Eighty-Eight: Nightcalls

Halloween is coming in a few days. It'll be a Thursday this year, which is an awkward day for a holiday. Whatever anyone does on Thursday night, there's still Friday (work, classes) to get through.  Thursday night parties lead to Friday hangovers with no chance to sleep late, and a Friday morning post-Halloween Walk o' Shame is awkward indeed. Sitting hungover at a coffee shop in last night's Halloween costume on a Saturday or Sunday morning at least guarantees you'll be in good company. Coming home in last night's costume through crowds of office-bound day-dwellers is just a bit embarrassing.

Still and all, I like Halloween. I like it because it's an autumn holiday, one with lots of memories of childhood autumns. I like it because it opens the holiday season that takes us to year's end. And I like it because it's one of the trio of holidays that are about sex and delights.

Halloween as a holiday for children is one thing--- that's ghost stories and candy corn and candles inside jack o' lanterns. But Halloween for university girls and twentysomethings is about throwing off inhibitions. It's about slutty costumes, and well it should be. Halloween is a chance to give yourself to the night and to physical desire.

New Year's Eve and Valentine's are about sex, too, but in very different ways. Valentine's is about structured romance and the rituals of romance, and it's about romance as social display. New Year's Eve is about a kind of elegant, melancholy abandon. Kissing a beautiful stranger at the tick of midnight on New Year's Eve is about saying goodbye to another vanished year and about hoping the kiss will be a kind of magic for the new year. Halloween is something much more immediate, something much more basic. Halloween is about physical desire. It's about lust, and we need holidays that celebrate lust.

We've forgotten about lust, and about how powerful and exhilarating it can be. Or maybe not forgotten--- maybe we've become afraid of it. Lust and desire aren't about a cost-accounting view of life. They aren't about rational planning, or about understanding the "deeper context"  and "genealogy" of things. Lust and desire are immediate. They're about immediate pleasure and immediate need. We're afraid of that now. We're afraid of the irrational in pleasure, afraid of risking our carefully-constructed social selves for pure adventure and physical delight.

We do need more of that, though. We need a holiday that is about slutty costumes and adventures and losing oneself in the night. We need holidays that proclaim that just for the night, the rules are suspended and that you're free to just seek out pure physical delight.

It will be a bit awkward this year. Friday may be a bit awkward--- hungover, yes, and an odd kind of speed bump before the weekend. But I think that Halloween needs to be valued as one night when you can dress up as someone seeking immediate pleasure, one night where you can shed a daytime identity and take up new masks...or throw away the mask you wear all day.

There are three days in any year where we celebrate the different aspects of sex and romance. Halloween isn't about chocolates and champagne, or about sympathetic magic under the ticking clock. It's about something much about pure id, pure adventure. Value that--- value that and go explore. You can stay home later and watch "Arsenic and Old Lace" or "The Trouble With Harry". Take Halloween night and go explore physical delights and all the things you can be or create.

Eighty-Seven: Compliments

I note that the actor Russell Brand is drawing fire from the usual quarters this weekend for having told an interviewer that he'd written a very political article because an attractive girl had asked him to do it. Needless to say, all I could do was sigh. Doing something because a lovely girl asks you seems to me to be the perfect reason for doing pretty much anything. It's certainly been the reason why I've done a great many things in life, and very, very few things are as persuasive as a beautiful girl.

I do wonder these days, though, about telling a girl she's beautiful. There seems to be a view out there in the gender warriors' world that says that beauty itself is a deeply suspect category and that telling someone she's beautiful is an aggressive act that erases all her "deeper" or more "fully human" or "important" qualities. Well, I'm not disposed to get into all that right now. At least I'm not disposed to get into the politics of it all. Though I do wonder what the current rules are for offering up compliments to beauty.

Oh, yes, rules. I believe in them. I believe in social rules. Rules and procedures are one of the great inventions of human society. They do make it easier to get through life, to know where you stand and what's expected of you.  They smooth the edges of social interaction and keep you from having to constantly re-invent the wheel.  And they keep you from over-thinking and over-analyzing--- and that's something whose importance you can't ever overstate.

But how do you pay compliments these days? I'm not talking about cat-calling here--- not at all. I'm talking about flirtation, yes, and also about just paying tribute to beauty.

