Three Nine Eight: Social Construction

 I've been thinking about fantasies lately. I'm not actually having fantasies, mind you. What I've been doing is thinking about the concept of sexual fantasy. Here in the blighted year Twenty-Five, there are questions worth exploring. What does The Discourse tell us about--

1. Who gets to have fantasies? Are some of us-- male, cis-het, white, over 30 --allowed to have sexual fantasies any longer? 

2. What fantasies are acceptable these days? Who sets the terms for judgment? 

3. Is it only cis-het male fantasies that are seen as problematic in The Discourse? Do women despise cis-het males for having fantasies?

4. What is it that conjures up particular fantasies? How do we choose (do we choose?) the fantasies we do have? 

5. Can we ever admit to having sexual fantasies, let alone try to enact them with a partner? 

6. Can you still discuss your fantasies, even with a partner? Is the answer different for women? 

7. Why does it seem that any fantasies and/or kinks are nowadays regarded as acts of aggression or as an admission of being a pathetic loser? 

I'm an aging Pale Person of Penis. I recognize that in the lands of The Discourse, my sexual performance is instantly seen as inevitably (or inherently) "mediocre". I recognize that any fantasies whatsoever that I might have will be instantly categorized as misogynist. There's no away around that.

When I was at university, the key word was supposed to be communication. You were encouraged to tell your partner what it is that you liked or hoped to try, and you were encouraged as well to ask your partner about her own fantasies, kinks, and interests. You were encouraged to explore new avenues of pleasure. Those things are long gone, of course. I'm not about to admit to a partner/companion that these days I do still have fantasies. I'm certainly not going to tell her what my fantasies are about. I'm not about to admit to fantasies that might be found either "problematic" or (worse) boring.

You'll need to understand that in the realm of The Discourse, all sex involving cis-het white males is defined as boring. As a white, cis-het male over thirty, I'm well aware that any fantasies I create must be boring. I've spent my entire life trying not to be boring, but it seems that my efforts must, by definition, be futile. 

Now I'm not going to discuss any of my kinks or fantasies. I won't take that risk. Lovely girls can discuss those things, but not anyone cis-het male. 

I wonder whether kinks and fantasies are nowadays supposed to fit into the Born That Way category. We're rather disapproving of the idea of choice these days. The idea of experimenting with things-- genders, sexual orientations, fantasies, kinks, social presentation --has been largely rejected. Only the authentic counts. Only innate qualities and interests count. Experimentation is regarded as...what? Poaching on the territory of the Born That Way? Lying to oneself and one's partner? 

A friend once told me that she couldn't imagine me ever being too shy or too ashamed to tell a partner what I wanted. She might've been right about that when I was twenty-five, but these days...no. There's no way I would tell anyone-- even a skilled professional companion --what my interests and fantasies might be. 

Next time...next time maybe I'll try to talk about how fantasies are created. Maybe that's an easier topic.

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 Seven Nine: Berlin

Last evening I discovered a new FMTY girl's channel at YouTube. She calls herself "Lucy Huxley" and her channel is called "The Whore's Bedroom". 

She's a Vancouver girl, an ex-ballet student who's ended up as a Berlin-based escort. Her YouTube videos all begin her sitting cross-legged on her bed in Berlin and talking about her life and career:"My name is Lucy. I'm a whore, and this is my bedroom." She talks about how she sees her job and her clients, and she tells stories from her life. 

Lovely girl-- auburn hair, maybe not quite thirty, lovely eyes, wry sense of humor. If I sound like I have a crush on her, well...of course I do. I like her voice, and I love the deadpan introduction: My name is Lucy. I'm a whore. I do like the way she makes the word sound. My own parasocial voices whisper to me that while I'd never have the money to book her, she'd be very likely to be someone I could have a conversation with. 

Huxley, she says-- she chose Aldous Huxley's name for her own work name. Well, I do like that. I like a few of Aldous Huxley's books ("Crome Yellow" and "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" and "The Devils of Loudon") rather a lot, and for whatever it's worth, Aldous Huxley died on my birthday. How's that for a connection?

She explains in her first video that she has a firm policy-- any booking of three hours or more has to come with lunch or dinner, since she's a girl who gets hungry easily and becomes irritable when hungry. My first thought was...steak or Szechuan? It's all too easy to imagine booking her for four hours and spending half of the time talking over dinner.

She says that she prides herself on her Girlfriend Experience talents, and I have no doubt that she'd make a wonderful companion. Again, this is all very parasocial, but listening to her stories makes me believe that I'd feel secure enough with her to explain what my interests are and ask for the things that would give me pleasure. The sense of humor she has in her videos is dry as the Atacama Desert, and that's exactly to my tastes. 

I did follow the link to her Twitter feed, and she has excellent legs and a very knowing smile. That may well be all GFE marketing, but that's fine. I'd love to be able to talk with someone again, to be able to talk to a lovely girl who'd be willing to listen to me. She says that she's always liked older men-- ever since she was a budding ballerina --because, yes, they have financial security, but also because their stories are better. She says that she's never laughed at or mocked a client, and that she understands that many of her clients are just a bit afraid. Well, that's something that did make me sigh. You've read my last several entries. You'll understand that here in this grim and charmless year 2024 I am anxious and afraid of the idea of telling a lovely Young Companion anything at all about myself and my interests. 

Now one of her videos explained that she's based in Berlin and can visit clients all across the EU, and that she could certainly visit friends and family in Canada-- but that she's excluded by law from ever going to the US. Apparently, if you're a sex worker the US won't allow you entry (even though sex work is legal in Germany). I hadn't known that. Yet one more thing about US law that makes me shake my head in disbelief. It makes me very uncomfortable, too, that US Border Control monitors social media to help identify sex workers (even nude models) who might be trying to enter the US, even as nothing more than tourists. 

Well, I could never afford Ms. Huxley, but I do enjoy her YouTube videos, and I wish I could look across a table at someone like her and just say, This is what and who I am, and this is what I enjoy. Is that something you could work with? 

Here I am tonight, listening to hard rains falling over my city. In some better world Ms. Huxley and I would be talking over Campari-sodas about games and kinks and flirting shamelessly. I really would like to have a girl in my life and bed whose judgment I'm not afraid of, and whose skills and discretion I'd trust.

Three Seven Four: Notes

 Once upon a time Liberty and I were sitting on the porch steps of a weekend cottage we'd rented by a river in the hills. It was an autumn morning, and we were drinking coffee while there still mist outside. She was wearing nothing but one of my pullover sweaters-- I remember that -- and leaning back with her legs stretched out. I traced a finger along her leg and she laughed.

Her last older man, she said, had always liked her in anything that showed off her legs. A beautiful young girl, he'd told her, should always sit in one of two ways in a skirt-- legs crossed to show off how long they were, or else slightly parted so that she'd be a bit on display, so she'd be aware that strangers could tell she wasn't wearing underwear. I remember kissing her knee and telling her that I agreed with that. 

She sat up and kept her legs apart. No problem, she told me. She disliked ever wearing underwear anyway, and she liked having me look at her. What she wondered, she said, was about why her last older man had wanted her on display for strangers. It wasn't that she minded that so much, but she questioned whether he'd wanted others to see her to show them that she was there as his sex toy or that he wanted her to be aware of and excited by being on display. Older men, she grinned, all had very precise interests. She raised an eyebrow and looked at me for comments.

