Three One Three: Boxes

I've been going through boxes and looking for ghosts from my past. I found the journals Levin gave me, and I've spent nights sighing over them. It's odd--- I have so few photos of Levin. I have her pencil and pen-and-ink sketches in the Pentalic journals, and she did lovely self-portraits. What I regret, though, is not taking photos of her. 

That's always been a regret for me. There are really no photos of me, let alone any of me with lovely young companions. I've always avoided being photographed. I can think of only two that I know exist. One is of me at my brother's wedding. The other is me standing outside the house where I'd rented rooms while I finished my doctorate. One of me in a tuxedo, one of me in black blazer and black long-sleeved tee. Two existing photos in all these years. I suspect you can guess the reasons. I'm not fond of my body or my face. And to be photographed next to a lovely young companion would only emphasize how I don't belong there next to her. 

The first time I went to Europe, I flatly refused to bring a camera. A camera, I thought, would mark me as a mere tourist, a rube from the provinces. And so I have no record of my life in Vienna. A year of my life might as well not exist. I feel the same way now about photos of girls I've been with, girls I've loved. I've no clue if any of them contrived to get photos of me, or if they managed to get photos of the two of us together-- though I know that I didn't get any.  Back in the day, I'd have been terrified of being photographed, terrified that any photo of me with a lover would be a kind of mockery of the stories my young companions and I told ourselves about who and what we were. I'd have been terrified that her friends would see photos of me and feel only disdain and contempt. 

Levin and Liberty were able to be muses for older lovers. Miss Ginny in Montreal, too. They were all of them proud of being someone's muse. For Levin that was the painting professor, the man who did that nude portrait of her. For Liberty it would've been the gallery owner in Santa Fe. And for Miss Ginny, it was an aging Russian emigre who played chess with her, taught her to do vodka shots, laughed at her obsession with Swinging London and the early Sixties, and gave her a couple of cartons filled with old issues of Cahiers du Cinema. I'm sure they each had other older lovers for whom they were muses and inspirations, but I keep thinking of that portrait above Levin's bed and about Miss Ginny sitting on the floor of her rooms near McGill, going through articles about half-forgotten French and East European films. Or of Liberty in just a man's shirt, being taught how to paint desert light. 

Liberty told me about her mysterious journal with its "My Older Lovers" chapter, about the entries she'd been making since she was sixteen about the things she'd learned about older men and about how to manage older lovers. I never asked to see it, of course. I certainly never asked her what she said about me--- or if I was in her entries at all. But I do have visions of Liberty sitting cross-legged on a sofa in just a pair of faded, cut-off denim short shorts, brushing that mass of red-gold hair off her face and reading from her notebook on older lovers. I always loved her voice, and I can imagine her doing a kind of podcast, telling her stories out over the aether. Liberty was always very direct and straightforward, always very earnest. It's easy to imagine her reading out her guide to older lovers not as regrets or even as erotica, but just as a clear set of memories--- an operator's manual with clear descriptions of procedure.

Miss Ginny claimed to have something similar, by the way--- written in French, like a good Montreal girl, and bits of her father's Polish ---with lists of books and films older admirers had told her about. Miss Ginny, though, would have focused on the books and films. She wanted, she told me, to sleep with at least one famous academic and one rare book dealer. She wanted the lists, she said, wanted to have a bibliography, an annotated bibliography, to go with her life and experiences. 

There are boxes somewhere in rooms wherever Liberty and Miss Ginny and Levin are tonight. I have to believe that they still have boxes, that they've kept journals and notebooks all these years, that they treasure the stories and the lists they made.  All three girls told me that they set out very deliberately to find adventures and experiences, that they  spent their late teens and early twenties keeping notes and lists, finding raw material for the art and the books they wanted to create.

I miss them. I miss that attitude. I miss the way each of them saw my age as a positive thing, the way each of them set out to design a world for herself, the way each of them kept notebooks and lists. 

