Four Zero Zero: Dining

I don't know why I do this to myself, but I do. 

I've been at Twitter looking at posts by lovely FMTY girls. I'll never be able to afford a companion at FMTY level, but I will look through companion / escort Twitter sites and sigh over what I might be missing. Yes, yes, I know that I'll only end up feeling alone and depressed, but there's something in me that enjoys pressing my face to the window of the expensive restaurant or the high-end shop. 

I have followed links to several FMTY girls' websites, and the finances of having a companion are far beyond me. One very lovely girl in Toronto listed her rate for a basic dinner date as $CD 1850, which is about $US 1300. That doesn't include the dinner itself or the hotel room or a tip. It also doesn't include an introductory gift-- say, a gift card for maybe $US 250 at a high-end spa. The cost of the rendezvous would be far beyond me. I don't begrudge the Toronto girl her fee or the auxiliary costs-- a skilled professional is worth her fee, and what used to be called Girlfriend Experience calls for a great deal of skill. I don't begrudge the FMTY girls their fees, but I am very aware that they inhabit a world beyond my reach.

What have I learned from the FMTY sites? I've learned that there are restaurants-- e.g., Aulis in London, Octavia in San Francisco --that are suitable for an evening with a skilled companion, and I like knowing small things like that.

One of the FMTY summed her perfect life in a Twitter post: Small circle, overdressed, living privately, handwritten letters, intentional purchases, coastal walks & ritualized routines. 

I love that vision of life. I could so easily imagine offering up her fee plus tip and gift for access to a life-- to the vision of a life --styled like that. 

FMTY girls pride themselves of being "companions", as being able to offer a client a vision of a life where the client is valued: It rules getting to explain to a silver daddy who’s been in boss/dad mode for the last 30 years that’s he’s actually really, really hot now. I love being the bearer of glad tidings.  

An FMTY girl posted this: “I think we were rival Samurai in a past life” is my new favorite pick-up line. Yes, I'd pay to have someone say that to me. 

I look through the FMTY sites and sigh over photos of dinners and spas. I sigh over witty lines. I sigh over the idea that I would be worth a professional deploying her skills. I sigh over the hope that I'd ever be someone who could appreciate a professional's skills. I sigh over the hope that a skilled professional wouldn't mind teaching me about the tasting menu in a star restaurant. 

I do this to myself, you know. I keep my face pressed to the glass far too long on empty nights.

Three Nine Three: Swans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Eight Four: Spider Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Seven Eight: Numbers

I had a long conversation with an old friend the other night. I've known him since grade school, and so we do know all about each other's lives. The other night he was talking about the incel  obsession with women's body counts. He despises incels on both aesthetic and political grounds, as do I. But he did tell me that he could understand the obsession with body counts, with how many sexual partners (or at least male sexual partners) a woman has had. 

It's not a moral thing for him. Not at all. It's fear of judgment. It's fear that a woman will immediately compare him to the male lovers in her past and that he'll be found wanting. He's competitive, and always has been. He and I have competed with one another over things like books read and films seen since ever we were schoolboys. And so he's always deeply anxious whenever he's involved with a woman who's had more than a bare handful of lovers in her life. He's terrified of being judged as incompetent or (worse) just mediocre in bed.

I can understand that. There's something soul-killing about the idea of a lovely girl in bed with you who's actually just recalling old TV shows in her head so that she won't seem too bored with you. There's something soul-killing about the idea of a girl sitting with her female friends the next day and dismissing you as mediocre.

Yes, I'm competitive. I always have been. I was brought up to believe that making a 95/100 was good, but not good enough. Even 100/100 might not be good enough. And what was worse was being seen to only get 95/100. Being seen to fail in any way would end with your social status being destroyed. 

I've been lucky. No young companion in my life has ever mocked me face to face. I've never had a girl yawn or fumble for the TV remote during sex with me.  I'm bright enough to know that it's possible that girls have been telling me soothing lies all through the years. I know that. But I haven't been mocked for failure. I haven't been mocked (so far as I know) for mediocrity.

But it does get harder to think of myself as worth anything in bed. Far too many Twitter feeds are devoted to sneering at "mediocre men" for their inability to induce pleasure in their partners. I do live in fear that somewhere girls with whom I had affairs years ago are using me as an example of an incompetent lover. 

Now there are other (if related) reasons for being concerned with body count numbers. I'll agree with Muriel Rukeyser that our lives are made up of stories, not atoms. And every affair, every encounter, spins off stories. If a girl has far more stories, or better stories than I do, then I feel my social status crumbling. If she has stories about being with a lover or a hook-up in cool places ("There was that time in the stacks at Sterling Library at Yale" or "There was that time in the back seat of the Aston-Martin") and I don't have similar tales to tell, well then-- why should she bother with me. Sex with me won't generate any stories worth telling.

There's envy here, too. There's always envy. Envy is the Deadly Sin that's always been my companion. If a girl has really good stories to tell about sex and adventures, I'll feel my old friend Envy making his appearance. I'll obsess over doing the things she's done, over having sex in the places that have enlivened her stories. We're not talking so much about the actual numbers in anyone's body count, we're talking about the stories derived from those numbers. We're talking about the fear that I won't have stories of my own that are good enough. We're talking about the fear that she'll have more and better stories than I ever will.

And we're talking about the way that I've always seen stories as social currency, as things that can be exchanged for social status. Good stories can be used to seduce, too. Good stories can build up a world that lovely young companions might want to visit with you.

I have no moral comments to make about a girl who has a high body count. But I do get anxious and envious when I'm afraid that her body count is the raw materials for stories that will only emphasize my own failures.

Three Seven Six: Episodes

 I've been thinking about scenes in s/m novels that have meant something to me over the years. There aren't so very many, and some scenes have just evaporated out of my memory. 

A couple of scenes do stand out. There's the opening chapter of "Story of O.", of course. That chapter marked me for life. I've talked about it before, but it has stayed in my mind. 

You know the scene. O. is in the backseat of a car being driven to Roissy. Her lover tells her to sit with her legs open and then removes her underwear. He tells her to lift up the back of her skirt and sit directly on the seat. She does all this without complaint, without a word. He unbuttons her blouse, produces a penknife, and cuts the straps of her bra. She will never, he tells her, wear either bras or underwear again. 