I told her that I understood. I liked being able to look at her, and I liked knowing that she was available to be seen and touched. And if she was sitting there, legs a bit parted, she'd be aware of how vulnerable she was. She nodded-- older men liked her to seem vulnerable. She was twenty-two that autumn, and she laughed about that. Maybe two or three more years, she said, maybe two or three more years when she could still be a young girl who could be corrupted and violated. After that, she said, she'd have to act like a grown-up woman, and she had no idea how sex and sex play went with adulting.

Older men, she said, had always been something she'd liked, all the way back to the kayak shop owner when she was a teen in the Pacific Northwest. Older men were something she could learn from, and she liked that-- learning things, having someone teach her things. Kayaking, rock climbing, art, books-- she wanted to learn about things and try being something or someone new all the time. That went for sex, too. Older men were the sounding boards who showed her all kinds of pleasures and games and things to explore. That, she told me, was what I was there for.  I had to be flattered by the vote of confidence. 

The older man before that, before the one who'd taught her to sit open-thighed, was a foot fetish devotee. She grinned and told me that she pretty much believed that older men were always into feet. Not that she minded, she said. It was an easy fetish for her, since she'd grown up barefoot half the time anyway. Her foot fetish man had paid for lots of expensive pedicures for her, too. And having her toes sucked and her feet and ankles licked felt nice. Foot jobs were fun to do, she told me, especially with uncircumcised men. The only thing she didn't understand, she said, was why a lot of foot fetish play that she found at places like PornHub seemed to be about submission and domination. She didn't think her older man was creepy about the fetish, and she didn't feel like she needed to play the domme and order him around. He enjoyed it, she liked the way what he did for her felt, and just asking for something was always better than ordering someone around. 

I remember her looking at me with a raised eyebrow then. She told me that when I wanted to blindfold her or tie her wrists, or play with a riding whip, I should just ask. Or she could ask me to do it to her. Neither of us needed to play at domination, let alone humiliation. She was much more submissive than dominant by nature, but while she liked being a bottom, she never understood humiliation as sex.

She asked me if I ever wanted to suck her toes or lick her feet, and I just shrugged. If she asked, I told her, I'd do it. I was, after all, her current official evil older predator, and I was open to whatever she wanted to try. Good, Liberty said. She expected her older men to teach her things and she expected them never to be afraid or ashamed to explore things with her. 

She opened her legs a bit more and grinned at me. What she liked, she said, was that attitude. I'd been good at creating scenarios for us, and she liked that. I'd been good at playing faux-nonconsensual games, too. She liked that about older men-- the being able to understand about faux-nonconsensual sex. Boys her own age, she said, knew nothing about games and irony. Sex, she said, was about pleasure and having fun. She didn't need people who were grindingly earnest about sex, or about anything else, in her life. 

I make notes about you, Liberty told me. You're in my journal. I expect you to show me things.  I remember that, and I was proud of it.  

Keep sitting like that, I told her. Especially in public. Keep avoiding underwear. And I'll think of things. I will work at that. I know my role. 

Liberty is someone I do still think about. I remember the stories she told me and the things she and I explored. I do have to write about her more.

Three Six Zero: Brushstrokes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Three Four Zero: Education

 I have been thinking more about the idea of paid companions and FMTY girls. There's something to be said for an essay looking at the difference between a GFE companion and the FMTY girls at Escort Twitter. And that's a difference that goes to something in my own life.

GFE girls exist to...what? Well, they exist to make their clients think they're not with a paid companion. Or at least they exist to make people who see their clients think that the client isn't with a paid companion. Does that sound right? 

The bios of FMTY girls seem to stress that they have the social capital to be in Michelin-star restaurants and elegant settings, that they know how to perform the role of someone used to such settings. What they perform is...class. And that does leave me just a bit melancholy.

I have always thought of myself as having social capital. I know that I suffer from what David Brooks called the "income/status disjoint"-- I have advanced degrees and I'm reasonably well-read...but I have no money and I don't have the accoutrements of the monied classes. As someone who has managed to project the idea of genteel poverty most of his life, I've been able to function on the edges of the social world. I can function well at small hipster cafes and restaurants, but I'd never risk a Michelin-star restaurant or a high-end hotel. I'd certainly never risk going to a resort. And I'd never, never risk a conversation with a beautiful woman who knew anything about business, finance, or the mechanics of politics.

A friend asked me the other evening what I looked for in relationships. I wasn't sure how to answer. What could I say? Someone lovely, long-legged, a fraction of my age, and averse to underwear? Someone with a Comparative Lit degree who likes obscure books? Someone who'll call me late at night and talk about wonderfully random things while flirting shamelessly?

What I do know is that I'd be really, really at sea across a table from an FMTY girl. From what I can infer, part of the arrangement between an FMTY girl and her client is that they go out to high-end venues. Part of what she gives the client is the chance to show off his social skills and his knowledge. She markets herself as someone who has the beauty and social capital to be shown off, and part of what he gets is the opportunity to feel like he belongs in her company. I'd be awful at that.

I think that what I'd look for in an FMTY girl would be someone to be a kind of life coach for me. I'd be the one who wants to be taught how to fit in. Look-- I know which fork to use, and I can read the French on a menu. What I can't do is feel like I fit in. Walking into a restaurant with a Michelin star would trigger a massive case of Impostor Syndrome, even if I had on my magical class ring from New Haven. Checking into an elegant resort for a long weekend with an FMTY girl would make me instantly feel like I was adrift in an alien world. 

I'd be asking my companion to...make me feel like I fit in. I know how to hold a conversation at an "Asian street food" restaurant in a hip neighborhood near a university. I know how to walk through a serious museum. But being at any of the places the FMTY girls post on the Twitter timelines would leave me anxious, depressed, and empty. Yes, the terms of the arrangement might ensure that I'd be having sex with a very beautiful, sexually skilled companion, but I'd nonetheless feel that I'd botched the part of the evening devoted to seduction and flirtation. And, yes, I'd feel like I'd failed. I'd feel like I hadn't lived up to the skills my companion relied on in her clients-- like I didn't have social capital enough to understand and appreciate what she was offering me. 

A life coach. That's what I do need-- a life coach. Someone who could make me feel less anxious. Someone who could teach me to appreciate what she's offering. I can read the French on a menu, but I won't understand what the dishes are. I have a couple of tailored black blazers, but I don't own a suit. I have no idea how to hold a conversation with someone who talks about things that aren't obscure books and films. I have no idea how to be with someone like an FMTY girl, and I have no idea whatsoever how to have an evening with someone who's at home in the social world. I have no idea how to perform outside of a very well-fortified niche.

I'd make an FMTY girl feel like she was wasting her time, whatever fee she was getting. I wouldn't even know what kind of gift cards to send her. I'd be a disappointment from the moment she met me at the aerodrome or in the hotel lobby.

Three Three Three: FMTY

I am still unsure about the social rules at Escort Twitter. I understand that "luxury companions" go on tour these days. They set up a list of cities and book appointments with clients in each. And of course there's the FMTY idea-- Fly Me To You.  I understand the basic idea, of course. Just not the attendant procedures.

