One Seven One: Hearts

Today is Valentine's. It's  a celebration that I wish I could like more than I do. I'm well aware that it's currently regarded as a slightly silly faux-holiday, and I'm very well aware that it's regarded as problematic by the gender warriors. Ms. Flox, who's one of the few sex bloggers I find worth reading, has dismissed Valentine's--- and Steak & BJ Day, its semi-serious March equivalent for males ---as both ridiculous and somehow oppressive. Nonetheless, Valentine's has the power to make me melancholy.

I enjoy rituals and formality, of course. I like the clear guidelines for social rituals, and I like it that social rituals are goal-oriented. There's a clear goal to social rituals, an everything is about checking the boxes on the way to the goal. A graduation ceremony, a Mass, a wedding service, a funeral, a formal dinner party: clear goals, and clear steps to reach the goal. Once you begin the ritual, you say the right words and make the correct gestures and the protocols carry you through to the end. I have to like that.

Valentine's, I always believed, was about the formal presentation of romance. That matters to me. The romance itself is important, yes, but I like the formal, ritual presentation of romance.  Just as New Year's Eve is a night for champagne and stylized kisses at midnight, just as where you kiss someone on New Year's Eve matters at least as least much as who you kiss, Valentine's is about dinner and drinks as a couple, about stylized gifts, and about sex infused with the power of ritual. You can have champagne and chocolate truffles any night of the year, but 14. February has the special power of ritual. Ritual has that power, you know. A gift given on 24. December or on a lover's birthday has an aura that makes it very different from one given on a random night, no matter how heartfelt the gift may be.

Presentation matters. Restaurants and museums know that, and it's no less true for romance.

I suppose that Valentine's is a FOMO thing. Being alone on Valentine's means missing out on socially-assigned rituals of romance. It means missing out on the aura of high romance. It mean missing out on one night where romantic gestures are encouraged, and where all the accoutrements of romance are on display. You're encouraged rather than just allowed to make stylized gestures. Whatever happens physically, in bed, isn't just sex or lovemaking on 14. February.  It's regarded as somehow qualitatively better, as occurring on a higher level of style and passion. And of course having a lovely girl agree to be your Valentine's date is a way of affirming your own social value. You've been judged by a beautiful girl and found ritual-worthy. What could be better?

I'm sitting here on a Valentine's night typing on my laptop rather than holding hands across a table while champagne is poured for the two of us. I'm sitting here all-too-aware that no one in this city found me worth being with tonight, that I didn't fit anyone's idea of a romantic partner for the evening. No champagne in my glass, no chocolates shared. No warm, silken, taut, tanned, bare flesh to caress--- no lovely young companion's bare thigh under my hand in the taxi or under the table.  Well...I am all-too-aware of my failures. I'm missing out on the actual physical experience of romance, I know. But missing out on all the social proofs of romance--- the ritual of chocolates and champagne, of dinner and passion in stylish locales ---may be worse.  Missing out says too many things about your social value, about whether you're worth the time and effort for a ritual of romance. That makes14. February more melancholy than any birthday or New Year's Eve spent solo.

One Six Six: Crystals

I was at a small bistro downtown tonight, one of those places that's a hip version of an Italian restaurant from some designer-retro vision of 1950s Little Italy. You probably know the kind of place: Sinatra endlessly playing, the furniture dark and heavy, the wine list good yet one  that would've induced shock and awe in the real 1950s. The clientele was exactly what you'd expect, too. Late twenties, early thirties, carefully tailored. Out in the dining area there were even a couple of tables with families who might well have been brought in by the designers. I was at the end of the bar--- a quick stop on my way home from work. You can imagine me there; you've known me here long enough to do that.  At the end of the bar, always. The quiet figure with a glass of pinot grigio, older than the others at the bar, nondescript dark-grey fleece jacket on a crisp evening more October than two days before year's end. A glass of wine, a small plate of pasta with olive oil and a bit of garlic butter. Something simple and as nondescript as my jacket and my black chinos. Someone who's just there because the bar was a brief haven on my way home. Someone just there to watch.

There was a party of girls just down the bar. Four of them, all mid or late twenties, corporate chic, streaked blonde, two of them with State-issue ID/access cards still on cords around their necks. Exactly the demographic the bistro was designed for. One of them was showing off an engagement ring, happy and proud of the diamond on her hand, clinking glasses with her friends. So easy to imagine how thrilled she was--- so easy to imagine that she'd be spending her spring planning a wedding and a honeymoon.

