Red wings

I recently came across this post on CL:

Got your red wings? if so this an ad for you if not just skip - w4m (Lower East Side)

Reply to: pers-XXXXXXXXXX@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-10-13, 5:08PM EDT

ISO Submissive males who earned their wed wings (ever gave oral while chick on the rag?)

I am not sure if the 'w' in 'wed' is intentional or not; I like to think this woman has difficulty with her 'r's, or else is looking for men who do. I did not reply, as the Lower East Side is not my beat, and I am pretty sure this woman falls below my standard minimum age (the use of 'chick' suggests as much, and her AIM name ended in 1983). But if anyone has earned their red wings, I have.

'Red wings' has always seemed an odd expression: why wings? But the Hells Angels, who popularized the term, liked to award wings to themselves, perhaps in mockery of the Air Force, so I suppose we are stuck with it. And it does have the advantage of making the Detroit ice-hockey team the butt of many jokes.

One of the more frustrating aspects of adultery is that, because days pass between assignations, it is not unusual to miss out on the bloody flux entirely, sometimes for several months in a row. Recently, however, I seem to have been lucky: I had a very bloody session with D at the Seton a couple of weeks ago, and just today had a couple of hours with F that left us both daubed in blood, sweat, cunt-juice, and come. A good argument for running several mistresses, then, is that this increases the probability of hooking up with at least one when they are in full flow each month.

The Hells Angels were notoriously sexist way back when, and so going down on a woman during her period was probably more akin to hazing or an initiation ritual than a genuinely sexual act for them (according to Hunter S. Thompson, they gave out black wings for going down on a black woman, and brown wings for ass-fucking). But for me, eating out a woman during her period is a pure pleasure. Sex is about many things, but one is the complete acceptance of the body of the other, and the unreserved offer of one's own body to the other. There can't be days of the week or times of the month when some acts are proscribed; there cannot be some parts or products of the body that are spurned or spat out while the rest are adored. I have no particular urge to try watersports, but I appreciate the impulse behind it, if it is about acceptance rather than humiliation.

The first woman with whom (these 'whoms' are getting everywhere) I had sex during her period was MRR, the one true, deep, abiding passion of my life. Since then I have tried always to persuade women to let me fuck them, go down on them, finger them while menstruating, and it is remarkable how many of these women have never done anything like that before. D had not - and yet now she is especially excited if one of our meetings coincides with the height of her period. F has, I think, been much less squeamish and uncomfortable about her own body, her blood; she took no persuading at all. Of the women I have fucked in the past couple of years, M has perhaps been the best attuned to my way of thinking and feeling, and A the least. A regards her period as a nuisance, and seems to enjoy nothing about it at all. Interestingly, A is the only one of these women whose tubes are tied.

Does getting one's red wings, as a man anyway, indicate some special sensitivity, or nobility? I don't know. College Call girl thinks so:

I’ve never been huge into period sex, although I think dudes who are willing are usually super-cool guys. If you can act like a grown-ass man about the fact that we women bleed of our va-jay-jays once a month, you will make an excellent boyfriend or husband.

You can find the rest of her excellent post on period sex here: Just One of Them Days

Googling 'red wings' still turns up, once you are past the Detroit Red Wings (and adding 'period' as a search term is of little help here, I warn you) plenty of offensive material. Men are jerks. But it is not some major achievement, akin to sainthood, not to be a jerk. Going down on a woman whenever she would enjoy it, and whatever the time of the month: that is just good manners.

I like work: it fascinates me.

There is not much in the world more pleasing than a good oxymoron. Even hackneyed examples - military intelligence, folk art, social science, popular culture - are worth a smile. Sometimes oxymorons rise to the level of art - perhaps the best instance here is the etiolated richness of The Who's '5.15'. But some oxymorons are so deeply embedded in the orthodox conceptual scheme that they pass by entirely unnoticed - inconsistencies that are so central to a culture that it is impossible to imagine that culture surviving once the inconsistency is revealed and addressed. The culture therefore moves to restore the self-contradiction to its central place, shedding what is incidental, but retaining what is essential. And that is how, forty years on, the sexual liberation movement has ended up as a struggle to win for gays and lesbians the right to enter into the same stultifying 1950s sit-com set-up that the 1960s were supposed to free us from altogether.

The oxymoron occupying me at the moment, however, is 'work ethic'. I think there used to be just one of these, the Protestant one, and though Protestants who espoused it were admired for their industry, they were also regarded as in the grip of a rather particular, and peculiar, set of values. But in the United States (and sadly, this is true increasingly in other countries as well) this work ethic is now construed ecumenically and even secularly. Work is an ethical activity, underpinned by ethical motivations, hedged about with ethical constraints. Someone who works to live rather than lives to work is a dangerous amoralist.

