Cha Cha Changes

I seem to increasingly find myself living in homes that have ‘period features’ and inactive fireplaces. I say inactive; I am writing as a squirrel panders about in the blocked off chimney, scuttling chunks of debris echoing about the cavernous inlet. My She-Cat is lazing on the chaise, her ears bent in the direction of the fire; sitting with quiet caution. Alas, my Tom-Cat+ is apoplectic, scurrying frantically to and fro to find the front or back entry points; neither of which exist. The squirrel unintentionally taunts him with his adventuring, but I feel it will be the vase of pink peonies on the coffee table, or my glass of lemon water that will be the most likely to suffer.

Box organising, removal vans, deep cleans, key returns…all dusted and done and I’ve gotten to Leeds in more or less one piece. I am pleased to have already been acquainted with the local wildlife. Indeed, I’ve also watched a hedgehog totter across the garden, bug sniffing as he went. From the semi-harsh wilds of the moors - deer and barn owls in my thorny hill of a garden - to the cut grass and rose bushes of a Northern Leeds suburbia.

It’s not the only change of note (for me at least) this week. Rumblings about the fix in UK law surrounding online adult material have finally reached the escort-client town square, as a consequence of the most used escort directory finally making a move on how it plans to adapt. In brief, the law means that online adult material has to exist behind age verification procedures and cannot be accessed casually. As a consequence, many companionship directories are de-pornifying their content so-as to avoid having to ask users to comply to such verifications. That means, in practice, ladies having to only post images of themselves in demure poses and non-revealing attire. Cute dresses and coyness in place of crotchless panties and legs akimbo.

The clamours have come forth as one might expect; it’ll never work! what is the point? it's a violation of our human rights, incursions into freedom of speech and so on, et cetera. I was once similarly exercised about supermarkets requiring ID for alcohol sales and smoking being banned in pubs. But then time whistles along and it becomes apparent that such regulatory changes are not straight-jackets, rather somewhere on a spectrum between necessary and amusingly benign. To my mind, it was always strikingly inevitable that liberal democratic governments would keep working at making explicit adult content less straightforwardly convenient just like restrictions on smoking were always going to be in the post as soon as the evidence that smoking=lung cancer became impossible to ignore. People got their pants in dance about the fact for many years, decrying the nanny state and puffing away with an air of armchair anarchy (I would’ve been one of them; I am reformed).

I also imagine in a few years time people will adapt to the new normal and think it odd that such material was ever so easily accessible in the first place, just like its weird to think that once upon an age (The Victorian age specifically) it was legal for children to buy cigarettes and alcohol and continued to be practically easy for them to do so for many years to come.

I don’t have the post-move energy to marshal a full polemic as to why the usual reactionary libertarianism around this stuff is unhelpfully distorting, but I will say this: I’m kinda relieved about it all to be honest. I enjoy sex, I’m pretty liberal about sexual politics (ladette liberalism circa 1995), but I won’t miss most of the DIY porn clips that bloat the edges of Adultwork’s already ugly interface. It's hard to say that really, because its not uncommon for it to elicit a Very Cross Response from someone, somewhere, as though expressing a negative perception of some forms of popular pornography is akin to barging into a bedroom during a personal moment with a Kalashnikov screaming ‘pervert!’ and demanding the codes to all relevant devices. Is it really so bonkers to say you enjoy being an escort and doing some kinky stuff in private but you don’t want to have to be subjected to screenshots of a vexed Betty getting several cocks the size of the starship enterprise pummelled into her various vestibules?

Older porn was mostly OK, if a bit slapstick and silly, if that helps my case. But we can all be so hopeless singular about sexual politics, can’t we? You are either with us or against us, wholly pro-sex or wholly against it. I am, and plan to keep on being, “pro-sex to a certain degree in certain places and certain times and support sensible attempts at regulation on the matter.”

But perhaps I am a prude after all. And perhaps I don’t really mind about it, as it so easy to be a prude ‘these days’. Now that it is not abnormal for people to throw a bit of ‘erotic asphyxiation’ into the mix of a casual sexual encounter with someone they barely know and without prior discussion and arrangement. You know, you are in fraganti and she begs you to kiss her neck, squeeze her breasts, kiss between her thighs, cut off her oxygen supply…

Maybe in a strange way it is presumed that not wanting to be a passive participant to someone’s predilections confers immediate judgement, but I really don’t think it does. Like, I’m very OK that some people enjoy sniffing their own effluence but I don’t want to be party to that either. And I resonate and relate to the urge to pretend one is Brian May with your wife’s tennis racket (don’t ask how I know), and if I had a wife, and she had a tennis racket, I’d probably do the same. But the mortification of either being caught or observing such a ridiculous pursuit would be excruciating for most.

