pool! We should try that!  Porn isn't there as a textbook. It's there as bricolage, as a set of things to pull out and try in new configurations. 

Porn was good for me, back in the way. It did give me ways to enhance the learning curve. It gave me things to try, some of which turned out very well indeed. It helped me believe that so many things were possible. 

There's always a learning curve. Whatever talents you possess on your own, you'll need to practice, to work through all the awkwardness of the new. If you're having sex, if you're starting out on your sexual history, the first year or two will be awkward and not particularly about massive pleasure. But you learn. And porn? Porn can help. It can at least suggest things that are worth trying and show you that people can do...those things.  

And that's important.

Three Zero Nine: Catalog

 I'm on the mailing list at several high-end sex toy boutiques. I've used their catalogs to buy gifts and accessories for young companions. Well, I use a couple of old-school equestrian shops to buy riding whips, but I suppose many such shops stay in business because of s/m far more than dressage. 

I'm had young companions thank me for the gifts I've bought them. And I've had FaceTime conversations with lovely young companions who were shopping in high-end sex toy boutiques in distant cities. I'm glad that the gifts were appreciated (and, yes, sometimes used together), but I remain out of the loop when girls tell me that they've been online shopping for sex toys or that they have a whole drawer in a bedroom dresser devoted to vibrators and dildos. I like the idea of accompanying a lovely girl while she shops for dildos, but there's something very alien about that. It's not something I could ever do on my own. I've seen lovely twenty-somethings earnestly consulting with sex boutique clerks over designs, colours, brand names. I can't imagine asking a clerk for advice in even the most gentrified sex boutique. That's not something straight males can do. My leggy posh blonde friend Jill in New Zealand lives in Wellington, where there's a rather famous sex toy boutique that delivers--- that has its own cadre of uniformed young women who deliver elegantly-wrapped sex toys to posh customers late into the night. I'd be far too afraid to open the door.

Over last weekend I found all the catalogs I had from sex toy suppliers and threw them away. They somehow seemed...pointless. I won't be ordering on line any longer. That really does seem pointless. There's no one in my life currently to buy bedroom gifts for, and I'm...worried that someone might find the catalogs and think that I used them to shop for myself. 

A male buying sex toys is seen as pathetic at best, creepy and disgusting at worst. And always a figure of mockery. I have no problem using toys on young companions, but I can't imagine using any myself. Girls in the past--- Levin, Liberty, my NZ friend, a certain lovely girl in the Home Counties, a Juilliard girl who was once a pro domme and who's now with the Vienna Philharmonic ---have asked to use toys on me. I've always refused--- gently, firmly, clearly. But you'd love it, they've told me. Just give yourself over to the sensations, give yourself to pleasure. No. No. That's not something I can do. There's always the fear that I'd be hearing the derisive laughter of the invisible audience in my head.

Sex toys are for lovely girls. Sex toys are ways they can find  pleasure or amplify it. I can't do that. Pleasure isn't something for straight males, and certainly not straight males of a certain age. Pleasure isn't something I can understand, and it's certainly not something I deserve.  Asking for pleasure, and especially asking for aids to pleasure, is a terrifying thing. I hate my own fears, but they're there.  Levin called across the boutique to the girl at the counter: do you have this in other colours? do you have ones that are shaped like uncut cock? uncut and with balls?  I of course froze and tried to will myself into invisibility. 

I can imagine talking about blindfolds and riding whips; I can imagine talking about candle wax and nipple clamps. I cannot imagine talking about any of the sex toys "for him" in the catalogs or at the upscale websites. Any sex aids for men seem designed to humiliate, to make the male user into an object of derision. And yet I feel envious of lovely young companions who can blithely buy toys to help them with orgasm. I've seen a girl look at a half-empty Corona bottle and suddenly laugh. This! she said. I so have to try this!  There's no male equivalent of that laugh. There's no male equivalent of the look that says that something is worth trying for fun. 

Well, the new year, the Year Twenty-One, is almost here. I won't be getting the sex boutique catalogs any more. No one to buy gifts for, of course. And it's impossible to think that I could ever be part of a world where using sex toys--- even with a lover I trusted ---would be safe. Pleasure isn't something that I can ask for, let alone seek on my own. There's nothing in the marketing plans of sex toy manufacturers for someone like me. Not this year, and not any other.

Two Eight One: Comfort

A year or so ago I wrote here about a girl I'll be calling Liberty, a lovely strawberry-blonde bartendrix girl with whom I had a casual affair all through much of 2018. I wrote here about her first encounter with an Older Man--- in her case, she was sixteen and he was in his early thirties, the owner of a kayak shop in the Pacific Northwest.