That small episode has stayed in my mind. It means a lot more to me than the later part of that chapter, where O. is taken and used by the male members at Roissy-- gang-violated I suppose, since she knows none of them, and no one asks for her consent. That part of things is hot enough, although it wasn't done terribly well in the 1973 film version (the Guido Crepax graphic novel did it much better). O. accepting her lover's instruction to be always bare under her skirts or slacks, to always sit so that she's aware that she could be seen-- that has meant a lot to me. O. is vulnerable and available, and perpetually aware of both. I've always liked that, and especially liked it that O. is so aware of how she's dressed. This is why I ask my young ladies to be bra-less and panty-free when they're out with me. Part of that is the sense of vulnerability, that there's nothing between her and the outside world. Part of it is the sense of availability, of her knowing that she could be seen or touched at any moment. I like it that she's aware of her body, aware that how she sits or bends or stands is something she now has to consider.

I've been lucky. My young ladies haven't been appalled by my request. They've been willing to do this thing for me. It's selection bias, I know. Any girl who's willing to be out with me or involved with me to begin with is likely to accept my version of what constitutes an Adventure. I've been lucky, and I'm very clear on that. 

The age difference helps as well. Co-eds and twenty-somethings see themselves (I think) as learning about the world, about checking off lists of new experiences. The age difference helps with that, as does the idea that they now have a Secret. 

There's another scene that I liked a lot-- it's the climactic scene in Joyce MacIver's "The Exquisite Thing". The ice-blonde heroine-- who's six foot two, something that does matter in the story --has always felt alienated from her body. The men and women she's been submissive to sexually throughout her life haven't given her a sense of being a body, of belonging inside her body. 

She's at last taken to a very exclusive, high-end sex club in Barcelona (or maybe Madrid) called La Jaula, The Cage. The man who brings her has her taken up on stage, introduced to the masked audience, stripped, and tied to a wooden horse. (Because I'm like I am, I obsessed over the being stripped part-- was she wearing underwear before she was stripped? did she keep her heels on or was she barefoot?) She's then whipped for the audience. For the first time in her life, she feels like she's inside her own body, that she belongs inside flesh. She of course has a shattering orgasm by candlelight there on the wooden horse. 

I read "The Exquisite Thing" when I was an undergraduate, and I do remember sitting in my window seat and reading it on a rainy summer afternoon. That scene...that scene...I was just amazed and thrilled. I think I envied the girl in the book-- not for the sexual submission, or the exhibitionism, but for the ability to stand up at six-two and walk up to the stage-- for the ability to actually throw herself into an Adventure. I envied her, too, the sense of inhabiting her own body, the sense of being able to feel that her body mattered.

Which of course may be something that all too-bookish academic types long for-- escaping the land of the word for the land of actual sensation.

In any case, you'll have read "Story of O.". If you're reading this at all, you'll have already read "Story of O.". But I'm rather certain that you've never read Joyce MacIver's "The Exquisite Thing". The novel came out c. 1970-- half a century ago. But it's worth your while to find. I think you'll enjoy it (as you might enjoy "The Frog Pond", Ms. MacIver's other novel). As for me, I wonder about how I'd behave as part of the audience at La Jaula, and whether I'd ever have the money or social presentation to be allowed into the club. I'm like that, of course. A club like that would be aspirational for, a chance to become part of a ritual and a story. But I'd never be allowed in. 

So... If you're reading this, what are the scenes in erotica that have meant something to you? Not just in s/m novels, but in any erotica, even the sorts of ghastly and unintentionally hilarious books sold in "adult bookstores" back in the 1970s and 1980s. High-end literary erotica is more my sort of thing, of course. How could it not be? I'm class-aspirational, over-educated, and something of a literary snob. 

But...I hope that if you're reading this, you'll tell me about scenes in novels that have meant something to you, that have shaped your own views of sex and sexual fantasy.

Three Six Two: Regimentals

I haven't yet seen "Tár", though I very much want to. It's the sort of film that does intrigue me-- the Creative Genius under stress, a world with its own arcane skills and rituals. 

And of course there are film stills of Cate Blanchett in black tie and severely tailored suit. That's a look that's held my attention for years. I'm rather an admirer of garconne style, all the way back to my lost youth. I remember sighing over photos in old magazines of Swinging London models in man-tailored suits, and I recall being at university and seeing some of the more daring girls going to parties and proms in severe suits and expensive neckties. 

I would've given a lot to have been able to take the young Jane Birkin or the young Marisa Berenson dancing in Sixties London or Paris while they were dressed in garconne look. And tonight I'm thinking of a Sixties actress/model named Merle Lynn Browne, who wrote a comic "expose" of "jet set" sexual adventures called "The Ravishers". The paperback edition of the novel showed a lovely photo of her in a tailored suit, light brown hair in some Sixties style falling over her shoulders. I saw her once on (I think) the old "Tonight" show in the days of Johnny Carson. She was there to talk about her novels ("The Ravishers" and its sequel, "The Arousers"), and she was in pin-striped suit and tie. That's a memory that's stayed with me since boyhood. 

These days, now...are we allowed to find lovely long-legged garconne girls attractive? Are we still allowed to...gender-bend? What are the semiotics of girls in man-tailored suits these days? I suspect that the image of a girl in a man-tailored suit is regarded these days as being about anything except sex.

Some months ago, I read about a literary-world scandal involving Donna  Tartt. I've been a fan of Ms. Tartt since ever I read "The Secret History" when it first appeared. It seems that some podcast or other had interviewed some of Tartt's Bennington classmates about her life as an undergraduate, and somehow the podcast had become part of the gender wars. 

There were ex-classmates who argued that Ms. Tartt's signature elegant suits and ties were part of her whole design to "have sex like a young boy", and that (shock! horror!) her love life at Bennington was all about boys who were gay or gay-adjacent. I wasn't sure why any of that was supposed to be shocking...or the least surprising. From the first magazine photos of Ms. Tartt I saw, I'd taken it as a given that her boyfriends would be at least gay-adjacent. And I assumed that her own social pose would be "handsome gay boy at Oxford 1925".  I did laugh at one of the shock-horror types who went into gender wars mode and sniffed that there was no such thing as "having sex like a young boy"-- showing that here was someone who either being deliberately obtuse or had zero imagination.

