Nightwork Review

I just read a book called Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. [Amazon reference] I recommend it to those interested in how and why hostess clubs operate and their role in Asian society. I make this recommendation despite the horribly inappropriate cover art.

Nightwork is a somewhat scholarly work by an associate professor and one-time acting chair of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, Anne Allison. Apparently she took work as a hostess in a top tier club in Tokyo in the 1980’s as part of her research.

There are a few quibbles I have about the book and its broad academic generalizations about gender and social roles, but for the most part when it stays factual it is a good analysis and description of what goes on in a hostess club. The club where she served was in Roppongi and although it is often called a top club in the book, she admits that the quality of hostesses actually ranked it in tier two (of eight). The location would also be a factor.

What might surprise a western reader is that there is no sex at hostess clubs, at least at the reputable ones. It is all about women who know how to entertain, create conversation, and flirt, engender, provoke and otherwise cause socio-emotional responses. There is definitely a sexual undercurrent, but it is not about the sex act. For that, there are many other kinds of establishments to visit.

Special Purpose Rooms

I once had a special purpose room, the last time I had a house. It was a crazy room. I was flush with cash after making a second fortune, and I splurged a large amount on a media room.

Now when I say “media room,” I really mean a special purpose room for, well, enjoying media. In particular movies, music, and computers.

My media room was pretty crazy. I would tell you all about how crazy it was, but it was so unique it would readily identify me to many people. Suffice it to say that I had contracted with several well-known engineering and sound companies for the work, none of which normally take residential projects. (I will reference one very interesting component, which is a motion control system that works with several hundred movies. Check out D-Box.)

Suffice it to say that this totally insane expenditure got out of hand because it was less about sound or video, and more about an intellectual design challenge with cost constraint as a low priority. I have many associates and friends that have one or more special rooms that receive similarly obsessive treatments. I have seen rooms for books, art, wines, cars, computers, fossils, model trains, dolls, and any number of other things. Mine happened to be about audio and video. (Ok, I confess, I had an earlier space with a very cool library and reading room, but I have seen plenty that were more elaborate than my early effort there.)

My next media rooms for our upcoming living spaces will be far more modest. I do not have the time (nor the eyes or ears) to justify a media room that pushes the state of the art. Or more accurately, I want to devote my time, eyes and ears to other pursuits!

Jenny and I have another project: another special purpose room, but not a media room. This one is our pleasure room. We're naming it Xanadu, of course.

We may eventually put one in each home, but for now we are thinking of it in one particular city in a specific room of appropriate size and infrastructure.

The Xanadu idea arose from multiple sources. The couples spa suite at the Landmark Hotel in Hong Kong was one inspiration. An interesting sex room and a few soap club experiences in Japan were others. And our recent amateur dabblings in stripping, bondage, and massage seemed to indicate that ordinary furniture might be insufficient even with MacGuyver levels of ingenuity. Products like sex swings, benches, and swinging benches, and the Liberator point to interesting design directions for custom furniture. Since I have commissioned work in the past from shops with computer-based milling and forming capability, almost anything imaginable is possible to build.

Xanadu is quite a challenge. It has aspects of a media room, a bathroom, a spa, and a bedroom. There is even a kitchen aspect. It has to be flexible and reconfigurable like our moods. Yet we do not want it to be complex nor difficult to clean or maintain.

Yet Xanadu is a great project for us. Although challenging it has aspects that are fun, and many that are detail oriented. It has implementation and incremental progress. It is for Peau and us — plenty of motivating factors.

I will keep you posted. If you have any ideas to share, please do!

Sex Training, Part 1: Jenny's Project

Initially Jenny was somewhat disturbed by the nature of my experiments in sex and relationships. The parties and such she could explain as “guys having fun,” but my more, um, personal experiences were discomforting. In fact we had many discussions, some heated, about this early on in our relationship. Later as we built trust and I had more opportunity to demonstrate my commitment and love, she accepted it.

Now she finds it exciting. In general she has become much more interested in sex. She thinks it is because of her relatively sudden greater capacity for orgasms. We joke: it must be because she is thirty [PDF].

Once early on she tried to lap dance me. After all, at one point she had danced well enough to win a prize on television. Surprise: it was fun for us, but she was not that sexy. As I have posted elsewhere, I even dated strippers that did lap dances, though they were generally not so excited about taking work home, so to speak. So Jenny asked me to take her to a few lap dancing places (in the United States) to see how it is done. She even received a few dances herself. Although she is not bisexual, she found it interesting to see and feel what it was about. She developed some theories of her own on why men are interested in this — I may post them later. I was impressed how quickly she improved after that. When I was away from her on trips this year she would show me her progress on webcam (isn't modern life wonderful). When in person, there are many interesting variations on lap dances you can do in private with a committed partner that are (generally) unavailable from women at clubs, even the “highest mileage” clubs I've known.

