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 Nine Six: Vibrations

 I've been looking at emails sent to me from one of the higher-end sex toy boutiques. It's midsummer, and they're having a sale. They're offering their products specifically for summertime, with all the romantic and alluring touches they can add. It's odd, of course, or at least odd for me. I can look at their products and feel nothing at all. Everything they make is alien to me.

I'm a mere cis-het male of a certain age. Toys from Good Vibrations or Lelo mean nothing to me. I understand that their products are mean for pleasure, but self-pleasure isn't for cis-het males. There's nothing there that might be pleasure, let alone empowerment. 

There are always arbitrary social rules, and those rules are rarely if ever successfully defied. Males aren't meant to receive pleasure. Cis-het males aren't meant to give pleasure. The male body has no aesthetic potential and isn't designed for pleasure either given or received. That's what the rules tell us, and I've internalized those rules.

Here in the age of The Discourse, there are clear social punishments for any male who believes himself capable of either giving or receiving pleasure. I've spent time these last few years wondering what sort of sex I'm permitted to have as a cis-het male. The word to focus on there is "permitted". To whom do I have to look for permission? The answer is...The Discourse. There are whispered voices out over the aether that let me-- that let us all --know what's acceptable.

We know from The Discourse that cis-het sex is boring by definition, that any sort of cis-het sex is boring and retrograde, and that the sexual performance of any cis-het male is by definition "mediocre". We know that. The whispered voices tell us that. 

I suppose it's not only cis-het sex. I'm hearing over the aether that gay male sex is no less boring these days, and that male performance, either straight or gay, must be disappointing to all parties. 

The Discourse also tells us that there's no escape from that. Learning techniques won't help. Having any of a wide range of fetishes won't help. Fetishes themselves are being re-branded as retrograde and boring. We live now in an attention economy, and what can be worse nowadays than "boring"?

If you scroll through the posts and videos that make up The Discourse, you won't find anything that cis-het males might do or enjoy that can ever be worth a partner's interest, or that might be regarded by the whispered voices as acceptable...or permissible. Nothing new can be learned, and any efforts to play with transgression or exploration are pathetic at best and some cocktail of disgusting and ridiculous at worst. 

Make a list. Make a list, if you can. What kinds of sex are still treated as exciting or worthwhile? What fantasies are you allowed to have that won't mark you as mediocre, unimaginative, un-hip, retrograde, boring?

I've spent a lifetime trying to acquire the skills to please a partner. I've spent a lifetime learning to construct fantasies and scenarios for myself and my partners. I've spent a lifetime exploring kinks and persuading partners to join me. All those things have been cancelled and erased. I no longer believe that anyone experienced any pleasure with me or while experiencing any of the things I had to offer. I no longer believe that I can (or should) have any sexual interests. 

Sex toys aren't for cis-het males. Fantasies and kinks aren't for cis-het males. Sexual skills are beyond the reach of cis-het males. The Arbitrary Social Rules have no patience for ordinary cis-het male sex, and less and less patience for the idea of fantasies and kinks altogether.

There's nothing on the aether or in the quotidian world this summer that says that people like me have social permission to have sex or seek pleasure. There's nothing that makes me think that in all the years I've been with lovers I ever gave or received any pleasure, whether via the flesh or via what goes on behind my eyes. All those things, all those beliefs, have been erased. 

Three Nine Five: Hierarchy

 A young lady of my acquaintance called me up late the other afternoon and asked me to meet her for drinks at a place by the river. What she wanted was advice, or at least a listener. So we sat and ordered up Aperol-and-orange juice and she told me that her latest Gentleman Admirer had fled her apartment an evening or two before, and she was perplexed by it all.

Okay, fine. I'm her designated interlocutor-- the Older Gentleman who'll listen to her stories and offer up comments without judgment. She knows me well enough to know that I have very, very little room to be judgmental, and that the judgments I do make are aesthetic rather than moral. 

She explained to me that her Gentleman Admirer (himself a gentleman of a Certain Age) had taken her for dinner, and drinks, come home with her, and then left suddenly. She was unclear as to whether he planned to see her again. He hadn't called, and she was worried that she'd been ghosted.

They'd gone out several times, and she liked him. She thought he was fun and bright, the sex had been good, and she enjoyed his company. She'd spent some time trying to read his tastes in bed, and that, she said was where she'd gone wrong. 

I've known her long enough to know that she has very, very good gaydar and kink-reading skills. She's good, from what I can tell, at intuiting what a partner wants or needs or likes. I think what happened was that she was just a bit too good at reading her Admirer-- great intuition, but no sense of context.

She told me that she'd watched her Admirer and paid attention to how he looked at her. And, well...her intuition told her he was into her feet. Okay, then-- her first foot fetish guy. She told me that she was fine with the kink. She thought it might be fun to try. She already knew that she liked having the small hollows behind her ankles kissed and caressed, and having her toes sucked sounded like it might feel really good. I'm also reasonably sure that she was looking forward to him paying for lots of expensive pedicures. But when she did stretch out on her sofa and showed off her legs and pointed her toes and told him that she'd be very much into whatever he'd like to try and that if he was into foot fetish games, all he had to do was ask...he went white, grabbed his jacket and tie, and stammered out that he had to leave. She hadn't heard from him since.

What, she wanted to know, was going on? She didn't think there was any way he could've thought she was somehow kink-shaming him. She looked at me and told me that this guy was about my age-- so was this some weird generational thing? She was annoyed about losing the chance for all those free pedicures (and the inevitable free spa days that would go along with them), but more annoyed that her kink-reading had gone wrong.

