Three Five Zero: Essentials

A lovely friend wrote this back in 2013, in response to a List I created for her-- a List of 20 Essential Things Every Gentleman Should Have. You'll have to tell me what you think of her List...

 I've been inspired to write a short list of things every girl needs to have. So, here it goes:

1. Black skinnies. Goes with everything and can be dressed up or down; I like Gap as their sizing is the most consistent and the prices are reasonable.

2. Black flats. Same as above, APC makes a delightful pair, as does Bloch.

3. A strip-tease song. Mine is "Nightcall" by Kavinsky from the Drive soundtrack- wonderfully sultry and slow enough keep a sensual and fluid rhythm.

4. At least one foreign language. How else will a Ghostgirl communicate in the Far Foreign? French is a must (obviously) and another should be unique, specific to your interests. I love Russian and Korean, however Arabic or Japanese are perfect as well.

5. A small book to carry around in one's purse. Perfect for reading on the quad or at a cafe and is a great conversation starter. Mine lately have been "Invisible Cities", "Discipline and Punish", and a copies of n+1.

6. A good vibrator. Need a girl say more?

7. A lighter. For the impromptu post-sex cigarette or lighting a stranger's--- a great way to get to know someone.

8. A brand of cigarettes. This becomes your signature and reveals a lot about your personality. I smoke organic American Spirits (liberal arts, humanities educated, "concerned about the environment", and upper-middle class). Please don't be a Parliaments or Menthol girl. Just no.

9. Some knowledge of wine. Being an oenophile is sexy and can really impress a date. Choose one that fits most dishes and is in the $15-30 range. You never want to be cheap when it comes to wine--- girls who buy $8 bottles of Moscato are almost always virgins. My favorites: Garnachas, Tempranillos, Sangioveses, Cabernets from Napa.

10. An animal friend. An animal companion can instantly lift one's mood; my Dmitri is my everything.

11. A troubled past. Provides for great stories and a better understanding of the human condition (at least in my experience).

12. A passport filled with visas and stamped to oblivion.

13. A few favorite artists, poets, directors, etc. that one can discuss in-depth. A few of mine: Mikhail Vrubel, Neruda, Almodovar.

14. Red lipstick. I wear YSL Rouge Volupte (so creamy and it smells like mangoes!). Classically sexy and an easy way to vamp up any look.

15. A signature perfume. YSL Opium for going out and Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb for the day for me. Always be careful when applying: you want someone to only smell your perfume when they lean in close for transgressive suggestions.

16. Some ability to sing or play an instrument. I did choir for 5 years and have a fairly good voice and played piano for 9 years. Also, have a favorite composer. I love playing Chopin and Rachmaninoff.

17. A reliable pen for writing down potential lovers' contact info, random thoughts, and Lists (in a Moleskine, of course). I prefer Pilot G-2's.

18. A cast iron skillet and good chef's knife. That being said, know how to cook. Nothing is sadder than a girl who lives on takeout and can't chiffonade for shit.

19. A moneyed lover. Naturally.

20. Sharp cheekbones, jutting hipbones, and long legs.

I'll note that she listed black skinny jeans but didn't list any lingerie. That's a good thing. Beautiful young girls should habitually be panty-free. 

Tell me what you think of her List. I may have to find my own original List for Gentlemen, or at least attempt to reconstruct it. I'll post here if I do, of course.

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 Nine Seven: Markers

Not so very long ago--- a week or two ---there was something called International Non-Binary Day. There  were announcements on Twitter and Non-Binary flags flown in some hip neighborhoods and at the protests we're experiencing nationwide here in the summer of the Red Death.

I will have to admit that I don't understand the whole Non-Binary (NB, enbee) idea. I'll read about the concept and have trouble distinguishing "non-binary" from simply 'bisexual' or 'androgynous'.

Now I can craft an argument that divides non-binary from bisexual. Bisexual is the ability to be sexually attracted to either sex, to be sexually attracted to both (or either) male and female. That seems simple enough, though I do fear that the argument may already be outmoded. My current understanding is that sexual attraction is being downplayed these days, and that attraction must be based on gender, not sex.  "Non-binary" remains an ambiguous usage here. Is it the ability to be attracted to more than one (or two...or more) genders, to multiple social presentations? Or is it presenting oneself as performing more than one (or two...or more) genders? Does it include what we once thought of as 'androgyny' or does it go beyond that?

Non Binary seems to be linked to the idea of 'pansexual'. From what I've been reading, 'pansexual' is the new ideal, the new gold standard for sexual orientation. I've seen articles and Twitter posts that assert (sometimes violently) that 'pansexual' is the only moral or ethical sexual orientation, that any other orientation (straight, gay, lesbian, bi) is immoral--- bigoted and exclusionary. To some degree, that seems to be special pleading by trans women, who are busy building an argument that any refusal to have sex with someone on the grounds of body and anatomy is 'transphobic', reactionary, and evil. That argument seems to come down to saying both that bodies don't matter and that anyone who won't have sex with them is a Bad Person.

I've seen assertions on line that being Non-Binary is purely internal, that someone can be a 'man' or a 'woman' at any time, at will, even without social presentation. All identity, they're arguing is internal. You can change identity without having to do anything or look like anything. That's an argument I have trouble with. I can see that it's not altogether aligned with trans views of identity, since it rejects the idea of a real or authentic identity. I also take for granted that social presentation matters. An identity has to be recognized by the world around you to have any meaning at all. Saying, for example, that your inner identity is "woman" while sending out signals (dress, body language, beard) that your particular culture reads as "male" is a pointless exercise.

So there are the Non Binary flags, true...but what are the social markers for being Non Binary? There's an IG girl whose account I follow, a girl in the Pacific Northwest, who did a long series of posts about being Non Binary. Yet to my eye...I have no idea what she means. That she's bisexual is obvious and trivially easy. She's tall, lanky, lovely eyes and face, with hair shaved down to USMC boot camp length. She works as an alt-model, and her photos can be anything from haute fashion sexy to punk erotica. I read her as androgynous in a kind of Eighties art-school style--- an assumed boyishness used to enhance obvious femininity. Her social presentation remains "female" to my eye. I have no idea what she thinks when she looks in a mirror or sees herself in photos, and I do read her as  female-hot.

