Beauty & Time

14 Mar

Beauty

"There is no instinct like that of the heart.” Lord Byron

I’ve long been afflicted by this penchant for artistic and literary romanticism; you know, the pre-Raphaelites, Lord Byron…oh and I love, gothic horror, which is romanticism’s more calamitous cousin, his hangover, if you will. Romanticism is about freedom from restraints to pursue art, love and desire, a pre-occupation with the notion of beauty ‘in the abstract’, a rejection of bourgeois morality. A belief in some non-godly ‘heaven on earth’ pleasure-seeking, even a touch of mysticism. The style was often grandiose, flamboyant, camp even. The gothic after-effects, Wuhering Heights, Dracula, even German Expressionism, are about the headache, the hollow feelings and the nervous guilt after the wild ride, but are usually as ambivalently swimming in the desire for subjectivity and uncertainty. Romanticism is the rugged bad boy on the motorbike or the hot, exotic Bertha Mason. Gothic horror is the visceral bike crash and the arsonist mad woman in the attic that say, “but you are going to take another spin, all the same”.

It’s not very popular these days; we live in utilitarian times. Writing has to be punchy and to the point, very clear about what it is saying, bring everyone along with it, fit a political agenda. Art is…well, crisp packets by posh-kids, stuck to white-wash museum walls, which are apparently saying something about the “liminality of consumerism”. Painting, with is naughty, oily brush strokes and baroque frames… is considered a dead art. Even photography has become too oblique, too whimsical, for the post-computation generations.

That is probably what it was the did it, the death of the romantic dream. The computers. Mind you, they did have a romantic era of their own, in the transhumanist 90s, when people seriously talked about uploading brains into machines and the ‘internet’ being a Wild West of exploration and freedom from that terrifying of all vague things, ‘The State’ (insert gasp). It turned out though, that statelessness had its own brutal regime. It came pumping out of Silicon Valley like digital ooze, but its malignancy was about surveillance, not restriction. What a coup! You can do whatever you want now, but they are watching you, counting out your every move, quantifying you. What you like, what you think, what you masturbate to. Your being is converted to information and being bought and sold by Steve Jobs style psychopaths doing yoga and humming mantras in $500 dollar underpants, in San Francisco.

This is the context for troubled young men, inebriated on Andrew Tate-isms, a new golden age of chauvinism, to spit out into the ether their absolutisms, their quantifications, about beauty and sexual morality. I saw it only the other week, another microcosm of their cynicism; a woman over 200 pounds cannot be beautiful. Can. Not.

I’m not going to confront the particulars of that statement; its beneath any woman to argue with the pointlessly destructive petulance on display of any person who, simply because they do not fancy fat woman, have to ensure that all fat women everywhere never feel beautiful to anyone at any time, not even to themselves. Or maybe they do sometimes feeling an attraction towards fat women, and that is precisely what worries them. In a culture where people feel that not only what they look like, but the appearance of their associates confers some total status upon them, it would be disconcerting indeed to discover you get mouth watery over an association that would, impoverish that status. How much easier would it be if voluptuous women didn’t idle their juicy fruits in the line of sights of such troubled anti-troubadours? Leave this place vile witches! With your subcutaneous temptations, ungodly in their generosity!

Even so. It’s not the fat that concerns me, it’s the number. It's the arbitrary way in which some people want to quantify human life. The ‘what number out of 10 are you?’ brigade. I’m not rationalism’s greatest apostle by any stretch, but I can at least see its purpose in getting us to the moon and back and lighting up my home and mechanical engineering and all that pickle. But the facts of it make me feel sleepy and stupid. But pseudo-rationalism? It’s positively rancid. It has neither the humanistic, creative potential of artistic, romantic subjectivity, nor the actual certainties of the material sciences.

