Three Nine Nine: Jouissance

 I'm still thinking about fantasies. We're living in a time where sexual fantasies have been pushed aside as a topic of any importance. The world seems to be burning down around us, and sex is the last thing on anyone's mind. I haven't found any new active blogs devoted to fantasies or sexual memoirs in, well, easily a year. 

People are presumably still having sex, but no one is discussing it. Even the FMTY Girl websites are now largely devoted to travel and restaurant critiques. Blogs devoted to sexual adventures seem to have gone silent. Erotica sites seem to have vanished one by one. What are people actually doing? What sorts of adventures are now on aspirational lists? Is anyone writing about fantasies and dreams?  My God, there are even reviewers of "romantasy" books at BookTube complaining about anything "spicy" in novels. If anyone wants to talk about sex on a tropical island, they're not talking about sex on the beach or on a moored sailboat-- they're talking about the Epstein scandal and prosecutions.

It's become harder and harder to even construct fantasies in my head. I have no idea what fantasies-- what genres of fantasy --are still acceptable. I have a glum suspicion that the age of seeking adventures with lovely partners has passed.

Let's think about erotica in the here-and-now. Let's think about fantasies. How does one go about constructing fantasies these days? Is transgression still considered exciting, or are transgressive fantasies regarded as a sign of not so much "depravity" in the older, exciting sense as they are a sign of criminal predisposition? 

I'm male, and I'm both cis-het and no longer young. I have no idea what fantasies I'm allowed to have. According to The Discourse online, am I allowed to have fantasies at all? Male fantasies and any male indulgence in the Solitary Vice have been regarded as pathetic and contemptible for a long time now. Is there any way for a cis-het male to admit that he has any sexual fantasies? If so, what raw materials is he allowed to use?

Sexual fantasies are I suppose like any other sort of story-- they need to be crafted, polished, thought out, and reviewed. I've written academic papers for publication, and each one of those has been carefully outlined and crafted. Why would erotica be any different? But in the here-and-now, how does one admit to using any specific sorts of source material? Wouldn't citing one's sources mark one as a target for derision and moral outrage these days? The question remains: what are we allowed to desire, or even imagine desiring? 

If you're reading this out over the aether, tell me if you think sexual fantasies are still...doable. Tell me what you think we're allowed even to imagine desiring. Tell me if sexual fantasies are still worth having here as the republic decays and late-stage capitalism burns the world down. 

Three Eight Eight: Tales

 Here we are at the end of January in the blighted Year Twenty-Five. There's so very little to write about these days. The world is an increasingly grim and brutal place. There's little enough place right now for tales of elegant sex or speculations on the meaning of erotica.

I did find something, though-- tales from the Long Ago, tales from letters sent me by lovely Young Companions back in the days when actual letters meant something, when lovely, long-legged, underwear-averse girls did flirt with me by mail.

These are things sent me by a girl who saw me as mentor and confessor, a girl who wanted to be a muse, a demimondaine, and an adventurer. She wrote me back in the mid-Noughts, back in better days--

Fantasizing about fucking some tan surfer-girl who moved to Florida to wake up to the sound of the waves. She lives in a bright cottage full of tropical flowers and hanging lanterns, and when I say, shyly, that I haven't been with many girls, she says she could teach me a few things.

I can't imagine living in Florida these days-- hurricanes and Republicans make it no country for me and mine, but my Young Companion back in the day had other visions as well:

Fantasizing about fucking a freelance-writer Brooklyn girl. She rolled her eyes at me along with the rest of the city last year when my poetry was published, but recently she's been crushing on my Twitter. After we break up, neither of us talk about it much, but it was the most powerful orgasms we ever had.

I wish I knew more girls these days who spend their afternoons and late nights constructing fantasies. I wish I knew more girls who'd phone me late at night to whisper their fantasies to me.

Muse, demimondaine, adventuress....I need someone like that again. I need someone to be a Voice for me.

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 Three Eight: Borderlands

 This is how it is. The girl talks and I sit across the table with my drink and listen. She's lovely, bright, bookish, and twenty-three. She tells me that she's non-binary, and we talk about how that's different (or if it is different) from her being bi. Her first and middle names are androgynous enough, and she likes that.

She's in skinny jeans and deck shoes, a mostly-unbuttoned men's dress shirt, a silver necklace with a pendant. Her hair is messy and looks like a pixie cut that's gotten away from her. She's strikingly lovely, yes, and I'm fortunate that she's there with me. She likes "androgynous" as a word. She asks if I think she'd make a beautiful gay boy, and I tell her yes. 

The way she's dressed at the bar is...what? Eve Babitz died a few days ago, and I'm thinking the girl could pass as a California gay boy in the mid-1960s...or at least as the film version of one. I can place her in my head as a boy in a gay bar in some imaginary movie from the 1960s or early 1970s, as a gay boy on some black-and-white late-night-cable rerun of an episode of "77 Sunset Strip". That would make her a memory of a memory, wouldn't it? She's not dressed in 1920s gay Oxbridge undergraduate drag-- like Donna Tartt at Bennington c. 1980.  She has a period California look, an air of effortless hedonism. 

What she's telling me is that she likes having boys in her bed that will role-play with her. She can't decide what makes her more hot-- being with a gay boy who'll treat her as a boy to be topped, or being with a straight boy she can persuade to act as her gay boyfriend or-- better --her girlfriend. She enjoys being topped like a boy, but she likes dressing straight boys up and making them beg to be topped and taken, too. She probably likes that more. 

Non-binary, she says, but she doesn't know how to get outside the terms of binary sex. Being with another girl is wonderful,  she tells me, but dressing up and using strap-ons with another girl is just...Lesbian Classic. What she likes, she says, is making boys, gay or straight, lose any sense of their own boundaries. 

She asks me if I know the word autogynephilia. I do know it-- it's a word used as an accusation in the Trans Wars. The angriest of the GC brigade use it against trans women. It's used to mean that trans women don't really see themselves as wholly or "actually" women, that they're simply fetishists excited by the idea of sex as a woman. The trans brigade reject the word absolutely. I've read some of the arguments around the word and don't know what to make of them. If you see yourself as a woman-- as "really" a woman --wouldn't you by definition be excited by the idea of having sex as a woman? And both GC  and TRA types reject and despise anything that might be "just" a fetish. 

The girl across the table tells me that she likes the idea of fetishes. She likes exploring fetishes, of focusing desire on things that have a kind of magic to them, of turning partners into someone and something new. Nair and make-up, she says. Depilate a  boy, do his make-up, teach him to "rock a miniskirt" and beg to be fucked-- there's nothing like that, she says. Make him into a hot teen girl, she says, then be inside him while he begs to be your rag doll, to have his holes stretched-- there's nothing like that. Make him love the look and feel of dressing up, teach him that it's magic. And the same thing works the other way, too, she says: wear a suit and tie, have a gay boy top her while he tells her what he'd tell a straight boy he was teaching to be a gay bottom. 