I'm not mocking her at all. I don't want you to think that. A lovely girl, out with her friends, and genuinely happy about the next stage of her life. I did smile at them and nod--- a quiet stranger who was nodding at her happiness.

I may have told you before, though I'm not certain. In the course of my life, I've asked two girls to marry me. Both accepted. Neither time came to anything--- nothing all that awful happened, it just didn't work out. My record, though, is perfect: two proposals, two acceptances. No, I've never been married, and at this stage of my life, I'd probably be awful at it.  There's a point at which you're too used to living alone to finally marry. There's a point, too, where the number of people who might consider you as a partner falls away to nothing, a point where those you might ask are either already married or too traumatized or exhausted by previous marriages to risk anything on you.

Still and all, I do miss the idea of marrying. I've said before that I suppose I like the idea of having been married more than the idea of actually being married. I miss the idea that I could still participate in a major social ritual.

I'm not particularly excited by the idea of a wedding. I'm male, and I know what my role is at a wedding--- to stand to one side in a rented tuxedo and say "I do" at the prompts. Which is fine, after all.  I can wear black and learn my steps and responses in a few minutes. I'm a quick study, and I wouldn't forget the ring.

I think the moment of putting a ring on a bride's finger attracts me: symbols are magic, after all. I like the reverse of that, too. A lovely girl putting a ring on my finger in response is like...what? I've been through a doctoral hooding, and I imagine that it would be like that--- a formal reminder of being translated into some new state. I vaguely recall being very young and going through a confirmation ceremony in a dark old stone church; that comparison might be more appropriate. The attraction is the same, and I'm sure it's something the girl at the bar understood. It's about becoming something new, about being recognized as something new.

You've been reading me here for a while. You've heard me say more than once that I like ritual and the idea of ritual. Ritual makes so many things easier. Ritual makes so much of social life possible. And rituals give us a place in the social order.

I'm a gentleman of a certain age, and a gentleman of limited circumstances. I'm not the target demographic for De Beers. I'm not sure I could offer a girl a diamond even if I wanted to.  But I miss the idea of being part of a moment where someone would let me slide a ring onto her finger, where she'd be recognizing that I have value in the social order.

You fall in love with an individual, but you live in a social world. Being formally with someone establishes you in a role in society. Having someone accept a formal proposal is a statement about your social value.  Missing out on the ritual at an appropriate point in life means that you'll be left farther and farther behind in the social world and that you'll seem more and more suspect in terms of your social value. It's not just you're assumed to be Oedipally-challenged or perhaps gay. It's that you're increasingly assumed not to have the necessary value to be part of social structures.

Two more days 'til the end of the year. The week after Christmas is always a melancholy thing, or at least always is for me.  Tonight at the bar, I did envy the girl with the ring. Somewhere in the spring or summer of the new year she'll be taking a public, socially-sanctioned step into a new phase of life. I envy her that--- the social transition, the rite of passage. Well, I hope that in ten years she'll look back on this season and be happy. I do wish her well.  I'm running out of moments of transition and growth, of rituals that affirm my value and place. I do worry that I've run out of time altogether.

One Three Two: Masks

I'm still thinking about the objections to "Fifty Shades". So many of the articles I've found on line seem to take it as a necessity that the makers of the film should've consulted "experts and practitioners" about BDSM and followed their admonitions. Understandable, I suppose. There's a "community" that wants to be "properly" portrayed. Didn't we go through all this with gay groups in the 1970s and 1980s--- the insistence by an outsider group that they have the final word on how others portray them? For that matter, hasn't "representation" been a key issue for all marginalized groups over the last fifty years? The BDSM community is desperate to establish itself as a legitimate community,  desperate to free itself from being taken as inherently about abuse and violence and misogyny. Understandable, yes. But still something that I find utterly irrelevant.

All things considered, "experts and practitioners" would be the last people I'd go to if wanted to discuss how to present s/m on film or in a novel.

