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 Seven One: Library

 Here we are at the very beginning of the year 2024.

I haven't been here in too long, and I apologize for that. I have no idea who if anyone reads this out over the aether, but if you're reading this, you do have my apologies. I've been away from this blog for too long, and I want to make 2024 a year where I spend more time here.

I'd like to spend some time this year focusing on fantasies-- what they are, how they evolve, how they're used. I'd like to focus, too, on what they mean. Note that I'm not using "mean" in any Freudian sense. I'd like to focus on what it means that we need fantasies, and on how (if at all) they relate to individual lives.  

Consider the sentence beginning "I am not my..." Consider all the things that can complete the sentence. Well, fantasies is one possible word. So I'd like to spend some time examining that version of the sentence. Are we our fantasies? Should we be "accountable" (a word I really hate) for our fantasies? How much are we defined by our fantasies? I want to think about those things and write about them during the year. 

But in the meantime, let's start the year with a few books that I'll recommend. Some are older, yes, but there are libraries and interlibrary loan systems. If you read any of them, please do tell me what you think.

1. Robert Hellenga, "The Sixteen Pleasures". A very clever and often very hot  literary mystery set in Florence in the mid-1960s. The McGuffin here is a 16th-c. book of erotica with engravings of the sixteen sexual positions supposedly most likely to give pleasure to women. Late Renaissance Italian history, erotica, and antique books-- how could I not like this book?

2. Georges Bataille, "The Story of the Eye". Okay, now-- a work of French surrealist s/m erotica. It's considered one of the most bizarre novels of the last century. It has madness, s/m, slapstick comedy, and lots of sex involving eggs. I don't know enough about it (or about Bataille) to say whether it's supposed to be a parody of French s/m. It is funny in a perverse way, mind you. And there's a film version from the very early Noughts that I do hope to see one day. 

3. Alec Waugh, "A Spy in the Family". Alec Waugh was the older brother of Evelyn Waugh, and "Spy" is at least as funny as some of the younger Waugh's early comedies. The plot is simple. A late-1960s upper-middle-class young London wife discovers that her boringly vanilla civil servant husband is actually a spy working for MI.6. Somehow she becomes a lesbian dominatrix working for Her Majesty's Secret Service...and really, really likes her job. Some very, very hot moments, some very witty dialogue. This does need to be a film.

4. Joyce MacIver, "The Exquisite Thing". A largely forgotten s/m coming-of-age novel from c. 1970. There are some very hot sequences, including a stunning scene in a Spanish s/m performance club. MacIver did at least one other book that's worth reading-- a kind of autobiographical novel called "The Frog Pond" that's also an s/m coming-of-age story. I haven't read "The Exquisite Thing" in decades, but the scene in Madrid still haunts me. There's a third book, too, called "Mercy"...which seems to be a Southern gothic Lolita tale. About MacIver herself I know nothing. But do read "The Exquisite Thing" and let me know what you think. 

So...four books for you here at the start of the year. I do hope you'll make a point of reading at least a couple of them. I'd like to be able to discuss them with some lovely young literary girl. And I'd like to know if these four books do anything for your fantasy lives.

Three Four Two: Pages

Does anyone know if actual porn novels are still published?

Long ago and far away, in my teens and in my undergraduate days, porn novels filled the spinner racks at all-night convenience stores and bus stations. There were other genres there-- mostly action-adventure series --but porn novels seemed to fill three-quarters of the spinner racks. I haven't seen porn novels sold new since sometime in the 1980s, and I've always assumed that videotape killed the porn novel. Reagan's attorney-general deliberately omitted porn novels from his anti-porn efforts because "who reads?" 

There are websites devoted to cover art from 1960s-80s porn novels, and the other evening I found a link to a Russian website that has the scanned texts of something like three or four hundred American porn novels from the 1970s and early 1980s. I suppose I'm glad the books at the site were all from American publishers. British porn is...depressing. British porn is at least as depressing and dreary as British girlie magazines. And I think I'd be afraid of Australian porn novels. There are limits. Yes there are.

Steven Marcus used the word "pornotopia" in his "The Other Victorians", and it does apply to 1970s-80s porn novels. In porn novels, everything turns on sex. Wealth or poverty exist only to provide excuses for sex scenes. All schools exist only as spaces for students and teachers to engage in breathless sex. All travel is from one site for exotic (or at least outdoor) sex to another. Everyone is either handsome/beautiful or, if gnarled and gnomish, at least shockingly well-hung. Any social interaction at all is an occasion for sex. And all sex-- hetero, gay, lesbian, bi, interspecies, incest --invariably produces multiple orgasms all around. Everyone is always ready for anything, and even if a character seems to be horrified or appalled, she (and it always she) is secretly excited and thrilled by what's happening. In porn novels, nothing exists that isn't an occasion for sex. No object exists that can't be used as a sex toy. No one is ever bored during sex, no one's disgust is ever other than feigned. 

The Russian website had a copy of a c. 1980 novel called "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl" that was...hilarious and awful in equal parts. The writing was (of course) awful, but...not as bad as you'd think. So here we have a teen schoolgirl-- just turning sixteen --on a week-long summer field trip with a Future Farmers group. And...it shouldn't be hard to trace her story arc. In the course of the first couple of nights at a young farmers' convention, she loses her virginity while still on the bus...to her seat mate's well-trained dog. And some random, nameless boy who's been watching the girl and her seat mate with the dog. Young Denise (yes, she has a name) goes from Bronte-reading virgin to sex with boys, other girls, grizzled old bus drivers, dogs, donkeys, and a stallion. And of course with her own older brother. She also swears a public vow before a cheering crowd of other teens never to wear underwear again (I approve of that scene). By the end of the book, she and her brother are deeply in romantic love, and they're sleeping naked in one another's arms in a hayloft after he orchestrates her first time with a stallion.  