I  raise my drink and grin at her and ask if what she wants isn't a kind of meta-autogynephilia. I know that there's a "forced feminization" thing that some dommes do, and there's something of that in what she wants to do with boys. I'm just not sure whether she sees the "humiliation" part of that as actual degradation for the boy or just as pedagogy. Does she want to teach straight boys that they can be excited and aroused by what it must feel like to have sex as a girl? Does she want a waxed, mascara'd boy in a miniskirt to fuck her not as a trans woman with a cock or a "trans-lesbian", but as a boy who's learning to derive pleasure from pretending (or being made to pretend) that he's a girl? When she gets topped herself, she says, she loves it that the boy thinks she's good enough at pretending to be a gay boy for him to fuck.  I'd love to be a boy, she says, and have an older man make me dress up and be his girl. 

She can tell me these things because...? Because I'm older and could never be the beautiful boy her fantasies require? Because I'm someone who looks like he can talk about these things with her and not be shocked or appalled? Because I'm quiet and I'm doing my own Freudian Analyst fantasy-- letting her pour herself into my silence?

I do like listening to her. I like it that she says she sees herself as "non-binary", but that she wants to live on the border of binaries. She doesn't really want to be someone/something who's neither male nor female. What she wants is to turn from one to the other and back at will, to have the sensations of sex as each...and to take others into a land of sex in funhouse mirrors.  I like listening to her, and I want to hear more of her stories.

Three Two One: Flags

I had a discussion not so very long ago about the idea of being "non-binary"-- NB or "enbee". A friend told me that she was beginning to regard herself as non-binary, and was considering coming out to her friends and family. I of course will fully support my friend in whatever she does about this, but I, as an aging roué, am very much out of the loop on just what NB is and what one does as a non-binary person.

My understanding is that NB is a gender identity, that it's an identity where someone doesn't identify as either "male" or "female". Well, fine. But what exactly does that mean? Is being NB a way of saying that you're able to move back and forth between social identities as M or F, or that you identify as something that's neither? Functionally, how does it differ from being bisexual or pansexual?

I spent a great deal of my academic life studying nationalism and the idea of nationality--- how nationalities are created and how they define themselves. How do "imagined communities" (Benedict Anderson's famous phrase about nationalities) define themselves? So, yes, any view I have of non-binary / NB people is going to be based on nationality studies, and I have no idea if that'll be a valid sort of comparison.

Any community that forms needs its markers. It needs criteria for who's inside and who's excluded. Any community needs a Secret Handshake or its own On Thursdays We Wear Pink rituals. It needs ways for members to find one another, and it needs ways to separate itself from outsiders. The rituals, the common symbols, help build and cement identity as well. It's more complicated that just thinking that any group creates its own uniforms, though of course they do. And the group's markers need to be recognized as identity markers by the outside world. There's that, too. 

Social identity requires social presentation. That's clear. If you want people to see you as a Serb, you use Cyrillic lettering and you go to an Orthodox church. Believing yourself to be something (anything!) doesn't give you any social position-- other Serbs and the rest of society have to see you as that as well.

Of course the markers are likely to be arbitrary and often trivial. A left ear piercing versus a right ear piercing. Handkerchief colors in hip pockets. Lapel pins. An in-group argot (see, e.g., Polari). Sleeve buttons on a blazer that actually unbutton. Saying zed instead of zee. The markers are arbitrary and often trivial, but all they have to do is mark out some kind of distinction. They give a new community a way of saying we do this, not that. It's a way of saying we're this, not that...and this is how you tell.  Class, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, sexual interest/kink-- the point is to have a distinction.

So...what are the NB markers? What's the checklist for new NB community members? I know that there's an NB flag that can be flown on Pride days, but a community needs more than that. What do you do-- socially, as presentation --to let others know you belong to this group? I asked my friend that question and she was perplexed. Does everyone else need to know? she asked. Can't I just tell the people who need to know?

My first response was that of course you need public, social markers. If you want to have political and social leverage-- a key reason for having  a community --then you need to find ways to make members feel like they have things in common and that they have ways to let each other (and outsiders!) know that here's a community whose interests need to be addressed. A flag is a place to start, but a community will always end up creating a checklist. 

Which brings up the idea of an NB Checklist. What does a potential NB person do, wear, sound like in order to create a distinction. Social distinctions are by definition socially constructed-- arbitrary, often trivial, but often of key importance. 

We're talking about creating stereotypes, yes. But that's part of community building as well. Humans create uniforms for themselves. 

So I will ask anyone out over the aether who reads this... What are the Official NB Identity Markers? This is a web age, and some website, some listicle, some Reddit  board has created checklists for this: clothing styles, bands, slang, accessories and accoutrements.  There's the equivalent of the Official Preppy Handbook out there somewhere on the web. 

We'll get to the other discussion here-- what being NB means in terms of what one does as NB --later. I'll need to discuss with my friend how taking up a new identity affects her sex life or her styles of romance. Does it make any difference at all? She's always been bi as long as I've known her-- will being NB make any functional difference? What's the connection here between gender identity and sex life? 

Well, I'll get to that discussion later. Right now I'll see about what's on the Official NB Checklist. 

Three One Eight: Springtime

 Here we are--- one full year into the time of the Red Death. For many of us, it's been a year of empty streets, empty storefronts, working from home, masks, and social distancing. More than half a million dead in the US this last year. Something like 530,000 lost to the Red Death as of today.

No one has been thinking much about sex this last year, or at least no one has been thinking about sex-as-pleasure. Quarantine Porn exists, but there's something so desperately forced about it. And everyone seems too tired for pleasure, let alone for flirtations and Adventures. I'd thought that the plague and the lockdowns would lead to a revival of phone sex and erotic letters, but that doesn't seem to have happened. More's the pity about phone sex, I must say. Phone sex was always something I liked--- I'd always been told I was good at telling stories and creating scenarios ---but not even lockdown boredom and frustration seems able to make people talk on the phone these days.

My friend Jill down in NZ wrote me once about her best teen memories of oral sex:

Best memories... God, so many nights...I was able to practice on boys just a few years older than me, so when I started spending time with much older men I was very good. And I like to think I returned the favour -- teaching 16 year old boys just how to eat pussy.

I do remember one night...when I sucked two boys off while the other one watched... I loved that, and so did they. After I'd sucked off both of them and we smoked a joint, they did each other, which made me so wet... We were in the back of a car, and later I did ride one of them... But I still wish I could have had them both at the same time.

Those stories-- stories like that --are still out there, but everyone seems too exhausted and depressed to tell them, let alone to create more. I have a friend-- I always call her the Other Melissa, a nickname that dates back a dozen years now --who's in Vienna tonight. Vienna was always my city, and I envy her being there. I should be back in my old flat in the IX. Bezirk, and I should be at Zum Schwarzen Kameel with her, listening to her stories of being a young professional domme in late-Noughts New York. She phoned me once from a cab going to Brooklyn to meet a client to say that it was amazing to think about how much pleasure (and money for pleasure) was being exchanged on any given night in the city. I'd so love to hear her stories, to hear about the adventures she's had since she was nineteen and at Juilliard. 

There is a compliment I received once. One gets so few in one's life that they're important to remember. A lovely five-eleven girl of twenty in Asheville wrote about me in her escort blog:

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.

