FOMO

So am still not one hundred percent, but the body is gradually simmering back to some normalcy. Still, feeling riddled and unsexy, haven't sought any hookups for fear of sexually transmitting this virus (the flu I mean). On top of that, feeling like I'm missing out on a party raging just through the translucent wall of my device, attended by all those lovely trim and vaingloriously healthy icons on grindr extra (I've upgraded). 

Life almost doesn't feel worth the living without optimum health, without all my precious faculties intact enough to actively take pleasure, not just in sex but in anything. It's ironic because nothing would benefit my depleted life forces more than a good fuck. Sex to me is a consummate reminder of life's value, and it's been an interesting period of deprivation (a mere week) in which I've remembered some of the mental/spiritual occupations of a younger, fanatically literary and pre-sexual self.  Like transcendental meditation, and a conscious reconstitution of sexual energy up through the spine and out through my various etheric-energy centres. 

That's one way to practice safe sex. 

Sick

So I'm really sick, and on some level I can't help thinking it's my body's reactionary curtailing of excessive gratification, a bodily penance for too much pleasure. Which is misguided and superstitious and a guilty distortion of what's merely seasonal. Urrbody has the bug. 

It's funny though, you combat sex negativity to such an extent but it creeps back disguised as anything but what you'd expect. Funnier still, a general underlying fear of pleasure that secretly rejoices when you suffer and erects the insidious caption of divine punishment. I'm unconsciously fond of sweeping generalisation and easy contextualising, and attributing adversity to 'sin', though rendering humanity a herd of meek penitents, offers the comfort of narrative symmetry. 

I'm aware of these thoughts/feelings/tendencies in myself, and resist them despite their reinforcement. 

On reinforcement, I'd like to mention a trope of the horror genre; the cavorting of nubile bodies in sexual bloom, only to have these same bodies mangled maimed and tortured as if in punishment for their natural prime. This convention excludes most suspense driven horror, is rather a motif of slasher/torture-porn horror. 

What is being communicated by a cinematic coupling of sexuality with death? And not just death, but death as antagonist rather than inevitable physiological process, death as the hunter and the destroyer, especially frenzied by teenaged sexual vitality. 

I'm of a mind that this coupling writes the boundaries of excess for the public imagination, establishing guilt by inducing horror of natural inclinations, using adolescence to subvert the innocent and exploratory into something dangerous and unnatural. This is also a re-conceptualising of original sin, that the stain is ever-present, born with, and innocence non-existent. That man is a born penitent and has to earn favour with the wrathful patriarchal forces, played by the slasher/spectre. 

The Final Destination franchise is a good example of omnipotent deathly forces exacting revenge from hot young bodies. The 'crime' is not overtly sexual, but film being a visual language these are nevertheless sexualised characters whose transgressions are against a natural order of death, suggesting an increased vitality or libido displeases a silent witness, be it god or society. 

A related horror convention is the promiscuous girl meeting grisly ends, time and again, as if being punished for abusing the power of sex. Or perhaps her death signifies the intrinsic excess of sex crossing over to death and consuming her. This, again, articulates a horror of pure gratification and by proxy elevates such institutions as marriage that serve to contain the 'innately unstable' forces of sex. 

The opening scene of Scream is an interesting example of this, where the first teenage victim isn't necessarily a 'slut', but her boyfriend with whom she's presumably sexually active is a factor, captured and killed before her very eyes. They are seemingly punished for having sex at all. Furthermore, it's somehow her fault, the boyfriend merely implicated while she is the slasher's intended. God punishing Eve for her deception in the garden? A pretty fantastic reading of this scene, but there are parallels (like her remains being strung up in a tree, the site of Eve's original misdemeanour with the plucking of the forbidden fruit, which allegorises carnal knowledge anyway).

I'm stuck trying to find a film where the sex featured (duly followed by bloody chaos) is homosexual, concluding the above convention a heteronormative one, labouring to sell conservative values as immunity from a world that only means you harm.  Like marking your front door with lambs blood while the angel of death roams. 

And also, why would a generic convention working to shroud sex in fear sometimes deploy softly pornographic imagery? (as horror's often do).

To induce guilt. By titillating first and appalling second the viewer endures the same fall from pleasure as the sexualised protagonist, and the crime of sex is guiltily transferred onto the viewer-experience. The bare-breasted scream-queen is testament to this. 

