Three Nine Zero: Blue

 A young friend in the English Home Counties told me once upon a time that she had no problem with men using what we call the Blue Pill. The Blue Pill, she said, was a tool, a solution to a physical problem. In the course of her life, she'd been with boys and men from sixteen to their sixties, and many had used the Blue Pill either "recreationally" or to solve a problem. The Blue Pill for men, she said, was no different than a girl needing extra lube. 

I can't disagree with her on that. If there's a problem, you look for a way to solve it. And yet...I'd be too afraid to use Viagra or any of its sister drugs. Today I read that Viagra had a number of off-label uses that men needed to consider. It's a vasodilator, and it's supposedly good for heart health and longevity. I have no idea if that's true or not, or what the medical research actually says. It doesn't seem implausible, at least on the  face of things. The idea was advanced that men, and especially males over forty, should take one or two Blue Pills a week as a medical thing, a health thing. Again, I have no idea what the research says on any of this.

I've never taken the Blue Pill or any other Sildenafil-based drugs. I could say that I've never needed it, but that does sound too much like bragging. My luck has been good-- that's all I'll say. My body hasn't betrayed me...yet. I've always told myself that if I had systems failure, I'd remember that I'm not a one-trick pony and that I've had years of expensive post-graduate education. I could figure out a back-up plan. I told my friend in the Home Counties about that, and she just laughed. She pointed out that I had fingers and a tongue and that she expected that I knew how to use toys-- from Corona bottles to high-end Lelo vibrators --on a partner. 

I do trust her on these things, and I know that I'm not a one-trick pony. And as I get older, I remind myself that one of the good things about BDSM play is that there are ways to give pleasure that don't require that all male systems be operating the way they did at twenty. Nonetheless, any intimations of mortality and decay do leave me depressed and unwilling to do anything that reminds me of my clock ticking down to zero.

These days, I'm far more anxious about things physical than I was even ten years ago. I've never been really afraid of systems failure before, and I've dealt moderately well with poor body image. Nowadays, though, I'd be terrified of a young companion feeling insulted if I needed the Blue Pill. I'd be terrified of her seeing me take the Blue Pill and having it remind her of my age and the idea of decay. Remember, I'm the one who read a novel where the ingenue suddenly thinks that her older lover "smells old" and leaps out of bed. That led to months and months of showering and using two or three applications of the strongest and most severe body wash I could buy before ever coming to bed with a partner...even if she already knew my age to the day. 

I can't decide what I'd be more afraid of-- systems failure (I'm far too anxious not to use some euphemism for "impotence"-- here we are with magical thinking) making a partner feel unwanted or not desirable or systems failure highlighting all my other failures (age, looks, social status, wealth). 

In my life, I've been with girls who took MDMA before sex as a "recreational" thing. But I can't quite believe that taking a Blue Pill before sex would make my partner think that I was doing something to make things better for her. These days, I'm far too anxious and afraid to do anything "recreational"-- anything that's about giving and receiving pleasure. I'm far too anxious and afraid of disappointing whoever I'd be with...and, yes, afraid of being seen as an object of mockery. 

And...yes. I still use a severe body wash whenever I might be anywhere near (and not just in bed with) a lovely young companion. My life these days is about masking decay in so, so many ways.

Three Eight Nine: Smut

 There's a 1993 book by a Valerie Kelly called "How to Write Erotica". I recall having a copy of it back in the Nineties. The book itself was well-done, and it had a lot of advice about the craft of writing that was very well-taken. Very good advice, really. 

The book had lots of suggestions about writing erotica and had a long list of places where aspiring authors could submit manuscripts. All those little magazines are gone now, replaced for a while by websites, and nowadays simply...gone. Erotica isn't in favor these days.

Some 1993 suggestions-- writing copy for the boxes of VHS porn cassettes (and DVDs?) --are almost funny now. I don't even know that 2025 porn is put on DVD at all. And even in 1993, the publishers of paperback porn novels were mostly gone. Literary porn? Where would you go for that these days? There are no more sites like Nerve.com or Filthy Gorgeous Things.