That's a compliment I've treasured these last seven or eight years. Talking with her late at night, telling stories back and forth 'til dawn--- that mattered more than I can say. 

If anyone's thinking about sex at all these days, it's not about sex as pleasure. Blogs and Twitter timelines are filled with angry exchanges in the Trans Wars, and I intend to keep well away from that. The Gender Wars of the early and mid 2010s morphed from being about male-female skirmishing into being about whether gender and sex are related, or if either really exists in the ways we've believed these last few thousand years. The Gender Wars were ugly; the Trans Wars are vicious and brutal. I don't want any part of them.  

I will note that I, as an aging roué, am what one side in the Trans Wars would disdain as a "genital fetishist". I'm attracted to female bodies--- female in the older definition. I won't say that others shouldn't have the right to present themselves however they wish, but my own tastes are fixed, and have been since a long ago day when I discovered a box of high-end "glamour photography" magazines and realized that, yes, one life question had just been answered. But just as the early Gender Wars and #MeToo made it impossible to talk about male desire or present heterosex as anything but coercive, intrusive, and always both unwanted and mediocre, the current Trans Wars have made it difficult to talk about desiring bodies-- desiring what I define as beauty. So we will stay away from that.

Throughout the time of the Red Death, we've been pulling back from sex and from talking about sex as something we want or miss. The predicted lockdown baby boom hasn't happened. There doesn't seem to be a spasm of post-pandemic hedonism building up. We're all just too exhausted and glumly empty for that. 

It's springtime now, one year into the Red Death. I wear my mask almost everywhere and I have a small Plague Doctor stuffling who sits on my writing desk. But on days like today, I wish there were lovely voices on my phone or lovely Young Companions sitting across a streetside table from me and telling stories. 

I don't want it to come to a world and a time when there are no new stories to share, or (worse) no new adventures and encounters generating stories. Stories matter, and it matters that you're able to share them with lovely companions, to create narratives about adventures to share over the aether late at night. Having adventures and encounters matters, and so does being able to craft those into tales told in the dark.

Three Zero Zero: Debriefing

 I wrote here earlier in the summer that:

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

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

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

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

I wrote this, too--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Four Zero: Median

There's a phrase that I've been noticing these last few months: "mediocre white men". I'm not sure where it began, though my own reading is that I first saw it applied to authors--- and then to figures in politics and corporate life. The initial usage, I think, was based on the idea that women writers, professionals, politicians were being ignored and overlooked in favor of less talented people whose claim to success was largely that they were male. There is also the idea that mediocre white men are likely to be angrily defensive and entitled about success. I've seen this as a mock prayer meme at Twitter and elsewhere: "Oh Lord, give me the boundless self-confidence of a mediocre white man".

I'm not commenting here on the political usage, or even on the usage inside professional life or the literary world. What I will comment on is how the term has been extended into social--- sexual ---life.   I've been seeing the term--- "mediocre white man" ---appear at Twitter in tweets where women discuss their love lives and the men they're with or have been with. It seems that most male performance is rated as "mediocre", and male attempts at introduction and seduction are laughingly dismissed as mediocre.

I'll admit that the word terrifies me. I was brought up to believe that any grade, any rating, any judgment of my own performance that was less than outstanding was a failure and was totally shameful. And I was brought up to believe that a mediocre grade was worse than a failing grade. Not that, say, a 50/100 on a math exam was ever acceptable, but a 75/100 was somehow more shameful. Being a failure was bad, but just being someone in the middle of the pack was somehow worse. Call that one of the reasons why I've always shied away from things I knew I wouldn't be good at. Success was mandatory--- that's a given. But the real fear was ending up just being one of the faceless, nameless people who were just getting by, who weren't worth noticing.

There are a lot of things in that description that I still have to unwind. Let's just say for the moment that I am terrified of being judged 'mediocre'. Failing outright seems less shameful. If I took a girl to bed and experienced systems failure, if I couldn't achieve and maintain an erection, I'd be angry at myself, certainly, and there would probably be stammered apologies. But I'd have a Plan B. I'd know that I had a chance to redeem myself. If we had sex and the girl sneered at my performance as 'mediocre', I'd flee the bedroom and maybe the city. There's no coming back from having her tell all her friends (and maybe everyone on Twitter) that I was merely 'mediocre'.

Once upon a time, in a darkened bedroom in another city, a young companion and I were talking about how we came to our particular sexual interests. I confided in her that sometimes I thought that I found S/M attractive not just for its class markers (French novels, elegant chateaux, expensive accoutrements) but because it was something where I understood the criteria for judgment. I knew how to construct narratives and scenarios, I knew how to use blindfolds and candle wax and ice cubes and riding whips. I didn't have to be judged on my body or its performance. She had the grace not to say anything one way or the other about my flesh. She did kiss me and tell me she loved the stories I told, the stories I made her part of.

These days, here in the age of the gender wars,  here as a gentleman of a certain age, I'm increasingly terrified of being dismissed as mediocre. And I'm not sure what the criteria are. I'm not rich, I'm not at the top of my profession, I'm not someone with any social presence or value. I've spent a long time thinking that I was a reasonably proficient lover. I'm good at intelligence work, at ferreting out information. So I've applied that to books and films and blog entries to find out what skills I need to hone.  I'm not sure that's good enough now, and I'm not sure that it was ever good enough. I'm finding it harder and harder to think that I wasn't lied to all these years, that I was never any good and could never be any good.

I do not know how to avoid being tagged as a "mediocre white man". I don't know what the rules are, or what the criteria for judgment are, or how to avoid judgments that would keep me from trying ever again. Not ever trying again could very well be the best course. That's certainly something to consider.

Two Zero Three: De Bourgh

It's been a sombre year. So very little good has happened, and many of us here in what used to be the American republic are emotionally exhausted. In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, in a post-Weinstein world, it's harder and harder to write about sex. We no longer see sex as something that's exciting or fun. Sex is no longer wicked in the fun way. Everything I've seen in the past few months has described sex only in terms of power and coercion. Every single article I've read about the future of sex has been written by a woman who's taken it as a given that flirtation and seduction, especially if done at any location vaguely connected with work or school, is inherently oppressive and disgusting.

The only person I know of who's still enjoying herself having sex is my friend in London Town, who wrote me about her Christmas plans while visiting family in the States:

Had a nice visit with my former professor (including naughty sex on the floor of an empty classroom at my old university while he was supposedly administering the final exam to a class of his students) en route and am now in the hills of New England deciding if I want to take either of my out-of-the-blue marriage proposals seriously. I'm leaning towards no. Though I am making plans to visit the very wealthy, powerful, never-married (and really not at all bad-looking) 70-year-old at one of his houses before I head back to London. But I honestly think it would probably be a disaster.

She also had this to say about the social hierarchies of air travel:

Regarding air travel, first class is better than business class. However, many airlines only have either first OR business class these days. British Airways is somewhat unusual in having four classes on many of its flights: economy, premium economy, business, and first.