I can remember being something like fifteen and seeing a very attractive girl (certainly older than I was, probably in her early twenties) walking across a parking lot in a very short dress one summer day and agonizing over how much I wanted to just say, "You have beautiful legs!" I was far too shy to do that, and I've regretted that all these years. I did want so desperately to say that. If I had said it, I didn't expect her to instantly offer me sex. I didn't want to say it to demean her or make her feel powerless. I wanted to say that because I was just so...aware...of how she looked.  Being fifteen or so is an age when suddenly the world is full of beauty, of reminders of beauty and sex. I wanted to be able to say something, to acknowledge how amazing it was that the world had girls who looked like her in it.

Did I want her to notice me back? Well, I was younger and shy, and I certainly had no faith in my own looks. I knew that she wasn't going to throw herself at me because I'd complimented her legs. If I'd said it--- if I hadn't been afraid of her being offended or mocking me ---and she'd smiled and nodded as she walked by, I'd have been exhilarated all day. But I didn't expect even that. The point would've been to say it for its own sake.

What did I want her to feel? Complimented, I'd hope. I'm not used to ever receiving physical compliments,  and I don't have experience at accepting compliments. But I would've wanted her to feel good about herself,  to feel good about her presence in the world. I had no idea what her day had been like or what she was thinking about behind her sunglasses. Maybe being told you have great legs on a day when your job is awful or depressing things are happening means nothing at all. Or maybe it does. Maybe it does make a glum kind of day some tiny bit better. Maybe it reinforces feeling good on a good day. Sometimes I think that a compliment from a passing random stranger would be the best kind of compliment--- after all, it's not given out of social obligation or out of any hope of advantage. (Again, not cat-calling--- simply a compliment)

"You have beautiful legs!"  That doesn't imply that you're not smart or thoughtful or skilled at your job. It doesn't say that those long, slender, sleek legs are your only assets. It just says that you do have beautiful legs. It's a small compliment. And of course it can apply to other things--- lovely hair, lovely eyes, even great wardrobe. I would've said it because I was walking across a parking lot and saw something that held my attention. Here was a lovely image on a summer's day--- someone I'd never know, someone whose life was intersecting with mine for twenty seconds as we passed ---and I wanted to say that the image was beautiful.

I was too shy that day at fifteen to say anything. I've certainly told other girls down the years that they had great legs or great eyes. Beauty matters--- I believe that, and I believe that beauty should be complimented. That doesn't mean other things shouldn't be complimented--- professional skills, intellect, knowledge. But there should be a way to say that you find someone attractive, that you find them visually appealing or aesthetically pleasing that isn't taken as somehow reductive or demeaning...or at least hasn't been re-defined as those things.

It's important to salvage the ability to offer up compliments. Courtesy is part of that; politeness always matters. Let's take that part of things as a given. But we do need to salvage the ability to compliment beauty, to salvage the ability to value beauty. Those things are important, and we need to guard those abilities and set out clear procedures. Any ideas on what they should be?

Eighty-Six: Specifications

There's a lovely girl not far outside London with whom I correspond. We've exchanged letters and e-mails for almost three years now, and she's been quite kind and charming and supportive. I've had a birthday call or two from her, and she does send me mp3s of songs she thinks I'd like (yes, very good tastes). When she writes, she calls me "beautiful boy". That always makes me grin. It's a lovely thing to hear, and it's so delightfully absurd. After all, she knows my age quite exactly, and it's been a lifetime--- almost her lifetime, anyway ---since I could be called a boy.  I'm certainly not complaining though. She's made surprise calls where I've picked up and heard her voice with that lovely Received Pronunciation accent saying, "Hullo, beautiful boy..." All I can do is feel amused and very, very pleased.

It's a silly thing, I know. A lovely posh girl a few thousand miles away calling someone of my age "beautiful boy"? Of course it's silly, but it means a lot. I'm not someone who gets compliments that have any connection to beauty, so of course it means a lot.

I read an on-line piece today asserting that males in contemporary America have very little ability to accept physical compliments, or to imagine that they might be physically desired. Men, the article says, are used to being judged on how useful they are, and they have no real idea of how they might be sexy or sexually desirable. They're certainly not used to being given compliments, the author claimed. In his lifetime, he wrote, he'd had a woman compliment his physical appearance twice--- once every twelve years of his adult life. He couldn't imagine a woman wanting to see him naked.

