Three Six Six: Algorithm

I spent time the other night wandering through PornHub. I'm not a great fan of PornHub, and I'm not sure exactly what I was looking for. There are half a dozen actresses in porn that I have any interest in, and I'm far more familiar with them from their interviews than I am with their actual work. That's something that shouldn't surprise you. I spend more time listening to interviews with porn actresses than I ever have watching porn itself. Watching Kenzie Taylor interview Kenna James means far more to me than watching actual scenes with either. 

In any case, PornHub's algorithm  suggested various video clips to me. I noted that a number of the clips came from a studio called ATK. I'm guessing that ATK stands for "All The Kink". Or maybe "Kinks". If I'm wrong about that, please let me know. I scanned through the suggestions and did a quick tour of the clips. All I can say is that I sighed and shrugged.

Most of the "kinks" in ATK films are...well...boring. The things they're describing as out-of-the-ordinary, shocking, or transgressive really aren't.  There were MILF videos with lactating actresses having sex-- which has been done before --and lots of "stepsister" videos that lack the dialogue needed to really explore the emotional complexities and allure of pseudo-incest. No s/m, really-- that did surprise me. But I suppose that in a world terrified of any suggestion of abuse or lack of consent, s/m has fallen out of Gen Z favor. There were also a number of "hairy" videos, which I think shouldn't be read as transgressive by Gen Z viewers, since unshaven legs and underarms wouldn't be shocking in the Gen Z world. There didn't seem to be any foot fetish videos, even though girl-on-girl foot fetish was touted a couple of years ago as being the Next Big Kink.  

Strangely enough, only the lesbian piss fetish videos had any sense of transgression or erotic potential. I don't quite know what to make of that. At least the actresses in those clips were rather hot, and they did seem to have a sense of doing something that felt risky and wicked. I did stop to ponder the question of how piss-fetish actresses are hired. Are there specialist agents for kink? Are the actresses told before-hand what's expected of them? How is doing piss-fetish videos regarded in the porn world-- what's the social status attached to doing them? Do actresses negotiate before the shoot ("You can get it in my hair, but I won't swallow")?  Are there showers available on set? Do you have to bring a change of clothes? 

This of course is part of my own failure at being part of the kink world. Yes, those videos did have more erotic energy than the others, but what caught my interest was (inevitably) the backstage / backstory questions. What's the underlying history of what we're watching? And what are viewers supposed to feel while watching? Are they supposed to be excited by two hot young actresses defying social conventions? Are they supposed to be thrilled by seeing two hot young actresses do things that can be regarded as degrading to themselves and each other? Is misogyny the underlying idea here? 

Yes, I do want to see Kenzie Taylor use her podcast ("The Sauce") to interview these actresses and talk about the whole piss kink. Ms. Taylor is a good interviewer, and I'd very much like to see what she could get piss-fetish actresses to talk about in terms of what the semiotics of the videos might be.

The other thing that caught my interest during my tour of ATK videos was what are called JOI clips. I'm guessing that JOI stands for "Jerk Off Instructions", So this should be self-explanatory. A JOI clip is an actress looking into the camera and giving instructions...or commands...to the viewer. Okay, fine. But my expectation would be that the video would be done to offer enticement, to make the viewer feel like he's having a hot girl tell him that she knows he wants to masturbate and that she wants him to do it. But none of the clips offered up were like that. They were all harsh, mocking, and based on ridicule. The viewer was mocked for needing to use the video, told that he was a perv, a failure, a loser. A couple of the actresses were Eastern European, and their accents were highlighted to play on...well...some Cold War dominatrix trope. 

There was one clip where a very lovely British girl  showed off unshaven blonde underarms and went from a very polite, quiet posh-girl voice introducing herself to a snarling, taunting monologue about how disgusting all the "pit pervs" watching the video were. My question was of course...why?  Is masochism such an integral part of male masturbation?  Is male masturbation really regarded as that pathetic and disgusting? Are all male viewers supposed to be ashamed of themselves for liking what's defined as kink? Why were the JOI videos so...hostile?

I have always been attracted to the idea of kink, to the idea of ritualized, abstracted, probably transgressive sex. But the kink that the ATK algorithm offered up was either boring (no inventiveness, nothing really out of the ordinary) or based on the idea of taunting and ridiculing the viewer for being there to watch the video. I'm out of the loop on this. I continue to feel that I'm losing any grasp of what's happening the worlds of erotica.