We are thinking of installing a pole in one of our rooms. More on this later.

I posted earlier about our taking massage lessons also. We focused on our favorite massage techniques: Thai, so-called Swedish, Shiatsu and others, and learned a subset of the arts, the Greatest Hits, so to speak. From there we modify as our hearts, or other organs, desire. Jenny is getting pretty good. Alas, my progress has not been as good. There are also some soapland techniques in which Jenny has professed interest, but it is difficult to perfect without an appropriate location. More on this later, too. (The soapland link fails to mention the special seaweed-based lotion, which is important.)

And we have been experimenting with light bondage and discipline. A few weeks ago Jenny had an orgasm so intense that she basically passed out draped over a small glass table with her wrists and ankles tied to the table legs. I will do a separate post on that topic because I find it emotionally fascinating, a sexual allegory to male-female relationships which all have elements of sadism and masochism. But back on topic...

So that's the background. Now to the meat of this entry, my favorite self improvement project of our relationship:

After one several hour mutual massage session last January, Jenny brought up my experience with May, which she had read about. She wanted to understand what skills made that experience so spectacular. She was curious if she could learn them from me. It was a great question. Unfortunately I knew and could remember very little about the repetoire of specific techniques.

We talked about it off and on over the next several months.

Then one day Jenny told me she wanted to be trained in those arts.

I admit I did not take her suggestion very well, since I was very much upset by the image of her honing these skills on a series of other men. But that was not her point, and once I understood her intention, I was both flattered and excited. The key was that I was to be the test subject. There would be no other men. And the way to do this was to find a private trainer.

Now I have mentioned before that very few men or women, even the highest end women in the sex trade in the West, receive any training in sex. Some may read books, but the quality of most books is poor. Even the very few places in the East that do have training are waning. Nobody has the patience any more. But for me, perhaps due to my anorgasmia, see an enormous difference between the well-trained and the amateur. Make no mistake, there are great amateurs, and sex is one of those things where connection can make a bigger impact on perceived performance than skill, but, boy, don’t knock highly-trained skill until you have tried it.

Jenny had already turned out to be a fast learner. There were some purely physical/mechanical reasons why sex with her was so amazing, but beyond that, for example in oral sex, she had taken my instruction very well. More importantly she learned to listen to my responses. In less than a year she could nearly perfectly adapt to my feelings with her mouth, better than I could even do manually. Of course that was a year where we spent over thirty two weeks with each other 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We were in tune.

But add to that an expertly-trained level of skill? I had to ask myself: would I die of pleasure?

No wonder why I was totally excited.

So the search for a trainer was on. The ideal profile was a trainer who was retiring or had retired from the business, in Asia, of course. Using an active trainer would be difficult since the management of these establishments would not take kindly to personal instruction to a wife of a customer’s friend. No matter how good the customer.

It took another few months to line up three possibilities. I am posting this now because I received word from Jenny that she had interviewed all of them and had stack ranked them. The cost is high but manageable. It was up to me now to confirm the rankings. And it turns out that we would also need a location. There was no chain of Golds Gyms for sex.

I love a challenge.

To be continued.

Cheating Nature

Despite what you might think from the media, it is quite unlikely there are any behaviors that map to single genes. Yet between 2002 and 2005 the media was swept with stories about genes for homosexuality, aggression and violence, intelligence, and, yes, even infidelity, as if our complex behaviors were switched on and off by small fragments of DNA.

The infidelity stories were predominantly triggered by a recent study of twin females. Putting aside the general issues of studies that rely on self-reported behavior, the actual data has only circumstantial support for an infidelity gene. The data does, however, support the notion that infidelity is an inherited trait. It is still difficult to segregate the inherited and learned characteristics in twin studies, but we could assume it is true, that there is some genetic predisposition to infidelity. Does that make sense? Seemingly so, because even more compelling than the human twin studies are studies of animals, where the gamut of lifelong pair bonding to promiscuous behaviors are seen, but are always strongly associated with a species, that is, a genetic type. For example, marmosets are monogamous and the orgy-loving bonobos are most certainly not.

Variations within a species are interesting, but more likely merely factors rather than inherent behaviors. So let’s look at species behaviors for some insight about infidelity: as I wrote about elsewhere, prairie voles and meadow voles have very different fidelity characteristics, but inject vasopressin antagonists into male prairie vole (or into mice that have a similar neuroanatomical V1a receptor pattern) and you can get them to stray.