What are the social markers for being Non Binary? It says something about me that I assume that there must be social markers. As far as I know, every group develops its own internal symbolic language of identifiers--- whether that's late-Victorian gay men with a green carnation or Nineties lesbians in Birkenstocks. I grew up reading "The Official Preppy Handbook" and "The Sloane Ranger Handbook" and "The Official Yuppie Handbook". I take it as a given that there are social markers, whether that's finance bros wearing micro fleece vests or old-school preps wearing Nantucket Reds. After all...checklists are everything. But I don't know how Non Binary people perform an identity.

Any identity must be something the external world can read. How else can they react to you as what you assert that you "really are"? Any identity has its external symbols and poses. Nothing is more human than constructing stories to explain ourselves, whether verbally or in symbols.

Right now, though, I can't quite explain what Non Binary is, or how it's enacted in public. What does it mean? How is it announced? Who out there over the aether can tell me? Be specific, as I always told my students--- be specific and give examples.

Two Six Four: Champagne

A lovely blonde friend once made a list of champagnes for me, a list of champagnes that had meant something to her in her life, champagnes that had played parts in her adventures with various lovers. Champagne came to mind today because I was at brunch and had a couple of Mimosas made with fresh-squeezed satsuma juice.

If I had to list champagnes from my own life and past, I suppose they'd be:

- Veuve Clicquot
- Moët et Chandon
- Piper Hiedsieck
- Bollinger
- Taittinger

Nothing too out of the ordinary there, of course. My blonde friend added something called Daniel Le Brun, which seems to be a New Zealand local brand that she keeps on hand in Wellington as a champagne for "ordinary" drinking. I'll note that I never became enamored of either Cristal or Dom Perignon. Krug remains a mystery to me, as does Pol Roger, which I believe was Churchill's preferred brand.

Champagne for me was always associated with ritual. It was not so much the old, apocryphal quote (Buonaparte or Churchill, take your pick) about champagne--- "in victory we deserve it, in defeat we require it" ---as it was the idea that here was a drink that lent itself to ritual and symbolism. Absinthe does that, too, I suppose, but it lacks a certain clarity of meaning.

Champagne was and is something you open as part of the rituals of seduction. Champagne is what you kiss off a lovely young companion's lips--- or nipples. It's something for licking off bare hipbones. A drink for rooftop bars overlooking Manhattan or Shanghai or Paris. A drink for ritual nights, for birthdays and New Years Eve. A drink for celebrations, and for first nights together.

I've always believed that we need things like that. We need markers and symbols for things. Opening a bottle of Veuve for a young companion is a way of marking the transition from companion to lover, from balcony to bedroom. We need rituals for moving through the steps of relationship, we need symbols that establish what's happening between two people.

I believe in ritual; I've said that before. Ritual makes so much of life and love, of sex and romance easier. Begin the ritual and move through it. I keep comparing that to the Mass, or to a graduation ceremony, both things I know something about. And I do miss rituals, and it saddens me that we seem to be losing them.

There in my fridge tonight are two bottles of Piper. There's a bottle of Veuve and a bottle of Bollinger on my liquor shelf. The year is winding down, and what's left of it will pass through my birthday, through Christmas and New Years Eve. I do wish that I could open those bottles with someone elegant and clever, someone lovely and long-legged. Champagne calls for ritual, and I miss being abe to enact those rituals.

Two Five Zero: Leather

A lovely long-legged blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me once that a few years ago she'd had an affair with an older, moneyed businessman who was wealthy enough to be part of an Aston-Martin Collectors' Society. I've had serious doubts about her stories in the past--- and I continue to doubt many of her stories. This one is I think more plausible. She works as a chartered accountant in some boutique firm, and it's certainly possible that she could've met him through work. In any case, she does like older men, and she likes posh adventures. According to my friend, her older man had a bank account with $10 million in it (though she never specified whether that was in $US, $NZ, or $AUS) and an obsession with Aston-Martins. Well, I don't see the whole thing as strictly impossible.

I asked her once what her favourite high-end car was, and she responded instantly: an Aston-Martin V12 Vanquish. I don't know if that's the car the businessman had ( if he existed) or if it's something she learned about from brothers who had posters of expensive cars on their walls when they were at school. A $300,000 car, mind you--- and that's in $US. She has however hinted that she's been naked in an Aston-Martin, and it is a great image to imagine her curled up naked on the passenger seat while the Vanquish speeds up the highway along the edge of the Tasman Sea north along the Kapiti coast.

Naked on expensive upholstery--- I have to love that image. I can imagine her in the car, peeling down skinny jeans and pulling off a sweater (she rarely wears anything like bras or underwear) and feeling the coolness of expensive leather against bare skin. (What was that sensation like for her?)There are questions about that that immediately arise, however: would the businessman be thrilled...or worried about passing police cars? And more to the point, would my friend keep her Ray-Bans on? That second question very much intrigues me.

Also--- sex in the Aston-Martin backseat, or did she ride him while he was in the driver's seat and the Vanquish was parked at some overlook? Which is the hotter thing? I'll have to think about that.

She did tell me that once she came up from the beach at Wainuiomata, southeast of Wellington, one night, tossed her bikini into the backseat of her car and drove naked back to her girlfriend's nearby beach house just to see if she could do it. That's plausible, I suppose. In her younger days, she sought out risk and adventure. Wainuiomata is away from the city, and she did love the scene in Steve Erickson's "The Sea Came in at Midnight" where the heroine blithely drives a stolen car naked from L.A. to Vegas one night. Memory says that in the Wainuiomata story she'd have been twenty or twenty-one, still a co-ed at VUW, driving a dark grey BMW her father bought her. I think I envied her the BMW more than I wished I'd been the one she'd been driving to visit.

And many a year ago, a very lovely girl from outside Asheville told me about deciding to prove something to herself and pulling off her sundress and driving home naked in her battered old truck to her parents' house down backroads in North Carolina. High school days, she said--- she'd have been sixteen or seventeen. Why don't lovely long-legged girls tell me these stories any more? She told me that being naked in the truck felt deliciously free on an early-autumn night. It was only being barefoot on the pedals that felt odd. I laughed at that. She'd always focus on the oddest details in telling stories about anything at all.

