Three Eight Three: Receptivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Six One: Clowns

I've been following along with the Trans Wars over the holidays. They're the latest round in the larger Culture Wars.  And the current campaign  seems to be built around drag queens. 

I can remember seeing drag shows back in the Long Ago, back in my clubland days. I can recall seeing an advertising poster for a drag show in Vienna and realizing that "Travesti", the local term for a drag show, was related to both "travesty" and "transvestite". No, I was not very knowledgeable at that age.  I can remember seeing drag shows, though I don't recall ever finding them very interesting. The shows were almost inevitably "tributes" to female singers or actresses who'd become gay icons. Lots and lots of drag queens on stage doing Liza Minelli or Nina Simone imitations. The music was never my style, and I was too young to have any appreciation for Joan Crawford (or even Joan Collins) impersonations. 

I might've responded better to things like Dame Edna Everage, but that kind of performance (is "panto" a correct term here?) wasn't on offer at dance clubs in my Lost Youth. 

Anyway...here we are in 2023, and Drag Queen Story Hours are a battleground. The right wing and the most strident of the GC brigade now see outright evil in drag queen performances and refer to drag queens as "groomer clowns".  I'm not sure what to say to that.

Maybe the whole idea of a drag show has changed since I was in my twenties. I remember the shows as being a mix of beauty pageants and icon tributes. They weren't for children, but that was largely because children wouldn't have had any idea who Talullah Bankhead was, let alone Jayne Mansfield. I can recall the jokes as being sly and filled with double entendres, but I don't recall the shows as being overtly sexual. I don't recall any strip shows as part of drag performances, even in largely gay clubs.

I've seen drag queen brunches where the waitstaff were in drag and did comedy bits at the tables. The humor isn't really my thing, and at brunch I usually just want to drink Mimosas and be left alone to (I hope) flirt with my lovely co-ed companion. But I have no moral objection to someone in drag bringing me eggs Benedict and hash browns. And I have no objection to someone in drag reading books to children.

I can remember a few years ago when there was a less hysterical controversy over sex workers reading books at libraries to children. The sometime porn actress Sasha Grey was attacked by the right wing for that, for being a volunteer at her local library and reading to kids. I was very sympathetic to Ms. Grey and other sex workers. Being a volunteer reader was a good deed in itself, and I understood her political point, too. Being a sex worker didn't (and doesn't) make someone a monster, and volunteering at a local library was a way to show that sex workers were part of the community. 

So I can understand why drag performers might want to do story hours. The idea is to show that they're simply entertainers and that they're part of a larger community... and that they're willing to volunteer to do constructive things-- like teaching children that reading is fun.

I'm a bit wary, mind you, of the way drag queens have been conflated with trans folk. My own understanding was that most drag queens aren't trans-- that they're gay men. My own understanding is that some might simply be transvestites and might be straight. Drag has its own history and it's not just a subset of the trans world. There's a critical argument to be made about drag as being misogynistic (the whole "woman face" argument), and whether or not you agree with it, it's at least a respectable argument. But it's poor damned history to see drag as being inherently trans. 

I'm wary, too, of the right-wing arguments that drag performers reading to children constitutes "grooming". When the right accuses drag performers of "sexualizing" children, I have to be skeptical. What they really mean is that they're angry that children are being told that some people are gay or trans, or that it's possible to be different. They don't object to stories where two hetero characters kiss or marry. What they object to is any performance or story that suggests that heterosexual monogamy isn't the only kind of acceptable romance. 

My own view of the Trans Wars leans more to the GC side. Take that as a given. There are two biological sexes for humans, and humans don't change sex. But there are multiple genders-- maybe as many as there are individuals, since each and every individual is  a different mix of socially-defined traits for men and women. 

But I have no time for people who use the Trans Wars as a way to re-fight the LGB Wars of the 1970s-90s. I have no time for people whose ultimate argument is that anything not "normal" is evil, or who use dislike of the TRA types to attack LGB people.

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 Two: Pages

Does anyone know if actual porn novels are still published?

Long ago and far away, in my teens and in my undergraduate days, porn novels filled the spinner racks at all-night convenience stores and bus stations. There were other genres there-- mostly action-adventure series --but porn novels seemed to fill three-quarters of the spinner racks. I haven't seen porn novels sold new since sometime in the 1980s, and I've always assumed that videotape killed the porn novel. Reagan's attorney-general deliberately omitted porn novels from his anti-porn efforts because "who reads?" 

There are websites devoted to cover art from 1960s-80s porn novels, and the other evening I found a link to a Russian website that has the scanned texts of something like three or four hundred American porn novels from the 1970s and early 1980s. I suppose I'm glad the books at the site were all from American publishers. British porn is...depressing. British porn is at least as depressing and dreary as British girlie magazines. And I think I'd be afraid of Australian porn novels. There are limits. Yes there are.

Steven Marcus used the word "pornotopia" in his "The Other Victorians", and it does apply to 1970s-80s porn novels. In porn novels, everything turns on sex. Wealth or poverty exist only to provide excuses for sex scenes. All schools exist only as spaces for students and teachers to engage in breathless sex. All travel is from one site for exotic (or at least outdoor) sex to another. Everyone is either handsome/beautiful or, if gnarled and gnomish, at least shockingly well-hung. Any social interaction at all is an occasion for sex. And all sex-- hetero, gay, lesbian, bi, interspecies, incest --invariably produces multiple orgasms all around. Everyone is always ready for anything, and even if a character seems to be horrified or appalled, she (and it always she) is secretly excited and thrilled by what's happening. In porn novels, nothing exists that isn't an occasion for sex. No object exists that can't be used as a sex toy. No one is ever bored during sex, no one's disgust is ever other than feigned. 