Liberty told me this about Older Men:

[S]he decided she liked Older Men, or at least was comfortable with them. That made it easy when she and I first started talking a couple of years ago, when she was at the oyster bar. She thought I was interesting and the age thing meant pretty much zero to her. When I told her my age--- she just shrugged.  What mattered, she said, was that I was interesting.  We'll use each other for the stories, she said. We'll trade stories and we'll learn things. 

I liked the word she used-- comfortable. I'd heard that before from girls when they were talking about affairs with Older Men. Comfortable. A friend who now divides her time between Edinburgh and London told me that having affairs at uni (yes, Oxford) with much older men felt so much simpler than dealing with boys her own age. She understood the terms of the exchange, and so did they. She could explore things with them and then lie back in bed and question them about so many topics. The whole Oxbridge vision of mentoring-plus-sex seemed perfect to her, and being someone's muse and pupil was a role she understood.

Another friend-- this one now in south Florida, but who'd been at USC for grad school --used the same word: comfortable. For her, that meant feeling free from drama and demands. She did laugh once and say that from sixteen on, she'd tried to avoid becoming involved with anyone who wasn't twenty years older than she was. It was never, she told me, about Older Men taking advantage of her. Older Men, she said, had always been willing to show her things, to talk with her about the world, to let her climb out of bed and go through their bookshelves.

Liberty said the same-- We'll trade stories and we'll learn things.  That I could understand. I felt the same way about her, in a way. A neo-hippie girl with long legs and an aversion to wearing underwear who'd tell me about life in Santa Fe and about growing up in the Pacific Northwest...and, yes, teach me kayaking and all about estuary and gulf systems.

Liberty told me that what she liked about affairs with Older Men was that they all had kinks and obsessions that they'd rarely (if ever) been able to talk about with anyone. She was always willing to listen and learn...and not mock them. In Santa Fe there'd been the owner of some little Southwest Modern gallery who was very much a hidden foot fetishist, He'd been terrified to tell anyone about that. Liberty at eighteen had just laughed and asked him why he'd think she'd be disgusted by that. She remembered sitting on the back of his sofa, barefoot in tiny denim shorts while he used wet wipes to go over her feet and then licked her ankles and arches and sucked her toes. She told me that he was amazed that she'd run her fingers through his hair and tell him it felt good.  She had no problems, either, giving him foot jobs or letting him cum on her bare feet. She liked the idea of foot jobs--- she always liked learning skills ---and she liked making him feel good. They'd have more standard kinds of sex, too, and she'd curl up next to him in bed or on his sofa and tell him (truthfully) that it was all fun.

When they weren't in bed, he'd show her about sketches and watercolors and how to paint and sketch. He was probably forty, she said, and all she felt about the age difference was that he had more stories to tell her and more things to teach her. I know how to paint desert light, she said, and I give great foot jobs. I expect to have my toes sucked, too.

When she was at uni, taking environmental science classes, she went on a field trip with one of her classes--- and at one point the class (eight students?) camped at a former state park, an 1812-vintage fort. There was a fair amount of weed smoked and bourbon consumed, and a lot of pairing off. Liberty spent the night in a sleeping bag with the class instructor.  She remembered riding him while he told her about the fort and about the way the coastline had changed. At one point that night she was standing naked on a dock, wrapped in just the sleeping bag while he pointed out boats moving in the distance and told her about the early days of settlement on the coast. She took me kayaking there once upon a time, and she walked me around the fort and told me what she'd learned from those nights paired off with the instructor.  I'm always the one who can talk about history and odd bits of the past, and it was wonderful to have Liberty being my tour guide, having a lovely girl be the one to tell me about things.

She told me that I was easy to talk to, that she liked that part of my being older. And she liked my stories. Maybe I'll make you a character in a novel one day, Liberty said. And I know this'll disappoint you, but you won't be the villain.

She is I think back in the Pacific Northwest these days. I saw a mutual friend who told me Liberty had sent her a postcard from Vancouver Island.  That would've been just before the Red Death closed down travel. I hope she'll come back down here to my city. I would love to know more of her stories.

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.

Two Six Seven: Numb

I saw ads at social media today about a product called Roman Swipes. I first thought the wipes were male body-cleansing wipes, much like the Every Man Jack "speed shower" cleansing wipes I've become obsessive about storing--- wipes designed to make sure that a potential Young Companion isn't sickened by the taste or scent of male flesh and male...parts.

I'll note that I have a supply of Every Man Jack and Cetaphil wipes on hand just...in case.  You did note that I've become horrified and disgusted by my own flesh, didn't you? You know the drill: shower twice a day under water as hot as I can bear, use a body wash probably originally designed for biohazard labs, and rough washcloths that will abrade away a couple of layers of skin. I'm not taking any chances.

