Three Nine Five: Hierarchy

 A young lady of my acquaintance called me up late the other afternoon and asked me to meet her for drinks at a place by the river. What she wanted was advice, or at least a listener. So we sat and ordered up Aperol-and-orange juice and she told me that her latest Gentleman Admirer had fled her apartment an evening or two before, and she was perplexed by it all.

Okay, fine. I'm her designated interlocutor-- the Older Gentleman who'll listen to her stories and offer up comments without judgment. She knows me well enough to know that I have very, very little room to be judgmental, and that the judgments I do make are aesthetic rather than moral. 

She explained to me that her Gentleman Admirer (himself a gentleman of a Certain Age) had taken her for dinner, and drinks, come home with her, and then left suddenly. She was unclear as to whether he planned to see her again. He hadn't called, and she was worried that she'd been ghosted.

They'd gone out several times, and she liked him. She thought he was fun and bright, the sex had been good, and she enjoyed his company. She'd spent some time trying to read his tastes in bed, and that, she said was where she'd gone wrong. 

I've known her long enough to know that she has very, very good gaydar and kink-reading skills. She's good, from what I can tell, at intuiting what a partner wants or needs or likes. I think what happened was that she was just a bit too good at reading her Admirer-- great intuition, but no sense of context.

She told me that she'd watched her Admirer and paid attention to how he looked at her. And, well...her intuition told her he was into her feet. Okay, then-- her first foot fetish guy. She told me that she was fine with the kink. She thought it might be fun to try. She already knew that she liked having the small hollows behind her ankles kissed and caressed, and having her toes sucked sounded like it might feel really good. I'm also reasonably sure that she was looking forward to him paying for lots of expensive pedicures. But when she did stretch out on her sofa and showed off her legs and pointed her toes and told him that she'd be very much into whatever he'd like to try and that if he was into foot fetish games, all he had to do was ask...he went white, grabbed his jacket and tie, and stammered out that he had to leave. She hadn't heard from him since.

What, she wanted to know, was going on? She didn't think there was any way he could've thought she was somehow kink-shaming him. She looked at me and told me that this guy was about my age-- so was this some weird generational thing? She was annoyed about losing the chance for all those free pedicures (and the inevitable free spa days that would go along with them), but more annoyed that her kink-reading had gone wrong.

I just shrugged. I told her that she was probably right about his interests. The problem, though, was that he didn't want her to know about his kink. He would've been fine with doing something-- sucking her toes, licking her ankles --so long as it was just part of "having wild sex". But once it was named, once it was categorized as a kink, he couldn't face it. She'd told me once that a certain person we both knew was "so far in the closet that he could see Narnia"-- the same, I said, applied here. 

Moreover, she'd made him aware that his kink could be read. It was something a very attractive late-twenties girl could just read about him. She had, I told her, picked a kink he was ashamed of.  If she'd read him and intuited that he liked, say, BDSM, he'd probably have been fine, no matter if she'd told him she could see that he was either a top or a bottom. He probably wouldn't have fled her apartment if she'd told him her gaydar read him as bi. Those things are ordinary enough-- maybe even fashionable enough --in the here-and-now to barely be treated as out of the mainstream.

What she'd intuited, though, was a kink that might have been pleasurable for them both, but was nonetheless a kink that's regarded as very, very...what? Declassé? Contemptible? Laughable? Pathetic? Something like that, anyway. Pathetic may be what I'm looking for here. What she'd done hadn't been taken as an offer to experiment or an invitation. She'd made him feel unmasked-- had left him feeling that someone he was attracted to knew that something he liked or needed was regarded as pathetic and contemptible.

