My life, in the last couple of years, has featured more boundaries, more of the time, than it did when I started this blog.
Back then, my time was my own. Not all of it, of course, but vast swaths of it. More recently, I have almost no unprogrammed time. This results in less writing. In two ways.
First, of course, because I simply have less time in which to write. But more powerfully, because more of my stimuli are within my boundaried existence. Far more of my interactions are with people with whom I have relationships that come with boundaries.
It’s not that I don’t fantasize about those people. I do. (Oh, do I.) But it’s one thing to objectify a stranger. It’s entirely different to objectify someone with whom I have an ongoing relationship with edges, parameters, requirements. To whom I owe things. Who owes me things. Including respect. Fairness. Kindness. Objectivity.
With all those things we owe one another, and with sex and sexuality explicitly excluded from what we owe one another – or even are permitted structurally to contemplate, in some instances – it’s a challenge I haven’t yet solved to share my fantasies here.
Fantasies about D. Stunning. Brilliant. Fascinating. Married. Flirty. She and I are engaged in a bit of a dance. I think – I think – we each want to take things in a different direction. Or that we at least both want to play with that possibility. But I don’t know that. And the not knowing, in this context, in this relationship, makes exploration dangerous.
About Ivy. With whom there was a brief and explicit flirtation. But who turned it off suddenly. Dramatically. Forcefully. When she got pregnant. By her husband.
About Leanne. Who all my radar tells me is submissive, longs to submit, in all the ways I crave. But with whom circumstances make it at least trebly impossible to pursue.
These are just three of my current impossible objects of longing. Impossible not just because of the contexts of our relationships, but also because of the moment – because the meaning of objectifying a woman without her explicit consent has been, for better and for worse both (I think) shifted, perhaps irrevocably – I simply don’t dare.
Or at least, I haven’t yet worked out the ways in which I might dare.
Beyond the anodyne way in which I just did.
It sounds to me as if you are afraid of your fantasies. Many people use fiction as a way to explore in writing things that aren’t possible in “real life”. Other people might just come out and say “here’s what happens inside my head” without worrying that it breaks some sort of social code because those people know that pretty much everyone has improper fantasies and that thinking something isn’t the same thing as acting on it. You have an anonymous sex blog. If you make an effort to shroud the real details of these women when you write about them in this place designed to hold your private thoughts, it seems to me that it takes care of the practical issue of violating a person. Maybe I am missing a point but I can’t see anything in this post that explains why you cant write these fantasies. Yes you can’t share these fantasies with the women. Yes you can’t act on them. You CAN turn them into stories, if you wish. You can either change details to remove the factors that make even thinking about these fantasies professionally impossible, or you can use the boundary-breaking nature of those details to write some hot fiction that could never really happen. To me the issue isn’t a lack of possibilities that exist in writing. I think the issue is more related to the way you compartmentalize your urges and a kind of difficulty having sexual thoughts about people with appealing 3d qualities. I’ve long thought that boundary also had to do with your wife’s feelings. More recently I’ve become curious if some of your trouble is related to a deeply held misogyny that conflicts with the values “regular you” believes in causing internal avoidance and meltdown. I think it’s related to the way you see real you and n as so separate which is very confusing to me. Also, there are these ugly sparks that happen in your writing sometimes lately and I wonder if those feelings are actually what you are afraid of coming out. I don’t really know YOU but I’ve read your blog for.a long time and I used to be impressed with the honest way you used this forum to explore your feelings and actions even the uncomfortable ones. That stopped and I often wonder why. So perhaps another option (besides writing fiction or fantasies) is to grapple with those dynamics / and your secret fantasies about these women head on in interrogative prose. I know you’ve gotten into trouble lately with some things you’ve written and that could make you afraid but my take on those instances is that it’s not the fact of but rather the quality of the way you approached what you wrote – writing briefly, shallowly, without reflection. I miss the blogger who was brave, inquisitive, and self reflective even when the subjects were uncomfortable.
I really appreciate all of what you write here. There’s a lot for me to chew on, and I don’t want to do it short shrift by responding within a comment, here. I think there’s a LOT of different things going on, some of which you are on to, and others of which either I think you miss, or get slightly wrong. An example: part of what’s hard for me is that I don’t WANT to write fiction. I never have written fiction. It holds no appeal to me. I appreciate the value it provides others in their writing, but it’s just not what gets me off. What I love(d) about writing was the relationship between what I write and my reality, my fantasies, my memories. The interplay of all those things is very central to me. And, for example, as it relates to writing about people, I always, always fantasize that, one day, everyone I write about, whether a friend, a lover, or a stranger, might one day read what I wrote – and – and this is essential to my fantasy – be flattered, pleased, and possibly turned on, by what I write. Lately, I’ve fucked up by “phoning it in” a bit. It’s happened a few times over the years that I wrote something that landed badly or upset someone. It always was challenging for me when that happened, and recently, it’s happened more….