I'd known girls all through my undergraduate days who desperately pursued arts-and-literature gay-adjacent boys, and who loved pretending to be pretty gay boys in some "Brideshead Revisited" fantasy world. I looked at the photos of Ms. Tartt in her suits and ties and knew exactly what was going on. It wasn't about the Trans Wars at all. It was about sex and class, or at least sex and aesthetics. After all...the whole "Dark Academia" thing always incorporated lots of sexual role-play and visions of academia as a setting for gay aesthetics. 

Whether it's Lydia Tár or Donna Tartt or the young Jane Birkin, the garconne look attracts me. It's sleekly elegant, which I always love, and it's very deliberately artificial. It's role-play, and that's always better than the current obsession with "authenticity". 

Even here, in the autumn of my days, I like the idea of a leggy co-ed in a tailored suit, and I like the idea of sharing my necktie collection with her.

Three Four One: Connections

Tomorrow is Valentine's. That's always been a troubled day for me, and tomorrow will be no different.  I'll be alone, of course, and any connections I make will be with lovely friends I've known online.

This is the third calendar year of the Red Death. Whether or not the pandemic is winding down, we've had two full years of putting off social life.

When the Red Death began, I watched PornHub develop a whole "Covid Lockdown" genre for porn clips. The idea was simple enough. Two people-- roommates, step-siblings, neighbors --found themselves trapped into close proximity by the pandemic and ended up having unexpected sex just because of cabin fever, boredom, and availability. Some of the clips were unexpectedly hot-- I will admit that. There were a couple of step-sibling scenes that had actual thoughtful dialogue about why things were happening, and at least one clip that had a face mask and social distancing version of the classic pizza delivery trope. And, yes, a face mask can be quite hot. 

I'd thought that lockdowns and social distancing would lead to a revival of phone sex. I mean-- you'd have a voice on the other end of the line, and the storytelling nature of phone sex would help relieve the tedium of WFH. That doesn't seem to have happened, though. Maybe it's only that even the Red Death wasn't enough to make Gen Z  actually talk to people by phone. Maybe. But even if camgirls were able to make decent money during the pandemic, that's not the same as phone sex.

I do miss phone sex. I miss telling stories in the dark. I miss establishing a connection with a girl and building up layers to our fantasies. I miss the parts of phone sex when you move back and forth between a shared fantasy and just talking to one another late in the night. 

Memory says that back in the early Noughts, you made connections via email and then moved on to the telephone. And phone sex was something that played to my strengths. I always feel better as a disembodied voice-- let's take that as a given. Girls have told me over the years that I'm good at telling stories, and that I'm good at making them feel they can do or be anything. My NZ friend used to say that I'd done a good job at making her feel like she could live in a late-night world she called NSNL-- No Shame, No Limits. Hearing her say that to me all the way from Wellington meant a lot.

I have no clue whether there was an upturn in sexting statistics during the worst of the Red Death. I of course was never good at sexting. I'm a very, very bad typist, and I text with one finger. And text messages aren't a good format for complicated fantasies. 

In those awful years of 2016-2020, right up to the first lockdown orders, phone sex had faded away. I suspect it was also seen as problematic by Social Justice types. Phone sex has never escaped the taint of being an "obscene phone call", and the idea of shared fantasies by telephone seems to strike many of the gender warriors as somehow exploitative. 

But I do miss voices in the night. I miss creating shared fantasy worlds with lovely young companions. When we've all given up masks and social distancing and gone back to whatever  a post-pandemic normal may be, I suspect no one will be doing phone sex. After all-- we're all too exhausted to have the orgiastic post-pandemic Hot Girl Summers or revived Mardi Gras parties that were predicted back in 2020. 

I don't expect any late night calls, and I miss them.

Three Three Six: Carpet

 I've brought the story up here before.

My friend Jill in NZ told me once that she'd once been naked in the passenger seat of an Aston-Martin Vanquish going at speed up the coast highway along the Tasman Sea. I don't find that wholly implausible. She grew up in a moneyed family, she works with successful businessmen and wealthy shareholders in her corporate life, and she tends to sleep with men who are substantially older and wealthy. So I can see her in that Aston-Martin, bare feet on the dashboard, stretched out naked and tanned while her older lover tested how fast his car could go. Or see her curled up naked next to him while the sea is there on one side and she bends to take him in her mouth.

That's not implausible. How likely is it? That I can't say. But it is plausible.

When I told a certain friend in London Town about that, she countered with her own tale of having been naked in the cabin of a (married) lover's private jet, bound for somewhere in the Mysterious East. Nothing, she said, could quite top being naked and drinking champagne in a private jet. 

Plausible? Maybe...just. She has entree to the worlds of art, law, and Oxbridge academia in Britain. She also has a history ("has form", British detectives say on TV) of older, married lovers who pay her rent and fly her places. One of her lovers, she told me, was one of the leading global figures in international arbitration law; another was a notorious and famous art auctioneer. Private jets aren't out of the question. Though I'm not sure how one handles the logistics of having a mistress naked in the cabin while remaining undisturbed. Would there have been an aide or two to dismiss to...somewhere? Would you get on the intercom to the crew and tell them not to leave the cockpit? So-- just plausible, but much less likely than Jill's Aston-Martin adventure. 

You'll note that I'm not assigning percentages here. As someone who's never seen an Aston-Martin in real life, let alone been a passenger on a private jet, all of that is as alien to me as the FMTY world I've been writing about.

I conveyed the story of the private jet back to Jill, and she snarked that being naked thirty thousand feet up on the way to Dubai or Singapore was all well and good, but what about the cabin decor? What if you had to walk barefoot or kneel to give head on...shag carpet? How...Seventies! How...bad Shopping & Fucking Novel! How, Jill asked, could any girl maintain her self-respect if there was shag carpet there?

Now I do love the idea of a response born from envy, and maybe she has a point. Though I can't recall what airliner floors are covered with. Not something I ever paid attention to. I can call up the visuals of Jill in the car seat fairly well, but the private jet cabin remains just out of imaginary reach. I can't even imagine what kind of plane a private jet would be. I'm sure that Lear Jets are passé; I don't even know if they're still made. The same is true for Gulfstreams. In my head, I take it for granted that the window shields would be raised. What would be the point of covering a window at thirty thousand feet? But imagining the cabin, let alone the carpet, is beyond me.