Meta-horror Cabin in the Woods acknowledges the patriarchal antagonist in the dark gods slumbering in hell, for whom all the killing and bloodshed are libations, lest they go without and wake up. Here, instead of punishing man directly, a shaky bargain is revealed between man and god, that a bureaucratic initiative will exact penance on god's behalf, enacting god's wrath in simulacrum because his actual wrath is too terrible and indiscriminate. Cabin in the Woods reveals these tropes to be arbitrary scapegoating for the purposes of a bureaucratic elite, working under the delusion of a higher power. 

God doesn't give a fuck about whether or not you like to have sex, be you straight gay or undisclosed. In the world of Cabin in the Woods He hates us all equally. 

A Weekend

Apologies for the the lag but I've been a busy boy. The previous weekend's grindr activity coincided with a mood of abandon. Below you'll find the resulting chronicle, in triptych no less. 

To begin, D.

I'd had a lot to drink. His apartment was some ritzy shit. I have an irrational hate of the rich, and this guy came as close to resentful assumptions I'm wont to make as is humanly possible, thusly receiving a giddy punish-fucking by yours truly. And that's all I have to say on the matter. 

Not twelve hours later there was J. Younger than I normally like, but I think I'm converted. In a word adorable, in more words a sensitive boy from the suburbs who I'd enjoy seeing again. After the sex (which had to be quick, in his friend's city apartment where J had spent the weekend while said-friend was out for an unspecified duration), we got coffee, an activity reserved for not-assholes only. Depending on whether or not alcohol is involved, in which case even if some guy in the morning makes you negatively  question your sexual orientation, sharing morning bean and even brunch is a courtesy I'm fond of. 

Finally, the following evening, there was C.

Now I've only had good experiences with British boys and C was no exception, rather a shining example of everything I've come to love and eventually crave from Europeans. Especially the French, but that's for other posts. 

Long and then some, this was one of those rare sessions you only leave throbbing dully with fatigue. I've always thought the idea of sex as cardio fallaciously tongue in cheek, something posited by tanned athletic braggarts who thankfully, probably compensate for nubby appendages with shameless promotion of their own prowess. 

But I'm not so sure now. I really think I lost weight fucking C. 

I did have trouble finding his room though. He lived in a large villa shared with eight or nine other people, all coupled. In a house of defacto bliss, one promiscuous gay guy with his ground level lair and separate side door. Lol.

I'd been to dinner, was drunk, was on the phone trying to navigate the side of his house in the dark while he gave directions in real time, tripped and fell and felt something take a chunk from my shin, a morsel scraped blessed millimetres from the bone. Being drunk, and wanting sex, I cast it aside in my mind as a graze and nothing more. 

It wasn't until later, when I was actually fucking him, that I noticed the blood. There was quite a lot, on the sheets and the carpet. I went icy thinking I'd 'broken his plumbing' by being too rough. Sitting sweaty and naked in what looked like a crime scene, we both realised it was my knee, which on inspection proved a deeper and grosser chink. Anyway we dressed it and carried on, which is kind of romantic. 

You really do dictate the kind of experiences you're going to have. I think that might be a source of stigma for grindr, that it dispels notions of serendipity, of external forces responding to desire with magical instantaneity. I think we've seen too many romcoms, and there are pressures to have your fulfilment assume an acceptable form, or risk the reclusive pervert's lot.  A kind of, 'everyone wants it but its only okay if it's sought after in a roundabout way' double-speak.

I'm personally getting comfortable in the burgeoning Age of the Active Sex Pest (that's me). Before I could pretend I was merely seeking a 'good time', hanging out in bars waiting for sex opportunities to present themselves behind a thin facade of sociability. Now even that lens has dropped, and the random quickie normalises tenfold by stride of grindr's and tinder's combined popularity.  Why shouldn't I take what I want directly, no frills?

This world fucking rules. 

Miracles and Modern Romance

'Successful' use of grindr is directly proportioned to how I'm feeling about myself, I can't seek substantiation from grindr, rather I have to be feeling affirmed enough to use it. The impossibility of actualisation through the gaze of another is something I've self-programmed, taking lonely power from the idea of forever wandering, never partnering off and making a home, and eventually dying alone without a significant other to mar the final revelation between me and god. Lovely. 

 

And so, I'm returning to the uninhibited world of grindr with acceptance of its flaws, I'll even embrace them. I'm too young to question the moral integrity of promiscuity, which underneath my libertine pretensions is exactly what I'm doing, projecting disjointed guilt through a critique of the forum which would justify my hookups outside of grindr as sacred and make every related hookup profane. I'm scapegoating grindr for my own unease in assuming gay stereotypes and postured liberality. 