I just shrugged. I told her that she was probably right about his interests. The problem, though, was that he didn't want her to know about his kink. He would've been fine with doing something-- sucking her toes, licking her ankles --so long as it was just part of "having wild sex". But once it was named, once it was categorized as a kink, he couldn't face it. She'd told me once that a certain person we both knew was "so far in the closet that he could see Narnia"-- the same, I said, applied here. 

Moreover, she'd made him aware that his kink could be read. It was something a very attractive late-twenties girl could just read about him. She had, I told her, picked a kink he was ashamed of.  If she'd read him and intuited that he liked, say, BDSM, he'd probably have been fine, no matter if she'd told him she could see that he was either a top or a bottom. He probably wouldn't have fled her apartment if she'd told him her gaydar read him as bi. Those things are ordinary enough-- maybe even fashionable enough --in the here-and-now to barely be treated as out of the mainstream.

What she'd intuited, though, was a kink that might have been pleasurable for them both, but was nonetheless a kink that's regarded as very, very...what? Declassé? Contemptible? Laughable? Pathetic? Something like that, anyway. Pathetic may be what I'm looking for here. What she'd done hadn't been taken as an offer to experiment or an invitation. She'd made him feel unmasked-- had left him feeling that someone he was attracted to knew that something he liked or needed was regarded as pathetic and contemptible.

There are hierarchies in kink, of course. There are social rankings attached to everything. Always. Wanting to tie my friend up and whip her-- or wanting her to tie him up and whip him --is something that films and music videos and novels have taught us to see as stylish (and involving lots of cool outfits). A foot fetish...isn't. My friend is someone who's very open about being experimental and adventurous with her lovers. Her focus was on the shared thrill and the pleasure. Her beau, on the other hand, assumed that he'd been revealed as someone pathetic, someone who did things that only sad and pathetic men did. He fled her apartment because he thought she'd look down on him-- and was probably terrified that she'd tell people that he was into something sad and pathetic. He'd lost his class status in the eyes of a beautiful younger girl.

My friend ordered more drinks for both of us and shook her head. This, she said, was the thing about men she'd never understand. So much insecurity, she said, so much fear that invisible strangers will laugh at them, so much energy wasted on arranging rank-ordering. So much male fear of ever being seen as less.

What could I say? She's right about all that. She's known me long enough to know that one reason I'm usually available for drinks or coffee or long telephone conversations is that I'm afraid to go anywhere that would involve being judged socially and rank-ordered. I could see her looking at me across the table and reading my own social fears about age, looks, and status. The joke here is that I would never have fled her apartment because I was ashamed of being judged for my kinks-- those are very, very carefully curated and crafted --but I would've fled at the first sign that she (or any other girl) was judging me as a body. At the first hint that a potential partner saw me as a "mediocre white male" or as someone who could only (at best) have "mediocre sex" I'd have dived out the window. I'd even have left my necktie on the floor. 

 

Three Eight Three: Receptivity

I've always liked the idea of S/M. I've always liked the aesthetics of S/M. I've liked those two things much more than the praxis. I know that S/M is supposed to be "the intellectuals' kink", but I've never much gotten anything from reading manifestos or essays about the politics or theory of S/M. All those articles in the 1980s and early 1990s that tried to ground S/M in critical theory or tried to present it as something political never did anything for me. Yes, by the way, I am distinguishing idea from theory.

I've always liked S/M because it's sex that lends itself to creating stories. I've liked it because it's about role play and crafting and wearing masks. People have told me all my life that sex is something where you lose yourself (and lose your self) in what you're doing. But that's never worked for me. Sex has always been something in which I couldn't lose myself. I've always remained far too self-conscious during sex. It's hard (and just maybe impossible) to experience pleasure if you're aware of everything you're doing, or if you're busy critiquing what you're doing.

Last weekend I found a You Tube channel called Kink With Kitra. It's a very well-done channel, and I'll offer it up as a recommendation. Kitra is a professional domme. She seems to own a dungeon in L.A. or Las Vegas, and her You Tube channel is in interview/podcast format. She also films fetish videos. She has guests on-- people she's known and worked with --and they talk about the world of S/M.  

I'd like very much to say that Kitra is very articulate and thoughtful and fun. I'd like to say that, but it's a hard thing to say these days. Saying that someone in sex work is articulate is too much like saying a person of colour is articulate-- it can be taken to mean that you're surprised that anyone like that is capable of using language well. 

Nonetheless, I have enjoyed listening to what Kitra and her friends and colleagues have had to say. Her interviews have given me things to think about.

One of her guests was a fetish/kink actress called Sonny McKinley. I'd never heard of Ms. McKinley before, and I'd never seen any of her videos. She and Kitra had worked together before, and they had a lot of rapport. Good discussion and some fun stories.

One of the things they agreed on is that being a bottom allows you, whether male or female, to be receptive-- to receive sensation and experience. They both recalled hearing that from male clients who were switches-- tops who were experiencing or experimenting with being bottoms. For once, these men told them, they could just feel something. They didn't have to worry about anything other than feeling. They could experience unmediated and immediate pleasure.

There's something very arresting in that. I'm almost invariably the older partner in a relationship, and while I don't expect to have more power in the relationship, I am expected to be the one setting up stories and providing the script for what's happening. And that's fine. I'm an academic and a writer. It's expected that I can craft a storyline, and I'm glad to do it for a partner. Doing that makes me feel like I have a skill, and that I can be proud of using it to thrill my young companions. 

But I've never taken physical pleasure in it. I've almost never taken physical pleasure in anything. I have no idea what physical pleasure means, and I can't recall ever having a girl do anything for (or to) me as a gift (or grant) of pleasure. 

