Three Four Four: Boxes

I have been going through Escort Twitter these days. It's springtime, and the FMTY Girls are going on spring/summer tours. I do envy them: a working vacation in a posh resort or a four-star hotel is still not a bad thing. I suppose I do wonder, though-- is it hard to enjoy yourself when part of your job is enjoying yourself-- being seen to enjoy yourself  --in a swank setting? 

These things are beyond me. I take no pleasure in travel, since I'm likely to be traveling alone these days and of course since I'm a gentleman of very limited means.  I have to wonder if I'm even capable of pleasure when traveling with a lovely young companion. I'd probably spend my time being far too anxious to experience pleasure. If I were with a lovely, long-legged, panty-free young companion, I'd compulsively worry about all the things that could go wrong while traveling. I'd worry about whether she was having anything approaching a good time, about whether I'd reveal myself as a provincial-- a rube --in my choices for a hotel, for dinner, for wine. I'd be far too likely to paralyze myself with those anxieties. 

The FMTY girls post photos of gifts clients and patrons have given them. So many of the photos show the gift boxes as well as the gift. I can recognize some of the brands-- usually expensive lingerie. I understand that Agent Provocateur is an expensive line of slinky lingerie, although lingerie is never a gift I'd choose. I'm not fond of girls in lingerie. I prefer girls panty-free, after all. The stockings-and-garters look hasn't appealed to me since the start of the Nineties. Long, sleek, taut, tanned bare legs attract me more than silk stockings. I'm far more attracted to a girl in just a man's dress shirt than in lingerie, and of course I prefer my young companions to sleep naked. All I can do is look at the boxes and try to gauge what the price might be and what statement each gift-giver is trying to make. 

I'll admit that I do like some of the boxes-- elegant things. 

I have limited resources, so I'm not likely to give Agent Provocateur lingerie or jewelry. Books-- I do give books. And I have been known to buy my young ladies men's shirts or pullover sweaters. My gifts have been hand-delivered in New Yorker tote bags, but never in boxes from exclusive boutiques in NYC or London Town.

One of the FMTY girls did hint at her fee schedule. A gentleman admirer, she noted, was flying her somewhere for a long weekend. The fee, she noted, would pay her rent for two months. Based on rents for the city where she makes her home, that's probably half again my salary for that same period. Far and away out of my league. 

Well, I wouldn't know what to say to a high-end escort anyway. I know nothing about business-- and so many girls at Escort Twitter do say that they love talking about "entrepreneurship". Many are basketball fans, too. I know nothing whatsoever about sports. And I'd be far too scared to attempt anything with a menu or a wine list. 

These days, I'd feel the same about some young companion here. I'd be too anxious to go anywhere outside of a few small, hip places. I'm not even sure I'd risk a good sushi bar. I'd certainly never risk anything with a wine list. Doing anything where I can be seen to fail in public, where I could be seen to fail at being the person I used to believe I was, is far too much of a risk these days.

Three Four Three: Preferences

 I may have mentioned this, but I'll recount the story again.

Once, long ago, I took a test found in (I think) Playboy. The test was something like "What Your Tastes in Women Say About You". I can't recall how old I was, but certainly very early in my teens. I ranked photos of actresses and models, and I chose my favourites out of drawings of body types. At the end, I added up my score and was told that the total meant that I must be gay. 

After all, the women I chose were very much not the body type that was in favor in those days. My choices were clearly all for tall, very slender, very long-legged and small-breasted women. "Buxom" or "curvy" never crossed my mind. No woman that I fancied in adolescence-- or now --would ever evoke something like "va-va-voom!" as a comment. 

I thought even then that the authors of the article were idiots. I stand by that judgment. Even at that age, I was clear about my preferences. For women, yes. And I like to think that society's beauty standards caught up with my own. The age of the "bombshell" was replaced by standards I liked-- tall, leggy, taut-bodied, thin. I'd have always chosen the young Audrey Hepburn over Marilyn Monroe. I'd have always chosen a young Jane Birkin or a young Marisa Berenson over the standard Playmate of those days. Those were my preferences then, and they remain my tastes. Karlie Kloss and Anja Rubik and Aymeline Valade are all examples of what I find to be beautiful. I have no use whatsoever for the Kardashian look.

