Ninety-Nine: Enchantments

Last week there was a video clip that went viral all through the web. The initial descriptions were simple enough. A filmmaker had gathered up twenty strangers, paired them off, and filmed each couple's first kiss. The initial response was full of delighted accounts of how the couples--- always described as "real" or "ordinary" people rather than models or actors ---were so wonderfully awkward yet willing to make one another more comfortable, to make a shy, slightly anxious first kiss into something very touching and sometimes very sexy.  Everyone was thrilled with the video, and even the gender warriors refrained from ranting about whatever they might've declared to be "problematic".

I watched the video and just sighed. It was all very charming--- watching ten pairs of strangers share a first kiss. I did like the way some of the men were trying so hard to be as polite and apologetic as possible; I very much identified with that. I felt a twinge of envy, too; there's no denying that. The first kiss, especially with a stranger, always has a special rush of delight and excitement. I only wished that I'd been asked to be part of a video like that...or that I could kiss a lovely stranger on a springtime afternoon.

Alas, though--- the video was revealed to be, well, if not fake, then at least not what it was originally thought to be.  The video was revealed to be an ad for some obscure hipster clothing company. And so the backlash began. There was a feeling of being cheated, and the footage itself was subjected to a withering revision. Commenters on the web were angry that the magic had been taken away from them.

I could only agree. Watching the video again, I felt...vaguely irritated. All the magic had gone out of it. If this was an art project,  it was lovely and touching and romantic. If it was an ad, well, it lacked those things.  If the kissing couples were strangers assembled to share a first kiss as part of an art project, then that was something very different in intent and atmosphere from assembling for a advertising job. Volunteering to kiss a stranger for art has a very different valence. I couldn't any longer imagine myself standing in a studio, a bit bewildered at the video equipment, looking at a girl who'd been paired off with me, trying to be nonchalant and pleasant, feeling like I'd been given the gift of a kiss. The video lost its charm once it was an ad. I couldn't even watch it and feel any kind of sexual thrill. These weren't "strangers" if it was an ad; they were just co-workers.

And, yes, if it was an ad, there was another loss of sexual or romantic appeal. If the twenty subjects worked as art-project volunteers, they were...appealing. They were all of them reasonably attractive for an art project... but they weren't attractive enough to be models in an ad. There's a certain kind of beauty expected of models in ads, and the people in the video weren't advert-beautiful. Once the video was just an advert, then I couldn't look at it and project myself into it; I couldn't imagine myself as part of one of the couples.  And if it was just an advert, the people in it weren't attractive enough to watch just for themselves. (The clothing line? Never heard of it, couldn't possibly care less.)

I haven't kissed a lovely stranger in rather a while. I miss that rush of excitement and the new. I miss that, and just for a moment I felt it when I looked at the video as an art project and imagined being part of it. There wasn't even the consolation prize of being able to watch and desire girls of the quality I've been taught to expect in ads.

Disappointed, yes. Perhaps it's only that context is everything.  The visuals that worked so well as an art project failed utterly in an ad. They didn't offer up either hope or the consolations of voyeurism. In any case, the Kissing Strangers video means nothing to me now that it's only an ad--- and now that the world is just a little less magical.

Ninety-Eight: Finisterre

Memory says that it was sometime in my later twenties when it occurred to me that I would never be married or live with anyone in a romantic relationship. There was no particular trauma involved, no bit of drama. I suppose it was a gradual dawning, much like realising that, say, you've gradually chosen a favourite varietal of wine, and now your wine rack is filled with pinot noir rather than cabernet.  It had to be something like that--- just a quiet acknowledgment that this is the way your life is going to be.

I have in my life asked two girls to marry me. Both accepted, but the project never got much farther than some vague, nebulous idea that marriage might be out there somewhere. No rings exchanged, no plans made or save-the-dates sent. I'm not at all sure I'd have known what to do or how to act, the closer I got to a wedding date.