I've never been much for "community". I'm not good at any of the things that build community. Whatever interest I do have in s/m isn't about community, and I suppose it's not about what writers on the topic like to call "the power exchange".  I'm not at all sure what I'd ask experts about. I suppose that a skilled practitioner of shibari could tell me how to tie intricate knots and do rope bondage that's as pretty as origami.  I have to laugh about that, though. I've been hopeless at knots all my life. I've always told people that repeatedly failing the knot-tying test kept me out of the Scouts. Asking about bondage itself means, well, nothing to me. The BDSM community, like any other community, must have its own terms of art, its own specialized vocabulary. That doesn't mean anything to me, either.

If I asked anyone about portraying s/m,  I'd ask designers--- fashion designers and interior designers. I'd ask photographers. I'd ask rare book specialists. Really--- those are the people I'd ask. I'm not interested in the politics or ethical debates. I'm interested in the aesthetics.

I know that means I'll never be someone who's part of the "community" or the "lifestyle". My interest is about style and ritual as part of sex. My interest is always in the idea of crafted moments, in the idea of being part of a performance.

Here in the days of the gender wars, there's a part of the trans* world that is openly hostile to people who think that trans* is about sex, and even more hostile to people who are old-school transvestites, people who dress up for sexual reasons, people who are seen as mere fetishists. Authenticity is what's demanded (though authenticity is a fetish and obsession all its own).

By that standard, then--- no. I can't be interested in s/m for "authentic" reasons. I see it not as an end in itself, but as an occasion for performance. The BDSM groups I've read about disdained those who saw s/m as "dress-up" and not as a way of living.  That's fine. What I do with lovely young companions is very much dress-up. It's getting into character. It's learning lines and backstories and finding the right sets and soundtrack. It's about class markers and certain kinds of style. It's a fashion statement and as formal and stylized as eighteenth-century court dances. Yes, it's all about surfaces, about how it looks. It's about its literary pedigree, too...but isn't that tied into style and looks?

I suppose that's why knots don't matter to me. Rope is too material, too...blue collar. Bind with silk, blindfold with silk. Or just cross a lovely girl's wrists and whisper to her that she's to imagine that she's bound with white silk. One more step into abstraction.  Decor matters--- and nothing is in red. I just wanted to note that.

I've always said that there are two choices in sex--- hot or cold. I've always leaned toward cold. That doesn't mean heartless, by the way. But it does mean stylized, ritualized, abstract. It means seeing sex as a kind of performance piece, something where decor and dialogue and fashion matter.  I've asked lovely girls to be part of what really are scripted pieces, and I've been lucky enough to have them accept. I've been lucky enough to have young companions understand that what we're doing derives from literary sources and fashion photography, that we're doing something abstract and formal.

I'd never consult "experts and practitioners". Nothing that I do is about politics or ethics. What I want with a lovely young companion is not community or even the flesh. What I want, in the end, is to tell a story, to be lost inside something worth reading, something that is about surfaces. But then--- haven't I said for years that pleasure for me is never, never unmediated?

One One Six: PowerPoint

A friend in (of all places) Ghent was talking to me about Elizabeth McNeill's "Nine and a Half Weeks" the other day. You probably remember the film--- mid-Eighties, Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, John Taylor of Duran Duran on soundtrack. You probably don't remember the book, though. It came out in something like 1978, and it was much darker and much more intense and obsessive and claustrophobic than the film. Much, much sexier, too. It's still in print--- it always did have a small underground following ---so you're encouraged to read it. I do hope you'll tell me your thoughts. I've always loved the book.

My friend in Belgium and I were discussing the idea of how the book would be received if someone published it today. Not well, I suspect. We've mainstreamed s/m imagery, and of course "50 Shades" sold some grotesque number of copies. But I think that we're far more afraid of some things now than we were in 1978. This is a DSM-V world, a gender wars world. We're far less willing to accept an affair that's about dancing into the fire with open eyes, far less willing to see the erotic attractions of obsession. We've stripped obsession and compulsion of any glamour--- even dark glamour.  We're a lot less likely to pursue dark fantasies now than in 1978. Maybe that's because those things, all the things in late-'70s Helmut Newton photos, aren't new and shocking anymore. All those things are just passé. Myself, I suspect it's that we over-think everything, that we apply critical analysis to everything, and that the Guardians of the Problematic are teaching us to see every sexual kink, every hint of lust and desire, as something political, as something that needs to be seen as an exercise in power and aggression, as something that needs to be analyzed and corrected and purified.

