One Nine One: Judgments

I spent some time last weekend watching a cable series called "The Girlfriend Experience"--- watching the first season all the way through. Well-written, though with some soap-opera touches that weren't necessary. The actress who was the star--- Riley Keough ---was wonderful. My type, of course: tallish, painfully thin, cold and calculating. I enjoyed watching it, though I suppose that it did leave me sighing not only over Ms. Keough, but over the idea of high-end escorts.

My own version of a Girlfriend Experience would include the things I think you know about. The girl would be dressed for a role in my films-in-the-head, with all the class markers I look for. and with a very clear set of scripts. I'd be paying--- I'd be more than willing to pay ---for certain kinds of attitude and conversation. The girl would probably need a syllabus and a reading list, which says so much about my own past and about my desperate need to feel like sex and books can be combined.

I'd be willing to pay for a girl who could perform as my leading lady in my films-in-the-head. I'd certainly be willing, although it's clear that I could never afford someone who has the skills I'd want.

I'd certainly be deeply afraid of disappointing whoever I'd paid. I'd be afraid that she'd feel like her skills were being wasted, that her talents far exceeded my ability to appreciate them.

I know that there are websites for clients of high-end escorts to rate their providers' skills and performance. There seems to be a whole set of polemics about the sites, about "hobbyists" using the sites to punish escorts by harming their business. Some of the sites seem to be infected by the whole Yelp Era attitude--- demanding, arrogant, and all-too-ready to take offense...and looking for a way to extort extra services. That's all very ugly.

There are also sites now where escorts can rate their clients. Fair's fair, I suppose, and escorts have a very clear need for a place for exchanging information about clients who might be violent or obsessive. Let's take that as a given. Yes, by the way, I am thinking of Wodehouse stories, of the huge ledger where Jeeves and other valets write down their judgments about their employers. Still, though--- there's something frightening about being a client and being rated.

A small parenthesis--- what is the correct term for someone who pays for an escort's services? Apparently there's a discussion in the demimonde about whether "john" is acceptable these days, though I don't know the details. I suppose I'd be okay with "john". It's  a usage that goes back a long way; I grew up hearing it. "Customer" or "client" would be a bit antiseptic, but fine as well. It's "punter" that I hate rather a lot. I think I hate "punter" almost as much as I hate "wank"/"wanker". Working-class British slang always manages to be cruel and dismissive and offensive. "John" or "client", then, but never never never "punter".

I would be terrified of being a client and finding a website where escorts rated clients by performance or looks. Please understand--- a site that discussed clients by the difficulty of their requirements or their tipping levels wouldn't be a problem. That's just business. It would be a site that rated clients as people that would be upsetting. Again, be very clear. I'd never use a rating site to rate escorts. If I had a problem or a compliment, that would be between the girl and me, or at most between the me and the girl's booker. I'm not a Yelp Reviewer type. And site that rated clients would leave me afraid ever to book an escort again.

After all--- let's be clear. One of the underlying things about booking and escort is that you aren't being judged as a person. Both parties negotiate a price for a certain specified set of activities and for a scripted scenario. It isn't about you at all.  You don't have to be afraid or ashamed of your looks or skills. You're paying to be part of something: the script matters, the exchange of money for services matters, not you.

There's an old, old (very male) saying that men don't pay prostitutes for sex; they pay them to leave after sex. I've never quite understood that, but I do know that part of what I'd be contracting for in any arrangement with an escort would be freedom from judgment. My preferred scripts have some level of difficulty, some level of complexity that requires skills worth so much.  That's fine. I'll pay for professional skills. I'm paid for mine every day at work. But I'm also paying to be treated with a cool professionalism. I'd be paying so that I wouldn't see contempt or derision in the girl's eyes. To be part of a set of scripts is one thing. To be judged as a person is another.