Roman Swipes, though, aren't body cleansers. As best I can tell from the ad copy, they're  wipes saturated with a "4% Benzocaine solution" that's supposed to increase time-to-male-orgasm by 340% over several months.  The idea of course is that the Benzocaine is a numbing agent and that you apply it to...sensitive areas to reduce overstimulation-- i.e., it numbs your penis to prevent what used to be called ejaculatio praecox. It doesn't seem like you can just go into a drugstore or to Amazon and buy a pack. From what I could tell by a quick glance at their website, you sign up for a monthly or quarterly program.  Now I have nothing to say about the product or its efficacy. I was just perplexed by the idea of the product.

Ejaculatio praecox has never been my problem. Quite the contrary. I don't need the product for its intended use. When I first glanced at the advert, I hoped it was for another body cleanser. I'm always in the market for anything that can assuage body fear for a little while.

Reading the ad copy, though, it began to occur to me that I am reaching a place in life where Encounters might require pharmaceutical assistance. That hasn't happened yet, though I know it will...which itself is a fear that keeps me paralyzed and unwilling to try.

I used to tell myself that if it ever came to that, to systems failure, that I wouldn't be too proud to use the Blue Pill. My friend Katie in the Home Counties told me that she'd been with men who were a wide range of ages, and that she had no problem with the Blue Pill. She'd known boys in their twenties who used it "recreationally" and men in their late sixties who did need it to perform.  She told me that the Blue Pill existed to solve a problem, that it was nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, she said, she had a problem with dryness, and she'd just use a bit of "personal lubricant". Same thing, she told me--- there's a problem, and you use a tool to fix it. None of it is a judgment about your value as a person or a lover. 

When she and I talked about that, I completely agreed with her. I told myself that if ever the time came, I'd look for a simple and efficient way to fix the problem. Just a pill, I told myself. And I had confidence in my other skills. I told myself that I wasn't a one-trick pony. I knew other ways to offer pleasure to  a Young Companion, and I knew that if the moment came, I'd get through it.

None of that is likely to be true, of course. Over the last year, I've been edging closer to fear that any systems failure would in fact be a judgment on my value as a person. A year ago, I'd have brushed off any fears.  That's not the case tonight. I'm paralyzed by fear of failure, and in the best tradition of...much of my life...I'm unwilling to risk being seen to fail.  Worse, I'm unwilling to be seen at all. I'm increasingly unwilling to be touched. Tonight, even if the opportunity presented itself, I'd be unwilling to be a body with a Young Companion. I'd take it for granted that my flesh--- look, texture, taste, scent ---would disgust any girl who'd be in my presence,

So...I don't need the Roman Swipes. The Blue Pill would be pointless. I have a store of Every Man Jack wipes and I spend my time standing under scalding water and sanding away at my skin.  If I could remove any trace of texture, scent, and taste, I would.  The next stage is...what? Changing my clothes down to the skin two or three times a day? I don't think the Blue Pill can do anything about my growing inability to venture out into anything social.

Two Five Five: Beliefs 3

Let's consider another story from my leggy blonde friend in Aotearoa down in the Land of the Long White Cloud. This is something she told me in July of 2016--- not so very long ago.  And it's not one that I believed then, and not one I believe now:

a contractor is here working on the ceiling tiles in our office.

he is wearing blue jeans, workboots, a long sleeve black top and a hi-vis vest. 

and he is just my kind of dirty hot. you know the type. 

wiry build, stubble, an ex-heroin addict aesthetic. mid to late 40s.  

he actually looks kinda like bronn from game of thrones. 

i made him a coffee on friday when he was working here. (side note - neither of the two receptionists offered him a drink, and he was working here for hours!  i don't know if this is an age thing or what, they are very early 20s, a guy and a girl. obviously they look after clients with coffee/tea etc, but workmen & the IT guys all seem to get ignored!).

manners are important. 

he was flirty and i was bored. 

i may have found an excuse to make my way into the archive room he was working in, and quietly shut the door behind me...

he ran his fingers through my hair while i sucked him. he was big. i swallowed and sat in a meeting with cum on my breath. 

And a bit later that night:

Yes, he was white not Maori, alas. And yes -- I did get his number. I didn't know his name (Rex) until he scrawled it on a piece of paper and handed it to me when he left the building a few hours later. 

The lights were out in the archive room, as he was working on the light panels and ceiling tiles. He saw me come into the room while he was up his ladder. I smiled at him and shut the door behind me. He came down from his ladder and thanked me for the coffee. We didn't say anything else, really. I pulled him towards me by his belt and kissed him. We kissed for a while, and he had his hands down my shirt, on my breasts and nipples. I knelt and undid his jeans and took his cock in my mouth. He tasted clean, mild. After he came, I stood, kissed his cheek and left. I do want to fuck him...