Kitra and Ms. McKinley talked about the idea of receptivity, and how it defies and subverts conventional gender roles. They talked about men needed to be able to receive pleasure-- to be open to sexual sensations. I understood what they were talking about, of course-- strap-ons and penetration --but the idea of receptivity goes beyond that. It goes (or, I think, should go) to being able to receive pleasure, of having sensation wash over you without self-awareness getting in the way. 

Immediate and unmediated pleasure is something that's always eluded me. I know better than to think that being a bottom for a while would help. It wouldn't. I'd end up trying to top from below in a very precise way-- meaning that I'd still be trying to craft scripts and worrying not about whether the scripted activities "worked" but rather about if they could be presented as something wicked, elegant, stylish, literary-- whether they'd be things that would make good stories. 

I don't have anything in the actual way of fetishes-- I don't have any needs or longings to which I can just surrender volition and control. I have kinks, but a kink is something crafted, something that takes conscious thought. I've never been given pleasure as a gift, and I'm very much unable to feel it on my own. I wouldn't understand pleasure  if someone did take the time to offer it to me. I have no ability to be receptive to anything. I don't experience the world like that.

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 Four: Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Seven Zero: Domme

 I've been spending a great deal of time at YouTube, and the other night The Algorithm delivered a recommendation that I needed to see a particular video. Well, fine. The video was an hour-long interview with a woman who calls herself Eva Oh, and I was intrigued.

Eva Oh is a very high-end domme. She seems to be based mostly in Australia, though in the interview she mentioned moving to Britain. She claims very straightforwardly to charge $10,000 a day for her services and to have a very exclusive (if not "closed") book of clients. She also does online classes teaching both potential dommes and potential clients about the procedures and etiquette of the high-end BDSM world. 

I have to say that I quickly developed a crush on her. She's Eurasian-- she describes herself as Anglo-Burmese-Chinese-Irish --and she's very lovely. She seems to have moved around a lot as a girl, and her accent is a delight. It sounds like American English overlaying Australian English with dashes of British Received Pronunciation and what I think of as Singapore English. She has an amazing voice-- smoky, alluring, throaty, precise, measured, confident. It's a voice with command presence-- very much so. It's a voice that would never need to be raised to seem powerful. I immediately thought of it as a voice Tywin Lannister would've appreciated. Eva Oh  was in a very elegant , body-conscious silk slip dress and heels, and she has long, amazing legs...but it's her voice that caught my fancy. She's very coolly distanced, very precise, very elegant, very aware of irony. I like all those things, but...ah, that voice!

I'll note that she's also starred in a film called "Grief Encounter", about an enigmatic woman who attends strangers' funerals in order to seduce grieving men. I like that as a premise, and I like what the trailers show about the psychological dynamics of what her character does.

Eva Oh's biography online says that she worked as a researcher for a couple of human rights organizations in Asia. I'd probably end up letting my academic side take over and spending much of my $10,000 a day asking about where she went and what her research was about and how it was conducted. I've never been able to get away from being an academic. Even trying to discover if she wore anything at all under that silk slip dress (God, I hope not) would take second place to asking about her methodology in research. That's the way my mind works, alas.

I've always been attracted to BDSM, all the way back to reading "Story of O." when I was far too young. S/M for me has always come with a whole set of class markers, and it's always been what Andrew Holleran called "the intellectuals' fetish". It's a fetish that requires literary references and expensive accoutrements. It's a fetish that requires the ability to create and tell stories. What's S/M without a script, without a set of character backstories? 

My relationships have usually involved S/M overtones. I'm older than my young companions, and I was the eldest sibling in my family...so I'm used to having my way. I spent much of my life as an academic, so I'm used to crafting and telling stories. My young ladies are often comparative lit or French lit majors, and they're used to seeing the world as a set of stories...and used to being mentored by older admirers. So affairs for me have always been very much a sort of creative writing seminar. And Eva Oh seems to be someone who has the ability to do be part of stories and scenarios and character play. 

I've never had any particular interest in being submissive, and I'm not someone who feels the need to be "broken down" or punished. So I'm not sure that Eva Oh-- who seems to enjoy psychological games and shaping psychological dynamics --would be a good real-world choice for me, even if I were some tech billionaire or forex trader who could regard $10,000 a day as just a rounding error. Though let's say that I did admire her own accounts of scenarios she's created with her clients, and I am fascinated with her ideas about how to create "headspaces" for clients. My own wish (not quite a fantasy) would be to sit with Eva Oh in some elegant, tiny bar in Melbourne or Singapore and work with her on creating scenarios.

Though let's be honest. I'd probably have the same fear I had about the FMTY girls at Twitter. Would my particular interests seem good enough to her? Would I be good enough to be her client-- to be worth her time and effort, even if I paid in advance? Would I be a project worth her time?

The scenarios wouldn't involve the usual BDSM things, but they would involve complicated scenarios and a fluidity of control. In my own life, as I've said before, my pleasures happen behind my eyes. It's always been very difficult for me to pass control over from my thoughts to my body. It's never been easy to release myself and just experience sensations. I always have to have a script (or at least an outline), and I always have to have a very literary ambience. I could never afford Eva Oh, and I could likely never explain myself properly even if did have the ability to move funds over the aether to her offshore accounts. But the idea is there. Maybe a domme has the auxiliary skills to let me finally feel something outside my own head-- the necessary skills at character creation, scriptwriting, and finding out what's actually going on behind my eyes.

I also found a platform called Soft White Underbelly that had an interview with a young (twenty-five or twenty-six) domme who called herself Monique. She's not anywhere near Eva Oh's price-point, and she's very...American: Los Angeles by way of Minnesota. Very tall (six foot two), very slender, very pretty in a kind of angular way. I liked her interview a lot, liked her attitude and laugh. Monique is very like many of the girls I've sat with at off-campus or hipster-enclave bars down the years, and of course I loved the idea of how long her legs were, and I loved the way you see her hipbones just above her low-rise jeans. Very, very kissable legs, and the sort of dry humor I like. 

