Three Four Eight: Signposts

I have been back at Escort Twitter, looking through feeds by FMTY Girls.

One thing I've found to think about is this. I've never liked lingerie. I understand, or at least think I understand, the semiotics of lingerie. When I look at the FMTY Girls' feeds, I understand what they're trying to say with photos of themselves in expensive lingerie or photos of the gift boxes expensive lingerie came in. 

Part of it is very simple, of course. Gifts of expensive lingerie symbolize luxury. They're a marker for the client "spoiling" the girl. Things like Agent Provocateur symbolize both luxury and "decadence"-- they symbolize upper-class lifestyles and what is always taken for "decadence": champagne for breakfast, willowy girls in nothing but lingerie at noon. High-end lingerie stands for a certain kind of sex, and it also stands for a life where the girl has nothing to do on any ordinary day but wear silk thongs and garter belts and be ready for sex in an elegant setting.

And yet...lingerie never meant anything to me. I am old enough to remember Helmut Newton's photos from the later 1970s and early 1980s, with all the models in black silk stockings and lace bustiers or bras. I thought of those things even then as a kind of obsession not with sex itself but the idea of "European" sex-- chateaux and castles, four and five-star hotels in Paris or London. Of course I'm attracted to the idea of decadence, but stockings and garters never seemed to be the markers to attract me.

You know this part. I prefer my girls to avoid lingerie. I prefer them to avoid undergarments altogether. I prefer girls who'll sleep naked-- or just in one of my shirts --to ones in silk teddies or camisoles. I have no idea what I'd say to a girl who wanted to wear a nightgown in my bed...except to explain that there's nothing sexy about sleepwear for beautiful girls. I'd offer her one of my dress shirts, but I'd hope that she'd sleep naked. 

I remember the early '90s and lots of Prince videos-- girls in very short skirts that left their stocking tops and garter belts clearly on display. That was a brief fashion moment, and my young ladies of the day were encouraged to forego stockings altogether. I'd much rather caress or kiss tanned, taut, sleek bare flesh than be kissing fabric. And I suppose, too, that stockings do run. Active sex is hard on stockings, and you'd have to replace them far too often.  Bare legs are always best. 

I'm fine with slender, toned girls in black leggings, but it's dark-tanned bare legs in short skirts that I prefer on my dates. In the Southern summertime, sundresses should never be worn with stockings or lingerie. Sundresses go next to the skin. If a girl tells me that she has summertime fantasies of "getting railed in a sundress", I always point out that there should be nothing at all under that sundress to get in the way. 

I'm not sure where I want to go with this. What I'm thinking is that I'm not sure what signs and symbols appeal to me. Lingerie, even the most expensive and most well-designed or made, isn't a symbol for sex-- at least to me. In the FMTY world, expensive lingerie has its own ritual justifications, both for companion and client. But those things don't speak to me.

The girl in a man's dress shirt. The girl in a very tailored, half-unbuttoned white blouse. The expensive sweater worn next to the skin with a pair of very short cut-off shorts. The girl in a man-tailored blazer next to the skin. Those things all appeal to me. Collarbones, hipbones, long bare backs, long slender legs-- those things excite me in ways that girls in Agent Provocateur or La Perla never can. 

I'm not sure what the social messages in my preferences are. They're more...what? Model Off Duty looks? And things that suggest Comparative Lit co-eds who are living out fantasies of being a Muse or Learning About The World from an Older Lover. 

But I just don't fit into the FMTY world. I can't afford its rituals, and I have far, far too little of the particular kind of social capital I'd need to ever have a dinner date with an FMTY Girl.

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.

One Eight Five: Shopping

I never quite know how to behave at sex shops. I'm never quite sure what pose to strike or how to ask questions.

I've been to sex toy shops, though usually--- perhaps inevitably ---I'm there as a young companion's accessory, as the older admirer she leads by the hand. Literally leads by the hand, mind you. That's something my young companions have seemed to like--- drawing me along the store aisles in their wake. I can't say that I mind, of course. I love watching them shop. I love the way they show off their acquisitions and take me to the displays they want to explore.

It is awkward, though, if you go in alone. It's something that takes some deep breaths. Going into a sex shop alone, you have far too much to prove and far too much to hide.

I worked in a bookstore all through grad school. It was a good job. I was the evening and night manager, so I didn't have to be there 'til two in the afternoon. I'd close up at ten at night and then go out. I managed to get most of my doctoral thesis written and still spend lots of late nights in clubland. My job required me to take books home to read, and I had special authority to order History and Modern Lit and Non-Fiction. We had a good clientele, a good mix of upscale types, bohemians, and students. They valued my advice, and I tried to be knowledgeable. I hired good people to work with me, people whose lives had been built up out of books.  A very good job, and one I look back on now with special nostalgia.