She told me later that she did fuck him a couple of nights after that encounter, that she called him and got sloppy drunk with him at a bar on Cuba St. in Wellington and took him home. After that, he vanished from her stories. I can understand her being attracted to someone who looked like Bronn from 'Game of Thrones', but I don't believe the story at all. It's too cliched, too like something that Showtime or Cinemax would've featured on one of their late-night soft-core anthology programs in the 1990s. And I just can't believe in a character named Rex. I just can't.

There are stories she's told that are believable, of course. In March 2011 she did send an email from work that began simply enough: i had a delicious older man's cock in my mouth this morning. i love starting the day with a mouthful of cum. i missed my first class, i was having so much fun...

Her first class--- she'd have been finishing up an accounting degree in those days. She did take a degree in English Lit and then (practical girl!) go back to VUW to take accounting classes.  She explained things a bit:

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

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

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

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

So...he was around 45 in 2011--- in his mid-50s now. She'd have been...twenty-four? twenty-five? She added this later: This was Shane. He was gorgeous. I had a few nights with him and Caitie both.  Do I believe that part, about the three-ways? Maybe. Maybe. But meeting him that way at a marina party and ending up in bed--- that's not implausible. The dirty-hot contractor? No--- I don't see that as plausible, especially since the risky-hot part, the risk of getting caught, would have meant losing a job and not just getting tossed from a bar.

One story I believe, and one I don't.  Do we agree on plausibility? And...do comment and let me know what your own criteria for plausibility are. What things do make erotica plausible or implausible for you?

Two Three Four: Nerve

I remember a film from long ago, a film whose name and actors I can't recall at all. I might have been in my first year at university when I saw it--- it was as long ago as that. Last night I remembered one scene, and it's stayed with me.

There was a scene where one of the main characters was exposed to nerve gas. I can't recall why, whether it was a lab accident, a military training accident, or something deliberate. I can't recall, and in the end it doesn't matter. What I do remember is the character sprawled on a floor somewhere, his body spasming and twitching as the nerve gas took effect. A scary enough scene, disturbing and grim.  What came to me last night, though, was not a character dying in the story, but how his body jerking helplessly was far too like what you might look like in the throes of having sex or, maybe more to the point, in the midst of indulging in the Solitary Vice.

Sex is almost always about loss of control.  That's coded as good in a great many scenes: giving up control in order to find pleasure, to be able to receive pleasure.  Yet while the film scene did make me think of how I (or anyone) might look during sex, thinking that also made me ashamed and depressed.

I've seen a fair number of lovely young companions indulge in the Solitary Vice over the years. That's been something I've asked them to do for me. Some, yes, have offered to do that all on their own. I've had young companions tell me that they wanted to show me what pleasure looked like. Some I know enjoyed the performance itself, enjoyed the idea of performing.  And, yes---- I watched and thought they were beautiful. I admired the way they gave themselves up to pleasure. I envied them the ability to lose themselves in what they were doing, the ability to hold my eye and bring me into their own sensations.

Do I have to say that I've always and ever been hesitant to do the same thing for them, even when they've specifically asked?  The reason why is and always has been body dysphoria, I suppose--- or at least a distrust of my body. That film scene with the nerve gas victim haunts me right now--- the jerking limbs, the aimless kicking, the head helplessly shaking. I'd imagine myself looking like that, and I'd know at some very basic, foundational level that there was nothing attractive in the way I'd look, that whatever happened with my body, the young companion watching it would either laugh or be disgusted and contemptuous.

I am not at home in my body and never have been. I have good eyes. I have long, slender hands. These days (and years too late) I have good cheekbones. But there's nothing in the way I hold myself, nothing in the way I move, nothing in the way I look undressed that's sexually alluring. There's nothing about my body these days that doesn't represent decay and failure to me. I find it harder and harder to imagine taking any pleasure in my body or taking any pleasure from it. I find it impossible here this afternoon to imagine my body giving any pleasure.

I've always thought of sex as something crafted into story arcs,  and I can't imagine a story these days where my body doesn't look like that dying nerve gas victim. I'm certainly nothing to watch, and anything physical I might offer to do with or for a young companion would look like that spasming, helplessly twitching body in the film scene. That character dies a horrible and hopeless death. Anything I'd do with my body, anything I'd try to do with a lover, would be what was happening there in that long ago film.

