A Perfect World

Posted by Lex Konrad in | Jul 12, 2005

W. S. Cross from Beyond You & Me sent me a note the other day informing me he had written a review of Naked Loft Party. He struck a conciliatory tone, so I braced myself for criticism, which, at any rate, is better than ass-kissing. When I clicked over to his site I found the Internet had this to say:

With Naked Loft Party, I’m not sure what to think sometimes. It’s a site that I definitely have mixed emotions about. The stories seem at times too perfect and not that far removed from the classic faux erotica of “Letters to Penthouse”. Dude, if you’re lurking and I’ve done you wrong, I apologize, I call ‘em as I see ‘em. If the stories are true and without embellishment, then everyone reading this should drop whatever they’re doing and move to NYC, because AIDS and Herpes and all the other things that scare people about the 70s never seem to have happened in the world of Naked Loft Party. The girls are all slender, beautiful and bi, the men never get shut down or rejected (if anything, our hero, Lex, seems to have that weary put-upon aura of a man in demand in the bedroom). ...

In a perfect world, all the boys and girls are beautiful, we always (and I mean always) come, and no one ever feels rejected.

At times it strikes me that to many people my stories must be about as believable as the tales of Lake Wobegon or the pronouncements issuing from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. While this notion once caused me distress I’ve come to appreciate that such is the lot of the sex diarist—particularly the heterosexual male sex diarist living out what appear to be typically heterosexual male fantasies.

Later on in the same entry, Cross praises Suicide Girls, which is often held up as that shining city on the hill of grrrrl-centric sexuality—the vanguard of a new sex-positivism that, if reports are to be believed, marks the extinction of the objectifying male gaze. I can only shake my head at the cognitive dissonance: Suicide Girls is selling nubile ass just like everyone else is these days, from hardcore porn sites to hipster clothing companies. All the tattoos and piercings in the world cannot mask the reality that the models are still barely-legal and skinny and white. The breasts may no longer be pumped-up with silicone but the beauty ideal is as much beyond the reach of mere mortals as it ever was. To paraphrase Marx, when you negate powdered wigs you are still left with unpowdered wigs.

Whatever alliance I might have with self-styled sexual progressives is an uneasy one at best. It seems we’ve done away with one kind of orthodoxy only to elevate another: whereas once upon a time men and women were expected to conform to a particular heterosexual script, nowadays we sex-positive types are encouraged to frown upon anything that vaguely resembles, say, the sex that transpired inside the Playboy Mansion during the 70s. Anything that isn’t queered and kinky in the appropriately gender-deconstructed ways is automatically considered suspect. Rather than simply cast aside all the old cultural baggage, we’ve loaded ourselves down with new baggage made from, like, all-natural hemp fibers. It all seems rather humorless and cynical. And so drearily academic. To wit, here’s an excerpt from the entry that started it all:

As Penny straddled Leslie I made the mistake of muttering something to the effect of “that’s kinky.” Penny shot me an evil glare and responded, “It’s not kinky. It’s my sexuality!”

No, dear. Someone soixante-neufing my girlfriend while I watch is pretty much the fucking definition of kinky. Well, that’s what I would have said had I been half the man in college that I am today. It’s taken me awhile, but I’m finally learning to drown out all the self-limiting cultural noise, to unburden myself of the baggage of gender politics. To me sex isn’t a power struggle: it’s this amazingly pleasurable and utterly nonsensical and sometimes messy thing that happens when I least expect it. The less I worry and analyze and criticize, the more it happens. I’m liberating my own ass here and no one else’s.

So, yes. I am heterosexual and, dare I say, happy to be so. I have a beautiful, aggressively-bisexual girlfriend who can come from intercourse alone in about three minutes. We meet a variety of beautiful women and sometimes we have sex with them in groups of three or more; and when we do the sex is, on the whole, very much fun. The women who sleep with us often want more sex from us, and they jump us about as often as we jump them. Our nubile prospects are almost always willing to sleep with us at least once, so rejection is rarely an issue. Sometimes there are warm, fuzzy feelings involved, other times not so much. And being selective about our partners and good about using protection has staved off any horrible, icky diseases. Oh, and when I wake up one morning and decide I want to photograph a naked amateur, I of course find someone within four hours and she’s eighteen and looks like a model.

Phew. Does that cover it? Come to think of it, Cross might have a point. I used to cast aspersions upon Belle but looking at this I see that I might even have her beat. Yes, I know my sex life is allegedly “every man’s fantasy.” I’m also aware my escapades are almost painfully hetero-normative. Honestly, I try not to think of my life in these terms; I just want to be naked like everyone else does.