I used to tell the evening staff that we were like bartenders or psychoanalysts or priests. People told us what they were looking for on the shelves, and we ended up knowing all about their inner lives and hopes. Not just the thirty-something soccer moms who'd buy a hundred dollars' worth of self-help books on reaching orgasm or saving their marriages, and not just the solemn art-school kids buying guides to Coming Out. We knew what authors you'd choose to give you the right vision of romance, the kinds of futures that the sci-fi readers believed in, the skills people wanted to acquire and the phobias they wanted to overcome.  We knew who was pregnant for the first time and who was traveling to Bali that summer. I knew--- predatory creature that I am ---which senior girls from the posh prep schools were buying "Story of O" or Anne Rice's "Sleeping Beauty" books.

So I expect I'm a bit afraid of sex shops for that reason. Shopping there shows someone what your current fantasies and fetishes are. You're vulnerable to the judgment of strangers--- always an unpleasant thing. More--- the shop clerk will see you what you buy, and she (it should always be a she) is likely only to see you once or twice in her career. Whatever you buy that night, whatever you seem interested in or excited by that one night--- that's what'll define you in her eyes.  That's a problem in general, by the way. If you tell a potential young companion about your current interest, she'll assume that's all you are, all you're interested in.

Cliche, of course, but true. It's easier to be a lovely co-ed and go to sex shops (at least those where the staff are more likely to have graduate degrees than those where the clerk looks like Comic Book Guy) than it is to be a gentleman of a Certain Age and shop there. A lovely co-ed can stare down anyone who raises an eyebrow and fiercely defend her own sexual agency and empowerment--- one of the best uses for all that training in critical theory. Someone male of my own age must shuffle and look at the floor and find some guilty way to insist that he's not a sad perv with a Real Doll at home. Possibly a Real Doll of an underage sheep.

I've been the official carrier-of-purchases for young companions at sex shops. I've been the older admirer to whom a lovely girl turns in the presence of the clerk and says, "Do you think this one will leave good marks on me?" I've been there when a young companion grasps my arm and leans her head on my shoulder and tells the salesgirl, "No--- give me the next size bigger." Those things are fun. Part of the delights of being an older admirer. But I couldn't go in alone. I certainly couldn't go in alone and ask the staff for advice or recommendations.

That's disheartening, really. I'm a gentleman of a Certain Age--- a professional, a sometime academic,  holder of post-graduate degrees. Yet I can't ever walk up to the counter at someplace like, say, Good Vibrations in San Francisco or any of its upscale equivalents worldwide and just...ask for advice and recommendations. Whatever my interests might be, from mere vanilla to the very baroque and complicated, I can't risk being judged and mocked. Whatever my young lady buys is fine. And I'm fine carrying her parcels or giving her my own take on what she's looking at. But I'm never going to be able to shop on my own.

One Six Four: Magic

I've been thinking about identity these last weeks. 


I'm not a fan of what's come to be called identity politics, and of course I'm always suspicious of the way "identity" is taken to be something ineffable and something fixed. I'm no fan at all of the way the gender warriors insist that any professed identity must reflect something "real". 

This goes to other arguments as well. I hate the whole idea of "cultural appropriation", too--- the idea that cultures should represent something fixed, some sacrosanct and precious possession guarded like Smaug guarding a treasure. I grew up in one of the more creolized cities in the Western Hemisphere, and I've taken it for granted all my life that cultures were sets of raw material to be discovered, shared, tweaked, re-made. 

I read postmodernist theory at university and in grad school. I was utterly thrilled with it, mind you. Enchanted. I loved--- still love ---the idea of identity as mutable, as something that can be constructed out of bricolage, something always to be creolized, something to be worn like masks at a Japanese drama. I'm not a fan of the idea of an essential, "real" self. I'll remain old-school PoMo--- a believer in the re-created, shifting self. 

I've said before that the last fetish we're supposed to find acceptable is authenticity fetish. We're supposed to assign a kind of ritual magic to being "authentic". We're not supposed to choose anything we are, let alone anything we find attractive or sexually alluring. Choice implies...what? Mere whimsy? We're at a point in the culture where choosing to try something or be something is regarded as...what? Lying to others? Are we supposed to think that anything can be chosen, tried, and rejected isn't worthy of respect? I have no idea why we obsess over being "real", why we insist on social presentation that's "real" rather than a transient choice, or something to be continually re-invented.