She did talk about how it mattered to her that her clients were able to feel a sense of freedom around her and how she was open to adventures and experiments. I could imagine her as someone I could talk to about my needs and hopes and interests and not feel that I might be...boring. I'd have a drink with Monique and simply...discuss prices and services without feeling like someone trying to hire a top-end DC or Manhattan lawyer to represent him in a minor car crash. Monique might be someone I could talk to and feel like I might be an adventure rather than a psychological experiment or corporate project for her. No wire transfers to banks overseas, but I would be happy to bring cash.  I suspect she wouldn't be as coolly precise about things as Eva Oh, but she might be less likely to judge the decor in my flat. 

And I suspect Monique might be someone with whom I could be more open. She'd be easier to just look at at say, "Well, I've always wanted to be able to just feel something, or just lose myself in something other than books and movies." Maybe. Maybe.

Well, these days I lack the money and the ability to do anything FMTY...or to be on an aeroplane to anywhere. And I'm really not sure just what I'd say to either Monique or Eva Oh. Monique, though...I'd love to hear that laugh while I was kissing her hipbones and thighs. 

 

Three Six Seven: Observers

 It's been a while since I've had stories to tell you here. I want you to know that I apologize for that. Stories mean a lot to me. They always have. 

Stories are histories of lives, of the other lives that I, a flaneur-at-arms, move through. They're the lives that I see but never quite belong to. Over the last few years we've had a world where the pandemic and awful politics have made stories (or at least the kinds of stories that I've recounted here) seem trivial or obsolete. Stories of sex and sexual adventures are out of fashion. More's the pity of course. Sex has lost the tang of adventure and become all about abuses of power. It's not been a good time to be a roue.

This summer has been exhaustingly hot. Here in my own lost city, we've had more than a month of blindingly white sun and no rain, of days like ovens. There's no relief to be found in swimming pools-- every pool's a hot tub this summer --and it's too hot for afternoons in bed with a lovely young companion. There are leggy co-eds on the downtown street in tiny shorts (but not miniskirts-- I wonder why not) but they all look wilted and deeply drained. My own thought is that here under the Heat Dome, we're in the Burmese version of Hell-- a place too hot even if you've been through Rangoon in the summer.

However, I do have one story. A friend and I were talking by telephone the other night, each of us in the air-conditioned dark of our respective cities, and she did tell me a story. We were talking about the idea of consent, about the idea of past experiences that came right up to the line of something awful...but didn't quite cross over into a true-crime tale.

Her story was simple enough. She was still sixteen, not quite seventeen, in the summer between Grade 11 and senior year. She was with her parents at a rented condo on the beach. She was deeply, gnawingly bored. She spent her days getting away from her family, reading, walking along the beachfront, becoming tanned in that Deepest South way, and sneaking drinks. It wasn't hard to get alcohol where she was, and she was usually pleasantly buzzed before noon. I know the place she'd been at, and she would've been one of scores of girls her age doing exactly the same thing. There hadn't been any boys she'd wanted to flirt with, and there hadn't been any summer flings. She was in fact still a bookish virgin. 

She was on a bench by the beachfront one morning very early when she was approached by what she still calls "an older gentleman". She was reading when he came up. She told me that the "older gentleman" (and here "older" seems to have meant something like sixty) was pleasant enough, and sounded shy. He called her "Miss". He was reasonably well-dressed. He told her that it was a delight to see a young lady as pretty as she was so early in the day and asked about the book she was reading. My friend just smiled politely and thanked him for the compliment. They chatted for a moment about the book and then he asked her if she'd be offended at a question. She just shrugged.

He told her, a bit apologetically, that he thought she had very lovely legs and asked if she minded if he looked at them. My friend told me that she thought that was more hilarious than creepy and told him she didn't mind. She thought about asking if he wanted her to strike modeling poses. She didn't, she told me, feel threatened as much as she just felt like she was part of a comedy bit. Why not play along? She was wearing a short sundress and sandals, so she just crossed and uncrossed her legs a few times and stretched her legs out on the bench. She asked how she was doing.

He told her that her legs were amazing, and that he appreciated what she was doing. It had been, he said, a very long time since anyone like her had let him look at her. At that point he shyly (he called her "Miss" again) asked for a favor. He told her how lonely he was, and told her that if she was willing, he'd sit on the next bench over and just...look. He wouldn't touch her, he said, and he wouldn't come any closer than the next bench. All he wanted, he said, was to look and, well, pleasure himself.

My friend said that she was well aware that she was supposed to be angry and/or horrified , and that she was supposed to run away. She didn't feel preyed upon, though. What surprised her was that she didn't feel anything at all, really. She told the man that, okay, sure, that was fine. He'd be on another bench, and she'd be reading. It wasn't, she told me, like she had to really do anything.

So she put her legs up on the beach and just...read. She could tell that he had his hand inside his shorts and that at least for a while, he was exposed. The thing was, she told me, that he wasn't really part of her day. The book meant something to her, but the older gentleman was just a figure on another bench. There was no one else around, which made it all easier. It was only later that she wondered if the man had wanted to be caught or slapped or chased away. Was he, she asked, maybe disappointed at her for not yelling at him and threatening to call the police?