Even among species that are thought to be monogamous, such as swans and wolves, most of them “cheat” on the side even while they stay with their mate for life. Indeed, although it was conventional wisdom that 90% of birds were monogamous, new radio tracking and DNA based evidence indicates that this is more than 90% incorrect. In one study, 20 or more percent of chicks taken care of by bonded bluebirds — once considered among the most faithful of birds — are not fathered by the attentive male.

Humans fall somewhere in the middle of primate behaviors in terms of fidelity. The evidence is legion: ranging from social anthropology studies including harem management behaviors, to serial mating behaviors, to fertilization competitive features including the sperm count per ejaculation and female internal geometry changes.

The point is that fidelity is unnatural. It is in our nature to cheat.

So the challenge is: can I cheat nature?

The only tool I have to cheat nature is my mind. So let's see if it is up to this challenge.

To understand the nature of this challenge to nature, so to speak, let us delve into the goals and assumptions a little further.

Certainly there are examples of stable life-long pair bonding. For animals this is mostly about social pair bonding (e.g harems), resource management (e.g. hunting packs), and child rearing. The fact that most of those so-called “faithful” animals cheat is interesting (and sensible from a population dynamics and selfish gene perspective), but really a different issue: promiscuity, sex without the stable pair bonding, is different from polygyny and polyandry, sex with multiple partners. So the type of pair bonding is very important and can be quite distinct from sexual fidelity or monogamy.

And humans are not animals: on top of our having greater control over instincts, we also have many more daily distractions — Life Tasks — that are not about our survival. Most wolves don’t have to worry about how to manage the budget for their next startup, create long-term strategies to save up for that new car, deal with their children’s education, or vote in the next election. Also, relationships among humans include emotions: because we have risen above being sexually controlled by pheromones (we do not go into heat), we have these crazy things called emotions that drive us to create our social and sexual patterns — and as a bonus create new classes of mental health problems rarely seen in other animals. There is even the joy of intellectual sharing, something not present in animals but very much so in humans — an interesting discussion, learning and teaching, debate, co-creation tasks, and the like are not activities shared by other animals. These, too, could be a part of a “relationship fidelity.” Certainly high end courtesans today are providing intellectual and self-image stimulation, and not better sex, assistance in life tasks, child rearing, or (usually) social status improvement; their pricing premium reflects some value to intellectual interaction in a male-female relationship.

So our relationship goals can be likewise dissected:

1. Social or resource management based fidelity or pair bonding
   
   
2. Child rearing fidelity or paid bonding
   
   
3. Life tasks fidelity or pair bonding
   
   
4. Intellectual fidelity or pair bonding
   
   
5. Emotional fidelity or pair bonding
   
   
6. Sexual fidelity or pair bonding
   

When discussing this with Jenny, we narrowed down the important components to emotional, life tasks, social, sexual and intellectual, child rearing being irrelevant in our case (more on that later.) Jenny and I have different orderings, however. From most important to least important:

Jenny	Me
Emotional	Sexual
Life Tasks	Emotional
Sexual	Life Tasks
Social	Social
Intellectual	Intellectual

Well, at least we have the bottom of the lists the same! We both value intellectual discussion, but fidelity there is not that important. I guess she can accept that I am an intellectual whore, willing to talk to anybody who shows some conversational leg! We also have some distinct social circles, a side-effect from different upbringings in different countries. So fidelity there is not that important, with one exception: that society at large should view us as a pair. That is not subject to negotiation.

For Jenny the emotional commitment has to be 1 on 1. That is also important to me, but I take the view that I can’t support all of Jenny’s emotional support and don’t mind if she is finding support elsewhere. Jenny wants to provide all my emotional support. Without going too much into my personal life, I think it will be a challenge, but she feels up to it. The point is that she wants a commitment from me that I will not turn to others for emotional support, unless, of course, it is about issues generated by her.

I have written before that I am a fairly jealous person, perhaps surprising to women I have dated who were providers or strippers. I have a fairly hard switch, however, between dating and loving, and in the latter case I am an owner. The intensity of this feeling is surprising to me, but I revert to the plains ape mentality, with a desire to kill threatening males. Jenny actually loves this. I don’t fully understand why, but rather than being defensive or offended when I am jealous, she likes it. Not enough to purposefully trigger jealousy, but, go figure.

Doing this kind of deconstruction is interesting to me, but crazy for most others with whom I have discussed this. Why not live a simpler life, like Tucker Max? Just show off, bang gals you like and are willing, and live it up? Why fight evolution?

Just not my way, sorry. I go the road less travelled (and less popular, judging from the attention garnered by the Tucker Max’s of the world.)