The stories are wonderful, and I wish I'd been the one driving my NZ friend or that the NC girl had been driving to visit me. I'll laugh though at the idea that the two stories only work if they're about lovely lithe young girls. No one male could ever do those things without being tagged as a serious pervert. For girls, though, it's all about adventures and visual beauty. It's about empowerment and courage and risk and proving something to oneself.  Males have to rely on other kinds of challenge.

I do wish, though, that lovely girls were still looking to me to be the designated audience for their rites of passage.

Two Four Seven: Handbags

I do have that SXSW story to tell. My friend did send me her handwritten account--- good stationery, good ink. We'll think of that as a gift to me. After all, paper and fountain pen ink have always meant a lot to me. The story itself is worth saving and recounting, and she writes well. It's something I'll try to get to over the weekend. It's something I would like to find comments on, too.

Let's go back to an entry I posted here not a few months ago, and entry about what girls I've known carried in their handbags on nights when encounters and adventures were a possibility. I began with this:

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

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

My friend in Wellington did get back to me to these issues. She agreed that her basic list, her basic Hook-Up Kit in her purse on a Friday night, would contain

--1 travel pk. of condoms (3)
--1 travel pk. of wet wipes
-- Small tube of lube
-- Travel toothbrush/toothpaste

That seems very minimalist but functional.  I'm assuming she'd already have basic make-up (lipstick, at least) in her purse. She almost never spent the night at a hook-up's place, so minimalist would work: she'd be on her way home well before morning.

Those things would work for her on a night out downtown in Wellington. I did wonder what someone a bit more professional would carry, though. If ever you do wonder what escorts carry in their purses, well, there are lists to be found on-line.

Karley Sciortino at the Slutever website once interviewed a former high-end escort  in Montreal whose carry list included:

-- 1 pr. clean underwear 
-- A good book
-- Dry shampoo
-- Lube
-- Condoms (multiple sizes)
-- Phone and charger
-- Band-aids (in case you've been wearing stilettos all night)
-- Toothbrush and make-up
-- A sex toy (bullet vibrator or butt plug)
-- $US 500 cash

Other articles about escorts and their lives point out that the phone has a dual purpose--- enabling an escort to check up on her bookings  and offering a way to be safe when with a new client. One article suggests chewing gum as well as a travel toothbrush; another suggests latex gloves.

Of course, escorts have to have a much more professional set of concerns than someone like my NZ friend on a night where encounters might happen. She wouldn't have the problem of using cash so as not to leave a paper trail of any locations or deposits. I can see my Wellington friend carrying a small dry shampoo, though. She has always liked the concept of dry shampoo. I know her well enough to know that of she carried a bullet vibrator, it would be a Lelo Mia. She is always brand-loyal. A Dutch website for escorts also lists something called an "action tampon"--- something I wasn't familiar with. It's basically a sponge, designed to allow a woman to have sex during her period without ruining the sheets. The website suggests it's also useful in case there's any bleeding after rough sex or a more well-endowed client. Again, the lists for professionals tend to be much longer and more problem-focused than the Hook-Up Kits I've been asking girls about.

I do have to smile, mind you, since there's no equivalent for men. I suppose a gentleman could carry a condom or two, but that does look a bit predatory. Also, there's the problem familiar to teenaged boys throughout the last sixty years or so: where to keep a condom? I've never really dealt with condoms, but be damned to keeping one in a wallet like some hopelessly optimistic Grade 10 boy. And a condom case (yes, they do come in brass or sterling silver) is far too 1970s for words.

In any case, I do want to find out more from girls I know. I love checklists and inventories. I'll always go through any list of what's in purses, wallets, backpacks, briefcases, travel bags. Details always matter, and there's nothing like looking at lists and inferring lives from them.

Two Four Five: Sounds

So, in late May a dozen years ago a lovely girl at Cambridge was doing this:

This afternoon I lay on the floor of my room and touched myself as the notes of "Salvete Virgenes" moaned at me from across the room and the rain clouded my windows. What is it about sex and religion that really gets me going?

Divine
Divine
Dionysia.

It took me a while to discover that 'Salvete Virgenes' wasn't a piece of ecclesiastical ritual chant but rather a piece done by Hans Zimmer and Richard Harvey for the soundtrack of "The Da Vinci Code".  Well, it is an eerie and lovely song--- haunting. I've never seen the film, and I have no particular interest in it. But the song itself has gone into my laptop iTunes.  Very much the sort of night music I do like.

The image of a lovely, long-legged girl at Cambridge caressing herself in her college rooms while 'Salvete Virgenes' plays will stay with me today. It's an image that manages to trigger so many things for me, so many of the things that always form the scaffolding of my own fantasies. Once again, I wish I could hear her voice telling me all of her own memories of the afternoon.

She wrote this, too--- wrote it that same spring a dozen years ago:

I've been listening to that old Bright Eyes song, 'The Calendar Hung Itself'. I haven't done so in ages. It always brings out the worst (best?) recklessly passionate side of me no matter how sensible I might have been feeling just beforehand.

I think I'd like to dance with her to that song. I'd like to play it while we did vodka shots and she told me of all the recklessly passionate things the song had inspired her to do back in her days as a posh schoolgirl and an Oxbridge undergraduate.

She's quite tall and long-legged, my friend is. Dancing with her would be a lovely thing, and all the more so because of how painfully long it's been since I was on a dance floor. Too long as well since I've had a leggy posh girl explain--- and demonstrate ---what passionate and reckless mean to her.

Two Three Two: Checkboxes

I realize that by writing here at all, I run the risk of being thought obsessed with sex. I find sex and courtship fascinating, but what I'm obsessed with seems to be something else. I'm much less obsessed with sex than with the accessories and accoutrements of sex.

I'm obsessed less with sex itself than with how sex fits into stories. I see sex and courtship as based on stories, on narrative arcs. I look less at the act than at how and where it all happens. Sex in one's own bed in one's own house may be wonderful, passionate, intimate, athletic. But it's not as good as sex in a parked Aston-Martin or on a sailboat moored in Milford Sound or atop a rooftop bar in Manhattan. Location matters, just as all the sets and props around you matter. Sex matters less for the physical sensation or emotional exchange than for the stories constructed around what you've done. I've believed that all my life. Part of roué-hood is telling stories, after all. All the things I've ever done in my various careers have been about telling stories. And every story requires a setting and props. Every story requires accessories.