The Russian website had a copy of a c. 1980 novel called "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl" that was...hilarious and awful in equal parts. The writing was (of course) awful, but...not as bad as you'd think. So here we have a teen schoolgirl-- just turning sixteen --on a week-long summer field trip with a Future Farmers group. And...it shouldn't be hard to trace her story arc. In the course of the first couple of nights at a young farmers' convention, she loses her virginity while still on the bus...to her seat mate's well-trained dog. And some random, nameless boy who's been watching the girl and her seat mate with the dog. Young Denise (yes, she has a name) goes from Bronte-reading virgin to sex with boys, other girls, grizzled old bus drivers, dogs, donkeys, and a stallion. And of course with her own older brother. She also swears a public vow before a cheering crowd of other teens never to wear underwear again (I approve of that scene). By the end of the book, she and her brother are deeply in romantic love, and they're sleeping naked in one another's arms in a hayloft after he orchestrates her first time with a stallion.  

I'm not sure how you're supposed to respond to "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl". It's all very light-hearted, and there's no post-Foucault focus on power structures. A random boy who sodomizes the heroine over a bus seat goes from shouting, "Take my jizz  you lezzie dog-slut!" to whispering in her ear that "your skin is like honeyed Asian silk". All I can imagine is the standard porn-writer trope of the Ivy League English Lit graduate paying his rent by writing porn. 

Porn novels in those days assumed that incest was commonplace, and that all suburban siblings were in and out of one another's beds. And of course there's an obvious meta-incest happening, too, since the authors of the novels manage to repeat one another's work and share character names. There's probably a bit of revenge going on as well-- Denise in "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl" is always described by her full name: Denise Chapman. I'm taking it for granted that Denise Chapman is the author's ex-girlfriend or ex-wife, or at least the Unobtainable Beauty of his own teen years.

Porn novels were at least honest. I'm thinking of a series called the DB Collection-- DB standing for "Dirty Books". The covers were all flat black with a white number and the title. And the titles were things like "DB 1 - Stuffed With Big Black Dick" or "DB 4 - Fucking Her Tender Teen Asshole". You paid for nasty porn, and you got nasty porn. There was no way you could tell someone that you'd bought a title from the DB Collection by accident. You couldn't say you'd been looking for one of Tolstoy's later novels and picked up a DB title by accident. 

There's a whole body of discussion about how porn and erotica are different. One key thing, I think, is that '70s and '80s porn novels were much more about doing sex than erotica would ever be. Yes, the novels said, you can do that with an Irish Setter or a polished ivory statue of a saint. Porn novels never questioned the idea of going farther, or trying the most unlikely positions or partners. What you can try, you must try. Erotica can be about finding oneself, about discovering that you're submissive or bi or poly. Porn is about the functional possibilities of the world. There's no magic in porn, but there is a lot of...industrial engineering.

I spent a lot of time in my lost youth reading Foucault and his contemporaries, and reading 1970s porn through a critical theory lens is a comic experience. But I suppose that's not the way to read "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl". It's the only way I can read it, mind you, but that's always been the problem with my reading. I assume that the author was at least as devoted to irony as I am, and he's feeding me postmodernist set-ups for jokes. 

I will have to spend more time going through the scanned titles at the Russian website. And I will have to tell you, my friends and readers, about the things I learned from porn novels back in the last age.

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 Two Six: Vintage

Erotica ages badly. 

I think we can agree on that. 

Erotica from past decades has bad fashion, bad music, and body choices that feel...somehow wrong in the present. 

Last night I watched a c.1978 French-Italian film called "Laure", supposedly written as a novel and then adapted for the screen by Emmanuelle Arsan, the nominal author of the "Emmanuelle" novels. The lead actress was called Annie Belle-- a French actress with platinum-dyed hair cropped as short as my own Russian-gangster haircut. She'd have been twenty-two when the film was shot. A rather pretty girl, but my tastes have been shaped by fashion and bodies from later days. My thought was immediately was that she should've been taller and more aerobicized. Waxed, too. Beautiful blue eyes, and I do like girls with garçonne hairstyles, but while she managed to be suitably panty-free during the entire film, she was just a bit off from what popular culture in the last twenty or twenty-five years has favored. 

Odd note-- Annie Belle does remind me of the 2021 porn star Skye Blue. Same platinum-dyed 1922 boy's haircut, same lovely eyes, same large areolae. Though Skye Blue is taller, with good abs and a sense that sex is based on irony and transgression.

I think-- think --that I did once own a copy of the Arsan novel Laure, or at least a German translation of it. Something purchased at an "alternative" bookshop in Vienna, back in the days when porn, Marxism, and New Age books were all thrown together. I bought it only because it was by Emmanuelle Arsan, and the two novels (Emmanuelle-- L' anti-vierge and Emmanuelle-- La leçon d'homme) attributed to her had been the sources for the classic Just Jaeckin films with Sylvia Kristel. So I bought Laure and...puzzled my way through the German before giving the book to some long-forgotten girl in my past. 

Laure and the two Just Jaeckin films still have hot scenes, true. But the horrid, syrupy French soundtrack music kills anything approaching arousal. So of course do the hairstyles and the costumes. All the films are set in a quasi-imaginary Asia (Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong), and while there are some elegant white-linen colonial looks, the women's outfits are so painfully 1970s-- bad platform sandals, lots of patterned Qiana blouses, hiphugger bell-bottom slacks --that you break into laughter even when the actress is busily shedding the Anne Klein knock-offs she's wearing. We won't talk about the male looks and costumes. Let's just say that both things are...tragic. Or tragicomic. 

The films were all shot in the Orient-- not Asia, mind you, but an imaginary Orient filled with languidly decadent expats and willing natives. Pretty much everything that has any trace of political, social, or ethnic/racial issues will set your teeth on edge in the year 2021. 