One Nine Zero: Pasts

A lovely friend who lives in New Zealand hinted for years that she had a dark secret that she'd been keeping. I'd make guesses, of course. Most of my guesses were very dark, which says more about me than about her. When she was maybe twenty-eight (she turns thirty-one in December), she did share this, about the older lover who's haunted her life:

I can't stop fantasising about my uncle (for clarification--- he's my mothers cousin, but I shall refer to his as my uncle for convenience). He must be...62-ish now. He's tall and tan and solid. He owns a pub in the outback in Australia. I first met him when I was in my mid teens, he taught me how to blow smoke rings, we drank sambuca and we fucked. Now I can't stop thinking about the last time I saw him...it must have been 2008? Or 2009? It was at a family funeral. When I saw him after the funeral I went up to him and hugged him. Brushing my hands around his waist, I felt something like an electric shock. 'Hey there, beautiful' he whispered in my ear, then kissed my cheek. An hour or so later I noticed him watching me, and nodding his head towards the bathroom. I swallowed the rest of my gin & tonic and walked ahead of him. I was wearing black heels and a black skirt. After he shut the door, he ran his fingers up my thigh, lifted my skirt and kissed my bare cunt. 

I need him again.

She expanded on that a few nights later:

it has been years. but there will never be anyone else. i met him when i was 17. not so young, i suppose. but give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. cards on the table, right from the beginning. first cousin once removed is the technical term. and thirty years between us. our first night together i was drunk. sambuca flowed through my veins. but it was electric. i knew at the time it was different to anything i'd ever felt before. i didn't know that i'd never feel anything like it since. it was a cheap motel room. we fucked countless times that night, then the next day he flew back to australia. a month later he flew me to his pub in the outback. we had a whole month together. to date, that was the longest time we ever spent together. i started to understand that it was love. we'd pour drinks at his bar all night, then take a bottle upstairs with us. we would drink and talk until dawn. the sex was amazing. he went down on me for hours.  i'd had men before...but not like this. i felt so powerful, so needed, and so loved. 

we've been together all over the place. vancouver, tokyo, auckland, sydney, the outback, fiji, wellington. we steal long weekends. we fly each other wherever, whenever we have the chance. for a long time i wouldn't let him cum in my cunt. my mouth was fine, preferred. i got over that though. its been ten years now. and nobody touches me like he does. nobody looks at me like he does. he is the only man i want, and i can never have him. 

“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.” 

and i have tried to not let it consume me. i slept with men his age. boys my own age. girls. there is only him. i've had long-term boyfriends, who thought nothing when i flew to fiji for a 'girls weekend' and spent four blissful days with his tongue in my cunt and his arms around my waist. when i flew to vancouver with friends he arranged to be there for a weekend too...i told them i was catching up with my uncle, and had his hand in my cunt in the lift up to his hotel room. another time we were together for four nights in auckland. we stayed at a house in devonport, and it was like this 'what we could have been' experience. we cooked for each other, and read aloud to each other. we played cards, and mixed each other drinks. we walked around naked. we bathed together. we came together all week. it was agony to catch the plane home after that. 

he is my addiction. we're a chemical reaction. 

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” 

some nights i stay up late, drinking straight bourbon and smoking. habits i learnt from him, of course. they aren't my only bad habits. on those same nights i might cut and purge. i didn't pick up those habits from him, but i'd say he inspired them. it would kill him to hear me say that. what we have together chokes me. it annihilates me. it is everything, yet it can never be anything. how did it end up like this? i was young and drunk, our first night together should have been just that, a drunken regret. not the start of an affair which would come to both doom and define me. 


and a few weeks ago i got a text. i will see him soon. 


this is my secret. 

I read those two e-mails and sat back with a drink and tried to decide how to react to her story. I don't find the travel implausible. She's from a posh family, and she grew up taking travel for granted. I know her family's place in Wellington society; I know the firm where she works. I know her tastes in older men--- I'm one, after all. I had no way of knowing how true it all was, but it was all quite plausible. Accept it as true--- I decided that she wasn't making it all up after a few bourbons. What I felt was...well, jealousy of course. Obviously jealousy. She's haunted my thoughts for years, and I can only wish that I could evoke that kind of romantic obsession in her. I wish I could mean that much, for good or bad. So of course I felt jealous.