On Booktok people have taken to unironically referring to any book with sex scenes as "smut". Maybe that's just a way of dismissing what's called "romantasy" out of hand, or maybe Gen Z really doesn't have any use for sex and erotica. I really dislike that use of "smut". "Smut" back in the 1950s-1990s had a connotation not just of graphic sex, but of self-conscious irony and amused transgression. The Gen Z types don't seem to have any sense of humor about sex and don't like irony and especially don't like transgressive fiction. My God, there are twenty-somethings on Booktok and YouTube that are terrified that sometimes characters in YA novels actually have sex. I just want to facepalm about that. They're actually afraid that high schoolers will be corrupted by knowing that people do have sex.

I'd still like to write erotica, but I don't think that what excites or arouses me would be commercially viable. As I've always said, any erotica that I'd write would probably have footnotes and a bibliography. (Please note that I mean "footnotes" in the academic way, not in any fetish sense) And my characters would...talk. They'd talk a lot. They'd talk before, during, and after sex. 

I mean...that's always been my own experience of sex. Lots of talking, and very much lots of talking during the sex itself. The girls and women who've been with me down all the years have been adventurous and experimental and willing to try lots of transgressive things...and we've always talked while doing things. My young companions and I have always narrated what's happening and done lots of serve-and-return badinage during sex. I suspect that most audiences wouldn't get that.

I also suspect that most audiences wouldn't see s/m as an occasion for social climbing and/or irony. They wouldn't get the idea of the two very different people (yes, sometimes age-disparate, too) talking themselves into bed or into new and untried experiences not so much out of lust as out of a sense of the excitement and sheer fun of trying something outrageous. I think, too, that Gen Z would dislike the idea of pushing past limits just to see what's out there. 

One day, maybe. Maybe one day I will write something that would've gone on a slightly louche erotica website back in the Noughts. All I have to worry about is that the sort of people who become self-righteous about "smut" on Booktok aren't going to like stories about exploration.

Three Eight Eight: Tales

 Here we are at the end of January in the blighted Year Twenty-Five. There's so very little to write about these days. The world is an increasingly grim and brutal place. There's little enough place right now for tales of elegant sex or speculations on the meaning of erotica.

I did find something, though-- tales from the Long Ago, tales from letters sent me by lovely Young Companions back in the days when actual letters meant something, when lovely, long-legged, underwear-averse girls did flirt with me by mail.

These are things sent me by a girl who saw me as mentor and confessor, a girl who wanted to be a muse, a demimondaine, and an adventurer. She wrote me back in the mid-Noughts, back in better days--

Fantasizing about fucking some tan surfer-girl who moved to Florida to wake up to the sound of the waves. She lives in a bright cottage full of tropical flowers and hanging lanterns, and when I say, shyly, that I haven't been with many girls, she says she could teach me a few things.

I can't imagine living in Florida these days-- hurricanes and Republicans make it no country for me and mine, but my Young Companion back in the day had other visions as well:

Fantasizing about fucking a freelance-writer Brooklyn girl. She rolled her eyes at me along with the rest of the city last year when my poetry was published, but recently she's been crushing on my Twitter. After we break up, neither of us talk about it much, but it was the most powerful orgasms we ever had.

I wish I knew more girls these days who spend their afternoons and late nights constructing fantasies. I wish I knew more girls who'd phone me late at night to whisper their fantasies to me.

Muse, demimondaine, adventuress....I need someone like that again. I need someone to be a Voice for me.

Three Eight Seven: Gifts

 Today is the day after Christmas, and here we are in the last week of the year. The last week of December is always a dead, empty week-- a time for watching the last embers of the year fade to ash. It's a week for pessimism and a sense of loss. There seems to be no way of escaping that.