Underlying the storylines of all three films is the belief in some kind of Free Love. Not the grindingly earnest polyamory of our own day, but a belief that sex is something beautiful people do when they're bored, or when they've just found someone interesting. Jealousy exists just as a plot device to give characters an excuse to have sex with the partners of people who've been having sex with the main characters' husbands or wives. Older, wiser expats give long lectures about how "monogamy is dying" and how sex is an avenue to a higher state of consciousness, or at least to higher aesthetics. It's taken for granted that all lovely teens will acquire older lovers, and that while bisexuality is taken as a given for all expat females from fifteen into old age, male bisexuality is solely between fey young native men, never for any expat who isn't rich and sixty...and who prefers gazelle-like native boys. 

Everyone of course speaks in long, complex sentences filled with justifications for giving up monogamy and for membership in relationships that are as complex as DNA chains. Lots of theory, but...nothing taken from Foucault. There are no earnest and moralizing looks at power dynamics, no sense of self-righteous political analysis. Well, everyone Laure or Emmanuelle meets is rich, at least by 1970s Manila or rural Thai standards-- so politics never has to intrude into the Arsan world. 

I may watch the two Sylvia Kristel films again, though. Not for the plots, of course. Just for a couple of Ms. Kristel's scenes with lovely girls, or in unexpected settings. There is a scene in Emmanuelle 2 where Ms. Kristel reaches orgasm via acupuncture needles that I've found hot for years and years. But it's too hard to avoid laughter when considering the plots.

Erotica is built what we find arousing in the here-and-now, in the present moment. Watching Laure in the Land of Bush A-Plenty (as a friend calls the 1970s) sets off so many aesthetic and fashion warning signs that it's barely possible to see the film as sexy at all. And whenever the characters talk, they pontificate about beliefs we all find ludicrous if not sinister here in the age of Default Friend and other neo-Victorian blogs.

Maybe porn clips are the only way one can approach visual stimuli these days.

 

Three Zero Six: Requests

Once upon a time, I recalled something my friend Liberty said about the older men in her life and past:

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. 

That meant a lot to me once upon a time, hearing a lovely strawberry-blonde girl say that she wouldn't mock the things I like. That's something I've been agonizing over.

Back in another age, I had no problem asking girls for the things I liked in bed. I had no problem telling someone what gave me pleasure...and asking what they liked. Even ten years ago--- maybe even five ---I had no problem with just asking for things. I took it as a given that that was what an affair was about. You told a lover or potential lover about the things that gave you pleasure, and the two of you shared that knowledge. In all the years since I was fifteen or sixteen I'd felt perfectly safe doing that. An affair, a relationship, was about learning what obsessions and kinks a lover had...and learning something from trying them out. Back a dozen years, and I had no problem just saying, This is something I like. Have you ever tried it? I'd had girls laugh with me about those things--- the bright laughter of someone thrilled or intrigued or amused ---but no one had ever laughed at me about the things I liked. No one had ever recoiled in horror or disgust. But here in the third decade of the not-quite-so-new century, I don't feel safe any more. Not at all. 

Last evening I watched a brief video clip of a rather lovely porn actress who calls herself Ashley Lane. She's apparently a fairly well-known bondage and fetish model, and she does more standard porn as well. Lovely girl, by the way. Long light brown hair, high cheekbones, that lithe and slender look I like. Anyway...the clip was simple enough. She was sitting naked on a countertop, giving a foot job to some random male scene partner. She was smirking a bit, and obviously confident in her skills. I watched the clip and sighed. Ms. Lane herself was very attractive, and what she was doing looked fun and just wicked enough to seem worth trying in some risky place. And...it's not something I would ever ask a girl to do. I'd be far too afraid to ask.

If the girl offered, of course I'd accept. But I could never ask. Asking for that would be too close to the foot fetish world, and that world is always considered pathetic and risible these days. As a male of a certain age, I certainly couldn't ask for anything either specific or non-vanilla. To be a male of a certain age here in the brave new world is to be regarded as inherently creepy and disgusting. You're not allowed by the Arbitrary Social Rules to admit to anything non-vanilla...or to admit to any sexual preferences at all. 

There was a time when I had no problem looking at a girl across a table and telling her that I'd love to do the blindfold and candle wax thing with her, or to introduce her to a riding crop. Nowadays I won't even hold someone's hand.I'd never spend an evening talking about films or books while running a finger along a long, slender bare leg. If a girl asked me what I like, or what turns me on, I'll never tell her. I"ll respond to a direct offer, but I will never admit to having any preferences. I will never ask if someone might be interested in something. That's not mine to do. 

Nothing I might like, nothing that gives me pleasure, is anything I can admit to, no matter what it is. And I'm equally forbidden to offer some way to give a lovely partner pleasure.  In any case, it would be taken as a given that I'm incapable of giving pleasure--- or at least I'd take it as a given. Anything I might want to do or try is inherently pathetic or creepy. Any skill I might offer up is insufficient, and my thought that I might have a skill is a sign of toxic narcissism. 

We've reached a place where lust, adventure, and exploration are all regarded as sad and pathetic, if not abusive. The Age of the Windowless Monads, I suppose we can call it. Communication used to be the panacea for all things--- communicate with your partner! Not these days, mind you, Opening up to a partner is as unwelcome as an actual phone call. 

Two Nine Three: Lessons

Last night I watched "Altered States"--- a film from c.1981 that I've always rather liked.  If you haven't seen the film, I will recommend it.

