Age and infirmity

We all grow old, unless we’re unlucky. If we’re very lucky, we also keep our health. When I was young, I thought that old people and sick people were somehow on life’s shelf, measuring out their days in patience, waiting for the end. Sex and fun were for the young and healthy.

At the time, I thought that people of forty were old, and that anyone who had anything worse than a cold should be in the queue for euthanasia. I now freely admit I was wrong. As age and infirmity have staked their claim on my body, I have remained determined to enjoy my life. I still drink wine, I still love chocolate, and I still delight in the pleasures of the flesh. If my younger self could see me now, she’d be appalled, and perhaps disgusted.

I’m sorry, Rosebud, Rose is loving what’s left of her life. My petals are no longer crisp and dewy, my leaves might be spotted and wilting, but I still look forward to the visit of the passing bee. Perhaps the youngest and fittest bees are buzzing away into the distance, looking for the brightest and finest blooms, brimming with nectar and powdered with pollen, but there are still bees for me. I love those bees, and they love me.

Be my bee, and I can be your Rose. There will be no seedlings from our union, but that should never stop us from coming together. There is more to the flower and the bee than productive pollination. Drink what is left of my nectar, and I shall enjoy the touch of your tongue. As our day wanes, let us make the most of the last of the light. I may be old, and infirm, but I am still here, and still able to love.

billierosie

Like me, billierosie writes erotica. There's more to erotica than sex, though obviously, without the sex, it wouldn't be very erotic. The internet is awash with descriptions of sex, but it takes more than that to make a good story. billierosie explores what makes people love and lust, their fantasies, secrets, and lies, their dark desires.

For five days, starting today, Saturday May 23rd, Rebellious Slave is free to download to your Kindle from Amazon US and Amazon UK. Delve into the dark world of the Coterie, meet mistresses Claudia and Melissa, and find out what Reuben has done wrong.

Besides her published stories, billierosie also writes a weekly blog, where you can find links to all her books, and you can follow her thoughts on Twitter.

The laws of attraction

People are attracted to people, in general. I’m mostly attracted to men, but from time to time I find myself attracted to another woman. I have a friend who regards himself as gay, but he spent a few months in a passionate sexual relationship with a woman. It didn’t stop him fancying men, and when it all finished, he moved on to another man.

I’ve never been to prison, but from what I’ve read, homosexuality is relatively commonplace. It isn’t because most criminals are gay, but with no one of the opposite sex available, you make do. I went to an all girls’ school, and it was a bit the same. We’d generally have preferred a boy, but there weren’t any. The priest who took us for mass was an old man, and about as attractive as most of the nuns. One of my best friends had a brother who was at a school not far away, and when her parents came to pick her up, he lounged against the side of their car while we all ogled him from the Geography Room windows. I pretended he was looking up at me, and that I could go and stay with them at half term and swoon in his arms, but it never happened.

Sister Philomena (not her real name) was younger and better looking than most of the other nuns, and we fantasised that she was really a man. She took us for gym and hockey, and she was muscular and flat chested, but she had periods like the rest of us, or she wouldn’t have needed the big bag of Dr Whites I saw on the windowsill in her room once. I still fancied her, especially when it rained during hockey and her Aertex shirt ended up plastered to her skin.

I had to wait until later for my men, but none of it did me any harm.

Some of my friends who were once gay now regard themselves as straight, and equally I have friends who were once straight, but who now regard themselves as gay. I happen to think they’re as wrong as the people who would never admit to the possibility of switching teams in the first place. We’re all capable of being attracted to the right person, whatever their gender or ours. Of course, if you like big strong men, you’re less likely to go looking for a ballerina, but if the right ballerina came along, and your guard was down, you might find yourself in her arms. Don’t fight it. Live and love. The only law of attraction is that it brings people together, like gravity.