That was in response to a note of mine speculating that one of her Older, Moneyed Gentlemen would've paid for her first-class flight from LDN to BOS. I'd wondered if first-class or business class was the more exclusive these days. That's not something I'm likely to know.  I have the idea that she once flew to some kind of rendezvous in Singapore (professional? romantic?) in one of those 0.10% masters-of-the-global-economy quasi-cabins that airlines like Emirates and Singapore reserve for the global elite. Now of course I saw the first "Emmanuelle" film many a year ago, so my only question is whether she did the Young Sylvia Kristel-on-the-Concorde thing in joining the Mile-High Club. The in-flight amenities and cuisine I couldn't care less about. It's only the carnal uses of the flight time that I care about.

Anyway...I do wonder if she'll give me a call from wherever she is in New England. I like her, and of course I enjoy hearing her stories. But I forever feel utterly de bas en haut around her. Socially, intellectually, sexually. I mean, she's never played Lady Catherine de Bourgh around me, but I can't help imputing condescension on her part. I have a very keen sense of class distinctions and rank-hierarchy, and a very heightened sense of self-loathing. Let's be clear. I could never be part of any of her Encounters or Stories on the grounds of my looks, poverty, social ineptitude, and possible sexual incompetence. Even if I had an invitation, I'd never take the risk of total humiliation.

I used to think that I was rather good at creating fantasy scenarios via telephone. I was actually quite proud of the craft. I think it was listening to my  friend in London Town talk about men and their fantasies--- her even more than listening to Ms. Flox do the same thing at her various blogs  ---that persuaded me that anything I might create or fancy would be trivial, jejune, and pathetic. So that's just one less thing I can risk doing, and certainly one less thing I can believe gives me any value.

One Seven Six: Iterations

I have been considering the idea of fantasies these last few nights. Obviously, everyone has preferences and hopes and dreams. The question here in these latter days in what we're allowed to do with those things.

A friend in London Town told me  the other afternoon of her recent Sex Dreams all about the young Vivien Leigh. If I'd had Sex Dreams (and in a Classic Hollywood mode) they'd involve 21-year old iterations of the Two Hepburns. If I were in a mode for Year Sixteen fashion models, of course it would be Anja Rubik, Karlie Kloss, and Aymeline Valade. I probably shouldn't go into the idea that having those thoughts would be of no use, since the Solitary Vice, while "empowering" for attractive girls, is socially unacceptable (creepy, pathetic, a sign of being a loser) in males---- though that social fact is always lurking somewhere.

The age of the gender warriors and the intersectionalistas has meant that kinks, fetishes, and preferences are judged far more harshly than they were in the 1950s or the 1980s. I've been talking about that for a while now. It's much more dangerous nowadays to reveal a set of kinks or to be seen as seeking to explore new things--- the standards for judgment are political rather than moral and aesthetic, and there are the clear risks in being judged on social media.  Judgment is based on politics, and on what I call Authenticity Fetish--- the idea that it's morally culpable to want to explore things that aren't "authentic" to oneself. For example, it's fine nowadays to come out of the closet, but wrong to experiment with being gay or bi just to see what it might be like. I've seen the term "sex tourism" expanded to that as a criticism, with the term having all the overtones of  an attack on the sort of cultural imperialism that's involved in trips to Thai or Moroccan brothels. I suppose that goes for s/m as well--- doing s/m as part of an organized "community" is fine; doing it because it was intriguing in films or French novels is wrong. It's now wrong to seek out adventures and new experiences for their own sakes.

The trick of course is to have fantasies and kinks that aren't "problematic", to tailor one's sexual interests  so as not to risk contempt, disdain, political/ideological attacks, or the dread and fatal accusation of possessing "privilege".

The age of the gender wars is one where it really is less and less easy to explain to a potential partner what you might like. The risk isn't so much being told that the proposed scenarios aren't interesting (which is painful enough) or that they're aesthetically icky. The risk is being told that you're a Bad Person in some social and political sense. And having that Bad Person status regarded as intrinsic...and broadcast to the world on social media.

What should a fantasy/kink/preference be? It should be...complex and stylish enough to establish that you're literate and imaginative and clever. But it should under no circumstances trigger  social disdain or political attacks.

It should however be seen as contingent--- something you may enjoy for a time or two, but not necessarily something defining your identity. That way you're free to change over to new preferences, new ideas, new games without being trapped in an identity. That of course is harder now, since only Authenticity counts.

It seems to me that it's less and less possible to do any sort of role-play, too. The roles you might want aren't "authentic"--- by definition. There's the accusation that role-play traffics in cultural appropriation and stereotypes. Though it might be worse if the assumption was made that the role-play roles you'd fancy really are "authentic", and that you were now trapped inside them--- that there was no allowance made for play or imagination, for trying on masks simply because they were different. There's something exhausting and disheartening in having a partner in role-play believe that she knows what you "really" are, to have her think that the scenarios you've created reflect your true inner life and self-conception.

But the serious part of things is simply finding fantasies that are socially acceptable. They should have enough of an edge to give girls a slight frisson of wickedness, but they should still avoid any territory that could be labelled as "problematic". Under no circumstances should any kinks or preferences lay you open to attacks or social disdain or be tools that could be used against your social standing. That's always the heart of the game---- learning to play defense. That remains the hardest thing: establishing a list of fantasies that you can deploy without being treated as someone deserving of social and political contempt.

One Five Six: Categories

Tonight I'm thinking about categories in erotica and how they shift and evolve. I was reading a piece by the porn star Stoya--- a kind of ask-a-porn-star feature at one of the hipster lit websites ---that brought the issue up. I'll note that I like Stoya. I've never seen any of her films, by the way. I've only and ever read her interviews and her articles and her blog. The blog is called Graphic Descriptions; it's often quite interesting. Always well-written, too. It's something I'd recommend, along with her columns at the Vice and Verge websites. Anyway--- I like reading Stoya. And a few days ago, I ran across a piece where people wrote to her for advice.

The particular question that struck me was from a guy asking about...incest-themed films. He said that he seemed to keep running across an amazing number of such films on line and he wondered, well, why. Was this the next big theme? he asked. Why, he asked, did Stoya think these films were so popular. Her answer did sound a bit nonplussed. Exactly where was he going on the web? Was he just visiting the wrong places? Or was he in some way already looking for incest-themed videos? Was there some fetish that he just didn't want to admit to? 

The question--- and Stoya's response ---raised a few issues for me. The particular category does very little for me, but the issue of categories in general catches my attention. The questioner had said "incest-themed" films--- a fairly general description of the category. Of course you can break down the obvious sub-categories: father-daughter, mother-son, siblings, and a specialized twins ("twincest") sub-category.  Cousin-incest wouldn't seem to be a category that would generate too much interest, and in-laws would barely fit at all. (Would uncle/niece or aunt/nephew just be  left inside the broader father/daughter or mother/son categories? What about aunt/niece?) The questioner  didn't specify what he was finding so much of--- what he may or may not have been looking for. Stoya's answer, though, took an odd turn.