Three Six Five: Stars

 I've been spending time at Twitter looking at the Twitter feeds by FMTY girls. That's a depressing thing, but this summer has been deeply depressing. Depressing personally, yes, and of course this is the summer of the Heat Dome. There's no reason at all to go outside, so staying the air-conditioned dark and reading FMTY Twitter feeds isn't such a bad option.

When I'm playing the flaneur at Twitter these days, I look at the Twitter accounts run by various FMTY Girls and just sigh. It's not so much that I could never afford a FMTY Girl. That goes without saying. It's also that whenever I look through the tweets of girls who advertise themselves as "dinner dates and travel companions" I realize that I'd feel ashamed to be some lovely escort's dinner date. I wouldn't be good enough to be there with her. 

Someone who's taught herself about Michelin stars and tasting menus, someone who's mastered the social graces and the arts of flirtation and seduction, someone who knows how to make charming conversation-- that would be someone whose social value far outpoints mine. I'd feel like I was wasting her time. She would be a professional providing services, but I'd feel like I was someone bringing what should be a Small Claims Court issue to a boutique high-end Manhattan law firm. I'd be wasting everyone's time, really. And she'd know that I was a waste of her talents. 

I think that I have been to a Michelin-star restaurant once or twice in my life. Memory says that I was in my undergraduate days and was willing to spend what little money I had in order to have "experiences". Maybe that was only once, and in  some long-ago iteration of Manhattan. Maybe I have been in a Michelin-star restaurant. But I'd have been twenty-one and obviously someone trying to have a learning experience. I'd have almost certainly been alone, and it's possible that I had a good experience there because I was young, painfully callow, quiet and polite, and the staff felt kindly-disposed to me some evening. Here in these latter days, I'd have no idea at all what to do if "fine dining" was involved. "Fine dining" with a companion is something that would reduce me to anxiety attacks. 

I do recall eating alone at Weibel's Wirsthaus in Vienna. Weibel's may or may not be starred. My memory isn't what it used to be. I recall Weibel's as a classic Vienna city location, but maybe I was at least in my later thirties then. Maybe I was in that zone where I was no longer a boy seeking new experiences, but still not old enough to be empty and bitter.

Never mind FMTY Girls-- right now I'd never waste anyone's time as a dinner date. I don't have anything to offer my date in terms of stories and experiences and conversation. I remain terrified, too, of ordering the wrong thing or using the wrong fork. And of how poorly dressed I'd be. 

I have no idea how I'd make conversation with an FMTY dinner date. Look-- I do not get stage fright. I've been spared that. I have walked out in front of a lecture hall filled with a hundred and twenty students and talked and told stories for an hour and a half. I did that for years. I have no problem with that. Yet sitting with an FMTY Girl at dinner would be a disaster. The idea is made all the worse in that the FMTY Girl would be someone whose professional skills were designed to put a dinner companion at ease. I'd feel like I was forcing her to try to be pleasant, forcing her to try to put me at ease and bring me into a conversation. I don't want to be someone who requires special handling and special effort to be part of an evening.

I'd suspect that being honest and just telling her that I'd have no menu suggestions and probably couldn't read the menu at a starred restaurant would send red warning lights flashing. A well-trained Companion would grit her teeth and realize that I was going to be work for her. My own response would be to begin randomly apologizing for, well, everything. So many FMTY Girls' Twitter biographies stress that they're knowledgeable about things like finance and government-- they're clearly marketing themselves as Companions who'd be able to have conversations with C-suite men, with men who have the day's ForEx results at their fingertips. I of course know nothing at all about business or finance. The things I know about aren't  likely to come up in conversations with people who have actual careers. I'd feel embarrassed at not having anything to say to a Companion who'd be educated and skilled and proud of her knowledge of the world. 

I wouldn't be embarrassed to ask about recommendations about the wine list or the menu. But I would be embarrassed that I couldn't appreciate either. I'd be embarrassed that I lack the ability to enjoy myself. These days I think of myself as far more socially awkward than Larry David ever was on "Curb Your Enthusiasm". I suspect I wouldn't even be able to appreciate any seductive wiles an FMTY Girl might deploy, I'd sit there thinking that my age, my body, and my inability to read hints or body language would make me a failure as a client. 