I'm not sure how you're supposed to respond to "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl". It's all very light-hearted, and there's no post-Foucault focus on power structures. A random boy who sodomizes the heroine over a bus seat goes from shouting, "Take my jizz  you lezzie dog-slut!" to whispering in her ear that "your skin is like honeyed Asian silk". All I can imagine is the standard porn-writer trope of the Ivy League English Lit graduate paying his rent by writing porn. 

Porn novels in those days assumed that incest was commonplace, and that all suburban siblings were in and out of one another's beds. And of course there's an obvious meta-incest happening, too, since the authors of the novels manage to repeat one another's work and share character names. There's probably a bit of revenge going on as well-- Denise in "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl" is always described by her full name: Denise Chapman. I'm taking it for granted that Denise Chapman is the author's ex-girlfriend or ex-wife, or at least the Unobtainable Beauty of his own teen years.

Porn novels were at least honest. I'm thinking of a series called the DB Collection-- DB standing for "Dirty Books". The covers were all flat black with a white number and the title. And the titles were things like "DB 1 - Stuffed With Big Black Dick" or "DB 4 - Fucking Her Tender Teen Asshole". You paid for nasty porn, and you got nasty porn. There was no way you could tell someone that you'd bought a title from the DB Collection by accident. You couldn't say you'd been looking for one of Tolstoy's later novels and picked up a DB title by accident. 

There's a whole body of discussion about how porn and erotica are different. One key thing, I think, is that '70s and '80s porn novels were much more about doing sex than erotica would ever be. Yes, the novels said, you can do that with an Irish Setter or a polished ivory statue of a saint. Porn novels never questioned the idea of going farther, or trying the most unlikely positions or partners. What you can try, you must try. Erotica can be about finding oneself, about discovering that you're submissive or bi or poly. Porn is about the functional possibilities of the world. There's no magic in porn, but there is a lot of...industrial engineering.

I spent a lot of time in my lost youth reading Foucault and his contemporaries, and reading 1970s porn through a critical theory lens is a comic experience. But I suppose that's not the way to read "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl". It's the only way I can read it, mind you, but that's always been the problem with my reading. I assume that the author was at least as devoted to irony as I am, and he's feeding me postmodernist set-ups for jokes. 

I will have to spend more time going through the scanned titles at the Russian website. And I will have to tell you, my friends and readers, about the things I learned from porn novels back in the last age.

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.

One Three Five: Vox

I've been watching a film this morning, a quirky little comedy with Emma Roberts and John Cusack called "Adult World".  It's not a bad film. Nothing special, but something to enjoy on a grey, cool morning while drinking vanilla latte. Emma Roberts' character is certainly someone I'd have focused on had I met her--- bookish, lovely, willing to explore the things in life she'd read about (and been warned about).

I think what catches my eye, though, is that she wants desperately to be a poet. Her character has the worst possible reading voice, but she does love poetry. So I am thinking about poetry, about which poets and which poems have affected me, about which poems have said something to me about love and desire.

Years ago, I found a blog by a very, very serious girl who wrote that her plan for one spring semester was to read "one good poem" every day. I did grin at the ponderous undergraduate seriousness of it all, but I couldn't disagree with the idea. That is something worth doing.

Yes, I have written poetry, not that you'll ever see it. After all, I was an undergraduate once, and I did send poems to lovely girls I fancied. Yes, they were written to entice. However not? They weren't declarations of love, now. They were enticements and small visions of things I imagined. They weren't too overtly erotic or graphic. They were all of them a bit melancholy, though. All these years later, I still don't know if that melancholy was an affectation or actually the way I've always seen the world.  By now there may not be any difference, of course.

I have favourite poets, and you can probably guess most of the names. I was in the last generation brought up with the Modernists, and they've stayed with me--- Eliot and Pound and Stevens and Auden are always there on my shelves. Rilke, too, in C. F. MacIntyre's translations. And Leonard Cohen, too, I think.  (I have no idea which poets undergraduates are taught to admire these days--- can anyone out there tell me? ) If I had a poet for poems about love, though, it was always Cavafy. Cavafy always evoked things that I liked. The sense of exile, the cafes in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria, the sense of history, the sense of time and loss.

One of my favourites, a small poem called"Grey":

While looking at a half-gray opal
I remembered two lovely gray eyes—
it must be twenty years ago I saw them...


We were lovers for a month.
Then he went away to work, I think in Smyrna,
and we never met again.

Those gray eyes will have lost their beauty—if he’s still alive;
that lovely face will have spoiled.

Memory, keep them the way they were.
And, memory, whatever of that love you can bring back,
whatever you can, bring back tonight.


And another by Cafavy--- "Body, Remember":

Body, remember not only how much you were loved 
not only the beds you lay on. 
but also those desires glowing openly 
in eyes that looked at you, 
trembling for you in voices--- 
only some chance obstacle frustrated them. 
Now that it's all finally in the past, 
it seems almost as if you gave yourself 
to those desires too--- how they glowed, 
remember, in eyes that looked at you, 

remember, body, how they trembled for you in those voices. 

I can remember reading those aloud alone in my rooms. I can remember reading them to girls there, too.  My young companions have told me over the years that I have a good reading voice, and I'd like to think that's true.  It's been a long time, though, since I've read poetry to a girl. I'd like to remedy that.

I can remember reading Cavafy to entice lovely girls, and I can remember reading him myself (always in the Keeley-Sherrard translations) and feeling myself move into his world. I first read Cavafy as an undergraduate, though, and that's a lifetime ago.  I've no idea what poems and poets are taught as poets of romance and sex and desire and loss today. I've no idea which poets and what poems lovely undergraduate girls sigh over these days.  I can't recall which poets black-clad bohemian girls are reading at coffee shops these days--- whenever I look at the books they have with them, it always seems to be critical theory. Well, that is something I should ask about.

Tell me, then, if you're reading this--- what are the poems that literary girls sigh over these days? Who are the poets regarded here in the second decade of the new century as speaking for their time about desire and love and loss? What are the poems read to girls in half-lit rooms just off campus? Let me know, if you can--- tell me who the voices are these days for seductions and romance.