There are hierarchies in kink, of course. There are social rankings attached to everything. Always. Wanting to tie my friend up and whip her-- or wanting her to tie him up and whip him --is something that films and music videos and novels have taught us to see as stylish (and involving lots of cool outfits). A foot fetish...isn't. My friend is someone who's very open about being experimental and adventurous with her lovers. Her focus was on the shared thrill and the pleasure. Her beau, on the other hand, assumed that he'd been revealed as someone pathetic, someone who did things that only sad and pathetic men did. He fled her apartment because he thought she'd look down on him-- and was probably terrified that she'd tell people that he was into something sad and pathetic. He'd lost his class status in the eyes of a beautiful younger girl.

My friend ordered more drinks for both of us and shook her head. This, she said, was the thing about men she'd never understand. So much insecurity, she said, so much fear that invisible strangers will laugh at them, so much energy wasted on arranging rank-ordering. So much male fear of ever being seen as less.

What could I say? She's right about all that. She's known me long enough to know that one reason I'm usually available for drinks or coffee or long telephone conversations is that I'm afraid to go anywhere that would involve being judged socially and rank-ordered. I could see her looking at me across the table and reading my own social fears about age, looks, and status. The joke here is that I would never have fled her apartment because I was ashamed of being judged for my kinks-- those are very, very carefully curated and crafted --but I would've fled at the first sign that she (or any other girl) was judging me as a body. At the first hint that a potential partner saw me as a "mediocre white male" or as someone who could only (at best) have "mediocre sex" I'd have dived out the window. I'd even have left my necktie on the floor. 

 

Three Nine Four: Opus Dei

 I've written about phone sex before, and it's a topic I want to re-visit. 

Phone sex was always something I found to be far better than any sort of sexting or email exchanges. I have no idea if people still sext, by the way. I haven't encountered sexting jokes online in a long time, and it's possible that sexting has fallen out of favor. I'd thought it would've been rejuvenated by the pandemic, but then I thought the pandemic would've revived phone sex, too. It seems that I was wrong on both counts. 

Phone sex is about storytelling in a way that sexting can never be. I'm a storyteller myself, and I agree absolutely with the well-known lines from Joan Didion and Muriel Rukeyser. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and our lives are made of stories rather than atoms. But it seems that we aren't telling stories any longer. Well, nothing that's happened since the end of 2016 has made anyone want to tell stories. I think we're back to the age of windowless monads. We no longer live in an age where sexual adventures are worth pursuing. Survival seems to have replaced pleasure as the key thing in our lives. 

Once upon a time, I did receive phone sex calls from Australia. It would've been in wintertime here, and in the austral summer. Two different girls called from Melbourne to entice me into creating stories for them. I was flattered by that, of course, and there was the thrill of doing something that was not just transgressive but done across multiple time zones, the equator, and a couple of oceans. 

There were other overseas phone sex calls in those days-- the later Noughts. Melbourne, Wellington, London, Edinburgh, Bruges, The Hague...lovely girls made calls to me from all those places. I can't imagine that happening again.

There are stories left over from those days, and I wish the girls were still out there over the aether, or that I at least knew the backstory of the things they told me. I once asked a girl who'd been a co-ed at St. John's College in Annapolis via email where she'd first had sex outdoors. She called from London to say that--

Outside Christ Church College at the University of Oxford.  I was on a school trip and certainly was not supposed to be fraternizing with the locals - inside or outside - so there was plenty of risk.  The campus itself was imposing and lent the whole situation a gravity and drama that I have rarely felt since.  I didn't get completely naked, as I was wearing a short white skirt with no underwear, which could easily be thrown up (though it did take some athleticism and flexibility to avoid getting grass stains on that skirt).

That's the sort of story that I liked. So much backstory implicit in what she told me! So many follow-up questions to ask! If nothing else, an account of the positions required would be good.

The same girl answered my question about the riskiest place she'd ever had sex this way--

The European headquarters of Opus Dei.  I've always been privately smug about this one and wish I could tell more people because it delights me in so many ways.  It was in the evening, and we were walking back from a movie.  I had been teasing him throughout the movie and on the trip back, and I guess he just couldn't restrain himself anymore.  We jumped over the fence for what I thought might be a quick blow job, but he threw me on the ground.  It was very passionate and rough, naughty and forbidden.  We were collapsed on the grass when someone caught us and we had to run, me carrying my bra and my jeans half on, cum smeared all over my shirt and jeans.  The man was shouting at us, and he said something about our souls being cursed or perhaps he cursed our souls - something rather violent anyway.