Two Three One: Hydraulics

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

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

Condoms are something of a mystery to me. I remember the Plague Years of the Eighties. I remember when clubs were filled with PSA placards urging everyone to "cover up". I will admit that they remained something on the edges of my own experience. That's probably something like straight privilege--- the Plague was something that happened to other people, to, well, Others. It's also that my own outlook on sex was shaped before the Plague Years. I thought about contraception in some way, I suppose, but I hadn't had to consider the Plague or even the non-fatal kinds of STD. In my late teens or early twenties, I took it as a given (and this may be a generational thing) that girls all went at sixteen or seventeen to be put on the Pill, that they and their mothers connived at a belief that the girl's periods needed to be regulated, or that the Pill was good for some hypothetical acne issue. I took it for granted that when a girl arrived at university, she immediately used her student health services plan to get on the Pill. I may well have been in grad school the first time a girl handed me a condom, and I was clueless enough about how to put it on.  That's a long way from the days when student groups had bowls of free condoms at informational tables on campus.

I do want to ask my friend in New Zealand about condoms. She was born at the end of the Eighties, and I have no clue what she was taught about using protection at school. She was a posh party girl, though, and I do wonder if she kept a couple of condoms available...just in case. I wonder if she keeps one or two in her messenger bag or her bedside table even now.

This takes us to someplace else, though. Condoms are about contraception and STDs, about "protection". But there is something else I wonder if girls carry--- something I worry about for myself, too.

I'd always assumed that on any date night, or when a lover was coming by for a sleepover, that you showered and shaved and shampooed. Those things were essential and taken for granted. Right now, though, I've developed a new set of hypochondriacal fears. I've been reading question sites and blogs where girls (inevitably) complain about male behaviour. And now I have a set of hygiene fears. What if showering isn't enough? What if it isn't enough at all? The human body is an unreliable thing, and its design is haphazard at best.

A couple of years ago I discovered that porn actresses have been known to fast before certain kinds of scenes and then eat only boiled white rice. Boiled white rice serves to prevent unpleasant after-effects from scenes with sodomitical (or strap-on) practices. It seals them up against loss of control or leakage.

What I've come to worry about involves not boiled white rice but wet wipes. I've seen blog posts and AMA questions about the use of wet wipes for male hygiene. I'd always thought that a long, hot shower and body wash would be sufficient to take care of any male hygiene issue, but the things I've been reading suggest that I may be wrong. I've seen answers and blog posts that suggest that a girl should wash and/or wipe down anything she's planning to put in her mouth.  Carry a pack of wet wipes, the suggestions go--- wipe him down before you put anything in your mouth, and do it for all guys, not just the uncut. Well, now I have something new to fear.

I need to ask my friend whether she carries a wet wipe or two with her when she might meet someone while she's at a party or a club. A quick glance at the Walmart or Target websites shows that there are wet wipes (cotton, flushable, "for adults") that are marketed as "feminine hygiene" wipes. But the question here is about the male body. Should the male partner keep wet wipes in his bathroom and excuse himself to go use them before sex? There is a brand of wet wipes called Dude that very obliquely markets itself as a product males can use to do exactly that.  The brand has a competitor called Every Man Jack--- a brand I'd never be able to buy without some mixture of shame and barely-controllable laughter.  No young companion, no partner, has ever made any kind of complaint relative to hygiene. I know that. I know that I'm relentless about showers and body wash. But...what if? What if? So I do find myself staring at the Target website (or Amazon--- Amazon carries both brands) and wondering if I'll have to re-write my own history and wondering about shame, self-loathing, and how many abject apologies I might have to make. This is hypochondria, but it's paralyzing enough.

My friend in Wellington is fond of sodomitical practices and of analingus as well. An email she sent me back in late fall just noted in passing that she'd become really into eating ass and wasn't sure why. So I wonder if she keeps wet wipes in her backpack or her messenger bag to deal with any cleanliness issues either for herself or her partner.  And...would she be the only one? Are hip twenty-somethings carrying a small pack of wet wipes with them on adventures in the urban night?

I've seen a fair number of things on line about why sleeping naked is the best way to sleep...but also about recommended procedures for making sure that sleeping naked doesn't lead to stains or skid marks on the sheets. This is not something you need to read in tandem with fashion articles where lovely actresses and models enthuse about the sensations and delights of sleeping naked under expensive Egyptian cotton sheets.  Yet another thing to sit and let gnaw on your mind until you're terrified of your own body and shower habits.

In any case, I must ask my friend in Wellington (as well as various lovely young friends here) about wet wipes. Do they ever carry them? Do they ever use them on male companions--- or on themselves ---prior to sex? What are the social rules about such things these days? If you're reading this out over the aether, let me know what you think. If you're a lovely girl who may find herself meeting a potential new companion at a bar or a party--- do you carry condoms or wet wipes just in case? And do you have any problems telling a new companion what the wet wipes are for?

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 Nine Six: Metrics

I've tried to write here about sex and romance as slightly distanced, slightly academic issues. No one male these days can write anything about sex that might be taken as "narcissism". But tonight's entry is about me, and about overcoming fears.