I'm old enough to remember when "fetish" was something that one was allowed to experiment with. I remember all the groups and "communities" devoted to fetishes, to the  objects and accessories that came to be imbued with sexual magic. (Yes, alas--- some people did insist on spelling that "magick") Of course, to have a fetish, to do a fetish, was to be laid open to moralizing disapproval...or at least aesthetic critique. How strange, then, that "fetish" is now a bad thing again, something that the gender warriors and the Social Justice Cult see as morally corrupt. There's a suspicion out there that any specific sexual triggers, any attraction to particular looks, particular images, are exclusionary and oppressive. Which goes back to the idea that there's some inner essence that's unconnected to presentation, to the idea that we're only allowed to be attracted to the "real" essence and not to mere expressions. 

Well, we can blame Plato as much as the queer theorists, I suppose. That seems only fair.

One One Four: Boxes

A girl I once knew--- lost, some years ago, to the ranks of the gender warriors and the Social Justice Cult ---wrote at her blog not so long ago that she'd just received her first subscription box from a site called UnboundBox out on the web.  She was thrilled about receiving it, and she made a point of thanking the company. I took a quick look at the website, and found that what she'd subscribed to was a quarterly service that sends out gift  boxes with half a dozen "provocative" items--- i.e., a selection of sex toys and gels.

Well, why not? There are subscription services that provide monthly or quarterly boxes with clothing or shaving tackle or books. A subscription service that sends out gift boxes of sex toys  isn't really that different.  I only glanced through the UnboundBox.com website, but from what I could tell, they do market high-end and highly-reviewed items.  I can't criticize the idea of the subscription box, and I can't criticize the idea of sex toys, even though as a male, I don't have any emotional connection to the idea.

I'll just note in passing that the closest thing I've ever owned to a sex toy was a small selection of riding crops, and I bought those at an equestrian sports supply house and not a sex toys shop. I can imagine going to a sex toy shop with a young companion some late evening, but we'd be shopping for her--- I'd just be there to offer support and the occasional tentative comment on colours or styles. I'm male, and the toys that are designed for males seem to be either ghastly (artificial vaginas, powered or otherwise) or grotesque (the Inflatable Love Sheep).  Sex toys simply aren't for males...or at least straight, non-Scottish males. I can't imagine a similar box arriving for anyone male.

So,  the girl I once knew is thrilled with the box she received, though she didn't provide an inventory. The inventory would've been worth a look, of only for the semiotics.

My bookshelves are full of books with checklists and lists of tribal markers--- the Official Preppy Handbook, the Sloane Ranger Handbook, Paul Fussell's "Class",  Pierre Bourdieu, U and Non-U.  There are markers for every tribe, every social group: on Wednesdays we wear pink. Everything has its own markers for class, for in-group and out-group. I really do want to know what the semiotics of sex toys are.

Some of that must be ideological. How can it not be, here in the age of the gender wars? Some sex toys must be "problematic" and ideologically suspect. I'm thinking that there may well be lines drawn between vibrators and dildos on that, that it would be easy to argue that a vibrator (especially something like the Hitachi Magic Wand and its cousins) is designed specifically to provide female pleasure, whereas a dildo is too much like a mere (oppressive) penis. I wonder if there isn't a class line, too...though it can't be a simple one. A vibrator is hi-tech and expensive, but a dildo can be a hairbrush handle or a Corona bottle. Still...a dildo can also be something hand-crafted---- something artisanal.  A high-end dildo can be a bit like a small Brancusi sculpture, and it's easy to imagine a shop in Portland or Bushwick selling artisanal dildos to trust-fund hipster girls.  M. Bourdieu may not have been thinking of dildos, but they're as much markers for social capital as books or wall hangings.

Everything social devolves into cliques, sooner or later. There are people and institutions that use Gerber multi-tools and those that use Leatherman--- and each looks down on the other. Tribal markers--- and markers that come with extensive rationalizations. It's never just about actual efficiency or utility. Those criteria are never the key. Sex toys can't be any different. But would it just be a line between vibrators and dildos? Gels and lubes--- would there be lines between those who like flavored gels and those who reject them as promoting the idea of oral sex and hence of female submission? Lingerie seems like a obvious area--- Frederick's versus Victoria's Secret along lines of economic class as well as aesthetics and social class, lingerie wearers versus those who see lingerie as a tool of oppression.

Remember--- it's never about the freedom to choose. In the end, almost no one really believes in such a thing. They really want the freedom not to choose, but the freedom to choose whatever is right, the freedom to insist that their own tribal and class markers are not just theirs, and not just better, but right--- and that others are wrong.  Society operates by exclusions, and sex toys aren't any different from clothes or music.