The European headquarters of Opus Dei is the Villa Tevere in Rome. I knew it had to be in Rome, but I had to look up the Villa Tevere. It's a house that was once the home of the Hungarian Legation to the Holy See. I love the story, and all the more so since Opus Dei began appearing in thriler novels as some shadowy conspiratorial group. I still have questions, of course. How naked did she get before she and her male companion had to flee? What had they managed to get accomplished? Carrying her bra? She almost never wore underwear, so why did she have a bra? What imprecations did the person who caught them use? And in what language? (Latin, please let it be Latin)

These are great stories, and I wish she and I had been able to talk more by phone and go through all the details. I still have the emails, and a few postcards she sent from overseas, but I do miss her voice. I have no idea whatsoever about what her life has been like these last fifteen years or so. I did tell her that it would've made a better story if she'd gotten pregnant during the Opus Dei encounter, since aborting a fetus conceived on Opus Dei property would've been a brilliant thing. She laughed across the aether for five minutes straight over that idea.

Still...no phone calls these days. No stories to share, no fantasies to construct together. I hate the silence at night when lovely young companions and I should be telling stories to one another. If you're reading this-- is the aether silent for you as well? Are there stories still being exchanged? Do people still know how to create mutual fantasies? Are we allowed to have fantasies at all these days?

Three Nine Three: Swans

 There's a novel I read some years ago-- Elizabeth Kostova's "The Swan Thieves" (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2010) that I picked up again the other day. I'd read her "The Historian" when it first appeared, and I was looking forward to her second novel.

The novel itself is about the art world, psychiatry, and what constitutes beauty. It's also about age, desire, and loss. I hadn't thought about "The Swan Thieves" in years, but I half-remembered one particular passage and wanted to find it again.

The setting is simple. The hero, a fifty-something psychiatrist who's also a failed painter, goes to the National Gallery to look at a particular painting, one that's prompted one of his patients to try and deface the canvas. He's talking to one of the workers at the information desk when he notices a twenty-ish young girl who works there as well. The girl, he notes, has dyed-obsidian hair and green eyes...and then he's launched off into fantasy:

I found myself staring at her, unexpectedly stirred. Her gaze was knowing as she stood there behind the counter, her body lean and flexible under a tight-zipped jacket, the smallest curve of hip showing between that and the top of a short black skirt-- that would be the maximum glimpse of abdominal skin permitted in this gallery full of nudes, I speculated. She might be an art student, working here in her spare time to get through school, a gifted printmaker or fashioner of  jewelry, with those long, pale hands. I pictured her up against the counter, after hours, no underwear under that too-short skirt. She was just a kid; I looked away. She was a kid, and I was no catch, I knew...

I do love that brief glimpse of the girl. Well, of course I do. Short skirt, no underwear, emplaced in the worlds of art and academia, in her early twenties-- those things are all on my list of criteria for a perfect fantasy girl. Especially the idea of her up against the counter after hours, skirt up around her waist, one leg hooked around me. How could I not like that? The paragraph might've been written specifically for me.

I recall that when the novel came out, Ms. Kostova was attacked online and in reviews for that paragraph. Far too many self-described feminist reviewers were appalled that she gave her male main character such thoughts. How dare a character have such thoughts in a novel, especially a character in his fifties?  

I was annoyed and amused at the attacks. Once again, here we are-- assigning real-world blame to an author for the thoughts of a fictional character. I was amused, too, since I'd have had the exact same thoughts there at the gallery information desk. The issue of age would never have occurred to me, not then and not now. 