I've written here about Morning After Kits, and I have been obsessing over those for a couple of weeks. I want to know what lovely girls take with them to assignations. I want to go over their Morning After Kit inventories and see what exactly they're preparing for. I want to know how often they carry their Kit items--- whether they're carried only on some designated nights or whether the girl is always ready for some random coup de foudre moment.

Let's be clear here. There is envy involved. Not so much envy of the sex, or of their ability to have random encounters, but envy of the Kit itself, envy of having a list of items. A lovely girl will send me her list of Morning After Kit items, and I'll go through it to see which of those things (or their male equivalents) I either have or can acquire. A travel toothbrush and a travel-size tube of toothpaste? Check. A travel-size anti-perspirant container? Check. A body wipe or two? Check.  A sign of my own obsessions is that the first time a girl sent me a Morning After Kit list, I instantly dashed to my laptop to find and purchase a travel toothbrush. In the end, I bought a dozen or so. I knew that I was unlikely ever to need them--- if nothing else, I prefer to bring Young Companions back here to my own rooms ---but I wanted to have them because they made me feel as if I could have the same kinds of accessories and accoutrements as the young ladies of my acquaintance. That new box of body wipes on my bathroom shelf is there for the same reason: Look, it says, I can have a  Kit, too! I can be ready in hotel rooms with a lovely stranger! I'm going to take as a given that this is something that could be described as pathetic.

This happens to me. I end up obsessing over lists and checklists. I want to check whatever boxes so that my own story arcs will be as good as those of my Young Companions.  I check off accessories--- cleansers, moisturizers, hair masques, wet wipes ---and I also check off locations (parked cars, rooftop bars, sailboats, offices, bullet trains). Again, this may in fact be sad, but presentation is everything. And I do long for story arcs as good as those of my Young Companions.

Two Two Seven: Ink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Two Six: Cold

There's some kind of Arctic weather phenomenon happening this week: sharp winds in from the north, temperatures falling into danger zones. I can sit in my window seat and see the winds whip the water in the courtyard swimming pool. Oh, I have some expensive artisanal hot chocolate with a heavy shot of dark rum, and I'm wrapped up in black merino wool. But I still feel deeply empty.

This afternoon I discovered that several websites for fetish enthusiasts have agreed that the actresses Emma Stone and Emma Watson were tied for the honour of being the most sought-after foot fetish photo girls on the web. I wonder of course how the two Emmas are taking the award. I hesitate to speculate on the trophies.

I'll admit that I've always found Emma Stone attractive, all the way back to a film she did called "Easy A". Very lovely, very good comedy actress. Yes, excellent eyes and excellent legs. And it does occur to me that I might--- albeit shyly, politely ---pay her either compliment in person. But even if I were a foot fetish person, I'd never, never say anything like, "Congratulations on your foot fetish award." I'd certainly never say, "Pretty feet!" I've no idea why there's an absolute line between complimenting her on her eyes and complimenting her on her arches, but there it is. Some compliments are beyond the pale.  Lovely collarbones, lovely legs---- those things are acceptable. Cute toes--- no.

All fetishes, all sexual preferences, all sexual interests come with a set of social rankings attached. I think that's just a given. Some kinks are socially acceptable, some are instantly dismissed as lower down the rank-order. Your fetishes define you--- isn't that just something Edmund White said thirty years ago? They define you not just in terms of what your desires are, but in terms of where your desires fit in a social hierarchy. Desires can evoke all sorts of responses--- disgust, amusement, fascination, arousal ---but they always make a statement about where you fit in a rank-ordering. BDSM is the intellectuals' kink, thanks to French erotica. It's a bougie kink, too--- equipment and accessories are expensive. Role-play outranks cos-play. (Query: does voyeurism outrank exhibitionism, or is it the other way round?) Age-play is no longer acceptable. Gender play was briefly edgy and cool, but nowadays it's lost itself in the hellscape of the Trans Wars.

There's a always a rank ordering, though. Telling a girl you want to blindfold her with silk and whip her with a riding crop can be spun as sexy and stylish. Telling her you want to suck her toes will never be read as stylish; you'll get no social points for dark elegance.

It's cold tonight and I'm thinking of how I've lost the ability to tell a girl about any desires I might feel. I'd certainly never ask for anything these days. I'd certainly never tell a young companion that I had any preferences or interests, and I'd never tell a girl that something in particular gave me pleasure. There's always the risk of being laughed at--- at, not with. There's the even greater risk that you'll be regarded as pathetic or low-status.

The risks seem all the more daunting these days. Pleasure and the things that give lovers pleasure are too fraught these days. Revealing oneself to a lover---  and very possibly to her social media circles ---is too risky.

Once upon a time, I had no problem talking about desires and hopes and kinks and pleasure with young companions as part of the process of seduction,  as part of the process of opening oneself up to a new lover. Not any more. On a cold night with hard winds outside, all I can say is that there's no way these days that I'd tell a lover about anything I liked about them--- let alone anything that might give me pleasure, or be something for the two of us to share.

One Eight Seven: Tour

Let's go back to something this August. Let's go back to talking about sex toys. A young companion and I have been discussing the issue, and I suspect that the whole issue is making me increasingly unhappy.

My friend has an extensive collection of toys and accessories, and she tells me that she acquired her first vibrator at not quite sixteen. She's proud of her collection, and proud of the research she's done about brands and performance.  I sat the other evening and listened to her enthuse about her new glass butt plug and how brilliant it is to chill it in a bowl of ice water before use. I'm quite good at a fixed smile, mind you. I just smiled and nodded and filed away the details in my mental archives...and felt increasingly depressed.

She sees it as a kind of mission to convince me that toys are for everyone, that everyone needs a set of toys. She's completely uncomprehending about my own fears. Don't you want to try things that'll give you pleasure? Why are you afraid to try things? She does ask me that. Sometimes she laughs and makes jokes about it being a generational thing--- I thought your generation was all about free love. Mostly, though, she's baffled about why I'd be afraid or ashamed of trying things that would enhance my own pleasure and let me know more about what my body needs. My Lelo, she says, taught me so much! 