Whatever problems I have with the article, I did have to think about the idea of compliments and desire.  I pay lovely girls compliments; I always have. It's part of flirtation, part of roué-hood, part of the social graces expected of a gentleman born in the region and city where I'm from. I'm all-too-aware of beauty and desire on any city street here in early autumn. Thinking back, though...I have to agree with at least part of the article. It's hard to recall girls complimenting me on anything physical, and it is very hard to imagine ever being desired for anything physical.

Lovers and young companions who've complimented me have always focused on the things I know. Girls who've been attracted to me have been attracted by the things I know. That's the classic exchange, always: youth and beauty exchanged for knowledge and experience. Even when I was young, though, girls who liked me told me that I was smart, not that I was handsome, let alone hot.  A couple may have told me that they liked my eyes, but that's as far as that went. A girl in my undergraduate days told me one night in her dorm bed that I had wonderful hands, but I knew she was talking about being touched and caressed and not about anything to do with physical beauty. Once, not so very long ago, a young companion in a hotel bed in another city looked at me and offered me a particular physical compliment--- something that should've been a line in some "erotic romance" ---and I did kiss her and thank her, though my memory was good enough to know where she'd acquired that phrase: I'd once told my young companion that a girl in some sex blog I'd read had written about her latest lover's...attributes...and she'd used those exact words. Well, I did appreciate the thought. Not a compliment that I could believe, then or ever--- or maybe just not one that I'd be willing to believe. Nonetheless, I did kiss her and thank her. She may have just been offering up a quoted compliment she thought I wanted or needed to hear, but it mattered that she'd made the effort.

I can agree that I know what it's like to feel useful, but I have no idea what it's like to be desired, or at least desired as a body. I know how to be seductive; I have no idea what it's like to be desired. Part of the limitation there may be that I'm straight. I've read enough early Andrew Holleran to know that there may have been swoony physical desire in the gay world of the 1970s, but that's outside my range of experience. Desire itself I know--- the noonday demon, after all ---and I know what it feels like to have my eye light on a lovely, long-legged undergraduate girl at a coffee shop or walking down city streets. I know that breathtaking is a word that can have a very literal meaning. I know about what it's like to reach across a bed and caress and name all the elements of a beautiful girl's body: those long, slender legs, those hipbones, that long bare back, the arch of those cheekbones.  I have no idea what it's like to have a girl look across a bed and find any physical part of me alluring. At this late stage, it's unlikely to happen.  I do wonder, though--- what is it like to feel desired, or to believe that one is worth being desired?

I once told another London friend that if ever I had an on-line dating profile, I'd insist that the profile picture be a solid black square. The text would emphasize things I know, or at least emphasize intellectual interests. I'd have no idea at all how to present anything physical. I'd certainly have no idea how to respond to physical compliments, and I can't imagine receiving any.

Beauty matters. Beauty is worth tribute. I believe those things, and I do sigh over beauty. Yet I can't imagine beauty that isn't female. I certainly can't imagine that I could ever be sighed over, or that I might be taken as desirable for anything I am in the flesh rather than for things I know. I have no idea what it is to be desired as a body. I can write about desire, and I can certainly experience it. I can look at beauty as it whispers by and feel physical desire. Being male, though, or being male and being who and what I am, I can't be desirable or desired as a body. I have my virtues and uses, but I won't meet any criteria for being looked at and desired. My very lovely young friend in the Home Counties calls me her "beautiful boy", and I do smile, though I fear the smile is more about the absurdity of it all than about accepting admiration.

Eighty-Five: Options

Last year, there at her own blog, an acquaintance wrote a piece attacking something Alain de Botton wrote about sex. She was angry at de Botton for taking a Freudian view of sexual tastes and preferences. De Botton had argued that all sexual tastes and habits are a product of the past, that they reflected something longed-for or denied in childhood, or at least reflected memories of childhood. My acquaintance was angry--- not just about the invocation of Freud ---but about the idea that any sexual taste had an origin deep in the past.  It wasn't, she wrote, that one had a fetish or liked some particular thing because one was "weird", but because there was some memory from childhood that led to the strange taste. She saw the idea of sexual tastes having a history or a genealogy as  some kind of way to avoid responsibility. I read that and felt surprised and disappointed by her attitude. "Responsibility" these days means "blame" or "guilt". Using "weird" like that--- in a derogatory sense ---wasn't something I'd ever thought she'd do. After all, she'd always seemed to be in favor of exploration and adventure. There she was, though--- dismissing a broad swathe of sexual tastes as "weird" and something that didn't have a history or a past--- just something that should involve blame and guilt.