"Nine and a Half Weeks" is about sexual obsession, about a 30-ish executive who launches herself into an utterly compulsive, devastating, destructive s/m affair with a man she never names.  Who'd believe that now--- who'd be able to say that it's sexually exciting without falling foul of the gender warriors?

There are s/m devotees out there who've circled the wagons,  who've started using the language of identity politics to defend their kinks--- to defend their identity ---the way that transfolk and gay people and racial minorities have.  I don't think they can win, mind you. They're too late to the party. The gender warriors have staked out the field--- "kink" is seen and judged through the language of power and oppression. The s/m devotees, the FetLife crowd, are starting with a clear handicap in trying to appropriate identity language or in trying to reject judgment. In gender wars terms, kink is unacceptable. It's seen as complicit in oppression, and it's seen as inauthentic, as mere play--- something that's always suspect.

I do think it's a lot harder today to admit to a kink than it was in 1978. Having kinks, being able to talk about them, asking a lover to play one out with you...that's all much harder now. Maybe it's just that in 1978 that was all new and thrilling. I think, though, that it's also that it has become risky to admit to any kinks.

Some of that is social media--- the judgment and mockery that fills social media. To admit to anything that can lead to having your tastes and needs attacked or mocked on line--- risky indeed. And there's been a shift in attitudes about kink. If you're male--- and this is always about males ---it's far riskier now to sit on a bed with a new lover and tell her what you like and what you hope she'll do with you. Anger, horror, and mockery are more likely now than they were in 1978. Things that in 1978 might have been seen as something transgressive-exciting, as deliciously new to try, are now subjected to gender wars scrutiny. To be male and admit to particular sexual needs (to admit to desire at all, maybe) is to be seen as confessing to flaws and failures. And what kinks can't be made to seem morally corrupt and evil in gender wars terms? Think of how the term "fetishize" is deployed these days. Girls are encouraged not so much to be able to discuss their own kinks and needs and desires as to regard having those things as a failure in males--- a combination of weakness and aggression.

At some point in an affair, you do have to do a kind of presentation, to say that you like this, that you like doing these things. Both parties do, of course, but it is more dangerous for the male. I can't imagine ever mocking a lovely Young Companion for her tastes or desires.  I've always thought that being open to those things was a clear part of pleasing a lover, and I've always been open to trying things.  But when you do a bedside presentation as a male here in the age of the gender wars, you're risking being mocked and held in contempt for what you want. You're risking being told that you're morally and politically evil. It's not even about negotiation, about the two of you constructing exchanges for what you each enjoy.  It's about male desires being regarded with a presumption of vileness and being contemptible.

I find it harder and harder to imagine telling a Young Companion what I like. We're defined by our desires; that's always been clear.  It's a vulnerable thing to admit to desires--- even to admit to desire itself. "Nine and a Half Weeks" is an example--- desires that would have been treated as wickedly exciting in 1978 are treated as politically and psychologically and socially unacceptable today. How many educated, well-brought-up, attractive professional women of 30 would admit to wanting to do what McNeill did, to wanting those experiences for their own sake? Wouldn't they be risking the wrath of the gender warriors and the moralizers? But I will insist that it's worse for males. I have less and less idea what the Arbitrary Social Rules allow me to feel or admit to.  I have less and less confidence in my ability to tell a lovely Young Companion what I'm interested in. There's the fear of having her recoil in horror or contempt and tell me how and why I embody male evil, and certainly the fear of having her rant about it all on social media. This is why I give the back of my hand to all those adjurations to "communicate"--- more risks, more dangers every year in such things. Be clear--- it's not about rejection. It's not that. It's about contempt and derision, about being told that one is morally evil. Funny thing, now.  1978 was a time when so many groups were still marginalized, excluded, reviled.  But it was easier then to tell a potential lover what you liked and have her shrug and grin and say that it all sounded interesting and worth trying, easier to think that she'd think that sex was about trying new things.

Forty-Three: Enquiries

This morning at the coffee shop by the university, a lovely co-ed at an adjoining table looked over and asked me about the book I was reading. I looked up over my reading glasses, pushed aside my caffè macchiato for a moment, and chatted with her about the book. The book itself was the kind of thing I am likely to have with me on a weekend morning--- something academic, something historical. In this case, an English Marxist look at radical groups during the English Revolution: Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down. The girl was a History major, and she'd heard the title before and had always, she said, meant to read the book. A pleasant enough conversation on a Sunday morning. She asked me if I was faculty somewhere, then asked about what I'd taught in my past. We talked about her grad school plans and about what I liked about the book. She told me about her interests and I recommended a couple of other books. I wished her luck on her last couple of semesters and on grad school. She thanked me and we each went back to what we'd been doing--- reading, working at a laptop. Five minutes' worth of conversation, ten at the outside. I mention this only because the exchange--- this kind of exchange ---seems now to be regarded as evil.

