Porno Playlands

It's been forever I know. 

Other projects have gotten in the way of blogging, not the sex mind; just the chronicle. 

Recently had a friend point out the critical (yet invisible) referent of 'sex-stocks', when scrolling for a hookup. These massively pivot on ones profile image, a careful selfie being a make and a clumsy one being a break, generally. And the selfie-genre being so established now (Kardashian's 'Selfish' perhaps fully realising the auto-deification of such practices), it isn't surprising many profile pics are 'professional' ones, maybe recycled from various art/modelling portfolios or (more desperately) captured (paid for?) with the express purpose. 

This conversation came about perusing profiles together (out of curiosity, not recruiting for 'group-fun', though I'm into it), when we came across a pic of a guy recently featured in LYC's Gear Up campaign. We knew this because he'd used the image as his profile pic. I won't mention which in case there are patent-clauses being breached, but I will say this; 

Drool.

Admittedly, after finally collating a selection of selfies I'm happy with, my sense of personal security plummeted. I don't have the time, money or metabolism to look like that, but lord knows I want to. But then why should I? If sex is all, do I have to look like some porn-god to satisfy someone I'll know for twenty-four hours or less? I mean, they're not paying. 

Having said that, before reiterating my stale tirade against the commodification of sex, I'd like to pose grindr is a discursive platform where the fantasy narratives and desire objects proliferated by pornography can be explored and potentially refuted. Certainly the Gear Up campaign is abetting the normalisation of a certain silhouette as desirable, and I don't blame that guy for capitalising on it albeit obtusely (shamelessly?).

I only think that playing with eroticised image should be exactly that; play. Especially when it comes to casual sex. When appearance is thusly regimented the game becomes elitist and overly serious, and not fun. 

Everyone should be allowed to ride. 

(Also, when did the know-how to objectify one's self to an acceptable standard become a valuable life skill? And a fucking knee-jerk one at that? I feel like I've been sneak-attack assimilated into some garish double-think, lured fatally by sex. Oh well).

Revenge and the Absent God

Argh. I find myself giving over to the clipped lexicon of grindr. I've never described myself as a 'relaxed, chill guy' before but find it increasingly necessary as a precursor to a certain kind of hookup. Funny how reliably indicative a guys profile ends up being, adhered to the bandied colloquialisms pregnant with specific meaning. Chill, I've discovered, generally foretells a hookup in brief, strictly no staying over and more often than not excluding anal (stink). Funny to think fellatio a kind of greeting, and any kind of ass-play the opposite of 'chill' (apparently), either too arduous (for reasons of personal pain thresholds, hygiene etcetera) or otherwise signifying commitment. Like it needs to be earned.  

I also suspect for the younger guys with the word 'chill' in their profiles, often paired with 'masc' or 'discreet', it describes either lack of sexual experience or the bizarrely held notion they're less 'gay' if they don't do anal. Like ass play is the master signifier of gayness, not attraction to the same sex. 

Hooked up with a guy who'd seen me around first and then found me through grindr. Flattered much. Anyway the interest was mutual, which got me to appreciating grindr as a way of salvaging missed connection. We drove out to the burbs and the conversation took an interesting turn. His parents were religious, and remain members of a cult-seeming church whose media fuelled notoriety has dropped recently, but are otherwise the subject of frenzied polarisations. This church (which I won't name fully for anonymity's sake, even though my florid skirting should make it obvious) has a totalitarian-like infrastructure, where one man (with the mediation of no one) decides on the direction of tithe, targeting different charitable organisations or events or even direct purchases justified with charitable ends, such as computers for (certain, hardly public/secular) schools. 

At this unadulterated (and thus anti-democratic) decision making, their (high profile) leader sends a collective message, and the collective acts accordingly, fulfilling His wishes with few-to-no questions asked. And he takes a cut for Himself. Members of the congregation are figures of revenue, raw materials for the actualisation of one mans vision for a better world. 