There's a moment in "Altered States" where Wm. Hurt has the first physical symptoms of regressing into some kind of archaic hominid. He's in bed with one of his students at the time (she calls him "Dr. Jessup" when he leaves bed and dashes to the bathroom to look at his transformation in the mirror). The actress is named Ora Rubinstein; her character is billed only as "Young Medical Student". I like that...and wonder if you'd still still have that character if you re-did the film in the Year Twenty. Could you still have Dr. Jessup sleeping with one of his students? The film takes it for granted that he'll have affairs with students, and one of his senior med school colleagues says off-handedly earlier in the film that he has to go, that he has a date with one of his students,

Which once again takes us back to Levin and her painting professor. That affair was something that happened long ago, and certainly long before #MeToo. Levin had no objection to sleeping with her professor, and no particular thought that she was being exploited. She found some of his stories pretentious and self-involved, but that just went with being in the art world. What I'd like to know is the full backstory. At what point did she sense that his interest in her was a seduction? How did she react to the discovery--- surprise, amusement, excitement? Did she ever think she was being exploited or used (in a bad way)? Did she laugh at how cliched it all was--- art student and her professor? Did she decide to sleep with him early on, or did she make a quick decision that night in the studio when he asked why she wasn't naked yet?

I asked her once when she made that decision about me, and she shrugged and told me she'd decided early on, when I was telling her what films and books I liked. Just seemed like you'd be interesting, she said. I mean, I'll take that as a compliment and a perfectly valid reason. But I did wonder when she'd made a decision and what criteria she was using. 

Levin was a fine arts major. I do wonder how her criteria compare to Liberty's.'s criteria. Liberty was a coastal ecology major--- a science girl, albeit in what was regarded as a "hippie science". From what I could infer, all the "soft" sciences--- the ecology programs, anthropology, biology ---were very sexually active. Funny thing--- "Altered States" gives the same impression, that the physical anthropology students and faculty are more sexually active than the hard sciences or even the liberal arts. I need to look into the accepted mores of various academic departments. 

I of course was a History major--- a department not noted for carnality. Fine Arts and Comparative Lit were of course notorious for both ambisexuality and teacher-student affairs. Neither Levin nor Liberty ever seemed to find sleeping with faculty to be anything out of the ordinary, mind you. And both seemed to have accepted bisexuality as perfectly ordinary since their teens. Okay, yes, great--- I'm now thinking about a survey and analysis on sexual criteria by academic major back to the Sixties. Somebody get me a research grant and a Netflix deal.

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

Though I suppose it's possible that they wanted the idea of "experience" more than any particular concrete experience. Levin was part of the art world, and there's still a strong master-pupil attitude there, the idea of learning by transmission from some older figure with talent. That may be part of it all.  Levin and Liberty (and my friend in Montreal) liked the idea of having experiences,  of collecting experiences that they could use to form themselves. I suppose I felt the same way in my own late teens and undergraduate days. The idea was to be able to say that, yes, I did this, or that I'd read that, that I had a range of experiences (all approved in novels or films) that I could use to become (or become seen as) the sort of character I wanted to portray.

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)...or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things...but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

Two Eight Eight: Compliments

Well, I am still afraid to be seen on a dance floor, and I'm still afraid to use the pool where I live. But tonight's worry is about compliments.

Yesterday evening I was down in the courtyard talking to one of my neighbours, a lovely red-haired girl who's been here for almost four years now. She had friends over to use the pool, including one girl whom I'd seen before and was very hot indeed. My neighbour told me that she'd an awkward conversation with our property manager about the girl.

The property manager had been talking to my neighbour when the visiting girl climbed out of the pool. The manager looked at her and commented that the girl had "really come into her own". My neighbour shut the conversation down by crisply saying that, yes, the girl had become a grown woman at some point in her life. She told me yesterday evening that she found the comment "creepy and inappropriate".

I had to partially agree with her, at least on general principles. I'm not sure I'd go as far as "creepy", but it was an awkward and very odd comment. "Come into her own" sounds just a bit too much like saying "well, she's in her prime breeding years". I suppose it also sounds like "well, she's finally inherited that five million from her rich uncle", but that's really not any less odd and awkward,

Now, yes, the girl is very attractive. Late twenties, maybe five-seven, very slender, long light brown hair, lithe and lissome in a very high-cut maillot. I've exchanged a few words with her in passing. I know her first name, and that she works (I think) at Sephora. That's all I know, really. She doesn't have a local accent,  but I know nothing about her origins or life.  She's certainly attractive, and she's been pleasant to me. I told my neighbour that if I wanted to compliment the girl, I'd just say that she was very attractive and let it go at that. My neighbour assured me that saying that would've been fine, but the whole breeding-years implication wasn't.

Now my neighbour has been someone I've chatted with and had courtyard drinks with these last few years, I'm sure that I've walked by her, raised a red Solo cup or a wineglass, and said something like, "God, girl, you have long legs!" or just said, "Great legs, girl!" when I've seen her in short shorts on her balcony. She's always just smiled, raised her own drink, and nodded her thanks. We're on good terms, and she's never been annoyed by anything I said. I've always made any compliments part of my persona as an aging roué, and she's responded to the persona. I may be lucky in that she and I are born natives of a region where that particular persona still has some currency. We both know how the ritual works.

I'm no longer sure what I'd do in terms of complimenting a lovely girl in, say, Manhattan or Wellington. Tonight I'm thinking that it's like being on a dance floor. At some point you lose the belief that you have any skills, that you might have something to do or say that would make you feel like you're doing things right. Offering up compliments is always a risky thing, but I think I've lost the ability to do it any place that isn't...here in this city or this downtown.

Two Six Two: Silence

I've written about this before, but it's something I keep thinking about. It becomes harder and harder here in the age of the gender wars to tell anyone that you feel physical desire towards them. It becomes harder and harder to express not just underlying desire, but your own preferences.