I'd like to be a client whose knowledge, presentation, and skills would match any Companion or Provider I might employ. That's unlikely ever to happen. I'd sit there trying desperately to be polite, but knowing that I'd have no more idea how to appreciate a Companion's skills and graces than I'd be able to appreciate the menu items or the wine list. I'd never ask an FMTY Girl to be a "travel companion", since I'd never put a lovely, bright, well-spoken FMTY girl through a week (or even a weekend) with me.

Menus, wine lists, and conversation are all beyond me these days.

Three Six Four: Ghosts

 I haven't been here in a while, and I do apologize for that. This blog is a project I do want to keep up, and I hope to write here often enough to attract comments and questions.

I'm thinking tonight about ghosts. Not the ghost girls who've been part of my life and still haunt my dreams, but about the ghosts of erotica past.

I've been saying for rather a while now that erotica seems to be fading as a genre. There seems to be less and less erotica available. Porn clips at streaming services, sure. PornHub and its fellows are readily available. But actual erotica-- written or drawn or painted, not put on video or conjured up via AI? The boundaries seem to be shrinking.

I hadn't gone to Literotica for a while-- well, yes, several years --and my thought when I did go back this week was that there seems to be a dearth of new stories. And there seems to be an utter drought of inventive stories. No one seems to be writing anything elegant, transgressive, stylish, powerful. 

The boundaries of erotica seem to be collapsing towards the ordinary. What erotica I can find is flat and dull. The link between the erotic and the darkly elegant seems to be broken. Even S/M stories are just...boring. There's no longer an association between S/M (I dislike BDSM as a term) and style and elegance. Where there is any attempt to be transgressive, it veers towards urban punk and not towards decadence. And for me, decadence-- rooted in class and style --was always key.

Tonight I'm thinking of two figures from my past-- Michael Manning and Olivia de  Berardinis. Both of them erotic artists whose work meant something to me in the days of my lost youth. Olivia began work in the l970s doing her "O Cards"-- greeting cards with wickedly clever and highly erotic art based in decadence and dark elegance. Michael Manning appeared in the mid-1990s. His work combined goth, manga, cyberpunk, and gender fluidity. I miss both artists.

Olivia's work came under attack in the early '90s, if I recall correctly. A lot of her '70s and early '80s work had references to s/m, certainly, but also clever references to drugs. By the '90s, cocaine was no longer a chic quirk or erotic accessory, but a Social Menace. She was pressured to discard much of her early work, and her work became ever less explicit throughout the '90s. Once upon a time, I'd buy several dozen O Cards at a time, some for my own collection, but most to be sent to lovely young companions during correspondence. That's all gone, now. I have no idea what happened to the O Cards I saved, and there's nothing out there today from her that has the wicked and elegant darkness that her '70s and '80s work had. I've seen interview snippets where she apologizes for the explicitness of her paintings and cards. That's deeply sad.

Michael Manning's graphic novels-- "The Spider Garden", "In a Metal Web", "Hydrophidian", "Illuminagerie", "Tranceptor", etc. --were amazingly erotic and engrossing. His heroines crossed through boundaries of gender and sensation into some very dark and elegant places. He incorporated cyberpunk and biomechanics motifs as well as lovely Oriental architecture. For a while, late in the 1990s, he was with a now-vanished publisher called Eurotica, which is where I discovered his graphic work. But in the world of the Noughts and beyond, he found it increasingly hard to market his work. 

The Culture Wars caught up with Michael Manning, I suppose. His version of gender fluidity was based on sci-fi and fetishism rather than trans ideology-- he had characters who were self-described "androgynes", fabulous creatures whose "trans" status meant "trans-human". His androgynes were languid, willowy, goth-Heian, cruel in their beauty, and eerie. That didn't help Manning in the current age. And late-capitalism caught up with him, too. It became harder and harder for him to get credit card transaction companies to process orders. In a world of on-line marketing, he was hamstrung.  I haven't seen anything new by him in years. I can look at his "Cathexis" collection and feel like I'm looking at lovely art and wicked stories from a lost age.

There's less and less erotica out there that wants to take chances. There's less and less erotica that wants to link class, style, and darkness. Experimentation is frowned upon, fetishism (either in the anthropological or the private club sense) is rejected. There's less and less out there that I find erotic. 