It says a great deal about me that I read "Sambuca" and let my mind go to the last time I'd had Sambuca. Years and years ago, in an Italian seafood restaurant in Vienna of all places. I thought about her description of Sambuca flowing like electricity through her veins. I tried to recall the girl I was with in Vienna and what the sex had been like for us that nightWhat.  It says a great deal, too, that I was a bit disappointed about her clarification of who her older lover had been. "Uncle" is simply far hotter in this context than "first cousin once removed"--- a status I couldn't begin to define or diagram. If she had to be with him, he should've been her mother's biological brother. The vision of an incestuous affair is hotter than simply a years-long affair with a much older man--- even if the older man happened to be, well, me.

What I felt was a mix of jealousy, envy, and depression--- a toxic enough cocktail. Jealousy that I wasn't the older lover she could obsess over. Envy that she got to fly to distant cities and carry on an affair in elegant hotels and exotic settings. Depression that I wasn't likely to have that kind of amazingly literary obsessive romance in my life ever again. Jealousy, envy, depression--- I used to note that mixture as JED in my paper journals, and note that it never ended well, that it was always associated with self-destructive time in my life.

It's certain that the thing that makes her stories most painful for me to read is that I don't have stories of my own right now to match hers. Her past is full of stories, and this season I can't imagine that any of my own are as good as hers, or ever will be again.

I've spent my lifetime living through stories, living inside stories, aspiring to be part of stories. JED is the dangerous and corrosive feeling I get when it strikes me that my days of having worthwhile stories to tell may be over. I always see sex and romance as being about the stories one gets to inhabit, the stories one gets to trade with lovers, the stories that one uses in seductions.

I love the stories my NZ friend tells. But I do sit alone and recognise that I'm not likely ever to have stories worth telling a lover again.

One Eight Nine: Holmes

Downtown on a Saturday morning, watching sleepy-eyed co-eds and young twenty-somethings drift into the coffeeshop by the river. Bright and surprisingly hot so early--- a morning for iced coffee rather than anything hot. The girls I'm watching are on their way home, threading their way through older, empty streets and construction zones back to their own rented rooms or to the new condos in reno'd buildings along the river streets. I can sit at a corner table with my own iced coffee and a stack of books from the tiny downtown library branch and try to read faces. I suppose it would be a novelist's feast, watching the faces of Saturday morning Walk o' Shame girls--- so many stories in those expressions.

Twenty-odd years ago, there was a Zalman King "version"--- a very, very free "version" ---of "Delta of Venus". It actually wasn't so bad on its own terms, and it's worth watching. It just wasn't Anais Nin in any way--- take that judgment however you wish. There was a fun scene where the two leads walk through Paris streets in that odd Phony War autumn of 1939 and try to construct stories for passers-by. They sit in cafes and do the same--- watch the other tables and construct whole lives for the couples who flirt or bicker or sit silently. Well, I liked the girl who played the lead in the film; I'll admit that. I did like the idea of sitting with a lover and constructing stories. That's one of the things I've loved, and one that I wonder if ever I'll do again.

Walk o' Shame stories for sleepy-eyed co-eds--- always a lovely chance to see what you can do with imagination and deduction. I won't refer here to all those moments in Sherlock Holmes stories where Holmes deduces a whole life from details. I hated those moments, really. Far too arrogant, and I was never a Holmes fan. I'll always admit to using imagination more than deduction. I'm turning the girls at the coffeeshop tables into characters in a story, not assessing them as potential clients or criminal suspects.