So this guy argued the church does good, while I asked can you blame the media for scrutinising their infrastructure which is blatantly authoritarian, and is any lasting good achievable when it's foundation is an aspirant empire? Their legacy of 'good' is theologically contaminated, exacted by a cynical anti-democratic model, not merely democracy's absence but a radical condescension regarding the public's ability to self govern or even discern for themselves a better trajectory for society. 

He also told me they had successful realtors in the congregation who'd basically established districts around their biggest churches, selling exclusively to fellow members. I imagine their own gated subdivision is phase two. 

We fucked at his parents house, in their living room floor so as not to leave any bed with tell-tale signs. Eliding more personal details regarding this boys upbringing, which he generously shared with me, we'd basically enacted a revenge fantasy of his against his mother and father. A conspiracy of two, what John Berger likes to call (referring to the value of erotic desire in and of itself) 'a locus of exemption from the liability of pain', a sexual synthesis of old wounds staged where those wounds themselves were garnered. The family home. 

I hope I helped reconcile this guy to the sins of the father. 

Jaded-Tricks Are For Kids

So I have had to update my store of 'pics' again. I'm pretty satisfied with this new batch, and taking them ended up being the dated equivalent of cyber-sex, in as much as real-time photos followed sexy chat and (allegedly) mutual masturbation. I'm frustrated the other person was so coy about giving over their details and arranging a hookup proper, and yet there's a weird narcissistic satisfaction in someone bringing themselves to climax over your image. After what I'm guessing was his climax, his interest rapidly waned and he logged off without so much as a thankyou. While I'd  handled this more involved chat as prelude to an evening of actual fucking, I'll bet this guy had no intention of hooking up, despite acting like he was a pic-swap away from relinquishing details and designating the hour. Motherfucker. 

Also, chatted with a guy in a bar the other night about how grindr has hurt the gay community. I'd obviously considered how people could frequent gay friendly venues less with the lure of an easy hookup, minus the costly segue of drinks etcetera, but hadn't fully appreciated this fact and how it might emaciate communities in a local sense.

I have niche communities in mind, or groups of people sharing a street or suburb and a watering hole which one might term a 'scene', that word I'd normally use to describe affected cliques derogatorily, but here meaning organic centres in which individuals share a sense of place and belonging. There is (or was) such a thing as conviviality, the gathering of humans around food and/or drink, quite away from bureaucratic intrusions where the individual is proffered in contexts of shared experience, not consumption (ironically). I believe such gatherings to be possible only materially, their Internet counterparts being another species entirely. 

Will the next generation have lost this mode of social reality completely? Even I feel apart from any 'gay' community (which some might say is the result of generally avoiding active affiliation through some kind of internalised homophobia), and I've got this idea I'm part of the last few ages able to remember life before the total facilitation of social media. I remember the technophobia stemming from txt messaging alone when I was in high school, and can't imagine being a teenager with a smart phone. Fucking heinous. 

But anyway, I'm arguing for the spontaneous appearance of communities outside the organisation of online spaces. I know these online spaces can supplement orchestration now, but that's exactly what they should be, supplementary not substitutive. 

Also recently hooked up with a guy completely DL (down low, discreet), or in other words still in the closet, and with grindr's help quite comfortably. It's unequivocal to me that grindr is delaying the moment of coming out for a new generation of young gay guys, depending on their temperament and circumstance of course. Coming out is the most powerful I've felt in my life to date, a moment of pure self-determination rarely afforded people before they've obtained 'adult' resources, and arguably inconceivable to those who've never felt uncomfortable gender-wise. I wouldn't deprive anyone of that awful/awesome upheaval, that blissful rejiggering of ones life to better accommodate desire. Fuck all the above and related grindr use *drops mic*.

