SkyRim for Fuck-Buddies

So what is the etiquette for seeing someone out in the real world with whom you haven't hooked up but have exchanged 'pics'. This is a perfect stranger who has seen your cock, who has also expressed an interest in having casual sex with you. You'd expect the exchange in real-time to be breezy, all the groundwork having been laid prior to accidentally meeting, only the inevitable effort of sex remaining. Right?

My experiences this evening just been were contrary. I was at a gay-ish theatre show (a knowingly fagged-up version of The Importance of Being Earnest with an all-male cast, ironically about leading double lives), and was serendipitously confronted with not one but two guys with whom I'd been chatting, both parties I'd swapped pics with. Just so we're clear, the pic-swap is a do or die moment and the minute or so after you've sent your pic-share, before the other person has replied, is a harrowing suspension of self-esteem. The release of serotonin when the reception to your fussily composed selfies  is positive, is incomparable (hello social media addiction).

There was no effortless segue from recognition via eye contact to sex, not like I'd pictured. Instead there was an uncomfortable dissonance experienced between whatever rapport I had with these guys online, and their actual physical presence. It was like neither of us had earned the right to see each other, being in preliminary stages of chat. 

Incidental meetings be damned, it was premature and un-kosher; the latter probably because each felt awkward about so readily forwarding nude pictures of themselves to someone they'd never met, an offering yet to bear fruit. 

Outside a moment of awkwardly prolonged eye contact we all pretended that the other didn't exist. It was like they weren't the guys I'd been chatting too, like I'd only engaged tenuously related and mostly fictional avatars, the guys behind the icons taking very little interest in each other outside the vanities of the game. Like it was some RPG adventure, and they the socially awkward malcontents you'd imagine losing themselves in their own online odyssey. 

Furriphilia

Okay, kind of sick of grindr dudes instigating chat without any intention of hooking up, wanting to trade photos and then jack off rather than meet up. That's fucked. That's grindr becoming an extension of a guy's porn searches, with the added excitation of 'live chat', and what's more a free one. Cheap cunts. 

Also, had a guy start an unsettlingly lewd chat with me. He firstly asked me if I was 'pervy bro?', to which I nervously replied 'yeah, sure. What'd you have in mind?', to which he replied 'what kinda porn are you into?'. I thought maybe he was the kind that can't get off unless there's porn playing in the background, and not having any particular or extraordinary preferences I replied with something to the effect of 'meh, the usual'. He proceeded to inform me of his preferences in an exactly ordered list; young, zoo and incest. Wtf?

He then asked me if I was into these or something similar. That's when I smelt cop. 

I ignored the cringe inducing mention of young and incest and asked if zoo was anything like furries. 

If unfamiliar with furries, think back to the very last scene of Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, only rendered in the gross exaggerations of hentai. If unfamiliar with Sexy Beast, just think Goku from DragonBall Z, naked with a striped pelt and cat ears, fucking a similarly mammalian hominid of either gender. 

It's nothing I'm into, I just know it's a thing. A confounding inexplicable thing. 

He said no, but that 'furries would be hot with you bro'. What the fuck did he mean by that? I know I'm bearded in my profile pic, and there's visible chest hair (a rarity on anyone under fifty advertising on this thing, is it a crime?), but I couldn't help but be slightly sickened by someone re-imagining me as an animal hybrid, which they'd then fuck! 

I quickly blocked the cunt and his obviously phoney profile picture. I say so because anyone as banging as that shouldn't have to resort to fuckin' furries! However grindr did give me his location which was a fair distance from the CBD. Perhaps a closeted labourer in a small town somewhere, resorting to obscurer-taboo stuff to satisfy himself in a roundabout way, whereas the vanilla sex with guys he dreams of would be too earth-shattering? Or is that one of my own fantasies?

I guess I'm definitely prejudiced against any Internet fetish that no longer resembles actual erotic practices between human beings. 