It is Christmas season, and the FMTY girls at Twitter are posting photos of the gifts their clients/patrons have given them. Lots of elegant gift boxes. Lots of gift cards to very high-end shops in London or Paris or NYC. Lots of photos of hotel lobbies and elegant dinners. The photos of gift-boxed lingerie do nothing for me, of course. I've never been a fan of girls in lingerie. I prefer girls to sleep naked and to wear nothing at all under dresses or tailored trousers when out with me. I understand lingerie as a class marker and as a symbol for high-end sex, but it does nothing for me as an erotic lure. A girl in just one of my dress shirts is far sexier than one in the most expensive Agent Provocateur or designer lingerie. 

The Aston-Martin, the private jet-- those things do belong in some "erotic thriller" on late-night cable or a Shopping & Fucking novel bought in (of course) an airport bookshop. Question-- here in a time of global pandemic, global economic uncertainty, and a new, critical attitude towards late capitalism, are there still Shopping & Fucking novels? We're a long way from the days of Judith Krantz or "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" here in 2021. "Champagne wishes and caviar dreams" doesn't sit quite so well when you live in a country that survived an abortive armed coup not even a year ago, a country where the pandemic has killed something like eight hundred thousand people since early 2020.  It's possible that, as a good leftist, I can't see the erotic possibilities of an Aston-Martin or a private jet any more.

I can still see the erotic possibilities in places, mind you. Being naked in an office after hours. Being naked in a classroom after all the teachers and students have gone home. Being naked in a university library. Or (like Liberty and Levin) in galleries and studios. Those are all things I can imagine having a beautiful girl do. Some of them I have done with lovers in the past. 

Places still have their own rank-ordering. A beautiful young companion being naked for you in a hotel pool is good, but only really counts if it's a rooftop pool. Extra points if it's an infinity pool cantilevered out over the city. Sailboats and private pools? No real points. Girls skinny-dipping off sailboats or in backyard pools is something very ordinary. Ditto girls like Liberty being naked while camping. Though I suppose a girl standing naked at sunrise (or just in hiking/climbing boots) on the slopes of some famous mountain would have some point value. Jill in Wellington hinted once that an older, moneyed lover wanted to take her to Everest Base Camp and have sex there. Some hip magazine-- Outdoor? Wired? --noted once that Everest Base Camp had become "a real sausage-fest" as soon as it became a tourist draw, with tech bros bringing their latest model/actresses there. But in general...the outdoors isn't really a place for nakedness, or for beautiful girls to have sex. Nature, at least in my mind, has never been erotic.

Though I will note that I've seen a couple of very, very alluring fashion nudes shot in the desert. I haven't quite figured out why deserts are sexy and forests or hillsides aren't. That bears thinking about.

I try to think about the sound of the Aston-Martin going north along the eastern shore of the Tasman Sea and I can't. I can't imagine the cabin-- let alone the carpet --of a private jet. I haven't even seen porn with a private jet cabin as a setting. I certainly can't imagine what champagne my friend claimed to be drinking.

Trains, now. Just as a passing thought, there's always point value in sex aboard trains. That at least has been proven in both porn and film noir.

 

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 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 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 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.

Two Nine Four: Masks

I've been thinking about desire and enticements, about what we see in what we desire.

I've been reading about the Los Angeles club scene in the 1960s, reading books by Eve Babitz, who was the chronicler of that world. I've liked Babitz's stories and memoirs for a long time. Her "Slow Days, Fast Company", "L.A. Woman", and "Sex & Rage" have been favorites of mine since my days in grad school. She was always a better It Girl than any of the Manhattan scenesters. The Warhol girls may have been cool, but none of them got naked to play chess with Marcel Duchamp.

I suppose it was a combination of things that made me want to re-read Babitz. I'd seen the new documentary about Joan Didion and I'd just read Taylor Jenkins Reid's "Daisy Jones and the Six". And I'd seen "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". All of that made me want to go back and re-read Eve Babitz, especially "Slow Days, Fast Company". Lovely short pieces, a lovely invocation of a Los Angeles I'll never see. Please call this a recommendation. Let me know what you think of Ms. Babitz.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fantasizing about the young Jane Birkin and the young Francoise Hardy-- two of my key Sixties Girls. I suppose reading "Slow Days, Fast Company" and "Daisy Jones and the Six" has made me fantasize about mid-Sixties California girls. I don't know what that means, and of course I haven't given up my dreams of being in Paris and London 1965 with Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy. But I am going through a phase of L.A. girls in miniskirts and big sunglasses as images for desire.

How do desires and fetishes change? There are underlying points in all my fantasies; that much is always true. A certain age, long legs, a disdain for underwear, dark tans. a certain height and angular slender build. Those things are part of the definition of desire for me. But if some things are necessary for me to feel desire, periods and costumes and styles do change. Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy are leggy Sixties girls, but they're not quite girls you can imagine partying with Eve Babitz at a party in Malibu. The trick, I suppose, is to find out what's behind the shifts in the precise forms of desire. And let's be  clear--- it's all as much about sets and settings as it is about the girls themselves.

Yesterday I walked from my office to a small burger joint to lunch. While I was waiting for my order I noticed a girl standing on line to pick up a take-away. I was struck very much coup de foudre with her.

Probably nineteen or twenty, tallish, slender. Streaked light-brown hair to her shoulders, light eyes, a seriously dark tan, perfect legs. A very tiny khaki miniskirt--- a look I haven't seen much of this spring and summer ---and cute sandals. And...a mask. She had on a black face mask. Somehow the mask made it all work. Somehow the mask made her desperately desirable. It is the season of the Red Death, and we're still in the midst of the pandemic. The mask may be the new normal for the rest of the year. After all, I was wearing one myself. But the mask and the miniskirt were a trigger for serious desire. I may have imagined her in the mask, those long legs over my shoulders. I may have imagined her gasping in orgasm through the mask.  I may have imagined those things, but I have no idea why they came to mind.  I'll certainly never know who she was, but it was the combination of mask and miniskirt that instantly made her a fantasy girl. So I suppose that Red Death face masks will become a fetish for me, the same way that ankle bracelets on lovely girls once did.