There's a girl tonight with her first subscription box of provocative toys. I'd give a lot to know what she sees in them, what the items represent to her, and what she reads into having them. It's not just that they'll induce orgasm; that may be the least of it. I'd like to know what girls read into sex toys, what tribes they mark and how the toys are deployed as displays of cultural and ideological capital against out-groups. It's always the semiotics that counts--- always the semiotics of the object more than the object itself.

One Zero Nine: Armour

I've been reading comments at various on-line articles about the mating dance and I must say that I find myself raising an eyebrow.

The issue seems to be about what signals indicate that a girl is open to being approached while out, and there are things here that I don't quite understand.

The argument seems to be that what a girl wears is never to be taken as a signal at a club or party that she's looking for potential partners or trying to attract attention. That line of argument is well enough when arguing that no one deserves to be the target of violence or harassment because of what she's wearing, but it's still difficult for me not to read how people dress without looking for signals. Commenters assert that women aren't dressing up for men when they go out, and that no male should ever believe that a girl is dressing up to signal that she's  part of the mating dance.  That strikes me as self-evidently wrong.

I know that when I go out at all, I go through a whole ritual, and I'm very aware of what I'm doing. In my own mind, I really am imagining rituals of garbing and armouring--- the matador before the corrida, the priest before High Mass, the knight before tournament or battle. If I'm standing in front of the mirror before going out, I'm very much trying to imagine myself as part of something very formal and formalized. I know that I'm trying to choose what I wear to send signals.

Some of that is about class. No question about that. When I leave my rooms to go out anywhere at night, whether to a bar or an event of any kind, I'm in costume--- in armour. I want what I wear to give off certain signals about class and education. The black blazer, the oxford-cloth button-down, the necktie in regimental stripes--- those are chosen to say things about me. A gentleman of a certain age, of a certain background.  Someone who can be a bit insouciant, but who's been taught how to dress and behave. Someone whose background can be read as good schools and a liberal arts background.

That presentation is always and ever carefully curated. Part of it is that I very much was taught to dress in certain ways, and I can't imagine being out in public after dark in anything that doesn't meet the standards I was trained to for what was proper.  I want the look to suggest something a bit old guard, but with a hint of the casual. The ties--- well, I like ties. And they're carefully curated--- regimental striped ties with the colours of British army regiments my character in a novel might have served in, regiments associated with long-ago campaigns I've enjoyed reading about. I'd never wear them in London--- be clear about that. Never in London. No one in this city is likely to identify them,  though, and they're my secret. They help me be the character here that I'd have been in a good novel. There in the mirror, I'm creating myself as someone who should be out in the night, as someone who's living inside the right kind of novel or film.

Why do I do it? I do it so I can live inside the novel or film in my head, so I can be that character.  But one of  that character's key qualities is that he's attractive to girls, or at least attractive to lovely girls who can read his presentation. Yes--- if I'm dressed to go out, it's always and ever so that that certain niche of potential young companions will read the signals and, if my luck holds, respond. If I'm out at all, I need to be...in character. If I'm out at all, I want certain girls' eyes reading me. Whatever else I'm doing, I'm dressed for my imagined reader, for a very particular audience. If I'm out, I'm signaling to attractive, clever, bookish girls. I don't leave my rooms after dark  if I'm not in character to appeal to my niche audience.

That's probably why I can't ever accept those comments where the gender warriors rant that when they're out in something slinky or revealing that they don't do it for men or as a signal. Oh, fine, there's certainly something about announcing status--- they know that other women will read labels and designs and combinations and so they're staking out status claims. But anyone who insists that she's dressing to impress other women seems to me to leaving something out. If she's dressed to demonstrate that her tastes and styles are better than the next woman's, you have to ask better for what? That's  a proof-and-pudding kind of thing. Having clothes with the right labels or right fashion lines is all well and good, but the point of the clothes is to be stylish and sexy. The clothes work when  they convey that message. And the proof is in the response.  I can't get around that.

So much of this seems to me to be an attack on the whole idea of the mating dance, the idea that social interaction always has that subtext of sexual possibility. I've spent my life looking at the social world as a whole set of possibilities for seduction and romance. Whatever else you're doing, those possibilities are out there. And you come to the ritual armed and armoured. Going out at all puts you in places where the mating dance can happen. Going out at all is always and ever about the mating dance. And you remember that you're in costume, in uniform. Always in character, always ready for the dance to swoop you up.

Ninety-Three: Characters

I do think that I'd have to craft any erotica that I might write into some very specific forms.