But I won’t apologize for living in a perfect world. My life is filled with moments of perfection—so many that it fills me with sadness that I’ll never find the time to record them all—and even the imperfect moments are somehow perfectly imperfect. And for reasons I am still trying to understand I share these perfect moments with the world, perhaps in the hope that at least one other person out there understands what the fuck I’m talking about.

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Abby Winters

  1. phi. | Jul 12, 03:47 PM | #

    For what it’s worth, I understand exactly what you’re talking about.

  2. Girl | Jul 12, 07:13 PM | #

    And to some extent, so do I.

    Though I have to admit to living somewhat vicariously through yours and Leslie’s lives, since my own doesn’t yet offer the same opportunites.

    Still, perhaps next time I am in New York though…?

  3. Rei | Jul 12, 09:16 PM | #

    I think being able to experience and share beauty should be something that everyone should be lucky enough to do. People take it for granted too much and get all caught up in the orthodoxies that you mentioned.

    I for one really appreciate what you do. Blessings in life are those little perfect moments and sometimes we’re just overwhelmed by them and just wish that there was some way to just snapshot each and every one, that joy and bliss we feel. Shared joy is double joy. With all the shit going on in the world, it’s nice to share someone else’s moments.

  4. W. S. Cross | Jul 13, 08:56 AM | #

    Very interesting discussion, and I’m glad to read what you have to say. A cognitive dissonance? Well, in a porn-drenched culture where the schticks of a handful of filmmakers have had huge ripples on the media, I guess small advances like “Suicide Girls” seem like a relief. Maybe that’s what happens when we’re beaten into submission by the media?

    But you have to realize that images empowering women are close to my heart (being a product of the era when my novel takes place, at the dawn of the Women’s Movement). Is it trading one sexual fetish for another? Maybe. But there’s even a passage in the novel where the protagonist mocks herself in a pseudo-Playboy interview. The sex at the Mansion was always about the boys and what pleases them, so the fact that women have more control over what they do (and with whom) is a good thing, in my opinion.

    Sometimes truth IS stranger than fiction. I’m glad you’re living your fantasies (and those of many of your readers). All in all, a very balanced assessment of what I wrote.

  5. Darren James | Jul 13, 03:13 PM | #

    Lex, I’m with ya bro…. As a man in the same suit as you I would have a hard time telling the moments of my life to people. My life is other men’s fantasy… and some women’s. I do take heart in knowing that My girl and I, allow others to fufill their fantasies by creating the space to be….. whatever! And that’s a gift most people can’t give… Ciao

    DJ

  6. Lex | Jul 13, 06:30 PM | #

    Phi—I know you do. We seem to attract the same sort of criticism.

    Girl—I’ll respond to your email personally, but the answer is yes.

    Rei—Thanks. It’s always nice to hear from a fellow Textpattern user. I’m still running 1.18 but hope to rectify that soon.

    Cross—Regarding the whole empowerment angle, you might want to have a look at the sgirls LJ community, particularly the FAQ. Though some of the models’ and users’ complaints are perhaps overblown, all is not as rosy as it may appear from the outside.

    Look, I treated my model well and I suppose the resulting images are “positive” in some sense, but I’m under no illusion that I “empowered” Natalie, much less all women, by paying for a nude photoshoot. Nor do I think the dynamic would be fundamentally altered were I a woman, transgendered individual or sentient dolphin.

    In many ways things never change: women sell their bodies for what is, in a cosmic sense, a pittance, men orchestrate the action either up-front (in my case) or behind the scenes (in the case of SGirls), and horny wankers drive the demand. In some ways the proliferation of amateur grrrl porn is even a step backward: where once the pornographer had to pay women real cash to get naked on film, nowadays he can float his entire site on almost-free user-submitted content and pretend he’s doing everyone involved a favor. Just look at highly successful photo-contest sites like IShotMyself and (though I love ‘em dearly) Nerve.

    I feel bad for the professional porn-stars and models who now have to compete against all these amateurs who are “empowering” themselves (and making someone else rich in the process).

    Follow the money trail, folks. Business is business. Everything else is, in my view, a matter of branding. I quoted Marx to remind people that there are quotidian labor-and-capital issues at work here that no one wants to talk about in our age of feel-good progressivism. In this light, good-old gonzo porn ain’t so bad after all, no matter how much it may offend certain white, upper-middle-class, college-educated sensibilities.

    (Perhaps someone should start a thread in the forum about alt-porn. It would be interesting to hear what others have to say.)