Despite however many years of popular culture talking about "communication", it seems to be increasingly difficult to tell a potential lover what it is you actually like to do. It seems to be just as difficult to ask someone what she likes.  I know that I feel far more afraid now of being mocked or attacked for my preferences than when I was, say, eighteen. I feel that telling a lovely young companion that I find her desirable or telling her what I like in bed is just a lot riskier than it was when I was an undergraduate.  Desire itself feels somehow suspect.

I'm well aware that it could just be me--- a function of age and despair. Yet my reading of comments at articles and blog posts about sex and relationships makes me think that it's something more general. There's a spirit of disdain and mockery in the culture at the moment that's depressing and disturbing.

A few years ago, I felt that I had a reasonable grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses as a lover. I was clear on what I liked, and clear on what I'd like to learn and experience. My lovely blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me once that she couldn't imagine me ever being too shy or scared to tell a lover what I wanted. She may have been right once upon a time, but that's no longer so. She also told me that one of the things she liked about me was that I was willing to try whatever my partner thought would give her pleasure. She was (and is) right about that. Someone else, a lovely friend in Montreal, told me that one thing she liked about me was that I was willing to discuss the things that gave pleasure, that I wasn't shy about asking whether something pleased my partner. These days, though, I stay mute. I'm not about to ask anyone anything, and I'm certainly not about to make any revelations.

Over the last few months I've been posting stories here, trying to save stories girls have told me, ones that leave me excited and intrigued.  I do wish I had newer stories to post. I sometimes fear that the days when lovely young companions and I could exchange stories and try to arouse one another are gone. Out there on the web, it seems less and less a Done Thing to tell stories.  I miss listening to a lovely friend's tales of adventures. I miss the sense of sharing lives and Pasts.

I miss the days when it seemed easier to tell someone what I enjoyed, what I'd like to try with them.  I miss the days when sex and romance involved constructing adventures and challenges, when lovers could risk being open to one another,  when silence wasn't the default state for being out with someone.

Two Four Nine: Belief

I've been presenting stories here, stories by friends and young companions over the years. The stories are things I've saved in my archives, things I want to keep. The stories are things I can read more than once, things I'll want to read again or cite from. Yet there's always the question of belief, of whether others' stories and memories are real.

My friend in London Town recounted what her friend there had told her, and then, after a couple of years of believing what he'd told her, found out (but how?) that the whole secret gay life her friend had revealed was made up. She still hasn't been able to talk to him, and she doesn't know what his reasons may have been. For me, the second issue is more interesting than his life--- what made him create this fake life, and especially this particular fake autobiography?

Friends and young companions have told me things about their past Adventures, and this afternoon I've been wondering about what to believe, and what levels of belief to assign the stories. Some stories--- Marta on the cruise ship, the girl in the kayak shop, the girl at SXSW ---are ones I've known for a while, and I have some faith in the girls' truthfulness. There's at least verisimilitude there, and I can imagine each of those girls seeking out new experiences and pushing limits. It may be only that if a girl has been involved with me, I take it as a given that they're willing to break certain social norms. But I do believe them.

Now I do have a friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud that I can't believe about things. She's told me about a new affair she's having, about being willing to follow her new man anywhere, and about how eager she is to follow him all over the Pacific on adventures. According to her, they went to Bangkok and Pattaya last October for ten days. And all over the South Island of New Zealand (Queenstown, central Otago) on hiking trips over the new year. She says that she went to Tokyo and Osaka with her brother at Easter, and will go back there with her new man at year's end to climb up Mount Fuji and ski in Hokkaido. She's supposed to have gone to Maui for a week in the spring. Her stories include going to Moorea this summer and then taking a boat to Pitcairn Island for a week. She tells me she's booked for Buenos Aires in late September, and that she's making reservations for Singapore. She says she and her man will go to Shanghai and take the high-speed train to Lhasa, then visit Everest Base Camp. She talks about making reservations to visit the Okavango River delta in Botswana and go on safari to Kilimanjaro. She assures me that she's been sitting up nights booking tickets and hotels.

I don't believe this. I don't believe it at all. Bangkok and the Tokyo visit I might believe, but not the rest. She's a successful professional, but the money does add up. More, the time adds up. Corporate life doesn't allow for random ten-day or two-week vacations, and her stories of 2019 add up to a long time away from the office. Her man is supposed to be moneyed, but is he paying for all of this? Is she a sugar baby now? Did she inherit a million or two she hasn't talked about? Even in a country that offers paid annual vacations, how does she maintain a job if she's not in her office for ten days at a time?  There are no blog posts of any of her purported journeys, and no photos or postcards.  That may be (at least for me) the most suspicious thing. Had I gone to some exotic locale, I'd have sent out postcards to friends and written up a travel memoir when I got back. There's no way I wouldn't have traveler's tales to tell.

Her stories from her teen and early twenties are wonderful. She has lots of Slutty Party Girl tales to tell of growing up in an upper-middle class NZ family. But she's stopped telling those, and while she tells me she's gone to Pitcairn Island and will be going to Buenos Aires and Lhasa, she's sent nothing that passes for evidence.

I was taught to do both History and Law, and looking at her emails as texts, looking with a critical eye, I can't believe her stories at all. What she's constructing it seems is a world as imaginary as the haut-gay life my London friend's acquaintance created. I do wish I knew what she was doing, and why.

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 Four One: Gallery

There is a question that occurs to me tonight: what are we permitted to desire?

Of course, asking that question immediately leads back to another, more basic one: permitted by whom?