Christmas gifts are rare at my age, but this year I did receive one gift worth noting. Someone with the best intentions in the world gave me the gift of a spa day. I have a lovely and expensively-produced gift card for a day at a hip local spa.  I was duly appreciative. The gift was unexpected, and it was given in friendship. So please be very aware that I'm not saying anything bad about the person who gave me the gift card. I was thrilled to be remembered at all. But the gift will never be used, and there's no way it can be.

This is the second time in my life I've been given a spa day, a "self-care" day. The first time was years ago-- back in the last age, back in the last millennium. Again, it was intended to be something enjoyable. I didn't use that first gift certificate, either. There was no way I could use it. I did tell the person who gave that first spa day to me that I loved the gift, and I did tell her that I'd used it and had a wonderful time at the spa. There was no way to tell her the truth-- that I'd put the gift envelope in a desk drawer where it would be forgotten forever.

No one like me can ever have a "self-care" day. No one like me can ever use a spa day. There are always social rules-- yes, arbitrary rules, but rules nonetheless. I'm a straight, cis, white, middle-class male of a certain age. Spa days aren't for people like me. Any day involving care of the self-- care of the body --isn't for people like me.

I've been in saunas before, and sitting naked in a steam room isn't something I can do. I found myself barely able to breathe in a sauna once, and I knew why. I knew that it was about anxiety rather than any physical issue. I'd seen horror films and thrillers where someone gets trapped in a sauna...so that was certainly on my mind. But most of the anxiety was that I had to be unclothed. The sauna towel around my waist did nothing to make me feel secure. I was aware of my body, and that's never  a good thing. 

I've never seen any reason for the male body to be exposed. I've never seen anything attractive or aesthetically pleasing in the male body. I've certainly never seen anything attractive in my own body...let alone when covered in sweat and gasping for breath. I didn't want to suffocate in the sauna, but what I was most afraid of was being seen by anyone else. I remember being desperately afraid of anyone else using the sauna while I was there. I was terrified of being seen-- terrified of having anyone else see what my body was really like. 

Now, I'm a  trained historian. I know that in Classical Greece, upper-class men exercised naked and took pride in making their bodies fit to be seen. That Greek attitude is utterly alien to me. I can read about Japanese or Korean spas-- elegant, hi-tech, sleek, with robot-serviced cold and hot baths and future-coded steam rooms --or watch videos demonstrating their technical wonders. I can do those things and marvel at the facilities...but there's no way here under God's green sky that I could go to one.  For all that I've obsessed over cyberpunk visions of Japanese style, I couldn't go to a Japanese or Korean spa. Not even the idea of having a Wm. Gibson experience could get me there.

I've spent my life suggesting to young ladies of my acquaintance that all beautiful girls should sleep naked. I'll stand by that position, but I've never been able to sleep naked on my own. It seems wrong for someone like me.  If I can't be naked in my own bedroom, I certainly can't do that at a spa.

The spa day I was gifted included a full-body massage. I almost grimaced at that. I've never actually had  a massage, and there's no way it can happen. There's no scenario for me in which  getting a massage ends well.

If the person doing the massage is female, there's nothing but shame awaiting me. I understand that a trained masseuse sees human bodies as a set of muscles and nerves, that she'll have been trained to be a professional. But I'll still be utterly ashamed to have anyone female (and presumptively attractive) see my flesh. And in a post-#MeToo world, other, horrible things can happen. I'd be on the massage table and there'd be a touch on my back and shoulders and...well...what if my body began to respond? What if I did start to become, you know, aroused?  I could stay face-down to try to hide what was happening and try to get away from any touch. It wouldn't do me any good, though. 

One of two things would happen. The masseuse would be disgusted or enraged. Not all the apologies in the world for the involuntary physical response would be enough. She might recoil in disgust and/or point and laugh with contempt. That would be bad enough. But she'd be even more likely to immediately for the manager...or call for the security guards. I can so easily imagine myself being shoved out of the spa and told never to return-- and I can imagine the police being called. I can always imagine that-- the police coming and me ending up in handcuffs. No matter how professional and clinical the setting was, I couldn't risk having a masseuse touch me-- or even see me.