The client is screened, and then he provides an airline ticket (first-class or business class, obviously) and the escort flies out to see him in his home city. The assumption is that the girl will be staying at a high-end boutique hotel to joining the client at a resort. Several of the Escort Twitter girls have posted photos of airline gift cards sent them by clients. A couple have shown photos of gift books they've been sent with $100 bills placed at random between pages. I do like that latter idea, although it's not something I'd ever be able to do. One girl did tweet: "FMTY deposits tucked inside cloth-bound art books *chef's kiss*." The idea is lovely, but forever out of reach.

Gift cards seem quite efficient, mind you. They keep the airline tickets from appearing on any married client's billing statement, and I'm assuming they can't just be cashed in.At least I'd hope they couldn't be cashed in. What could be more humiliating than waiting at the aerodrome arrival gate and slowly realizing that your Muse & Luxury Companion has flown off to Paris or Tahiti by herself...on your gift cards? 

I do wonder about the screening process. How would you as a client be vetted? What would the escort actually do about that? I'm aware that there are blogs in the escort world  where escorts talk to one another about clients both good and bad. Is there a Red Flag List for escorts-- men whom no one should meet?  Would a potential FMTY girl use a credit rating service? I have no idea if individuals can sign up to check creditworthiness with the various credit bureaus, but again...that's a scary thing: sorry, but your credit score is only a 710... Worse, would a FMTY girl insist on your real name and run a Google search? I'd like to know how the vetting works. I remember the anguish I went through the last time I purchased a car. That was only allowing a Honda dealership to examine my life and judge me. Having a lovely, high-end escort do it would be much, much more terrifying.

I've written about my hotel-room door fear-- the moment when an escort would knock at my door, then recoil in anger and derision when she saw what I looked like. That's a nightmare that always includes hearing what angry things she's telling her booker over her smartphone as she stalks away to the elevator. Wouldn't it be worse at the aerodrome arrival gate? And wouldn't it be worse still to get a text or an email from her curtly denying your FMTY or dinner date application?

I have always thought of myself as a gentleman, and as at least marginally cultured. I was brought up to the standards of a very old-guard city and educated at a university with a reputation stretching back to the early 1700s. I do know which fork to use, and for a long time I thought I was capable of making conversation with elegant and charming companions. I haven't believed that in rather a while now, mind you. A very lithe and leggy and clever escort in London Town posted a photo of where she'd gone on a dinner date and commented that: Wonderful evening with the best company, at The Wolsey. Thank you, Sparkling Heart! I of course had to look up The Wolsey. It seems like a restaurant worth trying. And yet...and yet...I wouldn't know how to order, let alone dress to London Town standards. I can't imagine what I could do at The Wolsey or its equivalents in other cities that wouldn't mark me as unfit to be seen with a high-end Escort Twitter companion. 

I have faced down my PhD exams and the Bar exam. I have walked alone at night through cities where the local werewolves are afraid to go out after dark. I have lectured to classes filled with military officers and foreign officials. I have done those things. But standing at the aerodrome waiting for a FMTY arrival is beyond me. Surviving the vetting process for an FMTY encounter is something that's very probably beyond me. 

Here in the latter part of my life, I have come to fear that certain things are beyond me. Ordering and discussing an elegant dinner, making flirtatious and intriguing conversation, knowing how to first take an FMTY girl's hand or brush a fingertip over her bare leg-- I really can't do any of that.

Three Two Seven: Scandals

 There's a new scandal on line around the 2017 Kristen Roupenian short story "Cat Person". Another author, Alexis Nowicki, has published a piece at Slate.com saying that Roupenian drew on the details of Nowicki's own affair with an older man as the basis for "Cat Person". So there's an argument on line about authorial voice, integrity, and who has the right to tell someone's story. That argument is exhausting enough. What makes me anxious, though, is how the person-- called "Charles" in the Slate piece --is being portrayed.

When I was an undergraduate, I ran with a circle of people who planned on writing things-- novels and short stories as well as non-fiction. We took it for granted that one day we'd all be published. I expected that I'd have a career where I'd publish four or five academic history volumes. 

And we all took it as a given that we'd make appearances as at least minor characters in friends' stories and novels. I thought that was a fun idea, and I looked forward to being thirty-five or forty and running into friends and raising a glass and grinning over how we'd appeared in print--- hey, look, I'm the detective's sidekick! I'm the ex-husband! I'm the girl he meets in the airport bar! 

But here in the age of the gender wars, no one gets to feel any delight at being in a story. When Ms. Roupenian used Nowicki's real-life relationship for "Cat Person" she made the affair much darker and unpleasant. The older male in "Cat Person" became the villain of the story. Ms. Nowicki wrote in Slate that the real relationship was nothing at all like what Roupenian depicted. Here in the age of the gender wars, though, no older male can be portrayed in fiction as anything other than creepy and incompetent in bed.

The new "Cat Person" scandal has left me anxious and self-loathing. Any depictions of ex-lovers, and especially older ex-lovers, have to be scathing and savage. The older lover-- Charles --in the real life affair isn't able to defend himself. The Nowicki essay concludes with the discovery that Charles died in 2020. On first reading I thought he'd died of Covid-19, but the essay's insistence that he died "suddenly" leaves me thinking that he committed suicide. Not over the story-- Nowicki never implies that. But nonetheless, Charles isn't able to defend himself in a world where all fiction is taken as auto-fiction. 

So now I have a new anxiety. I still move in circles where people write and blog, and I keep thinking how easy it would be for some ex-lover, a Young Companion from days past, to turn me into the villain of the story. I've been the Older Admirer in relationships for a long time now, and while there are ex-lovers who stay in contact and seem to have fond memories of what we did when we were together, I know that anyone with a laptop or a smartphone can make me into someone distasteful. 

I style myself as roué, and that of course makes me an easy mark as a villain. It would be all-too-easy to portray me as the bad guy. It would be just as easy to portray me as useless in bed. And it's all-too-easy to sit in my flat and assume that somewhere in the city, a faceless, nameless girl is telling an audience that I'm mediocre (at best) as a lover and creepy and disgusting in person. 

"Cat Person" itself made me wince at how the older lover was presented, and the new scandal leaves me convinced that someone somewhere is re-writing the past I believed in. I always thought that most of my past encounters had ended with fond memories on both sides. I can't risk believing that any more.

Three Two Four: Fears

 Sometimes I do take counsel of my fears.  

Right now there's one more place downtown where I'm afraid to go.

One recent Saturday, on a bright summery afternoon I went to the hipster cafe downtown for a drink, and I met a lovely co-ed, a girl of twenty-two who'd just graduated university here, We chatted, flirted a bit, ordered cocktails. Towards dusk she walked home with me-- yes, holding my hand --and went swimming with me. We swam, kissed, went back upstairs to my flat. The next morning I drove her back to her car.  All well and good.  She had lovely legs, amazing blue eyes, and a mass of chestnut hair. 

I gave her my number, and while she was attentive and flirty and talked about borrowing books, I haven't heard from her in two weeks. So she ghosted me. Well, it happens. I'm supposing that I was an experiment, something out of the ordinary, something outrageous, that she was doing in that strange liminal space between graduation and going into the corporate world. Okay, it does leave me a bit melancholy. She was very bright and fun and adventurous, and I was hoping for a small summertime affair.  Well...alas.