I'll be more precise. This kind of exchange is now evil, but only if I'd been the one to initiate it. There's been a new front opened in the gender wars, and I missed the reports of the landings.

Oh, I did find the reports, or at least accounts from the front. I found three or four accounts on line--- each with its flurry of angry supporters ---about the evils of conversation. The accounts from the front were all remarkably similar. In each case, a woman was somewhere in public--- on a subway, on a bus ---and reading. A man attempted to strike up a conversation, or at least ask her about the book. Unpleasantness then ensued. It took me a minute to get at the rage each of the women felt. None of the accounts suggested that the man had propositioned the woman reading. None of the accounts suggested that the woman reading was specifically annoyed at having her reading interrupted. None of the accounts suggested that the man was unpleasant or even unattractive. The anger was at something else altogether.

Now--- it may be that the particular scenario--- asking about a book ---is particularly baffling to me. I was brought up to think that readers are a kind of freemasonry, that they're likely to share information, likely to regard sharing information about books as a kind of social ritual...and perhaps a responsibility. In my younger days, I did work at a bookstore. I'm used to talking about books, and books have always been a key social passport for me. So I'm predisposed to ask about books, to ask about authors or topics I'm interested in. Of course it's better if there's an attractive girl with whom I can discuss a book. I certainly won't deny that. If you're going to strike up a conversation, a girl who's a reader, who's reading something you find interesting, is always a good choice. But beyond that, books and enquiries about books always have defined a freemasonry for me. Talking about books is something that even supersedes even Manhattan subway rules about eye contact and sullen silence.

The anger, it seems, isn't so much about being interrupted. It's about the idea that someone male would open a conversation. It's taken for granted that asking about a book is always and ever a poorly-disguised cold proposition for sex, or at least that any effort at asking anything, initiating any conversation, is somehow the same as unwanted sexual attention.

I was brought up to believe in courtesy, in being just a bit tentative and semi-apologetic when asking anyone anything. I was brought up to be polite always, whether in making an enquiry or responding to one. I have never assumed, though, that there was a line of evil in asking someone about a book.

The women recounting these tales were all bitterly angry that someone asked them a question, that someone tried to make conversation. They weren't angered at the particular approach, or at the looks or status of the male. It wasn't that the man said anything untoward, or that he wasn't good enough to speak to her---- the anger wasn't about that at all. The anger was at males in general for thinking they could just open a conversation, that they would ask something that might require a response. Each of the women regarded that--- the need for a response at all ---as a kind of violation.

So here we are. Striking up a conversation is a new front in the war against...what? Flirtation? Social interaction? Well, it is regarded now as on a par with knifepoint or chloroformed rags to ask someone what she's reading. The response--- whether that's a brief discussion about the merits of the book or a curt acknowledgment that you're reading a certain author and title ---is regarded as something taken from the woman with the book. The social need for a response is equated with...well, equated with some kind of sexual aggression.

I have to sigh. This is what it's come to. Yet another front in the gender wars, yet another group of bloggers arguing that any approach, any interaction, probably has some kind of sexual component or intent and is tantamount to sexual aggression, to violation and harassment. I know that I'm all the wrong things (older, male, straight, cisgendered, white, nominally middle class) to be allowed to have opinions on these things, but I am nonetheless left perplexed and saddened and irritated by all this. There's a war here against flirtation, or any social interaction that might have a hint of flirtation to it. There's a demand for a world of atomised and armoured individuals--- a world of windowless monads ---where anything "social" is kept to a strict minimum and anything sexual is excluded altogether.

The girl at the coffee shop this morning asked me about the book I was reading. I was happy to take a few moments to respond, and to make polite conversation. She was attractive, young, intelligent: all the more reason to be happy about talking for a few minutes. The new "social justice" rules may allow her, as the female, to initiate a conversation. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the rules say that by making people like me think that girls are willing to have conversations with male strangers, she's "objectively" a gender traitor. One never knows about these things.