We're not supposed to have fantasies these days. We're not supposed to feel, let alone admit to feeling, physical desire. Sexual fantasies aren't for anyone male these days, let alone males of a certain age. I'm not sure what the Arbitrary Social Rules say about female desire and female fantasies these days, but I do suspect that the Purity Culture of the Year Twenty-Five opposes such things.

Let's be clear. I'd certainly have the same thoughts the character in the novel had. I wouldn't act on them, of course, and these days I'd never admit to anyone that I was having such thoughts. I'd certainly never admit to anyone female that I had sexual thoughts about anyone, ever-- not even if I was talking to a lover.

I'm a person of the male persuasion and of a certain age. I know better than to have fantasies. Fantasies are thoughtcrime. We know this in the Year Twenty-Five. To have fantasies as a male, let alone fantasies about anyone younger, only enhances the thoughtcrime. Male sex is itself suspect, since all male sex is "mediocre" by definition. To be male and feel desire is to be actively harming the object of desire, even if that person never knows she's being desired. 

It's better to do and feel...nothing. To do anything else is to be open to both anger and mockery. To have thoughts about beauty and desire is to show oneself as pathetic, ridiculous, and dangerous. Better to avoid all crimethink, to do and feel nothing at all, lest you be held in contempt for your irrefutable failings. 

Three Nine Two: Hands

 I'm still on the mailing list for several high-end sex toy boutiques. I've written about that before. There was a time when I might have used their catalogs to buy gifts for lovely Young Companions, but at the moment I have no one for whom I could buy such things. 

That makes me by definition an incel, and I'm not happy with that. I have no lovely Young Companion in my life, and there's no one with whom I could be involved in what seems to be called a "situationship". I'm currently celibate, and I don't want to be. This makes me an incel by definition, and I hate that word. I dislike the aesthetics and politics of the so-called incel community, and I refuse to be part of that.

Nonetheless, seeing the email adverts from places like Good Vibrations makes me all too aware of my current status. Now I have nothing against Good Vibrations or the wares the company sells. Their sex toys are elegant enough, and girls I know give them high marks. I've bought vibrators and dildos from them as gifts, and my young ladies have been pleased.  My unhappiness is based on how pointless and uncomfortable it is for anyone of the male persuasion  (me, that means me) to look at their online catalogs.

Their latest ad campaign was "Give Your Hand A Hand", and they were marketing sex toys and sexual aids for men. I can't deal with that.

Self-pleasuring is just not something men can do and retain any sense of self-respect. I looked at the Good Vibrations catalog and could hear derisive laughter in my head. Being male cuts you off from any ability to find pleasure on your own. To be male and "give your hand a hand" makes you pathetic and contemptible. It marks you out as a pathetic failure who's engaging in something creepy and shameful.

Think about a high-end Lelo vibrator or one of the classic "rabbit" vibrators. Young ladies have been using those for the last twenty years and more to discover their bodies and discover pleasure on their own. No one male can do that. No one male can risk being known to do that. Having sexual fantasies at all (especially about an actual individual) is a red flag if you're male. It's a marker for being sad and disgusting and probably threatening all at once.

My friend Jill in NZ, or any of the girls I've written about here-- Liberty, Levin, my vanished ghostgirl here --can use a high-end Lelo and be proud of it. They can discuss self-pleasure with other girls as something that's a Good Thing in their lives. They believe that they have a right to seek pleasure, and that there are tool that are useful and acceptable for doing that. Their bodies can serve them. I can't imagine applying any of that to myself.

I'm male, and the male body is an object of contempt to begin with. Even a gym-toned male body is regarded as contemptible. The act of male self-pleasuring is seen as laughable, sad, and disgusting. I would be almost breathlessly proud to have a lovely Young Companion tell me that I was a fantasy image she used while pleasuring herself. At the same time, I'd never under any circumstances tell a lover or potential lover that she was my fantasy image. I'd rather take a bullet to the knee than tell a lover that I fantasized about her. I know deep in my bones that she'd be disgusted and appalled and would stalk out of my life in a cold rage. No lovely girl would ever be thrilled or pleased that she was someone's fantasy. 