The erotica I'd write would have to have an s/m storyline, as much for the element of ritualized sex as for the s/m itself.  I'd want there to be an sense of the very formalized about the story line. There would be a sense of cool (or even cold) formality and ritual. The characters would be able to look at what they were doing with a kind of stylized distance, a kind of abstraction. There could be romance, and even longing, but there'd always be a sense of distance. My characters would have read about the things they hoped to do long before they ever did any of them, and they'd always see themselves as being part of a story.

The characters would be age-disparate. There's never any question about that. The girl who's the heroine would always be much younger than the hero. However not? The hero would always be me, at least in some ways. The heroine would be a much younger, though she'd always be fiercely bright and well-read. Even as an undergraduate girl, as a co-ed, she'd understand the literary references implicit in the affair. It would be important that she knew those things, that she was aware that s/m existed, that she knew what any affair with the hero would involve.

My heroine would be young, yes--- perhaps just barely into her twenties. But she'd have lived inside books all her life, and she'd be visualizing herself as a character in a novel or a film. She'd have read enough to know what her older admirer wanted from her. The word "predator" wouldn't frighten her at all.

There's a moment that I'd insist on seeing, by the way. Imagine that early-autumn night in the city, and imagine her there on the stoop of a brownstone, holding hands with the hero, kissing him,  and knowing what's waiting upstairs in his apartment. She puts out her cigarette and stands and pulls him up by his hand. "Show me," she'd say. "Show me." That's very much what I'd want--- a girl who's willing to explore, who's prepared to overcome any fears with the desire to try new things, to just dive into experience. That would be important--- that she'd be willing to go up those stairs as an adventure.

He is older--- that's a given. How much older? Well...enough to make their affair suspect in most people's eyes. Enough of an age difference for their affair to be transgressive. But it's important that he not see her as a child or as simply a plaything. He admires her courage and her intelligence as much as he loves her long legs and sharp, visible hipbones and ribs. Whatever he wants to do with her, he wants her to be part of it, to know that she sees herself as a character in so many stories.

I can think about what's likely to happen upstairs--- silk blindfolds, silk bindings, riding whips and candle wax. I can think about those things. But what matters is that the girl who's the heroine walks up those stairs because she wants to see new worlds and new experiences, and that the hero knows that his own role in the story demands that he offer her up formal, ritualized experiences.

It's no less important that they talk, that the affair demands long conversations late at night. The story can be very explicit, but to the two principals, it's also about long conversations, about stories and dreams spun out late in the night. It's important that they know that each of them is creating backstories for what's happening.  For every kiss on a bare hipbone, for every new position and every enacted ritual, there must be long, intricate conversations. They'll be deeply enamoured of one another, deeply in lust and in love. But they'll be all-to-aware of what they're doing together, all-too-aware of being part of something very formalized.

I'm not sure at all if this makes any sense. The story I'd want to tell would be very passionate, but a passion that's mediated through literary references, through an awareness of all the books and films that my characters have experienced.  My characters would approach one another through their own knowledge of those things. Is that erotica, no matter they might do in bed? That's a question that I'll open up to any readers--- does self-awareness blight erotica? What are your thoughts on that?

Anyway... It's hard to imagine erotica that isn't about two people who want to experience new things, who are aware of so many things in books and films that they need in their own lives.  Erotica for me requires a kind of distance, an awareness of sets and setting, an awareness of what sets and props the characters have chosen--- brand names, despite anything Remittance Girl may have said. My characters would always want to be part of a literary world that embraces everything they do with one another.

Erotica for them has to be about be about dreams rather than flesh...or at least about something formal that's more than the mere collision of flesh.

I do wish I new how to write all of this down--- to shape a story around the characters I've seen in my mind's eye all these years.

EIghty-Nine: Bibliophilia

A few years ago there was a blogger who signed herself as "Debauchette". She did a very thoughtful, very clever, very hot blog about her career as a high-end escort. She had a second page elsewhere where she talked about the books she was reading. I was a follower of her blog, and I do miss the stories she'd tell. She wrote about always using a fountain pen for her paper journal, and she recommended the Lamy fountain pen. That was recommendation enough for me to order one, and I do give her credit for the pen.

I found an interview with Debauchette where she talked a bit about her life and her transition from grad school into being a "professional companion". The interviewer asked her about her hobbies, and Debauchette talked about her own specialized bibliophilia, about collecting antique erotica. That caught my eye, of course, and on a couple of levels.