And so here we are, in the spring of the Year Twenty-Three, focused on politics and economics, and with no interest in the possibilities of the erotic.  

Three Six Three: Narration

The 10 April 23 online edition of "Paris Review" has an article called "On Fantasy" by a woman who's an escort/gallery girl/ conceptual artist who calls herself Sophia Giovannitti. It's about how boring and exhausting male fantasies are, and why all fantasies are pointless and annoying. Consider this incredibly depressing passage:

This client also wanted our time together to be cinematic. I suppose all clients do. The first time we met, I was struck by his impulse to narrate what was happening, as though by speaking aloud how good something is one could will it to actually be so. It’s not that it wasn’t good, or was bad—it was just mundane, the way formulaic excess often is.

The "impulse to narrate"... Well, there goes my entire life. Narration and curation have been my life-- things written, things lived. If those things are just mundane, I have yet more reasons to stay here in the lakeside flat with my books and my DVD collection.

The author of "On Fantasy" also uses song lyrics from Cigarettes After Sex in her article. I like the band a lot, and I like their music. Now of course, having read her article, I've been looking at my iTunes and feeling a bit wary of listening to them. I hate losing bands I've liked, and Ms. Giovannitti's article has just taken away Cigarettes After Sex.

Now I do have to ask myself a couple of questions about Ms. Giovannitti. Is her disdain for male fantasies something that derives from her sex work or from her time in the art world? There are two possible kinds of disdain here, and I wish I knew the backstory.

More to the point, though-- 

In SoHo, there is a boutique hotel whose rooms are blue. Blue carpet, blue ceiling, blue-patterned sheets. I met a client there several years ago, when I still had short bangs. I wore a vintage skirt-and-top set—black, with colorful flowers—and black lingerie from l’Agent, the now-defunct, less expensive little sister brand to Agent Provocateur. My client wanted our time together to feel like a movie. He didn’t say this, but his behavior made it clear. He booked me for only an hour but wanted an experiential arc: he sat me first in the small living room area of his suite, presenting liquor he had put on ice for me. Music played softly through the room’s sound system: “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex, a song that I’d only ever heard as the background of a bad television show. He moved me into the bedroom, bantering, as though he had to charm me. I have absolutely no recollection of what he looked like or what his name was. This isn’t because I was seeing so many clients I couldn’t keep track, but because it’s useless information to retain after the fact. I remember how he behaved—the only salient thing—which was annoying, and also standard, fine. I overstayed our appointment because the sex refused to end, as happens often with older men who want to paw at a young woman but don’t quite care whether or not they finish, and certainly not in the allotted time. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” returned to the playlist; it was looping, as was the experience.

And that's deeply depressing. 

We live in an age where The Discourse tells us that male fantasies are by and large boring and that male sex is inherently mediocre. I've been writing down the fantasies I have these days and trying to analyze and critique them. I keep looking for the weak places, for any places that don't seem like they'd interest a partner. I'm inside the fantasies, though, so my views on them are flawed and suspect. But I am and remain afraid that any desires and fantasies I may have would be mediocre and boring. 

It's always possible to ask a partner what her own fantasies are. I do that, and I'll always try to act out what she likes. But I am increasingly afraid to tell anyone what I like or what I want to try.

I played the song for myself after, alone in my own room. A user called “i’m cyborg but that’s ok” had uploaded it to YouTube along with a compilation of scenes from Lost in Translation, a movie I’d never seen but that I knew was about a relationship between a washed-up older man having a midlife crisis and a beautiful young woman. The video compilation looked like an escort advertisement: in the opening scene, Scarlett Johansson sits in a hotel room window wearing only a large men’s shirt—blue—looking down at the wide expanse of Tokyo beneath her; in the next scene, she dives into an enormous, empty hotel pool, at night—the pool and the surrounding windowpanes all blue, too. The images spoke of money and alienation. The song captured the affect of a certain type of client: slightly flat; grasping toward a Daddy-esque certainty but falling short; single-mindedly offering reassurance, but of what he hardly seemed to know. I grew oddly attached to the song and to cyborg’s music video for a period. I would watch it on my way to work, flattening my own affect, compacting myself into a version of a girl aligned with the lyrics:

Whispered something in your ear

It was a perverted thing to say

But I said it anyway

Made you smile and look away

Nothing’s gonna hurt you, baby.