Those two occasions were later on, and they were nine years apart. Still, I'd never have known at either time in my life what one was supposed to do...or how to cope with what would happen afterwards. I suppose I never thought any girl could ever really want to stay with me, and I was certainly afraid that being married would be a big hit on my standard of living, that being married would make me realise how poor I really was. Marriage requires bringing social standing and stable finances to the table, and it requires some kind of understanding of how to live with another person. I've never had either of those things, and of course it's far too late now.

When I was in my later twenties, I was still in graduate school, working on my seemingly interminable doctorate. I used to blame being unmarried on having poured so much of my life into pursuing a PhD, but in all honesty I can't say that's true. I knew other postgraduate students who married, or who moved in with lovers. I never understood how it happened, though, or how people reached some kind of agreement. I'd had lovers at university,  certainly, but I could never have imagined how one made the jump from planning the next Friday night to planning living together after graduation.  Planning a four-day weekend in Manhattan was something I could do, but I never thought about how one planned a wedding or a life. I never thought about how one asked a girl to move in together. That always seemed like something that would be beyond me, like something that would be futile even to attempt. 

There are endless numbers of articles by authors both male and female that take it as a given--- or which very plainly declare ---that anyone who hasn't been married or lived in a romantic relationship by their early thirties is damaged and unmarriageable. One male author at (I seem to recall) Good Men Project actually did a long post about how only "losers" hadn't been married by their mid-thirties. Anyone who hadn't, the author claimed, was either a failure at his career and  couldn't hold up his economic end of a relationship, or was deeply damaged psychologically ("narcissist", "Peter Pan", "womanizer", "misogynist").  Since I of course have a lifelong history of immediately accepting as true any negative things anyone says about me, such articles leave me  depressed and bitter.

My fear of course is that I slipped into being unmarriageable or unfit for relationships without ever noticing what was happening. But a deeper fear is that I may have had the ability to create and maintain a long-term relationship and just never known it--- or, another way, that I missed the social lessons on what to do if planning a long-term relationship.

Even here in my later years, I tend to see a relationship as being about next Friday night or next Sunday brunch. My Young Companions and I can agree on a restaurant or a kind of wine or on sharing a Sunday NY Times over flat whites at the coffee shop, but I'd have no idea how to discuss anything that others seem to have taken for granted at twenty-four or twenty-five. 

I have no particular wish to be married. I'll say that. I wouldn't know how to live with another person, and I've read enough 19th-c. novels to understand how key money is in any long-term relationship. I can very nearly get by in genteel poverty alone. I have nothing to offer a girl who expects the kind of financial partnership that well-educated North Americans should have in the new century. 

I've certainly fallen in love since my mid-twenties, and I've told girls that I did love them.  Nonetheless, at some point I must've understood that I was now unmarriageable. I'd still to understand how it happened, though, and I'd like to know what I failed to grasp as social lessons at university and after. 

Ninety-Seven: Margins

A British interviewer of  a certain age ran afoul of the Guardians of the Problematic not so very long ago by saying that whenever he was speaking with attractive women, he was very likely to be considering in a part of his mind what she'd be like as a lover, or what an affair with her would be like. I read the on-line attacks on him by the usual crowd of ranting moralizers and gender warriors and just threw up my hands. It did no good to ask if these people were fools, since they so obviously were, but I had once again to wonder how it had come to this.

I for one have never partitioned my thoughts about speculative desire. I have to be very open about that. If I'm talking to a lovely girl, I'm flirting, even if it's just pro forma. When I meet an attractive girl, or if I see her walk into a room or an office or a club, I am constructing a story in my head about what it would be like to have a romance with her, what it would be like to take her to bed.

There's a difference between that and leering. There is. One needn't be staring or drooling. But in some part of my mind, whatever else I may be doing, I am telling myself stories in my head about how the girl and I would meet, about what we'd do out for drinks and dinner, about what where we'd travel and how we'd flirt and what we'd do in bed. I can be lecturing to classes or working over documents with a client or reading in a cafe, but I am telling stories in my head and imagining what conversations would be like. Yes, of course, I wonder about what her key sexual skills are, certainly, but I'm also constructing dialogues and trying to puzzle out what interests we'd share.

