Three Three Zero: Complications

We've talked about this before, but I'll just note that I've always distrusted the idea of authenticity or the idea of an essential self. One of the things that makes me distrustful of the whole current idea of being trans is the idea that there is some kind of essential self, a "real" self that can come out of hiding or finally break free of social impositions. I'm old-school postmodern, and I believe in the idea of reinvention, the idea of  transformation, the idea of becoming someone or something new. Needless to say, I'm always a fan of literary impostors and of people who've gone off to new cities and new worlds to reinvent themselves.

Right now I'm watching someone tangle himself up in that-- or watching two people tangle themselves up. I know both of them, though I know her better than I know him. They're not a couple, or not yet, though I think they'd both like to at least have an ongoing, off-and-on affair. They're both in their early thirties, educated, hip, articulate, successful. Members of the meritocratic class. 

As best I can tell, here's what's happening. He is trying desperately to tell her that he's bisexual, or gender-fluid, or whatever. Watching from the outside, I'm not altogether sure that he actually is. He may well be, although she tells me that sometimes she thinks his hints are very much like some haute-bourgeois sorority girl announcing that she's "spicy straight", whatever that is. 

She is very bisexual, and very open about it all. Let's take that part as a given. She's also very lovely and adventurous. She tells me that he's been trying to tell her that he's bi and femme at heart. He won't come out and say it, though. He hints and talks about things in the abstract and dances around actually admitting anything. What he wants, she tells me, is to have her ask the direct questions and ask for stories. He wants her to do the work. Her instinct, she says, is to tease and withdraw, to entice-- or force --him into saying the things he's trying to say, to make him admit to whatever past and preferences he has. 

I know her better than I know him, and I'm not about to just ask him what he's doing. I'm not about to ask him about his past. That's not something that I can do as a cishet male. She tells me that she's not sure he's even bi at all. She wonders if he's creating a bi persona and past  just to entice her into bed.  Which makes her consider the option of seeing how far she could push him into being a femme bottom. She'd quite like that, I think.

 She wants to encourage him to tell her stories, true or not, because they'd feed her fantasies just as much as they feed his. Last week she raised a gin & tonic at the bar and told me she'd like to take him to bed, but that it's much more fun just to see what she can get him to say or do. He might well like to go to bed with her as a femme bottom or dressed up as a girl. She'd be up for either. Or for sleeping with him as a cishet male. She's confused about what he wants. As much as she'd like listening to whatever fantasies he's creating-- or memories he wants to recount --she's unsure what role to play: confidante, domme, garçonne,  girl-boy to his boy-girl. She's unsure whether she's dealing with someone coming out or someone who's developed a really intricate seduction plot or a complex kink? Whether or not autogynephilia exists for political purposes, she has no problem with the idea of it as a kink in men with whom she has Encounters. 

The issue here is how she should handle this. She'd be okay with whatever persona he's creating or revealing. The only question is how to coax him into taking the last step, into actually saying what he wants and who he wants to be when the two of them do finally hook up.

Three Two Nine: Status Check

 I've been watching the endless, grinding campaigns and punitive strikes in the Gender Wars-- TRA forces arrayed against the Gender Critical armies. Part of it I find almost hilarious. It is like watching 1930s intra-leftist battles ("Stalinist! Revisionist! Neo-Trotskyite!"). Endless fighting over tiny matters of nomenclature, endless attention to purity of thought, heretic hunting, a breathless and near-hysterical sense of drama. I've tried to stay away from the whole issue here. But I have noted something in the polemics that I decided to look at.

One of the accusations that some old-school Second Wave feminists throw at Gen Z gender-fluid and pansexual types is that they're only doing it for the attention. There's the ongoing idea that young people (usually described as having "blue hair") are only proclaiming themselves "queer", "gender-fluid", or "pansexual" as a way of garnering hipness points. Announcing oneself as "gender-fluid" is depicted as a way of showing that you're not...boring. In a social media world, the argument goes, there's nothing worse than being boring. Being "gender-fluid" or "pansexual" is far less boring and ordinary than saying that you're bisexual. 

I've seen some comments out there over the aether about that. Someone in a blog whose name I've since forgotten commented that one reason people (the Youth!) insist on being "queer" is that somehow we've all come to take it for granted that straight sex, cishet sex, is by definition boring and unsatisfactory. Endless blog comments and Twitter posts are  already out there with that as a given. Who, the premise runs, would choose dull, vanilla cishet sex if they had any intelligence or aesthetic sense at all?