But now I am afraid to go back to the hipster cafe. I'm not sure which word to use-- afraid or ashamed. The girl and I flirted shamelessly at the bar, and we told each other stories. Going back with her on my arm would be one thing, but going back alone is another. The flirtation, the semi-dancing up against one another--- it's not so much that.  But it is the stories. The girl-- Avery was her name --was very open about her tastes and fluid gender preferences and her adventures. But she's a beautiful girl. She can get away with those stories.

I of course am male and of a Certain Age. I'm of a different generation, and I am embarrassed and anxious about the stories I told her. Who heard them? What effect might they have had on how the bar staff regard me?  Did the bar staff believe the stories? Is it worse if they thought I was making some of it up? If they thought all of it was true, would they look down on me? What exactly am I afraid of-- reputation? Being told I'm not welcome at the bar? Did random customers complain about the stories Avery and I told? 

There are things I've done in my life that do make for good stories, but I've suddenly become anxious about my reputation and how I'm regarded downtown. I want to be the flaneur, the quiet figure who sits and has a drink or two and occasionally has a conversation. The stories I'd tell a lovely girl as part of a seduction or a flirtation-- those seem increasingly likely to marginalize me. 

I  spent a lot of weekend mornings at the hipster cafe. Very good fresh croissants, very good flat whites, very skilled bar staff. But I can't go back now. I'm afraid of what the staff might think of me. And, no, this is not about any age difference. Avery asked my age early on and thought the number was irrelevant, or at least amusing. It's not about that at all.

I will miss the hipster cafe. Just as I miss the oyster bar on the plaza. But right now I can't face what the staff might think of me. 

Three Two Zero: Night Drive

 A tall lovely girl in North Carolina told me once about a story from the spring when she graduated high school. The story is simple enough. She was driving home one night to her parents' house in the countryside and she decided to do something transgressive, something daring and wicked. I thought I knew where the story was going, that either she masturbated while driving or else picked up a stranger and had sex in her battered old SUV. I might have raised a wary eyebrow at the latter possibility-- too trite, really, and really not her. I would've doubted that story. Masturbating while driving would have been seriously sexy, but of course that's been done in lots of late-night "erotic thrillers" on cable.  Twenty or thirty years ago, Joan Severance would've done that while driving some Italian sports car in a Cinemax late-night film or a Red Shoe Diaries episode.  She didn't do either, though.

She did something else. She was in a long sundress, she said, and she just stopped by the roadside and got out of the dress. She was braless, and she'd been experimenting with being panty-free in spring and summer. She settled into the car seat and drove home naked the last couple of  miles. Late at night, country road, tree-lined. Very much a fun image-- she's a beautiful girl now, and at seventeen she'd have had a deliciously coltish beauty. I did have to admire her courage and her defiance. It felt good, she said-- a spring night, her window halfway down, the feel of the wind and the upholstery, the rush of doing something risky. 

Unlike my NZ friend and her posh Wellington set, my NC friend hadn't spent her teens as a party girl with an array of older lovers. She told me that she always felt very sexual, but that for her sex was less about having a lover than it was about finding out about her own body and her own dreams. Yes, she's another bookish girl in my circle--- a lovely girl who (like me, too) lived inside her head and inside books. Being naked driving home down some dark road would've been just the sort of thing she'd do, just the sort of thing she'd have recalled from some novel. It's an amazing image, though, and one I've treasured since ever she told me about it. 

I'll offer her up one other compliment here, one other thing she did that's always meant the world to me. Once upon a time, one long-ago November-- my birthday --she called me late at night and sang Neko Case's "Hold On, Hold On" to me. An unexpected gift, and one that left me breathless and near tears. "Hold On, Hold On" is a favourite song, one that's meant a lot to me down the years. She had-- has --a lovely voice. Lots of years singing in school and church choirs. So...she sang for me and I felt for once that I did matter, that someone lovely and clever thought I was valuable. That night, that call, has been in my memories ever since-- one the best birthday moments in my life.

She offered me one other lovely comment a couple of years after she sang for me, and it's something I want to keep. She was trying to use sugar baby websites to help support herself as an art student, and she kept a blog about it for a while:

Sugaring is dangerous for obvious reasons. I was going to a top secret meeting with a person who, for all I knew, would turn out to be someone who collects human female hides and would force hydration upon me. So I texted a good friend--- the only friend to whom I could ever reveal this sort of information ---to be concerned if I didn't give him an update by morning. Coincidentally, the friend I texted was my first Older Man, but more of a mentor and certainly not a Sugar Daddy. If he had been such a thing, I hardly think we could've considered it sugaring. He says I'd have been his mistress, a sort of extended affair between compatible souls. We are very much alike, my first Older Man and I, and because of that, I do wish it were him instead.

Well, that is a compliment. I'm glad that I she trusted me and that she saw me as someone who cared about her. And, yes...she would've been a perfect mistress in the eighteenth-century usage. In a better world, I'd have been able to take her into keeping: a flat near university, an allowance, having her as my companion at small dinners or at concerts, long conversations over good wines. I'll note that she loved "demimondaine" and "demi-rep" as terms. Wrote them down in her Moleskine. And..."compatible souls"... That does mean a lot. 

These are all memories I want to keep. She was (and is) very much a girl I treasure. I still do dream of finding a gallery opening of her paintings one day and walking in to congratulate her. 

Three One Nine: Closed Door

 My lovely friend Miss Ginny in Montreal wrote me once upon a time with this story. I found it utterly delightful. She'd have been seventeen at the time, having just acquired her own first boyfriend, an Older Man of...I think...thirty-two. The story is so perfectly Ginny:

I only remember this.

At a friend's party, her stepfather hand-picked me, I suppose. "I always noticed you," he said. We left the teenaged voices and skateboards and gangly limbs by shutting the door on it all. And just-like-that it was quiet. It was so quiet, but we were only down the hallway. Only a wall separated us from all of that.

Oh yes-- one thing. My boyfriend was out there in that room. My first boyfriend, and an "older guy" himself, incidentally, but not in the way I was looking for I suppose. This was complicated by a boy (a "peer") who was also in attendance, who liked me for a couple of months. The boy and the boyfriend were in conflict. The boy was hurling all sorts of unsavory insults ("child molester", etc) at my boyfriend, but for a few moments I was away from all of that. Remember? We shut the door on that.

So what was different about my boyfriend, old enough as he was, and The Stepfather? When the boyfriend said I was pretty, I was surprised. "You're a doll, a real living doll." "Really?" I had never thought of myself in that way. I didn't see myself as a younger girl, but as an Equal, maybe. I didn't feel any delicious imbalance in power. I wasn't aware of my youth, maybe. However, with him I felt it. It was full in the air. There seemed to be a Game going on that I didn't understand.

I understood that somehow, I had something he wanted. I never thought of myself in those terms. So he shut the door on the party: "I want to show you some art books." I remember that some Game was going on, something that required rules, because I remember thinking about the way I'd sit. About the way I'd arrange myself. (Prostrate, by the way. Bare legs bent at the knees, calves criss-crossed) Our arms were very close. "I always noticed you. Slavic eyes." (A thrill-- all those afternoons coming home to my girlfriend's schoolbags flung on the floor, had he been watching me? I'd never noticed.)