Stoya wondered whether MILF films--- films where a young man ends up in bed with his friend's hot mom ---weren't a kind of incest-lite category. No prohibited consanguinity, true. But there is an age disparity, which is one of the great taboos in sex these days--- taboo enough to be at nearly the same level of transgression as incest. And the MILF image depends on a (late-thirties? early forties?) hot, "older" woman being someone's mom. Is sex with a friend's mom a kind of incest-by-proxy? Stoya lamented that an attractive woman of forty could only be found hot as an incest-lite "MILF" and not for her own sake. Which is fair enough. My own tastes run to beautiful Young Companions, not to the MILF idea, but I see Stoya's point.

You'll note that I'm shying away from discussing the classic pairing of the younger girl and the older man. I never minded being a co-ed's academic fantasy, but I'm not sure I'm ready to be an incest-lite fantasy figure. Fortunately, no girl has ever called me Daddy. Let alone Dad. Those are things that really would freeze my blood.

What goes into fantasy categories--- that really is a question. How do we shape and define what's inside the categories we choose for our fantasies? That's something I may want to think about at some length. Any thoughts any of you out there over the aether might have? 

I'm at a disadvantage here in that I really don't watch porn videos. I don't search the web for porn. I can't talk about what's been filmed or how it's marketed. I do know of a couple of web archives with porn stories, though. (I always go for the written word; that's something you can always count on with me. I'd rather read words on a page than watch a video.) The archives are extensive. The stories are submitted by amateurs--- call it fanfic if you'd like. At least one of the archives goes back to the late 1990s, to the early days of the web. The writing quality varies wildly, of course. What matters, though, is that the stories are searchable. They're tagged with category labels, and there's  a search feature. 

The academic in me wishes the stories were all fully cross-referenced and that I knew exactly who created the labels and definitions and what criteria they used. I'm utterly hopeless at anything like spreadsheets or graphs, but I'd like to do a basic analysis of categories and changes over time. Go back to, say, 1996 or 1997 and work forward. Which categories had the most stories per year? How did that change over time? What became more popular, what faded away? How many different (pseudonymous) authors submitted each year? How long did a given author keep sending in stories? In a perfect world, mind you, there'd be some way to know at least what basic regions/states the stories came from. What cities or states favored which categories over time? How did the number of stories sent from overseas change, and what categories did overseas writers prefer? 


Thank you, Fernand Braudel---- what do the porn archives look like over the longue durée? What's the biography of each archive? Those really are things I'd like to know. Whatever a key porn fantasy may have been in 1996, is that still a major fantasy twenty years later. Some of the stories are about celebrities (models, actresses, rock and pop stars, female athletes). The names would change, but would the kind of celebrity change? One archive does do a category for male-male stories--- more or fewer of those over time? Do the boundaries of what's forbidden change?  Yes. I would like to know. I'd like to speculate about what external events are referenced in the stories and about changes in the way the fantasy figures are presented.

I'd hate to think that I'd end up looking at the graphs and trying to decide what the Next Big Thing might be or what the hip fantasies for the current year might be. But I would like to analyze what's out there. Everything has a history. That's obvious. Even the categories of fantasy. And I would like to see what the contents of the categories are and how they change. I'd like to know what drives the changes, too.

I know I'm building a lot out of a few offhand remarks in Stoya's article.  I was born to be an academic, though. That part of me will always be there. I do want to ask the questions and I want to know the history of these things. 

One Five Five: Fortunate Isles

I'm told that the Social Justice Cult has turned its attentions to the world of polyamory. Not for any of the reasons you might expect, mind you. It's all about nomenclature, all about words. The gender warriors and the Social Justice Cult believe in the power of words as deeply as any medieval magician. If you say the right words, you can call up magical power for good or ill. Words are part of magic spells, things imbued with magical force. If you get the spell wrong, the demons will get you. The Social Justice Cult does not accept nominalism; let's be clear about that.

In any case, the the polyamorists are being attacked because they call themselves "poly". It seems that  there are others who want possession of the word. "Poly" belongs to...well...Polynesians. Or so the story goes. By calling themselves "poly", the members of the polyamory world are showing themselves to be "entitled" and "privileged". "Poly", the Tumblr rants say, should be reserved for community-building and identity-formation amongst the Polynesian community. Assuming that the story is true, my own first thought was that, well, yes, the Polynesians want to make the word tabu in its original sense--- and that the Social Justice Cult wanted to enforce that exactly the way violations of tabu would've been enforced in pre-Contact Polynesia: by clubbing violators to death.

From all that I can tell, the polyamorists are prepared to fold. They're terrified of the Social Justice Cult and its social media power to shame and demand. They're terrified of being called "privileged" and of being tagged with other magical words of disdain: white, moneyed, upper-middle-class. More's the pity, I suppose. I can't see why the Polynesians and their Social Justice Cult supporters can't be satisfied with something like "Otaheetian" or "Breadfruit Islanders".  My own rule is simple enough. Whenever possible, use the most archaic and obscurely-spelled eighteenth-century words you can find to describe places and peoples in what British mariners called "the Far Foreign". I do that habitually--- an aesthetic principle,  which of course means it's a moral imperative.

I have never known what to make of polyamory. I've never quite understood how it differs from simply dating more than one person at a time. When poly devotees have tried to explain it to me in terms of a primary relationship plus other, satellite relationships, I can't see how this differs from some nineteenth-century French arrangement where husband and wife are free to pursue discreet relationships so long as no public scandal ensues.

We're not, I'm told, allowed to say "wife swapping" any more. That has sexist implications of ownership. Worse, it calls up images of people with cheap wood-panelled basement rec rooms and balding men with moustaches--- the "porn 'stache" of so many mocking memes. It calls up the worst of both sex and fashion c. 1970. Flared trousers may be involved. There are, if you must know, small groups of cos-play Klingons at Star Trek conventions who do...mate-swapping. That's as nightmarish a vision as you're likely to find.

You can't say "wife-swapping". Or "swingers".  Well, both remind me of bad fashion and the sort of parties where someone might ask (without irony) what your zodiac sign was. They both call up "key parties"--- where people put their car keys into a bowl, and blindfolded wives selected keys to see which husband they'd be with that night. It's all very, very much like some dark comedy about the way the so-called Sexual Revolution of the 1960s sputtered out amongst the 1970s light-blue-collar class in the Heartland.

When anyone says "wife swapping", I do think of the 1997 film "The Ice Storm".  That had both wife-swapping and a key party. I'll note that it was an utterly depressing film by Ang Lee. I watched it entirely in hopes that Sigourney Weaver would be naked.  I'll just admit that. Well, although Ms. Weaver wasn't suitably unclad, still...at the climax of the film...a hobbit was electrocuted. You'll see what I mean if you look at the cast member list.  A friend of mine tells me that since seeing the film, "electrocuting the hobbit" is now his preferred euphemism for the Solitary Vice. I have to agree with him on that.

I still have no idea what to make of hipster polyamory. Is it done with retro-irony? Is it a way of making an ironic reference to the 1970s while still having sex in the new century? Are its aesthetics any better than those of the days of "swingers"? Even if they are, is polyamory suffused with the identity politics and gender wars language of our own day? Which is worse--- bad fashion or bad ranting?