A very lovely friend messaged me a few days ago with a very direct request. She wanted to know a particular number in my life. She's Kiwi, and so she's very, very direct. There are only four numbers in my life that I'd worry about. I knew she wouldn't ask about my salary. She wouldn't do that, and I wouldn't have to tell her that she probably makes at least twice what I do (who doesn't?). She knows my age to the day; I've never hidden that from her. She knows the tally of my sexual partners. That only leaves one thing, doesn't it?  Her question was very simple, and not one any girl has ever asked me directly before. It's a question that I've avoided thinking about all my life. I sat on the edge of the bed with my iPad  and watched my hands tremble. At my age, I have very few comforting illusions or  blissful bits of ignorance left; I wasn't sure I needed to lose this one.

But I did remember something. I remembered about loyalty and trust and facing my demons. My lovely Wellington girl had written me not long before to say that if she had to describe me to her friends, she'd say Handsome, smart, passionate, loyal, brave, clever, mine.  And she'd always told me I need my man to be brave. I was brave, once upon a time. And I wasn't going to be the sad figure sitting on his bed and having the shakes. I wouldn't be that figure. That's not the image I want to leave behind. My friend said that she was sure that every boy went searching for the number when he was about fifteen, which isn't true at all. I'd spent my life avoiding the whole topic. I called that dignity or having contempt for silly beliefs, but it was only a lack of courage.

Oh, I did my due diligence. I am a trained historian and researcher. I took my iPad and did some quick and basic research. Yes, there are studies on the issue. However not? I found the numbers based on studies in North America, Western Europe, and Australia-New Zealand.  Now, afterwards,  I can sit here and grin ruefully. I was saying that the "average" result was whatever-whatever, and it struck me that...hmmm--- do I mean average or mode? Or mean?....and that I couldn't for the life of me remember my long-ago statistics classes or what each of those things was or did. (What exactly is "median"?) So I just said "average". Why not? All the average results fell in a reasonably narrow range. I made a note of that. Let's remember--- I have been desperately competitive about test results since I was five years old. I have spent most of my life agonizing over test scores and defining myself by my scores.  So I knew what I was competing against.

The next part of the story is the embarrassing part. You know what it is. There on the bed with a notepad, a red sharpie, and a cheap green plastic grade-school ruler. So I took measurements. Different bases, different positions, different angles.  Made notes. And looked at the numbers.  I typed out a message on my iPad to my friend in Wellington, took a breath, and hit Send.

I spent the day at my desk, disoriented and abstracted. Yes, I imagined a bell curve in my head. And...I knew where I fell on it.  I was comfortably on the right side of the bell curve. Not the right-hand tail, not even close to that. But the place on the bell curve was...acceptable. Acceptable. Not awful. Nothing shameful. I told myself that--- nothing to be ashamed of.  I was nonetheless scared all day. It felt all too like waiting for grades as an undergraduate or sitting outside a parent's room in a hospital and waiting for a verdict.  My hands kept trembling.

About 18h30 that evening I checked my phone for email. She'd answered, and it began, Thank you for being brave. And you're perfect for me.  The answer was everything I'd been too afraid to hope for: love, acceptance, trust, delight. All of that was there. For the record, now: I very nearly cried. That's the really embarrassing part--- not that I looked ridiculous taking the measurements, but that I ever doubted her.

Remember this. I was afraid to know the number at fifteen. I was afraid to know the number at thirty and far beyond. I didn't have to be--- I'd never had to be afraid. I don't know why I'd thought I ever had to be. No lover in all those years had ever laughed or mocked or told me I was lacking. But I spent all those years afraid of my own flesh, and I'd never needed to do that. I had lovers, mind you, but I'd shied away from so many possibilities out of fear. So many times I'd run away from things I could've had if I hadn't been afraid of being mocked.

Remember this, too. That here so late in my life, a very lovely posh blonde girl half my age told me that I was valued and valuable, and that I was brave enough to be her man. If she messaged me tomorrow and told me to get my passport and laptop and a single carry-on and that she'd have a ticket to Wellington waiting for me, I'd throw over my so-called career and be gone--- Poof! Gone like Keyser Soze.

One Four Nine: Sad Comedy

There's a truly hilarious, albeit sad, post at Salon.com for 13 July 15 that's worth reading---- called something like "Anal Sex Destroyed My Relationship". It's worth your consideration. I'm not at all sure what to think of the girl who's the author. Her pose in writing the story is that she's now married and looking back on the awful experiences of her younger days. That's a risky pose, and one that can be both painful and cruel. 