And then the most delicious sense of touch, ever-- he trailed one finger down my profile. "I want to paint you. You should sit for me. You were meant to be painted nude." "I will, I will!" It was hard to understand him because of his accent. I made a bold move-- threw out the pretense: "Do you like Nabokov?" Yes, he did. Lolita was brought up. (When I had given a copy of Lolita to my boyfriend-- he hadn't read it, nor heard of it --he complained, "There's too much French!") He ran his finger over my bare knee and thigh. But we were taking too long...our absence would be noticed. Books gathered up. Hair smoothed, skirt straightened. I kissed him on the cheek and returned to the living room.

He had given me his card, and once I worked up enough courage to walk by the studio, but I couldn't go in. I think I saw him at the art supply store. There is such a sense of regret. I know my friend's mother eventually threw him out of the house. I wonder if he would still like me if he saw me now.

I still remember that finger on my profile and on my leg. I don't know if I've felt something like that since. Why didn't my boyfriend do something like that? Maybe I felt that I could outsmart him-- unlike the painter.

A lovely story. Just the kind of thing Miss Ginny would tell. I remember asking her about it on the phone one night and hearing her do this major sigh. She'd passed up the chance to be a muse, she said. She told me that she imagined posing nude for him, imagined feeling like one of the young would-be models in "Blow-Up". I do hope she finally saw "La Belle Noiseuse" sometime.

Levin posed nude in high school for a couple of people-- not posing for phone camera nudes, but formally posing to be sketched and painted. That made all the difference, she told me, that it was a formal thing. I of course am thinking right now of the young Liv Tyler in "Stealing Beauty", posing topless under a Tuscan olive tree. That's something I can use as a template for both Levin and Miss Ginny. Not that I can draw, mind you, let alone paint.

This makes me think, too, about a new memoir that's appeared in France-- Vanessa Springora's "Consent: A Memoir".  The book is about her affair at fourteen or fifteen with the much older writer Gabriel Matzneff, who was fifty. I haven't read the new English translation, but I probably will. Miss Ginny, Levin, and Liberty all liked older men, and Miss Ginny and Levin sought out Older Admirers who were literary or artistic...though of course Miss Ginny's high school experiences were mostly unrequited crushes and daydreams of European cities and literary parties. I seem to have known a great many girls in my life who were attracted to age-disparate relationships (none like Ms. Springora's, mind you) and who had stories to tell that were often romantic, usually complex, generally over-intellectualized, and sometimes very, very hot. 

There's always the question of what comes after, yes? There's very much the question of how the girl reacts, ten years later, when she's in her later twenties and runs across the man for whom she was a muse. There's awkwardness built in, but also the possibility of something not unlike friendship. A possibility--- and that's a relationship I'd like to put into a story. I'd like to think that the male character (my voice, of course-- how could it not be?) would have the intelligence never, ever to say anything that approximates "I taught you well" or "You turned out like I knew you would."  Those things would deny her own agency.  What could you say, though? I'm thinking about something Dr. Lecter says in an episode of "Hannibal": With all my knowledge and intuition, I could never entirely predict you. I can feed the caterpillar, I can whisper through the chrysalis, but what hatches follows its own nature and is beyond me. That's a brilliant quote, but it has to be said in a way that isn't creepy-- it has to be said in a way that makes it mean that she is something you may have helped along but didn't claim to create, that she's become herself in some brilliant way.

Does that make any sense?

Three One Seven: Salle D'Armes

 My lovely long-legged blonde friend Jill in Wellington NZ told me once about her high school friend who became a nationally-ranked fencer. The girl was good enough to get invited to fencing competitions and fencing master classes all around the Pacific. The girl's name-- I think --was Sarah.  My NZ friend knew at least two other girls named Sarah when she was at her posh private school, so I may be wrong about the name.

But what I do know is the fencer girl (we'll call her Sarah anyway) went off to a fencing training camp in China and had a very hot, fairly public affair with a "much older"  and rather famous German fencing coach. Some things remain unclear in the story. Was the man her coach or just one of the coaches at the camp? I can't decide which would be hotter--- having a torrid affair at 16 or 17 with her mentor at fencing (foil? épée? sabre?) or meeting and hooking up with an internationally-rated German coach while in the Mysterious Orient. So-- I know she was sixteen or seventeen (Jill was just turning seventeen when she and Sarah were emailing about Sarah's adventures in China), but I don't know if she was in Shanghai or Beijing. I don't know what "much older"means here, although given Jill's own tastes in those days, I'd suspect that "much older" means that the man would've been in his forties. 

The story (or as much as I know of it) really is hot. And I would love to know more. Backstories matter, mind you, just as Details Matter. Context and setting are always key. It matters how they met, and how the flirtation began. It very much matters who made the first move. 

My friend at McGill in Montreal told me that she'd gone to university very much in order to have affairs with distinguished and literary older academics, but she was always brought up short by the feeling that she didn't know the correct procedure for initiating an affair with a distinguished Older Man. Was she supposed to look young and vulnerable and wait for him to be predatory? Was she supposed to drape herself on his desk in something slinky and offer herself up as muse and sacrifice? What, she asked, were the procedures in these matters? Who was supposed to initiate? What costumes and poses did she need to know about? Importantly-- which of her female friends should she tell, and how dramatic should her announcement be?

The athletic world-- and especially something like fencing, which strikes me as a fairly incestuous community --might be a place where physical affairs were carried on fairly openly. After all, as an athlete, everything you do is about your body: you're focused on the flesh, and on competition. It may also be a place where mentor-mentee relationships are common. Maybe. I have no idea how age-disparate relationships are seen in China, or what age gaps are regarded as acceptable. And...what are are rules for overseas training camps? Remember the old naval saying: No sin below the equator? Did something like that hold true? If you're a few thousand miles from school and home, training and competing amongst foreigners, are all the usual rules suspended? My Montreal friend laughed once and told me that at Comparative Lit conferences in New York or Vancouver or London, the accepted thing was that quick affairs and gender experimentation were perfectly fine. Distance made everything seem permissible...and hotter.

I do wonder about whether Sarah and her coach spent whole nights together, or whether they sneaked off to dorm rooms or offices or showers for sex. What were the mechanics of the affair. Jill in Wellington had given up underwear by seventeen, but had Sarah? Could she be wickedly panty-free in a fencing costume? How easy would it be to get out of fencing togs for impromptu sex? These are the things I wonder about, after all. And...was the man married back wherever home was? Did he laugh over drinks and tell other coaches about Sarah?  How did Sarah tell her fencing companions...and what did they say? She fired off dozens of emails to Jill about what was happening, but did the fencing authorities in Beijing or Shanghai know what was happening? I'm under the impression that Sarah's affair with the coach was fairly open, that she loved being on the man's arm in public, or at bars. Jill's circle at school did love shocking their audiences, so there may have been some of that.

I have no clue as to how long the affair lasted, or if Sarah ever saw the man again. All I know about Sarah is that she lives in Melbourne these days and has a practice as a physiotherapist.  Before the pandemic, Jill would fly over to see her once or twice a year. 

I wish I knew more, and that I had photos of both of them from those days. There's a very hot tale to be crafted from the story of Sarah and the fencing coach...and a very hot film to be made. I might suggest casting Kenna James and Mick Blue in the video...or maybe Riley Reid and Mick Blue.

Any thoughts?

Three One Six: Austral Summer

 My city is dealing with a sudden winter storm. Roads are closed,  the city is largely shut down, neighborhoods are dealing with loss of power and water. 

