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.

Fifty-Eight: Demimondaine

 A lovely friend wrote me a night or two ago to say that she's joining the demi-monde in her city. It seems that she's found an actual sugar daddy. The negotiated arrangement calls for $500 per week with occasional shopping trips, and she's to be available two nights a week, with no sleepovers. The schedule, she tells me, meshes perfectly with her other jobs. She says she can go from barista or receptionist to demimondaine in just a few blocks' drive. Her SD is, I'm gathering, married and rather older (of course). He's a landscape architect, with a small firm in a city that's coming to be thought of as hip.

 I told her that I'd be very jealous if he's older than I am, since I rather do like being her official Older Admirer. I'm jealous, too, of his profession.  The career I envisioned in high school was probably architect or urban planner, and landscape architect is a career I might have considered as well. My friend told me not to worry about her SD being older than me---- she assured me that he isn't.  There are very few times when I'd insist on being older, but this is one. She assured me, too, that I'd been her first Older Admirer, which should count for something in both our lives. It does, of course. It certainly counts for something in mine.  

Anyway... I am intrigued and pleased. She negotiated the whole thing herself, which does impress me. The actual dollar figure per week isn't high, but she plans on using the shopping trips to expand and re-do her wardrobe. She is a fashionista, and her tastes are precise and impeccable. I like her sense of style, and at her height (just at five-eleven)  and her weight (very much in model range) she can carry off some wonderful looks.  Her SD is likely to be very surprised when she takes him shopping--- $500 per week may be the least of his expenses.

Am I actually jealous? Oh, maybe...maybe a bit. I've known her for a while, and I do think of her as a wonderful discovery in my life. She's funny, clever, witty, literary, long-legged and sharp-hipboned. Excellent music tastes, a fine painter, and properly averse to underwear. I told her yesterday that I always do want to travel with her, and that I wish I could be the one taking her into keeping. She texted back to say that she did wish it could be me, too. That's a text I'll keep. She knows the right things to say. But after all, she always has.  I do want to end up at a Chelsea cafe with her one autumn night. I may be a bit jealous, yes, though I have no proprietary rights here. I am glad that I'm on her text/call list. 

 Now I will have to ask her things, of course. Did she put up an on line ad? How did she decide to do this? What was the initial interview like? Was there a kind of trial session in bed? (I think there was, based on her texts to me) Where will they rendezvous? She lives with three other people in a rented house, and I doubt she can bring him there. So...motel? His office? I'd like to know how the logistics work.  My hope would be that she insists on hotels. My friend is a painter, and she has a certain fascination with sex in offices and studios, but I hope she'll insist on a small boutique hotel. 


I did write her to say that, yes, I wish it could be me, too. Not as a sugar daddy, but as someone who could take her into keeping. She liked that--- she wrote back to say that she'd rather be a mistress than a sugar baby, if only because it seems to have more style to it, and because she thinks that a gentleman's mistress would share more interests and emotional sympathy than a sugar baby. An escort, she wrote, has independence, but right now she'd like to have some regularity in income over and above her day jobs, and she wants the ability to avoid sleepovers. She may, she said, interview other possible SDs as well. But her requirements are simple enough: regular income, no encroachments on her life as a hipster girl with bookshelves and a tiny painting studio. 

I do wish her luck, of course. And I will be following up on all her stories. She did write to say that I was someone she saw as a mentor, or at least as a tempter, and that she intended to report to me about everything. She does that--- she makes me feel valued, and she knows exactly how to hold my interests.   She's a girl who's been a dear friend for something like five years now, and I want always to be there for her. She's self-aware and introspective, and I suppose I will be reading her e-mails and texts with a historian's eye, or at least an analytic eye. I'd like to see how she moves into the demi-monde, and see how she creates herself as a new girl in a new kind of world.

Twenty-Five: Grisettes

A British journalist I've chatted with once published an article not long ago about the websites that offer to bring together "sugar babies" with "sugar daddies". The article itself isn't bad at all, and she does ask a number of interesting questions. One thing that I wish she'd addressed, though, is the question of how one distinguishes a "sugar baby" from the classic idea of a mistress. 


How do we distinguish between "sugar baby" and the traditional--- meaning the 18th and 19th.-century --idea of the mistress? What differentiates one from the other? Is it that a "sugar baby" is simply given gifts, while the traditional mistress is "in keeping"--- living somewhere supplied by her patron, all (or at least most) of her expenses paid? Is it the level of the arrangement--- the mistress expected either to be on call or to abide by a carefully-crafted schedule for meetings, while the "sugar baby" is more able to set her own schedule? I do think there's a level of display that's expected with a "sugar baby" that isn't expected from a girl taken "into keeping" in Paris or London in an earlier age. A "sugar baby" is given gifts by her "sugar daddy" and she's taken out to be shown off, even if that's somewhere where friends of his wife or his business colleagues aren't likely to find them. I might argue that display is a key function of the "sugar baby", that she's there precisely to be shown off in her new dresses and jewels. The classic mistress was kept more discreetly. What's the old phrase--- "the somebodies whom nobody knows"? The semiotics here interest me. There's a difference between a mistress and a "sugar baby" that says something about display and how wealth is to be seen in the modern day.


There may also be a question of class here. In French or English or even Russian novels, the mistress is the ex-governess, the ballerina, the actress, the grisette. While there are fallen gentlewomen who appear once in a while, the mistress is usually from a lower social class than her keeper. The "sugar baby", though, is something different. The idea of the websites is that the girls are presented as university girls, as students who need financial support to finish a degree and are willing to accept gifts from a "sugar daddy" and offer up sexual favours. The girls may be impoverished at twenty, but the idea is that they are from a class that goes to university and can expect to be financially successful on their own in a few years. The "sugar daddy" who visits the websites isn't taking a shopgirl into keeping. He's making an arrangement with someone who comes from his own social class, and it's the middle and upper-middle class status of the girls that's a selling point.


I've never taken a mistress. I've never taken a girl into keeping or been anyone's "sugar daddy". Genteel poverty hasn't allowed for that. I suppose I'd rather take a mistress than a "sugar baby".  If I had the money, I'd prefer to take a girl as a mistress in the 18th-c. kind of arrangement. It's a more literary thing to do, and whatever I may do in the realms of sex and romance, there has to be a literary reference. It'll never be any other way. Though I will note that I'd want the girl to be someone who'd otherwise be the "sugar baby" type, the undergraduate girl with the bookshelves filled with critical theory and high lit. I wouldn't be comfortable with someone who didn't have the right academic (and, yes, class) markers. 


The article noted that so many of the men presenting themselves as "sugar daddies" were in IT that the question really had to be asked: why were IT or tech types so prevalent? I might suspect that the men who'd made serious money in those fields had devoted their twenties to staring relentlessly at computer screens and had never learned social skills. A "sugar daddy" arrangement would allow them to have a social trophy and be with someone who wouldn't mock them for geekery. Or is that only dealing in stereotypes? It's certainly dealing in stereotypes to speculate that MBA and finance types might prefer escorts to "sugar babies" as more efficient and less likely to make any emotional demands. But am I wrong? If you're reading this, do comment. I'd like to hear what you think.


I think I will be acquiring a copy of Marcel Mauss' "The Gift" and David Graeber's "Debt" as reading for a next note here. I find articles out on the web that discuss the idea of "sexual economics" or an "economy of sex", though usually in terms of attacking the idea. I'll have to think about that. I hope you'll comment on that, too. It's a discussion I'd like to have.