I have no idea what fantasies are acceptable these days, or how male sex can be anything other than mediocre. I remain convinced that the girls in my past were probably contemptuous of any sexual desires or fantasies I may have had. I have no idea what fantasies will seem well-crafted enough not to be mocked. I have no idea why I should try to develop any fantasies, let alone actual physical techniques. Rising above mediocre seems to be a fading hope.

Three Six Two: Regimentals

I haven't yet seen "Tár", though I very much want to. It's the sort of film that does intrigue me-- the Creative Genius under stress, a world with its own arcane skills and rituals. 

And of course there are film stills of Cate Blanchett in black tie and severely tailored suit. That's a look that's held my attention for years. I'm rather an admirer of garconne style, all the way back to my lost youth. I remember sighing over photos in old magazines of Swinging London models in man-tailored suits, and I recall being at university and seeing some of the more daring girls going to parties and proms in severe suits and expensive neckties. 

I would've given a lot to have been able to take the young Jane Birkin or the young Marisa Berenson dancing in Sixties London or Paris while they were dressed in garconne look. And tonight I'm thinking of a Sixties actress/model named Merle Lynn Browne, who wrote a comic "expose" of "jet set" sexual adventures called "The Ravishers". The paperback edition of the novel showed a lovely photo of her in a tailored suit, light brown hair in some Sixties style falling over her shoulders. I saw her once on (I think) the old "Tonight" show in the days of Johnny Carson. She was there to talk about her novels ("The Ravishers" and its sequel, "The Arousers"), and she was in pin-striped suit and tie. That's a memory that's stayed with me since boyhood. 

These days, now...are we allowed to find lovely long-legged garconne girls attractive? Are we still allowed to...gender-bend? What are the semiotics of girls in man-tailored suits these days? I suspect that the image of a girl in a man-tailored suit is regarded these days as being about anything except sex.

Some months ago, I read about a literary-world scandal involving Donna  Tartt. I've been a fan of Ms. Tartt since ever I read "The Secret History" when it first appeared. It seems that some podcast or other had interviewed some of Tartt's Bennington classmates about her life as an undergraduate, and somehow the podcast had become part of the gender wars. 

There were ex-classmates who argued that Ms. Tartt's signature elegant suits and ties were part of her whole design to "have sex like a young boy", and that (shock! horror!) her love life at Bennington was all about boys who were gay or gay-adjacent. I wasn't sure why any of that was supposed to be shocking...or the least surprising. From the first magazine photos of Ms. Tartt I saw, I'd taken it as a given that her boyfriends would be at least gay-adjacent. And I assumed that her own social pose would be "handsome gay boy at Oxford 1925".  I did laugh at one of the shock-horror types who went into gender wars mode and sniffed that there was no such thing as "having sex like a young boy"-- showing that here was someone who either being deliberately obtuse or had zero imagination.

I'd known girls all through my undergraduate days who desperately pursued arts-and-literature gay-adjacent boys, and who loved pretending to be pretty gay boys in some "Brideshead Revisited" fantasy world. I looked at the photos of Ms. Tartt in her suits and ties and knew exactly what was going on. It wasn't about the Trans Wars at all. It was about sex and class, or at least sex and aesthetics. After all...the whole "Dark Academia" thing always incorporated lots of sexual role-play and visions of academia as a setting for gay aesthetics. 

Whether it's Lydia Tár or Donna Tartt or the young Jane Birkin, the garconne look attracts me. It's sleekly elegant, which I always love, and it's very deliberately artificial. It's role-play, and that's always better than the current obsession with "authenticity". 

Even here, in the autumn of my days, I like the idea of a leggy co-ed in a tailored suit, and I like the idea of sharing my necktie collection with her.

Three Six One: Clowns

I've been following along with the Trans Wars over the holidays. They're the latest round in the larger Culture Wars.  And the current campaign  seems to be built around drag queens. 