I think the answer is, simply enough, social media. Social media has become the gallery of hooded figures passing judgment on us all. Cancel culture, call-out culture--- whatever the term, social media has become an externalized superego, the external voice of social shame. Twenty years ago, what you did in public could be judged by your friends, certainly, and by the relatively few people who physically saw you. You weren't yet judged by an audience of potentially scores of thousands.

It's possible that a generation ago, guilt meant more than shame. How you judged yourself meant more than what strangers thought--- if only because there were so few strangers who were aware of you or who were physically close enough to see anything you did. And now we've displaced the right to issue judgments to the people who view your social media.

Right now, most of us have some kind of social media presence. Not so much here, mind you, but at places like Twitter or FB, places designed for interaction. Judgment has become much more externalized. Social disapproval, social exclusion--- all that has become much more weighty. There are more voices in your ears telling you that what you think, what you desire, what you do and are is unacceptable and shameful.

Tonight's question is simple: what are we permitted to desire? And more--- how are we allowed to articulate that desire? 

When you look at a potential partner, a potential lover, what are you allowed to want? Here in the age of the gender wars, can you say that you want anything specific? Can you say that you like a particular set of physical or social qualities? Age, height, weight, eye colour, hair colour--- are you allowed to have preferences? Are you  required to justify your preferences? Are you even allowed to justify your tastes? Can you even express desire without being told by angry, unknown voices that you have no right to feel anything at all?

I've said this before, but it feels much harder now than it did twenty years ago to even talk about desire. Once upon a time, discussing fantasies and sharing memories of past adventures would have been part of any enjoyable date, of any courtship ritual. Who can do that now? The ghosts in the gallery are there waiting to call you out, to cancel you--- and they needn't actually be lurking on your smartphone or your laptop. They're on the devices of everyone around you. They're sitting invisibly at your shoulder, waiting for you to make that first mistake.

The ghosts in the gallery have no clear set of standards for judging you. Their point is that doing anything at all is wrong. Being there is wrong. Any choice excludes and marginalizes, they'll say. Any courtship is coercive. Any social time spent together is an imposition on someone's time. Any sexual preference--- positions, places,  fetishes ---is wrong. Physical desire itself is wrong, and certainly coercive to discuss. Pleasure is not just seen as a zero-sum thing demanded of someone else, pleasure is regarded as suspect all on its own, as a concept.

To write about sex and pleasure, to write about courtships and explorations--- that's no longer acceptable. The voices in the gallery can tell you with derision and vitriol that talking about those things makes you complicit in oppression.  Feeling desire is something that must be suppressed, and discussing it must be cancelled. So the gallery voices say.

And right now no one is defending the idea of desire.

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 One Nine: Kink

There is such a thing as kink-shaming.

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

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

That feels gone these days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Zero Four: Weinstein

A story that remains a mystery---

A friend of a friend, someone who teaches Law and History at one of the non-Oxbridge British universities, is as they say "taking advice" in a post-Weinstein matter. He's consulting his solicitors over what amounts to a forced retirement at his job.

He's sixty-ish, I think, so he'd have had another ten years of teaching. Right now he's been suspended and the university administration is orchestrating a forced retirement. He's resisting and is, as best I can tell, planning to sue over the university's failure to follow its own procedures and give him the process written into his contract. My understanding is that it's all based on accusations of "inappropriate conduct", though I have no specifics.

He's at a British university and he's a bachelor, so the first thought his friends here had--- that I had, too ---was that this was about handsome young undergraduate males. That would be the usual British thing, no? But I suppose it could be girls. I know nothing of his preferences or kinks. He's a private enough man, and he did practice law for a while, so he's been trained to discretion. My friends and I agree that it's not particularly relevant what his tastes are, and it doesn't matter to us which team he plays for. We'd probably like to know, though, if only for purposes of gossip.

We have no clue what the specific accusations are. Part of his legal argument is in fact that he's never been given specifics or a chance to refute them.  I can't comment on what he's supposed to have done.  He seems ready for a legal action, for whatever that's worth. All I can do--- all his friends can do ---is watch from the transatlantic sidelines.

I note the story because this is the first brush I've had with the post-Weinstein era.  I was once a mid-semester replacement for a faculty member who'd taken to showing up drunk for his lectures and who'd drunkenly crashed a university vehicle while driving to some official meeting.  But I've never known anyone who was accused of "inappropriate conduct", whatever that might be.

The person in question should be financially okay even if he is forcibly retired. My understanding is that he'll have a pension from his university and that he has a fair amount of land and investments in Pennsylvania (where he's originally from). I'm not so much worried about him as I am intrigued with what the accusations are and what level of process he's entitled to under British law and his own contract.

I've always said that my own love life has been based on conduct as inappropriate as I can manage for these last few decades.  I'm not surprised that in the post-Weinstein world I'll have yet another level of  social disdain attached to me.

Two Zero Zero: Silence

I've been thinking about how the voices out in the night have fallen silent, one by one.

There was a time not so many years ago when my phone rang late at night and lovely young voices were there to tell me stories and be there until long after midnight. I understand that the current social stereotype is that Millennials would rather take an arrow to the knee than actually talk on the phone, but I miss those voices. I miss the days when you could have long conversations, when the telephone was the tool for flirtations and seduction.

I'm a storyteller. That's what I've always been. I've made my living by telling stories, by constructing narratives. It's how I've made my career, and it's how I've enticed lovers into my life. Without stories, without the ability to tell stories, my life would be empty.

All the those late-night conversations are missed. Books, films, music, lives, hopes--- the conversations would wander from topic to topic 'til dawn. They'd take long detours into flirtation and seduction, and we'd construct long, intricate fantasies. We'd tell one another about lovers in the past, about adventures and encounters, and of course about all the things we wanted to do with future lovers--- places, people, positions, wardrobes and costumes and accessories. We'd create scenarios and imagine what we'd do with one another.  It occurs to me that those days are over. It's not just the lack of voices on the other end of the phone.  It's that fantasies have fallen out of favour. Fantasies are now regarded with suspicion and a kind of disdain.