Three One Two: Paint

I've spent time going through my storage cube and seeing how much of my past is hidden away there. In one plastic storage box I did find things Levin left for me long ago. I remember her packing to go off to grad school, remember that she packed up her life in a couple of bags and a few cardboard boxes in the trunk of her car. She gave me a few of her old notebooks--- You're a historian, she said.  This is history. She may have said my history or our history, Too long ago to remember.  But I have been looking through them and thinking about ghosts. 

The notebooks are hardbound Pentalic journals--- both sketchbooks and lined, What's the size? 5 x 8? I haven't seen Pentalic journals in forever, and I have no idea if they're still made. These have hard blue covers; I like the solidity.

Levin had posed naked for sketches and paintings since she was in high school. Self-portraits and for friends and (older?) lovers when she was a high school girl, for the painting professor whose muse she was at university, for lovers male and female. Her sketchbooks have details of nude self-portraits, sketches of collarbones and throat leading down to breasts, sketches of Levin done in a mirror. 

I remember that at one point she and her painting professor had spent time laughing and painting on one another. She'd been thrilled at that. Not just because it felt good or was part of sex, but because her older lover had been able to laugh about it, had been able to give up authority and art-world fame and just play.  So there in the sketchbooks are drawings of herself topless, or just of her breasts and throat, colored in in pencil. 

Levin had large areolae and nipples. I liked that, liked the way it looked when she was in the boy's white singlets that were a uniform look for her, She liked it sometimes, but felt awkward at others. A boy in high school had mocked her for having "pepperoni tits", and she'd been wounded by that. Still, Levin was always bra-less, and I loved the shadow of her areolae and nipples against thin cotton.  I love the drawings, too, and love the colors she used. 

She told me once that one summer she'd worked as a server in a men's club called Rembrandt's. The club wasn't exactly a strip bar. Its gimmick was that the servers and bartendrix girls were topless and painted--- the body paint glowing under the black light that flooded the club. For something like $25 you could paint on one of the girls. Girls had designs and names painted on them.  A patron, she told me, could touch a girl's legs and stomach and back and go around her breasts, but couldn't touch the breasts themselves (something the bouncers enforced). Depending on the tip, the girl would paint her own breasts or slyly trace a glowing streak across the crotch of her bikini. I did laugh when she told me how many men wanted to paint football team names and slogans on a girl. I listened to Levin talk about the club and spent time imagining that there was a secret inner club where girls were totally naked and that girls and their patrons were having black light sex in VIP rooms. I have to grimace about that now. Black light is so very much a period thing, though never one that's been retro-hip. I've run ice cubes around Levin's nipples and dripped candle wax on them and kissed vodka and champagne off them, but we never played with paint. 

One of the notebooks has long passages in Portuguese in it. Levin had done a year abroad in Lisbon, and she was proud of knowing the language. A couple of the passages are marked in red and have my name by them. I've never done Portuguese or Spanish, and I have no idea what the passages are about. She used to whisper to me in Portuguese while we were having sex, and she told me that she was saying the most outrageous Talking Dirty things she knew. I took that as a gift then, and I still take it as a compliment. I wish I could've responded better in German, but in those days my German was far too academic and formal. I should've looked up more bedroom-useful words and phrases. 

I do wish I'd been able to paint her or sketch her...or paint on her. I can talk about a few, a very few, things in art history, but I have no artistic talent of my own. 

Her sketchbooks have a couple of sketches of my face. That's my name and a date on the page, but it's so hard for me to recognize the young man there all in pen-and-ink or colored pencil. Yes, at some point I did have a goatee. Yes, for a while there was a white streak dyed in my hair. Yes, I must've been that thin. I know that I gave her written things--- love letters, the odd bit of poetry (don't ask) ---but I wish I could've given her something visual. I wasn't hopeless at photography in those days, and Levin would've been perfect as a photo model. Portrait photos, nude or not, would've been something to give her.

Levin's painting professor told her once that she needed always to point her toes when she posed naked for him. Nothing, he said, was more alluring than a lovely girl who stretched out her legs and pointed her toes--- especially alluring, he said, if she was in the midst of an orgasm. I have to agree, and I do remember that when her legs were over my shoulders she always stretched and pointed. I'm not sure that means anything now, but I did take it as both very sexy and as a gift.