But the ‘what number are they out of 10?’ brigade don’t care about beauty or truth, they care about ego and power and they are out in force on the digital highway, playing at being primary school-grade statisticians trying to dull the innate uncertainty of life using a cat-in-the-hat degree of numerics. I’m being patronising, numbers have never been my strong point, but even I can ascertain that taking such complex, unwieldy concepts like beauty, desire and the sex lives and social antagonisms of multi-billions of humans and trying to gun them in to some basic graph… is more asinine than going on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and picking as your book of choice The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Power for power’s sake has always been a trifle stupid, and a bore to boot.

What number out of ten would The Lady of Shallot be? Or The Mona Lisa.

I was in a park once, being followed by some Elliot Rodgers to-be and after politely rejecting his bizarre advances he shouted, “You should be grateful for my attention %^8$£, you are a 6.7 out of 10, MAX ON A GOOD DAY+”. I was so astounded at seeing the moral vacuity of incel Reddit in the actual wild, that I just gawped at him for a bit before shuffling off. Later, when I was pondering over a gingerbread latte at a Caffè Nero, I thought of my come back, which was something about being a 0.5 idiot out of infinity. It was belated and not very good even for having been slowly stewed. But what can you say? I didn’t feel offended, it was too silly an insult to find offensive, like having a school kid tell me his dad could beat up my dad (my dad is not longer animated by oxygen so that is probably true in most cases). But I felt deflated by the miserliness of it; the cold, hard, surreal singularity.

Because in a fashion, it's not strictly untrue. To that guy, who looked like the love child of Kiki Dee (no relation) and the late, great John Woodnutt++, I was interesting looking enough to sexually harass near the swing set, but not interesting looking enough to respect my desire to decline. Which would be about a 6.7 one wagers? That was ‘his truth’. But it misses the point, or, rather, the big picture. Its like going on a long journey and only looking at the bits of the map that pertain to the parts of the road that are not directly ahead of you, or, if asked by an alien what cake is, you reply, “a substance for consumption”, or worse, “a floury item that comes in to being through measurements, implements, and heat”. You wouldn’t be wrong. You are looking at the way, but you are still getting lost. You’ve told the alien the truth, but he is none-the-wiser.

There is some truth I believe to hierarchies of beauty and desire, and it’s a touch tone deaf to utterly ignore it. It’s a clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right style vibe, when you have some people trying too give human desire a basic ‘score’, and others denying that beauty has any value attached to it at all. Indeed, some ugly people become vexed at the ‘all things bright and beautiful’ bunch because they are engaging in wilful denial of the The Halo Effect; the way in which attractiveness results in material, social gains. Pretty people get more social respect, better economic outcomes and so forth. Some ugly people, like some fat people, want to be able to articulate the potential unhappiness of that experience, and find it stultifying when some jump to happy retorts, like, “ugly is an ugly word! We are all beautiful!!” in a fashion that makes them feel better about themselves morally, but obscures the cause of some people’s discomfort in an unfair world. Often it is pretty people themselves who do this, sometimes just because they are kind, and sometimes because they just don’t want to acknowledge their unearned advantage.

It is true that what is considered beautiful changes across time and place. There is nothing much essential about the particulars, other than perhaps youthfulness, which commonly is a part of the package. But a sense of there being an ideal and a hierarchy seems persistent. And we all know when a supermodel, the feted 9/10 creature, walks in the room, we all do. But even so, if beauty exists on a bell curve, then most of us (6.7 out of 10, MAX ON A GOOD DAY people included) veer somewhere near the middle. The majority of people, when it comes to beauty, intelligence, social skills and other, are, average, or near. And it is here, in the morass of human averageness, that subjectivity becomes so important.

Personal preferences. What is it to you about women with green eyes, men with long, sinewy, limbs, women in hippy festival garb, that just assaults your attention? The energies of biochemistry. The memories of erotic encounters warming your perception of someone’s face, a visage that may have once drifted anonymously by in a populace buzz. Someone’s untouchability or the precarity of their mutual regard, further exciting your desire. That’s romanticism. In effect. And it cannot be quantified, the ego will not be mollified by vain attempts to give numbers to its vagaries. It may be sated by partnership with some officialised beauty, if you have the means to attract her, but it won’t protect you from falling in dangerous lust with the less remarkable looking nanny. Ask Mr Rochester of Jane Eyre fame. Or Jude Law, of fame fame. They know. And seeing as you got to the end of this waffly blog written by a woman with a flair for the romanticism of mediocrity…I’m guessing you might too.