Sleepy-eyed, I always say. If they've been with lovers, they should be sleepy--- they should've been having sex 'til not long before dawn. Hungover a bit, too. What's sex without vodka shots or bourbon on the rocks? Pensive, sometimes--- you can see the girls thinking about whether last night was a mistake or a disappointment, thinking as well about whether last night was a one-off or whether there's an affair beginning. Sometimes you can see them wondering about how to explain to roommates that they slept in a new bed last night. Once in a while you do see smiles--- they liked the guy, liked what they did, enjoyed the sex. Sometimes you see them looking at cars parked on the street, or at couples, and wondering why they're walking home alone, without their new young gentleman escorting them. That expression leads to all kinds of interesting speculations about social rules here in the new age, right?

It's all different if you're male, I suppose. The walk home is less thoughtful, less a contemplative time. More triumph, less analysis---- unless that's an image that we've decided to reject here in the new age of equality and diversity.  My own experience has been that the walk home is a victory march--- proof of my own value, proof that for one night I've won a battle against time and decay and my own body and past.

But it's still a fact, I think. Male stories on mornings-after are much, much less interesting, and they're so much less complex.

Well, a morning that's all summer sunlight. You can sit and sip vanilla iced coffee and watch girls with stories in their eyes and try to imagine what their lives are like. Surely there was a third Holmes brother who was a novelist---- surely.

One Eight Eight: Smile-Mask

When I was young, I read a lot of Marxist theory. I was good at it for a while, and I knew all the arcane definitions and analytical techniques that Marxism had developed on its own or absorbed from critical theory. I knew the terms of art--- interpellation, ideology, alienation, comprador capitalism. I'm having problems these days with something more personal: the idea of "emotional labour".

 I do understand that there's a difference between "emotion work" and "emotional labour". One is, I think, more about presentation of the self at work, and other is more domestic. I don't know the dividing lines. What I do know is that the underlying concept--- when it's applied to domestic, personal concerns ---leaves me even more depressed and exhausted than the labour-market application.

My understanding--- based on reading any number of the more political sex blogs ---is that "emotional labour" is used to mean male demands on women for emotional support in a relationship. It's a male demand, of course. The male half of the relationship demands that the female half provide emotional support and help him through emotional downswings. This is regarded as evil, since it's a male demand. I suppose I'd always thought one of the desirable things about a romantic relationship was that you had someone there who would offer you emotional support, who wanted to raise your spirits and help steer you through depressing moments. Oh, of course you did the same for them. That goes without saying--- loyalty and support in return, always. Always. But the hope-- for both parties ---would always be that in a romantic relationship you'd have someone who would see it as worthwhile, or as part of the relationship itself, to be there for you, to say the small romantic things you need, to offer solace and congratulations and care.

Reading the blogs about the evils of "emotional labour" in a relationship, all I can think is that there's no longer any room for such things. Once again, it's better--- best ---to remain silent. Never ask a lover for anything, not support, not solace, not kind words. Never ask, never expect. Never hope. The new rules call for silence and distance. No one--- and especially the male half of the relationship ---should ever display any emotional needs or ask for any emotional support. Never ask for anything that could be spun as a demand. Never offer anything that could be spun as condescending or smothering. Simply enough, never ask for anything.

There was a time when I believed that lying back in a lover's arms would be safe, that I'd feel safe and supported and loved. A relationship could be a haven in a heartless world--- a phrase Marx supposedly used about the bourgeois family. Haven in a heartless world---- a kind of blanket fort against the outside, a place where someone believes in you and supports you, where someone sees it as part of their role to make you feel better, to make you feel desired and loved. For the record, and to stave off ranters, I'll be clear: you do all that for your partner, too. Ride or die--- you give that to them just as they give it to you. Those days are over. The new rules make it impossible to look at a romantic relationship as a haven, or to think you might get--- or seek ---any support.

There are things I'd hope for in a Young Companion, and things I'd like to tell a lover I'd need. There are things I'd like to ask for.  I can't, of course. I can't even begin to say anything. I can't even hint. All you can do in these latter days is stay silent. Never ask, never hope, never expect.