I can't say I know what led to her attack, and she didn't specify what tastes she was thinking of in particular. I wish I did know the details, of course. Everything does have a history, after all. Every idea has a genealogy. I was taught long ago to think like that, and to always look for what came before, to go back toward origins. I'd love to have been able to find out just which tastes she had in mind and then link them to her own past and backstories.

I've always been an admirer of Freud and his thought. I like the archaeology in Freudian analysis, the careful scraping down layer by layer, the delving down into the past.  That means far more to me than blaming everything (and, see--- we're already using "blame" here) on neurochemistry or genetics, let alone on an idea of choice that seems to have the ghosts of ideology hovering round somewhere.

How do people come by their sexual tastes? What does it mean to have a preference? Those questions have a history, and I'm always intrigued by tales of discovery. Sometimes, though, I wonder if there are other issues besides history--- if there's not a question of branding that's involved. I agree with Alain de Botton, of course. All our sexual tastes come from the past, from things remembered and things lost or things denied. All those things shape the way we see the world and the way we feel our longings. I do agree with Edmund White about that, about how our desires define us.

I've said it before, of course. My own interest in s/m, or at least in a very specific version of s/m, comes out of my own past. I know that I see s/m as being as much about class as about sex, and what attracts me to it are the class markers--- hidden chateaux, rituals that involve expensive accoutrements and lots of historical references and high-end fashion touches. When I was a boy, growing up in a series of small towns far from the places and times I read about, s/m seemed like an escape into a world of wealth an style and elegance. There was a brand involved, a statement being made.

The branding issue is always there, of course. A particular sexual taste, a particular fetish, is always a brand. You do make a statement about what you are when you state your own desires. I'd thought for  a bit that my friend might be using "weird" in a way that was about branding and aesthetics, but I think that she was taking a moralizing view of the word. I think that she was using "weird" to dismiss people's tastes as morally flawed, as a moral choice. She'd have been on safer ground talking about branding and aesthetics.

Certainly there are some fetishes that seem destined to get you laughed at. The whole Big Baby fetish is likely to be treated as risible anywhere.  Ditto enemas and scat, of course. Ditto cuckold fetish, too. A foot fetish may not be uncommon, but it's usually regarded as, well, silly. Certainly some writers--- e.g., the Bad Girl columnist Cat Marnell ---use that preference as a way to mock men, and especially older men. Cat Marnell has, I think, used that idea in at least two or three of her old Amphetamine Logic columns--- sneering at "old rich guys" who want to "jerk off on the bare feet of bottle service girls" at expensive clubs. FemDom will get anyone male laughed at, though I want to be careful about noting the politics of both enjoying and mocking FemDom.

High-end s/m still has class markers about wealth, power, and things European. It still links to fashion photography, which is about style and elegance...and wealth and power enough to engage in things that are dark and daring but still stylish. If you have a particular sexual taste, you're better off if it's high-end s/m.

Sexual tastes and fetishes and preferences all have a genealogy, and you can read back through them into someone's history. But they're a brand choice as well: about presentation as much as pleasure. It's not so much that the question of "weird" is on the table, but that the issue of presentation and social ranking is. I won't follow my friend into using "weird" as a moral thing, but you are well-advised to think of sexual presentation as a branding issue, as an issue of how you want to use your tastes to reveal your own history.

Eighty-Four: Tango

A friend who writes a fairly well-known sex blog once chided me for liking ritual too much in terms of sex and encounters. I think she finds the whole idea of ritual vaguely dehumanizing, or at least something that's too cold. I've never felt that way. Ritual and formality have always been part of my love life. Mind you, I'm not especially talking about anything s/m there. I'm talking about something else altogether. I've always seen ritual as very much a social lubricant, a social buffer.