Today, though, I found an email from a travel blog that focuses on New Zealand. Today's article was about wine festivals in the North Canterbury hills on the South Island. I did sigh over that. 

Years ago, my lovely posh long-legged blonde friend in Wellington wrote me about her own adventures in the Wairarapa wine country north and east of Wellington one afternoon in the early Austral summer. She'd have been twenty-four or twenty-five when the Adventure happened, and I do wish I could get her thoughts about how she feels these days about the things she did in those days.

I'm assuming that the North Canterbury hills are a different kind of wine country from  the Wairarapa--- pinot noir rather than sauvignon blanc. I do wonder if the sorts of things that happen on wine tours there are as drunkenly wicked as what happened up on the North Island almost a decade ago. My friend described her afternoon like this---

Oh, yes! went to Wairarapa wine country for a festival and had a lot of naughty fun between the vines. 

We met a group of guys early in the day and had a few drinks together, then came across them again at the last vineyard of the day...i sucked two cocks between the vines as the sun was going down...and scored 3 Es!

I asked if this had been two separate encounters, or if the two men had watched each other. Her reply was that

They both watched each other...then one of them licked my cunt...he was incredibly good considering how drunk he was.  i was on the ground, in a black and white striped summer dress, low cut and short, no bra or panties...i actually took a photo on my iphone of him licking my cunt...i have a shot of the top of his head, then another of him looking up & smiling....i love waking up in the morning & seeing photographic evidence of the night's depravity! they were both 50ish...and they both came in my mouth.

I can re-read that now and wish I'd asked more questions once upon a time. She used "we", meaning that she was with one of her girlfriends. What did her girlfriend do? Was she engaged in her own Encounters, or did she just watch? Were phone numbers exchanged with the two fifty-something men?  When she got back to Wellington, who did she tell? She always claimed to have a tight circle of girls she'd known from school and uni, feral posh girls who shared their adventures over drinks. 

No, I never saw the photos. Though I wish I had...and that I could've advised her and/or her girlfriend on how and what kind of photos to take.

Last Sunday was Valentine's Day. Valentine's is a holiday I try to avoid. I'm not likely to have a Young Companion these days, and it's been a while since I had a Valentine's opportunity to share champagne and kisses, or to lick chilled champagne off a lovely girl's erect nipples. I don't miss the sex itself as much as I miss the idea of ritualized romance and the idea that a lovely girl would want to be seen with me in public. I miss the social markers of romance...and the markers of sexual value, 

It's the austral summer in NZ. My posh blonde friend will be haunting the beaches and living in a bikini. Sauvignon blanc time for her, and freckles and a dark tan on those long legs.  

Tonight in the city where I live it'll be just under twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Of course I wish she could be here--- in just a man's faded blue denim shirt...and maybe the merino socks she always wears in cold weather. I'd wish her here to drink pinot noir with me while she curls in my arms and tells me about her stories from austral summers in the first decade of the century. Stories do matter, just as details always matter. 

Winter here still, and I'm unlikely to sleep next to anyone on a winter's night. I have stories tonight, and hot chocolate. But I wish I had my blonde posh Wellington friend.

Three One Five: Sleep-Out

 My lovely posh blonde friend in New Zealand, my long-legged Wellington girl, once spent a long night telling me stories from her past. I've written about some of those before, and you can go back a year or so and read over some of her adventures. 

I've always found her stories to be amazingly hot, although I have developed serious doubts about some of her stories--- the ones about foreign travel, or being swept away by millionaires, or about adventures and encounters in risky or exotic places. 

She did write one brief note, though, that I find believable. I asked her about her introduction to anal sex, and she wrote to say it was with a Maori boy she knew, one who was slightly older. I'm not clear whether he went to her posh school or whether she knew him from her feral party girl life. The story she told me was:

I was 15, both of us drunk as fuck, we'd been at a party together, then went back to his house, he lived in a sleep-out at the back of the garden, we'd fucked a few times before this night, but never in the ass....he was big, and he just went for it, tiny bit of spit for lube...i screamed...he almost stopped, and i screamed at him to keep fucking going!...i was crying and screaming and moaning and loving it...he spit in his hand, then rubbed his dick with it... he came in me and i moaned and cried as hard as i could.  Tama-te-rangi, I still remember his full name...he was gorgeous.

A sleep-out in New Zealand is "a single-storey detached building up to 30 square metres", or "typically a building separate from the main house which is used as extra accommodation. It does not contain cooking or kitchen facilities and usually shares facilities with the main dwelling. Its used in association with the main house and isn't a standalone/ self-contained accommodation option." So there's that. 

I do wonder whether they did the Jill's Introduction to Sodomy experience in the garden or in the sleep-out itself. It does matter where exactly it happened. I'd like it to have happened outdoors, or maybe on the porch of the sleep-out. A risky place, anyway. My friend claims that she always enjoyed the idea of risking being discovered having sex, whether by parents (hers or the boy's), friends, or strangers. And she's never been shy of being naked outdoors.

It matters, too, that the boy was Maori. Jill told me once that the posh girls at her school loved the idea of exotic partners, whether Maori or Islander, and that she loved the whole golden-brown skin tone thing. Telling me that story fifteen years after it happened, she was proud that her first anal experience was with someone exotic.

The sleep-out reminds me of the girl in Baltimore having sex in the carriage house in Silver Springs. Which of course makes me think of where that girl is today--- somewhere in South Brooklyn, I believe.

My one shred of doubt here is that Tama-te-rangi is a fairly famous name in Maori culture. It's also it seems a name given to a fair number of Maori boys, so it's possible that it was simply a common Maori name there in Lower Hutt and Wellington. But I'll never quite be sure.

It does leave me saddened that she didn't tell me the extended story, the story of how she met him, of how they started having sex, of what her girlfriends at school thought, of what happened after he finished that night. How long did they keep up a FWB relationship? And how much older was he? All those things matter... 

I'll always remember her for having amazingly hot stories. I only wish I knew more of them.

Three One Four: Shadows

 Long, long ago I found a short story with an image that's stayed with me ever since. I can't recall the name or the author. That's long gone. The story was in a paperback anthology of  "modern horror" stories I bought at a used bookshop in Tampa. Ten cents-- I do remember that. I bought a dozen paperbacks there at ten cents each.  Mostly sci-fi, since that's what I was very much into in those years. I was in Florida with my parents, and I needed books for the beach or to read while they drove from St. Augustine down to the tip of Florida on A1A and then back up the Gulf side. 

The stories were all "modern horror", which meant (I suppose) that there were no monsters and no demons, or at least no external ones. No creatures in the swamp and nothing supernatural.  All the monsters were human--- isn't that the definition of "modern"? 

Anyway, the story...  I don't recall the author or the title. That's all long lost. What I do recall is a scene where a character--- a teen girl, maybe the daughter of one of the other characters ---comes into the darkened library of a vast old tumbledown house and spends time going through the shelves and reading by a single small lamp. She does that while naked, though I don't recall if she undresses in the library or walks naked through the dark house. I don't recall what happens, and I don't recall what she was reading. But I do recall being stunned and thrilled by the image--- a beautiful young girl reading naked at midnight in some library with a second level and a balcony and huge bookshelves. Well, I was thirteen or fourteen. Of course I was excited by the image. But of course--- of course ---what meant the most to me was the idea that she'd chosen to be naked with books. I do wish I had a copy of the story. I'd like to know what went on before and after that scene and what the story was actually about. I suppose I never will know, but...that image of a girl naked in a shadowy library has been with me all these years, and it's not something I'll give up.