Ninety-Six: Caveats

There's an article I ran across not so very long ago where the author talked about the horror of contemporary dating life.  The article struck a moralizing and morally-panicked tone--- how horrible, that men might ask their dates for the kinds of sex they'd seen in porn! and on a first date! ---and I dismissed the bulk of it with a contemptuous flick of my hand. I don't find it horrible at all either that men might watch porn or that they might ask a partner to try things from films.  I certainly don't find it worthy of outrage that one might ask that on a first date, either. I really do find such articles deserving of contempt.

Still...it is true that dating life here in the teens of the twenty-first century is fraught and often frightening. There was one brief passage in the article that did catch my eye, and it did leave me deeply uneasy. There was a throwaway line about all the things morally-corrupted males ask girls to do, and ended by imagining girls crying afterwards amongst themselves over the disgusting, pathetic things men really wanted to do. There's something in that to make one's blood freeze. What I imagined when I read that was simple enough. Not girls crying, but girls laughing at the things males wanted or liked or asked for. Not, mind you, laughing with affection or delight, but with mockery and disdain.

One of the most fraught parts--- the most frightening parts ---of any affair is making the leap from flirtation and seduction to actual sex. That leap from words to flesh is always dangerous. All the things that sound romantic or erotic, that sound alluring or exciting when they're spoken or hinted at, can go bad when translated into the concrete. Flesh and physics are tricky things, and it's so easy for imagination to fail, for things imagined to fail abysmally in practice. More than that, of course, there are social fears at hand.

Let's not talk about body fears, about the fears of not being attractive enough, not sleek and toned enough. That's not what this is about.  The fear, I think, comes from something else. If you--- as a male ---have any particular sexual interests, anything not wholly vanilla, then there's always that fear of being unable to reveal them with any kind of safety. When you make the step from the bar table to the bed, you will have to finally tell a new lover what it is that you fancy. This is what I like, you'll say. Which is also saying This is what I am. And in that moment you're wholly vulnerable--- undefended against derision and mockery, against that look in a girl's eyes that says pathetic and disgusting.

This is a gendered thing, I think. It's simply not something I can imagine--- being male and looking at a girl with disgust when she tells you her fetishes or preferences. A lovely girl willing to come into one's bed--- and you'd mock her sexual interests? No. That's not something I can ever imagine doing, not something anyone male is likely to do.

But if you're male,  to express any non-vanilla interests is to take a very real risk. My Young Companions know that coming into my bed involves being with someone much older, and they know that there will be games that involve silk blindfolds and ice cubes and candle wax and riding crops. They've known that all along. But that's something that I do always present as a kind of abstraction, as something almost literary, as a chance to be part of a story, as something to be expected with an older lover, with a self-described roué. I haven't had to express anything that was too concrete, too fleshly....and at least the things I tell Young Companions that I want to do involve them and not me. What I tell them about are rituals that offer them literary pleasures. Those things are abstract enough to offer some kind of distancing from the words pathetic or disgusting.

I've known all my life that girls do talk amongst themselves. I have tried very hard to avoid any activities or needs or interests that can be turned into derision.  My own tastes run to the abstract and literary, and my Young Companions tend to be girls who are bookish.  Those things are a kind of defense.

The contemporary dating world is fraught and frightening. There's no question about that.  There's the ever-present fear of being found sexually contemptible and disgusting. A girl might be thought too slutty if she asserted certain desires, but to be male is always to risk being thought pathetic and disgusting. Those things are worse--- or have worse consequences. I've always thought of myself as sexually open, as adventurous, as open to experimentation. I'm not sure the risks are worth it these days.  Having any fetishes, any particular or non-vanilla needs or desires, lays you open to being thought contemptible. Yes, I think pathetic is found far worse than slutty, if we're weighing these things on a contemporary scale.

The step from table to bed, the moment when you have to say that you like these things--- the level of risk here in 2014 is higher than it was twenty years ago, and the level of fear is higher whenever you need to explain or justify yourself. Sexual experimentation, sexual tastes, sexual fetishes--- the whole thing becomes ever more terrifying. Looking at a new lover and waiting to see derision in her eyes... That fear is always there, now.  Unless you're willing to stay well inside the lines of the most anodyne and inoffensively vanilla tastes, you can never admit to wanting anything particular. That's the way it works in contemporary dating. Never admit to what you might really like. Whatever happens, admit nothing, ask for nothing, try nothing. It's probably best, all things considered, to say nothing at all, to shut down your imagination or longings altogether.

Ninety-Three: Characters

I do think that I'd have to craft any erotica that I might write into some very specific forms.

The erotica I'd write would have to have an s/m storyline, as much for the element of ritualized sex as for the s/m itself.  I'd want there to be an sense of the very formalized about the story line. There would be a sense of cool (or even cold) formality and ritual. The characters would be able to look at what they were doing with a kind of stylized distance, a kind of abstraction. There could be romance, and even longing, but there'd always be a sense of distance. My characters would have read about the things they hoped to do long before they ever did any of them, and they'd always see themselves as being part of a story.

The characters would be age-disparate. There's never any question about that. The girl who's the heroine would always be much younger than the hero. However not? The hero would always be me, at least in some ways. The heroine would be a much younger, though she'd always be fiercely bright and well-read. Even as an undergraduate girl, as a co-ed, she'd understand the literary references implicit in the affair. It would be important that she knew those things, that she was aware that s/m existed, that she knew what any affair with the hero would involve.

My heroine would be young, yes--- perhaps just barely into her twenties. But she'd have lived inside books all her life, and she'd be visualizing herself as a character in a novel or a film. She'd have read enough to know what her older admirer wanted from her. The word "predator" wouldn't frighten her at all.

There's a moment that I'd insist on seeing, by the way. Imagine that early-autumn night in the city, and imagine her there on the stoop of a brownstone, holding hands with the hero, kissing him,  and knowing what's waiting upstairs in his apartment. She puts out her cigarette and stands and pulls him up by his hand. "Show me," she'd say. "Show me." That's very much what I'd want--- a girl who's willing to explore, who's prepared to overcome any fears with the desire to try new things, to just dive into experience. That would be important--- that she'd be willing to go up those stairs as an adventure.