When I was in my teens, the whole process of dating was highly formal, highly ritualized. There were social rules that defined the mating dance, and they did make life easier. I've always liked procedures and protocols, and I do appreciate them for what they're designed to do: make things simpler and less awkward. Procedures and protocols are designed to get you from Point A to Points B and C simply, clearly, and without having to constantly re-invent the wheel.

I always think of the idea of the Mass here. There's the Mass, and there are highly formal procedures for how it proceeds. There's a goal for all the ritual, and that's the moment of transubstantiation, the moment when the bread and wine are suffused with the Real Presence. When the Mass begins, there's a defined goal, and everyone knows what it is. The ritual doesn't just stop midway through, and it doesn't suddenly turn into bingo night.

When I was young, dating had its own goal.  You went out with a girl, you did certain things--- a film, dinner, a concert ---and the end of the evening was about making out. Dating was a mating dance. You weren't expecting to find your soul mate; you weren't expecting to fall into a lifelong relationship. Dating was a series of steps that ended with making out. It provided a framework, and provided steps that moved you along through and past awkwardness and insecurity. My memory is that both parties understood what was happening, and that both parties thought that being able to make out--- to just experience excitement and pleasure ---was a goal worth reaching, and that they were there together so at the end of the evening there actually would be making out. My memory of those days is that girls at my high school knew where the best places to go parking were, knew where to go to be able to make out--- and that they weren't shy about giving boys directions.

Procedure and ritual carry you along step by step. Follow the procedure and you don't have to think about things--- you don't have to worry and overthink and obsessively analyze everything. That's very much a way of doing things that needs to be valued.  Know what the goal is, whether that's transubstantiation of the bread and wine or a lovely girl straddling you in a parked car and pulling off her top. Know the goal--- be part of a ritual, a set of procedures that will get you to the goal. These days, we all overthink and over-analyze. And we miss the charm of the steps toward the goal.

Both parties in the dating world were physical creatures back in my own lost youth.  Even if you didn't talk about it, everyone knew about making out and that it was worth doing.  When you asked a girl out in the halls at school, or when the girl accepted, everyone knew that you were attracted to one another, or at least found one another acceptable enough to be seen out with and acceptable enough for physical interaction. Dates themselves were designed to make everything...simple. Everyone understood why he or she was there. You went to some kind of activity, you went somewhere like a pizza place or a cafe afterwards, you made conversation, and then you went parking. No one had to agonize over what has happening or about what the other party was really thinking. There was much less pressure and anxiety than here in the new century. With even a bare minimum of politeness on both sides, the evening would go along well.

I miss dating. I really do. I miss the idea of the mating dance, of knowing that there's a framework for social encounters, that there's an understood goal. I miss a set of accepted steps designed to carry both parties along to the goal. The rituals of dating, like the rituals of politeness at a dinner party, are designed to keep you from having to re-invent the wheel, to keep you from having to constantly think and worry. I can't imagine why we don't see the value in those things.

Eighty-Three: Depth

I'm never sure what to make of places like Good Men Project or Thought Catalog. Both sites have occasional articles that are interesting or amusing, but both have lately begun to hammer away at the idea of physical beauty, and at the idea of physical desire as well. Both sites have featured articles attacking the very idea of physical beauty, and I have no idea what to make of the arguments.

I've seen warnings about physical beauty before in a religious context. That argument is simple enough. To look at earthly beauty, to look at fleshly beauty, is to lose focus on the divine. All flesh is grass, the argument goes. All beauty is transitory. Only the divine and the eternal are worth devotion. I'm not a believer in those arguments, but I do understand them. If you believe in the divine and the eternal (and I don't and never have), then everything earthly pales in comparison.

The arguments at GMP and Thought Catalog, though, take a different attitude. The arguments there are that beauty--- physical beauty ---is oppressive at heart. To value physical beauty, the argument runs, is to dismiss or ignore everything else about a person (a girl, always) and to somehow grant oppressive power to the male observer. There's the assertion that only inner states and qualities are "real", and that a person (again, a girl) should only be valued for inner qualities. One author at GMP a couple of weeks ago actually argued that it was an act of oppression to talk to a girl because she was physically attractive. Until and unless you knew about her "as a person", you shouldn't even consider speaking to her, let alone asking her out.