As for “misogyny,” I think it’s a HUGE topic. I think my anger – toward women generally and toward specific women – is a topic I probably fruitfully could spend years writing about exclusively. And I think it would be good – for me – if I were to try harder to do some of that. So thank you for reminding me of that.
As for “compartmentalization” – that’s an interesting one. I don’t, actually, think I compartmentalize much, if at all. Most people close to me know about “N,” and most people “N” knows come to know about the “other” me. Really, what I do, is compartmentalize this BLOG, which is so confessional, so revelatory, that it’s really fucking important to me it stay private. But that’s different from compartmentalizing. I sometimes use shorthand, referring to “N” as a sort of simplified way of describing “my sex life that extends beyond my home,” but that’s shorthand, not compartmentalization. (I think.)
I’m not touching on all you wrote. I hope to write more in response, because you clearly are a perceptive, astute, student of N. And of his alter ego. 😉
Thanks for so generously sharing your thoughts/reactions.
N.
I find this part interesting: “But it’s one thing to objectify a stranger. It’s entirely different to objectify someone with whom I have an ongoing relationship with edges, parameters, requirements. To whom I owe things. Who owes me things. Including respect. Fairness. Kindness. Objectivity.”
I’d be curious of your views on the owing of respect, fairness, kindness and objectivity to these women vs. the other women you’ve written about extensively on this blog. Do you consider those women “strangers” in a sense, and apply respect, kindness, etc. differently? Is it a consent issue, a timing issue with the #metoo movement, or the fact that the women mentioned in this post, specifically, are in a more boundaried, perhaps professional circle? I think a deeper dive into the differences would certainly be interesting to read.
Also, I would think if you just cloak the specific details about these women, you could write about your fantasy while… well, fantasizing… about that woman. For example, the “fingered” post from awhile back, I assume that was inspired by an object of your fantasy at the time—yet there are no identifying details.
I hope this doesn’t come off judgmental, it’s just genuine curiosity. Like the other poster, I do miss reading the inquisitive, honest posts as well as the hotter, more fantasy-driven ones.
Oh god, MC tapped into something I was feeling but didn’t know how to express.
N, what you write about fiction vs fantasy totally makes sense and I found almost all of your reply to me to be but the bit about not compartmentalizing didn’t sit right with what I know. The bit that MC quoted points to why. I don’t think I could be objectified as one of your girls (as hot as it might be) without knowing that you believed I deserved an ongoing relationship with parameters and that you owed me respect and fairness etc.
For the sake of us uninvolved readers I’m sooo glad if you’re sorting out some of your writing blocks. For the sake of the women you date (and for your own sake, and your own ability to hang onto the women you like) wouldn’t it be great if you could figure out what’s going on with this need to not “owe” basic things to the women you view sexually (or view sexually in an interactive way)? xo
Very short answer while I work on finding the time to write a proper one to all that’s in this thread: I think I wrote sloppily.
I try, always, to respect, to write respectfully, of every person about whom I write. Whether I know them or not.
When I write a paean, I try to write in a way that, I hope, would flatter its subject were she to stumble on it and recognize herself. I don’t feel entitled to mistreat or disrespect her. Or anyone.
What I’m finding confounding right now is the difference between the public sphere and the private one. Rightly or wrongly, I imagine that people in public have no right to be immune from others’ fantasies. Dr Zhana wrote recently about this in a post I’ll link to at some point if I can. And I don’t imagine that those people in my private sphere have a right not to be jerked off to by me any more than do strangers.
But what troubles me is the public act of sharing a fantasy, and, beyond that, the impossibility of its being shared.
As I’ve written above, when I write about a fantasy, a crucial part of the fantasy is my imagining the writing being read by its subject.
A stranger on the subway? I can fantasize that she might be flattered. Or offended, sure. But mostly, I imagine she would be flattered. And if she wouldn’t be? Well that’s really no skin off my nose. I’m comfortable with my presumption that, if she wouldn’t be flattered, if she might be offended, well, I’d still be essentially blameless. At least in my conception of the moral universe.
This is more challenging with someone in my social, professional, or general relational orbit. These people might well not take well to being splayed out before my readers, my fingers deep in their cunts, my cock in their mouths, even if only in my mind (and words).
And that renders writing, confessing, just a little more… complicated. I was going to write “dangerous,” and maybe that’s in there. But I think it’s multifactorial. There’s all sorts of possible consequences that flood me. And that flooding has the effect of preventing my fingers from typing.
So far.
I wrote earlier about this a bit. I owe every human about whom I write respect, fairness, kindness, objectivity. Whether I know you or not, if I write about you, I do so from a position of respect. Period.
My current struggle arises from the existence of obligations prior to my placing my fingers on the keyboard.