I'd known that there was such a thing as "Victorian erotica" since I was in high school and saw the books (some real, some clever pastiches) that Grove Press was putting out in those days. Lots of books about lascivious swells and gents, lots of tales of debauched maidens in Mayfair. I was at university, though, before I read Steven Marcus' "The Other Victorians" and realized that there was a whole subterranean world of Victorian publishing that did expensive editions of erotica.  I read Marcus' descriptions of the printing and distribution and found myself wishing I could have my own collection of erotica.

There were porn novels in those days--- paperbacks printed on the cheapest paper possible, bound in solid dull colours. You'd find them on spinners at bus stations or in convenience stores in the bad part of town. That's not what I wanted, of course. I read Marcus' long essay about "My Secret Life" and wanted a set. I wanted things from the upscale parts of the subterranean world. I remember a passage in (I think) Walter Kennedy's "The Secret Museum" where he noted what "upmarket" meant in the erotica world. A skilled craftsman (say, a master plumber) c. 1890 would've paid the equivalent of three or four month's wages for something like "My Secret Life". That was something I thought was doubly alluring:  transgressive sex, yes, but also a kind of secret world where Dorian Gray types furnished their secret garçonnières with finely-bound illicit novels and memoirs.

I did try to buy a few things in my grad school days. There was a bookseller's in Brooklyn called C.J, Scheiner's that did a mail-order business in antique erotica from ads in the New York Review of Books, and I'd go through their catalogs and try to find things that fit a grad student's budget. I couldn't afford anything extravagant--- folios of hand-coloured prints, Regency survivals, early reprints of Sade. Oh, I did see a set or two of "My Secret Life" for sale, but memory says that even in those days a set brought four or five thousand dollars. I did get a rather nice hardbound edition of "Story of O", obviously handcrafted, and I got a couple of signed prints by Guido Crepax, but never anything that would go into a serious collection.

The interview with Debauchette did include photos of a few of her own treasures--- an early English edition of Aretino, a good copy of "Venice Preserv'd", some 1920s underground reprints of Sade's "Justine" and "Juliette".  I'd like to see what else is on her shelves.

As for mine, though... I'd still like to collect antique erotica. I'd love an authentic set of "My Secret Life", and I'd like to have some of Rochester's plays. I might even like an edition of "The Romance of Lust". Though I wonder where one draws the line at "antique". Aretino or Tokugawa-era Japanese shunga would be all well and good,  but I think I'd like to focus any hypothetical collection on post-1945 editions. Yes, good hardbound copies of "Story of the Eye" and  "The Image", or good editions of Sade--- good meaning well-translated and annotated. And very probably some fashion-noir erotic photo collections from the 1970s through the mid-1990s.

Things like "My Secret Life" would be there as an exemplar of a secret world and clandestine high-end printing. To have things like Bataille or Sade or even "Story of O", though, I would want fairly recent well-bound editions, since the bindings would have to go hand-in-hand with modern translations and illustrations.

I will say that I want erotica in books--- in texts and photo collections. I want something tangible, something with a history. Streaming video can never have that.

But this raises a question. What out there is worth collecting now? Is there a world of high-end erotica done in the last ten or fifteen years that's worth seeing as collectible? And I will ask--- if you were setting up your own secret bookshelves, what would you collect?  What would you collect not just for its value at provoking arousal, but for its sense of style, for its value as an object? Let me know what erotica you'd collect for your own hidden shelves.

Eighty-Five: Options

Last year, there at her own blog, an acquaintance wrote a piece attacking something Alain de Botton wrote about sex. She was angry at de Botton for taking a Freudian view of sexual tastes and preferences. De Botton had argued that all sexual tastes and habits are a product of the past, that they reflected something longed-for or denied in childhood, or at least reflected memories of childhood. My acquaintance was angry--- not just about the invocation of Freud ---but about the idea that any sexual taste had an origin deep in the past.  It wasn't, she wrote, that one had a fetish or liked some particular thing because one was "weird", but because there was some memory from childhood that led to the strange taste. She saw the idea of sexual tastes having a history or a genealogy as  some kind of way to avoid responsibility. I read that and felt surprised and disappointed by her attitude. "Responsibility" these days means "blame" or "guilt". Using "weird" like that--- in a derogatory sense ---wasn't something I'd ever thought she'd do. After all, she'd always seemed to be in favor of exploration and adventure. There she was, though--- dismissing a broad swathe of sexual tastes as "weird" and something that didn't have a history or a past--- just something that should involve blame and guilt.

I can't say I know what led to her attack, and she didn't specify what tastes she was thinking of in particular. I wish I did know the details, of course. Everything does have a history, after all. Every idea has a genealogy. I was taught long ago to think like that, and to always look for what came before, to go back toward origins. I'd love to have been able to find out just which tastes she had in mind and then link them to her own past and backstories.