I can remember seeing drag shows back in the Long Ago, back in my clubland days. I can recall seeing an advertising poster for a drag show in Vienna and realizing that "Travesti", the local term for a drag show, was related to both "travesty" and "transvestite". No, I was not very knowledgeable at that age.  I can remember seeing drag shows, though I don't recall ever finding them very interesting. The shows were almost inevitably "tributes" to female singers or actresses who'd become gay icons. Lots and lots of drag queens on stage doing Liza Minelli or Nina Simone imitations. The music was never my style, and I was too young to have any appreciation for Joan Crawford (or even Joan Collins) impersonations. 

I might've responded better to things like Dame Edna Everage, but that kind of performance (is "panto" a correct term here?) wasn't on offer at dance clubs in my Lost Youth. 

Anyway...here we are in 2023, and Drag Queen Story Hours are a battleground. The right wing and the most strident of the GC brigade now see outright evil in drag queen performances and refer to drag queens as "groomer clowns".  I'm not sure what to say to that.

Maybe the whole idea of a drag show has changed since I was in my twenties. I remember the shows as being a mix of beauty pageants and icon tributes. They weren't for children, but that was largely because children wouldn't have had any idea who Talullah Bankhead was, let alone Jayne Mansfield. I can recall the jokes as being sly and filled with double entendres, but I don't recall the shows as being overtly sexual. I don't recall any strip shows as part of drag performances, even in largely gay clubs.

I've seen drag queen brunches where the waitstaff were in drag and did comedy bits at the tables. The humor isn't really my thing, and at brunch I usually just want to drink Mimosas and be left alone to (I hope) flirt with my lovely co-ed companion. But I have no moral objection to someone in drag bringing me eggs Benedict and hash browns. And I have no objection to someone in drag reading books to children.

I can remember a few years ago when there was a less hysterical controversy over sex workers reading books at libraries to children. The sometime porn actress Sasha Grey was attacked by the right wing for that, for being a volunteer at her local library and reading to kids. I was very sympathetic to Ms. Grey and other sex workers. Being a volunteer reader was a good deed in itself, and I understood her political point, too. Being a sex worker didn't (and doesn't) make someone a monster, and volunteering at a local library was a way to show that sex workers were part of the community. 

So I can understand why drag performers might want to do story hours. The idea is to show that they're simply entertainers and that they're part of a larger community... and that they're willing to volunteer to do constructive things-- like teaching children that reading is fun.

I'm a bit wary, mind you, of the way drag queens have been conflated with trans folk. My own understanding was that most drag queens aren't trans-- that they're gay men. My own understanding is that some might simply be transvestites and might be straight. Drag has its own history and it's not just a subset of the trans world. There's a critical argument to be made about drag as being misogynistic (the whole "woman face" argument), and whether or not you agree with it, it's at least a respectable argument. But it's poor damned history to see drag as being inherently trans. 

I'm wary, too, of the right-wing arguments that drag performers reading to children constitutes "grooming". When the right accuses drag performers of "sexualizing" children, I have to be skeptical. What they really mean is that they're angry that children are being told that some people are gay or trans, or that it's possible to be different. They don't object to stories where two hetero characters kiss or marry. What they object to is any performance or story that suggests that heterosexual monogamy isn't the only kind of acceptable romance. 

My own view of the Trans Wars leans more to the GC side. Take that as a given. There are two biological sexes for humans, and humans don't change sex. But there are multiple genders-- maybe as many as there are individuals, since each and every individual is  a different mix of socially-defined traits for men and women. 

But I have no time for people who use the Trans Wars as a way to re-fight the LGB Wars of the 1970s-90s. I have no time for people whose ultimate argument is that anything not "normal" is evil, or who use dislike of the TRA types to attack LGB people.

Three Six Zero: Brushstrokes

There's a story I've told my friends for years.

Once upon a time, I was talking to a lovely, long-legged co-ed at the bar of a favourite pub. We'd been enjoying the conversation, and we'd been flirting shamelessly. She arched an eyebrow, looked at me over her wineglass, and asked, "So...are you grooming me?" I looked back at her and said, "Like a show pony." She burst into laughter and shook her head. "Oh my God," she said, "now I pretty much have to sleep with you, just for that line."

It's  good story, and one I like. The girl herself is still a dear friend, and we do have dinner or drinks once in a while. I know that she tells people that story, too.

The once-upon-a-time in the story wasn't that long ago-- five or six years, maybe. But I think it would be an awkward thing to have it happen today. There are far too many people out there who wouldn't take "like a show pony" as a fun line. The word "grooming" itself has been twisted into other, and (I think) grotesque political definitions.