And yet one of the problems of the current day is that physical preferences are themselves subject to increased and hostile review. Having preferences, let alone talking about them, is becoming a Bad Thing. I do not like the current emphasis on butts. I look at photos of the FMTY Girls at Twitter or of current social media celebrities and just have no use for a look that emphasizes butts. My gaze focuses on long, slender legs and flat, hard stomachs and butts. I do realize that saying that I dislike big butts and fail to grasp why women pay for butt-filler injections puts me on the wrong side of current taste...and leaves me open to accusations of racism and "misogynoir". I do realize that. 

But my tastes remain what they've always been. The Young Companion of my dreams is very tall, very lithe, very leggy. She has never needed to own or wear a bra. (She dislikes underwear, of course). In tailored linen slacks and a very tailored, dangerously unbuttoned silk blouse, she's all legs and erect nipples and has that slouch-down-the-runway look that I've loved since I was a teen and first began charting out beauty and its implications for class and style. 

Well, so many things that I like are becoming unacceptable. That may be inevitable, since I'm a gentleman of a certain advanced age and very much out of step with social rules. And those rules do exist. Make no mistake about that. 

Bodies matter. I take that as a given. Bodies always matter. So do the stories bodies tell. My preferences, whether for lithe and leggy girls or for some s/m games, always suggest stories or films I want to live in. I suppose I do look at girls and see myself as a casting director for the films in my head. I like bodies that suggest certain things about class and settings, and those films are not going away.

It's not just that my particular tastes in female bodies are now seen as obsolete and regressive (or maybe even oppressive). It's that I read these days how having any tastes at all is morally flawed because any preference by definition excludes. And we're not supposed to exclude, these days.

It gets harder to discuss what does attract and excite me, and it gets harder to talk about the why of what I like. I have to say that I do miss the days when matching bodies to stories was something to talk about with lovely young companions.

 

Three Four Two: Pages

Does anyone know if actual porn novels are still published?

Long ago and far away, in my teens and in my undergraduate days, porn novels filled the spinner racks at all-night convenience stores and bus stations. There were other genres there-- mostly action-adventure series --but porn novels seemed to fill three-quarters of the spinner racks. I haven't seen porn novels sold new since sometime in the 1980s, and I've always assumed that videotape killed the porn novel. Reagan's attorney-general deliberately omitted porn novels from his anti-porn efforts because "who reads?" 

There are websites devoted to cover art from 1960s-80s porn novels, and the other evening I found a link to a Russian website that has the scanned texts of something like three or four hundred American porn novels from the 1970s and early 1980s. I suppose I'm glad the books at the site were all from American publishers. British porn is...depressing. British porn is at least as depressing and dreary as British girlie magazines. And I think I'd be afraid of Australian porn novels. There are limits. Yes there are.

Steven Marcus used the word "pornotopia" in his "The Other Victorians", and it does apply to 1970s-80s porn novels. In porn novels, everything turns on sex. Wealth or poverty exist only to provide excuses for sex scenes. All schools exist only as spaces for students and teachers to engage in breathless sex. All travel is from one site for exotic (or at least outdoor) sex to another. Everyone is either handsome/beautiful or, if gnarled and gnomish, at least shockingly well-hung. Any social interaction at all is an occasion for sex. And all sex-- hetero, gay, lesbian, bi, interspecies, incest --invariably produces multiple orgasms all around. Everyone is always ready for anything, and even if a character seems to be horrified or appalled, she (and it always she) is secretly excited and thrilled by what's happening. In porn novels, nothing exists that isn't an occasion for sex. No object exists that can't be used as a sex toy. No one is ever bored during sex, no one's disgust is ever other than feigned. 