One evening not so very long ago, she went to a sex toy shop--- someplace expensive, someplace that branded itself as being all about "sensual exploration" and "adventures in intimacy" ---and phoned me from there.  She told me to get on FaceTime, that she and I were going shopping together. I had to laugh, really. This was my own private documentary about sex shops, with a lovely blonde girl in her later twenties showing me everything. Now I'll admit that I felt very twenty-first century about the tour. Using FaceTime is a novelty for me. Nonetheless, that was the only device I felt comfortable with that night.

She did show me things she liked, and she did a whole infomercial tour of items she though I'd like or that we could use together. Again, I had my fixed smile on while I tried to puzzle out what I was feeling. The things to be used together didn't bother me. I have no problem with that.  But the things she showed me that she thought I'd like on my own--- those things left me depressed.

That I might be jealous of the toys she liked for herself, that as a male I might feel a sense of rivalry with her collection of dildos and vibrators--- that at least makes sense to me. That I might raise an eyebrow and grin at her inevitable choice of colours for her (inevitably very large) dildos---- black (a posh blonde white girl must-have) or a kind of rich caramel (her Polynesian fetish, her dreams of Maori and Tongan boys) ---makes sense, too. A tour that was only for her own pleasure would've been amusing. The things she told me I needed for myself, the things she did threaten to buy for me---  those things left me sad and miserable.

Part of the shame I felt was doubtless at my own  reaction. Is part of what I'm feeling just homophobia, just fear of being thought gay if I use the toys? That's a disturbing and shameful thought.

Is it shame at using because I'm male--- when the Arbitrary Social Rules define sex toys as something "empowering" when used by attractive young girls but shameful and a mark of failure when used by males? Worse--- much worse ---is it shame at the idea of using them when I'm neither young nor physically buff? I suppose I'm imagining the invisible audience watching and being disgusted and brutally mocking me for being an aged perv doing disgusting things while looking even more disgusting. In some meta-sense, of course, is it more of a sign of failure that I allow the fear of an invisible set of judges to destroy so many things I do or might try doing?

Maybe it's that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of pleasure. I've never been very good at unmediated physical pleasure. I take very little pleasure in things or sensations themselves. I'm only truly attracted or thrilled by the stories behind what's happening, by the settings and backstories. Something that feels good on its own means very little to me. Being part of a story, being a well-crafted character in a good story--- that's where I derive pleasure.  Using sex toys alone wouldn't be part of a story where I'm a character good enough to be having sex with a beautiful young companion.

My friend spent a few hundred dollars on toys that night. Ah, posh blonde girls whose Christmas bonuses at work equal my annual salary!  She was gentle and pleasant and fun and upbeat with me over FaceTime. She was going to enjoy herself a lot with her new toys, she said, and she'd bought things she and I could try together. She was even upbeat about the things she'd shown me that I could use myself.  I want you to have pleasure, she said. I want to you try things and find your pleasure.

I kept smiling and nodding, which was all that I could do. I'm even ashamed to tell her about all the depth of my fears.

There's rather a chance that I'm not suited at all for pleasure--- something you'd think I'd have learned after all these years.

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 Seven Nine: Towers

Geoff Dyer wrote an essay some years ago called "Sex and Hotels". I know that it was posted at Nerve.com once upon a time, and it was probably in one of his earlier collections of essays. I saw it referenced not long ago, and I'll be having the local library find me a Dyer collection with the essay. I usually like Geoff Dyer, and "Sex and Hotels" is something I do need to read--- or re-read.

Not long ago I wrote about Karley Sciortino's little essay on hotel sex, and I'd like to pair that with Geoff Dyer's essay. Hotel sex has always had a special valence for me, and I always love hearing girls' stories about the hotels where they've gone with lovers or beautiful strangers.

Location has always been an important part of sex for me. Backseats, desktops, library stacks, wagons-lits...  Location matters. It matters for establishing a mood, for establishing literary or film tradition. A lovely friend in New Zealand messaged me the other night to say that she wanted the measurements of my office desk, just in case she ever found herself spread out atop it.  Wellington NZ is something like eight thousand miles from where I'm sitting, but it never hurts to be prepared.

Hotel sex, now--- hotel sex comes with so many literary and film connections. Each hotel tells a different story about a city and about a particular affair. Each different hotel puts you in a different story.

I have my favourite hotels in Manhattan--- the Royalton, the Parker Meridien, the midtown Pod Hotel, the Night Hotel. Different lovers in each, different kinds of stories being told. My New Zealand friend told me once that she kept a log of every hotel pool where she's swum naked late at night, and that she has a list of Auckland hotels divided up into those where she's been with married men and those where she's just been with boyfriends or girlfriends. I admire a girl who keep lists of things, of course. I admire a girl who keeps score.

Karley Sciortino noted that hotel sex is about temporarily leisured, about being able to pretend for a few days that you're accustomed to luxury. Maid service, room service, the decor--- sex in hotels always feeds on class markers. Though there's something to be said for the stories you can create in decayed roadside motels or faded railway hotels in provincial towns. Both the four-star hotel and the places that probably house people who have "suspected" in front of their names promise anonymity, whether from the paparazzi or the FBI.

Hotel sex for me has always been about early mornings, too, about leaving a sleeping companion and looking out at cities just as the sky lightens. I don't smoke, but it would almost be worth starting just to stand with a cigarette and look out the window while the city began to stir. There are memories there, of course: kissing a companion's bare shoulder and slipping out of bed to watch the day begin.

If you're reading this, and if you're one of the quiet, literary girls I picture as my Imaginary Readers, I suppose you could tell me about your own favourite hotels and hotel sex memories. You could tell me about whether you see the hotel as an adventure in luxury, or an adventure in transgression (a married lover, say, or an alluring stranger), or as away to have anonymity and freedom.

Hotel rooms are for adultery,  as both Ms. Sciortino and Geoff Dyer tell us. They're for being sealed off in a room or a suite and not having to follow the rules of the outside world. Hotel sex is for call girls and clients, for escorts sent up after a discreet call to the concierge desk. Hotel sex can be about all the activities and positions and games you'd never feel comfortable trying at home. Hotel sex is about escape--- and all the best things in life are about escape from the quotidian.

If you're reading this, tell me about the hotels in your past. Tell me what desires you've been able to live out in hotels, and what you think about when the door closes behind you and you toss a carry-on bag onto a hotel bed.