Caravaggio and Blind Faith

Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia shows a naked cupid. He's very realistic (apart from the wings, of course), with uneven teeth and a small penis. If I were to find a prepubescent boy, fit him with a pair of wings, and photograph him in such a pose, I suspect there would be an outcry, and I'd possibly end up in court. There are various laws in Britain that cover the making and possessing of obscene images of children. In general, they are very sensible laws. It's the definition of obscene that falls short. Is Caravaggio's cupid obscene? How about my imaginary boy?

In the past, the puritans had less of a stranglehold. Take the cover of the Blind Faith album, by the supergroup of the same name. It features a naked girl holding a toy aeroplane. The photographer apparently saw a girl on the Tube, and thought she'd make a good model. The girl didn't want to do it, so her eleven-year-old sister modelled instead. If a photographer today approached a girl on the Tube and suggested she should take her clothes off for an album cover, all hell would break loose.

It isn't just Blind Faith. Roger Dean's picture for the back cover of Yesterdays shows two naked blue children, one of whom is peeing. Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy shows naked children climbing on the Giant's Causeway. The cover of Nirvana's Nevermind shows a naked baby swimming. Like the Blind Faith cover, they're great images, but I seriously doubt they'd be allowed today.

All of which is a shame. Just because some evil people get off on images of children, the world is impoverished. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not advocating the legalisation of child pornography, just a sensible approach. Predatory paedophiles are evil, but I don't expect Rolf Harris was particularly influenced by the Blind Faith cover, and the new puritanism didn't stop 1400 children in Rotherham being sexually exploited. Whatever happened to common sense?

Once we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater, where next? Perhaps we should continue further down the same road, and ban pictures of money, in case people are tempted to go out and steal it, or cars, in a bid to stamp out joyriding. There's definitely a case for getting rid of all those old master paintings of the Madonna with a naked baby. And the Caravaggio.

The Puritans in the Playroom

This is a Blogger blog, hosted by Google. Like all Blogger blogs containing adult material, there is a content warning, with an orange thing to click on, saying, "I UNDERSTAND AND I WISH TO CONTINUE" in big letters.

Two of my friends have had emails from Blogger (Google, really), containing the following. "In the coming weeks, we'll no longer allow blogs that contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video. We'll still allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary or scientific contexts, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content."

It's sad that the puritans are once again trying to take over the playroom, but what is surprising is that it only applies to pictures and video. My posts The Naming of Parts and How Far Can You Go? both contain explicit language, but there aren't any pictures (or videos). My short fictional pieces contain explicit language and descriptions of sexual activity, but Blogger haven't said anything. I don't flatter myself that it is because of any educational, documentary, or scientific content. My suspicion is that it is because the puritans only look at the pictures, like semi-literate children.

I could congratulate myself on having got away with it, except that the semi-literate are dangerous. In 2000, a paediatrician had her house daubed with white paint, because "People don't want no paedophiles here". It's presumably the same people who failed to understand the meaning of "WISH TO CONTINUE" and clicked on the orange thing by mistake.

Watercolour by Gerda Wegener

Luckily for Google, however, the puritans' lack of expertise when it comes to clicking on things means that Google can contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or videos. You can type a word like 'topless' or 'penis' into the search box, but then you have to click on the link to 'images'. Try it. Some of the results are educational, possibly documentary, and scientific, at a pinch, since human biology is a science. Meanwhile, here is a watercolour by Gerda Wegener. I assume I could have used it to illustrate my short story, The New Leda, since it's artistic. You can find a lot more of Gerda Wegener's art by typing her name into the Google search box, but you will probably still have to click on the link.

The Beaufort scale

Sir Francis Beaufort is best remembered as the originator of the Beaufort scale, describing wind strengths. However, there was more to the man than that. He was the author of a guide to the coastline of Asia Minor, and it may well have been Beaufort who suggested Charles Darwin to Fitzroy as the ‘scientific gentleman’ to accompany the second voyage of The Beagle. He was a naval hero, having been wounded in 1800 and again in 1812, and he slept with his sister Harriet.