But even where there is judgement, I’m not convinced that that is the worst thing in the world. Folk judge me for being a strumpet all the time. I’m not sure I care. Not, wait. I don’t care. I say this, because I think some people get a bit unnecessarily animated about government regulations++ because they are instinctively anxious that something they participate in is being viewed at through a critical lens. But it is ethically necessary for a healthy society that we are all capable of withstanding empathic, thoughtful, evidenced-based scrutiny on how we show up in the world and the presumptions we hold about what we believe to be our ‘rights’ and what we think we ‘need’.

You see something similar with meat production. I eat meat. I have mixed feelings about the fact. Either way, we are long overdue as a society in having a grown up conversation about the growing excesses of the meat industry and the move from smaller, grassland farms to industrial farming and the negative consequences that has for animal welfare and biodiversity. But some people get agitated in these situations because their immediate reaction is to assume any conversation around regulations on farming are an immediate comment on their meat consumption specifically, and they want to shut the conversation down.

We live in complex, densely populated, highly mediated cultures and we need therefore, to make compromises between our needs and desires and the needs and desires of others. Yes parents should take an active interest in how their children are consuming online material, but we live not as atoms but managed eco-systems, and we regularly consent to social restrictions that are meant to aid our collective functioning all the time. Yes one should drive one’s car sensibly, whilst acknowledging the need for laws around speed restrictions and seatbelts.

And it’s a sensible compromise, the basic assumptions underpinning the regulations. You can access porn but behind paywalls and age verifications. It's an off-shoot of the old liberal adage; the public is for publicing and the private is for privating. For me it’s manifested as being an introverted poetry-reader in the streets and a thirsty M&S office wench between the sheets (if thats not too much info). Then there are third spaces, the off-shoots; swingers clubs, nudist beaches, hospital wards, swimming pools. Those weird health/sex segments on morning magazine TV. One might even include bars and nightclubs in their way. Places where the private and the public co-mingle, to varying degrees, for pleasure or necessity.

But still here, rules exist. Indeed, perhaps even more stringently than in the ‘public space’ itself, due to the risk of compartment slippage. I see adult content as a kind of ‘third space’. It’s not wholly private or public, and to keep the freedom of that complexity it needs some regulation. Whether the specific technological details of the changes will work or not, the principle of having the right to make and watch porn, but as long as one is willing to identify oneself as consenting and ‘of age’ and whereby walls exist around the practice so others don’t have to be passive party, is only some outrageous incursion in a wild-west digi-culture where we are all at risk of being indulged by the glut of immediacy that new medias have provided.

The problem has been termed ‘gamification’: over-use of personalised digital media leads us to treat the world as a video game where the ingredients of life are ephemeral, movable objects that exist purely for our own purpose. And as studies of game-addiction have shown, the inability to traverse the landscape of the game for whatever reason (skill-plateauing, internet cuts and real life interruptions) can trigger irrational irritability, even rage. We are so used to smart phones serving us like little chrome butlers, that when some restriction goes up we feel like our life-support tube is being throttled.

In any case. The change will happen, people will adapt, escort’s pretty summer dress and pencil skirt collection will burgeon, clients will come to enjoy the mild air of mystery that hidden nudity provokes and I’ll go to sleep tonight glad I have a keen interest in social prediction and personal insurance. Still-while my Tom-cat is furiously watching the fireplace, even though the noise within has long since stopped, my She-cat having already nonchalantly eyed the (presumably) offending squirrel making off across the rose garden, dimming gently in the mild spring dusk.

KISSES, CORA LEIGH

LEEDS, UK INDEPENDENT ESCORT, DOMINATRIX & COMPANION

+He isn’t a Tom, his scrotum has been spliced out, but he was asleep, he doesn’t know, and I’ll never tell him. He still stomps about with masculine bombast, leaving all kinds of minor destruction in his wake; practice for the confidence he will no-doubt require in the inevitable event our colony is ambushed by outside aggression. Every time he careens through my morning tea tray and sullies more bed linen with honeyed Assam, he looks up at me from the mess with the sharp look of mind alert with foresight, reproving me for fussing over stains when we should all be as he… hawkish, vital and ready.

++- Always necessary for a functioning, high trust society, regulated, compromise laden democracies produce better social outcomes than consumer obsessed libertarian societies, see the difference between Norway and the USA for further details…