He is older--- that's a given. How much older? Well...enough to make their affair suspect in most people's eyes. Enough of an age difference for their affair to be transgressive. But it's important that he not see her as a child or as simply a plaything. He admires her courage and her intelligence as much as he loves her long legs and sharp, visible hipbones and ribs. Whatever he wants to do with her, he wants her to be part of it, to know that she sees herself as a character in so many stories.

I can think about what's likely to happen upstairs--- silk blindfolds, silk bindings, riding whips and candle wax. I can think about those things. But what matters is that the girl who's the heroine walks up those stairs because she wants to see new worlds and new experiences, and that the hero knows that his own role in the story demands that he offer her up formal, ritualized experiences.

It's no less important that they talk, that the affair demands long conversations late at night. The story can be very explicit, but to the two principals, it's also about long conversations, about stories and dreams spun out late in the night. It's important that they know that each of them is creating backstories for what's happening.  For every kiss on a bare hipbone, for every new position and every enacted ritual, there must be long, intricate conversations. They'll be deeply enamoured of one another, deeply in lust and in love. But they'll be all-to-aware of what they're doing together, all-too-aware of being part of something very formalized.

I'm not sure at all if this makes any sense. The story I'd want to tell would be very passionate, but a passion that's mediated through literary references, through an awareness of all the books and films that my characters have experienced.  My characters would approach one another through their own knowledge of those things. Is that erotica, no matter they might do in bed? That's a question that I'll open up to any readers--- does self-awareness blight erotica? What are your thoughts on that?

Anyway... It's hard to imagine erotica that isn't about two people who want to experience new things, who are aware of so many things in books and films that they need in their own lives.  Erotica for me requires a kind of distance, an awareness of sets and setting, an awareness of what sets and props the characters have chosen--- brand names, despite anything Remittance Girl may have said. My characters would always want to be part of a literary world that embraces everything they do with one another.

Erotica for them has to be about be about dreams rather than flesh...or at least about something formal that's more than the mere collision of flesh.

I do wish I new how to write all of this down--- to shape a story around the characters I've seen in my mind's eye all these years.

Ninety-Two: Decor

A cold Christmas Day morning, and I am thinking about the idea of writing erotica. I'm still not entirely persuaded that anyone male--- straight, white, "cis/cis-presenting" male and of a certain age ----is allowed to write erotica at all here in the age of the gender wars. That's an issue that needs to be considered, isn't it? Is it permissible at all for anyone male (let alone male and embodying all the other things so despised by the gender warriors) to describe sex or create sexual imagery? Is it permissible for males to have sexual fantasies at all in the age of the gender wars?

I'm looking out from my rooms at a winter morning and trying to explain what I'd like to see in erotica, or what I'd like to write about.  Sets and settings, obviously. I always begin with sets and settings. Where something happens matters intensely to me. Place, time, decor--- the context matters. Sex, or at least a rencontre, means very little without the right mise-en-scène.  Setting matters.

A fairly well-known writer of on-line erotica, an expat woman in Indochina who calls herself Remittance Girl once angrily blocked me from a discussion because I disagreed with her about the use of brand names in erotica. I'm no fan of the sex-and-shopping novels ("shopping and fucking") from the 1980s that made having Louboutin pumps and a millionaire, hard-muscled lover totally interchangeable for  wealthy cougars in L.A., but I do like the idea of brand names in stories (and not just in erotica). Brand names provide context; they do help define a social background for the story. And, yes, they are aspirational. Brand names allow me the chance to make lists.  I've done that with all kinds of genres, and done it all my life. Lists and brand names do help shape the encounter.

The hero in a thriller drinks this kind of Scotch and wears these kinds of shirts.  He takes these items of equipment with him to the hills of Nuristan. Some writers do that deliberately, of course. Ian Fleming's James Bond novels were notorious for that. They were as much about teaching postwar young Englishmen how to dress for an upwardly mobile life as much as they were about the spy plots.  I do want brand names and lists, despite Remittance Girl's hostility to them. I want to be able to read erotica and look for class markers and style guides. Sex has to be about a certain kind of stylishness. The physical encounter is never as important as the presentation.  And I do judge sex by presentation. Flesh and bodies are never very attractive on their own, or at least they're not sufficient to make an encounter work, even if they are necessary.  I don't want to be inside a story, or identify with a story, that's not appealing to the eye, or to a sense of style. That's style in both senses, mind you--- literary as well as fashion. Maybe that's what Remittance Girl was objecting to.  Maybe she was angry that I was saying that sex--- an encounter ---is or should be defined and judged not by flesh or physical pleasure, but by presentation.  I can't imagine it any other way, though.

Writing erotica... Anything I'd write would have lists implicit. What the characters did and how they approached it would be shaped by locations and decor. It would be important to them that what they were doing be part of the stories in their heads. My characters wouldn't be the Beautiful People from the "Dynasty"-era shopping-and-fucking novels, but they would be people who wanted sex to be framed like a story, to happen in ways that would allow them to live up to the stories in their heads. If they're over-literary, well, so am I. The important thing is to have a correct setting and a correct set of symbols and markers to deploy.  I grew up reading things like "Story of O"--- erotica set in the places and social settings I wanted to visit, erotica set in what were always aspirational settings for me.

Erotica for me has to have a self-aware literary edge. And it has to have a certain kind of s/m flavor. But that goes back to the idea of literary style. What's more "literary" than high-end s/m, with all its roots in Catholic ritual and French novels...?

I need to think more about that, about what and how to present the kinds of characters I'd like to use. And about how to present s/m--- how to deploy it and how to have my characters understand it.

Ninety-One: Pages

Classic and antique erotica--- I've been writing about that. I'd love to have a well-stocked library with its own section for classic and antique erotica.  If you've been reading here, you already know that. I'd want the books to be not just titles that are classics, or at least exemplars of  sub-genres, but finely bound as well. I'm not sure what it means to collect first editions of erotica, but having original editions--- high-end 18th-century and Victorian editions ---is an obsession all its own.