The Russian website had a copy of a c. 1980 novel called "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl" that was...hilarious and awful in equal parts. The writing was (of course) awful, but...not as bad as you'd think. So here we have a teen schoolgirl-- just turning sixteen --on a week-long summer field trip with a Future Farmers group. And...it shouldn't be hard to trace her story arc. In the course of the first couple of nights at a young farmers' convention, she loses her virginity while still on the bus...to her seat mate's well-trained dog. And some random, nameless boy who's been watching the girl and her seat mate with the dog. Young Denise (yes, she has a name) goes from Bronte-reading virgin to sex with boys, other girls, grizzled old bus drivers, dogs, donkeys, and a stallion. And of course with her own older brother. She also swears a public vow before a cheering crowd of other teens never to wear underwear again (I approve of that scene). By the end of the book, she and her brother are deeply in romantic love, and they're sleeping naked in one another's arms in a hayloft after he orchestrates her first time with a stallion.  

I'm not sure how you're supposed to respond to "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl". It's all very light-hearted, and there's no post-Foucault focus on power structures. A random boy who sodomizes the heroine over a bus seat goes from shouting, "Take my jizz  you lezzie dog-slut!" to whispering in her ear that "your skin is like honeyed Asian silk". All I can imagine is the standard porn-writer trope of the Ivy League English Lit graduate paying his rent by writing porn. 

Porn novels in those days assumed that incest was commonplace, and that all suburban siblings were in and out of one another's beds. And of course there's an obvious meta-incest happening, too, since the authors of the novels manage to repeat one another's work and share character names. There's probably a bit of revenge going on as well-- Denise in "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl" is always described by her full name: Denise Chapman. I'm taking it for granted that Denise Chapman is the author's ex-girlfriend or ex-wife, or at least the Unobtainable Beauty of his own teen years.

Porn novels were at least honest. I'm thinking of a series called the DB Collection-- DB standing for "Dirty Books". The covers were all flat black with a white number and the title. And the titles were things like "DB 1 - Stuffed With Big Black Dick" or "DB 4 - Fucking Her Tender Teen Asshole". You paid for nasty porn, and you got nasty porn. There was no way you could tell someone that you'd bought a title from the DB Collection by accident. You couldn't say you'd been looking for one of Tolstoy's later novels and picked up a DB title by accident. 

There's a whole body of discussion about how porn and erotica are different. One key thing, I think, is that '70s and '80s porn novels were much more about doing sex than erotica would ever be. Yes, the novels said, you can do that with an Irish Setter or a polished ivory statue of a saint. Porn novels never questioned the idea of going farther, or trying the most unlikely positions or partners. What you can try, you must try. Erotica can be about finding oneself, about discovering that you're submissive or bi or poly. Porn is about the functional possibilities of the world. There's no magic in porn, but there is a lot of...industrial engineering.

I spent a lot of time in my lost youth reading Foucault and his contemporaries, and reading 1970s porn through a critical theory lens is a comic experience. But I suppose that's not the way to read "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl". It's the only way I can read it, mind you, but that's always been the problem with my reading. I assume that the author was at least as devoted to irony as I am, and he's feeding me postmodernist set-ups for jokes. 

I will have to spend more time going through the scanned titles at the Russian website. And I will have to tell you, my friends and readers, about the things I learned from porn novels back in the last age.

Three Four One: Connections

Tomorrow is Valentine's. That's always been a troubled day for me, and tomorrow will be no different.  I'll be alone, of course, and any connections I make will be with lovely friends I've known online.

This is the third calendar year of the Red Death. Whether or not the pandemic is winding down, we've had two full years of putting off social life.

When the Red Death began, I watched PornHub develop a whole "Covid Lockdown" genre for porn clips. The idea was simple enough. Two people-- roommates, step-siblings, neighbors --found themselves trapped into close proximity by the pandemic and ended up having unexpected sex just because of cabin fever, boredom, and availability. Some of the clips were unexpectedly hot-- I will admit that. There were a couple of step-sibling scenes that had actual thoughtful dialogue about why things were happening, and at least one clip that had a face mask and social distancing version of the classic pizza delivery trope. And, yes, a face mask can be quite hot. 

I'd thought that lockdowns and social distancing would lead to a revival of phone sex. I mean-- you'd have a voice on the other end of the line, and the storytelling nature of phone sex would help relieve the tedium of WFH. That doesn't seem to have happened, though. Maybe it's only that even the Red Death wasn't enough to make Gen Z  actually talk to people by phone. Maybe. But even if camgirls were able to make decent money during the pandemic, that's not the same as phone sex.