Sometimes I know there's a kind of self-imposed melancholy there: Isn't it lovely to think so? Or sighing for what have might been even more than thinking about how to actually take the girl out or take her to bed.

In any case, I can't imagine ever not creating stories. I can't ever imagine ever not feeling desire when I see or talk to someone attractive. I can't imagine not flirting a bit when I talk to someone attractive. It's really not possible for me to not imagine some kind of sexual tinge to how I interact with someone attractive. Just as with the British newscaster, even if I go on to be completely professional in a meeting, the attraction, the interest, the stories will have been there.

After all, why shouldn't those things have been there? Why do we find it so horrifying that we (and here I'm using "we" to mean "males", since those attacked for the sin are inevitably male) experience desire or speculate about what-might-have-been?  Why is there the presumption that someone (meaning someone female) doesn't know that others will find her desirable and/or will be appalled and horrified at the thought? Why is it so hard to recognize that desire exists and that a certain well-controlled, often unspoken, sexual tension is likely to be in the air? Importantly--- why do we think that sexual desire or tension obliterates everything else? Why is it so difficult to imagine a certain amount of speculative or fleeting desire as just one more possible element of social encounters? Why does being desired seem to be taken as having everything else in one's life erased?

I suppose I'm asking why it seems to be so hard to imagine people as doing or being more than one thing. And why the culture has become so desperately afraid of sexual desire. It is funny, though--- sex as an act can still be assimilated to the category of "intimacy", but the desire behind it and the imagination fueling it are regarded as part of some category of oppression and power. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Ninety-Six: Caveats

There's an article I ran across not so very long ago where the author talked about the horror of contemporary dating life.  The article struck a moralizing and morally-panicked tone--- how horrible, that men might ask their dates for the kinds of sex they'd seen in porn! and on a first date! ---and I dismissed the bulk of it with a contemptuous flick of my hand. I don't find it horrible at all either that men might watch porn or that they might ask a partner to try things from films.  I certainly don't find it worthy of outrage that one might ask that on a first date, either. I really do find such articles deserving of contempt.

Still...it is true that dating life here in the teens of the twenty-first century is fraught and often frightening. There was one brief passage in the article that did catch my eye, and it did leave me deeply uneasy. There was a throwaway line about all the things morally-corrupted males ask girls to do, and ended by imagining girls crying afterwards amongst themselves over the disgusting, pathetic things men really wanted to do. There's something in that to make one's blood freeze. What I imagined when I read that was simple enough. Not girls crying, but girls laughing at the things males wanted or liked or asked for. Not, mind you, laughing with affection or delight, but with mockery and disdain.

One of the most fraught parts--- the most frightening parts ---of any affair is making the leap from flirtation and seduction to actual sex. That leap from words to flesh is always dangerous. All the things that sound romantic or erotic, that sound alluring or exciting when they're spoken or hinted at, can go bad when translated into the concrete. Flesh and physics are tricky things, and it's so easy for imagination to fail, for things imagined to fail abysmally in practice. More than that, of course, there are social fears at hand.

Let's not talk about body fears, about the fears of not being attractive enough, not sleek and toned enough. That's not what this is about.  The fear, I think, comes from something else. If you--- as a male ---have any particular sexual interests, anything not wholly vanilla, then there's always that fear of being unable to reveal them with any kind of safety. When you make the step from the bar table to the bed, you will have to finally tell a new lover what it is that you fancy. This is what I like, you'll say. Which is also saying This is what I am. And in that moment you're wholly vulnerable--- undefended against derision and mockery, against that look in a girl's eyes that says pathetic and disgusting.

This is a gendered thing, I think. It's simply not something I can imagine--- being male and looking at a girl with disgust when she tells you her fetishes or preferences. A lovely girl willing to come into one's bed--- and you'd mock her sexual interests? No. That's not something I can ever imagine doing, not something anyone male is likely to do.