I do remember a moment a couple of years ago when I was looking at TRA/GC polemics and felt a twinge of annoyance with trans-activists and the use of "trans". I thought about how trans is used as a prefix: transcontinental, transatlantic, transmontane. The prefix could be read as having a kind of arrogance to it. Trans is about crossing over, about going farther on-- over the mountains, over the sea. Transcending. Transubstantiating. Wasn't there something arrogant in using the prefix? We've gone beyond, gone farther, we're the future, you're left behind...  

So I did see a comment-- left, I think, by a GC or GC-adjacent type --that noted that the blue-haired Gen Z  brigade might not be so quick to define themselves as "queer" if some kinds of sex weren't defined from the outset as boring. Who, the commenter asked, had simply written off straight sex as necessarily dull, useless, Philistine...vanilla? 

I'm vaguely recalling a long-ago John Barth novel here. I can't recall which novel, though the one scene has stayed with me. A well-known academic and his equally accomplished wife have spent a couple of decades engaging in the most adventurous, arcane, experimental kinds of sex with a host of partners. And they realize that this has all been deeply exhausting and unsatisfying. They realize that what they want is to simply be with one another and have very ordinary straight sex. The realization horrifies them and drives them into near-hysteria. They're convinced that they've failed, that they are secret Philistines who can't appreciate the more intellectually adventurous kinds of sex, that they're boring people at heart. 

I do understand the feeling. I take it for granted these days that as a straight, cishet, white middle-class male of over twenty-five or thirty, any sex I have must be intrinsically flawed-- morally, politically, aesthetically. I take it for granted that as a white cishet male of over thirty, I must be incapable of pleasing a partner. Whatever kinds of sex I might like, asking for them would signal that I'm vanilla, un-hip, socially unaware. Straight sex? Always unlikely to please a cishet woman. Sex with blindfolds and riding whips and candle wax? Obviously vanilla and boring if it's in a cishet context. 

I've always been attentive to class markers, to social status. I'm well aware of all the disjoints in my own life and the cracks in my armour. So I suppose I would notice this. I've lived my life worried about my place in the status world. I won't deny that. I will just say that I find this exhausting and dispiriting. Being boring is the worst fate I can imagine that doesn't involve dying of severe burns or dying alone in a cardboard box under an overpass.  

Asking for sex, participating in sex, discussing sex with a partner or would-be partner... Those are things I find I just can't do right now. I can't risk being dismissed out of hand as vanilla, Philistine, unadventurous, unsatisfactory, inept, and...boring. I am convinced these days that I'm out of the loop, that I'm not capable of doing anything to please a partner...let alone demonstrate that I'm worth her time.

Three Two Eight: Embarrassment

This afternoon I drove past a restaurant where I used to spend almost every Friday and Saturday night at the bar. I spent six years doing that. I always refer to the place as "the steakhouse bar" and yes, they did the best Porterhouse and the best martini in the city. I miss being there.

I haven't been there since September 2017-- almost four years now. As much as I love the food, I haven't used a delivery service to order anything, and I haven't sent anyone from the office staff to pick up any of their signature tamales. There's no way I'll ever go back there. 

The reasons are simple enough. In September 2017 I hooked up with one of the bartendrix girls there. We were outside in the parking lot making out in her car and someone complained to management that we were doing that. I stress that she was not on the clock and that we weren't doing anything too terribly (or at least visibly)  advanced. However...the unknown person did complain and, yes, the girl was in fact married.  So I can't ever go back there. I don't know that I was officially banned, temporarily or permanently, but when I heard that there had been  a complaint made and that the manager (whom I knew) wanted to speak to me, I just never went back. I have no plans ever to go back. I was far too embarrassed for that.

The same is true about the hipster cafe downtown where I met the girl who came back to my flat to swim this June. The two of us had a fun time that afternoon at the bar, ordering cocktails and flirting shamelessly. Some dancing together at our bar stools may have been involved. But we did tell stories to one another about our lives, and I don't know who may have heard those things. I'm foggy on what exactly I told her. I'm foggy on what people who work at the cafe may now know or think they know about me.

So of course I can't go back. I have no idea whether I'm welcome there or whether the bar staff are laughing at me. I have no idea whether anything I may have told the girl will come back to haunt me or was overheard by random other customers. So that's one more place I can't go.

Embarrassment is like some razor-edged coral reef shaping all the travels of my life. I won't go back to any place that I associate with embarrassment or humiliation. 

Now-- embarrassment is always there for me-- embarrassment and fear of embarrassment in public. I wrote someone this morning to say that one way in which courtship rituals in 2021 have become far scarier and more exhausting than they were in, say, 2011,  is the enhanced potential for both embarrassment and public shaming. Ten years ago, I'd have had no problem saying to a Young Companion that, "These are the [insert list of things] I like. Do you like any of them? Would you be interested in any of them?" 