I liked the idea of her waiting 'til the house was asleep or until everyone (parents? hosts? relatives?) had gone out and then wandering naked through the hallways, feeling deliciously daring. Miss Ginny in Montreal said to me once that she'd done that at the lake house her parents used to rent in the summer, and that once--- on a family trip to the Tennessee mountains ---she'd waited for her parents and siblings to drive into town and then spent a morning wandering the big rented vacation house, peeling off her white bikini and dancing through the rooms and out onto the dock, naked except for headphones, a big glass of white wine in her hand. Beautiful, beautiful image--- Miss Ginny petite and blonde at sixteen or seventeen, whirling and pivoting, listening to British Northern soul, feeling wicked and daring.  What lovely teen girl wouldn't like that feeling? Being naked in the house, she said, was like having her hidden cigarette case or flirting online with older men. Transgression, she said, made her feel alive.

The first time Miss Ginny followed my advice and went to class at McGill in a skirt with no underwear, she called me at eleven in the morning, breathless and exhilarated. She felt, she told me, so alive, so vulnerable and daring. She felt, she told me, like Jane Birkin in 1964. I had to laugh at that, and I had to tell her how perfect that thought was.  

I've always encouraged lovely Young Companions to avoid underwear and to sleep naked. I've always told lovely girls that there's an official dress code if they're involved with me. Miss Ginny of course adopted all my suggestions--- I was the older man who was corrupting her, and she knew exactly how to play her role. 

The girl in the story... I have zero idea how the story developed. I have no idea if anyone was watching her or what happened. But I do recall being there in the car reading and thinking that this image was perfect, that one day I'd ask a lovely girl to be naked in a big, dark house and be in and out of the shadows while we flirted and played.  Levin (of course) slept naked, and I loved seeing her stretched naked on afternoon beds making notes and sketches in her journals or curled up naked in a big chair, reading on an autumn night.

I've kept that image with me for all these years, now--- the girl naked in the library, looking over the rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves,  finding one book after another. So breathtaking to imagine her in a big overstuffed chair, turned to hang her bare legs over the chair arm, naked except for reading glasses, reading something antique and amazing by lamplight.

I'll never know what the story was, or how it developed. But that image will be with me forever.

Three One Three: Boxes

I've been going through boxes and looking for ghosts from my past. I found the journals Levin gave me, and I've spent nights sighing over them. It's odd--- I have so few photos of Levin. I have her pencil and pen-and-ink sketches in the Pentalic journals, and she did lovely self-portraits. What I regret, though, is not taking photos of her. 

That's always been a regret for me. There are really no photos of me, let alone any of me with lovely young companions. I've always avoided being photographed. I can think of only two that I know exist. One is of me at my brother's wedding. The other is me standing outside the house where I'd rented rooms while I finished my doctorate. One of me in a tuxedo, one of me in black blazer and black long-sleeved tee. Two existing photos in all these years. I suspect you can guess the reasons. I'm not fond of my body or my face. And to be photographed next to a lovely young companion would only emphasize how I don't belong there next to her. 

The first time I went to Europe, I flatly refused to bring a camera. A camera, I thought, would mark me as a mere tourist, a rube from the provinces. And so I have no record of my life in Vienna. A year of my life might as well not exist. I feel the same way now about photos of girls I've been with, girls I've loved. I've no clue if any of them contrived to get photos of me, or if they managed to get photos of the two of us together-- though I know that I didn't get any.  Back in the day, I'd have been terrified of being photographed, terrified that any photo of me with a lover would be a kind of mockery of the stories my young companions and I told ourselves about who and what we were. I'd have been terrified that her friends would see photos of me and feel only disdain and contempt. 

Levin and Liberty were able to be muses for older lovers. Miss Ginny in Montreal, too. They were all of them proud of being someone's muse. For Levin that was the painting professor, the man who did that nude portrait of her. For Liberty it would've been the gallery owner in Santa Fe. And for Miss Ginny, it was an aging Russian emigre who played chess with her, taught her to do vodka shots, laughed at her obsession with Swinging London and the early Sixties, and gave her a couple of cartons filled with old issues of Cahiers du Cinema. I'm sure they each had other older lovers for whom they were muses and inspirations, but I keep thinking of that portrait above Levin's bed and about Miss Ginny sitting on the floor of her rooms near McGill, going through articles about half-forgotten French and East European films. Or of Liberty in just a man's shirt, being taught how to paint desert light. 

Liberty told me about her mysterious journal with its "My Older Lovers" chapter, about the entries she'd been making since she was sixteen about the things she'd learned about older men and about how to manage older lovers. I never asked to see it, of course. I certainly never asked her what she said about me--- or if I was in her entries at all. But I do have visions of Liberty sitting cross-legged on a sofa in just a pair of faded, cut-off denim short shorts, brushing that mass of red-gold hair off her face and reading from her notebook on older lovers. I always loved her voice, and I can imagine her doing a kind of podcast, telling her stories out over the aether. Liberty was always very direct and straightforward, always very earnest. It's easy to imagine her reading out her guide to older lovers not as regrets or even as erotica, but just as a clear set of memories--- an operator's manual with clear descriptions of procedure.

Miss Ginny claimed to have something similar, by the way--- written in French, like a good Montreal girl, and bits of her father's Polish ---with lists of books and films older admirers had told her about. Miss Ginny, though, would have focused on the books and films. She wanted, she told me, to sleep with at least one famous academic and one rare book dealer. She wanted the lists, she said, wanted to have a bibliography, an annotated bibliography, to go with her life and experiences. 

There are boxes somewhere in rooms wherever Liberty and Miss Ginny and Levin are tonight. I have to believe that they still have boxes, that they've kept journals and notebooks all these years, that they treasure the stories and the lists they made.  All three girls told me that they set out very deliberately to find adventures and experiences, that they  spent their late teens and early twenties keeping notes and lists, finding raw material for the art and the books they wanted to create.

I miss them. I miss that attitude. I miss the way each of them saw my age as a positive thing, the way each of them set out to design a world for herself, the way each of them kept notebooks and lists. 

Three Zero Five: Sheets

 I was looking at a video clip with Kenna James and Skye Blue, two of the girls I do crush on at PornHiub. The clip opens with Kenna waking up naked in a strange bed. That's an opening image that I did like. 

Oh, there's more to it, of course. Skye Blue comes upstairs with carry-out cups of coffee (one cream, one sugar) and a bag of fresh croissants. It seems that she's stolen Kenna away from her own bachelorette party. Their interaction there on the bed is languid and gentle and very, very romantic. And what makes it work for me is the coffee and the croissants, the two girls talking before they begin to kiss and make love.

I've always said that beautiful girls should sleep naked. I've been saying that since I was a boy, since I was barely old enough to grasp sex as a concept. It was James Bond who gave me the idea, of course. When I was very young, there were magazines whose Entertainment sections had lots of pictures of Bond Girls. The classic image was a Bond Girl stretched across a bed naked, with crisp new sheets draped strategically over herself. I suppose I took it for granted that in some later, better world, beautiful girls would sleep like that in hotel rooms or penthouse apartments with me. I still cling to that hope.