I can't imagine telling a lovely girl about any of my fantasies these days. To tell her would be a kind of aggression, the gender warriors would say--- something that demands her attention and response, something that imposes on her time.

I can't imagine taking the risk of telling a lovely girl about my fantasies.  It's all too easy nowadays to imagine not just mockery, but political disdain. The current wisdom is that no one can just have fantasies, that all fantasies must be judged in some social-political context. Why take the risk? Why end up stammering out political apologies?

Letting someone know about your fantasies also risks being pigeonholed--- of being regarded as someone who likes only the things in the fantasies. If you enjoy a particular scenario or genre,  then you risk being tagged as being nothing but someone with mere repetition compulsion.

There was a time not so many years ago when exchanging fantasies was a key part of flirtation and seduction. These days, that's far too risky to do. My own take is that these days one's sexual fantasies are judged far more harshly than they've ever been. One's fantasies may be "problematic" on political grounds. They can be mocked as inept, jejune, boring--- or as signs of weakness.

It's easier to remain silent. Say nothing, ask nothing, admit nothing, reveal nothing. Silence is always the default procedure.  

One Nine Eight: Triumph

It's been two months since I've written here, something for which I do apologise. These past few months haven't been a good time for thinking about the sorts of things I'd like to write about. For all the obvious reasons, there's a very dystopian feel to life right now, and there's an ugly undercurrent to social interaction.

Some of that may have been building for a while, of course. Even before the current political nightmare began, the gender wars have made social interaction a minefield. I grew up in an earlier time, at the flood of Sixties and Seventies attitudes towards sex and relationships, and perhaps I'm simply too conditioned by earlier mores to deal with the gender wars.

What have we learned, though? What are the new rules? A friend in northern California calls the gender wars "the triumph of the autistic", by which he means the triumph of an attitude that disdains social obligations, is suspicious of all interaction, and requires almost robotic responses instead of social cues. What we've learned is this--- all social contact is suspect and dangerous. We have learned these things:

Never speak first. Never initiate contact. Never ask for anything, never expect anything. Any initiation is a kind of aggression. Any act that requires the attention of another person is an act of aggression. Asking for anything is aggression. Any expectation of reciprocity or social obligation is aggression and oppressive.  You are not allowed to do or say anything that calls for a response from another person. Anything that requires a response from another person is an act of aggression.

Despite a half century's worth of advice about relationships, "communication" is oppressive. To tell someone that you're attracted to them is aggression. To discuss what you'd like to try sexually or what you enjoy sexually is regarded as demanding and oppressive. Having fantasies about someone is a sign that you are complicit in a violation of consent. Telling someone they're in your fantasies is an act of non-consensual sex and a kind of psychic violence.

No compliment is actually complimentary. All compliments are forms of oppression. All compliments are acts of power--- you are arrogating to yourself the right to say something about another person.

Never disagree, never contradict, never correct, never debate. All those things are acts of oppressive power or gaslighting. Any discussion of principles at all is an act of coercion.

Say nothing. Make no suggestions. Never initiate. Never ask. Never touch. Never look. Never disagree. These are the things we've learned.

Nothing is acceptable, nothing can ever be any good, if it has any flaws in it, or if it can be presented as in any way problematic.

Everything is to be "interrogated"--- i.e., to be shown to be morally corrupt and evil.  Nothing is ever good enough to be an acceptable social organization. Nothing ever can be good enough.

My friend calls this "the triumph of the autistic".  I think of it as the triumph of the armoured monad. The age of the gender wars is an age that wishes that sex would never happen, since that calls for social interactions and linkages, since it calls for all the messiness of human emotion and human dreams to be foregrounded.

The new age is one where armoured, atomized individuals hide from one another, desperately afraid of one another. What's the old saying--- everything is about sex except sex, which is about power....? We've taken that to heart in a way that's ugly and sad.

It's been an awful last six months. And now we're angered and made afraid by even the thought of interaction.
    

One Nine Seven: Community

I was going to write tonight about a question posed by a friend on mine in Ohio. She suggested that I write about what each partner learns in age-disparate relationships, about what each takes away from the relationship. That's a topic that interests both of us, since we've each been in a number of age-disparate affairs. 

That was my plan--- to write about the Young Companions I've been with and what we've learned from each other. Then I turned on the news a day or two ago and discovered the scandal that seems to have canceled Milo Yiannopoulos' career. In case you haven't been following the news, Milo is what the press likes to call a "provocateur"--- a nasty piece of alt-right work, a gay man who devotes himself to praising the Trump regime and attacking the usual list of groups and people on the alt-right's hate lists. He was always destined to have a short career. Sooner or later his right-wing audience was going to grow bored with him and turn on him. Being the alt-right's gay court jester is far too like being one of the Jewish musicians the death camp guards briefly spared so they could have dinner music. Anyway--- Milo's ship hit the rocks over the weekend. Someone found footage of him that suggested that he approved of  sex with underage boys or at least thought that age-disparate gay relations were potentially acceptable. The right wing, as the saying goes, was okay with misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism,  and disdain for trans people, but found pederasty to be a bridge too far. 