Well, if the Otaheetians come in their war canoes, that'll settle things once and for all. Though didn't C.P. Cavafy dash those hopes in "Waiting For the Barbarians"?

One Five Three: Madison

I don't think I could define what an "affair" is any more. I'm not sure at all what counts as an "affair" these days. Life is short, the Ashley Madison tag line runs. Have an affair. There's the question, though, of what an affair is these days.

I'm old enough to remember when some writers (John Fowles, I seem to recall) still wrote affaire de coeur when describing what their characters were doing. I remember being young--- in my teens, in my undergraduate days ---and reading novels where it seemed that "having an affair" was one of the clear markers for adult life, at least in educated professional urban circles. I can recall sitting in my rooms at home and reading--- Updike, Cheever, Anthony Powell, Louis Auchincloss ---and believing that in the cities and social circles I longed for and aspired to that it was simply taken as a given that educated professionals, married or not, had affairs.

Now I'll take a moment to note that I grew up far away from those cities, and probably a generation removed from the settings of those books. But I did grow up in a house where the shelves had all those novels, where there were comedy albums by Nichols & May and the young Woody Allen on the hi-fi.  That world--- Fifties and early Sixties New York or London ---was the world I always thought was just outside my windows, just over the horizon.

I've never had any particular reverence for the institution of marriage. I always assumed that it was an institution that had clear and concrete purposes--- passing on property in a given bloodline, a mechanism for raising children and training them in cultural norms. Nothing wrong with that, and those two things are necessary in any society.

I'm a life-long bachelor, but I never had any particular feelings one way or the other about marriage as an institution. It was a necessary thing, but I was outside it. I suppose I still see it as a social marker I can't claim, a social expectation I haven't met. Whatever marriage did for society, I always saw myself as a bit apart. When I was in my teens or early twenties, I saw marriage as something one would probably do for a while to establish a certain claim to be thought a serious adult (and, yes, to establish a certain clear hetero status), but I don't think I ever ascribed any particular value to the married state itself. I'm sure it suits some people (my own parents were, as best I could tell, happily married for half a century), but I never had any reverence for marriage as such.

You've been reading along here, so I'll assume you know that I always say that I was Ruined By Books in exactly the way the Victorians feared. I did read Cheever and Updike and Auchincloss in my teens--- read books about worlds as alien as those in the sci-fi I used to read as well. In my undergraduate days I read Stendahl and Flaubert and the Big Russians. By the time I was ready to come down from university, I think I took it as a given that "having affairs" was something that gentlemen did, that "having affairs" was a customary part of the social worlds I wanted to inhabit.  I don't know how to explain that any other way.  By the time I was twenty-one, I took it for granted that in the professional classes, among people who lived in what they'd simply call The City, discreet affairs happened as part of the daily social landscape.

Alas, though. Despite my advanced years, and despite the credentials on my wall and the initials tacked on after my name, I don't move in circles where people have affairs.  The closest I think I've come to an affair was in my middle twenties, with a married fortyish woman who was a food-and-wine critic. It was all very discreet and reasonably clandestine. I remember that she borrowed a place from a female friend for us to use for rendezvous--- a converted carriage house in what we'd have called Uptown, or "out on the Avenue". It lasted a couple of late-spring months, and the key thing I remember is how adult it all felt. Or at least literary. But that's as close as ever I've come to an affair. It's been liberal arts co-eds since then, not women of the professional classes, married or not. And there's a clear distinction between dating or hooking up and an affair. Whenever I read Anita Brookner or Louis Auchincloss about the very discreet and civilised affairs their characters have, I know that I'm out of the loop.

I don't know what counts as an affair these days. It also seems that, as the Ashley Madison hack is showing,  the moralizers and shame-wielders are all-too-ready to attack the very idea of an affair. I miss the idea, of course. I miss the formality of it all. Like I miss the classic idea of the mistress, too. If you're following this, tell me what you think about the definition of affair and what the semiotics of the term are. And tell me what's happened in the last generation or so to give rise to the ranting (and rancid) moralizing and shaming that have boiled up since the Ashley Madison hack.

One Five One: Incel

Let's see, now... Who recalls the term "incel" these days? Remember that? "Incel" = "involuntary celibate". It's a word that comes up in the angrier precincts of the "manosphere" for males who feel bitter and angry and betrayed that they've been left out of things sexual, that they aren't being granted access to the Forbidden City. I read this morning that back in the later Nineties there were support groups on line for "incel" people (male and female both) that really were about support and encouragement, groups that gave the lonely and bereft places to talk about being alone in a world of couples, groups that had a wistful air to them rather than a bitter one--- and read, too, that at some point those early people were driven away by rage-filled MRA/anti-feminist types. 

I've been wondering if any trace of that earlier culture still exists. The internet is a more brutal place than it was back in those days; we can take that as a given. I recall times when groups at places like Nerve.com would've talked about "incel" in terms of individual loneliness and how the lonely could help one another through their solitary times. I don't have any problem with the term, mind you--- in an earlier day "involuntary celibate" wouldn't have about seeking out some ideological enemy in feminism; it would've been about personal loneliness.

Being unwillingly celibate (the criteria seem to set six months as the time past which simple lack of luck becomes "incel") is pretty much something everyone goes through at points in their lives. And despite all the Social Justice Cult ranting about "entitlement" and reducing the pain people feel to just "privileged straight white tears" about not getting laid, there's a whole world of emptiness and social failure implicit in the term. We all have a need for someone else in our lives, a need not just for flesh but for all the social things that go with having a romantic partner. Involuntary celibacy means more than just not having sex, although the gender warriors seem to think it's about nothing more than being "thirsty" or wanting to get laid at will. (Funny, though, how they denigrate sex-as-pleasure or sex-as-adventure) Involuntary celibacy means being without the social part of being partnered--- being able to go to social events where the expectation is still that everyone is in a couple, not feeling excluded or useless in social settings, being able to share the closeness of romance, and, yes, being seen by others as valuable and valued enough to have a partner. Everyone has empty periods, everyone knows the discomfort of being single in a social world of couples, a world where the dyad is considered the norm. Everyone knows that. But it wasn't always a state that was associated with simmering rage and ideological disdain.  

I'd like to think that somewhere out there in corners of the web there are still communities where people offer one another kindness and support and hope about being able to alleviate loneliness or find romance. I'd like very much to think that, to think that there are still groups where members can tell one another that, even alone, they have some social value, that being alone doesn't mean that you have no worth in others' eyes.

I do wonder, too, whether "incel" as a term ever made it into gay or lesbian circles. Involuntary celibacy isn't restricted to straight white boys. I've no idea what the social dynamics of the gay world are these days, but I remember the dance club world of my Lost Youth as being one where the gay scene had its own exclusionary rules and lots of members who were painfully alone despite all their efforts to find romance. I remember reading Andrew Holleran's "Dancer From The Dance" where Holleran talks about the early gay disco scene as one of a "great and terrible" democracy of beauty...and thinking how hard that world must be for anyone not pretty enough to meet the scene's standards. Wouldn't involuntary celibacy have existed in Holleran's world--- and been at least as painful as in the straight world? In that era, in that world, in places that celebrated beauty and the casting off of old strictures and denials, wouldn't being incel have hurt even more than in the straight world?