Time

I could write screeds and screed about the dreaded Timewaster… an escort/companion/dominatrix’s largest natural predator. Only I’d bore myself, risk unduly worrying good clients that they might fall under the banner (if it worries you, you probably don’t), & the little shits wouldn’t read it anyway. Or if they did, it would be a hate read.

But I have a few words, a minor verbal exorcism of my frustrations.

They are many and varied forms of Timewasters, and, truthfully, a gargantuan percentage of my escort life is taken up with trying to manage them, trying to place sticky fly traps throughout the administrative architecture of my daily life, in order to avoid the buzz and the burn. But instinct is the best weapon; indeed, in the lion share of cases, once someone has come through to my phone/email and waved a read flag, no matter how patiently I try & answer their questions or meet them in the middle, more chicanery comes forth, not less. So, I find it helpful to just follow my initial instinct, and drop the communication.

It’s the ones who message like a teenager, “yo/what’s up/u about” etc. Or the ones who ask questions already easily viewed on the advert (honestly, it is so much easier having a quick read than making a phone call, so I’d assume in these cases they have no intention of booking and just enjoy ‘ringing around’). Or the ones that send ping pong messages (sending one well thought out message is easier than twenty short ones) or frequently messaging to enquire, but never actually confirming a booking. Or who are rude and curt in their tone or ask for a lower price or more photos or “if you have a boyfriend who can join us”. I’ve tried, I really have, it’s never worth it.

I’ve spoken to fellow escorts who’ve worried about ignoring these kinds of contact; “what if he does show?” they worry. He may. But you’re probably going to end up sat in silk Bluebella knickers scrolling aimlessly on TikTok waiting for the “I am parked” text that never arrives. But even if he did. Arrive, I mean…do you want to be intimate with someone who doesn’t have enough respect for other people to even engage with you in an ordinary, grown-up fashion? Indeed, in my experience, when I have ignored my niggles about someone, because they seemed terse, inpatient, etc, & I’ve actually gone through with a booking, the experience has usually left me with an uncomfortable taste in my mouth. Maya Angelou’s saying “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” is popular with people for a reason, it seems.

It’s hard to tell if people like this are disrespectful towards escorts particularly, or are just rude/entitled people generally. Do these pseudo-clients try to set up appointments with accountants with texts at 2am saying '“yo Nigel I like u maths we can have some fun I got some big accounts”, “Nigel u there???”, “the inland rev gets me hot Nigel answer”. Doubtful. Though they might book tables at restaurants and not show or send the steak back because it’s “not brown all the way through for some reason”.

But either way, I’m not asking for Downton Abbey style deferring from a potential client, I’m not a diva… just behaviours that show that he views me as an equal human being, not a utility or a beast of burden. Indeed, if you see an escort require you to read her advert before contacting her, approach her politely and so forth, and you think ‘up her arse bitch’, then I think you need to do some soul searching. Because though it can work both ways (I hear guys who tell me they had a bad feeling about an advert but followed their sexual energies not their mental faculties, and, well, regretted it) working in the sex industry as a woman, carriers some unique risks and dangers that having protocols like screening and deposits are is designed to help evade.

Because more often than not, it’s not the time wasting that worries me. You know what, if someone doesn't show, it sucks, especially if I’ve paid for a nice hotel, but I can make then best of it in other ways. But its what time-wasting style behaviours potentially portend; if someone does not respect a woman enough to send her a thoughtful message to enquire, if he doesn’t care about the vulnerability of the position of a woman who meets men for intimate encounters she doesn't know very well, I have a feeling he is more likely to be the type to pose a greater risk to me than simply being an irritant. And that is certainly not a risk not worth taking.