I've always needed the idea of sets and settings--- places, architecture, lighting, fashion ---for any fantasies to work. Right now it seems that I need the image of a certain kind of Sixties scene...and I may need lovely girls to wear face masks and tiny skirts. Or just the face mask.

But in any case, I have no idea where these images and fetishes come from.  I have no idea when and how they'll mutate or shift.  I'd still love to take the girl in the mask to a party at Ms. Babitz's house in the Canyons in some imaginary 1967, though.

Two Nine Three: Lessons

Last night I watched "Altered States"--- a film from c.1981 that I've always rather liked.  If you haven't seen the film, I will recommend it.

There's a moment in "Altered States" where Wm. Hurt has the first physical symptoms of regressing into some kind of archaic hominid. He's in bed with one of his students at the time (she calls him "Dr. Jessup" when he leaves bed and dashes to the bathroom to look at his transformation in the mirror). The actress is named Ora Rubinstein; her character is billed only as "Young Medical Student". I like that...and wonder if you'd still still have that character if you re-did the film in the Year Twenty. Could you still have Dr. Jessup sleeping with one of his students? The film takes it for granted that he'll have affairs with students, and one of his senior med school colleagues says off-handedly earlier in the film that he has to go, that he has a date with one of his students,

Which once again takes us back to Levin and her painting professor. That affair was something that happened long ago, and certainly long before #MeToo. Levin had no objection to sleeping with her professor, and no particular thought that she was being exploited. She found some of his stories pretentious and self-involved, but that just went with being in the art world. What I'd like to know is the full backstory. At what point did she sense that his interest in her was a seduction? How did she react to the discovery--- surprise, amusement, excitement? Did she ever think she was being exploited or used (in a bad way)? Did she laugh at how cliched it all was--- art student and her professor? Did she decide to sleep with him early on, or did she make a quick decision that night in the studio when he asked why she wasn't naked yet?

I asked her once when she made that decision about me, and she shrugged and told me she'd decided early on, when I was telling her what films and books I liked. Just seemed like you'd be interesting, she said. I mean, I'll take that as a compliment and a perfectly valid reason. But I did wonder when she'd made a decision and what criteria she was using. 

Levin was a fine arts major. I do wonder how her criteria compare to Liberty's.'s criteria. Liberty was a coastal ecology major--- a science girl, albeit in what was regarded as a "hippie science". From what I could infer, all the "soft" sciences--- the ecology programs, anthropology, biology ---were very sexually active. Funny thing--- "Altered States" gives the same impression, that the physical anthropology students and faculty are more sexually active than the hard sciences or even the liberal arts. I need to look into the accepted mores of various academic departments. 

I of course was a History major--- a department not noted for carnality. Fine Arts and Comparative Lit were of course notorious for both ambisexuality and teacher-student affairs. Neither Levin nor Liberty ever seemed to find sleeping with faculty to be anything out of the ordinary, mind you. And both seemed to have accepted bisexuality as perfectly ordinary since their teens. Okay, yes, great--- I'm now thinking about a survey and analysis on sexual criteria by academic major back to the Sixties. Somebody get me a research grant and a Netflix deal.

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. 

Though I suppose it's possible that they wanted the idea of "experience" more than any particular concrete experience. Levin was part of the art world, and there's still a strong master-pupil attitude there, the idea of learning by transmission from some older figure with talent. That may be part of it all.  Levin and Liberty (and my friend in Montreal) liked the idea of having experiences,  of collecting experiences that they could use to form themselves. I suppose I felt the same way in my own late teens and undergraduate days. The idea was to be able to say that, yes, I did this, or that I'd read that, that I had a range of experiences (all approved in novels or films) that I could use to become (or become seen as) the sort of character I wanted to portray.

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.

Two Nine Two: Procedures

I was looking through Alexander Maksik's "You Deserve Nothing" yesterday evening--- a rather powerful teacher-student romance. Yes, I know, we're not supposed to read those any more, or consider teacher-student romances as anything other than nonconsensual and exploitative. I rather like the genre, or at least the possibilities in the genre. I've been fortunate, too, in knowing girls who've been attracted to the same set of fantasies and have been willing to construct scenes in the genre with me.

My lovely friend in Montreal always told me that she'd gone to McGill as an undergraduate specifically to have affairs with older and knowledgeable men. She wanted to be someone's dangerous muse. The problem, she told me, was that she didn't know the procedures involved.  If she found an older admirer, how was the affair supposed to progress? Who was supposed to make the first move? What were the recognized ways in which she could make it clear that she was available as muse and mentee and bedmate? What she needed, she said, was a checklist. Or at least access to a covey (coven?) of co-eds who shared her tastes and could impart secret knowledge to her.  She showed me her notebooks with drafts of checklists she'd assembled, largely based on novels like Maksik's "You Deserve Nothing" and lots of memoirs by young female French writers who had tales of affairs with teachers and professors. She was--- and is ---like me in some things: checklists and rituals always matter.

Levin told me that the affair with her painting instructor had opened exactly like she'd expected it to--- lots of long conversations about art, lots of tales over coffee at the student union about the man's past in the art world, eventually a flask of vodka in the painting studio one night. She said that she was used to boys at school who never knew how to ask anything directly, and when her professor looked at her that first night and casually asked, "Why aren't you naked yet?" she just laughed and pulled off her singlet.  What she liked, she said, was that he had a whole checklist of his own in his head: things to do with and to her, places to do things in, a list of things to show her. She liked it when he asked her to model for him--- that was so very clearly supposed to be a sign that he wanted her for more than just a night or two ---and she knew that it was a sign that she was doing well.

Liberty was always a direct girl, and her procedure was to just ask for whatever she wanted.  She ended up in that sleeping bag with her instructor on that kayak trip by just asking, by putting down the joint she was smoking by the campfire and asking him if he wanted her to ride him or wanted her on bottom. That's the same kind of directness she'd used at sixteen with the kayak store owner. I admired her directness--- admired her ability to just be direct. Her own set of procedures worked on me, mind you. I liked watching her take charge of starting the affair. That first night at the oyster bar when we met, we'd talked for a while and then she very casually asked if she'd be sleeping over at my flat after she got off.

Sometimes these days I think that I've lost my own ability to work through a checklist or even know where I am among the items. I miss the sense of self-confidence that Liberty had, and I miss thinking that I had the ability to craft the checklist points and guide a young companion down the list: places, positions, discussions, games. I miss the idea that a lovely girl could intuit the key checklist points and enjoy the idea of ritual and procedure.

