From 2010-2020, substantially all of the sexual interactions I had were with my wife or women I met through Tinder, OKCupid, or my blog. I went to strip clubs, occasionally. I paid for handjobs in “happy ending” massage parlors, very occasionally. But my sexual energy found its outlet, for the most part, with partners who wanted to be with me. And this blog reflects that.
There were hiccups along the way. I had a big surgery in 2016. In the year prior to that, and the two years after that, I was kind of a mess, physically. My libido reflected that. When I’ve paid for sex – whether that is in the form of porn, or “massages,” or stretching, or whatever – I’ve not been paying to get myself off, but rather, as I’ve written fairly extensively, to feel alive, to feel aroused. I don’t know about other people, but for me, porn, sex workers, all that – it’s all the way that I access desire, not the way I fulfill it. From 2015, when the circumstances that led to my surgery appeared, to 2018 or 2019, when they, finally, began to abate? I was contending with a visceral, overwhelming, sense of deadness. I didn’t use “commerical sex” all that much in that period, but neither was I dating with anywhere near the ferocity I’d been doing in the years prior to that.
Now. Here I am. It’s 2023. And, as readers of this blog know – and, as the most loyal of them lament – I’m just not producing the kind of adventures that filled the blog from 2011-2016 or so. Was it my surgery that brought it all to a close? I’m not sure. But. Here’s a story.
A few weeks ago, I was in the company of a beautiful woman. A sexy, smart, interesting woman. She was flirting with me. But. Our relationship was (is) one in which I have power. If things go one way, she’ll get a lot of money; if they don’t, she’ll get nothing. And, for a moment, I was confused. I was worse than confused: I was Harvey Weinstein.
I’m not Harvey Weinstein. But. I was. For precisely one moment.
Thank the lord, the moment passed. The woman managed it well, and, while I didn’t manage the moment well, I like to imagine I managed the aftermath well. I apologized. And moved on. It might be that this lovely woman makes some money as a result of our relationship; it might be that she doesn’t. Regardless, whether she does or doesn’t, it won’t have anything to do with whether she indulges my desires, and I think I’ve communicated that clearly.
The main point, here, is that I’m in an interesting space: I’ve organized myself so that, for better or worse, for the last couple of years, most of the women with whom I’ve interacted sexually, or quasi-sexually, have been women I’m paying (stretching). That’s toxic, for me. It confuses me, and it confirms pathogenic beliefs I had gone a long way toward abandoning (“women don’t like/want me, they only like/want whatever I can give them concretely”).
Athena asked me tonight – and another woman asked me recently – a version of the obvious question: why? “Why are you not dating women, but instead, paying women?”
In the 70s and 80s, this would have been called the $64,000 quesion. Nowadays? $64k feels paltry.
The answer, alas, is pathetic: if I pay a woman, I’m in control; if I don’t, I’m not. That, I fear, is 100 percent (or close to that) of the explanation. I can command a woman to appear, and to disappear, when I wish; she will wear what I ask. She will do as I ask. She will provide temporary gratification of my desires, momentary evidence that my desires in fact rule the universe.
Real, non-commercial, relationships? THOSE are MUCH more complicated…..