I miss the eighteenth-century arts of conversation and flirtation. I miss the idea that such things are an art, and one worth learning. A world where an enquiry about a book--- even if that's a way of opening a conversation with someone attractive ---is a red flag for evil isn't a world for me. A world where conversation and introductions are thought of as evil is a world where something valuable has been lost. It angers me that the loss is either never thought of or disregarded as simply part of purging evil.

Thirty-Eight: Grey

This summer's most-talked-about book is of course the e-novel with the grey silk necktie on the cover. I've read reviews, of course, and read essays about it, though I haven't read the novel itself. It's already spawned a host of imitators; I do know that much. I can't say I have much interest in reading either the original or the imitations. I can't imagine being taken with either the romance or the s/m.

My own vision of s/m romance doesn't involve humiliation or psychological games. There seems to be an ongoing theme here, in original and imitations both, of the wealthy and powerful male lead using his money to isolate and control the female lead. And of course so much of the s/m does seem to involve exactly what I dislike in the professional s/m world: the idea of "breaking" the submissive, of destruction of will and personality. A friend who worked once as a professional domme boasts off-handedly that she can reduce "hipster boys and bankers" to "simpering bitches" in a handful of minutes.   That's something that fails to interest me in any way. It's something I can't imagine wanting to do to a lovely girl.

I understand the underlying structure of the romance in these books. The secretly-tormented brooding hero is to be redeemed by the heroine's love and sacrifice. Her willingness to endure humiliation is offered up to show the hero the meaning of true love. I just don't have any interest in that.

I have no problem with the hero having at least some money. An s/m romance requires some money, since money buys time and privacy and accoutrements. But is it necessary that the male lead be a billionaire CEO? There should be money for travel, and for accoutrements. But too much money is a bludgeon, and it's always used to force the heroine into absolute dependence on the hero. Now I know that I've always said the s/m is an aspirational thing, that it involves stylish things. But there's a kind of malicious deus ex machina quality to the hero's wealth in these novels. There's a distinction here, though it's one I haven't quite finalized.

I'm not sure an s/m romance works in a university dorm room. Having to remove two weeks' worth of dirty laundry and three weeks of class assignments from a dorm bed before you can tie a lovely girl up does seem to be a mood-killer. I'm very certain that s/m romance doesn't work in a blue-collar setting. But there does come a point where the idea of wealth becomes too overbearing, where it overshadows the idea of elegance and style with sheer materiality.

There is an s/m romance to be done. I can see that. But it needn't be about humiliation and redemption, and Stockholm Syndrome doesn't figure in it. The hero can be older than the heroine--- after all, I do encourage lovely young girls to prefer older men ---and can have some money without being an embodiment of corporate wealth and power. The heroine can be young and relatively inexperienced, but there shouldn't be a sense of her being victimized. There won't be a ridiculous "sex contract" (something that the original novel has bequeathed to all its progeny). There's no reason why the heroine--- intelligent, thoughtful,  someone not unaware that s/m exists ---can't come to the hero, can't keep putting herself in his path, precisely because she's interested in adventures or experiences, because she's willing to try something that's new and unknown and just a bit scary, something she's read about. There's no reason, too, why he has to want to control her life or treat her as a pinned butterfly. The sex can be intense, transgressive, explicit. That's all fine. But, again, there's no reason the sex--- and here the riding whip and the candle wax and the blindfolds are included ---should involve humiliation, no reason why it shouldn't be about measured rituals and formal games, and certainly no reason why the sex can't be done without the whole "breaking the girl" thing.

I don't mind a hint of the Gothic. There are certainly fashion and architecture styles that suggest Gothic romance that I do like. Yet...the s/m romance I'd want to read is a romance that's not based on the idea of suffering and redemption. There's something to be said for the two lead characters sitting on a stoop and kissing before the hero takes the young lady into his brownstone to be blindfolded and whipped. This summer's novel and all its epigones really don't have the kind of aesthetic that appeals to me. I'd wear the grey silk tie from the cover, I think, but I can't imagine an s/m romance where there's no sense of exhilaration and adventure, where the girl doesn't stand up on the brownstone steps and take the hero's hand and pull him toward the door. "Show me," she'd say. "Show me." That's something that would have to be there.

Twenty-Seven: Performativity

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

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

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

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

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

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