Maybe every fetish is a gross displacement of the erotic, an untimely disruption of the libido's 'natural' currents, which I'll be presumptuous enough to suggest would otherwise always point thirstily to human beings. Is this an unfair judgement on any kind of object-fetish being aberrant? 

Calling something divergent isn't the same as labelling it wrong, merely pointing out it's remove from majority trends. 

Whatever, each to his own I suppose, but I'd personally rather fuck a fit twenty-something than be mummified and catheterised (by a furry). 

Cronenberg Lives

I'm getting anxious about HIV. I think I need an education fast, the reach of my awareness pales in the face of it's calculatedly occluded prevalence in this country. Also, do I have to reiterate for anyone in 2014 that a disease doesn't discriminate on the basis of gender or race etc, that it's certain practices involving prone bodies which elevate risk, and not sexual orientation? Moving on.

So I had a test, and have made the overdue decision to have them regularly, taking responsibility for my chosen lifestyle. It showed negative by the way, in case you were wondering. 

I don't know too much about it, but am tenuously aware of conspiracy theories (available for indulgent perusal, somewhere between Self-Help and New Age and no doubt rubbing spines with David Icke), in which HIV and AIDS are lab products, implements of a long term political agenda. I don't know how credible these arguments are, but definitely feel the stigmas of this virus like an icy counterpoint to my otherwise perpetual horniness. Just fuck off AIDS. 

If it is lab made, it demonstrates the insidious manoeuvres propelling technological advancement, and a supreme indifference to the value of human life inherent to the logic of capital. 

Someone with AIDS loses volitional rights to their body, appropriated by pharmaceutical companies as pure revenue thereafter. They become examples for the limits of pleasure, framed by arbitrary stigmas as 'fallen' from the only legitimate mode of being, heterosexual monogamy. Penance for erring from the path of reproduction. 

David Cronenberg's films do a pretty good job of graphically describing the bodily anxiety of infection. I know I keep referring to film, but as Zizek says the film screen is less a theatre-stage of desires than it is a factory, ranging broadly from wish fulfilment to sheer propaganda and never absent of agenda. I'm personally aware of how heavily influenced my erotic life is by cinema, but with dystopian media saturation such as we're living in the trick is rigorous criticality. Fuck there's even a Cronenberg film about that, VideoDrome.  

His films aren't merely about infection by pathogen, but also infection by power, how certain authorities literally write the human body and what can and can't be done with it. If your standard horror movie is in reality a puritan fear-monger denouncing pleasure for its own sake (discussed at length in an older post), a Cronenberg expounds on that instant before you swallow the pill, peeling back the awesome mystery of human sexuality and citing the gross violation of such impositions.

VideoDrome sees its protagonist warring with the reality he's fed by an insidious frequency (called VideoDrome). It's about the loss of identity through the erotic lure of cinema-as-voyeurism (because the channel VideoDrome shows real-time snuff), the loss of ownership over the body as pleasure responses are replaced with doctored fetishes (cinema as factory of desires and fetish-implants). 

An addiction to pornography is an example of the above.   

Anyway, I feel like AIDS is more visible to me now, and the world is a little scarier, if you'll pardon my ignorance.

Also, I fucked an eighteen year old uni student. Was awesome. 

Glow

Had another hookup finally (those occurring beyond grindr facilitation are of no incident, you don't even wanna know). After work and some bevvies went home with every intention of finding bed and revelling in it's crisp vacancy, when I got itchy and opened the app. Disinterestedly, there was a bowl of rice in the microwave I had my heart set on as a pre-bed snack, holding more lure (it's been a drab winter). And then a profile popped up, and I got a now familiar feeling which I've learnt to let lead, a leaden nugget of sexpectation that drops all woozy and warm, a swell in that inch between cock and gut that's like my fucking barometer for everything. What is it about a face that can be so promising?

And so glad I followed through. 

This dude was incredibly open (there's a pun there, somewhere), discussing his sexual likes, dislikes, fetish and fantasy with a refreshing honesty.  Which I've already established is a benefit of the whole concept, no facade of propriety to uphold when you're meeting for sex exclusively.