There's still one question, though. Let's say that I could have a shelf or two of classic erotica, of things done from the early 18th-century up through the early 1950s. The question remains: what counts as "real" erotica, "serious" erotica today?

I'm not at all sure what counts as "serious" erotica these days, and I'm not exactly sure what I'd be looking for in erotica. Certainly nothing like "50 Shades" or its progeny. Nothing like the long list of "erotic romance" titles listed at GoodReads, where far too many of the stories seem to be Harlequin romances with explicit sex.

I'm a literary snob, and I'll admit that. I'd want erotica to be literary as much as anything else. I'd demand something that was aware of itself as literature. Explicit is fine--- graphic is better. But it has to be crafted the way literary fiction is crafted. But you know that about me. I want erotica to have the same quality of writing I expect from any other genre I read.

But there's something deeper here as well. Even if I decided to write my own erotica, what am I still allowed to write in the age of the gender wars? It strikes me that so much of the erotica produced in the last fifteen or twenty years has been by female authors, and I'm wondering if there's not a kind of social rule here. Are men who write self-described erotica regarded with suspicion, or at least with more suspicion than female writers? Are male authors of erotica regarded as working not just in a sketchy field, but as being suspect themselves for all the usual sins?

If I decided to write erotica, I'd have immediate problems. Writing about sex is regarded as having political overtones, as being immediately subject to political criticism in a way that, say, writing detective stories isn't.  I'm male, white, heterosexual, and of a certain age. (Should I add "cisgendered", too? And "educated middle class"?) There'd be a question of whether I was even allowed to write erotica. All the more so if what I wrote had age-disparate couples or told s/m-inflected tales.

The columnist Sarah Nicole Prickett is noted for dismissing anything written by "Dads"--- white males over 30 ---as being works she refuses to read. She sees no reason for such people to write anything anymore.  And when I follow on-line literary feuds, I see that she's not the only one to hold that view. And it takes very little imagination to imagine the abuse a male author of  erotica could face.  You'd never be able to write literary s/m, especially if you had a heroine who volunteered to be the submissive parter. You'd never get away with trying to be inside her head, and making her "conventionally" beautiful would only seal your fate in the eyes of the gender warriors and the social justice mob.

There have been times when writing erotica was a sin--- providing temptation to lure readers into sin and debauchery. That actually sounds amusing these days, and I suppose anyone who was serious about what they wrote would enjoy the idea of having that kind of effect.  Here in these latter days, writing erotica is taken as being a kind of political statement, as being "really" about issues of oppression. To write erotica as someone too male, too old, too pale, and too straight is to be instantly accused of writing erotica for all the basest or most ideologically-evil reasons.

I can have classic or antique volumes on my shelves. What I can't do is write the erotica I'd like to read without being immediately attacked on non-literary grounds. I told you this before--- I am a roué and a gentleman of a certain age. In the age of the gender was, there are no words for what I am that don't imply that any desires I may have are vile and oppressive.

Ninety: Bibliophilia 2

This morning I'm imagining that collection of antique erotica--- the shelves of carefully-preserved, hand-bound volumes. I can imagine running a possessive fingertip over them and taking pride in having found and acquired them; I can imagine feeling a historian's pride in knowing the biographies of the authors and the travels of the individual volumes. I can even imagine feeling a certain academic pride in being able to apply both critical theory and social history methods to the texts. Yet...there's still a question here. What exactly would I want from the collection? What do I expect the books to do?

That's a legitimate question, I think. Erotica has a tenuous position in the literary world because it's seen not as literature, or even as a text to be analyzed, but as something that's simply utilitarian. The purpose of erotica is simply to produce arousal. To have a collection of erotica is to be assembling a shelf of what are in effect tools for getting off. A collection of antique or high-end erotica, the argument goes, is exactly like a shelf full of Fleshlights.  An erotica collection can be seen as nothing more than a "spank bank" with antique fonts. Let's leave aside how much I despise "spank bank" as a term--- it's part of the whole vocabulary of words (e.g., "wank", "toss", "rub one out") designed to denigrate and mock male indulgence in the Solitary Vice ---and think for a moment about what the books do.

I'd want that erotica collection because...the books are objects with a certain kind of history, with links to a past of underground presses and clandestine circulation, to a specific kind of moneyed demimonde. To some degree, the actual stories inside the books are never as alluring as the stories of the books and their milieu.  And so we're back to what I said earlier: the antique erotica collection is an aspirational thing, aspirational not just in terms of being expensive objects to display, but also in terms of linking the collector to a libertine past. The writer who called herself Debauchette collected antique erotica because, yes, she'd been  a doctoral student in literature, but also because her collection linked her own life as a courtesan to literary courtesans of the past.

I suppose that in some ways a collection of antique or high-end erotica is the very definition of "fetish". Not in the sexual usage,  mind you, but in the anthropological usage: investing an inanimate object with ritual or mystical powers. The books on the shelf aren't there to be used in any direct way. They're not there as a collection of scenes with the power to induce arousal.  They're there to link you to a certain tradition and a certain history. They're markers, not things with intrinsic utility.

It's not the actual sex scenes that matter.  Check on line for video of any kinds of activities you can imagine. Check on line, too, for fiction sites where any kind of specialized scene you'd like will be listed. What matters is the antique volume of erotica as ritual object, as something invested with the power to link you to a past, and to a pose.

I can imagine having those volumes on a shelf, and I can imagine knowing their histories and knowing how to apply Foucault and Barthes and Deleuze to them. I can imagine knowing the names and locations of the presses, and knowing how the books were distributed and what else the authors wrote. What I don't want them for is, well, erotica. Their genre matters,  but only as part of their value as markers. They'd be in a collection on my shelves to say that I understood that there's a history of erotica, and I was linking myself to a tradition of literary libertines. Those things matter to me far more than the actual sex scenes inside the covers.