And having a masseur instead? That can't be allowed to happen. I know how that would play out. I'd be Geo. Costanza from "Seinfeld", fleeing a massage in self-loathing horror because he thought that "it moved!" when a male massage therapist touched him. I know that we're supposed to laugh at Geo. Costanza and his fears, but I nonetheless have the same fears. That knowledge does me no good at all-- if anything, it makes me feel worse. That I could have homophobic fears makes the whole self-loathing thing worse. Being afraid of being touched at all by anyone male is the kind of fear that should leave you angry at yourself. Homophobia and low-key gay panic aren't socially or politically acceptable, and I agree that they shouldn't be acceptable. Discovering my own fears is disturbing and calls up waves of self-loathing. 

But here we are. I can't be anyplace where I'm outside my armour-- i.e., anyplace where I'm a body, where I'm flesh rather than a set of constructed masks and costumes. I certainly can't be touched. I very much like holding hands with a lovely companion, and I love tracing a fingertip over a beautiful girl's thigh or collarbone. But I dislike being touched myself. Being flesh is unsettling and far too risky. Physical pleasure is far, far  too risky these days.

The old year is ending, and I've taken no pleasure in 2024. I don't expect to feel anything pleasurable in 2025. I have a gift card for an expensive spa day that I can never use. The gift card itself I can't even re-gift. I don't want to giver to know that I  couldn't use her gift, or that I gave it to someone else. The card will end up in my desk, buried under old bank statements. 

I appreciate the thought behind the gift, and I very much like the giver. But anything that involves the self as a body-- I can't use that. I can be a lot of things, but I can't be a body. I can never accept pleasure as a gift.    

Three Eight Six: Wellington, Rain

 You must've read this before. This is a story the leggy Jill in NZ sent me long ago-- maybe as long as a dozen years ago. I may have posted this before, but I'll post it again. 

As stories go, this is wonderful. Very powerful, very erotic, very shattering. It's a story that evokes jealousy and envy both. I'm hard-pressed to find stories in my own life that can match Jill's adventures in her mid-twenties.

I have no idea where Jill is now, but let's go to a rainy night in Wellington NZ back in the 20-teens--

rain was pelting on the windows. i woke up on the floor, naked under a kid's toy story blanket. dry mouth, pounding headache, very shaky. i sat up, and looked around for my clothes. an asian girl was snoring quietly on the couch. there were bottles strewn everywhere. i felt sick and dizzy. my black jeans were in the corner of the room, covered in mud. my keys and $650 were scrunched into my pocket. weird, i never carried that much cash. i pulled them on, no underwear, then vomited into a pot plant.

i couldn't see the top i thought i'd been wearing, so i grabbed a men's shirt that was hanging on the back of a chair and buttoned it up. i had no idea where i was or what i'd been doing. i wandered through the small apartment. there were three men asleep in one of the bedrooms. in another bedroom was a few weed plants. i looked in the fridge and took out a beer. one of the men woke up and asked me if i wanted a smoke. 

we stood on the balcony, under the eaves, and smoked in silence. i have no idea who you are, he said. i just shrugged. you're wearing my shirt, he said. i just looked at him. i was feeling too dazed to put a sentence together. you can keep it, he said. 

he flicked his butt off the balcony, and offered me another. he lit it for me. can i see your tits? he asked. i nodded, and he undid the buttons on his shirt. can i take a photo? he asked. i nodded. he took out a battered iphone and took a few pictures, then started slowly sucking my nipples. he was tall, and dark haired. he had a beard and green eyes. i fucking love your tits, he said. do you want to suck my cock? he asked. i undid his jeans and took out his cock. i got on my knees and took him in my mouth. i was still feeling sick and almost vomited once or twice, but i loved the feeling of him in my mouth. 

do you want me to fuck you? he asked. i nodded, with his cock still in my mouth. i stood up and he bent me over the balcony and slowly peeled down my skinny, muddy jeans. he kissed my neck and fucked me in the rain. the motion of it made me vomit over the balcony. i moaned at him not to stop. it felt so fucking good. his hand was rubbing my clit and his cock was deep in my cunt. i had purged and felt light and pure as air. he came, and rested his body against mine. he pulled my jeans back up, and buttoned my shirt. he put another cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me.

 i walked to caitie's apartment in the rain barefoot. i wasn't so far from there, 4 or 5 blocks. 