At any point since my undergraduate days, I'd have just said that-- please see list, shall we negotiate? I could never do that now. I'd be far too afraid of being mocked and treated with derision-- or worse, treated as some sort of aggressor. I don't think I could ask for a Young Companion's own list at all. I mean, I'd probably be open to most things, even to wearing plastic reindeer antlers in bed. But I'd never ask. Asking-- offering to negotiate her list --would almost certainly be taken as something Bad on my part. 

I can no longer risk being seen or heard to flirt with anyone. And in the current sexual climate, courtship rituals are dangerous. I can't deal with the risk of being seen to want someone or some particular thing. I certainly can't ask for anything any longer. 

I'm not talking here about rejection. I'm talking about embarrassment and humiliation-- something that has to do with shame, with failing to do the correct thing socially. I won't go back to any place, or speak with any person, that was part of social humiliation for me.

 

Three Two Seven: Scandals

 There's a new scandal on line around the 2017 Kristen Roupenian short story "Cat Person". Another author, Alexis Nowicki, has published a piece at Slate.com saying that Roupenian drew on the details of Nowicki's own affair with an older man as the basis for "Cat Person". So there's an argument on line about authorial voice, integrity, and who has the right to tell someone's story. That argument is exhausting enough. What makes me anxious, though, is how the person-- called "Charles" in the Slate piece --is being portrayed.

When I was an undergraduate, I ran with a circle of people who planned on writing things-- novels and short stories as well as non-fiction. We took it for granted that one day we'd all be published. I expected that I'd have a career where I'd publish four or five academic history volumes. 

And we all took it as a given that we'd make appearances as at least minor characters in friends' stories and novels. I thought that was a fun idea, and I looked forward to being thirty-five or forty and running into friends and raising a glass and grinning over how we'd appeared in print--- hey, look, I'm the detective's sidekick! I'm the ex-husband! I'm the girl he meets in the airport bar! 

But here in the age of the gender wars, no one gets to feel any delight at being in a story. When Ms. Roupenian used Nowicki's real-life relationship for "Cat Person" she made the affair much darker and unpleasant. The older male in "Cat Person" became the villain of the story. Ms. Nowicki wrote in Slate that the real relationship was nothing at all like what Roupenian depicted. Here in the age of the gender wars, though, no older male can be portrayed in fiction as anything other than creepy and incompetent in bed.

The new "Cat Person" scandal has left me anxious and self-loathing. Any depictions of ex-lovers, and especially older ex-lovers, have to be scathing and savage. The older lover-- Charles --in the real life affair isn't able to defend himself. The Nowicki essay concludes with the discovery that Charles died in 2020. On first reading I thought he'd died of Covid-19, but the essay's insistence that he died "suddenly" leaves me thinking that he committed suicide. Not over the story-- Nowicki never implies that. But nonetheless, Charles isn't able to defend himself in a world where all fiction is taken as auto-fiction. 

So now I have a new anxiety. I still move in circles where people write and blog, and I keep thinking how easy it would be for some ex-lover, a Young Companion from days past, to turn me into the villain of the story. I've been the Older Admirer in relationships for a long time now, and while there are ex-lovers who stay in contact and seem to have fond memories of what we did when we were together, I know that anyone with a laptop or a smartphone can make me into someone distasteful. 

I style myself as roué, and that of course makes me an easy mark as a villain. It would be all-too-easy to portray me as the bad guy. It would be just as easy to portray me as useless in bed. And it's all-too-easy to sit in my flat and assume that somewhere in the city, a faceless, nameless girl is telling an audience that I'm mediocre (at best) as a lover and creepy and disgusting in person. 

"Cat Person" itself made me wince at how the older lover was presented, and the new scandal leaves me convinced that someone somewhere is re-writing the past I believed in. I always thought that most of my past encounters had ended with fond memories on both sides. I can't risk believing that any more.

Three Two Six: Vintage

Erotica ages badly. 

I think we can agree on that. 

Erotica from past decades has bad fashion, bad music, and body choices that feel...somehow wrong in the present. 

Last night I watched a c.1978 French-Italian film called "Laure", supposedly written as a novel and then adapted for the screen by Emmanuelle Arsan, the nominal author of the "Emmanuelle" novels. The lead actress was called Annie Belle-- a French actress with platinum-dyed hair cropped as short as my own Russian-gangster haircut. She'd have been twenty-two when the film was shot. A rather pretty girl, but my tastes have been shaped by fashion and bodies from later days. My thought was immediately was that she should've been taller and more aerobicized. Waxed, too. Beautiful blue eyes, and I do like girls with garçonne hairstyles, but while she managed to be suitably panty-free during the entire film, she was just a bit off from what popular culture in the last twenty or twenty-five years has favored. 