The last couple of weeks have seen articles at both sites attacking males for looking at women. To look with physical desire is always an act of oppression and barely-concealed violence. One author at Thought Catalog kept striking a horrified pose and asking, "Why do men look at us...like that? Why do they think they can look at us like that?" Now...like that means "with obvious sexual desire".  I won't bother asking about female sexual desire; the article seems to assume that lust is only for males. Still, the answer to the question seems obvious enough: men look because they're experiencing physical desire. The article, let me clarify, isn't about anything the men have said or done. It's not about being touched or being followed. It's only about the like that look.  An approach, an action, cat-calls--- I can understand about being angry over those things. But being angry that desire exists, or that someone is thinking about you sexually?

Writers at GMP--- both male and female ---have written articles telling male readers that they should never look at a passing female figure. One male author, writing a "letter to my son" kind of article, actually specified three seconds as a limit. One female author really did tell male readers to always look down and never to make eye contact lest they convey some kind of sexualized message. All I can do is throw up my hands. When did we become that afraid of desire? When did we decide that sexual desire cancels out or overrides everything else about another person?

When did we decide that physical beauty should be rejected because it's "undeserved"? I never thought I'd see an article--- in Thought Catalog ---where a girl who's described as pretty apologizes to other girls (not to males, interestingly: to other girls) because guys at clubs buy her drinks. But it's there, and so are articles arguing that beauty has to be rejected as an ideal.

When did we become so afraid of desire that even the knowledge that it exists--- not actions, just the knowledge that lust is in the air, that it exists ---is regarded as a kind of assault?

Sex and desire exist beyond and outside of the rational and neatly packaged ideologies. Sex and desire have always been risky enough--- see the last three or four thousand years of literature. We've always known that, but we've never tried to pretend that it desire and lust just shouldn't exist at all. How did we come to that? And in a reasonably secular world, a world where there aren't jealous gods in heaven, how did we decide that beauty was a still a snare and a temptation, something to be rejected lest it blind us to the truly valuable? I know I keep asking that here, but...still: how did we come to this?

Eighty-Two: Holiday

Today, I'm told is something called International Tell A Girl She's Pretty Day, or so I'm reading at various places on the web.  Well, 9. September is a good day for that. Summer is ending, the afternoon light is turning a deep gold, and lovely young girls are still in summer dresses on downtown streets and wearing liminal season wear--- tiny shorts and hoodies ---at parties on the university green.

It is a good day for the holiday, and I like the idea of it. Beauty matters, and beauty deserves some admiration. And it's a thing that should make both parties feel just a bit better. Nod, smile, and tell a pretty girl that she is lovely. Be polite, of course--- always that. But do tell someone that she is pretty. A world without beauty, a world where you don't have the slight breathless moment when you see a pretty girl in late-summer sunlight, isn't worth living in.

Needless to say, the gender warriors are out today to attack the idea of International Tell A Girl She's Pretty Day. Their lives must be unimaginably grey and dull. They dislike the idea of physical beauty, and they dislike the idea of admiring beauty or complimenting it. They dislike the idea that there might be a slight hint of flirtation or sexual tension. They dislike desire altogether. They certainly become angry at the idea of the compliment offered up to a lovely stranger.  And such people get, well, the back o' my hand. We live in very different worlds, and I don't want them in mine.

I've been fortunate enough to have known some very lovely Young Companions, and to have had moments when beauty came into my life. However manufactured the holiday might be, I want to take a moment this evening and offer up a compliment to the lovely girls who've been part of my past and my life. Beautiful eyes, beautiful legs, smiles kind or knowing or faintly ironic. Each of them gets a ghostly kiss tonight and told that they are lovely indeed.

This afternoon I did smile at a lovely girl and tell her she was pretty. She was someone I've seen briefly at a downtown bar where I go--- she tends bar there on weekend afternoons. She turned out of a shopfront just as I passed by on my way to the plaza, and I smiled at her (dark-blonde, dark tan, tiny shorts, half-zipped lightweight hoodie) and told her she was very pretty indeed. She smiled back and thanked me and chatted for a few moments in passing. A small thing, but I'm glad she smiled and I'm glad I got to offer up a compliment to a girl who is deliciously alluring and who has always been nice to me at the bar.

Smile and do that--- make the holiday worth something. Tell a girl that you do see her as pretty, and that she has brightened your day just by being there. It's a small thing, but worthwhile. Beauty matters, and we should never be afraid to say so.