This isn’t the stuff of idle gossip. Francis Beaufort kept journals, written in code, which were deciphered after his death. Nor were he and Harriet a pair of unruly teenagers, experimenting behind the handcart sheds. Their affair took place after the death of Francis's first wife, Alicia, in 1834, when Francis was sixty. His unmarried sister Harriet was only some three years younger than him, and in a letter to their sister Frances in 1838, she wrote, "My face has become so wrinkled and odious." In the same letter she says of her 'dear Master', "You know in days of yore I used to be called his slave, and so I am still if it be called slavery, to wish to oblige so dear and so kind a friend - who certainly never unreasonable in his demands - and to whose tenderness and affection it is but due to try to please him in small as well as large things." She calls him 'my dear Francis', too.

The whole thing is rather touching, but it wasn't to last. Later in 1838, Francis Beaufort married Honora Edgeworth, Frances's stepdaughter. He was knighted in 1848, and he died in Hove in 1857. Harriet died in 1865.

On the Beaufort scale from nun to Fred West, Francis and Harriet shouldn’t create enough of a stir to rustle a puritan’s skirts, so it's sad that Francis was apparently tormented by guilt. How much nicer it would have been if he and Harriet had lived happily ever after, breezing gently together through their twilight years.

Hair

Hair is funny stuff. Depending on whose it is, and where it is, it is either desirable or undesirable. When I was young, we had plaits or pigtails, and no girl had anything shorter than a bob. On the other hand, until the Beatles came along, men with long hair were considered foppish and effeminate, and the crew cut and short back and sides were the norm. That's all changed.

Completely bald women are still something of a rarity, but they do exist, and like Gail Porter, they can be just as beautiful as women with long hair. I can't be alone in thinking that Jessie J looked hotter after she'd had her head shaved for Comic Relief than before. It wouldn't suit all of us, but it can look very sexy. Remember Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3?

Men more often have shaved heads, probably because nature robs them of the hair on their heads anyway, and as with women, it doesn't suit all of them. Bruce Willis and Patrick Stewart look great, but there's always a danger that the shaven headed man could look like a thug.

Men with beards are apparently considered manly, but I've never really understood the attraction of all that coarse facial hair, and designer stubble is even worse, like kissing a hairbrush. Give me a smooth face any day.

Moving away from the head, hair becomes even more controversial. Men almost never shave their armpits, and women mostly do. Not all women, of course, but if we think someone might see, we generally tidy up. Much the same goes for legs. There is a feminist view that we shouldn't shave our body hair, or pluck our eyebrows, but if you're going to go down that road, why bother with pretty clothes, either? If I think I look and feel better with sleek shins, I'm going to keep waxing, and if my eyebrows decide they'd like to meet in the middle, I'll keep plucking.

I don't much like hairy chests, either. A few silky hairs are nice, but the tangle of fibres that is supposed to constitute manliness reminds me of nothing as much as a doormat. Give me Jacob over Esau every time.

And so to the pubes. Female porn stars seem routinely to shave theirs, along with a few of the men, which seems a shame. I enjoy having my pubic hair pulled, gently, a few hairs at a time, one way and then the other. You can move the skin without touching it. I have a friend who has a few fine hairs around his nipples, and he enjoys having them tugged, in much the same way. The hairs around my nipples are so short that he'd need tweezers and a magnifying glass, but if they were longer I can see that I'd like it too.

As I've grown older, I've gone greyer. The hair on my head is dyed. If I let it grow out, I'd probably look like a road, with a white line down the middle. I don't bother with my underarms as often as I used to. My pubic hair has spread out, sparser in the middle than it used to be, and spreading to the tops of my thighs. If I ever want to wear a swimsuit again, I'll wax it, but for the moment, I'm happy for it to sprawl. There's more to pull.