I do miss phone sex. I miss telling stories in the dark. I miss establishing a connection with a girl and building up layers to our fantasies. I miss the parts of phone sex when you move back and forth between a shared fantasy and just talking to one another late in the night. 

Memory says that back in the early Noughts, you made connections via email and then moved on to the telephone. And phone sex was something that played to my strengths. I always feel better as a disembodied voice-- let's take that as a given. Girls have told me over the years that I'm good at telling stories, and that I'm good at making them feel they can do or be anything. My NZ friend used to say that I'd done a good job at making her feel like she could live in a late-night world she called NSNL-- No Shame, No Limits. Hearing her say that to me all the way from Wellington meant a lot.

I have no clue whether there was an upturn in sexting statistics during the worst of the Red Death. I of course was never good at sexting. I'm a very, very bad typist, and I text with one finger. And text messages aren't a good format for complicated fantasies. 

In those awful years of 2016-2020, right up to the first lockdown orders, phone sex had faded away. I suspect it was also seen as problematic by Social Justice types. Phone sex has never escaped the taint of being an "obscene phone call", and the idea of shared fantasies by telephone seems to strike many of the gender warriors as somehow exploitative. 

But I do miss voices in the night. I miss creating shared fantasy worlds with lovely young companions. When we've all given up masks and social distancing and gone back to whatever  a post-pandemic normal may be, I suspect no one will be doing phone sex. After all-- we're all too exhausted to have the orgiastic post-pandemic Hot Girl Summers or revived Mardi Gras parties that were predicted back in 2020. 

I don't expect any late night calls, and I miss them.

Three Four Zero: Education

 I have been thinking more about the idea of paid companions and FMTY girls. There's something to be said for an essay looking at the difference between a GFE companion and the FMTY girls at Escort Twitter. And that's a difference that goes to something in my own life.

GFE girls exist to...what? Well, they exist to make their clients think they're not with a paid companion. Or at least they exist to make people who see their clients think that the client isn't with a paid companion. Does that sound right? 

The bios of FMTY girls seem to stress that they have the social capital to be in Michelin-star restaurants and elegant settings, that they know how to perform the role of someone used to such settings. What they perform is...class. And that does leave me just a bit melancholy.

I have always thought of myself as having social capital. I know that I suffer from what David Brooks called the "income/status disjoint"-- I have advanced degrees and I'm reasonably well-read...but I have no money and I don't have the accoutrements of the monied classes. As someone who has managed to project the idea of genteel poverty most of his life, I've been able to function on the edges of the social world. I can function well at small hipster cafes and restaurants, but I'd never risk a Michelin-star restaurant or a high-end hotel. I'd certainly never risk going to a resort. And I'd never, never risk a conversation with a beautiful woman who knew anything about business, finance, or the mechanics of politics.

A friend asked me the other evening what I looked for in relationships. I wasn't sure how to answer. What could I say? Someone lovely, long-legged, a fraction of my age, and averse to underwear? Someone with a Comparative Lit degree who likes obscure books? Someone who'll call me late at night and talk about wonderfully random things while flirting shamelessly?

What I do know is that I'd be really, really at sea across a table from an FMTY girl. From what I can infer, part of the arrangement between an FMTY girl and her client is that they go out to high-end venues. Part of what she gives the client is the chance to show off his social skills and his knowledge. She markets herself as someone who has the beauty and social capital to be shown off, and part of what he gets is the opportunity to feel like he belongs in her company. I'd be awful at that.

I think that what I'd look for in an FMTY girl would be someone to be a kind of life coach for me. I'd be the one who wants to be taught how to fit in. Look-- I know which fork to use, and I can read the French on a menu. What I can't do is feel like I fit in. Walking into a restaurant with a Michelin star would trigger a massive case of Impostor Syndrome, even if I had on my magical class ring from New Haven. Checking into an elegant resort for a long weekend with an FMTY girl would make me instantly feel like I was adrift in an alien world. 