Here's the story. It's New Year's Eve, and the girl is with her boyfriend at a hotel in Manhattan. Girl is expecting (or desperately hoping, it sounds like) a marriage proposal, since it's NYE, but on the night when she expects a ring, her boyfriend instead asks if they can do anal. She's always regarded having sex at all in a relationship as shameful, as something vile she has to do to keep a man around and move things along to marriage. That's what her mother taught her, she writes. Even her more experienced sister agrees. Sex is what you have to do to get men to marry you. Anything more is shameful.

She's been dating her boyfriend for a while, and she does see sex as something that must lead somewhere. I don't necessarily think she thinks of England while enduring it all, but she's certainly horrified at his request. She tells herself, though, that it'll make him want to propose, so...she does it. And...things go bad. 

Neither of them has done this before, it seems, and by her account they both seem to be less than capable of figuring out the procedures. (In their mid/late 20s? Never? That's the saddest part of all.) Anyway, Bad Things ensue. Her boyfriend ends up in shower angrily cleaning himself off and telling her how disgusted he is. He ditches her immediately. You saw that coming, didn't you?

She now loathes herself for submitting to a "degrading" act and is angry and bitter she didn't get a ring out of the deal. It's Bad Comedy all the way round. Though there were a surprising number of comments by female readers who told the author that she was a fool, that no man who ever thought a girl worth marrying would ask her to do...that. Oh, I know--- Never Read The Comments. But still...this is just Bad Comedy. 

I have no idea what to make of the story or of the comments. I can't imagine that two educated, middle-class Americans in the teens of the century haven't done that before. I can't imagine that two educated, intelligent people couldn't work out what to do with a little joint planning--- or at least do some quick research on their smartphones. 

I certainly can't comprehend the attitudes here. She's angry that he'd ask for such a vile thing, and angry at how he treated her afterwards. I can follow her halfway on that--- the second half. She had every right to be angry at what he did afterwards. But being angry at him for asking? That leaves me blank. He behaved very badly afterwards; no question about that. A gentleman tries to live by old, old advice: function in disaster, finish with grace. Part of that is never, never treating a young lady who's offered up her favours with anything other than politeness and gratitude. Especially if things hadn't worked well.

I have nothing but contempt for the commenters who claimed that no man ever wants to marry a girl who'll do anal sex. The comments about how a man who cares for a girl would never ask her to do something so degrading and disgusting are just...beyond my ken. I'm baffled, too at her own self-loathing about having sex and at her belief that doing this with him would lead to marriage. Of course, she was already crushed and angry even before his request, since she'd gone out with him that NYE fully expecting a ring. I don't see anywhere in her story that he'd been hinting that he was planning a proposal that night. That's delusional, and it is sad.

I've never had a problem with doing that. I knew the act existed long before I had any chance to try it. It was something filed away from the French s/m novels I'd read--- something I always wanted to try with a lovely girl, and something I assumed would be part of any affair between two over-bookish people who wanted to be daring and decadent. It's something I asked girls to do in my lost youth and my undergraduate days, and they almost inevitably agreed. Part of that was the desire to be transgressive, part of it was a very simple desire to explore new things, part of it was (I suppose) a generational thing where when you did sex, you tried everything on the smorgasbord of possibilities. I can recall girls laughing about trying it and shrugging and saying sure, why not? I can recall girls pointing a warning finger at me and reminding me to go slow. But I can't remember anyone ever panicking about how it was a degrading act or a way of humiliating her. I don't recall it as having some huge emotional fraught-ness about it.  

Would I have laughed at the couple if they'd been on reality TV? Yes, I'd have laughed. It's Bad Comedy--- the inept fumbling, the boy frantically soaping himself in the shower, the girl bitterly wondering where her engagement ring was. But it's sad, too. Sad that she was taught that sex was disgusting except as a way to get a man to marry you. Sad that so late in life she still felt that way and that by her mid/late 20s she hadn't tried perfectly ordinary variations. Sad that the boyfriend was a jerk about it all--- and that they couldn't laugh about it, order room service champagne, and try again later, or at least try what they liked later. 

Oh, and it's no less sad that the author is writing a couple of years later from a place where she boasts that she now has a good man who married her and expects nothing sexual from her that might be...vile. (Yes, I wonder what he must think about when he reads that) 

The commenters are less sad than appalling, mind you. Their own attitudes about men and sex are alien to me. I don't find the act disgusting or an assertion of power over some helpless girl. I can't imagine looking down on someone who's done that with me. Reject a girl because she's had some particular kind of sex with me? That's an attitude that I can't begin to deal with. The girls I've loved in my life have all been willing to explore things, to take risks in bed, to regard exploration as good for its own sake. 

Well, Bad Comedy. Though I'd be interested to hear what you think of it all. If you're reading this, tell me what you think. Are there acts and variations you find inherently disgusting? What are your own thoughts on exploration? And...is there ever any reason to be disgusted simply by exploration? 