Three One One: Receipts

Here in an age of social media, screenshots, and "bringing the receipts", do you think that anyone with a proper sense of self-preservation would ever write a significant other a love letter? The risks seem far too high.

Social media, screenshots, and the ease of forwarding emails and scanned documents would all seem to be things that would kill the love letter.  Yes, of course letters could always be found by those other than an intended recipient. A recipient could share the letters with others. There's a trope from how many stories and novels--- the cache of love letters found hidden many years later, the ribbon-tied letters that solve a mystery or dissolve a marriage. But social media makes "bringing the receipts" so much easier.

And who could risk that? Love letters show you at your most vulnerable. Love letters reveal what you feel, what you need and want in your life. Any love letter that's the least "erotic" or "hot" risks revealing your particular desires, fetishes, obsessions. Worse, possibly, it reveals whether you're capable of writing erotica competently...which isn't a universal skill. Inept erotica leaves you open to derision just as much as being seen to have any non-vanilla desires. 

Derision of course is the real fear here. If a relationship goes bad and you've left "receipts", you are at serious risk. Any professions of passion or love or desire that you've made can be used against you. Any failure to describe anything sexual with perfect literary and political grace can be used as a sign that you're equally incapable of in-real-life performance, And as I noted above, the slightest hint of any non-vanilla desires can be used to show that you're clearly either pathetic or creepy.

I suppose it doesn't even have to be a risk for after a relationship ends. You're always at risk during the relationship itself. Is the recipient sharing your emails and letters with her friends? Are they sitting together and drinking wine and mocking what you've written? Or, here in a pandemic year, are they forwarding emails and screenshots and scans of letters to one another for round-robin dissection and derision? You'll never know, or you'll only know too late. Leaving any trace of yourself for others to dissect is a risky thing, and all the more risky if anything emotional is involved.

Now I do have to ask myself if this particular fear isn't the male equivalent of the fear women have that ex-boyfriends are circulating the nudes that they sent during the relationship. Women don't send me nudes, so the issue isn't something I've had to face in my own life--- I've been trained all my professional life for discretion, and I'm not about to circulate  anyone's deeply personal gifts to me. Still...I do wonder if the two fears aren't equivalent.

I do take it as a given that any revelations to a lover are dangerous, and growing more so. And I take it as a given that no group of women have ever discussed the boyfriend of a group member without subjecting him to contempt and derision. Even if I'm wrong about that, the possibility is always there. And "receipts"--- meaning any letters, any emails, anything that reveals anything about your feelings and hopes ---make you an easy target.

I've always said that love letters were an art that I admired. And, yes, sending deeply passionate love letters is something I wish people still did. I wish that we could still talk about desires and experiments and adventures with lovers and potential lovers. We can't, though. To have desires, to imagine romance and passion--- those things are no longer acceptable. Those things leave you open to mockery as inept, creepy, pathetic, sad. 

There are antique skills that I miss, and I suppose that love letters have joined the list of things I won't be trying again.

  

Three One Zero: Escorts

 I've never used an escort service. Writing that down tonight, I'm not sure how to feel about it. The simplest thing to say is that I could never afford it. I'd be hard-pressed to pay for even a street girl, and using an escort service to find a sex worker would be (and has been) far beyond my means.

I remember a decade ago, when escort blogs and sex bloggers talked about the idea of sex workers who could provide a GFE, a Girlfriend Experience. I saw the film with Sasha Grey and the cable series with Riley Keough. Fell a bit in love with Riley, too, but you'd expect that, wouldn't you? Twitter still has accounts run by women who market the GFE idea--- that they're socially presentable, knowledgeable about wines and food and current events, well-bred, stylishly dressed, and serve as "companions" as much as they provide sex. I would like very much to believe in them, even if only from a distance. 

The GFE idea will always attract me. What I'd be looking for is a companion who'd have the professional skills to shape an experience for me. I like the idea of negotiating with a high-end escort over creating--- if only for a night and a morning ---a world where I'd feel at home, a world that would be like the films I create in my head.

