The morning after the Chemistry party, I’m struck by how much of what I love about sex clubs and sex parties is how active they make my mind, how much they make me think, how many different thoughts I find myself having about myself and others. Serena‘s enthusiasm and excitement at the party was different from mine. I think she felt like she had discovered something that really spoke to her personally, whereas for me, it’s much more of an anthropological pleasure that I take.
I know some people in that setting find themselves turned on by what’s going on around them, by the burlesque show, by the hot people, by the public sex. I wish that were true of me. It’s not though. My arousal is, if anything, a little harder to access in a public setting like that, even as I am excited by all the hotness. And goddamn, was there a lot of hotness. I love being in the presence of all that hotness. But, and maybe this is partly a function of my age, and more than that, a function just of my wiring – although I’m perfectly confident in my attractiveness, there’s a part of me that simply doesn’t feel like I belong in a giant crowd of self-consciously hot people. And that sense of not belonging imposes a bit of a tax on me, costs me something. It puts me at something of a psychic distance from the happenings. And maybe my anthropological engagement is somehow, in part, a defense against the discomfort that I feel at that sense of exclusion.
Regardless, there was lots to think about. There is lots to think about. About Chemistry. About chemistry with a lower-case “c.” About sex parties. About sex clubs. About Serena. About me. About us. About the entire rest of my life. About other sexual experiences I’ve had. About what turns me on in that situation. About how hard it is for me to achieve and maintain an erection in the presence of so many others. About how envious I feel of those men who can simply produce turgidity and perform….
I’ve never been that man. I long to be. For a long time, I think I felt quite consciously like I was less of a man for this reason. Nowadays, to the extent that I believe that, it’s mostly an unconscious thought. I know it’s still in me somewhere. I know I still have anxiety about the ways in which my heterosexuality is non-normative. The notion of being a “side” is increasingly accepted in the world of gay men, but in the world of straight men, it’s simply unheard of. And while I’m not a big fan of labels, as I often think they tend to stop thinking rather than advance it, in this particular instance, there’s something really gratifying about seeing so much of my sexuality condensed into a single concept and symbolized in a single word.
And. Serena’s enthusiasm was so extreme. She was just over the moon. Just clearly over-the-top happy, giddy, excited, pleased, thrilled. I don’t know, we didn’t discuss, whether the surroundings themselves turned her on, distracted her, or some combination. I do know that while I was going down on her, every time someone entered the room, she would start giggling and lose whatever sensual experience she was having. I’m somewhat similar: the arrival of others, the proximity of others, it’s just not hot to me at all. It would be interesting, I suppose, if those in proximity to me were people I knew, people I cared about. It’s been years since T and I dated as a couple, since we found ourselves in that particular situation. But those days when we did, my recollection is that I found the presence of another man challenging, the presence of another couple distracting.
Another area of thought (this is about me, of course; so many of my areas of thought are) concerns the interaction we had with a man I will refer to as Jack. I mentioned him in the previous post, a 40-something guy, a member of the club who usually attends with his partner, but on this occasion she was traveling and he was solo. He struck up a conversation with us, began by saying, “You two are definitely the most interesting couple in the place.” He wondered about what had brought us together and we confabulated a little. I handed the ball to Serena: “Why don’t you tell him?” I said. I had handled the question once previously, earlier in the evening, and hadn’t particularly liked my handling of it.
I liked Serena’s handling better, what with how it fed my narcissism so comprehensively. “He writes a big sex blog,” she said. That led to a bit more of a conversation. And as I alluded to in my previous post, in that conversation, Jack said some things that, though well-intended, rubbed Serena the wrong way. And had I been less in my head, or maybe more precisely, had my head not quite been so far up my ass, they might have bothered me too. In retrospect, I suppose it boils down to the fact that Serena was put off by his objectifying appreciation of her, and I was gratified by his envy of me.
I’ve reflected on and written before about my strange relationship to the envy – and in particular, the sexual envy – of other men. Several times, on dates with wonderful, fulfilling, gratifying women, a huge part of the thrill I’ve taken has been a sort of schadenfreude in the envy of men who saw, who understood, and who envied, what was going on. Whether this was the guys at the bar with Veronique, with whom I staged an elaborate and somewhat, in retrospective, aggressive display; or the couple that Veronique met in a different swanky cocktail bar; whether it was with Charlotte, and various encounters we had in public with bartenders and couples; or just on my own, in the interactions I have with men in bars from time to time when I discuss my blog, my life.
The N. who writes the blog, whom I portray, has all the confidence and all the vulnerability that you know. But somehow, my compartmentalized “N” existence allows a certain… excising?… of some vestigial sense of shame that N’s alter ego still carries. And that shame is in some ways related to other men, and perhaps to what I was describing earlier, to my anxieties about the completeness of my masculinity. Maybe I carry around this anxiety about my masculinity, and achieving the envy of men, and in particular, the sexual envy of men, servers as a (surprisingly soothing) balm.
So there I was, basking in Jack’s admiration, somehow oblivious to, in retrospect, not just his dehumanizing objectification of Serena, his erasure of her as a subjective person, but also, now that I replay our conversation, his engagement with my marriage. He asked repeatedly something along the lines of, “Why do you stay married? Oh, if you get this (gesturing toward/pointing at/objectifying/dehumanizing Serena), I guess I can understand how you stay married!”
On one hand, he’s not wrong that our openness, our monogamishness, is fundamental to our relationship, and that in its absence, I suppose it may well be true that T and I might have decided to separate. But the repeated denigration of my marriage, and implicitly in her absence of my wife – and the dehumanization and eradication of Serena – didn’t really register at the time, but now it, they both, rankle/s.
He seemed to have a vision of my marriage in which I’m long-suffering and miserable, and this is my only escape. He seemed to imagine my marriage, at best, a sort of dead zone, and at worst, something of a hellscape. I had said nothing to give him this impression. But his attachment to it rankles.
Again, what’s most interesting about all of this is that as I basked in his envy, I noticed none of this.
That seems kind of fascinating to me.