I'd be asking my companion to...make me feel like I fit in. I know how to hold a conversation at an "Asian street food" restaurant in a hip neighborhood near a university. I know how to walk through a serious museum. But being at any of the places the FMTY girls post on the Twitter timelines would leave me anxious, depressed, and empty. Yes, the terms of the arrangement might ensure that I'd be having sex with a very beautiful, sexually skilled companion, but I'd nonetheless feel that I'd botched the part of the evening devoted to seduction and flirtation. And, yes, I'd feel like I'd failed. I'd feel like I hadn't lived up to the skills my companion relied on in her clients-- like I didn't have social capital enough to understand and appreciate what she was offering me. 

A life coach. That's what I do need-- a life coach. Someone who could make me feel less anxious. Someone who could teach me to appreciate what she's offering. I can read the French on a menu, but I won't understand what the dishes are. I have a couple of tailored black blazers, but I don't own a suit. I have no idea how to hold a conversation with someone who talks about things that aren't obscure books and films. I have no idea how to be with someone like an FMTY girl, and I have no idea whatsoever how to have an evening with someone who's at home in the social world. I have no idea how to perform outside of a very well-fortified niche.

I'd make an FMTY girl feel like she was wasting her time, whatever fee she was getting. I wouldn't even know what kind of gift cards to send her. I'd be a disappointment from the moment she met me at the aerodrome or in the hotel lobby.

Three Three Nine: Gates

 Here in the new year, I'm still reading along with Escort Twitter. 

I'm still amazed by many of the FMTY girls, and I'm envious of some of the travel photos they post. I read their Twitter biographies and find myself thinking about what kind of evening I'd have with a "champagne bubble about town" or a girl who describes herself as "your breathtaking dinner date". These days, dinner dates are rare enough for me, even those that aren't highly-skilled and highly-compensated professional companions who'd be at home in Michelin-star restaurants. 

The question remains, of course-- even if I could afford a professional companion's fees, why would someone at their level of skill want anything to do with me? Here in the new year, I am aware of some things. It seems far too clear to me that I'd never make it through a FMTY girl's first round of screening.

Over the last few days, I've been reading Twitter threads about the screening process. I understand the need for screening. Please don't get me wrong about that. An escort, even at the level of FMTY girls, faces risks to her safety. Screening is something necessary. And I have no problem with that. I could pass a basic screening using official records. I am not, as they used to say on "Law & Order", in the system. If my fingerprints are on file anywhere, it's only because I once went through the opening rounds of applying for a State Department job. 

What I'd be afraid of, though, is that somewhere, somehow, there's a long blog post by some now-forgotten ex telling the world what an Awful Person I am. That would be exactly what an FMTY girl would find when she was vetting me. I've no doubt she'd find something like that-- something that would raise a whole Comintern annual congress worth of red flags. And somewhere out there over the aether there would be long-ago blog posts or social media threads I'd made with a train of hostile comments in response. She'd find that, too. Here in the new century, hostile social media comments would be damning. That seems to be the way it works.

We won't talk about financial vetting. I'm unclear about exactly how that would work, but the idea of it terrifies me. A year and a half ago I bought a new vehicle, and the dealership looked at my credit report and was willing to finance a respectable car. But I have no idea what a credit report would turn up now-- that's not the sort of thing I'd ever check out about myself. I might well have saved up cash for a professional companion's fees-- perhaps at least once I could leave that elegant envelope full of $100 bills on the bathroom counter in a stylish hotel, or perhaps I could slide an envelope with a $500 gift card at some high-end lingerie boutique across a table. Maybe. Maybe. But I'd never survive a credit check...or at least I tell myself that. I could never risk letting a potential companion have the information they'd need for a credit check on me. 

I tell myself that I have credentials. I do have post-graduate degrees. I am reasonably well-read. I have some-- some --social capital. I know which fork to use, and I can appreciate gallery hangings and classical music. But my credentials would never be enough. I'd never know what to say.  A high-end professional companion would feel her own talents wasted around me. 

I would not do well with a professional companion-- I'd certainly never survive even a cursory vetting. There's the soul-crushing vision where I contact an FMTY girl and then-- always after a few pleasant initial DM exchanges, or perhaps after a meeting for coffee --I'm screened out. I can't survive a critical analysis. And of course what applies to Escort Twitter applies even more rigorously in civilian life. 

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.