I like the idea of having someone who'd have the skills and intuition to perform with me in films-in-the-head. I like the idea of negotiating or specifying a wardrobe for her (yes, leggy, yes, all worn next to the skin), of providing her with a basic sketch of my interests and likes and dislikes, and then putting myself into her hands for the evening. 

It's catalog shopping, yes--- select a girl from a set of photos and a biography, then brief her on my tastes. And I'd be under no illusions about actual romance or intimacy. But at least I'd feel...safe. I'd know how to be a character in the films-in-my-head. I'd know how to do my own performance. I'd be able to be what I've wanted to be.  At least for a night and a morning.

We've come to this. Hiring a GFE escort and meeting her after a briefing session is the only way I can think of to feel like I could get through an evening of flirtation, an evening that ends in a sexual encounter, without feeling like I was at clear risk of humiliation and disgrace. I have no ability left to believe in my own body or my own ability to hold a conversation, to flirt, to feel like I could be desired. I think that a high-end GFE escort might-- might ---not laugh at me. I have to believe that professionalism would hold her back from that.  That's all I can really hope for.

Needless to say, this is all speculative.  The sort of high-end escort service I'd need is beyond my reach. I've known a few girls in my life who worked as escorts for a while. We were friends, but I never trespassed into thinking they'd take me to bed. I knew their fee schedule, and I knew they were beyond me. Asking for anything--- a reduced rate, let alone a free night ---would've been disrespectful. I wasn't going to do that. 

Well, I will continue to believe that high-end escort services exist. I will continue to believe that such a thing as GFE-skilled lovely escorts exist. Those beliefs are my only way to believe that I could have sex again where I wouldn't be ashamed or afraid.

Three Zero Nine: Catalog

 I'm on the mailing list at several high-end sex toy boutiques. I've used their catalogs to buy gifts and accessories for young companions. Well, I use a couple of old-school equestrian shops to buy riding whips, but I suppose many such shops stay in business because of s/m far more than dressage. 

I'm had young companions thank me for the gifts I've bought them. And I've had FaceTime conversations with lovely young companions who were shopping in high-end sex toy boutiques in distant cities. I'm glad that the gifts were appreciated (and, yes, sometimes used together), but I remain out of the loop when girls tell me that they've been online shopping for sex toys or that they have a whole drawer in a bedroom dresser devoted to vibrators and dildos. I like the idea of accompanying a lovely girl while she shops for dildos, but there's something very alien about that. It's not something I could ever do on my own. I've seen lovely twenty-somethings earnestly consulting with sex boutique clerks over designs, colours, brand names. I can't imagine asking a clerk for advice in even the most gentrified sex boutique. That's not something straight males can do. My leggy posh blonde friend Jill in New Zealand lives in Wellington, where there's a rather famous sex toy boutique that delivers--- that has its own cadre of uniformed young women who deliver elegantly-wrapped sex toys to posh customers late into the night. I'd be far too afraid to open the door.

Over last weekend I found all the catalogs I had from sex toy suppliers and threw them away. They somehow seemed...pointless. I won't be ordering on line any longer. That really does seem pointless. There's no one in my life currently to buy bedroom gifts for, and I'm...worried that someone might find the catalogs and think that I used them to shop for myself. 

A male buying sex toys is seen as pathetic at best, creepy and disgusting at worst. And always a figure of mockery. I have no problem using toys on young companions, but I can't imagine using any myself. Girls in the past--- Levin, Liberty, my NZ friend, a certain lovely girl in the Home Counties, a Juilliard girl who was once a pro domme and who's now with the Vienna Philharmonic ---have asked to use toys on me. I've always refused--- gently, firmly, clearly. But you'd love it, they've told me. Just give yourself over to the sensations, give yourself to pleasure. No. No. That's not something I can do. There's always the fear that I'd be hearing the derisive laughter of the invisible audience in my head.