He spoke to her very briefly. He asked her to pose a bit ("would you mind very much...?") and draw one knee up, and to turn a bit to the side. He apologized and asked if she was wearing anything under her sundress. She barely looked over her sunglasses and told him underwear, but no bra. He didn't ask her to open her legs, though she did laugh and tell him that what she was wearing was a cotton thong in pale peach. She could hear him, but said it wasn't moaning or gasping-- just soft sighs. Telling the story to me now, she said that if he'd asked her to pull up her dress a bit, she might have. Maybe. She wondered, too, why he hadn't asked her to kick off her sandals. Her later experiences with older men had taught her that any man over forty either had or was developing a foot fetish. 

She wasn't sure exactly when he finished, but when he did he leaned forward and took a moment to get his wind back. She didn't get to see any evidence of what he'd done. She put down her book and asked him if he was okay. He nodded and stood up and thanked her several times. She crossed her legs to let him have a memory of her legs up to her mid-thighs and told him that she hoped he'd enjoyed himself. He told her he had and this meant a lot. He reached out to shake her hand. That was the only time he touched her. They shook hands and he went off down the beachfront walk. She never saw him again.

She wanted to pull out her phone and tell...someone. But she didn't. There wasn't any way to tell the story that didn't make it seem really true-crime creepy or, worse, funny in a sad way. She felt, she said, sorry for the man. Was he really lonely and just desperate for some kind of sexual interaction or did he just ask a different girl to do this every day? She wanted to believe he was just desperately lonely-- he'd certainly seemed genuine enough in his shyness --and however pervy the whole thing had been, she didn't want to laugh at the man. She ended up not telling anyone until she was at university, and the hardest thing, she said, was making it very clear that she hadn't felt violated and that she hadn't felt angry or contemptuous. 

The whole experience, she said, was maybe ten minutes or so out of her life. She hadn't had to do anything; no one had touched her. It made her feel like she'd become someone who had a story to tell, and that was good. But she wasn't sure how to present the story, or quite what to make of it. Nothing bad, she said. All that had happened was that someone had said he liked her legs and that she'd read a book while on a park bench. A decade later, she said, and she still wasn't sure what the story should mean.

Three Six Two: Regimentals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Six One: Clowns

I've been following along with the Trans Wars over the holidays. They're the latest round in the larger Culture Wars.  And the current campaign  seems to be built around drag queens. 

I can remember seeing drag shows back in the Long Ago, back in my clubland days. I can recall seeing an advertising poster for a drag show in Vienna and realizing that "Travesti", the local term for a drag show, was related to both "travesty" and "transvestite". No, I was not very knowledgeable at that age.  I can remember seeing drag shows, though I don't recall ever finding them very interesting. The shows were almost inevitably "tributes" to female singers or actresses who'd become gay icons. Lots and lots of drag queens on stage doing Liza Minelli or Nina Simone imitations. The music was never my style, and I was too young to have any appreciation for Joan Crawford (or even Joan Collins) impersonations. 

I might've responded better to things like Dame Edna Everage, but that kind of performance (is "panto" a correct term here?) wasn't on offer at dance clubs in my Lost Youth. 

Anyway...here we are in 2023, and Drag Queen Story Hours are a battleground. The right wing and the most strident of the GC brigade now see outright evil in drag queen performances and refer to drag queens as "groomer clowns".  I'm not sure what to say to that.

Maybe the whole idea of a drag show has changed since I was in my twenties. I remember the shows as being a mix of beauty pageants and icon tributes. They weren't for children, but that was largely because children wouldn't have had any idea who Talullah Bankhead was, let alone Jayne Mansfield. I can recall the jokes as being sly and filled with double entendres, but I don't recall the shows as being overtly sexual. I don't recall any strip shows as part of drag performances, even in largely gay clubs.

I've seen drag queen brunches where the waitstaff were in drag and did comedy bits at the tables. The humor isn't really my thing, and at brunch I usually just want to drink Mimosas and be left alone to (I hope) flirt with my lovely co-ed companion. But I have no moral objection to someone in drag bringing me eggs Benedict and hash browns. And I have no objection to someone in drag reading books to children.

I can remember a few years ago when there was a less hysterical controversy over sex workers reading books at libraries to children. The sometime porn actress Sasha Grey was attacked by the right wing for that, for being a volunteer at her local library and reading to kids. I was very sympathetic to Ms. Grey and other sex workers. Being a volunteer reader was a good deed in itself, and I understood her political point, too. Being a sex worker didn't (and doesn't) make someone a monster, and volunteering at a local library was a way to show that sex workers were part of the community. 

So I can understand why drag performers might want to do story hours. The idea is to show that they're simply entertainers and that they're part of a larger community... and that they're willing to volunteer to do constructive things-- like teaching children that reading is fun.

I'm a bit wary, mind you, of the way drag queens have been conflated with trans folk. My own understanding was that most drag queens aren't trans-- that they're gay men. My own understanding is that some might simply be transvestites and might be straight. Drag has its own history and it's not just a subset of the trans world. There's a critical argument to be made about drag as being misogynistic (the whole "woman face" argument), and whether or not you agree with it, it's at least a respectable argument. But it's poor damned history to see drag as being inherently trans. 

I'm wary, too, of the right-wing arguments that drag performers reading to children constitutes "grooming". When the right accuses drag performers of "sexualizing" children, I have to be skeptical. What they really mean is that they're angry that children are being told that some people are gay or trans, or that it's possible to be different. They don't object to stories where two hetero characters kiss or marry. What they object to is any performance or story that suggests that heterosexual monogamy isn't the only kind of acceptable romance. 

My own view of the Trans Wars leans more to the GC side. Take that as a given. There are two biological sexes for humans, and humans don't change sex. But there are multiple genders-- maybe as many as there are individuals, since each and every individual is  a different mix of socially-defined traits for men and women. 