One night during their affair, her painting instructor painted on Levin herself--- outlining her areolae and nipples in blue, tracing red along the sharp lines of her hipbones. She told me that she'd had a hard time not laughing--- that he was willing to be playful rather than simply mentor-mentee with her meant that he trusted in her not to mock him after he'd put some of his authority aside. I do like that image.

Liberty I'm sure knew that I wanted to do certain things in certain places with lovers, and she was willing to work my list with me so long as I understood that she was someone who liked simple, direct questions and straightforward answers.

I suppose I could leave examples of a checklist here, but somehow I don't feel quite comfortable or safe doing that.  Lists tell others what you want, what you desire, what you think you need. That's information that's never safe to have lying about.  It's so easy to be mocked for those things, whatever they might be.  And it's just no longer simple to ask anyone to work through a list with you, even if you're more than willing to work through hers with her.

I suppose it's harder, too, to know what you should put on the list--- harder to know what you actually do want.

Two Nine One: Stage Sets 2

Stage sets matter.

I said that last time, and I'll stand by it.

I can't do a vacation or a trip of any kind without a lovely Young Companion at my side. There's no point in travel to new cities, new locales, without someone who'll use those places to create stories of adventurous or risky or well-crafted sex.

There is a question, though--- what kinds of places make the best stage sets?  What kinds of places would you want to be having sex in? There's always something to be said for hotel beds, since hotel sex has something wonderfully louche about it. But...where else?

My friend Marta in Houston had the gym of that cruise ship off Alaska.

I'd love to be with Jill in a Pure Pod somewhere in the Otago hills. There's something very sci-fi film set about Pure Pods--- great architecture that suggests waking up in a film set c. 2035. I need to ask Jill about that, about what sex in a Pure Pod calls up in her mind's eye.

I suspect that for Jill, sex in a Vancouver hotel elevator with her faux-uncle ("second cousin once removed") is a stage-set memory that she does treasure. Or maybe her favourite locale was the backseat of that Range Rover with the two water-polo boys when she was sixteen.  Both would make very good sets for a film version of her adventures.

For Liberty, the kayak shop always mattered. I do imagine her there often...and imagine her on that field trip where she hooked up with her professor, imagine her naked on the dock, a sleeping bag draped round her, watching the lights of boats in the distance.

For Marsha, maybe the hills above Thessaloniki, there in the parked MG convertible with the Greek boy.

For Levin, her painting professor's studio. Or a shadowed bedroom in Charleston.

I have my guesses about Miss Ginny, but she was always very canny about how much of the details of her past she revealed.

For a girl named Morgan, one of the bartendrix girls I flirted with a couple of years ago.... Maybe an Amtrak sleeper car, or maybe (oh, yes) the catacombs in Paris. She told me once that the cost of the flight would be worth it if she could have sex in the catacombs.

Well...if you're reading this, tell me about your own favourite locale-based stories. Tell about the cities and buildings and hotels and sailboats and rooftop bars where you've arranged encounters.

I won't say anything about my own past and the places that have meant something to me. After all, I'm a gentleman of a certain age. Males don't get to tell stories like that. Accounts of adventures and locales are either taken as pathetic bragging or pathetic lies. All I will say is that there are places I'd love to have as stage sets--- places I'd keep on a list, however unlikely it is these days that I'll be checking anything off it.

One of the Pure Pods? Oh, certainly. I can go to the website and find a favourite.  One of the two remaining sleeper trains in Japan? Again, certainly. Though surely there's a way to do something on a shinkansen from Tokyo to Hokkaido...yes? A seaview villa in Rabat? A cabin on the Skeleton Coast? Yes, of course.

But I suspect I won't be adding any new places to the list I've kept in my paper journal all these years.  I have visions, but no time or money or energy--- let alone a Young Companion. So I'll just keep a list of what-should-be places. And hope that you'll send me your own lists of places where your encounters and adventures were amplified, valorized, shaped by architecture and decor.

Two Eight Nine: Disclosures

I was sitting outside with a lovely neighbour here at the lakeside flat the other night, talking and working our way through a bottle of Belvedere vodka with iced tea. How Deepest South is that, do you think? I'll note that we were in separate deck chairs on the upper deck, and that we were properly socially-distanced. This is the time of the Red Death, and I've been socially-distanced and properly masked throughout. My neighbour herself is a lovely girl. She's been here in my apartment complex for almost four years now. She has long, toned legs, a mass of reddish hair, and is something of a party girl, though she's no one's fool. The night itself was good. Cool for the season here, with the scent of earlier rain still in the air.

At some point she confided in me that she was and always had been "a total sexual deviant". I hadn't heard the word "deviant" in twenty years, and I was immediately intrigued.  She reached out one arm and tapped her glass on mine and drunkenly repeated that she was "such a deviant". Of course I asked. How could I not ask? She told me that she'd lost track of how many people she'd had sex with, and asked me if I remembered my own body count number. I do, of course, but that's because I've always written such things down, all the way back into my teens. Everything is written down, everything is annotated. I did become a trained historian, after all. I didn't ask whether she didn't know her own number because it was so large or simply because many of her encounters had been drunken couplings that she barely remembered. Please note that I'm not imposing any moral judgment here, and I never would.  She's lovely and probably thirty or thirty-one. I can make a guess at what the number might be, but the only significance it would have is if she and I laid bets on whose was higher at her current age.

She then told me that she felt like a deviant, too, because she'd had girls in her past. She'd always loved girls, she told me, though she hadn't had the nerve to hook up with more than a few--- which of course is very much like my friend Jill in NZ.  How odd that she finds being at least occasionally bi to be so wicked that she can only admit it after several large vodkas.

She looked at me and shook a finger and told me that she just knew I was someone who tied girls up and whipped them. I had to laugh at that. Good guess, I told her. Very good guess. But of course I do love playing with blindfolds and silk scarves and riding crops and candle wax with lovely young companions. My neighbour told me that I was just so obvious, that that was something all men my age who had "all those bookshelves" liked. I did shrug and tell her that with age you learned to rely to technique and style rather than raw physicality. That was all okay, she said. Older men came up with interesting things to do. And you, she said, I'll bet you're really good at doing scenes and telling stories with girls. That's something I was proud to hear.