The French fashion blogger Garance Doré noted in passing once that "all top models sleep naked, of course", a sentence that instantly caught my eye. I wanted that to be true, especially for Ms. Kloss and Ms. Rubik and Mlle. Valade. I wanted it to be true for the lovely long-legged undergraduate girls who ripple through the downtown in my city in black leggings and zippered hoodies. 

Liberty had slept naked since her early teens. Levin, too. For Liberty it was I think something she barely thought about, some mixture of comfort and presenting herself as a hippie girl in the Rockies. For Levin it was a fashion choice. Sleeping naked was something an art-world girl might do as a marker for being "European" and "decadent".  They both knew instinctively how to strike poses naked in late-afternoon sunlight or on late night balconies. Levin stretched out naked in the sun always looked like she should have a copy of something by Lawrence Durrell to read...which she often did. 

I'm male and older. Sleeping naked on my own is not something I'd do. With a lover, certainly. But not on my own. My body is not something I'm comfortable with.  Males sleeping naked on their own always call up thoughts of...well...skidmarked sheets. In the Ian Fleming novels, Bond slept naked as a young man, but then discovered the short Japanese sleep robes I can recall seeing sold in "novelty" menswear catalogs (yes, the kind that also sold cocktail sets and golf-themed joke ashtrays) when I was young. Is it a happi coat that Bond slept in? I will admit that I've had Young Companions sit up naked in bed and ask with some concern if I was okay, since they were sleeping naked and I was in a t-shrt and gym shorts. Well, being male and of a certain age comes with its own set of rules. 

If James Bond--- or at least the early Bond films ---taught me that all beautiful girls should sleep naked, it was Pauline Reage's "Story of O" that taught me that beautiful girls should avoid underwear whenever possible. I do remember reading "Story of O" at maybe fifteen and instantly accepting what the rules at Roissy tell O.--- no underwear. That's something I've tried to edge lovely young companions toward since high school. It's my particular obsession and something I always tell girls is a dress code thing if they're involved with me. 

I'm thinking of the gallery owner who had the major foot fetish thing with Liberty. My whole thing for having my lovely young companions panty-free under short skirts or skinny jeans or faded denim shorts is probably no less an obsession. It's certainly been with me lifelong. Not that I'd give it up, mind you. I love having a girl aware of her own body, aware of a certain kind of vulnerability to strangers' eyes. And it's certainly a signature thing for me, something that was always part of my reputation once upon a clubland time.

I do encourage lovely girls to sleep naked, to experience crisp fresh linen sheets again bare skin, to stretch out atop a duvet and do long phone calls not so much about phone sex as about books and politics and film...all while having a secret at their end of the phone. And...there is always something very, very kissable about bare shoulders (or hipbones, or ankles) just above the sheets. Always that.

Three Zero Zero: Debriefing

 I wrote here earlier in the summer that:

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)... or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things... but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

I'd love to see Liberty's journal and its "Older Men" chapter. She always saw affairs as learning experiences, and she was very earnest about that. It mattered to her that each lover, male or female, left her with more knowledge about the world. And, yes, I'd love to know what all those things were. I'd love to know what categories she put experiences into. I think I'd especially like to read the very early entries, to read the entries were Liberty was deciding what she wanted to learn and what avenues she wanted to explore.

I wrote this, too--

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

I do wish I knew how each of them defined "experience". The stories Levin and Liberty and my NZ friend Jill told me were often extremely hot, but what I'd like to do is get at the underlying structures, to get at the decisions each of them made to seek out and be open to experiences. Why this particular lover, this particular thing? I'd very much like to know what Liberty's chapter on Older Men says--- what makes someone worth/not worth being a learning experience. I'd like to go through her checklist of things she did to manage Older Lovers, to properly utilize them. 

Backstories matter, just as details matter. The why of something is as important as the thing itself. 

I'd also like to read the letters another friend has been sending out during the season of the Red Death. You know the backstory:

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do. 

I'd love to read those letters, to read what she thanked them for teaching her. One of the letters I know would be to the much older man who told her when she was sixteen that she needed to stop being afraid and actually make the effort to be admitted to Oxford. That affair re-shaped her life, and I'm taking it for granted that she wrote to tell him that. She told me once that what she has now--- a business of her own, a resume that includes political consultancy, a couple of terms as a town councilor ---owes so much to the older lovers who told her that she was capable of doing anything, who took her to bed and talked about the world. I'd very much love to read those letters with her memories. Yes...I wish I was a recipient of one of those letters. I do envy anyone who was worldly and knowledgeable enough to be chosen as one of her mentors. 

Bildungsroman, Erziehungsroman... and whatever those things are called in French. I'd like to know how Levin and Liberty and Jill constructed the tales of their lives--- my friends in Montreal and Edinburgh, too. How have they structured what Older Lovers taught them? What things in particular did they want to learn, what things did they learn, what checklists and outlines have they drafted...? 

Experiences have to be crafted into stories, into essays, That's always key for me: taking experience and trying to make it mean something. Liberty's journal, maybe whatever was in Levin's Pentalic sketchbooks and notebooks--- those are all things I'd love to know.

Two Nine Nine: Tasks

 Tonight is a midsummer night where I feel a sense of foreboding and a sense of exhaustion and hopelessness. There are things in my daily life that are going very badly this summer--- even beyond this endless Red Death season of quarantines and limbo ---and there's also a sense of impending mortality. 

Last time I wrote here, I wrote about preludes, about wondering how affairs and encounters and adventures begin. Those things have always intrigued me--- how and when people make the decision to have sex, or to have a particular kind of sex, or to have sex with a particular person. I've lost any real sense of those things. I've no sense any longer of how these things happen, and it gets harder and harder to imagine being part of those decisions.

I can't recall tonight whether it was Sophocles or Aeschylus who gave thanks to the gods for freeing him from desire--- a cruel taskmaster ---in old age. Sophocles, I think. You're free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think it was Sophocles.  I'm not sure tonight what to make of the saying. Desire can be a cruel master, no question about that. And it's ever more cruel as one grows older and watches desire fade.

At some point, desire becomes a mockery. You know that you're no longer thought of as entitled to feel desire, let alone find any satisfaction. At some point, acting on desire, even feeling desire, makes you an object of derision. 

It's easy tonight to think that I've run out of time for desire, run out of time to have desires. 

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do.

I keep thinking that my usual haunts have less and less appeal for me. There seems to be less and less reason to be out. Certainly flirting with lovely girls at small bistros seems to be something I have less and less social standing to do. And I can't really decide whether that's based on fear of being mocked or treated with derision or on fear of being seen to fail at desire. 

I do walk through downtown on summer evening--- properly masked, mind you, here in the time of the Red Death ---and think of myself as a ghost. I will not, now or ever after, look at myself in a mirror or allow myself to be photographed. I certainly won't look any photos of myself.  I walk along not looking into shop windows, not going in to any of the few places open, and knowing that I'm less and less likely to be speaking to anyone again. I've spent my life telling stories, flirting, trying to be an interesting figure there on the edge of things. Those parts of the story seem to have come to an end.

Desire drives, desire obsesses. We know that. But seeing desire fade away is a cruel set of moments.