But I have no time for people who use the Trans Wars as a way to re-fight the LGB Wars of the 1970s-90s. I have no time for people whose ultimate argument is that anything not "normal" is evil, or who use dislike of the TRA types to attack LGB people.

Three Six Zero: Brushstrokes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Three Five Eight: Wars

It's a strange time to be writing about sex and erotica.

I'd thought that the pandemic would generate a new batch of sex blogs and would see a revitalization of phone sex and erotic exchanges via email. I'd hoped that the pandemic might even lead to people sending love letters and erotic missives. After all, there must be some people who'd prefer to lie awake in bed and read over handwritten fantasies from a lover (or even an alluring stranger) than scroll through their texts. 

I know that I for one would rather read a handwritten erotic letter or even an email than scroll through sexts. I've never been able to sext. Text-speak isn't a way I can construct any fantasies that interest me.

Somehow, though, the Red Death did nothing to put new life into sex. If anything, the world after 2020 seems more sex-negative. 

I remember adding "Gender Wars" as a content label here back when I first started writing here. In those days, "gender wars" meant male-female hostilities. It meant things like the Dublin Elevator Encounter and #MeToo. Now it means the Trans Wars, the GCs versus the TRAs. And there's been a spillover from the Trans Wars into disdain for sex-- both the activity and the biological idea.

Look, I do agree with the GC side that humans come in two sexes only, and that one's sex is fixed at birth. That shouldn't be taken to mean that  trans people need to be "erased" or that they shouldn't have full civil rights and access to medical treatment. It does mean that socially presenting as another sex doesn't make you a member of that sex and that there should still be single-sex spaces. 

What bothers me about the GC side is that they've gone from arguing something simple-- two biological sexes, no changing biological sex, gender as socially constructed --to becoming increasingly anti sex-as-activity. There's far too much Second Wave prudery on the GC side these days. They don't like the idea of Pride being a kind of Carnevale, they don't like kink, and they don't like fetishes.  And you might guess that I've been fascinated with kink all my life. I like the idea of sexual adventuring and exploration. Reading GC advocates attack kink and fetishes makes my teeth grind. I also dislike the way they create an image of the "woke" enemy as university girls with blue hair. My clubland days were back in the lost land of the Eighties, and I always liked girls who ran through hair colours every few weeks. I had a white slash dyed through my hair for a couple of years in those days, and I did like that. I hate it that the GC side, much of whose thought I agree with, sounds increasingly prudish.

Now the trans side draws my disdain for other reasons. Look, I do not believe that TWAW. I do believe that socially presenting as the other sex is LARPing. There's nothing wrong with LARPing, by the way. If a certain social presentation feels more natural, then present yourself that way. Wear a dress if you want. Call yourself by whatever name you prefer. Your life may be better that way, and that's all to the good. But you haven't changed biological sex, and the search for "authenticity" will always end badly. 

I do not believe TRA assertions that pansexuality is the only moral or ethical kind of sex. I dislike the way that the TRAs are trying to destroy the idea of being gay, lesbian, or bi--- I dislike that more than I dislike the GC hostility to the idea of "queer" as a category that includes things like S/M or role-playing. 

I dislike the way that both sides are against the idea of sex as adventure and pleasure rather than some sort of moral-political statement. I dislike the way that both sides are so ready to mock cis-het preferences and cis-het sex as either boring or morally bankrupt. Though at least the GC side believes that cis-het does exist, whereas the TRA side believes that it doesn't (or shouldn't) really exist.

2022 is winding down, and there are so many economic and political nightmares hovering just at the edge of our vision. I had hoped that this year there would be new sex blogs with clever tales of adventure. I'd thought that after two years of dealing with the pandemic and its one million dead we'd be ready to explore the possibilities of pleasure. That hasn't happened, though.

It's hard for me to imagine a world without desire and kink and a sense of aesthetic play. But we seem to be coming to that.

Three Five Six: Damals und Heute

 I've been watching David Cronenberg's new film "Crimes of the Future", and I'm deeply impressed, It's an alluring and disturbing film, and I will be acquiring my own DVD of it. 

There's a moment in the film where Kristen Stewart's character says that "surgery is the New Sex". That's a lovely line, and as good as "long live the New Flesh!" from Cronenberg's "Videodrome". That of course is the basic element of the film-- that body modification is the New Sex, and its results are as powerful and unsettling as anything sexual can be.

I'll note that Viggo Mortenson's character responds to Ms.Stewart at one point by saying that she might be right, but that in any case he was never very good at the Old Sex. 

I once read a horror thriller where the heroine has a nipple cut off during sex and I remember sitting there with the book feeling disturbed, appalled, and yet thrilled at the scene. Yes, fine, that's a tribute to the author's skill, and it means that the author did succeed at the 1990s game of transgression. But creating something alluring and disturbing at the same time is a dangerous move. "Crimes of the Future" left me with that same uncanny feeling. The surgical scenes are graphic, oddly distanced, powerful, and highly erotic. There's a moment where Lea Seydoux drops to her knees not to give head to Viggo Mortenson, but to slide her tongue into and along the open surgical cut he has across his stomach. It's a stunning scene, and her face is as beatific as any blowjob scene in a porn film. I don't know what to make of the scene, and I don't know how to analyze my own response to the scene and to the film as a whole.

Odd thing. I know what my response to Mlle. Seydoux is, of course. In the film, she's had her hair cut to a short pixie cut, and she (like Ms. Stewart) dresses in tailored slacks and tops-- a very alluring garconne look. She's naked a fair bit in the film-- maybe more so than in "The French Dispatch" --and while Google tells me that her bra size is a 32B, she has very large ("Oreo-sized") areolae and nipples. Large areolae have always been a particular favourite of mine, but I've never known how to just say that, or (again) how to analyze that. 