One Four Two: Objects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Four One: Solitary

I just noticed that the on-line world is full of announcements that May is National Masturbation Month.  And 28 May, every article inevitably tells us, will be the climax of the month, National Masturbation Day. That's just something none of the authors can escape saying. The more recondite articles will cite the history of the event--- back to 1995, to a San Francisco vibrator emporium protesting the dismissal of a U.S. Surgeon General who argued that masturbation should be part of a sex-ed curriculum ---and note that the original National Masturbation Day was 7 May.  At least one or two of the better on-line articles will include photos of anti-masturbation propaganda or of the covers of medical texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about the diseases and disorders caused by "onanism"--- Samuel Tissot is the big name here, of course, especially if you remember Steven Marcus' "The Other Victorians".

The tone of the articles is always fairly jocular. They mock the anti-masturbation crusades and crusaders of the past (I'm sure you know the Graham cracker story) and make jokes about what you're supposed to do in the other eleven months. More political articles tend to make the (very valid) point that masturbation is a marker for a great many other things. Opposition to masturbation is a very good predictor for right-wing attitudes on lots of other things--- abortion, same-sex-marriage, contraception, sex roles, sexual autonomy, gendered work roles.

Nonetheless, there's always a comic undertone. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. One article that took it as a given that masturbation was "empowering" and should be a major part of one's sexual education and "self-care" also began with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink set of jokes about National Masturbation Month and "choking the chicken" and the horrors of being a street cleaner after National Masturbation Day parades.

National Masturbation Month, like the vibrator emporium in San Francisco (Good Vibrations) that created the idea of the celebration, is a rather gendered thing itself, mind you. The articles take it for granted that there's something celebratory and liberating in female participation, but that male participation is superfluous and...comical. Comical at best. It's also taken for granted that anyone male is such a chronic masturbator that there'd be no need to teach him anything...and that, unlike the female case, there still is something shameful or risible about male masturbation.

I've said this before, but...in a world where words like "wank" and "wanker" are in common use, or where any set of images of beautiful girls is referred to as someone's "spank bank", there's really no way anyone male could indulge in the Solitary Vice and still maintain any self-respect. You can't be male and have masturbation treated as "empowering". If you're male, the Solitary Vice is regarded as some mix of pathetic and ridiculous at best, and as probably creepy, misogynistic, and dangerous at worst.  Even at "sex-positive" playspaces or things like the Killing Kittens parties, while a masturbating female is regarded as getting into the spirit of things, a masturbating single male is regarded as repulsive and unwelcome.

Here in the age of the gender wars, male desire is taken as being inherently suspect and treated as both pathetic ("thirsty") and dangerous. Male desire is seen as threatening, and no one male who hopes to avoid being mocked or "called out" can ever admit to any particular forms of desire. Admitting to particular fantasies is a clear path to being mocked or derided in a way that girls don't have to face.  That's one thing I've taken from the articles I've found at gender wars sites--- never admit to any concrete fantasies, never admit to any particular form of desire. Never, never admit to engaging in fantasies.  Well--- never indulge in any fantasies. The Solitary Vice is not for males. We've learned that from the gender wars.  Male desire is always regarded as unwelcome, sad, and ridiculous. As being inherently violent and about aggression. And the male version of the Solitary Vice is, well, far too easily mocked and held in contempt for anyone ever to consider indulging it in.

There are arbitrary social rules out there for everything. Everything comes with its set of social rankings. It's quite clear these days that if you're male, you can't participate in National Masturbation Month except to make jokes from the sidelines. No one male could be a promoter of the event. Certainly no one male could be a spokesmodel for the event. And in the other eleven months, well, if you have any shreds of self-respect left in your life, you certainly can't surrender to the (ideologically suspect) sad habits of onanism. Pleasure is itself suspect these days; we know that. Self-pleasuring is a gendered thing now, and it's not for males.  Desire itself is suspect, but it's very clearly not for males.

But how did we get here? That's something I've puzzled over here in the new century. The male version of the Solitary Vice was never regarded as aesthetically attractive, but how did we get to "wank" and "wanker" as common terms of contempt? How did we get to something like National Masturbation Month being increasingly gendered--- empowering for females, a contemptuous joke for males? Any thoughts? If you're out there anywhere over the aether reading this, tell me your thoughts.

As for me, well...as a gentleman of a certain age, I have few enough shreds of self-respect left. But I will hang on to what's left of them. There are things one can simply never do--- more and more of such things, really.  But I won't risk mockery and contempt. I won't risk becoming a victim to the spirit of the age. There are just things one can never, never do, or even consider doing. Better avoid the risk. It's just that simple.