Odd note-- Annie Belle does remind me of the 2021 porn star Skye Blue. Same platinum-dyed 1922 boy's haircut, same lovely eyes, same large areolae. Though Skye Blue is taller, with good abs and a sense that sex is based on irony and transgression.

I think-- think --that I did once own a copy of the Arsan novel Laure, or at least a German translation of it. Something purchased at an "alternative" bookshop in Vienna, back in the days when porn, Marxism, and New Age books were all thrown together. I bought it only because it was by Emmanuelle Arsan, and the two novels (Emmanuelle-- L' anti-vierge and Emmanuelle-- La leçon d'homme) attributed to her had been the sources for the classic Just Jaeckin films with Sylvia Kristel. So I bought Laure and...puzzled my way through the German before giving the book to some long-forgotten girl in my past. 

Laure and the two Just Jaeckin films still have hot scenes, true. But the horrid, syrupy French soundtrack music kills anything approaching arousal. So of course do the hairstyles and the costumes. All the films are set in a quasi-imaginary Asia (Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong), and while there are some elegant white-linen colonial looks, the women's outfits are so painfully 1970s-- bad platform sandals, lots of patterned Qiana blouses, hiphugger bell-bottom slacks --that you break into laughter even when the actress is busily shedding the Anne Klein knock-offs she's wearing. We won't talk about the male looks and costumes. Let's just say that both things are...tragic. Or tragicomic. 

The films were all shot in the Orient-- not Asia, mind you, but an imaginary Orient filled with languidly decadent expats and willing natives. Pretty much everything that has any trace of political, social, or ethnic/racial issues will set your teeth on edge in the year 2021. 

Underlying the storylines of all three films is the belief in some kind of Free Love. Not the grindingly earnest polyamory of our own day, but a belief that sex is something beautiful people do when they're bored, or when they've just found someone interesting. Jealousy exists just as a plot device to give characters an excuse to have sex with the partners of people who've been having sex with the main characters' husbands or wives. Older, wiser expats give long lectures about how "monogamy is dying" and how sex is an avenue to a higher state of consciousness, or at least to higher aesthetics. It's taken for granted that all lovely teens will acquire older lovers, and that while bisexuality is taken as a given for all expat females from fifteen into old age, male bisexuality is solely between fey young native men, never for any expat who isn't rich and sixty...and who prefers gazelle-like native boys. 

Everyone of course speaks in long, complex sentences filled with justifications for giving up monogamy and for membership in relationships that are as complex as DNA chains. Lots of theory, but...nothing taken from Foucault. There are no earnest and moralizing looks at power dynamics, no sense of self-righteous political analysis. Well, everyone Laure or Emmanuelle meets is rich, at least by 1970s Manila or rural Thai standards-- so politics never has to intrude into the Arsan world. 

I may watch the two Sylvia Kristel films again, though. Not for the plots, of course. Just for a couple of Ms. Kristel's scenes with lovely girls, or in unexpected settings. There is a scene in Emmanuelle 2 where Ms. Kristel reaches orgasm via acupuncture needles that I've found hot for years and years. But it's too hard to avoid laughter when considering the plots.

Erotica is built what we find arousing in the here-and-now, in the present moment. Watching Laure in the Land of Bush A-Plenty (as a friend calls the 1970s) sets off so many aesthetic and fashion warning signs that it's barely possible to see the film as sexy at all. And whenever the characters talk, they pontificate about beliefs we all find ludicrous if not sinister here in the age of Default Friend and other neo-Victorian blogs.

Maybe porn clips are the only way one can approach visual stimuli these days.

 

Three Two Five: Panic Mode

No, I never did go back to the hipster cafe. 

The lovely girl I met there ghosted me. She still has my shirt and my necktie.

Being ghosted happens. It's part of life, I suppose. 

But I still can't go back to the hipster cafe. I'm still afraid of being laughed at, or held in derision, or told that I'm not welcome there. I'm afraid that the wrong people, or too many people, heard the stories the girl and I were telling one another. I'm not going back there.

Now I may have mentioned a policy decision I made long ago. The policy is simple enough. I do not meet the families or friends of girls I'm involved with. That's simple enough. 