I've stayed away here from discussing my personal preferences. In 2022, and if you're a straight, cis, white, over-thirty male, discussing your personal sexual tastes and interests simply isn't done. No cis-het male in 2022 could write a sex blog or do a sex podcast where his own personal experiences are part of the conversation. 

If I say anything, I'll note that my tastes run to the tall and slender-- lithe, lanky, lissome, long-legged. Always long-legged. And underwear-averse. Yes, sharp hipbones and collarbones. Yes, a dark tan-- something that Gulf Coast co-eds still favor. I do not like the current fashion for tiny waists and big hips. I do not like the idea of Big Butts. I do like short haircuts-- see Mlle. Seydoux in "Crimes of the Future"; see Ms. Stewart in several earlier films. Big areolae, yes. But that's as much as I'll say. I'm sure I can be attacked just for having preferences at all.

"Crimes of the Future" is stunning. David Cronenberg's body horror films have always been stunning and stunningly erotic, all the way back to "They Came from Within", down through "Naked Lunch" and "ExistenZ". I've just  had the local library get me a copy of Cronenberg's novel "Consumed". I read it once long ago, but after seeing "Crimes of the Future", I need to read it again. I need to see if Mr. Cronenberg did make cannibalism and underground surgery sexualized. 

I do note that Ms. Stewart is described in the film as "sexy...in a bureaucratic way". There's very little of her flesh on view-- her tailored blouses are buttoned to the neck, and she's clearly wearing a bra. But she has a very thrilling look-- messy hair, a look of starved obsession and compelling desire. That look of inner compulsion is very sexy. 

I do need someone with whom I can discuss the film, and all the lovely Young Companions I've relied on seem to have vanished over the past few years. If you're reading this from out over the aether, do comment. I'd like to hear what my Imaginary Reader-- a young, over-educated comparative lit major with concealed dreams of transgression --has to say about David Cronenberg. 

Three Five One: Flavors

 Jill in Wellington wrote me once upon a time with a story from her teen years, a story about Julia, the first girl she had sex with. I miss Jill's stories, and miss the spirit of adventure she brought to her stories:

I have quite a bad memory in general, but especially when i've been enjoying drinks & drugs. but i remember one night with julia, an old friend from school. i was about 15 and staying at her apartment in town while her mum & her mum's lesbian lover were away. we raided the liquor cabinet and were really drunk. we were out on the balcony and i was licking her clit and had my fingers in her cunt. she came and pissed at the same time, and a bit got in my mouth. i was not into it at all, i grabbed our bottle of tequila and had a few big gulps. Julia apologised several times...but also said how good it felt to cum and piss at the same time. i'm always very open to new experiences so i gave it a try...and it felt amazing. it made my orgasm so much more intense. Julia loved it too...

Later i discovered pissing while purging which is also amazing. 

I do feel sad that she abandoned her past. It's always sad when a beautiful girl who has a Slutty Party Girl past filled with wicked stories decides in her early thirties to pretend those experiences never happened. It's always sad when a beautiful, wicked girl decides that she now needs to be a Grown-Up and put sexual adventures aside. 

Jill told me once that Julia left school a year or so later and now lives in a council flat with two half-Maori children by different (and unknown) fathers. That could be (and probably is) a sad story-- all the more so since Jill hasn't seen Julia in years. 

Nonetheless, Jill has a good fifteen or twenty years worth of stories in her diaries and memories. It's sad that she's tried to erase them.

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 One Two: Paint

I've spent time going through my storage cube and seeing how much of my past is hidden away there. In one plastic storage box I did find things Levin left for me long ago. I remember her packing to go off to grad school, remember that she packed up her life in a couple of bags and a few cardboard boxes in the trunk of her car. She gave me a few of her old notebooks--- You're a historian, she said.  This is history. She may have said my history or our history, Too long ago to remember.  But I have been looking through them and thinking about ghosts. 

The notebooks are hardbound Pentalic journals--- both sketchbooks and lined, What's the size? 5 x 8? I haven't seen Pentalic journals in forever, and I have no idea if they're still made. These have hard blue covers; I like the solidity.

Levin had posed naked for sketches and paintings since she was in high school. Self-portraits and for friends and (older?) lovers when she was a high school girl, for the painting professor whose muse she was at university, for lovers male and female. Her sketchbooks have details of nude self-portraits, sketches of collarbones and throat leading down to breasts, sketches of Levin done in a mirror. 

I remember that at one point she and her painting professor had spent time laughing and painting on one another. She'd been thrilled at that. Not just because it felt good or was part of sex, but because her older lover had been able to laugh about it, had been able to give up authority and art-world fame and just play.  So there in the sketchbooks are drawings of herself topless, or just of her breasts and throat, colored in in pencil. 

Levin had large areolae and nipples. I liked that, liked the way it looked when she was in the boy's white singlets that were a uniform look for her, She liked it sometimes, but felt awkward at others. A boy in high school had mocked her for having "pepperoni tits", and she'd been wounded by that. Still, Levin was always bra-less, and I loved the shadow of her areolae and nipples against thin cotton.  I love the drawings, too, and love the colors she used. 

She told me once that one summer she'd worked as a server in a men's club called Rembrandt's. The club wasn't exactly a strip bar. Its gimmick was that the servers and bartendrix girls were topless and painted--- the body paint glowing under the black light that flooded the club. For something like $25 you could paint on one of the girls. Girls had designs and names painted on them.  A patron, she told me, could touch a girl's legs and stomach and back and go around her breasts, but couldn't touch the breasts themselves (something the bouncers enforced). Depending on the tip, the girl would paint her own breasts or slyly trace a glowing streak across the crotch of her bikini. I did laugh when she told me how many men wanted to paint football team names and slogans on a girl. I listened to Levin talk about the club and spent time imagining that there was a secret inner club where girls were totally naked and that girls and their patrons were having black light sex in VIP rooms. I have to grimace about that now. Black light is so very much a period thing, though never one that's been retro-hip. I've run ice cubes around Levin's nipples and dripped candle wax on them and kissed vodka and champagne off them, but we never played with paint. 