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 Six: Found Objects

I asked a favourite young companion a simple question a few nights ago. If you dropped dead tomorrow, I asked, what would you be most worried people would find in your house?

She laughed about that. Not anything silly, she said. Not the sex toys. She just shrugged about that. She was, she told me, an upper-middle-class, educated white girl in the year 2016. Of course she had sex toys. All girls like her did, everyone knew it, and no one would think anything about it.  The vibrators (the USB-connected Lelo models), the dildos, the anal beads and penetrators--- she was wasn't the least worried about having those found by family or friends clearing out her rooms. After all, she'd never worried or been the least bit fazed when customs agents or theTSA found her travel vibrators. She just gave them a cool, grey-blue, posh girl's stare and went on her way.

What she'd be worried people would find would be her notebooks and journals. She pours her heart and secrets out onto paper, and she has a locked box filled with them. Those are the things she'd worry about. That's why she burned a lot of her teen years journals, too. She wouldn't want her family and friends knowing about her teen Bad Girl adventures, for all the obvious reasons--- starting very young, doing risky things, having bad things happen, having encounters with her parents' (mostly married) friends, sex with some of her father's employees, sex with friends' boyfriends or girlfriends. And because of her emotional issues from those days, things that she may be more worried about than who she was having sex with. She didn't want her family knowing how she felt about them when she was fifteen or sixteen, or that she'd done things deliberately to defy them and their beliefs and values.

She and I are total opposites about the question. I kept notebooks when I was young, and I've diligently kept paper journals since the middle of the 1990s. But I was trained to always look to archives and documents. I believe in the idea of History, in the idea of a life preserved in archives. Everything must be documented and preserved--- I spent most of my years at university and grad school being taught that, and I believe in it.  I wouldn't be ashamed of anything I'd actually written down, not if I told it as a well-crafted story. I have the historian's kind of vanity, the idea that someday, someone somewhere would go through my journals and notebooks and find small bits of data that could be useful social history. I'm male, too. Having people know I'd had encounters in risky places or with unexpected girls would count in my favor. But all that only applies to things written down, to documents. Not to anything tangible.

What I'm saying is that I'd panic at the idea of people finding any hypothetical cache of sex toys. Not the riding whips or the riding crops, mind you. Those I'm rather proud of. They go with my reputation, with the self I've constructed since my early teens, with the interests I've clearly made part of my life. I could have riding crops found; that wouldn't change anything anyone things of me. But I could never have sex toys found. I've said it before, and I'll reiterate it here. There are no sex toys as such that a male can own that will allow him to keep his self-respect and social standing.

Vibrators and dildos for girls are associated with empowerment, self-discovery, sex. Things like Fleshlights or dildos or prostate massagers or inflatable dolls for males are associated with failure, creepiness, derision. I think the Arbitrary Social Rules are very clear on that. Male masturbation is regarded as a clear sign of social and sexual failure. Haven't we talked about that before? If you're found with sex toys in your nightstand drawer, the people finding them will hold you in contempt.

Part of that is something predicated on how porn is structured these days. If a girl has a collection of dildos, people will think about sex, about how hot it would've been to see her use them. If a straight male is found with dildos, he'll be tagged as closeted gay. If a gay male is found with dildos, he'll be mocked for being too much a loser to find a partner. Sex toys are an invitation to think of a girl as highly sexed, but an invitation to think of males as sexual failures.

The fact is, I told my friend,  I don't care what you read about in my journals so long as you think I'm a good writer and have a good eye.  What I'd be afraid of is being thought a sexual failure and sexually contemptible.  My paper journals are neatly archived and dated. I'd never hide them. But I'd never have a cache of sex toys because I would have to hide them,  because I'd agonize over what people would think about me if they found them.

And that, I think, is extremely sad.

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.