As an aging roue, I've always had long talks with Young Companions about the word. We've sat at the bar or at coffee house tables and discussed the word endlessly. I've been known to argue that since my Young Companions are of legal age, the word means nothing more than "seduction".  Let's quote one Young Companion: "Does this mean that you'll be buying me lots of French s/m novels and showing me films about French girls and older lovers?"  Well, yes, it did mean exactly that.

The word itself was once a term of art. It meant the ways sexual predators or neighborhood pimps slowly enticed underaged girls into sex or sex work. It means other things now, and I don't understand some of the newer usages.

The new meanings seem to have come from the Trans Wars-- specifically, from the right-wing opponents of the TRAs, though I've been seeing the word used more and more by the GC side as well. There's a group called "Gays Against Grooming" that seems committed to stopping things like Drag Queen Story Hours. For the Gays Against Grooming group, having children around drag queens at all is regarded as "grooming". 

The group-- and others like it --seem to think that any exposure of children to the presence of people in drag, or any lessons indicating that some people are trans and that it's okay to be trans is "sexualizing" or "grooming" the children. Those attitudes set my caution lights flashing. It's a very, very short step from there to the right-wing / Evangelical goal of saying that children should not be told that gay and lesbian people exist or that it's perfectly fine to be gay, lesbian, bi.

That's all a part of the Trans Wars that I don't understand. I've no problem with drag queens reading children's books to young children. (I had no problem at all with porn stars like Sasha Grey doing reading outreach with kids, either). Small children will think the drag queens are cool or funny, since to them it'll all be dress-up. And I think that Miss Penis Colada won't be doing the same bit she does at the club on Saturday nights. And it's bad tactics for the GC types, many of whom are themselves LGB, to stand next to right-wingers who'll use "protecting the children" or "safeguarding" as a way to attack LGB people next. 

I should note that the right is upset that children are "sexualized" (whatever that means in this context) by being taught that gay couples exist when so many ordinary children's books center on the standard heterosexual family. 

Be clear here. I do not believe that trans women are women, nor do I believe that trans men are men. I believe that they're trans, and that they deserve full civic and employment rights and the full and equal protection of the law, including protection from violence. But I believe women have a right to sex-based protections and single-sex spaces.  

I also don't believe that sex and gender are the same thing. One is about plumbing and architecture, the other is about social presentation. I saw a post at Twitter once that showed someone holding a sign that read "Gender Is A Performance". Well, yes, of course it is. Culture is a performance. All culture is a performance. What we do in society is cosplay. We act out our assigned roles-- class, gender, nationality, ethnicity. There will always be people who are gender non-conforming or trans (and those are very different things), people who fill the role of trickster and fill a niche for people who can bend the rules about social presentation. Yes, being GNC is an assigned role, too. Someone is Odin, someone is Loki. There's a niche role for everyone. All social life is cosplay, for better or worse.

And I'll reiterate something I've said before. There's nothing wrong with cosplay. If a male wants to wear a dress and make-up in public, fine. But he's not a woman. Biology matters, architecture matters.

I lean towards the GC side in the Trans Wars, and I refuse to accept the TRA assertion that anyone who doesn't instantly accept "self-ID" as the way to designate sex is guilty of attempted genocide. But I find the whole "grooming" panic dangerous. It's far too easy to manipulate "safeguarding" into an excuse for despising anyone who doesn't fit some right-wing myth. 

The Trans Wars have to be hard for transvestites (remember them?). Anyone who gets some psychological or sexual satisfaction from knowing, avowed cosplay is regarded as a traitor by TRAs and as some AGP perv by the GCs.  Too many GC writers seem to be rejecting sexual pleasure and sexual experimentation; too many TRA types seem to be rejecting the idea that someone can be lesbian or gay at all.  

I've snarked here before that we're all at the mercy of what I call Authenticity Fetish. We can't enjoy cosplay or experimentation. Any social presentation has to be real, permanent, and reflect some inner true identity. It's no longer possible to simply act out a role for a day, or act it out in certain spaces. Identity can't be provisional, and it can't be tried on, worn, and taken off.  

I miss the days when "grooming" could be taken to mean "seduction", and I miss the days when there were daylight identities and night identities, when life could be about social cosplay.