Am I the Groomer?
Sex After Virtue
I’ve seen a lot of straight male tears about how the current climate makes it impossible to write honestly about male sexuality. I’m rooting for you fellas, I really am — and in the meantime, I’m always happy to give a bro a hand.
I recently slept with someone roughly three-fifths my age. Rest assured, he was well over the age of consent1. And I swear I’m not trying to pull a Humbert Humbert here, but he seduced me.2 I’ve got the receipts:3
Also for the record: he bought the spliff we smoked together: I didn’t exactly ply him with drugs.
Why did I do it?
Count me among the “disciples of eroticism” praised by Becca Rothfeld in her essay “Only Mercy: Sex After Consent” in the collection All Things Are Too Small4, liberally quoting David Halperin on the “miraculous” affirmation of the bathhouse.5
In other words, my motivations probably didn't run very deep6:
In my defence, turning to “10,000 years of tradition, religion, and philosophy” is not that straightforward when for most of those ten millennia I would probably have ended up stoned/set on fire/sentenced to hard labour.7
So perhaps it comes down to this:
I made sure I followed Dan Savage’s campsite rule and I let the twink take the lead in bed. So I feel comfortable in my ethical judgement, even though I neglected to thoroughly consider the optics of the situation.
If this all comes across as a tad defensive, it might be because I feel my personal life was briefly turned into a scene from Anatomy of a Fall. So in the grand tradition of asking strangers on the Internet for sex advice,8 my esteemed readers: am I the arsehole?9
Five years over in fact. You may not be able to tell from my writing, but I am actually that old. (You do the math, darling, if you really have to.) I am slowly transforming into that most hideous of creatures: the ageing queen.
Maybe I can sell the BBC on a remake of Death in Venice wherein the role of Tadzio is played by a 21-year-old non-binary Nigerian.
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a post on the enshittification of Grindr, aka the modern gay version of Huis Clos, but I keep getting distracted by the enshittification of my soul.
I’ve previously written about Rothfled’s engagement with Weil in another one of the essays.
Rothfeld claims that the “gay community affords an especially tantalizing glimpse of mature erotic liberation”, but her notion of gay male sexuality appears to be stuck in the early 70s, unwilling to face up to some of the less salubrious consequences of gay lib: AIDS, chemsex, boyfriend twins…
No tea no shade girl, but putting on lace undies for hubby is not exactly analogous to fucking a bunch of anonymous men.
Talking about skectchy gay sex, two recent queer-themed British TV shows provide a good juxtaposition of good/bad art in terms of truthfulness: Baby Reindeer is a bracingly honest portrayal of abuse, shame and complicity; Lost Boys and Fairies feature gauzy shots of chillouts as part of a perfunctory set-up for a didactic redemption arc, rather than a good- faith exploration of why the scene is attractive in the first place (Shall we do a little key? Shall we have a little line?) beyond serving as a semi-automatic trauma response. For those with a lurid interest in the topic (or looking to exorcise some demons), I can recommend Chems by Johann Zarca for a terrifying romp through the contemporary Parisian demi-monde (it seems we still have to look outre-Manche for some honestly in these matters).
I was also curious to see whether the younger generation are all as irredeemably porn-brained as my previous encounter with a twenty-something had suggested: I wasn't traumatised by the unsolicited chokehold, but it did make we wonder, contra Rothfeld, whether Louise Perry might have a point.
I don’t totally get why society has to either institutionalise the neurodiverse or declare them God Emperor: underneath this fabulous façade, I’m just a centrist dog dad getting my American Beauty-style kicks under the banner of sticking it to heteronormativity.
I also thought that the situation might serve as a good opportunity to engage in the kind of ordinary life philosophy that Murdoch practised (as opposed to ordinary language philosophy, something I won’t even pretend to understand — all I know is that Murdoch was against it), ie an opportunity for a hypothetical person Z to learn through the act of attention to see his hypothetical ageing partner MJ in a more just and forgiving light, as in Murdoch’s famous example of M and D in The Idea of Perfection. Whereas previously Z might have described MJ’s actions as “icky”, “gross” and “problematic”, he might on reflection describe them as “spontaneous”, “adventurous” and “life-affirming”.
Or should we not so quickly have dismantled Chesterton’s fence between the categories “child” and “adult”? Our particularly mawkish attitude towards childhood might date back only to the Victorians, but that hardly means that it is an improvement to be contemptuous of actually existing children while spending a lifetime placating one’s inner child. What is an adult other than someone who takes responsibility for their actions?
1. You are the arsehole
2. Anyone who’s been to Sweatbox knows that you’re pushing a lot of things, but none of them even remotely resemble a boundary
3. Gosh, you’re barely even gay, you’re a wax exhibit of a queer in the Taylor Swift section of Madame Tussaud’s.
Christ I dread 35.
We are no doubt projecting a personal failing as a societal one. We writers are, generally, good little boys, shy and bookish. While some of us might achieve courage enough to kill our bad, bad fathers, it's harder for us, apparently, to admit we want to fuck our mothers.