Long ago, the vanished Ketzie wrote in her blog that she kept a note on her bathroom mirror as an incentive to go to the gym: "Remember-- You Are Someone's Reason To Masturbate". There is no way that anyone male could ever put up a note like that. There is no way in hell, no way here under God's green sky, that I could imagine doing that or even thinking it.

I will not allow myself to have fantasies, let alone engage in the Solitary Vice. I will not allow myself to do something that would mark me out as risible, contemptible, disgusting. 

If you're male, the Arbitrary Social Rules say that self-pleasure isn't for you. The male body isn't for pleasure. Male sexuality, and especially straight male sexuality, is something that's snickered at these days as mediocre and vaguely sad at best, and as disgusting and threatening at worst. 

I'd rather just withdraw from the whole thing. I will not do something that's so widely mocked these days. I will not be judged as a disgusting failure for pleasuring myself, and I will not engage in the Solitary Vice when I'm well aware that lovers or potential lovers would shudder in derision at what I'd be doing. I've read many an article or blog post these last few years pointing out that all straight male sex is mediocre at best and that anything anyone male might do with his body is both repulsive and an admission of failure. 

At my age, it's better just to walk away from things. It's better to do nothing and think of nothing that would mark you out as a failure. I cannot imagine buying (let alone using) a male sex toy. I'd rather give up the idea of pleasure altogether. In this life and this world, a lovely girl pleasuring herself is regarded as a thing of empowerment and aesthetic beauty. No one male can be seen the same way.

It's better to just keep your hands away from yourself. It's better not to think of pleasure and sex at all. It's better to just be invisible. Always. 

Three Nine One: Housewives

 I've mentioned erotic art before-- specifically, the graphic novels of Michael Manning, which began to appear in the 1990s. Manning's stories (e.g., Tranceptor, The Spider Garden, Hydrophidian, Cathexis) are...gender-fluid cyberpunk goth erotica. Something like that, in any case. The artwork itself is excellent, and it does remind me a bit of Matt Howarth's sci-fi work. 

Manning's work is hard to get these days. There aren't very many publishers of erotic graphic novels left, and credit card processors are refusing to process payments these days for erotica of any kind. The new century is a place where Gen Z "influencers" look with puritanical disdain on erotica, a place where sex scenes in novels (especially in "romantasy") are (non-ironically) called "smut" and dismissed as politically suspect. 

It's really very hard to find good erotica these days. I've been told that there's at least some new trans and queer erotica being written or drawn, but those are alien genres for me. And even in those genres, visual erotica seems to be suspect-- if only because beauty itself is now suspect, and no one wants to be accused of "fetishizing" bodies or preferences. 

Having said that, I'll note that I found a series of rather good erotic graphic novels from the early Noughts. The series is called "Housewives at Play", and it seems to have appeared from c.2000 through c. 2008. I've found a website (joinforjoy.com) that has several issues posted, and they're worth looking at. As best I can tell, the issues form a more or less ongoing story. The posted issues begin with Nr. 4 in the series, and form a (largely) connected story up through Nr. 18. I haven't been able to find the first three issues, and the story wasn't complete by Nr. 18. The website has most, but not all, of the issues between Nr. 4 and Nr. 18. I can infer how the storyline began, but I have no idea how (or if) it ended. I do wish it was still around.

The artist and creator of "Housewives at Play" is supposed to be "Rebecca". I have zero idea if "Rebecca" was actually female, and I know nothing at all about the person behind the name. The series was published by Eros Comix in Seattle, and I don't know whether the publisher is still in business. If anyone out there over the aether knows anything about the publisher, please do pass it along.