But if you're male,  to express any non-vanilla interests is to take a very real risk. My Young Companions know that coming into my bed involves being with someone much older, and they know that there will be games that involve silk blindfolds and ice cubes and candle wax and riding crops. They've known that all along. But that's something that I do always present as a kind of abstraction, as something almost literary, as a chance to be part of a story, as something to be expected with an older lover, with a self-described roué. I haven't had to express anything that was too concrete, too fleshly....and at least the things I tell Young Companions that I want to do involve them and not me. What I tell them about are rituals that offer them literary pleasures. Those things are abstract enough to offer some kind of distancing from the words pathetic or disgusting.

I've known all my life that girls do talk amongst themselves. I have tried very hard to avoid any activities or needs or interests that can be turned into derision.  My own tastes run to the abstract and literary, and my Young Companions tend to be girls who are bookish.  Those things are a kind of defense.

The contemporary dating world is fraught and frightening. There's no question about that.  There's the ever-present fear of being found sexually contemptible and disgusting. A girl might be thought too slutty if she asserted certain desires, but to be male is always to risk being thought pathetic and disgusting. Those things are worse--- or have worse consequences. I've always thought of myself as sexually open, as adventurous, as open to experimentation. I'm not sure the risks are worth it these days.  Having any fetishes, any particular or non-vanilla needs or desires, lays you open to being thought contemptible. Yes, I think pathetic is found far worse than slutty, if we're weighing these things on a contemporary scale.

The step from table to bed, the moment when you have to say that you like these things--- the level of risk here in 2014 is higher than it was twenty years ago, and the level of fear is higher whenever you need to explain or justify yourself. Sexual experimentation, sexual tastes, sexual fetishes--- the whole thing becomes ever more terrifying. Looking at a new lover and waiting to see derision in her eyes... That fear is always there, now.  Unless you're willing to stay well inside the lines of the most anodyne and inoffensively vanilla tastes, you can never admit to wanting anything particular. That's the way it works in contemporary dating. Never admit to what you might really like. Whatever happens, admit nothing, ask for nothing, try nothing. It's probably best, all things considered, to say nothing at all, to shut down your imagination or longings altogether.

Ninety-Five: Grey Silk

A lovely friend in the far snowlands of upstate New York told me once that having a lovely, bright, clever Young Companion as a sexual submissive would be very like trying to own a cat. I had to laugh at that. After all, long ago a very lovely girl in a plaid uniform kilt looked at me over her glasses and dryly told me that she was complaisant rather than submissive--- a perfect line, and of course she won my heart by knowing the word complaisant.  I do have to agree with my friend out there above Rochester somewhere. "Owning a cat" makes perfect sense as a metaphor here.

It's always worth remembering that any bright, clever, bookish Young Companion who plays the submissive is far more likely to simply be complaisant, and that it's inevitable that she'll be topping from below. After all, as a clever and bookish girl she's almost certainly chosen to be there with her wrists tied and a blindfold fitted as part of her sentimental education, as a knowing and very self-aware part of an exchange of youth and beauty for experience.  Letting herself experience everything--- ice cubes and candle wax, blindfolds and riding whips ---is something she wants, but every girl I've known in that situation has done more that just letting herself fall headlong into raw experience. They've been willing to offer themselves up to the experience, but they've never not wanted to have a clear voice in how the experience is played out. Not something that I can ever really imagine minding, of course. I'm not someone who finds topping from below in a girl to be a problem. Of course, remember, too, that I find the idea of being addressed as "Sir" or "Master" to be boring. I don't mind being addressed by my academic title (I did earn it, after all), but my preference is always for either my first name or "darling". I am reasonably skilled with a riding whip and with ice cubes and candle wax, but my role is always to provide experience, to offer up my part of a sentimental education.