Sex toys are for lovely girls. Sex toys are ways they can find  pleasure or amplify it. I can't do that. Pleasure isn't something for straight males, and certainly not straight males of a certain age. Pleasure isn't something I can understand, and it's certainly not something I deserve.  Asking for pleasure, and especially asking for aids to pleasure, is a terrifying thing. I hate my own fears, but they're there.  Levin called across the boutique to the girl at the counter: do you have this in other colours? do you have ones that are shaped like uncut cock? uncut and with balls?  I of course froze and tried to will myself into invisibility. 

I can imagine talking about blindfolds and riding whips; I can imagine talking about candle wax and nipple clamps. I cannot imagine talking about any of the sex toys "for him" in the catalogs or at the upscale websites. Any sex aids for men seem designed to humiliate, to make the male user into an object of derision. And yet I feel envious of lovely young companions who can blithely buy toys to help them with orgasm. I've seen a girl look at a half-empty Corona bottle and suddenly laugh. This! she said. I so have to try this!  There's no male equivalent of that laugh. There's no male equivalent of the look that says that something is worth trying for fun. 

Well, the new year, the Year Twenty-One, is almost here. I won't be getting the sex boutique catalogs any more. No one to buy gifts for, of course. And it's impossible to think that I could ever be part of a world where using sex toys--- even with a lover I trusted ---would be safe. Pleasure isn't something that I can ask for, let alone seek on my own. There's nothing in the marketing plans of sex toy manufacturers for someone like me. Not this year, and not any other.

Three Zero Eight: Lessons

 I'd thought that I might be writing tonight about sex in hotels, but I decided in the end to write about what I'd learned in my life from porn. I suppose we can include written erotica in that.

I've been reading things on line about people's sexual problems, and one of the recurring themes in the comments is that people--- meaning of course cis straight white males ---have to stop learning about sex from porn. That immediately sent me to PornHub to do a random tour of categories. I spent a while looking through PornHub clips and trying to recall what I'd learned from porn.

I know that I learned some things. Though in my long-ago youth, it was harder to do. That was before the web, of course, long before there was anything like PornHub or its sister sites. To see porn in my youth I had to sneak into actual backstreet cinemas to watch movies. I was probably in my twenties before I saw porn on satellite channels, and I never had much of a porn collection on either videotape or DVD.  But I did learn things from porn. 

That makes sense for me, of course. I learned about so much in my life from books and films.  Novels and films shaped who I am. I read books to learn about what to wear, which wines to drink, how to behave at dinner parties. So why not porn?

I learned from porn (yes, from a book first, from "Story of O") that there were beautiful girls who didn't wear underwear. I learned that there were girls there in the ordinary world who were deliciously bare under skirts or shorts. I learned that I could suggest to lovers that they be panty-free. I learned that I could whisper to a lovely girl and tell her to wear nothing at all beneath a sundress while she walked with me down a beach or a city street--- learned that this could be an adventure. And it has become a signature thing for me--- asking girls with whom I'm involved to give up underwear, at least while out with me.

I learned that there were beautiful girls who slept naked.  I may--- may ---have learned that first from the early James Bond films, but certainly it was porn where I found that sleeping naked was something beautiful girls seemed to do everywhere. I watched that and knew--- even in my early teens ---that this was something I'd be asking lovers to do lifelong. 

Porn showed me new positions to try. Porn showed me new places for risky and thrilling encounters. Porn showed me that, yes, oral and anal did happen...and showed me how to do both. And the same is true for various kinds of s/m. Until I read about something, until I see it on a screen, it isn't real. 

Porn gave me an incentive to try things, to think that certain kinds of adventures were possible. It gave me the courage to offer up ideas and suggestions to lovers. Were the things that I asked about or found fascinating "unrealistic"?  Maybe. Or even probably. But "realistic" has never been what I was after. 

Porn offered me raw material that I could shape into things I could share, things that I use as guides to adventures and to creating stories for myself and a lover. Porn showed me what I could like, showed me things that I didn't know I'd like. 

I never thought that porn was a guide to what a girl looked or sounded like while having orgasms. I never thought that porn showed how large or how hard a male was supposed to be, or how often a male could perform. But then I wasn't interested in those things anyway.  I did think that porn showed me how sex should be lit, and how bodies can be posed for maximum visual effect. Porn taught me how sex could look. And I'll always be grateful to certain porn directors (e.g., Andrew Blake) for that.