One Seven Seven: Rooms

I write from the bed of room 1014 at The Standard, Downtown LA, where I may or may not have “made love” in the ginormous bathtub last night. 

My goal in life is to live in a hotel. Reality can be so boring, so predictable—I prefer a lifestyle of constant escape, because why not? However, since I can’t afford that yet (sigh), for now I use hotels for their most basic functions: travel and sex. The first, of course, is self explanatory, but it’s easy to take for granted what a night in a hotel can do for your sex life.

The quote is by Karley Sciortino, "Karley Slutever" of the rather delightful Slutever blog (and her own column at Vogue these days, too). It's from a piece at the blog that Standard Hotels has at its website for 05 April 2016.  I'm an admirer of Ms. Sciortino, and I have to agree with her about hotels and sex:

Hotel bars and restaurants have a slightly different vibe than most others—there’s an inherent level of intimacy and possibility, which often leads to more free and open conversation. Who knows what can happen at the hotel bar: maybe you’ll meet an exotic stranger and have a surreal, Lost In Translation adventure. 

Hotel sex is a sexual luxury item, and the novelty of it allows you to play into fantasy. Basically, when you check into a hotel, you check out of life, which enables you to take on a new identity. I’ve had the most hedonistic, Helmut-Newton-style sex of my life in hotel rooms. It’s sort of like how an actor puts on a costume to help get into a new character—in a hotel, a space of both elegance and anonymity, you can be a different, more adventurous you. Also, the huge bed, good lighting and 400 thread count sheets don’t hurt.

I've always believed that a new city isn't really yours 'til you've had sex there, preferably with a beautiful stranger. Hotels, of course, are the classic venue for that. They're temporary places--- stage sets, really, if you follow the precepts of travel marketing. Well-designed, well-managed hotels are supposed to offer elegance and anonymity, an interlude where you're in a new world, where the stage is kept perfect for you. Fresh linens on the bed, the sheets turned down, the room immaculate, the view breathtaking. It's a fantasy locale, and there's nothing like the intersection of anonymity, elegance, and an unknown city to suggest that sex is, well...required.

I stayed once at a boutique hotel in Manhattan that made a discreet point of suggesting that its upstairs club--- which had an indoor pool with its own banks of benches and a poolside d.j. ---might lead to a night in one of its sleekly Euro-styled rooms. The main desk had its own little shop where "intimacy kits" with condoms, lube, and blindfolds could be purchased. The design was all about suggesting not just the hot-sheets hotels that used to be all over Midtown in the days when New York was on the edge of apocalypse, but a venue for adventures. Not romance, mind you, and not commercial sex--- adventure.

Hotel bars are like airport bars, of course. They're like some Interzone fantasy, some Casablanca or Tangier fantasy. Step inside, order a drink, and you don't come from anywhere, you aren't going anywhere, your name and particulars cease to matter. Hotel bars and hotel beds encourage confessions and stories. Insofar as they do that, they're my natural habitat. 

Once, long ago, I spent a Christmas Day in a boutique hotel. There was snow outside, and grey skies, and a language I barely understood. The hotel's theme was something Anglophile, something about foxhunting prints  and dark velvet. There was a restaurant with a Christmas dinner designed to bring up Oxbridge-life novels and films. I ate alone, and found myself talking to a girl who'd been sitting alone with her drink, very obviously near to tears. That ended a couple of hours and  a few drinks later with the two of us in her bed, exchanging stories and watching the snow outside mask the city lights. I left her asleep and never saw her again. I may have left her a note with my contact address--- not e-mail, no: this was before e-mail ---on hotel stationery. I do remember that it mattered to me that there was hotel stationery in the drawer. I did wonder if any of the things she'd told me were true--- name, upbringing, past, why she was there and what (who, of course) had left her crying on Christmas Day. I may or may not have told her stories of lives I wished I'd led rather than anything about the one I was living. 

In hotels I always think of the rooms as tiny, individual worlds, little display cases for lives and hopes. When you walk hotel corridors, you're walking past cells filled with ongoing stories. When the door closes behind you, you're cut off from the outside world, alone or not. 

Hotel sex is a statement about stage sets and making oneself part of some half-remembered (or half-imagined) film or novel. Hotel sex offers that--- escaping into being part of a novel or film. That's not such a small thing. 

Hotel sex is a way of marking out that you've been to a new city, a foreign city, an unexplored country, and been part of a film or novel there. It marks out the unexpected and the singular. It's a marker for discovering that, here in some new world, you do have social and sexual value. Those things aren't small, either. 

Hotel life and hotel sex offer up many of the same markers. And both things offer up hope of being outside the world, at least for a while. 

I do miss hotel bars and hotel restaurants tonight, and of course I miss hotel sex--- a lovely girl sitting naked on the bed, framed in half-light from a window looking down on a foreign city. 

If you're reading this, I hope you'll tell me about the hotels and cities where you've found moments of escape, where you've found Adventures.

One Six Eight: Graph Lines

When I began writing here, I positioned myself as a Gentleman of a Certain Age, an aging roué, someone of certain old-guard attitudes. I'm still all those things. I do look in the mirror in the mornings and list the things that go into how I define myself, and those things are always there. What else? Well, having grown up one of the older cities in America, one with its own very carefully-curated personality.  Having left here to go to university at a place in New England that trades on its own carefully-curated image. Being a native of a region that habitually inspires a complicated and often painful relationship to its culture and past. Being someone who has lived his life inside books. Having spent so many years in academia, I define myself by that. And by being someone who tells stories. Being a raconteur is a key part of being a roué.

I told you at the beginning, I live in genteel poverty in a flat on the edge of a lake, in a bohemian neighborhood in a city on a river. I define myself in part by memories of cities where I've lived, by memories of downtown streets and shopfront reflections.

What I've been wondering tonight is about how my life can be graphed. I'm not sure what axes I need to be plotting, though. Wealth and career success? I won't fare too well on those. Cultural capital? Well, a bit better.

I'd like to graph factors of attractiveness, of course. The result might well be very disheartening, but on any seriously complex graph I might be able to find enough axes to move along to shift myself into desirable regions. The question remains--- what to graph? What are the factors to be graphing for attractiveness as a male? And how are they to be balanced against one another? How do you compare, say, age versus cultural capital versus social status?