Grindr, far from being a neutral lens is neither riddled with agenda, merely geared to seedier encounters as a rule (with exception) because it was authored from such desires, a desire it's participants share. I've discovered a lag on some 'dates', and the recurring variable is mismatched expectation. Guys expecting more than casual sex with willing strangers had better find another platform, because they're not going to have a good time. 

I repeat, exceptions exist, true connection is spontaneous, flaring when and where it will regardless of genre or propriety. But I deduce from grindr's overwhelming 'fuck me' vibe that such occurrences are infrequent and wholly improbable, akin to grindr-miracles. 

Middlemen

It couldn't be more apparent, looking back on my last two posts, that I've struck some thorny grindr-related cognitive dissonance. 

I've been thinking, as you do, this might involve a resistance to social media generally, a personal refusal on some level to properly grasp the Internet as a legitimate extension of my social reality. Is that so unheard of? I grew up in a period of transition, and I think it's only newer generations whose earliest memories won't be discernible from full immersion. 

I'm wary of lumping time periods/shared experience into cultural sensibilities that speak for an imagined majority, and too often these consolidations have technology as their pivot. Which is fair, technology is a huge player. Only extrapolations seem to come quicker now, public amnesias concerning the definitively experimental nature of new-media (such as facebook, grindr, etc) precipitating hysteria that's starkly positive or negative, and hopelessly premature. 

It's either futurist-hippy hysteria (be you an advocate of utopia/dystopia), or a wilful docility incapable of discriminating each shift as more than given. 

Presently, I feel more despairing than hopeful, but I'm loathe to shuck an open and discursive presence of mind. So here goes a purging list of personal complaint against grindr, to be followed by a sketch of a remedial method to extract from grindr more positive experiences, ones closer aligned with expectation (realistically. I'm not Bridget fucking Jones).

For starters, as big a fan of sex with strangers as I am, there's no comfortable precursor to the deed beyond perfunctory (not obligatory) chat, during which you don't even get to slyly grade the person, except from a static profile image which can be tweaked, clipped, rendered GQ-slick at all odds with reality (if one were brazen enough). 

In fewer words, I miss the middleman. 

The best example is meeting someone in a bar (is serendipity an alcoholic? Where the fuck else are you meant to meet someone?). Of course you wanna score, but the grounds of every conversation you have aren't coloured as heavily by sexpectation as they are on grindr (unless you're that guy). 

I know that's the app's convenience, evasion of general interest for the common goal of hooking up. But a 'general interest' conversation is not a frivolous expenditure of time/energy to me even if I'm primarily focused on fucking the hypothetical person I'm having this hypothetical conversation with.

It sounds finicky, even hypocritical, but that middleman, though a narrow aperture of contextualisation, affords me a real-time moment to ground a new face in the narrative arc of my life (albeit a fleeting cameo). I need it.

Furthermore, I think it's the absence of the above that's giving me cognitive whiplash. I don't know how to integrate grindr's massive convenience, and am even wondering if I should. It might not be for me, it's detrimental to my approach. 

 

What method exists to reconstitute this middleman in terms of grindr etiquette? I don't know. Watch this space.

Soma

So.

Haven't been on any more 'dates' since the last, been tired/busy and just plainly exuding a frowny sexlessness. 

I lie. I've been on one but because of there being no sex I'd pulled it from the register. It was a date in the classic sense, time spent drily observing one another and gauging what sex with this person might be like, what life with this person might be like, would they burden or enrich? Pleasant or tiresome company? Easy or neurotic? 

We watched Adventuretime in his apartment with his cat whose name I can't remember. Which is weird considering I hold cats in higher esteem than I do children (on the lowest rungs sit middle-aged white men with chips on their shoulders, and dogs). It was okay. He had no snacks for us, which wasn't okay but he was kind of adorable with his proud Superman paraphernalia and barely intelligible accent, a glorious muddle of Scottish and Spanish. He was incredibly forthcoming with the backstory, like exactly where and how he'd been raised, parents occupations, why he broke up with his boyfriend of four years a mere five months ago (the boyfriend left him for a younger model, as it goes). His cat made stool a lot. 

I don't know. It would've been nice to fuck him but neither of us initiated. 

There was a moment where I could've sworn he was going to, or where maybe he was expecting me to, and where I almost did but from being overtired as was he neither of us made our cues. Tragic. 

Also, spending that kind of non-sexual time with a perfect stranger seems contrary to my reasons for joining grindr at all. Am I letting myself be hijacked? 