Remember the girl--- the heroine in the erotic romance I talked about writing? That key moment on the steps of the hero's brownstone, when she stands up and takes his hand and pulls him to the door. Show me, she says. Show me. That's always the key moment. Someone like my hero understands his role, of course. A beautiful, much-younger girl is giving herself to him because he's an opening into a new world. I'm not denying or minimizing any romantic connection, any passion--- don't think that. But for a bright and bookish and clever girl having an affair with someone older, one of his attractions is always that he represents a gateway to things she'd like to know--- things she'd like to have done. She's been topping from below from the first moment of the affair, and of course the hero knows it. How could he not? His own pleasure will be bound up not in asserting power or dominance, but in providing her (and himself, yes) with well-crafted, very formal scenes. She's very much seeking pleasure in having the experiences, in knowing all the literary and film sources, in knowing that she can be part of the kinds of experiences her older lover can provide.

Someone in the London exurbs reminded me not so very long ago that she was tired of having to defend herself and her choices--- that she liked being slapped around a bit in bed, that she liked very rough, intense sex with much older lovers. What you like in bed, she said, doesn't say anything about your value as a person. Not at all. Not what you like, not how many people you do it with. Not whether you're a dom or a sub. That's just in bed.  People assume far too much about her from what she likes in bed, and they never see that she's collecting stories and experiences, that what she likes in bed isn't about her essence or her value.

I like the London girl rather a lot. Having her in my bed with her hands tied with silk would be a major delight. But I'd expect her to be shaping what happens every step of the way. I can't imagine it any other way.

This may all be the long way round of saying that what I like about the idea of s/m has very little to do with the fact of dominance and submission, and a great deal to with a exchange of stories, with creating very formal scenes. And that, I think, requires seeing dominance and submission as simply self-conscious poses, as abstract concepts that are just part of the decor. It requires that a lovely Young Companion be complaisant, that she be willing to let me create stories she can walk into, but it  only requires that her submission be purely formal and notional. I suppose it might mean that she regard herself just for the night as a kind of canvas or screen, but that's not quite right, is it? She understands that she's there to accept experience, to be the recipient of experience. But if she's aware of that, then she'll always be part of shaping how those experiences are offered and delivered. My Young Companions are a bookish lot, and they know what they want in terms of scenes and crafting and literary references. Which is why I like them, after all.

Owning cats? Maybe...or just maybe a bit more like being a director and working with a skilled actress--- that may be a better dynamic.

Ninety-Four: Blue Pill, Black Draught

I'm a gentleman of a certain age. There's no denying that, and I've learned not to try. Nonetheless, certain birthdays do serve as markers, and there are certain mileposts that are reminders of mortality. My next birthday will be one of those, and I'll admit to a certain sense of unease. I brought the issue up with two different young ladies of my acquaintance this week--- both in England, oddly enough ---and in both conversations I found myself afraid to talk about the specific number. They've both known me for a while--- a dozen or so years in one case, something like three years in the other ---and they both know the number I'm worried about. Yet I am afraid to say it aloud, even with girls who know my biography and have been okay with me. This is a sad thing, though exactly in line with my personality. If I say it aloud, it'll have power over me, power to harm. Magical thinking at its finest, I think.

My fears do come down to a belief that the number is magic dark enough to mark the end of my ability to interest lovely Young Companions, magic that will bar me from any ability to be with a companion.  I have all the usual male fears--- hair falling out, losing the ability to achieve an erection. Greying hair I can deal with--- I know how to do the "distinguished" thing. There's always dye, if it comes to that. Bald spots...I don't know. If that happens,  I'll feel instantly hideous, though girls tell me that in an era where shaven heads aren't uncommon, a bald spot wouldn't be a major issue. Whether or not I believe them, they've at least made the effort to reassure me. I suppose it's the other thing that frightens me. Systems failure is a something that does leave me terrified for the future. Winter is coming, after all. 

I talked with one of my friends in London about her own experiences. Her latest lover--- mid-40s, moneyed, an academic with transatlantic connections, athletic ---hadn't been able to get it up all week, and she was baffled. She tells me she's been with men into their 70s, and this has never happened to her, ever. She's 32 now, so that's...in eighteen years of sexual adventures, no man has ever failed to be hard with her. The current lover did everything else with her, but couldn't do basic PIV sex. She was...concerned. Or at least concerned that something physical (blood pressure, undiagnosed diabetes, depression) might be wrong. She has, she says, a cache of generic, probably illegal, Indian black-market Viagra and wonders if she should give him a few. 