Fucking The Dead (-Inside)

There's a common discourtesy I've encountered. It involves guys checking their grindr messages during the hookup, establishing prospects for future satisfactions even before the bed has cooled. I'm not exactly offended (is it really discourteous in the parameters of casual/anonymous?), more concerned its symptomatic of an attention deficit intrinsic to the rapid gratification grindr provides. More than grindr, I think this describes a mind made berserk by the umpteen online spaces we move through in the course of a day, and the compulsive appetite for distraction these engender. With sex embedded as a possible outcome of 'trolling', it's easy to segue from need to habit, and finally addiction. But can an addiction be recognised in a culture where such behaviours are in the process of socialisation? 

We are all guinea pigs. Gone is media of an analogue form where exposure was a more volitional interface, replaced with immersive facilitation of every facet of our lives, begging rigours without precedent should we choose to practice selectivity. So we are clear, preference is not discernment. Preference is a user-modality internal to availability and the mechanics of consumption. 

Being guinea pigs, the job of wading through the possibilities of this brave new world with anything resembling ethical conduct, is one we've been passively assigned by the commercial run-off installing these new platforms in the first. The question is, what will they be platforms for? Will they simply meet existing needs, or will they also implant new ones for which we'll require future solutions? 

The originary premise of an app like grindr shouldn't limit it's use. The willing subject should, like with anything, be capable of repurposing it to clarify (and enrich, fingers crossed) its own existing problematic scripts. If grindr proves to have little transformative value, if the subject feels hindered as opposed to supplemented, the artefact in question (grindr, tinder etc.) should probably be discarded. Or refitted, depending on its footing in the zeitgeist. 

Anyway, I've had an unfortunate experience. Recently I met someone outside grindr. This person was really very cool, I surmised quite accurately despite being drunk, having this later confirmed for me during an arranged (and sober) meeting a few days later. As conversation followed coffee (the two alternating with swooning grace), times passing had us more and more agreeable to fates frivolous suggestion, namely the crossing of our paths. We jumped to an unmissable connection with gusto, unfurling majestically from our imagined coolness and opening up like strangers rarely do. With good reason, so it goes. I don't know what I said but some coin dropped about my sexual habits and he's since given me the shrug, being a 'one guy kind of guy'. Only the second time we'd seen each other and he felt confident enough to judge me the kind who strays not commits. What the fuck does that even mean? I just wanted to hang out (and we could do still), only he'd extrapolated a year into a fictitious future in which I slew his feelings by betraying a commitment we were nowhere near making to one another, and is consequently no longer open to the possibility. 

That's some delusional shit. That also happens to be some pretty fucking regular shit. Confabulating doomed futures from your own anxieties/insecurities, choosing to waste effort on fearful scrutiny of tenuous and unpleasant fantasies (serving what purpose?), rather than exacting pleasure from the moment (available for a limited time)? 

What a fucking idiot. 

But he's done me a favour. He's made me value the nature of grindr and its users streamlined to a shared love of sex no strings, that in my experience and with amicable frequency can blossom into friendships and more, connections that differ from the established relationship conventions in shape form duration and number, but are no less important or satisfying in being so. 

So fuck you you fucking fuck, take your scared unemployed ass (sadly true) back to the sheltered white-picket subdivision you came from. Some of us have living to do. 

RELEASE (But No Grain Waves)

So I bottomed for the first time in ages. I don't know if I've made it clear or not, but I've been the 'pitcher' rather than the 'catcher' for this blogs entirety, up until yesterday when someone broke the spell. This was achieved by a very competent someone who made me feel exquisite, had the most attentive bed manners and was otherwise a gentleman, and it was perhaps a combination of these (pleasure and safety) which drove me to offer myself in a way I'd half heartedly decided wasn't for me. How excruciatingly wrong was I!

Also, he was your typical bear, and there's something about bulkier guys that makes me want to melt submissively and satisfy every and any whim of theirs with total obeisance. 

I've been exhausted/negative on some fundamental level for some time, but now feel like someone's pushed the reset. I don't envy heterosexual males for whom sex will mostly assume the active-form of 'topping', whereas I'd forgotten that as a gay man I could essentially 'flip' a switch (flip-fucking is a colloquialism for vers or versatile, meaning good to both fuck and be fucked; that's me baby), and shift the dynamics for a totally different sexual experience. Not that sex is neatly dichotomised into acts that are either/or (passive and active, dominant and submissive etc.). 