If life cannot be all work and no play, then the work ethic requires that play be turned into work, a transformation that is almost complete. The gym is not a place to play, but to workout; lying out on the Sheep Meadow, I can work on my tan. Sex is one of the last holdouts, a site of play. This blog records my playtimes, times when I am playing with other people sexually. Nothing is achieved, no growth is accomplished, the world is not altered or enriched or bettered by this play. After the play is over, things are just as they were before, for playing (like philosophy) leaves everything as it is. I think it is for this reason, and not to do with that other (perhaps allied) oxymoron, sexual morality, that the acts and emissions recorded here incite distaste, disgust, and disapproval. All play and no work makes Jack a dangerous boy. I do not particularly mind working when I have to, but I do not think that people who really enjoy their work are luckier than I am. Poor sods, they work harder than they need to, and for longer, instead of spending time playing. The response that, because they love their work, they are playing while they work, is nearly always crap. Banking or lawyering is not playing, because it is not pointless, as play is. Derek Jeter doesn't work at all, though I am sure he works out a lot; he is paid to play. If I could be paid to play, that would be great, but it wouldn't make my playtimes times when I was at work.

Work gets its mucky hands everywhere, spoiling play and pleasure, and the US is undoubtedly the worst place in the world in this regard. I know of no other country where a waiter or waitress will ask, of a plate of food that is not entirely consumed, whether the diner is 'still working on that'. No, I am not still working on it, I never was working on it; if I was working on it, wouldn't I be getting paid? You might as well ask me, towards the end of three hours with D at the Kew Motor Inn, when I take a little break from fucking and am just idly fingering her ass: 'Are you still working on that?'

One reason why sex is limitless is that it is not work. The job is never finished because it is never begun; it is not a job at all. Because it is not work, effort is unregulated. Physical exertion in play is a delight. In work, while it may be enjoyable, exertion is directed towards an end. In sex there are no ends, and if there are goals, they are like goals in soccer - occasions for cheering and uproar, perhaps even a way of keeping score (in which case, if it is orgasms we are counting, D usually crushes me 10 - 2).

The playfulness of sex is under constant assault from that oxymoron, sexual morality, but also from the insistence that physical intimacy and emotional intimacy are correlated and connected. This is not a stupid idea, unlike sexual morality. But it is nevertheless used continually to lift sex out of the category of play and place it somewhere else, where it can then be regulated by therapists and counsellors, or by those with whom (hey! check out the 'whom') one is emotionally intimate. Playing with another person is necessarily intimate, and trying to find someone to play with, asking them to play, requires courage, and can be very difficult. It is easy to read Craigslist's 'Casual Encounters' as a vast playground where the kids are trying to find others to play the games that they like to play, or trying to join games already in progress, or at least to keep loneliness and exclusion at bay by asking, again and again: 'Can I play with you?' And like any playground, there are mean girls and popular boys, kids who get off on saying 'No', and kids who are just hopeless and you don't want to end up on your team even though you know it is not their fault and you feel sorry for them.

I enjoy playing, though sexual play is one of the few kinds of play that I do enjoy. I also find ways to play while working - the other day, for example, I wore D's thong to work. I can't think how I could easily work while playing, given my kind of play - I don't think, for example, that anyone would pay to watch me fuck D (but if anyone is out there who would, do get in touch). The trick in life is to reduce the worktime and increase the playtime, not because work is bad or evil or pointless, but because work, unlike play, is not done for its own sake.

Fortunately for me, most people do not put play ahead of work, as the world might cease to function if my advice was followed. I am not sure that makes it bad advice, but it does at least put a question mark beside it. Meanwhile, I can play hard, and others can work hard, and it averages out nicely.

[Ok, too much thinking and not enough fucking in this post - I will try to redress the balance in the next.]

Mixing it up

Anyone describing this blog to another would find it hard to make it sound at all interesting: "This middle-aged, mid-life-crisis, married guy fucks the same couple of women each week and then writes uninterestingly about it." The cast of characters hardly changes; the posts are not pornographic enough to jerk off to. So what reason do any of my readers (you three know who you are) have to keep up with their reading? This week, however, has been unusual. New characters, new acts, and so new things to think about, and write uninterestingly about.

