Tease and Denial: In Defense of Subtlety
Sometimes I joke that I get paid to keep my clothes on. There’s a lot of truth to that.
Modern Western culture has gotten so crass that men fantasize about women who keep their clothes on and don’t go all the way. I advertise not that I’ll be naked when you call, but that you’ll be teased — you might not get to see me naked at all. I’ll take my time and make sure you see my lingerie — if I let you see my lingerie — from every angle, half-hidden beneath my clothes at first. Peeking out.
Lifting up my short satin slip...
(This country has completely forgotten slips. My little green satin one is ready to be retired after a good run and I’m thinking a claw-foot tub and the complete decadence of shiny satin, warm lighting, and a slippery female body drenched in a clinging little slip…)
Modern men are hungry for charm, for implication rather than brash and in a hurry. It’s the line of the bra under the dress, not this taking it off so fast he doesn’t have time to see it.
I say he because a femme who knows her arts will take her time and make her butch smolder.
Fishnets. High heels. Sexy looks, flirtatious words, seductive games. Novelty. Adventure. The rush of attraction. Seduction as part of the narrative arc sex describes, building tension (dramatic and otherwise) before the climax and afterglow. An opening — ah! — that draws the audience in, foreshadowing the lip-biting, hip-grinding nights to come…
We’ve traded sexy in for sex. Sex under spotlights, sex in full view, skip straight to the fucking. Forget the foreplay. Worse — forget the seduction. Some modern porn includes the foreplay, and it’s the hottest; it’s much more real when you can see them feeling each other up through the clothes, working around them, the immediacy of it… but who knows how to seduce anymore? I love forthrightness but sometimes I worry the price we paid for directness was suspense. Or enchantment.
Sex is supposed to take us out of the everyday. You must set a mood, set the stage. A magician has tools, they have ritual, they have craft and will. They create a sacred space in which to work. In the act, in practicing their art, they become something more than themselves; they touch immortality.
Sexuality has that power which is why it is sacred. That is why it is feared. Empowered crassness is not disgusting; it is sad. Sex can be rough and primal and free of pretense without losing that energy but it must never, ever be ordinary. As sex-positives we go too far when we remove sex from its mysterious brown wrapper and bring it into the mundane.
Let us wonder. Let us dream.
As a tease, I imply much and promise very little, but I will promise you this: you will never see me fully nude. Not in my photo sets, not on cam, not in videos. I fetishize clothing, after all. It’s much sexier to keep the wrapping on, half-torn with just enough exposed to peek at your gift. Eroticism is in the mystery.