What is there to say about "Housewives at Play"? Well, the art is much better than usual. "Rebecca" did have an eye for lovely women, and her "My Girls" special issue does some excellent pen-and-ink portraits of her main characters. The body types are very much to my taste-- tall, toned, slender, and leggy. The characters don't wax, but they do neatly trim their pubic hair, so we're not stuck with a 1970s Land of Bush O'Plenty look.  The stories began in black and white, but seem to have transitioned to colour at some point. Rebecca's art is at least as good as anything in mainstream comics art.

The stories? Well, semi-comic suburban/pop culture lesbian BDSM is probably the best description. (I couldn't bring myself to use "tongue-in-cheek" here. I just couldn't.) The main character is a bored, 40-year old suburban housewife named Catherine Mitchell. One day, out of nowhere, Catherine is violated by her best friend Patty and turned into a lesbian sex slave for Patty and Patty's newlywed neighbor Beth. Catherine then acquires her teen daughter's best friend Jennifer as her own sex slave, although Jennifer and Catherine's beautiful daughter Melissa (both carefully and repeatedly described as eighteen) are themselves secretly a couple. Hilarity ensues, as does lots of transgressive sex. 

At some point, Catherine, Melissa, and Catherine's incestuous younger sister Lynn are kidnapped by the staff at a local Victoria's (errr..."Veronica's") Secret and sold to teen pop princess Bratty Sneers (Brittany Spears, obviously), teen idol Kandy Korn (Mandy Moore?) and country music idol Fate Will (Faith Hill, I assume). There's also Catherine's ex-lover Stephanie, a Native American stripper/escort who dances under the name Princess Poke-My-Hiney...plus random beautiful guest stars of 18-21 who are all seriously sapphic, blithely promiscuous, and open to trying pretty much anything involving lesbian BDSM. Males rarely appear, although there is a subplot where Fate Will orders a dozen of her ranch hands to impregnate Melissa so that Fate's husband Grim (Tim McGraw) will return from touring and think Fate's given him a child...and Fate won't have to risk her looks and figure with a pregnancy or allow anyone male to have sex with her. 

The stories are hot, yes. They're also fairly funny, and all parties, top and bottom, enjoy the BDSM. Even the subplot where Melissa is being bred by the cowboys is only an excuse for Princess Poke-My-Hiney to rescue her and have hot sex with Melissa ("Gosh, her taste reminds me of Catherine...I wonder where Cathy is these days!"). Everyone loves (extremely) large plastic strap-on dildos, and all actual males are mocked for having tiny penises. All the girls have foot fetishes, too-- which may or not say something about "Rebecca", or at least say something about fashionable fetishes in the Noughts. 

If I have any real criticism it's that the various girls who are topping Catherine or Melissa or Lynn or Jennifer do a lot of sexual humiliation based on slurs ("Get over here, you cunt-loving little lezzie slut pig"). That part seems...unnecessary and mean-spirited. I wanted Melissa and/or Jennifer to tell the older characters that they were all "lezzie sluts" and that there was nothing at all wrong with that...and that they were proud bottoms, but not "pigs". I also had to wince a bit when Fate Will hires Princess Poke-My-Hiney as an escort and makes her talk in 1930s cowboy movie-stereotypical "redskin" dialect. Beyond that, "Housewives at Play" is fun.

Amazon does have some collected editions of "Housewives at Play", but they're asking something like $140 for a collection of issues Nr. 1-4. I like the series, but I'm not going to pay that kind of money for a paperbound graphic novel that's nearly twenty years old. 

If any of you out there over the aether know anything about the publishing history of "Housewives at Play" or about its author/artist, I hope you'll let me know. I'd like to know if "Rebecca" ever finished the story, and I'd like to see more of her art.

Next time I post here, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into why it's no longer possible to have any sexual preferences and why kink-shaming is now seen as perfectly okay. I want to write about why I can't imagine ever asking a partner to do anything specific or ever telling a partner about any particular interests I might have. I once heard a gay acquaintance described as "so far deep in the closet he can see Narnia", and I want to write about how that phrase can be applied across the gender-orientation spectrum these days...and about how we seem to be losing any sense that sex is worth doing, let alone exploring.

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.