Caitie, just as a note, was the girl Jill was dating in those days.

I really do love the story. I wish there were still lovely, wicked girls out there over the aether who wanted to tell stories about their Adventures. I don't even know if there are still girls out there who want to have Adventures, let alone craft them into stories to excite future lovers. 

If you're reading this, what are the Adventures you'd like to have? What are the Stories you'd like to be able to tell? I know that 2024 is very different from 2012-- in this time of holy war and holy dread --but why do you think we seem nowadays to avoid adventures and transgressions and experiences?

Three Eight Five: Fears

 This isn't a podcast, and so I don't have guests to interview. That may or may not be a good thing. I'm not sure how I'd go about acquiring guests for a podcast, and I'm too far away from any major metropolis to have a deep pool of potential guests in any case. I can't think that any FMTY girls would be willing to be an interview subject, and of course the same holds true for any authors or scholars.

I have however been having long conversations with an old (and older) friend. We've known each other for decades now, and I've come to be the person he goes to when he needs a listener. What he's really longing for is the chance to be a classical Freudian analysand, but that's too expensive a thing, and these days classical Freudian analysts are hard to come by. He would, he says, settle for a Lacanian analyst, but those are only found in Paris and Buenos Aires, and he hates to travel.

My friend signs all his letters (and he is a devotee of the dying art of letter writing) as "Sir Francis Meerkat"-- a wonderful name, but one whose semiotics I haven't unpacked. I'll call him "Sir Francis", though. I sign my own letters with my actual name, by the way...though these days the closing of my letters is always the Targaryen "Fire and Blood". And why not? 

In any case, Sir Francis has had a recent birthday, and he's been agonizing over it for months. It was a zero-year birthday, and Sir Francis is terrified. He doesn't, he says, know how to be a septuagenarian. There's no checklist, no set of rules for him to follow. I can understand that. Life is always better with a checklist. I've stood in front of classes and improvised ninety-minute lectures, but I'm a post-modernist of the old school, and having a list (no matter how random the bullet points seem) is a key part of life. So I can understand Sir Francis' fear about that...and, yes, about age and mortality as well. That's all understandable.

He's afraid of women, mind you, and he's become something of a misogynist over the years, even though he despises incels on aesthetic and political grounds. Years of reading semi-scholarly books on evolutionary psychology and anthropology have given him distinctly misogynist tendencies. I've told him that he's walking disproof of the old saying that no one was ever ruined by a book. He loves classical Freudianism for its Oedipal structures and he wants to do a Freudian analysis, but he reads lots and lots of Jung (and far too much Lacan), and reading Jung is as dangerous for someone like Sir Francis as reading Nietzsche is for undergraduate males.

He and I have long phone conversations where he calls to tell me that his flat is in an area populated by what he always calls "beautiful lesbian vampires" who are waiting to tear out his soul...and this has nothing to do with either writing a screenplay or creating awkward metaphors. It's a literal belief and a literal fear.

He does tell me over and over about how bitter he is over his lack of sexual success when he was in high school...which must be fifty-odd years ago now. Sexual success in high school would've meant that he had some social status. It would've meant that even if he wasn't given status for anything academic, he'd still have had status among his male peers. 

I'm never quite sure how to take that. My own high school years weren't pleasant, and I didn't have a great deal of sexual success-- there was some, but not a lot. Status among other males might've been useful, but I spent four years in high school planning and striving to go to university far, far away from my hometown. Whatever I was looking for would be found a thousand miles away, and I knew that. Where I grew up meant very, very little to me. That suburb still means very, very little to me. I'm not about to agonize over things that happened long ago and far away.