Here in the new year, sitting alone in my flat, with Carnivale season beginning, I do wonder what the factors should be for the graph. If you're reading this, I'm open to thoughts. What are the factors for male attractiveness here in the new year? What are their exchange rates and relative buying power? What should be part of my graph, and how should I read it?

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 Six Zero: Neckties

I saw an article today that lamented the loss of "tomboy" as a term. It seems the term has too many problems in the age of gender politics. It supposedly categorizes some things as specifically male and more valued because of that. And a young girl who wears boys' clothes today and wants to do the classic tomboy things--- climbing trees, playing contact sports ---is regarded these days as "gender non-conforming" or possibly (probably?) trans rather as a "tomboy". The author looked back on her own life, and on all the girls who were the tomboy heroines of books she grew up with and sighed over the loss. I suppose I agree with her.

I can't say that there have been all that many girls in my life who were tomboys. I grew up in an older part of the Deepest South, and I knew girls who were skilled horse-riders or who hunted on family lands. I knew girls in small towns who played sports with boys when they were in grade school or who helped their fathers do manual things. I'm not sure what counts there, though. Is being an equestrienne a tomboy thing, or something expected of young ladies of a certain landed class? There's a classic thing about gentry girls who ride and hunt, and I don't know that "hoyden" and "tomboy" have the same semiotic value.

In my own life, I've always liked the garçonne idea. I've always liked lovely girls who can wear a man-tailored suit or a necktie.  In the long-ago days when I was at clubs and concerts and art openings, girls did wear neckties--- do you remember the New Wave days of skinny leather ties? And there was always something wonderfully sexy about a lithe young companion in a suit.

That's dangerous to say, though. We claim these days to be gender-fluid, but we police certain things still. To be male, and the older one in a couple, and to like the garçonne look on a girl is to be regarded as announcing a barely-hidden taste for paederasty. To have a pixie-cut girl in a suit and tie on your arm is regarded as saying that you'd rather be with an actual boy. Nothing can be done for reasons of play, it seems. You can't be transgressive for its own sake, for the thrill of inducing a bit of shock--- or some kind of frisson, anyway ---in the audience. Everything has to be about what you really are. 

There are memories from the days when I was young(er) and out in the urban night with a lovely garçonne on my arm in a black suit. The girl I'm thinking was taller than I am and possessed of a brilliantly dry wit. I remember her tossing her hair and straightening her necktie and asking me whether she  should be a gay boy at Cambridge in 1925 or a very young lesbian in the East Village in 1960. I think I told her Paris, a very young lesbian in Paris in 1925. She touched my face with a gloved hand and asked what a young lesbian would be doing with me, and I shrugged and said, "It's Paris, darling. Even a lovely young girl who fancied girls would still have an older male lover. It's a Parisian rule." She laughed and shrugged and told me that made sense.Tu as raison, she said, and kissed me. 

I still like the garçonne idea. I like the idea of necktie shopping with girls. Regimental or university stripes for me, that much is obvious. My young companion above shared that taste with me; she wore ties from British boarding schools. I still wear regimentals or university stripes when I'm in my professional guise. Hard tonight to think about what ties lovely young girls would wear with me. I do wonder if there are skinny leather New Wave ties to be found in vintage shops here in my city.

These days we have to talk about "performing gender" and see it as a bad thing. I miss a time when I could have a tall and lithe young garçonne with me who'd perform gender in an older style, who'd emphasize the idea of masks and sex rather than politics. Here is a lovely girl, her pose would say, a lovely girl wearing a mask. The mask is there to be seen very much as a mask, as a thing to be noticed, to entice and intrigue. Not about "authenticity", but about making an audience notice. 

Well, the garçonne image still entices me. Dangerous to say that these days, I know. But it's there. And since I prefer tall girls, lithe and slender girls, it's easy for me to imagine my young companions in costume. I like the idea of costumes and masks, and of course I still want to go shopping for neckties and dress gloves with a young companion at my side. 

One Two Eight: Reactions

Long ago, a girl told me that everyone wants to be found attractive, but only by people who are themselves attractive. If someone unattractive finds you attractive, she said, you feel like you've done something wrong.

I've thought about what she said over the years, and she's always had a point. Fame, Freud wrote, was  "the love of many anonymous people". But fame (or even celebrity) is different from individual desire. And my friend was right. We want to be desired, but only by people we'd desire in return, or at least by people whose desire raises our own social status. There's always the thought that if someone unattractive, someone much less attractive than you, desires you, then it means that your own value is lessened. If they think they can have you, then it means that they can see flaws. They can see something that means you're not out of their league, and your own social status is lessened.

All of which raises the question of how to respond to desire, of how others' desire is supposed to make one feel.  The gender warriors of course disapprove of desire altogether. Desire, they argue, is always an act of aggression, a demand.  The gender warriors see desire as a claim on someone else's body and time. Desire is seen as something that always lessens or cheapens the desired, since it reduces them to being seen as merely sexual. They seem to think that the only response to desire is righteous anger.

I've never understand why being desired is considered reductive. We're each of us a whole complicated collection of things, but a sexual being is one of them. There's the whole question there of how we see ourselves--- what we are versus what we've done ---and the question of differentiating desire from admiration. Both involve having status ascribed from others, but which is...better? Which is more "true"? Does being desired as a sexual being, as a physical body,  touch on something deeper or more 'authentic' than being desired as someone successful or stylish or intelligent?

I have to say that sometimes there is a feeling that being told that you're smart or fun or charming feels vaguely derogatory. There are times when one wants very much to be desired as a body, as a sexual creature.  Desire speaks to something deeper and more personal than social graces or knowledge,  and being desired as a body can mean something more personal, more intense, than being seen as bright or charming or good at social graces. I'm used to young companions telling me that what brought them to my bed was all the things I know, all the stories I can tell. I'm not used to being told that I'm simply wanted, or that I invoke any physical desire.

Well, wanting what you've never had, always believing the grass is greener over the hill. I'm used to those things.

The question remains, though. How do you respond to desire? How does desire make you feel? What does being desired tell you about yourself and your social status? If you're reading this, write and tell me. Tell me about desire and what it means to you to desire and be desired.