I do not ask girls to give up friends or family for me. I'm not interested in controlling their lives like that. I only ask that I be kept apart from their friends and family. I ask that I not be placed in proximity to people who'll be horrified by me. Any time a girl's friends see me, I know what they're thinking. They're listing all the things wrong with me-- age, looks, finances, social status, career, lack of any skills. I know full well that a girlfriend's friends will mock me and treat me with derision and pressure the girl to drop me immediately. It's  a lot easier to just avoid them. I'm not bad one-on-one. I'm polite, courteous, reasonably good at conversation, a good listener, and I have reasonably good stories to tell. One-on-one, I'm not a bad companion. But nothing that I am, nothing that I do or can do will survive hostile scrutiny by a girl's friends or family.

It's better to just stay away. That's the only way I can retain any sense of value in a young companion's eyes.

Once upon a time, some years ago, I was at a girl's flat for dinner and drinks. We'd ordered food to be delivered, and I was expecting an evening of Szechuan food, wine, and flirtation. And then her phone rang-- four of her friends were on their way over with bottles of wine. They wanted, my young companion said, to finally meet me. I went into panic mode. 

Just before the friends arrived, I dashed off to the bedroom and-- quite literally --climbed out a window and went down the outside stairs to the street. Four floors, I think. I ran out into the night and hid. Again, I mean hid literally. I kept my phone off for days, avoided my usual haunts, and kept lights off at my apartment so that no one would think I was home. 

The girl herself had been lovely and kind and charming. She was someone I did like. But I panicked. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want her friends to see me. I didn't want to see the girl's face when she realized that her friends could all see that I had no value. I didn't want to face derision and angry contempt from the friends-- why was someone like me taking up the girl's time? How dare someone like me be sleeping with their friend?

That's how things work. I very literally ran down four flights of stairs to avoid meeting a lover's friends...to avoid meeting people I knew would instantly despise me. I do recall the sheer panic of it all, the feeling that my life was disintegrating around me, the way I knew all the way down to the street that I was never coming back there. I knew that I had to leave, though. No one's friends or family will ever have any use for me or think that I have any value.

No friends, no family. That's a policy, however self-destructive, that I'm very, very serious about. 

Three Two Four: Fears

 Sometimes I do take counsel of my fears.  

Right now there's one more place downtown where I'm afraid to go.

One recent Saturday, on a bright summery afternoon I went to the hipster cafe downtown for a drink, and I met a lovely co-ed, a girl of twenty-two who'd just graduated university here, We chatted, flirted a bit, ordered cocktails. Towards dusk she walked home with me-- yes, holding my hand --and went swimming with me. We swam, kissed, went back upstairs to my flat. The next morning I drove her back to her car.  All well and good.  She had lovely legs, amazing blue eyes, and a mass of chestnut hair. 

I gave her my number, and while she was attentive and flirty and talked about borrowing books, I haven't heard from her in two weeks. So she ghosted me. Well, it happens. I'm supposing that I was an experiment, something out of the ordinary, something outrageous, that she was doing in that strange liminal space between graduation and going into the corporate world. Okay, it does leave me a bit melancholy. She was very bright and fun and adventurous, and I was hoping for a small summertime affair.  Well...alas.

But now I am afraid to go back to the hipster cafe. I'm not sure which word to use-- afraid or ashamed. The girl and I flirted shamelessly at the bar, and we told each other stories. Going back with her on my arm would be one thing, but going back alone is another. The flirtation, the semi-dancing up against one another--- it's not so much that.  But it is the stories. The girl-- Avery was her name --was very open about her tastes and fluid gender preferences and her adventures. But she's a beautiful girl. She can get away with those stories.

I of course am male and of a Certain Age. I'm of a different generation, and I am embarrassed and anxious about the stories I told her. Who heard them? What effect might they have had on how the bar staff regard me?  Did the bar staff believe the stories? Is it worse if they thought I was making some of it up? If they thought all of it was true, would they look down on me? What exactly am I afraid of-- reputation? Being told I'm not welcome at the bar? Did random customers complain about the stories Avery and I told? 

There are things I've done in my life that do make for good stories, but I've suddenly become anxious about my reputation and how I'm regarded downtown. I want to be the flaneur, the quiet figure who sits and has a drink or two and occasionally has a conversation. The stories I'd tell a lovely girl as part of a seduction or a flirtation-- those seem increasingly likely to marginalize me. 

I  spent a lot of weekend mornings at the hipster cafe. Very good fresh croissants, very good flat whites, very skilled bar staff. But I can't go back now. I'm afraid of what the staff might think of me. And, no, this is not about any age difference. Avery asked my age early on and thought the number was irrelevant, or at least amusing. It's not about that at all.

I will miss the hipster cafe. Just as I miss the oyster bar on the plaza. But right now I can't face what the staff might think of me.