This does not--- let me emphasize that ---end with the two of us in bed, or with her on my couch being whipped. It doesn't. It ended with us clinking glasses and just talking until two or three in the morning.  In a non-plague year, it would've ended with a long hug and maybe--- maybe ---a goodnight kiss.  But it wasn't a night that was going to end in bed. It didn't need to, and while I love flirting shamelessly with her, I'm not going to step outside any bounds.

But it did make me think. During the night out on the deck, we talked about our respective experiences and pasts. I've usually been someone to whom strangers in bars or on trains confide their secrets, and my neighbour found me to be a good listener and a safe confidant. I'm glad that she does. Importantly, she hasn't been embarrassed or nervous around me since. That matters, too.

Nonetheless, it is an odd thing. She told me that she hasn't had anyone who'd understand about her secrets in years. I've been feeling the same thing lately. Confidantes are hard to find lately. Certainly harder than when I was, say, twenty-five or thirty. It seems much less safe these days to admit anything to anyone. In the time of the gender wars, admitting anything to anyone seems like putting a weight on their shoulders or, worse, like some kind of demand or threat.

I've always loved the whole experience of drunkenly telling one another secrets, about disclosing one's past and interests and fancies. There's a delight in that, in the sharing. Sharing fancies and obsessions is very often better than sex-in-the-flesh. Mutual surprise, the moment of laughing with someone at shared things, the electricity of being on the borderline between flirtation and seduction--- all those things make disclosures fun.

Yet it feels less safe now. Not just because the other person might be turned off, but that they might be angered. I'm less and less sure these days about such things. It's hard to offer up compliments, of course, although my neighbour is fine with my obviously appreciating her legs. But it is harder to tell the stories girls and I would've talked about twenty years ago, or maybe even ten. The world has changed around me and sometimes I haven't followed along with it.

Two Eight Six: Saint Tropez

Tonight I'm thinking about Levin and the nudes her painting professor did of her. I remember looking at the framed nude portrait she had  in her bedroom and envying her older lover his skills. I can barely draw stick figures, and his portrait of Levin was amazing--- sunlight and shadow, the way her nakedness blended with the room, the way the furniture and windows set off how lithe and alluring she was. I'd seen her naked, of course, seen her naked in all sorts of rooms. But I did envy him the things he must have seen in her, the things he brought out in her image. He could see things in her that I couldn't. I could write about her; I could tell her stories. But I couldn't see her.

I can't decide whether thinking of Levin made me recall a 1991 film called "La belle noiseuse" or whether seeing the film again not so very long ago made me think of Levin and her portraits. If you haven't seen the film, please do take this as a recommendation. I purchased a DVD of it not long ago and sat enthralled with it here in the lakeside flat. I'd seen the film years ago--- probably because Jane Birkin is in it, and Ms. Birkin will always be a major crush of mine. "La belle noiseuse" was released in 1991. A young Emmanuelle Beart is the female lead, the muse to an aging painter. Beart would've been twenty-six, I think, when it was filmed. The film is almost three hours long, and Mlle. Beart is naked through most of it. The story is about Beart and the painter, about her modeling for him as he tries to reclaim the ability to paint. It's deeply powerful--- about obsession as much as desire ---to watch the painter pose her, move her, drive himself as he does figure studies, as he tries to build a painting from an idea he gave up twenty-five years before.  Much of the film is about the techniques of painting, about shots of a disconnected arm wielding brushes or charcoal, doing washes, sketching out lines and curve. It's a film I wish I could've watched with Levin all those years ago, and it's a film I wish I could watch with my blonde NZ  friend--- Jill, we'll call her ---down in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

The act of painting, the act of drawing--- that's an erotic thing all on its own. I've never been able to draw or paint or even sketch.  Once upon a time I did do photography. I spent Saturday mornings at university climbing over buildings looking for architectural moments, and I did spend time photographing girls with whom I was involved, dressed and undressed both. Some of the photographs I took of lovers and companions were good, and my subjects appreciated how I made them look. But no matter what I could do with a pre-digital SLR, it wasn't painting or drawing. In those days I tried to emulate the styles of fashion photographers I liked. I may have been reasonably good at it, but it always lacked the power of a painting. I could do light and shadow, I could pose a girl in some wicked outfit or naked on a rooftop...but it wasn't the same as the painting on Levin's wall or the sketch she gave me of herself in a rented seafront bedroom.

That bedroom sketch, with its shadows and the hint of the girl face down on the bed, did remind me of David Hamilton. Hamilton died in 2016; I only discovered that a couple of days ago. When I was first off at university, Hamilton's photography books were something art-school girls as well as aging nympholepts collected. "Summer in St. Tropez", "Dreams of a Young Girl", "Sisters", "Premiers Desirs"--- I had all of those when I was eighteen or nineteen. I even saw the film versions of "Premiers Desirs" (yes, a very young Mlle. Beart was in that) and "Summer in St. Tropez". Levin had her own copy of "Dreams of a Young Girl"; I do remember that.

I suppose all those books are long out of print. We're long past the days when David Hamilton's photos of young girls were on art-photo notecards and postcards. You know why, of course--- Hamilton's models were are all either in their teens or at least appeared that way (Emmanuelle Beart was twenty when "Premiers Desirs" was filmed). By the time he died, Hamilton must've been on any number of enemies lists and very likely being considered for indictment under British law about "historical offenses" with young models.

Nonetheless, I do remember Hamilton with fondness. You could always tell his photographs--- the long-limbed, coltish models, the way he used sunlight and settings down in southern Provence. Levin told me once upon a time that she knew that there was something very cliche-pervy about Hamilton's work, but that she couldn't stop looking at it and wishing both that she could sleep with all the models...and be one herself.  I haven't owned any of his books in years and years, but I'd like to see them again. I know what I thought of them in my own undergraduate days, and I know what I thought of them a decade later. But I have no idea how I'd see them now. We see bodies and nakedness very differently from the way we did in Hamilton's day, or even in the Nineties. We see the idea of coming-of-age very differently, too.

It's so easy for me to imagine Levin at nineteen or twenty as a Hamilton model.  I just wish I could have drawn or painted her myself. I wish I could have taken more photos of her, especially in that city with wrought iron and a seawall--- and saved them down the years.  I wish I could've looked at Levin naked in a deserted Victorian house and painted the passion I always felt in her.