I don't propose to comment on the scandal itself or even on Milo's pose as a defender of some version of free speech. I wonder, though, if there's something to be learned from the way he responded to accusations of being in favor of child molestation. He stumbled about trying to explain that in the gay world "boys" could be males in their twenties, that he really didn't mean that sex with thirteen year olds was acceptable, and that he regretted his own "imprecise phrasing". I wonder, though, if he'd have done better by simply saying something like When I was sixteen or seventeen, I had older lovers, some much older, and many of them are good memories. They taught me how to be a proud gay man, they taught me about the history and culture of  the gay world, they taught me how to be a lover and how to be in love. I feel gratitude and affection and respect and admiration for the men who mentored me and loved me and gave me stability and acceptance and letting it go at that: full stop.  I have no idea if he could have said something like that with honesty, but let's assume that he could. Saying something like that and nothing more, with no bitchy games of snark and no bitchy-transgressive poses--- would that have saved  his dignity and possibly his career? And how would a statement like that have been parsed out over the web?

I'm old enough to remember articles and novels about age-disparate gay relationships that argued that they were or could be a good thing. I can remember novels and articles that argued that this was how a gay culture, a gay world, was kept alive over time--- by mentoring relationships and love affairs. Again, I'm not commenting on whether those arguments are right or wrong. I'm only noting that once upon a time, back in my undergraduate days, the arguments were posed in serious journals and by serious gay advocacy groups. There are any number of strands there if you want to follow them up--- the desire to be (as Edmund White wrote) a community and not a syndrome;  the desire to preserve a separate community; a desire for the exchange of sex and knowledge; the whole idea of "recruitment". You can't make a argument these days for a sexualized mentoring relationship, whether gay of straight--- the issues of power immediately intrude. Anyone who argues for an "Athenian" kind of relationship between men and mid-teen boys is automatically seen as arguing for exploitation and violation. 

Again, I have no idea about the weight of arguments pro and con; that's not relevant to asking how the idea of a sexualized mentoring relationship was posed back in the 1960s and 1970s and how it became rejected--- or asking whether or not Milo Yiannopoulos could have salvaged something of his dignity if he'd made a very brief, cold statement saying that he didn't regret the older lovers of his past and let it go. Which of course takes us back to the idea of a lovely girl making the same basic statement about her own older lovers. Would the response to her be different to the response to the hypothetical statement Milo might've made? Would the response be more or less hostile?  Which factions would support her or condemn her?

I do hope you'll think about that. We'll come back soon enough to the issue of what each party learns in an age-disparate  relationship. That is something I want to address. And it is something I'd like to hear about from you, any of you out there reading this.

One Nine Five: Mediation

I apologise for being away so long. The last few months have been hard; the next four years are all to likely to be a dreadful time. It seems that we live in a time when we should be talking about the politics of Resistance rather than about the social intricacies of sex and romance. I am, as I told you when we began, rather on the Left. I have nothing in common with the new regime in America, and I find the new regime illegitimate, corrupt, bigoted, and appalling. I have hoped that the remaining Free World--- let's say NATO ---would invoke the "responsibility to protect"  doctrine in international law and undertake armed humanitarian intervention. I have hoped and prayed for the skies above Washington to fill with Dutch and Danish and French paratroops and for the members of the new regime to face trial. If you think I wouldn't welcome that, you're very wrong. I don't want to live in a bad re-make of "Shadow on the Land" (1969).

Nonetheless, I set out a few years ago to write here about sex and romance and the social games we play around those two topics. I want to keep writing, even if I have to make myself look away from politics and make myself look for topics that don't leave me emotionally drained.

A friend in London Town tells me that I should continue to write about the idea of "emotional labour". She writes---

About the emotional labour thing-- It resonates with me at the moment because I have just been spending three weeks with a good female friend/colleague. With her, the emotional labour is equally shared, and we are very good about taking turns. It has been refreshing--which has made me aware of how one-sided most of my relationships with men are and have been in terms of that emotional work. Not the case in all of those relationships, of course, but definitely the vast majority.

 If you're having to mediate someone else's emotional responses to the world, you are essentially, and often necessarily, putting your own feelings second. It's not necessarily a bad thing, as you say--indeed, it's very important. it's just something that does tend to be a bit gendered in its provision (like, say, house-work and buying holiday gifts) and perhaps often goes unrecognized by the beneficiaries. It's one of the reasons why there is that cliche of the man who becomes depressed approximately 1-3 months after breaking up with his girlfriend/wife, having initially been pleased about the breakup. It's also why many divorced men, who have become used to someone providing for their emotional needs, tend to quickly get attached again, where women will more often rely on their female friends for their emotional needs for a good while following a divorce while they figure out what they want from a future partnership. These are generalizations, of course.  But in my own experience, most women, and a very few men, do it naturally. Unsurprisingly, these men I know who do know to share the giving and receiving of emotional support are particularly dear, long-term friends.

I was thinking about what I expect from girls in a relationship. Validation, certainly. I do expect a lover to make me feel valued and valuable. I do understand my friend's invocation of the cliche of male depression a month or so after a break-up, even if the man himself initiated it. You realise one night that there's no one to talk to, no one on the other end of the phone, no one there across a table. One of the very worst things about a break-up isn't so much the anger and bitterness, or even the sexual deprivation. It's the silence on the phone, the lack of another voice.  That's what I've always hated most after a relationship ends--- the silence. There's no one to talk to late at night, no one to go with for coffee at a late-night cafe.  There's silence where there used to be conversation, and that's an incredibly empty sensation.  This isn't just about the loss of pillow talk and flirtation. It's about living in a space where it's possible not to hear another living human voice for weeks. 

This goes to the social pressures that keep men from having male friends who'd function as a support network. Male friends may help you bury that inconvenient body, but they're not people to whom you'd turn for emotional support. 

So...where does that leave us? What are we to think of the need for a partner as someone who'll provide support and solace and defense against emotional upheavals? What are we to think of the very different networks men and women construct for friendship? And...are we still allowed to think that one of the key parts of a relationship is having a partner who will act to make you feel better or keep the outside world at bay?