The collection is something I do want. Let's be clear about that. I'd like to have a collection of antique erotica as good as Debauchette's. There's no question about that. But I wouldn't be collecting it as erotica in and of itself.  I'd want the collection as a statement about other things. And I can imagine looking at the volumes as objects, as things I'd explain to a lovely young visitor the way you'd explain paintings on your wall. But I do have to note that I want "antique erotica" as an aspirational thing, as a concept rather than as something to use. What the books would do is allow me to link myself to traditions I admire and skills I've cultivated.  That's not unlike what all books do for me, and probably all the other objects in my life as well.

EIghty-Nine: Bibliophilia

A few years ago there was a blogger who signed herself as "Debauchette". She did a very thoughtful, very clever, very hot blog about her career as a high-end escort. She had a second page elsewhere where she talked about the books she was reading. I was a follower of her blog, and I do miss the stories she'd tell. She wrote about always using a fountain pen for her paper journal, and she recommended the Lamy fountain pen. That was recommendation enough for me to order one, and I do give her credit for the pen.

I found an interview with Debauchette where she talked a bit about her life and her transition from grad school into being a "professional companion". The interviewer asked her about her hobbies, and Debauchette talked about her own specialized bibliophilia, about collecting antique erotica. That caught my eye, of course, and on a couple of levels.

I'd known that there was such a thing as "Victorian erotica" since I was in high school and saw the books (some real, some clever pastiches) that Grove Press was putting out in those days. Lots of books about lascivious swells and gents, lots of tales of debauched maidens in Mayfair. I was at university, though, before I read Steven Marcus' "The Other Victorians" and realized that there was a whole subterranean world of Victorian publishing that did expensive editions of erotica.  I read Marcus' descriptions of the printing and distribution and found myself wishing I could have my own collection of erotica.

There were porn novels in those days--- paperbacks printed on the cheapest paper possible, bound in solid dull colours. You'd find them on spinners at bus stations or in convenience stores in the bad part of town. That's not what I wanted, of course. I read Marcus' long essay about "My Secret Life" and wanted a set. I wanted things from the upscale parts of the subterranean world. I remember a passage in (I think) Walter Kennedy's "The Secret Museum" where he noted what "upmarket" meant in the erotica world. A skilled craftsman (say, a master plumber) c. 1890 would've paid the equivalent of three or four month's wages for something like "My Secret Life". That was something I thought was doubly alluring:  transgressive sex, yes, but also a kind of secret world where Dorian Gray types furnished their secret garçonnières with finely-bound illicit novels and memoirs.

I did try to buy a few things in my grad school days. There was a bookseller's in Brooklyn called C.J, Scheiner's that did a mail-order business in antique erotica from ads in the New York Review of Books, and I'd go through their catalogs and try to find things that fit a grad student's budget. I couldn't afford anything extravagant--- folios of hand-coloured prints, Regency survivals, early reprints of Sade. Oh, I did see a set or two of "My Secret Life" for sale, but memory says that even in those days a set brought four or five thousand dollars. I did get a rather nice hardbound edition of "Story of O", obviously handcrafted, and I got a couple of signed prints by Guido Crepax, but never anything that would go into a serious collection.

The interview with Debauchette did include photos of a few of her own treasures--- an early English edition of Aretino, a good copy of "Venice Preserv'd", some 1920s underground reprints of Sade's "Justine" and "Juliette".  I'd like to see what else is on her shelves.

As for mine, though... I'd still like to collect antique erotica. I'd love an authentic set of "My Secret Life", and I'd like to have some of Rochester's plays. I might even like an edition of "The Romance of Lust". Though I wonder where one draws the line at "antique". Aretino or Tokugawa-era Japanese shunga would be all well and good,  but I think I'd like to focus any hypothetical collection on post-1945 editions. Yes, good hardbound copies of "Story of the Eye" and  "The Image", or good editions of Sade--- good meaning well-translated and annotated. And very probably some fashion-noir erotic photo collections from the 1970s through the mid-1990s.

Things like "My Secret Life" would be there as an exemplar of a secret world and clandestine high-end printing. To have things like Bataille or Sade or even "Story of O", though, I would want fairly recent well-bound editions, since the bindings would have to go hand-in-hand with modern translations and illustrations.

I will say that I want erotica in books--- in texts and photo collections. I want something tangible, something with a history. Streaming video can never have that.

But this raises a question. What out there is worth collecting now? Is there a world of high-end erotica done in the last ten or fifteen years that's worth seeing as collectible? And I will ask--- if you were setting up your own secret bookshelves, what would you collect?  What would you collect not just for its value at provoking arousal, but for its sense of style, for its value as an object? Let me know what erotica you'd collect for your own hidden shelves.

Seventy-One: Archaeology

There was a review article at Chronicle of Higher Education not so very long ago by Camille Paglia about academic treatment of BDSM. I dislike Paglia, and I want to be clear about that. She's the last person I'd choose to review books on BDSM, and in truth the article devolved into one of her usual rants against critical theory in general and against Foucault in particular. The only good thing about the article was that she included a patronising review of Staci Newmahr's "Playing on the Edge", and I'm having the library get a copy for me. "Playing on the Edge" is an account of the darker edges of BDSM by a writer who immersed herself in that world for a couple of years as both observer and participant. I'll be reading it for the darkness and the more highly-sexual passages--- reading it the way I'd read a novel. That at least came from Paglia's article.

As for the rest of it...well, the only thing I dug out of her rant was that she was annoyed that the authors she was reviewing didn't think BDSM had a history. Okay, yes--- it does have a history. Everything, every set of ideas and beliefs, has its own archaeology...though that may be too much like Foucault for Paglia to admit. If you look at BDSM as a set of specialised sexualised activities, you can trace it back through all those Victorian brothels that dealt in flagellation and back through Sade into the eighteenth century. You can probably trace the idea of the whip as a sexual accessory back to Restoration libertines. Before that, though, I'd think it gets a bit iffy. I'm not sure that what we think of as BDSM really crops up in Tudor or Renaissance times.  Is there anything in Aretino? And medieval flagellation...no. That's something different. If you're whipping yourself or being whipped to actually mortify the flesh for serious religious reasons, that's something altogether different. BDSM abstracts the idea of ritually mortifying the flesh--- this is why BDSM draws so heavily on Catholic imagery ---but empties out the religious content.  There's nothing ironic in medieval flagellants, and BDSM, even (or especially) in its most ritualised forms, is deeply ironic.