I'm dead-set against the idealisation of 'partnering off', this idea that sex outside of an exclusive monogamous relationship is to be taken less seriously, mere rehearsals for the latter state. Any sexual encounter for me is an end in itself, primary incentives being ones of pleasure and connection, ideally fostering one another. 

In another post I mentioned the interstices of sex, consumerism and addiction, and at the time of writing this I'm even warier of the role drugs and alcohol play, perhaps especially in the (under)world of gay sex. They're not neutral supplements but are intrinsic to a manoeuvre of commodification, much like grindr, reducing the variables of sex connection to a quantifiable limit. Not so much in themselves, but as they're utilised by certain cultures of sexual practice.

Ennui in the twenty-first century is sexually transmitted. 

Grinding Down

I think grindr's going to give me an eating disorder. Again. 

Maybe I'm just seasonally affected this week. Either way my use of it's lately been haphazard, frustrating, tic-like, often pointless. I think I'm in danger of 'going native', losing sight of my own premises/incentives and succumbing to a compulsive attachment, whereby hookups are sought as their own reward and not from any preexisting social-sexual drive. Not an effort of actualisation and affirmation, which I'd have previously classed all of my sexual encounters as. Instead becoming something counterproductive, conflicted and desperate. 

It's nauseating me this week. 

So much so I redressed my personal liquor ban and sought the company of fellow gay men in a bar where more general interests underlaid the conversation, not to mention the nuances of bodily presence (yet to be emulated by an app).

It's really brought out the misanthropist in me over the last few days. I've regressed to the homicidal fantasy of my teen years, a minds-eye littered with dead fags (cough, allowed to say that) whose sexual inanity is likewise killing me in agonising bits. And bigotry; 'no uglies, no Indians, no Asians, no chubbs'. I feel disheartened. Am I being naive?

I feel like this app could defer the moment of positive encounter with a community for anyone intimidated by 'designated areas' such as gay bars, offering an effortless solution to personal resistance to those cues and subsequent identities. And needless to say I don't think this is a good thing. Grindr could end up entirely preventing the right kind of someone from constructive engagement with other gay men, experiences a person could benefit from. Especially a younger person maybe still transitioning from one kind of life into another, gradually taking ownership of their sexuality and orientation etcetera. To that kind of person grindr is a set of overweening training wheels. 

Porn

I want to explore the tangentially relevant topic of Internet porn. 

Does grindr offer a space in which the hyperreality of pornographic material and its singularly sexualised players can be played out by its audience? Is it a place where members exchange varied fantasy with the opportunity to conjointly act these out, or is it just the one fetishised mode being actualised?; namely the hook-up, an organic interest-based commitment to rough-n-ready encounters with strangers. 

Is there contact with more specialised kink communities on grindr? Is that something I'm interested in?

And if grindr is solely committed to the hook-up (individual cases of prolonged involvement being exceptions), then in the conceivably liberating role of strangers, how many of us indulge in practices we wouldn't dare in any other context? Furthermore (because this rhetorical tirade isn't long enough), how many of these instances have been directly informed by pornography?

Firstly, I'm a biased fan of pornography. 

Secondly, I've personally utilised grindr (and most hook-ups for that matter) in such a way and continue to do so. From this could we conjecture a causal link between a steady consumption of pornographic material and frequent grindr usage? (speaking only for myself).

Maybe. 

All I know is I go to open grindr with the same erotic anticipation as when I'm surfing for porn, which even without a hookup is sometimes gratification enough. Especially if someone's sent me pics. 

This isn't a diagnostic, I'm not looking to pathologize mine or anyone else's behaviours; merely speculating there's a mimetic relationship between porn-fed fantasy and media such as grindr that facilitate the casual encounter, like one is an extension of the other. 

Beyond this, pornography as a whole seems to proffer a worldview skewed of sense, reductively consisting of always hot and ready sexual encounters. It's like consumerism's impossible arrival point, a call to absolute pleasure-seeking in a confounding world, all efforts to reconcile the subject constructively in affirmative action and engagement eclipsed by a sublatory (disempowering?) need to fuck. 

Here 'fuck' could be substituted for any habit-forming substance or 'thing'. The consumerist environments we move through, both on and offline, are calibrated to make addicts of us. That doesn't make any substance or behaviour inherently bad (though I'm hard pushed to defend heroin), it just means we need to examine our relationship with food, sex etcetera. Nothing short of constant vigilance (this coming from a pretty heavy smoker).

I think I feel that's what I'm doing with this blog, engaging grindr with a prophylactic. Just in case.