    DJ—You touched on an important point. Creating a safe space in which others can explore their fantasies is exactly what we do; it’s the secret, I think, to our success.

  7. W. S. Cross | Jul 13, 07:47 PM | #

    You’re a smart dude, well-read and have a head on your shoulders. Heck, quoting Marx is almost reason enough to nominate you for Best of Blogs. But there are some holes in your reasoning that I point out, not to show you up (hey, it’s your site and you can zap me!), but because you’re raising some interesting issues and leaving them hanging.

    There’s no question that empowerment is more complex than taking your clothes off. Women have been doing that at least since the Greeks. But you’re getting caught up in the reductio here, tossing off the qualitative differences between now and the start of the Sexual Revolution that makes all you and your lovely Les do possible. Trust me, I lived through the period, and have a certain perspective that you probably don’t have.

    In absolute terms, I’d rather see the models on SG use their empowerment to improve their life, get a decent job, create a system of values that go beyond living for the moment. But I also remember being that young, and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with acting out, which is probably more why these women do what their doing than for money (the pay in porn is notoriously bad). The young women posing for you need the money? Or is the act of shedding their clothes something more psychological and liberating than whatever money they get?

    These are important issues, even if they’re glossed over in today’s world. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book I did: some of the things the heroine is struggling with are still with us, including notions of sexual and emotional fidelity, gender identification, power games, and yes, money. Cassie DiMarco, the protagonist, can’t get any other job besides a secretary at the university her husband attends because she doesn’t have a degree.

    Thanks for sending me to the SG alt site. My reaction? As Marx would say, work sucks and The Man exploits us.

  8. Ron Jeremy | Jul 13, 10:39 PM | #

    I love the sex stories…I use them to, uh, masturbate to.
    And I can’t say that sexual politics ever entered my mind while reading about you fucking your hot girlfriend from behind while she goes down on an equally hot lover…..

    More power to you, Lex. I get the underlying “Hey, I don’t know why I deserve this, but I’ll take it” vibe to your blog.
    So keep having perfect moments, and I’ll keep reading them.

    You lucky bastard.

  9. Lex | Jul 15, 03:57 AM | #

    Cross – You give your Sexual Revolution too much credit. I may not have lived through it but I think you’re invoking an experiential fallacy: 99% of the people who are alive during any historically important era have zero perspective on what’s happening.

    Furthermore, it’s really hard to pin down those “qualitative differences.” We’re not talking about the storming of the Bastille here (ahem, note yesterday’s date). I can just as easily see your Sexual Revolution and raise you Weimar Berlin, or New York in the 20’s, or the Vienna underground of the post-Aufklarung, or Paris, like, in any era. The 60’s and 70’s just got better publicity thanks to the growth of television and cinema. Swinging, polygamy, and hedonism in general have long and storied histories. Every generation likes to believe it invented sex.

    Hell, a lot of the ground-breaking sex-literature—Tropic of Cancer, Ulysses, Lolita, etc.—emerged during the early-to-mid 20th century. I was getting turned on by Henry Miller’s multipartnered hookups long before I had any idea what went on inside Plato’s Retreat.

    Money was certainly a big motivator for my model (I specifically asked her about this). When you’re young and relatively poor, a few hundred bucks here and there makes a big difference. The financial transaction changes things, even moreso when the person writing the checks hauls in assloads of profit.

    Look, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with posing/fucking for pay but let’s not confuse commodification with meaningful empowerment. Capital, after all, serves its own god first and foremost.

    RJ – Excellent, just excellent.

  10. W. S. Cross | Jul 15, 03:44 PM | #

    I appreciate the historical perspective you’ve added, but would still differ with you. Society moves ahead or backwards in an oddly linear fashion: gay marriage may yet be too controversial for America, but most gays seem to recognize that we wouldn’t be this far where marriage could even be discussed if it were not for what went before. Is the average GLBT person aware of what led up to their lifestyle this moment? Probably not. That’s why God invented intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals like you and me to blather on about this kind of thing.

    Did the 60s and 70s get better press than Weimar Germany? Yes and no. It’s closer to our time, and yes, many relics like myself survive to muse about the “good old days,” or say we’re glad they’re over (I get both reactions to the fact my novel is set in 1975). But I can tell you absolutely that we were aware back then of the “decadence” of Berlin when we thought we were inventing decadence. And your point about Henry Miller, etc. just proves my argument: his stuff was written before WWII, but didn’t gain a wide readership until—oh, no, the 60s and 70s!