Basically I love my ass hole again, and I'm serenely pitying my straight fellows for whom ass play is a restricted area, being beyond the comfortable parameters of masculinity as it too closely resembles homosexual practices and sensibilities. I'd forgotten how intense it can be, once the initial sting of being penetrated recedes and there's only that fullness, punctuated by the sweetest jolts to ones prostate. 

I'm definitely becoming graphic now. But seriously, it's so fucking intense and I can't believe it's been almost a year since I allowed anyone to pleasure me in that way. It feels like wasted youth and I need to get back on that saddle. 

Anyway, details. He had a serious home entertainment setup with a 'smart' television and omnipotent sound, and was a stoner but (quite unprofessionally) had no junk food set up for afterward, an observation from which I kindly declined any more than the smallest toke. He was cuddly, a signature bear trait? But they don't have to all be adorable. Just because they don't have six packs doesn't mean they  can't be total cunts. 

So we snuggled on his couch and watched horror movies, also the third season of Girls which I still hadn't gotten round to seeing as I work a lot, and then the first episode of Amerrican Horror Story's fourth season which I'll admit to having mixed feelings over. It's tone is closer to Asylum's, which makes sense because I suspect it's in the same universe (Peppa has a cameo). But ultimately it's more of the same, and for the first time I had to force interest. 

We talked and I found out this guy had just broken up with his boyfriend of seven years. Thus the cuddling. I don't mind servicing very specific wounds, especially if I get fucked like that. 

In the morning I stayed on, peppering more television with more fucking, not leaving until the afternoon at which point cravings for junk food were high (pot and movies, but where the fuck were the grain waves?). 

Also, he was a painter, but not in the high-brow sense, more the as-seen-on-the-wall-of-your-local-small-town-espresso-shop kind (those unknowing masters of kitsch), quietly filling the homes of wealthy dairy farmers everywhere with wobbly impressions of native birds. I confess to being into them, they were crazy-busy and had these glue-gun textures. He'd done a zodiac series in the style of Crowley (I'm not sure this was deliberate), and while I wouldn't pay money I seriously considered smuggling one out with me. 

There was also a Lana Del Ray portrait, just above a water cooler serving lime-flavoured H2Go. Yuck. 

In summary, my ass holding the key to a general existential refresher? The body speaks!

Sexlessness and God (and Money)

This is a sequel post. 

As mentioned, I've let anxieties mar my otherwise steady outpouring of/will to pleasure. I'm trying to describe my own psychological manoeuvres when it comes to relishing sex and physicality generally. These anxieties have been of two related camps, finances and an extrapolation of those finances into a future nowhere near coming to pass. It's only with the obviousness of hindsight these pressures are seen to be wildly unnecessary departures from an otherwise comfortable present, with every facility and support a person of my specific socioeconomic grouping could hope for (wherever I fall on the scale; lower middle?). 

What I'm asking myself is whether there's a conceptual tie between the areas of money and sex, as partitioned by my tireless ordering system (my mind).

I guess money is frequently what makes my pleasure possible, not in the sense of paying someone for sex, but in the trivial expenses surrounding a hookup, enabling the casualness. Also, a certain amount of disposable is necessary for any kind of leisure time outside the home, and even then money haemorrhages discreetly.  

If I think back, my most satisfying hookups have been bookended by drinks/coffee and other costs extraneous to the act itself. 

Do I have less sexual desire when I'm poor? That is, do I feel somehow ashamed of having less money and am I less motivated to have a sexual encounter at these times? What sense of myself are these hookups serving then, the grindr facilitated ones. Are they sought as rewards for possessing money and thereby being a contributing member of society, participating in the flow of capital as an eligible consumer? 