I've always been an admirer of Freud and his thought. I like the archaeology in Freudian analysis, the careful scraping down layer by layer, the delving down into the past.  That means far more to me than blaming everything (and, see--- we're already using "blame" here) on neurochemistry or genetics, let alone on an idea of choice that seems to have the ghosts of ideology hovering round somewhere.

How do people come by their sexual tastes? What does it mean to have a preference? Those questions have a history, and I'm always intrigued by tales of discovery. Sometimes, though, I wonder if there are other issues besides history--- if there's not a question of branding that's involved. I agree with Alain de Botton, of course. All our sexual tastes come from the past, from things remembered and things lost or things denied. All those things shape the way we see the world and the way we feel our longings. I do agree with Edmund White about that, about how our desires define us.

I've said it before, of course. My own interest in s/m, or at least in a very specific version of s/m, comes out of my own past. I know that I see s/m as being as much about class as about sex, and what attracts me to it are the class markers--- hidden chateaux, rituals that involve expensive accoutrements and lots of historical references and high-end fashion touches. When I was a boy, growing up in a series of small towns far from the places and times I read about, s/m seemed like an escape into a world of wealth an style and elegance. There was a brand involved, a statement being made.

The branding issue is always there, of course. A particular sexual taste, a particular fetish, is always a brand. You do make a statement about what you are when you state your own desires. I'd thought for  a bit that my friend might be using "weird" in a way that was about branding and aesthetics, but I think that she was taking a moralizing view of the word. I think that she was using "weird" to dismiss people's tastes as morally flawed, as a moral choice. She'd have been on safer ground talking about branding and aesthetics.

Certainly there are some fetishes that seem destined to get you laughed at. The whole Big Baby fetish is likely to be treated as risible anywhere.  Ditto enemas and scat, of course. Ditto cuckold fetish, too. A foot fetish may not be uncommon, but it's usually regarded as, well, silly. Certainly some writers--- e.g., the Bad Girl columnist Cat Marnell ---use that preference as a way to mock men, and especially older men. Cat Marnell has, I think, used that idea in at least two or three of her old Amphetamine Logic columns--- sneering at "old rich guys" who want to "jerk off on the bare feet of bottle service girls" at expensive clubs. FemDom will get anyone male laughed at, though I want to be careful about noting the politics of both enjoying and mocking FemDom.

High-end s/m still has class markers about wealth, power, and things European. It still links to fashion photography, which is about style and elegance...and wealth and power enough to engage in things that are dark and daring but still stylish. If you have a particular sexual taste, you're better off if it's high-end s/m.

Sexual tastes and fetishes and preferences all have a genealogy, and you can read back through them into someone's history. But they're a brand choice as well: about presentation as much as pleasure. It's not so much that the question of "weird" is on the table, but that the issue of presentation and social ranking is. I won't follow my friend into using "weird" as a moral thing, but you are well-advised to think of sexual presentation as a branding issue, as an issue of how you want to use your tastes to reveal your own history.

Seventy-Three: Community

The library did provide me with a copy of Staci Newmahr's "Playing on the Edge" last week. I suppose it's not bad ethnography--- a study of the BDSM scene in a city in the American Northeast. Newmahr writes well, and she has a good grasp of theory. She seems to be someone who's done good academic work. Still...it's a depressing book.

The BDSM community she studied is one that tries very, very hard to distance itself from the idea of sex. Its members don't want to be seen as engaging in "kinky sex"--- and they do use that term in a disparaging sense. They're hostile to outsiders who assume that BDSM is about sex, and they separate themselves from the pro domme world. Newmahr argues that her subjects are seeking a sense of community and are trying to construct intimacy by offering themselves up to each other in physically risky and socially transgressive ways. She points out that most of the people she met and interviewed found the BDSM scene comfortable because it didn't rely on conventional sexual attractiveness--- because their own skills at the mechanics of BDSM took the place of physical beauty or sexual skills. Many of them, she writes, came to BDSM as an alternative to sex.

It's a tale that does leave me depressed. Newmahr's account of her own participation in scene play has some hot moments, but she never addresses the issues that would interest me--- did she have to prep for the scenes she knew she was going to be part of? What went through her mind as she was getting ready? Was any of it exciting or arousing? Did she have sex with any of her scene partners--- or want to? What did she think the next morning? What was it like to sit later and transcribe some fairly scary experiences into academic prose? How did any of it affect her own sex life away from the scene? These are all things that I'd want to know.  I read "Playing on the Edge" much the same way I'd read a novel, and the story is depressing.