One of the notebooks has long passages in Portuguese in it. Levin had done a year abroad in Lisbon, and she was proud of knowing the language. A couple of the passages are marked in red and have my name by them. I've never done Portuguese or Spanish, and I have no idea what the passages are about. She used to whisper to me in Portuguese while we were having sex, and she told me that she was saying the most outrageous Talking Dirty things she knew. I took that as a gift then, and I still take it as a compliment. I wish I could've responded better in German, but in those days my German was far too academic and formal. I should've looked up more bedroom-useful words and phrases. 

I do wish I'd been able to paint her or sketch her...or paint on her. I can talk about a few, a very few, things in art history, but I have no artistic talent of my own. 

Her sketchbooks have a couple of sketches of my face. That's my name and a date on the page, but it's so hard for me to recognize the young man there all in pen-and-ink or colored pencil. Yes, at some point I did have a goatee. Yes, for a while there was a white streak dyed in my hair. Yes, I must've been that thin. I know that I gave her written things--- love letters, the odd bit of poetry (don't ask) ---but I wish I could've given her something visual. I wasn't hopeless at photography in those days, and Levin would've been perfect as a photo model. Portrait photos, nude or not, would've been something to give her.

Levin's painting professor told her once that she needed always to point her toes when she posed naked for him. Nothing, he said, was more alluring than a lovely girl who stretched out her legs and pointed her toes--- especially alluring, he said, if she was in the midst of an orgasm. I have to agree, and I do remember that when her legs were over my shoulders she always stretched and pointed. I'm not sure that means anything now, but I did take it as both very sexy and as a gift.

Three Zero Nine: Catalog

 I'm on the mailing list at several high-end sex toy boutiques. I've used their catalogs to buy gifts and accessories for young companions. Well, I use a couple of old-school equestrian shops to buy riding whips, but I suppose many such shops stay in business because of s/m far more than dressage. 

I'm had young companions thank me for the gifts I've bought them. And I've had FaceTime conversations with lovely young companions who were shopping in high-end sex toy boutiques in distant cities. I'm glad that the gifts were appreciated (and, yes, sometimes used together), but I remain out of the loop when girls tell me that they've been online shopping for sex toys or that they have a whole drawer in a bedroom dresser devoted to vibrators and dildos. I like the idea of accompanying a lovely girl while she shops for dildos, but there's something very alien about that. It's not something I could ever do on my own. I've seen lovely twenty-somethings earnestly consulting with sex boutique clerks over designs, colours, brand names. I can't imagine asking a clerk for advice in even the most gentrified sex boutique. That's not something straight males can do. My leggy posh blonde friend Jill in New Zealand lives in Wellington, where there's a rather famous sex toy boutique that delivers--- that has its own cadre of uniformed young women who deliver elegantly-wrapped sex toys to posh customers late into the night. I'd be far too afraid to open the door.

Over last weekend I found all the catalogs I had from sex toy suppliers and threw them away. They somehow seemed...pointless. I won't be ordering on line any longer. That really does seem pointless. There's no one in my life currently to buy bedroom gifts for, and I'm...worried that someone might find the catalogs and think that I used them to shop for myself. 

A male buying sex toys is seen as pathetic at best, creepy and disgusting at worst. And always a figure of mockery. I have no problem using toys on young companions, but I can't imagine using any myself. Girls in the past--- Levin, Liberty, my NZ friend, a certain lovely girl in the Home Counties, a Juilliard girl who was once a pro domme and who's now with the Vienna Philharmonic ---have asked to use toys on me. I've always refused--- gently, firmly, clearly. But you'd love it, they've told me. Just give yourself over to the sensations, give yourself to pleasure. No. No. That's not something I can do. There's always the fear that I'd be hearing the derisive laughter of the invisible audience in my head.

Sex toys are for lovely girls. Sex toys are ways they can find  pleasure or amplify it. I can't do that. Pleasure isn't something for straight males, and certainly not straight males of a certain age. Pleasure isn't something I can understand, and it's certainly not something I deserve.  Asking for pleasure, and especially asking for aids to pleasure, is a terrifying thing. I hate my own fears, but they're there.  Levin called across the boutique to the girl at the counter: do you have this in other colours? do you have ones that are shaped like uncut cock? uncut and with balls?  I of course froze and tried to will myself into invisibility. 

I can imagine talking about blindfolds and riding whips; I can imagine talking about candle wax and nipple clamps. I cannot imagine talking about any of the sex toys "for him" in the catalogs or at the upscale websites. Any sex aids for men seem designed to humiliate, to make the male user into an object of derision. And yet I feel envious of lovely young companions who can blithely buy toys to help them with orgasm. I've seen a girl look at a half-empty Corona bottle and suddenly laugh. This! she said. I so have to try this!  There's no male equivalent of that laugh. There's no male equivalent of the look that says that something is worth trying for fun. 

Well, the new year, the Year Twenty-One, is almost here. I won't be getting the sex boutique catalogs any more. No one to buy gifts for, of course. And it's impossible to think that I could ever be part of a world where using sex toys--- even with a lover I trusted ---would be safe. Pleasure isn't something that I can ask for, let alone seek on my own. There's nothing in the marketing plans of sex toy manufacturers for someone like me. Not this year, and not any other.