A lovely young friend in Chicago tells me that she thinks "incel" never made it into usage outside outside the whole loathsome MRA/Red-Pill world, that she never heard it used in the gay or lesbian worlds at university or when she was a gallery girl in Manhattan. I do wonder, though--- are there self-described gay incels, and how do they perceive themselves? Do they use the word? Do they write about it? Is there a gay counterpart to "incel rage"? And...are gay males who call themselves incels attacked by the gender warriors and the Social Justice Cult the way straight users are? Gay men, I think, are currently being moved into the category of Bad Guys by the gender warriors--- see the whole feeding frenzy over "gay misogyny" or the way queen-speak "appropriates" black slang, see the way gay males are now treated by the gender warriors as bearing inherent male evil the same way straight males are. And what about the lesbian world? That's completely opaque to me; I have no travelers' tales to rely upon. How do non-straight-male worlds handle the idea of involuntary celibacy? That's something that the flaneur and the quondam academic in me would like to know. 

I'd like to know, too, if there are still groups who use the word "incel" without the ideological baggage of the gender wars and the whole dreary Red Pill nonsense. I'd like to know if there are still places where people can discuss loneliness and social exclusion with wistfulness and personal sorrow--- with mutual support, but without mockery, rage, and ideological derision. 

One Four Four: Counterfeits

It's not my intention to get involved in the Trans Wars. Oh, I do enjoy watching the Social Justice Cult dissolve into internecine battles between trans* and radfem factions. However not? I spent all those years reading about internal feuds and factional bloodletting inside political groups.  I love the dark comedy of it all, the Running Dogs of the Revisionists ranting against the Left Deviationists, the endless streams of over-the-top abuse, the ever more arcane demands for purity of thought.  As much as I enjoy all that, mind you, I don't want to get involved. It's all too bitter for me. It's not that I don't know that I'm a villain anyway. You know the string of accusations: white, male, cis-and-cis-presenting, straight, and of course over thirty. And, yes, I do enjoy calling the trans* faction the Asterisk Thieves. Mocking that asterisk is something I won't give up. Nonetheless, I don't want to join in any of the faction fights.

Oh, I suppose I come down on the side of it all that says biology and architecture matter. I support anyone's right to live out the lives they want, to present themselves as anything they want. I certainly support anyone's right to full social and political rights and to be free from violent attacks. But I won't give up thinking that architecture matters.

All of which leads to what I think of as Authenticity Fetish. It's not enough to just choose to do something, or to present yourself as something. You can't choose to be something--- that's not authentic.  There has to be some deep, inner reality that the visible self projects. It's not enough to say you've chosen to present yourself a certain way, to play out a role in social life. You have to be a real whatever. Think of the anger that's deployed against girls who had LUG affairs by radical lesbians. Think of the anger deployed against anyone who says they moved between gay and straight in whatever direction--- you have to be real! Choice and whim and fashion aren't allowed. You have to admit that you are something; it's not enough to do something. You can't be just trans and present yourself in a way that feels comfortable.  You can't just be male or female and wear the mask that makes you feel comfortable in your social life. You can't just present; you have to be a real woman or a real man. You can't wear a social costume; you have to be authentic.

Whenever the Asterisk Thieves hold forth about their own authenticity, I sometimes hear their disdain for anyone who's not authentically trans. I hear their contempt for people who cross-dress but don't see themselves as "really" another gender. The word "fetishist" gets thrown around with anger and derision--- used with contempt for people who aren't authentic, who present as they do for sexual reasons. It's the same kind of contempt you sometimes hear used in gay circles about people who are bi--- you're not real, you can't sit with us unless you're committed to what you really are.

That takes away the meaning of "transition", too, doesn't it? You can't have a story of metamorphosis of becoming someone new. You have to assert that you're just expressing who you really are. You don't get to have a new self or a new life.

Authenticity Fetish, I call it. The need to reject anyone who isn't really something, who puts on and takes off social poses. The need to assert that you're really something, that you aren't just doing a social presentation that you enjoy.  And it's not something I understand. It seems that it's not enough to say that you intend to live as if--- you have to assert that you're already, always, and ever some underlying thing.

I won't get involved in the wars.  But the need to insist that you're really something or demand that others are really something is a fetish all its own. We're creatures who know how to create masks and stories, but it's not enough to strike a pose. You can't admit that architecture and biology  matter but say that you intend to present in a pose you like. That's not enough. No one's allowed to just strike a pose. You must be Authentic. Whatever you have to deny, whatever you have to demand from others.

One Three Seven: Cubes

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One One Four: Boxes

A girl I once knew--- lost, some years ago, to the ranks of the gender warriors and the Social Justice Cult ---wrote at her blog not so long ago that she'd just received her first subscription box from a site called UnboundBox out on the web.  She was thrilled about receiving it, and she made a point of thanking the company. I took a quick look at the website, and found that what she'd subscribed to was a quarterly service that sends out gift  boxes with half a dozen "provocative" items--- i.e., a selection of sex toys and gels.

Well, why not? There are subscription services that provide monthly or quarterly boxes with clothing or shaving tackle or books. A subscription service that sends out gift boxes of sex toys  isn't really that different.  I only glanced through the UnboundBox.com website, but from what I could tell, they do market high-end and highly-reviewed items.  I can't criticize the idea of the subscription box, and I can't criticize the idea of sex toys, even though as a male, I don't have any emotional connection to the idea.

I'll just note in passing that the closest thing I've ever owned to a sex toy was a small selection of riding crops, and I bought those at an equestrian sports supply house and not a sex toys shop. I can imagine going to a sex toy shop with a young companion some late evening, but we'd be shopping for her--- I'd just be there to offer support and the occasional tentative comment on colours or styles. I'm male, and the toys that are designed for males seem to be either ghastly (artificial vaginas, powered or otherwise) or grotesque (the Inflatable Love Sheep).  Sex toys simply aren't for males...or at least straight, non-Scottish males. I can't imagine a similar box arriving for anyone male.

So,  the girl I once knew is thrilled with the box she received, though she didn't provide an inventory. The inventory would've been worth a look, of only for the semiotics.

My bookshelves are full of books with checklists and lists of tribal markers--- the Official Preppy Handbook, the Sloane Ranger Handbook, Paul Fussell's "Class",  Pierre Bourdieu, U and Non-U.  There are markers for every tribe, every social group: on Wednesdays we wear pink. Everything has its own markers for class, for in-group and out-group. I really do want to know what the semiotics of sex toys are.

Some of that must be ideological. How can it not be, here in the age of the gender wars? Some sex toys must be "problematic" and ideologically suspect. I'm thinking that there may well be lines drawn between vibrators and dildos on that, that it would be easy to argue that a vibrator (especially something like the Hitachi Magic Wand and its cousins) is designed specifically to provide female pleasure, whereas a dildo is too much like a mere (oppressive) penis. I wonder if there isn't a class line, too...though it can't be a simple one. A vibrator is hi-tech and expensive, but a dildo can be a hairbrush handle or a Corona bottle. Still...a dildo can also be something hand-crafted---- something artisanal.  A high-end dildo can be a bit like a small Brancusi sculpture, and it's easy to imagine a shop in Portland or Bushwick selling artisanal dildos to trust-fund hipster girls.  M. Bourdieu may not have been thinking of dildos, but they're as much markers for social capital as books or wall hangings.