Nothing Newmahr describes seems worth being part of. The scene she describes has nothing to do with anything erotic, and it has even less to do with anything aesthetic. The clubs she visits are all as depressing as the semi-private sex clubs my London friend told me about visiting with her older admirers. Those places, the clubs in London, aren't places I'd ever visit. I wouldn't be welcome there on the usual grounds--- age, money, looks, attire. I wouldn't go to the clubs Newmahr describes because they're aren't about sex or fantasy, because they aren't about being part of a literary tradition or about a sense of dark grace.

Community and intimacy aren't words I use very often. Neither word is a good substitute for sex or fantasy. And perhaps I'm not any good at either thing. But I can't imagine ever being in the clubs Newmahr describes, let alone taking one of my young companions there. They aren't stage sets for any sort of mannered seduction, and what goes on there isn't part of the sentimental education any of my young companions would want. The London sex clubs wouldn't be places I'd take a young companion, either. I wouldn't have anything to offer anyone at any of the London clubs, and there's nothing there that I'd want to show any young companion I'd be with.

There may be gated chateaux or secret townhouses where sex happens as part of style and ritual, where aesthetics and literary tradition matter, where elegance is regarded as key. You wouldn't go there for community, though. You'd go for the stage sets, for the idea of sex as style. I won't give up on believing that such places exist, even if I'm unlikely ever to see them.

Sixty-One: Characters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fourteen: Mornings

The girl at the next table this morning had a copy of Wings of the Dove, a Penguin edition with a yellow USED sticker on the spine. This was downtown, in a small coffee shop adjacent to two of the new boutique hotels. Very early, and only a handful of people on the street. She was dressed as one might expect (or hope) for a Sunday morning, in a mix of last night's clothes and a few things obviously pulled from the backpack by her chair. I sat over my own cappuccino and tried to read her semiotics.

Some things are easy. Alone at a coffee shop near trendy hotels so early on a Sunday morning is an easy call. Not with a regular boyfriend, or they'd have come  down together.  Not with friends who'd come into the city--- same reason. The book is an identifer: the yellow sticker comes from the university bookstore. That it's a later Henry James novel says something about her major and how far along she is at university. What says more is that she had it in the backpack. The backpack itself is another undergraduate marker, as well as place for a change of clothes. She was planning on staying the night, and the novel reinforces that. Walking alone through the hotel lobby at seven in the morning in last night's cashmere pullover and a pair of wrinkled olive-drab chino shorts, shouldering the backpack, she was striking a pose. Sitting over coffee with Wings of the Dove, she was elaborating on that: the literary girl on a morning-after, a girl who'd brought a serious novel to read after leaving her gentleman companion sleeping back in the hotel room.

Harder to get a read on whomever she was with. He could simply be an out-of-town boyfriend, but then, why wasn't he staying at her rooms rather than hotel? If they'd rented a room as a romantic gesture, why wasn't he with her? She wouldn't bring the backpack if she planned to go back up to a hotel room.  For my own very obvious reasons, I'd like to believe the sleeping companion back in the room was significantly older. Someone she'd met and spent the night with before. Someone she was keeping as a secret-- after all, she isn't letting him walk her home, or even to a taxi . Out-of-town, obviously. Moneyed enough to afford the room. Married...not necessarily. Would there be money involved? Again, not necessarily, though I remain attracted to the idea of the envelope left for her on a table (hotel stationery, I'd think) with the bills inside. She might not be doing it to help with tuition. It might simply be her way of proving to herself that she could do what girls in novels and films do.

Of course, there are now two strands of stories being told here. The girl at the next table reading Henry James is telling her own story. The backpack, the book, the choice of Sunday morning-after clothes are all parts of the story she's telling the city around her, and telling herself as well. I'm telling a story for her, too, even though I know that I'm re-fashioning her  tale. My instant hope is that the man sleeping back in the room is at least twice her age, and probably more. I have to hope that, if I'm ever to imagine her leaving my own rooms on a Sunday morning. I think about the envelope with cash because I like the idea of a lovely undergraduate girl who'd do that as a kind of performance art piece, or as a tale she could embellish and tell to half-shocked friends in later years.

We tell stories about the people we see; we invent lives for the ghosts who pass us by. That's actually a small trope in Zalman King films, in Wild Orchid and Delta of Venus. The main characters sit in a restaurant or walk through early-morning Parisian streets and build up imagined love lives for strangers. 

Tell me, then--- how do you read strangers? What stories do you tell about strangers on the street, about the couple or the solitary lovely girl at the next table?  What are the stories you want to live inside yourselves?