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?