    Finally, your points about capital, exploitation and nude modeling are very interesting, but too complex to be discussed in any detail in a “comments” section like this. But to take two examples from when I was inviting young women to shed their clothes for money or pictures, I had one model whose shrink convinced her she should strip for my camera because he believed it would help her overcome some serious inhibitions and self-image issues. Another did it to piss off her parents. That young women are posing or making porn for money is undoubtedly true, but they could probably make an equivalent amount doing something else; whatever they say about it, I think there are other impulses guiding their choices (rebellion, cool factor, performing for a lover). Are they exploited? Well, Marx would say ANY employment is exploitation unless you control the means of production. As a matter of interest, the rise of the digital video camera and the Internet may, in fact, bring Marx’s vision closer to reality than he would probably be comfortable with (though I have heard rumors he was a dirty old man who exposed himself to women outside the British Museum).

    And Ron, some of us remember you and your films back in the days when the women were as hairy down there as your back.

  11. Leslie | Jul 16, 03:22 PM | #

    ”...That young women are posing or making porn for money is undoubtedly true, but they could probably make an equivalent amount doing something else”
    But it wouldn’t be as quick and easy money – is the obvious point that you’ve missed there.

    “but too complex to be discussed in any detail in a “comments” section like this.”
    So why don’t you just write something on the forum about this instead of continuing paragraphs of comments?

  12. W. S. Cross | Jul 17, 09:21 PM | #

    The obvious question: what forum?

    I’m new around here and can’t find the bathroom in the dark.

  13. Lex | Jul 18, 09:25 PM | #

    See those buttons in the upper right corner? Click on the one that says “Forum.” Or just go to http://www.nakedloftparty.com/forum/.

  14. Sarah | Jul 24, 08:33 PM | #

    I just wanted to say that what I like most about you, Lex, is that you have (and please excuse the cliche) a genuine voice. It doesn’t ultimately matter to me whether you make this shit up or not, but I feel pretty convinced that you don’t. Your writing has an authenticity to it, not to mention a clear lack of interest in embellishing. And anyone who reads you regularly, as I do (or did, I haven’t been reading much of anything lately with my schedule), knows that the world you inhabit is not exactly perfect. It may be different and more exciting than my world, at least sexually speaking, but it’s no more or less perfect. I love the sex stories, they’re fun to read and a great turn-on, but if it were just sex stories with no real person behind them, I’d be bored to tears. Thanks for your writing!

    And hey, if I were 10 years younger and unencumbered by children and relationships and stretch marks (oh Natalie! How smooth!), I’d be trying to invite myself over as well.

  15. Napoleon Rodney | Jul 27, 04:43 PM | #

    Face it : body mod is in the same general category as plastic surgery and boob jobs. Lex makes a good point.

  16. Jay | Jul 28, 04:11 PM | #

    My B/D is August 1st.

    Will anyone send me nude pics of themselves to make my day one to remember forever

    Thanks everyone

  17. bunko | Jul 30, 06:37 AM | #

    my fave entry…..oooh nurse…was jimmy and the new religion….but why were the japanese girls called some cheap whore western names…???..j-girls gotta be like…miyuki, yuko, tomoko etc….yes i find your blog a bit far fetched..arrogant maybe…but the point is i always read it….well mostly always….heh

  18. Chingobling | Aug 6, 12:27 PM | #

    Throughout this whole blogosheric odyssey I keep wondering ‘what the hell does this guy do for a living?’ y’know what makes this apparently hip and freewheeling lifestyle possible. Maybe I missed the part where you talked about that (I’ve read about 3/4’s) or maybe you have a purpose in not talking about your mundane life, but eventually you start to give the impression that you live off a trust fund. I’m pretty sure that a lot of the comments about how your blog lacks a certain believablity come from the fact that your sexploits aren’t contextualized regarding other aspects of your life. Sorry to say this but in some ways you come off as a silk shirt with a dick. I for one think it’d be cool to know about
    job/family/background..etc…or the reasons why you dont want to share those things…
    Anyway, all in all its been an interesting read

  19. V | Aug 12, 04:59 PM | #

    This post, and the whole exchange, reminds me of one of my favorite moments a few months back… the two of us were in a bar chatting with a friend, and she brought up NLP and the stories of “all these fake parties they supposedly go to.” We asked, innocently, to have her describe what the meant and she started telling us all about this “fake place in brooklyn called grego’s”—of course, we’d been there and even had a cameo appearance in Lex’s blog so we smiled until we nearly burst. As she went on, she got angrier and angrier at all the “fake stories of orgies out there…” We set her straight, so to speak.

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