I've always been at least intellectually attracted to BDSM--- or to the idea of it. Blindfolds and riding crops and candle wax are accessories to stories, and they have a literary pedigree. They're markers for something, too. Like the double-diamond on ski slope warning signs, those things are markers for a certain kind of literary girl that she's doing sexual things that are beyond just the basic. Blindfolds and silk scarves and candle wax and riding whips are markers for advanced sex, for a kind of postgraduate-level sex. That's always something one can offer to a certain kind of young companion: not just sex, but the idea of sex that's more advanced, more complex, more literary than just fumblings in a backseat or in a residence hall bed.

I've said before that I came across BDSM by discovering books like "Story of O"  when I was very young. And there's no question that much of what I liked in literary BDSM was the idea of class.  Hidden chateaux, elegant townhouses, expensive fittings, beautiful people in distant cities. There's a traditional association of BDSM with wealth, after all. The men who could pay Victorian prostitutes in specialised brothels to whip them had to be at least upper middle-class; it takes money to afford the rent and upkeep at Roissy. Oh, I liked the idea of ritual and accoutrements; I liked the idea of the literary references. But what I think first intrigued me was the idea of beautiful people in expensive settings in distant places doing forbidden things that only made sense in that context. Roissy is a kind of literary idyll. Doing the same things in a tract home in Terre Haute is...well...part of a breaking crime story on cable news.

Paglia's review article never quite gets to the idea of a change in class markers for BDSM over the last thirty years or so, but it's there. In the age of FetLife and fairly open BDSM social organisations, in an era when BDSM clubs have "munches"--- potluck dinners, really ---there's been a kind of embourgeoisement of BDSM. I suspect that at FetLife  or other BDSM organisation dinners in Silicon Valley, people exchange business cards. There are BDSM workshops with credentialed facilitators. That's all so very American educated middle-class, so...respectable. Paglia argues in some kind of Golden Bough way that BDSM is about a kind of chthonic need for order and redemption and a contact with the animal self. But I think she's missing a sea-change in how BDSM presents itself, and what its class markers are.

I've always been a solitary type. I'm not sure my own attraction to BDSM could survive a potluck dinner or a workshop. A single young companion who shares a need to live inside books: that's more what I want for a partner for ritual games. It's always been ritual that I admire in so many things: the formal steps, the symbolic acts, the framework that carries you along step by step. And since I take no pleasure in things--- no physical pleasure, anyway ---that isn't mediated through books, I need a partner and a set of games that carry a literary pedigree.

So, then--- Interlibrary Loan is getting me a copy of "Playing on the Edge". With luck, it'll be like a very dark and powerful erotic tale with critical theory woven through it. Newmahr didn't go to gated chateaux outside Paris; I know that. But I'm hoping that her stories are stylish and dangerous and cleverly told.

There's a history to BDSM. An archaeology, in Foucault's terms. There's a literary heritage, too, and a set of aesthetics. I haven't much use for Camille Paglia, and I'd never trust her on aesthetics or style. I'm just as sure that I'd never quite find anything attractive in a version of BDSM that was...social...especially in that American middle-class way that has "facilitators" and workshops and justifies itself in psychological terms.  BDSM was always the intellectuals' fetish, Andrew Holleran once wrote, because it's something people come to through books. Whatever attraction I've had to it is about style and class markers and books. Whatever games I've played with lovely young companions, the point has always been about books and living inside books. I'm not sure at all that my attractions could survive in a word where the games were justified, or where they only about sex or the physical. And once again...my companions can only and ever be girls who live through books and ideas rather than flesh and the concrete world around them.

Sixty-One: Characters

A friend tells me that she's writing what she calls "Dead Poet Erotica". She's writing erotica about the imagined sex life, the should-have-been sex life, of the young Sylvia Plath. The fragments she's shown me have been very hot indeed. She has constructed some very detailed scenarios for the young Plath--- Sylvia in high school, Sylvia at college, Sylvia at Cambridge. Her point is that Plath needed a guide, an older lover, who'd have introduced her to things, shown her how to channel her own passions. I can't really disagree, of course. Plath did need someone much better than Richard Sassoon--- let alone the boys she dated at Smith ---to show her things, to offer her adventures and encounters that would've let her accept herself as fiercely sexual. I especially can't object since my friend has told me that she's used me as one of the young Sylvia's older lovers. I have to be flattered by that.  And Ms. Plath was tall for her age, and leggy enough.  If I'd met her when she was a freshman at Smith or just arrived at Cambridge, I might well have pursued her.

My friend calls what she's writing "Dead Poet Erotica", and I think she may do other stories about a young Anne Sexton. But it needn't be about poets, of course.  I know that there are readers who'd be incensed by what she's writing, who'd find the idea unacceptable. Some would be angry because my friend's stories infringe on the image of Plath that's been held by so many girls over the last forty years--- the Plath who inspires so many Sad Girls, the Plath the Sad Girls so deeply identify with. Some would be angry because they'd see it as a desecration of a feminist icon, or because it would be seen as a kind of necrophilia. Others, I suppose, because it does involve that most evil of all male creatures, the older lover. Nonetheless, I have to like what my friend is doing, and not just because she made me a character.

I suspect that Sylvia Plath erotica raises some readers' hackles only because Plath still seems contemporary--- that we're too close to her. Oh, there is an on-line genre of celebrity erotica, with (badly-done, usually) tales of sex with currently famous models and actresses. And there are certainly tales of the imagined sex lives of famous dead celebrities, a kind of fanfic where writers imagine being with a young Brando, or with Marilyn as an aspiring actress, or with either Hepburn. Those are all on-line erotica, with all that the phrase says about any literary quality. If you go back a bit, though, tales on a similar theme stop being fanfic or slashfic porn and become period pieces or historical novels. A novel about the imaginary erotic life of writers or royalty a century or two ago is treated very, very differently from a story where the author creates a character for himself (or herself) who has sex with a celebrity who's either living or only dead in the recent past.