There might be some truth in this, no matter how uncomfortable. Maybe I do feel less deserving of sexual pleasure when I'm broke, which is normally the result of impulse expenditures and, to complete this logic, begs sacrificial abstinence. So then I have to be able to afford sex? With strangers, the answer is an emergent yes. 

What price have I preemptively stamped it with then? At what monetary low is it off the cards for me? And if I was ever rich enough, from this appalling trajectory would I expect perfect strangers to jump my bone as if drawn magnetically to my swollen bank figure? If I'm good for it, should the world open its legs to me by default? Do 'suits' already think like this?

Or is it an ingrained conceptualisation of money as the singly reliable indicator of value, by which nothing of worth escapes an equivalent mediation. Not even sex. I know I've talked about sex as commodity before, but never in observance of my own behaviours. 

More than this, I sometimes feel in spite of myself the absolute licence of money and the cloistering dearth of options when one has very little to none.

I am not a free agent. 

Sexlessness and God

It's been a while because I haven't felt grindr as natural a segue of late, it's been a nuisance and a chore (and a frequently obnoxious one) rather than the god-given convenience I felt it to be just a month ago. I don't know what's heralded this dramatic shift in viewpoint but it's settled in with gloomy belligerence. Am I turning into an urbanite prude more interested in registering the minutia of celebrity/fashion/geek culture (enlarging my store of party-ready quips), than satisfying the nearest ache any human anywhere anytime has ever known, and with near-certainty might I say will ever know? I maybe need to take a retrospective of my life and the things that I want, because obviously my values are changing, which my general discontent with (though presently not exclusive to) grindr is probably symptomatic of; a spiritual 'spring clean'. Oh joy. 

Though I'm not dissatisfied with sex period, just disillusioned about the levelheaded-ness of my casual bedfellows. Apparently you can't gauge if a person is defunct on some fundamental level after an hour and three whiskeys, a skill I'd optimistically cemented in the set. Nor can you make an even remotely accurate summation of another human via grindr chat. Like, seriously, you can't even make a reliable guess as to whether or not the person you're chatting with is worth an hour of your time sexually. They could be all late seventies Sylvester Stallone, confess reluctantly to a semi-corporate occupation with neo-liberal sensibilities which definitely rubs your own imagined proletariat-status the wrong way but you make the decision to go round because they're funny in chat but in a caustic way so you really should've known better, and regardless of money and a knee-buckling twelve-pack still be an embarrassingly inert lay. If I was into that, I'd take up a job dressing corpses at a funeral home.

I did get head in a bar the other night which was new (kind of). I'm not into 'venues' (at this stage). I'm more into seeing what kinda place the guy has, out of some vampiric curiosity. There's something I get out of the hookup which I wouldn't at a venue, it's less anonymous. Seeing their domestic space contextualises it somehow, makes a stable memory even if we never see each other again. It's how I mark time. 

Back to my hiatus. There've been stresses external to my sexual activity and various partners which are hindering my 'mojo'. I don't like the way this stress has undermined my conscious ethos on sex, forcing me imperceptibly into patterns of behaviour I can only now acknowledge as compulsive. But then maybe that's fine. If the reality principle is felt resistance to the pleasure principle, the resonance of No, then loss of control is a necessary reminder, a prophylactic against casual arrogance and also a grounding pressure. I am centred by loss of control, I frequently find it necessary to feel unsafe. These things are fine. They humble me. 

I definitely own sex less when I'm stressed. It's less playful, I take less pleasure in it, as you would medicine. 

So that's where I'm at, that's why the absence from blogging my exploits, because they've been fewer and fouler. 

This post more than any other feels like dirt in plain sight, psychic debris I wouldn't normally scrutinise, but the fantasy-audience intrinsic to the act of 'blogging' and of interfacing with media period, forces me to flaunt the wound with pride. It's like making a blood-sacrifice to a god who finally bestows the peace you've sought, but only after you and your wrongs are made example of. Is this a Christian guilt thing? Is the need to talk about sex, even if consciously prescribing the body-positive, always going to be in light of guilt and expiation?