One Two Five: Learning Curve

There's a blog called A Faded Romantic at Wordpress that I find myself reading on autumn nights. The author there introduces himself this way:

About and Explanation

A faded romantic Dominant from a time before Dominant became a cliché, with a love of all things beautiful and a taste for the darkly sensual and decadent.

A lover of music, food and wine, literature, theatre, film and art.

A writer. Though not a good one. Of novels, short stories, songs and poetry. The written word is my joy and my curse.

I am tall, silver-haired, slender, athletic, with piercing dark green/blue eyes and long, sensitive hands. I am neither handsome nor unattractive. I am a realistic dreamer, an idealistic pragmatist. I am a sexually dominant but patient and sensual lover.

I adore intelligent, elegant, independent-minded, beautiful, sexually submissive women.

I am not young. I am faded and fading.

But if the music is playing, and the wine is good, and the stars are shining bright in a soft velvet night sky, and the light falls on me just right, then you might see the man who could break hearts.

Well, if you have a very good imagination anyway …

There's  rather a lot there that I can identify with, though I'm not silver-haired and was never athletic. I've never thought of myself as a Dominant, of course. I'm never sure what to make of that word.  Of course I like having my own way; I'd never deny that.  My companions are inevitably younger, and I did spend years in front of classes, with whatever authority that brings with it. I've sometimes been the one holding the riding whip, but I've never been a Dominant in any BDSM sense. The metaphors I apply to sex are less about dominance and submission and much more about ritual, formality, and crafting stories. Asking a young companion to be a character in your stories is about control--- when is a story arc not about control? ---but it's not about submission to you. It's about losing oneself in the story, which is something separate from the two of you.

I'll have to come back one day to the idea of what control and submission are about. All I can say tonight is that I've never seen myself as a Dominant. Roué, certainly. Flaneur, of course. Auteur if I'm lucky, though there's a pretentiousness in that word that puts me off. 

Whoever is writing at A Faded Romantic calls himself "a romantic Dominant, from a time before Dominant became a cliche". I'd like to know more about that, about how he's seen the word change to a cliche. I'd also like to know how he became a Dominant.

One of the standard arcs in BDSM tales is how the girl learns to be a submissive, how she comes to accept herself as a submissive and learns the arts of yielding up control. Name a classic s/m tale, from "Story of O." to "Fifty Shades" and you'll almost inevitably focus on the heroine's learning curve, on her initiation. There's almost never a story of how the male lead grows into being a dominant, let alone a romantic one.  There's no Bildungsroman about becoming a male dominant that I've ever seen. (Is that true of the world of gay male literature as well? Does anyone know?) And it's a story that has so many questions about learning techniques, about recognizing and accepting oneself. Would a story about a young man becoming a dominant need an older heroine to be his guide, to offer herself up as a learning experience? Is there a romance out there about a romance where two new lovers of seventeen or eighteen teach one another BDSM--- with or without the internet?

I do wonder what it is for the author at the A Faded Romantic to look back on his life to something like twenty and ask how he became what he is now. I'm using him as a particular example, but there's a wider issue here, something beyond s/m. How do we learn to desire what we desire? How do we learn what we are as lovers? And when we do learn, when we've finally ridden out the learning curve, is it too late to use the things we've learned? 

If you're out there reading this, darlings, write and tell me about learning curves. If you are a lovely young submissive, tell me how you learned that about yourself. Tell me about whether you think desires are innate or something acquired. Tell me what you think about when you look over what you've learned about being a lover, what you've learned about desire.

One Two One: Descriptors

There's a phrase a lovely young friend from Kiwi land used the other night: "a man's man".  She described an ex-lover, someone whom she'd run into again after a couple of years and spent the weekend with as "a man's man".  I've been trying to puzzle out exactly what she means by the term.

I understand the basic facts here. She'd had a longish, on-again-off-again affair with him when she was an undergraduate. She wrote to say that he was 48 now, which would've made him perhaps 40 when they met--- she'd have been 19 or 20. Her description of him now is, well, disheartening for other males. Forty-eight, now, yes. Distinguished, of course. Handsome and well-tailored. A very successful businessman, someone who owns companies. Athletic--- a player of squash and cricket.  Someone who owns a classic Aston-Martin and races it on weekends.  A forceful and skilled lover, of course--- but wouldn't that go without saying?

My young friend gushed over his description. She sighed over the idea of being in bed with a "real man" and how she can never help herself around anyone who's a "man's man". Oh, I'm jealous, of course: take that as a given. Jealous and envious both, since I'd love to have his tailor, his bank account, and the Aston-Martin.

I do want to know, though--- what does it mean to be a "man's man"? Even above and beyond my own jealousy here, what are the criteria for being a "man's man"? Is it something you aspire to, or is it something inherent? Are there class markers for it? It could be a thing that requires blue-collar, physical skills--- the screen vision of the Cowboy or the Firefighter ---but it could also involve achievements that require money. Yes--- there's a Thos. Crowne ambience here.

"A man's man"... Are there dangers in using the term? Here in the age of the gender wars, does "man's man" sound like something that could be used to imply an underlying homosexuality? In an age where "homosocial" and "homoerotic" are regarded as blending into one another, are there gender-studies types who'd instantly take "man's man" to mean...."closet case"?

Now--- I'll never be a "man's man". That's part of the jealousy and envy here. But I'm never comfortable with being referred to as "a man" in any case. "Guy" seems acceptable and acceptably bland, but "man" is unsettling. I've seen rants by gender warriors where using "female" as a descriptor is taken as misogynistic, since it supposedly reduces women to mere biology. Yet I'm far more comfortable with "male" than "man". I'm biologically male; no issues there. But "man" comes with too much cultural baggage, too many unmet social expectations. Whatever "man's man" means, I don't meet the criteria and never will.

I will have to ask my lovely friend down in the Kiwi south what she means by "man's man" and "real man". What markers does she look for? What about a "man's man" makes her wet and breathless? Does she think that someone is born a "man's man" or chooses to become one? Can someone decide to be a "man's man"?

I don't want to ask just my Kiwi friend. I'll throw the floor open to any lovely girls out over the aether who may happen to read this. What criteria would someone male have to meet to be a "man's man" or a "real man"? And what about those criteria--- alone or in combination ---would make you wet-and-breathless?

Any thoughts?