Sir Francis Meerkat also tells me that he's given up on any physical contact with women. He's terrified of being seen naked, and he's terrified of, well, gastric upsets. He's utterly terrified of being with a woman and realizing while undressing that he's had...problems. Does he have something like Crohn's Disease? No-- not to my knowledge. But he says he won't go to dinner with a date in case-- just in case--he has to dash to the bathroom. He obsesses over eating cartons of steamed white rice in an effort to seal such problems away.  

I can understand body fear. I'm not especially comfortable having my body seen by a lover. There are easy and obvious things I can be judged on. But I tell myself that by the time we've reached the point where we're undressing, a young companion knows what I'm like and what I very probably look like under my clothes. No girl in all these years has ever pointed and laughed or made a face in disgust. That does mean something. I tell myself that, and it does provide comfort. Sir Francis, though...Sir Francis tells me that he'd rather stay home in the dark than have a woman see him and judge him. It's all, he says, about assortative mating and sexual hierarchy. I'm becoming very, very tired of the term "assortative mating". 

He hasn't reached the Red Pill level yet. Even if his disdain for incels and Manosphere types is based purely on aesthetics, that has at least kept him from doing Red Pill things. 

Nonetheless, I can sympathize with his fears. They do derive from fear of age and mortality, and we all fear those things.  Of course...sympathy isn't agreement, and I do find his constant agonizing and bitterness exhausting. 

If I did have a podcast, I'd be telling lots of stories about Sir Francis. I'd probably read out passages from Jung or Lacan or some evo-psych monograph (maybe even from "The Red Lamp of Incest", one of his longstanding favorites) and ask him to comment and just let him go. He'd spin out hours of tales and rants. Hours, yes. Many hours.

I do have my own fears, but I tell myself that at least I'm not Sir Francis. Which is rather comforting to know.

Three Eight Four: Spider Garden

 It's Halloween tonight, and I'm thinking of the fetish artist Michael Manning. He's a San Francisco/Los Angeles artist who remains one of my favorite erotic artists. He is someone whose work I'll recommend, and someone whose work does come to mind here on a rainy Halloween night.

It's hard these days to find a lot of the work Manning did in the 1990s, but in those days he was something very new and different on the fetish scene. His work was eerie and had a very hothouse, fever-dream atmosphere. He fused cyberpunk sci-fi with a set of almost Heian-era Japanese images and a taste for exoticized s/m. I've always liked an s/m aesthetic, and Manning's art did mesh with my own desire for the self-consciously exotic. 

There was a press called Amerotica that published many of his collections in the 1990s, and I miss their catalogs. I miss the visions of hidden worlds that appeared in their books. The press is long gone, but keep their name in mind when you're searching for erotica in dark nooks out there over the aether. 

I discovered Manning's "Lumenagerie" art collection not long after it first appeared in 1996, and still find it enthralling. "Lumenagerie" and its sequel "Inamorata" (2005) are worth finding, as is his 1997 anthology of short stories and art, "Cathexis".  His sci-fi "Tranceptor" series isn't bad at all, either.

His "The Spider Garden" (1995) remains my favorite among his books, along with its companion works "Hydrophidian" (1997) and "In a Metal Web" (2003). I'm sad that they all seem to be out of print, and sadder still that we live in times that are increasingly hostile to fetish art and to the idea of exoticized and ritualized sex. 

Manning's world in the "Spider Garden" books was one where gender was deeply fluid, but not in any way that either the TRA or Gender-Critical sides of the current Trans Wars would accept. In Manning's world, there were no sexual identities, only masks that could be assumed or discarded at whim. There was nothing like a fixed identity, and no one, not even the mechanical spiders in his Heian-Goth palaces, was ever really anything. 

I believe Manning may still have a gallery website out there somewhere on the web. Find it if you can. 

Read some of his graphic tales, read the short stories in "Cathexis", and tell me what you think. Tell me your own thoughts on the idea of exotica and ritual sex.  And remember what a brilliant idea Heian-Goth is.