I can certainly see my friend's attraction to Sylvia, and I certainly would've been interested in being an older admirer for her. I'm flattered that she wrote me in as a character. I suppose I feel a bit depressed that at my age I haven't appeared as even a minor, passing character in a couple of novels. Appearing as the gentleman of a certain age who figures in a co-ed's sentimental education, appearing in some lovely girl's autobiographical first novel--- I very much like the idea, and I have always believed that if one lived in a major city or college town and moved among literary types that one would inevitably make at least passing appearances in novels.

It's possible to dream of being a character in a story, to live one's life as if one were a character in a story. It's possible to look at photographs or at words on a screen and imagine whoever is behind those things as a character in stories you tell yourself. I've imagined myself as a character in a story, and I've certainly told myself long, complex tales about strangers seen at other tables or in faded photographs.

I don't even have to ask what the gender warriors say about that. They dislike fantasy, and they see fantasy as tantamount to violation. My friend will be posting her stories soon, and I know she'll draw fire for them. She'll be attacked for desecrating Plath's legend, or for having her have affairs with older men, or for having sapphic experiences with other co-eds. I'll offer my support, of course. I'm grateful that she did write me into her stories, and even more grateful that she thought I'd be someone who'd have been good for the young Sylvia. And I am impressed with the stories themselves, with the writing and the settings and the ideas of sentimental and erotic education. My friend will very much have my support.

If you're reading this, I'd like to know your own thoughts about "Dead Poet Erotica", or at least about the idea of imagined erotica with figures from the past.  Who would you choose as characters? More to the point, perhaps, do you find yourself turning people you see--- whether or not you know them ---into characters in stories you tell yourself? And what do you feel about it all, about shaping characters, about creating them from people you know, about being a character yourself?

Twenty-Two: Discoveries

I learned how to make love from books.  That's very much the usual way I do things. Not from how-to books, mind you. I've never had very much use for self-help books, let alone books on how to improve one's sex life. I still laugh at Octavio Paz's line upon encountering shelves of those at a bookstore in Los Angeles: "Only a gringo thinks he can learn to fuck from a book." I learned how to make love from novels, of course. That's probably a generational thing, or a class thing. In my undergraduate days, certain young men learned how to make love--- learned about what to say and poses to strike and what things one might do ---from novels. There may have been some porn involved, but not much. No on line porn in those days, and only the beginnings of video porn. One learned--- we learned ---from novels.

There are girls who read Pride and Prejudice and came away from it with an idea of what a lover should be like, and other girls who took the same thing from Lolita. I learned about sex and love affairs from Story of O and Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. I'd read those in high school; I took them with me to university. There were other books, too. An odd mix of things, and not all of it translated from the French. Though most of the things I read were set a few thousand miles and a century or two away from where I lived. My own late teens were a long time before Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney; their books weren't aspirational for me 'til I was in graduate school.

I learned...what? Well, I learned that sex was only secondarily about flesh. Sex was narrative, sex was about style and mannered performances. Sex was as much about the place where it was done as it was about the people involved. What I read and took as my own abstracted me from sex in its simplest forms. It certainly abstracted me from being able to deal with lovers outside of mannered rituals.

Well, I'm here, somewhere past the midpoint of my life. I'm whatever it is I am, and I'm not likely to change. My ideas of how one makes love, of how one speaks to a lover, of the way a love affair should look--- all of that is derived from things I've read down the years. And it's part of me. I am what I've read. Books opened up the world to me, and I very willingly walked inside them.

If you're reading this, I hope you'll tell me how you learned about what love and love affairs and sex should be like. From films? Purely from fieldwork? Or did you have books of your own, books that showed you how to live and how to take a lover?

Eleven: Voix et Livres

I do have a certain fascination with classic erotica. Books, of course. There's the whole bibliophile attraction of collecting classic erotica--- things from that demi-monde of privately published editions in lavish bindings. Of course, the problem is that you're collecting the idea of a book; the text itself isn't all that important. Which may well be all to the good. The list of erotica, of erotic novels and memoirs, that can actually bear reading (let alone re-reading) is very, very small.

There was a time in my life when young companions asked me to read aloud to them. It's certainly a romantic enough idea, reading aloud to a girl curled up against you on a couch or in bed. I've read things by favourite poets--- Rilke, Cavafy, Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Pound ---aloud to lovers. I've read poetry aloud, but it's hard to imagine reading erotica aloud.

I suppose a more contemporary thing might be to watch DVDs of erotica with a companion, but the same set of problems applies. There are films that one can imagine watching with a young companion, but it's a short list: "The Lover", "Henry and June", certain Zalman King films, the French version of "Story of O" from the early 1970s, possibly "The Dreamers" or the 1997 "Lolita". There aren't too many more. The idea of the shared experience with the films would be to set a mood, to seduce and entice. But so far as I can tell, there are far too few films that actually set a mood, that don't just become trite or repetitive or silly.

Technology has made it actually more difficult to set a mood via music. When I was young, every young gentleman had a stereo system and could discuss the components and specifications. One played vinyl for a visiting young lady. One set the mood with jazz or classical or blues; one defined one's tastes with suitably hip and obscure tracks. Even when vinyl turned to CDs, the idea was the same: the girl curled up on the couch with a wineglass, her gentleman admirer playing music for her. That's not done so much these days. Music is on iPods and laptops; fewer people have stereo systems. I suppose I'll put that as a question: how does one set the mood now? Whatever are the guidelines for playing music as part of a seduction?  Do girls in their late teens or early twenties expect to have admirers play music for them as part of a seduction?

I'll pose this as a question. What counts as music for seductions these days? Does anyone even remember Juliet Greco or Miles Davis? Any girls reading this are invited to comment, too, on what they'd imagine having read to them by a lover. I think I'd be quite interested in that.