I told her about Caverject. Caverject is what male porn stars use. It's...injectable. Which would be...very, very painful, I'd think. But as soon as I said that, I thought about aging seducers in films or novels carrying three or four Caverject syrettes in a chic, stainless-steel Art Deco cigarette case. There it would be in the inside jacket pocket of your suit jacket, and you'd take one out and just...use it. It's probably a very sad thing that I'm far more intrigued by the idea of having the elegant case than I am by whether Caverject works as advertised.

Oh--- if you didn't have syrettes, the Caverject comes more often in a case with two vials and a couple of disposable syringes. That would look and feel just a bit too much like shooting heroin for me. Using it like that just seems...like something that would look too wrong. The syrettes would be hideously painful, but the more ordinary injection system has all the wrong visual symbolism.

Anyway--- I've never used Viagra or its relatives, and so far I haven't needed it. Systems failure is as yet only a shadow out there on the horizon. But...having talked to my friend, I'm now afraid that it'll happen any time. Yes, I'm probably hypochondriac--- talking myself into being so afraid of this that it will happen. This is my usual "taking counsel of my fears" procedure. I'm even afraid to say the word Viagra aloud. Somehow the power of dark magic doesn't apply if you say Sildenafil instead. The same applies to saying Tadalafil rather than Cialis. The generic names aren't as frightening.

I can say "the Blue Pill" and be okay with that, by the way. There's no dark magic there, no hovering Delators. I can even laugh about the usage. Patrick O'Brian's novels, of course. Dr. Maturin prescribes "blue pill and black draught" to seamen. The blue pill he uses is a mercury-based remedy for "the venereals", but I'll overlook that part.  Saying "the Blue Pill" brings up HMS Surprise and its adventures, and that's quite comforting.  

My other, younger, friend in London tells me that she's been with various older men who needed it and with a fair number of 20 or 30-somethings who used the Blue Pill recreationally, and that it never made any difference to her. Some girls need extra lube, she writes, and some don't. Using a pill is no different from that. I'd like to have that attitude--- that it's only a tool for solving a problem, not a judgment about personal value. Of course, I regard everything in my life  and world as a (usually negative) judgment about my personal value. My younger friend takes a very pragmatic view of dealing with male fears and male bodies. I have some experience in these matters, she said about dealing with much older lovers.  There are problems, she says, and if there's a simple tool for solving them, you use it.  The Blue Pill, she told me, is no different than lube for girls--- or reading glasses, for that matter.  I do need her attitude.  She's a very lovely, bright girl and of an age to be a perfect Young Companion. If she says that it's not shameful for men to need the Blue Pill and that she would never look at a man with contempt for needing it, I should listen to her.  I'm very much aware of that.

I'm a gentleman of a certain age and a certain genteel poverty, and there's some doubt that I could ever afford Viagra, even something generic and black-market smuggled in from Mexico or India. I almost certainly couldn't afford that elegant, custom-crafted silver cigarette case for holding Caverject syrettes. It says so much about me that I'm more concerned about not having the case than I would be about not having a cache of Blue Pills. 

I'll worried that I'll talk myself into being scared. I once talked myself into being afraid to fly, and that lasted for, well, much longer than I care to admit. Nothing has happened yet, and nothing may happen at all. If there is a problem, then solve it with the tools available. What matters is the result, after all. There's a lovely young companion that you don't want to fail, and you want to stave off decay and mortality as long as you can.

Nonetheless--- I will offer this up to you, if you're reading. What is the proper attitude toward the Blue Pill and its relatives? Is it just a tool, or does needing it serve as a judgment and condemnation, a statement about personal value? Is it something that you should be ashamed of using...or needing?  What are your thoughts?

Ninety-Three: Characters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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