Three Zero Seven: Permission

 As this grim and sullen year counts down to a close, I am wondering about the cartography of desire. I've been writing about this for a while, but the questions remain.  What are we still allowed to desire? What fantasies are we still allowed to have?

I have spent much of my life inside books (and not only erotica) looking for worlds where I'd like to live, looking for adventures and experiences I'd like to have. I've spent much of my life constructing fantasies--- about cities,  about lovers, about new lives. And I am increasingly worried about those things. Social media has made us all aware that we live at others' mercy. It's made us aware that anything we say or think or feel can be mocked and derided by strangers, that the disdain of total strangers can cost us jobs, respect, social standing. We've all had to become aware that the aether is haunted by people looking for excuses to be outraged, for excuses to attack and humiliate.

When I first began reading blogs--- twenty years ago, now ---the blogging world felt safe, felt like a place for building friendships and communities, felt like a place where you could talk about your thoughts, hopes, dreams, fantasies, desires and feel safe. Back in those days, I'd imagine blogging as being like sitting in a PurePod or some Wm. Gibson converted shipping container somewhere in the high desert, broadcasting out into the night. I imagined talking late into the night, telling stories, interviewing people by phone, getting emails and phone calls from distant cities.  It's all so much riskier now--- you're so much more vulnerable just for having thoughts and hopes and preferences.

I'm thinking that the time of blogs about sex is past. Given everything we've been through in the last few years, writing about sexual fantasies seems wretchedly self-centered and pointless. In a time of global pandemic, in a time when the American republic seems to have only very narrowly escaped a descent into right-populist authoritarian rule, sexual fantasies seem to be a dangerous distraction. And in an age of gender wars, desire (especially straight male desire) seems to be the enemy of social justice.  Sex, as any good revolutionary will tell you, is a distraction from important work. Sex is irrational, or at least a-rational, and fantasy worlds often embody images and tropes that represent parts of the current order that need to be swept away. As someone who subscribes to much of Marxism, I can't even disagree with that reasoning. 

But I will miss sex blogs and escort blogs if they vanish. I will miss knowing about adventures, costumes, scenarios, and  skills out there in the world. I'll miss checklists of what escorts have in their purses. I'll miss tales of which hotels in major cities are best for affairs and encounters. I'll miss reading tales of romantic and sexual adventures and learning about what's possible, learning about things worth trying with lovers in my own life. I'll miss knowing what beautiful Young Companions out over the aether have done in their lives and what they might (in some alternate timeline) do with me. I'll miss stories. I'll absolutely miss stories. And I'll miss sharing fantasies with lovely correspondents. I'll miss feeling like my own fantasies are worth something to someone. I'll miss feeling like I'm allowed to have fantasies at all.

These days... These days, whenever I think about erotica and fantasies, I find myself freezing up. I find myself paralyzed by fears that any fantasies I have are either repetitive and boring  and/or politically wrong. I can't imagine any fantasy as being judged only by a Young Companion with whom I'm sharing things. I can only imagine fantasies as being dissected and deconstructed by an invisible and hostile audience. I imagine harsh despotic voices telling me that I'm not allowed, now or ever, to want those things. It's not just the Freudian superego, either. It's the babble of voices out on the aether, telling me inside my head that I should be ashamed, that what I want unfits me for being part of any society. 

The days when fantasies and scenarios and fetishes could be offered up to lovers and would-be lovers as gifts and enticements, when you could share dark dreams with someone over drinks--- those days are gone.

I no longer know what thoughts I'm allowed to have, I know that in an age of "authenticity" and gender identity and  power analysis we're no longer encouraged or expected to experiment with sex and its components. Experimentation is looked down on as sharply as ever it was seventy years ago. It's been years now since strike the pose was a valid idea. It's been years since it's been seen as permissible to ask anyone to try anything new. I do know that I'm terrified of being cast out of the social pods where I live, and that kind of shame and fear is something new to me. I didn't have any of those feelings twenty years ago. But right now I'm totally paralyzed by them.