On Wednesday at midnight, I met AA in an upscale hotel room in midtown - described by him as a 'corporate hotel suite' - and we spent a couple of hours together. On Saturday, I visited CJ for forty-five minutes or so at her apartment. CJ gets 'her' rather than 'his' as a possessive pronoun because that is how CJ wants to be, for me and anyone else plucked out of CL and into reality; she is a woman, albeit one whose ass is referred to as a cunt by me and a pussy by her (remind me sometime to post something about the whole pussy/cunt dichotomy), and whose pretty little cock is referred to as a clit. CJ, in other words, is somewhere in the vastnesses of t-territory: a cross-dresser, a t-girl, a woman inexplicably missing an orifice but having a very large clit in compensation. AA, by contrast, is a man who likes to be fucked by another man. AA is a bottom. That makes me, the fucker rather than fuckee, a top. With AA, then, there is almost no conceptual space for me as an agent of pleasure rather than a patient; I have to be pleased, but cannot please - or cannot please except in so far as I am pleased. CJ is not a bottom but a woman, so the dynamic is utterly different. Women I love to please, and am good at pleasing; CJ is another. At some high level of generality, everything that happened between me and AA, or between me and CJ, is 'sex'. Below that level of generality it is unclear how to partition things, but we can at least be confident that there are a lot of people who would assign what happened between me and AA, and me and CJ, to the 'same-sex sex' category. Already this gets things entirely wrong. I would prefer a partition that followed the contours of the active/passive distinction, and that would put AA in a totally different category from CJ.

AA and CJ were both CL recruits. There are many, many things to say about CL, but in this context I am struck by the asymmetry in identity that goes along with (and is presumably either consequent upon, or else productive of) the marketplace asymmetries that drive the continual deep currents, and so also the superficial froth, of CL personals. I am not a poster, but a responder, and in CL world that may be the single most important partition. Responders can be, in their responses, a bottom to a top, or a man to a woman, or a man to a t/g/v/s; I can be a man writing to another man who, being ftm, began life assigned female gender, but who is now a gay man with a cunt that (for all I know) has to be referred to as a pussy though it is really an asshole. Responders are what posters are looking for, because in responding, the responder decides to be what it is that the poster is looking for. AA was looking for a discreet, bi, married top to serve, and that is what he got. CJ was looking for a man to come over and play around with her cunt and nipples, to finger her and and go down on her, and that is what she got.

Where am I in any of this? To be polymorphously perverse is to have no sexual character at all, and I sometimes wonder if that is true of me. But I would rather put it this way: my default settings are those of a straight man who takes pleasure from a woman by giving pleasure to her as a woman. Without too much adjustment, I can also take pleasure by giving pleasure with women who are biologically male (whatever the fuck that means - probably nothing at all), or with indeterminate third-sex people. I can run for a while as a straight man who wants to be serviced, and the servant can be a woman, a man, something in between. Or I can adjust my settings so that it is me shifting towards the neutrality at the centre of the gender spectrum: with D's jeans on, I can be some teenager who is being Mrs Robinsoned, or a butch boi girl being done by an older femme; or I can drift further, in panties and a skirt, to be fucked by D with the strap-on. I have no idea whether CJ is, for someone else, a guy's guy, and I am not sure my range of readjustment could get me far enough for me to be that someone else. I am sure that I could not be the man sexually servicing another man that AA was for a couple of hours in that lavish corporate hotel suite last Wednesday at midnight. Or not yet.

Details? Well, AA gave me an amazingly good handjob towards the end of our time, gripping my cock at just the right moment to intensify the ejaculation - I spurted a lot, hitting myself in the throat. That was after a lot of cocksucking, and a lot of ass-fucking. I would not describe AA as my type - a little too hairy, perhaps. But nevertheless, I found I could enter into the designated role very easily and then enjoy it to the hilt. With CJ, the same was true: I fell easily into the faction that I was a man dropping by to take a woman who was just a little too willing to give it up to a stranger. And when I went down on her while fingering her cunt and helped her come, I felt that I was psychologically and sexually straddling concurrent understandings of what was happening. I was a man eating out a women, fingering her cunt while licking and sucking on her clit. I was also a man with his finger up another mans's ass, blowing his little cock until he came. Two sex acts for the price of one - or rather, as I am not paying for any of this, two birds with one stone. But that is not right either. A bird in the hand, also in the bush? Robbing Peter to pay Paul? Maxims and metaphors are of little use - really a better analogy would be one of those hokey, parallel-universe episodes on Star Trek, where some little phase-distortion in the space-time continuum means that you really can do two things at once, be in two different places simultaneously, engage in two different scenes, be two different people, fuck an ass and a cunt with the same cock, at the same time.