One day I must ask Jill in NZ if she's ever posed nude for paintings. She's had nudes taken of her on camera phones (what posh, wicked Millennial girl hasn't?), but I'd love to know if she ever posed to be sketched or painted--- or even posed for higher-end art nudes.  I can imagine some ghostly figure with a DSLR shooting photos of Jill, but she needs--- has needed since she was the age of a Hamilton model at St. Tropez to be painted. It's only paint on canvas that draws passion out.

Two Eight Five: Pedagogy

Someone told me once in passing that a certain kind of erotic linkage underlay all education. They were talking about Plato and the Symposium, but I understood what they meant--- that the desire for knowledge and erotic desire are often hard to separate one from the other. Falling in love with a certain kind of knowledge is easily transmuted into desire for the person with the knowledge. Having one means having the other. Or so any number of French coming-of-age novels and any number of films about teacher-student affairs tell us.

Back a while ago I wrote this about my friend in New Zealand:

My lovely, long-legged, posh blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud wrote me once upon a time to answer questions about her adventures in her teens. Her life as a posh bad girl has always fascinated me, and I did send her a master list of questions about the things she did when she was a self-described wicked schoolgirl.

I asked her the obvious question about encounters and adventures with teachers--- something that's the stuff of any number of coming-of-age films (right now I'm thinking of Mischa Barton and her teacher in "The O in Ohio" or Kat Dennings in "Daydream Nation").

This was her response to my question about whether she'd ever had sex with one of her teachers back at her posh private school in Lower Hutt:

I slept with a teacher a few times...but he was sort of a family acquaintance. But he was also my science teacher, so it totally counts! (I was sixth form, so 16 when I did it)  

She also wrote me to say that:

At 15, i sucked a maori trainee-teacher's cock behind the school gym... just sucked him that one time...i would have loved to fuck him though!


I'm wild to know all the backstory for each encounter--- how it happened, what she thought and felt during and after, if she discussed doing either thing with her circle of close female friends. I'd love to know if she was ever discovered--- by parents or staff ---doing schoolgirl-teacher things.  Those questions do matter to me. She was I think thirty or thirty-one when she answered those questions, and I do wonder how she sees her fifteen or sixteen year old self, and if she has any regrets.

I think I noted before, too, that I've come to suspect that not all the stories she's told me over the years have been true. So while I'd very much like those stories to be true, I just can't be sure. It's sad and disturbing that I can't just believe her outright these days, and all the more so since for years I've known that I'd run off and live with her or marry her for the asking.

But let's assume it's true. Let's assume that she did have sex with her science teacher. And that she gave head to a Maori teacher-trainee behind the gym. Those are great stories, and I can add them to my list of teacher-student stories from girls I've known.

Liberty of course slept with her coastal ecology instructor when she was at university. From all I understand, the environmental sciences department (regarded as a haven for hippies) was notorious for things like that happening. I do love the idea of the sleeping bag and the dock (see my earlier entry), and I'd like to know if she slept with him again after the field trip. I suppose it's possible that it was only that the rules are suspended on field trips, but it's something I wish I knew. And if she was ever jealous that the instructor (oh, obviously and inevitably) slept with other co-eds in his classes.

Levin told  me once that she'd slept with one of her art professors. In some ways the affair had been a perfect art school cliche--- she'd even modeled for him. She was rather proud that he'd painted and sketched nudes of her. She had one framed in her bedroom. She was proud of being his muse, proud of being painted. The affair (and it lasted for a while) was art school cliche and filled with art school drama. Levin discovered that the professor had also slept with a boy she'd dated her freshman year...and who was now living with a girl Levin had once had a fling with. I nearly fell off her bed laughing and applauding.  She agreed with me that it was funny, although it made her feel that  art school was far, far too claustrophobic and incestuous.  I'll note here that I found that whole round robin thing far easier to believe than some of my New Zealand friend's stories, if only because I'd spent enough time around art school undergraduates and faculty in my clubland days. Art school always seemed to me to be a mix of indie mumblecore movies and Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen.

I will say, too, that the framed nude she had in her bedroom was very, very good. Very evocative, very powerful, very alluring. I did envy her art professor's skills, and I envied him for seeing all the things in Levin that he'd put on canvas.

Marsha told me once that she'd  had a thing with someone who was almost her teacher. She was in geometry in Grade 10 and he was a student teacher doing his required couple of weeks of classroom teaching. She ran into him away from school the next semester (memory says at a pizza place) and he remembered her. All the stories I've told here about Marsha involved cars--- the vintage MG in Thessaloniki, the Triumph along the river road here, the police car on the  levee ---and so does this one. They first had sex in a parked car here, though I'm unclear whether it was around the lakes by the university or atop the levee along the river road. I do remember her telling me that the car was a battered old hatchback, and that he had an ice chest with beer (dark beer, she remembered-- Heineken Dark?)  in the back. She got her skirt up and rode him in the car, and of course there was road head.  They may have done it at his parents' house a few times, and once she made him park at night in the school parking lot and do her with the seats lowered. He'd have been maybe twenty-two. His people, she told me, were "wild Hungarians", and his name was distinctively Magyar. Memory says that he went to Colorado, and of course in some perfect world (or at least a rom-com world) she'd have met him again when she was as the Colorado School of Mines. That didn't happen, but it should have. She told me the story just before she and I went to her senior prom together, possibly to make me just jealous enough to be competitive. After all, he was older and almost her teacher.

Teacher-student affairs do intrigue me. Or maybe it's that I'm interested in how girls see them a decade on. My NZ friend, Levin, Liberty, and Marsha all seem to have taken the encounters in stride. None of them was (or thought she was) in love, none of them felt 'groomed' (or at least felt that that was a bad thing), and all of them liked having the stories to tell later. Levin and Liberty certainly saw their academic affairs as just part of their lists of adventures, and certainly not as anything traumatic. My friend in NZ saw her affairs as competitive markers amongst her friends, who were notorious posh bad girls.

If any of you out there reading this have experiences that you've turned into stories, do tell me about your own academic encounters. Tell me how they happened, and what you thought while they were happening. Tell me how the memories feel to you now, some years on.