Everything social devolves into cliques, sooner or later. There are people and institutions that use Gerber multi-tools and those that use Leatherman--- and each looks down on the other. Tribal markers--- and markers that come with extensive rationalizations. It's never just about actual efficiency or utility. Those criteria are never the key. Sex toys can't be any different. But would it just be a line between vibrators and dildos? Gels and lubes--- would there be lines between those who like flavored gels and those who reject them as promoting the idea of oral sex and hence of female submission? Lingerie seems like a obvious area--- Frederick's versus Victoria's Secret along lines of economic class as well as aesthetics and social class, lingerie wearers versus those who see lingerie as a tool of oppression.

Remember--- it's never about the freedom to choose. In the end, almost no one really believes in such a thing. They really want the freedom not to choose, but the freedom to choose whatever is right, the freedom to insist that their own tribal and class markers are not just theirs, and not just better, but right--- and that others are wrong.  Society operates by exclusions, and sex toys aren't any different from clothes or music.

There's a girl tonight with her first subscription box of provocative toys. I'd give a lot to know what she sees in them, what the items represent to her, and what she reads into having them. It's not just that they'll induce orgasm; that may be the least of it. I'd like to know what girls read into sex toys, what tribes they mark and how the toys are deployed as displays of cultural and ideological capital against out-groups. It's always the semiotics that counts--- always the semiotics of the object more than the object itself.

One One Zero: Identities

I read last week that the Serbian model Andrej Pejic, who made his reputation doing androgynous looks and modeling women's fashion, has announced that he is in fact transgender and has re-emerged as Andreja Pejic after reassignment surgery. It's a complicated thing to write about, to put down in print. How exactly do you describe Pejic's announcement? Can you say "re-emergence" or "transformation" any more? Doesn't the trans* narrative these days insist that anyone trans* was always whatever gender they "really" are? What happens to the images of metamorphosis and becoming someone new? Is it now correct to use different pronouns even retrospectively, for someone's life before they made the announcement?

I'm using Pejic as an example here, but only because the Andrej/Andreja announcement is something I saw in the news. I wish Pejic the individual well, whatever the pronouns, and I'll say that Pejic's work has always been excellent--- striking looks, good poses. So this isn't about Pejic as an individual at all. Let's not think that.

The trans* issue is the Next Big Thing in the gender wars, and probably the Next Big Thing about legal and social rights as well. As much as I make fun of the "trans*" usage--- the trans folk have stolen the asterisk just as gay men took closets and lesbians annexed softball  ---I'm certainly a supporter of full social and legal rights for transpeople.  Take that as a given.

I will say, though, that I love reading about all the internecine feuding inside the world of the gender warriors over the trans issue. It's as much fun as reading about the Sex Wars and the Porn Wars inside feminism in the 1980s and 1990s--- as much fun as reading about feuds inside the Left in the 1930s, about factions and heresies, about demands for purity of thought. And the level of in-fighting here in the days of the "call-out culture" is even more wonderfully bitchy than amongst Trotskyites and Stalinists.

I'm only a flaneur here, of course--- wandering through websites as a tourist and reading articles and comments and laughing at the levels of bitchy (and tetchy) self-righteousness. I'm a mere vanilla straight boy in so many ways--- over thirty, white, middle class, over-educated, straight, "cis and cis-presenting". Am I even supposed to have opinions on things here?

I was an undergraduate when the first great flush of gay activism and gay dance clubs swept through university towns and big cities.  The issues of gay rights and gay culture were all around me, and I remember the university radio station having a half-hour LGB (no T yet) program on Sunday evenings with a mix of dance music, political discussions, and memoirs of coming out.  I remember those things, and I remember learning to negotiate social spaces with tribes that weren't my own.

The trans issue is harder to negotiate. That's worth bearing in mind. It raises the question of what real identity is and how it's marked. It raises the issues of whether the obvious markers for identity in others can be relied on at all. It's a legitimate political question whether being able to immediately and reliably identify someone as male or female should be so very important, and it's a legitimate political question as to whether someone trans is a "real woman" (or man) or whether trans is a separate category all on its own.  Trans disorients the usual identifiers. And its insistence that male or female isn't defined by possession of a penis or a vagina goes against what seems obviously, self-evidently true. It's easier for me to think about groups like the hijra in India and say that there's a distinct, third, trans group than it is to think of someone who still has a penis as "really" a woman.

It's interesting, too, to read articles and comments defining new lines of exclusion in the Trans Wars. I'm old enough to remember dance clubs with drag shows and club queens, a world where "tranny" was a role and not an insult. The lines of exclusion seem to be drawn these days to put people who cross-dress for purely sexual reasons into the camp of the enemy. Those people (and I'll be talking MTF here) who dress up at clubs as female to acquire (male, often straight) partners are treated as...traitors? Infiltrators? The enemy, in any case. They're not "really" trans, and they're on the bad side of the gender wars.  I'm assuming that straight men who cross-dress for reasons other than having sex get the same treatment. "Transvestite" is now taken as a bad thing, as referring to someone who hasn't read enough Judith Butler or who's a heretic and schismatic in the trans world, someone who isn't authentic or "real", someone in thrall to bad ideas...or who sees being trans as being about sex.

There's real anger reserved for those (almost inevitably portrayed as men) who want to have sex with MTF transfolk. They seem to be regarded as utterly evil--- "fetishizers". The description raises an eyebrow for me, since the people I know who really want to have sex with transwomen are female themselves. Their argument is simple enough--- they want the duality. They want to have sex with someone who has a gracile, feminine, female body and presentation but also has a  large, working penis.  They haven't gone to Bangkok looking for ladyboys yet, but I do know that two of them (one in Wellington NZ, one in Melbourne) have at least drawn up Craigslist ads looking for what I'm told are called "trans-lesbians", looking for "girlcock". The girl in NZ and the girl in Melbourne are both bi, and they both like the idea of experimentation for its own sake. They love the idea of  having a pretty girl with a cock.  I wonder if they'd be regarded as more or less evil than, say, men who went to ladyboy bars or went on sex tours to Thailand.

My friends in Wellington and Melbourne identify as...transgressive. Another kind of trans, though a kind that the trans* folk (the Asterisk Thieves, I've taken to saying) hate. Their own identity is tied to crossing boundaries and doing things that are exotic or forbidden.  Well...here's yet another issue in the gender wars: the idea that fetishes are incorrect and unacceptable, that the category of the exotic is unacceptable.

My friend in Wellington had a major crush on Andre Pejic, but is still undecided about Andreja.  She found--- finds ---the disjoint between presentation and biology to be alluring. She wants the things that aren't "real". I'll have to ask her whether she feels evil about that.