Became aware of some arbitrary boundaries I hold for whatever reason, which I'm willing to breech in future. Exciting stuff. Anyway, without going into graphic detail (because law and reason advise me not to), I had a really good time.

Side-note; these hookups, or any overtly sexual activity, serve to punctuate an existing ever-present continuum of the erotic which merely spikes when I 'fuck', that word bracketing all the delicious preamble AND the penetrative act. There was a moment walking back home from this particular hookup, feeling completely sated, where I became aware of my surroundings as grandiose, oceanic, just fucking beautiful. And then when it started raining on me and I was without umbrella or nearby cover, I was grateful. The transcendent reward of meeting the body's demands in earnest, with respect. Feeling at home in the world, every petty concern momentarily dissipating, a being bolstered by fantastic pleasure. Loves it. 

Positive Identity

Not a hookup. Haven't had the time or the energy. Rather, this is about a conversation I had with an inebriated, married gentleman. Said-gentleman claimed to have fucked both men and women, I'm presuming he still does despite being married, and whatever open polyamorous arrangements he's negotiated with his spouse I'm not judging. That's cool.

Only his tone was condescending. He basically asked me why I'd come out at all, insinuating that if I hadn't I could've had it all, just like him. By 'all' I'm guessing he meant the privilege of marriage; for its financial conveniences, companionship, an evasion of the stigma coming out potentially entails, added to the sexual freedom of extra-marital liaisons.

Um, get fucked. I was insulted that he suggested my own coming out process was some frivolous gesture, easily avoidable, that I could've navigated life thus far with the same freedoms but without the hassle. He clearly missed (and is perhaps still missing) the incentive behind the assertion of identity, the alignment such a declaration necessitates across the board, like some existential correction. To posit your own desire as the reference point for the arrangement of your social reality; now that is a Nietzschean, satanic fidelity to Self which I proudly reinforce on a daily basis by identifying as a gay man, because that identity, without perfectly representing me as a person, is the best equipped to get me what I want. Sexually. 

But then sex is one way I reach out of myself and engage reality with indescribable urgency, which I'm sure we can all recognise and agree on. Sexual orientation is an albeit limited attempt to describe these existential manoeuvres that evade definitive empirical framing. Sexuality isn't merely reproductive drive, nor is it purely Oedipal longings and convoluted childhood traumas seeking expression. I'm sure it's a heady mix of both, not forgetting more religious flavoured ecstasies that count as sexual experience. What's that about?Who knows. And who fucking cares so long as you're getting off regularly. 

Sex is important.

But that herds me back to a point I tried making with this guy, that people will assume identities with perceived benefits. The benefit of identifying as a gay man is for someone who enjoys sex with men, as a man, to pursue such encounters openly and at a frequency of his choosing. The benefit of identifying as bisexual is, for someone who enjoys sex with both men and women, the open privilege of the same. 

If you're so pan-fucking-sexual that disclosure is unnecessary, having evolved beyond need of labels, then that's fine. But don't criticise 'coming out' as a gay culture cliche. Especially if you're just going to go and get fucking married, which is a straight culture cliche (even that's changing).

This guy was white, and with his hetero-marriage combined occupies a primary position in society's myopic rank. The stakes would be higher for this guy, and I can understand his reluctance to part with privileged personhood by coming out, even while I judge his cowardice and righteousness. 

Also, his spiel was an active non-affiliation, a negative assertion of identity, a rejection of assumptions attached to the very word gay. He wouldn't think this way if he didn't feel a harrowing proximity or stickiness about that 'world', maybe even a jealous recklessness and secret desire to cast off his white-straight privilege, the maintenance of which I'd imagine cumbersome for someone feeling inadequately represented therein. 

I don't know. Maybe sexual identity and actual sexual practice never meet in the way we'd like. 

For me, I'd rather say 'I'm this' than 'I'm not that'. Negative identification asserts itself by collapsing potential and clinging to the remainder, while positive identification selects its objects directly. There's something pathetic about the former which I cannot abide. Fuck that guy.