But having said that, I do know such behavior is within me. It is written in my evolutionary heritage. But I can’t use evolution as an excuse. I have to keep in mind that I have cheated in relationships in the past. Perhaps not egregiously, but well on the slippery slope. I have also avoided temptations. This is a key area where I need eternal vigilance: I previously wrote about some of these nightmare scenarios and issues with avoiding temptation.

As I develop this blog, I will be interleaving my regular entries with stories of Why Did I Cheat along with stories of Temptation Avoided. Stay tuned.

Our Baby Peau

An earlier post reminded me about the Marriage Fund I set up last summer. I thought this is worth an update, since it embodies much of the values in our monogamous relationship. Here were the key points from my earlier post, along with the update in italics:

1. Create the explicit rules that are the foundation of our relationship. I wrote about the importance of doing this here. We have been doing this, but memory is notoriously imprecise, so we are now working on writing them down. This reiterates the operating constraints noted here. My point: I would never do a hundred million dollar business deal relying on human memory and spur of the moment thinking. I would think carefully about the deal and commit issues, expectations, and obligations to paper. My relationship is worth much more than any business deal, so why would I invest less effort and care into it?
   
   Jenny and I have a living document that is our relationship contract. It has been revised a few times, but not as much as I had originally anticipated. I do not have permission to post it, however.
   




2. Set explicit shared goals and projects to achieve them. See the point above. If it’s important we should not leave it to whim or nature. Nature is perverse about sex. Just watch Nova or those BBC specials. We need constructive projects to keep it together. These projects embody my interaction schema: intellectual, professional, social, sexual, exploration, sharing, friendship, and romance. It’s fun planning these. We track them all the time, but review comprehensively every year. I will blog about our first review later.
   
   We have several projects: one for-profit, one non-profit, several house related, and several self improvement related. At the moment we have too many projects and are paring down a few (meaning, for example, that some real estate will have to remain undeveloped or unimproved.) But there is one project which particularly excites me relating to sexual training. I will write about it shortly.
   




3. Cover the basics to reduce extreme or desperate behaviors. To that end I have established a trust fund for Jenny. It doesn’t pay out too much, but it’s more than enough to live on comfortably, based on her current earning power with reasonable growth. Nobody should feel captive to their ability to afford living expenses. The trust also holds a modest condominium which can be used for rental income or as a living quarters.
   
   I have written about my three party system for relationships, which makes the relationship itself a third human-like entity. We have even named it. I will not post the name we use but for purposes of the blog let's name it Peau. You can think of Jenny’s trust as a life insurance policy for Peau. It dies, we split, then Jenny is taken care of.
   




4. Create shared incentives that support shared goals. I am creating a Marriage Fund! Family and close friends will invest into a Marriage Fund. The marriage fund will pay a quarterly dividend for each year past year five that we remain married. If the marriage fails the money goes to charity (under some definition of failure that does not include a narrow subset of orderly dissolutions). This is the embodiment of my three party system. It is not a contract between the two of us; it is a contract with the relationship itself. This also serves as an icon for the socioeconomic investment and obligation noted here. And, yes, Jenny and I also pay into the marriage fund.
   
   The marriage fund evolved into an interesting beast. It is an asset secured multi-tranche debt fund with an option twist. Basically the investors receive an option to a debt service rate. I have contributed a good portion of our “couples” assets into the fund, predominantly real estate. Upon death or dissolution the assets are sent to a charitable trust. The option pays a coupon; the actual investment instrument is two options: a five and ten year option. There are buy back provisions. In theory you could take long or short positions, and we could do more leverage in these days of CDOs. Maybe in the future.

This thing is being managed by a private client services group. Let me tell you, there were some eyes-a-poppin’ when I described the structure to them, although I admit I did not describe all of the personal reasoning behind the crazy structure. There are tax headaches aplenty on this structure given the international composition of both investors and assets, but making a tax efficient global investment vehicle was not the point. Pooling with the community was an important point; making certain that was a return to investors as long as Peau was alive was another key point.

The other day Jenny pointed out that our “baby” Peau is already a millionaire.

I pointed out that our relationship is a hedge fund. Which tend to underperform the market [warning, PDF file].

There are also complexities regarding hedging against longevity and the issues of reporting. But that's for another posting.

Perhaps this is truly strange, but Peau even has an email address. Jenny and I sometimes dash off a note to Peau to tell it about our feelings — positive or negative. Peau’s email address is transparent — all missives come to Jenny and myself so we can see them. It is a purely psychological crutch, but it has been, in my opinion, surprisingly effective. There are many subtle features of this structure that Make Sense To Me. I will not bore you with a comprehensive discussion of them, but as an illustration consider the following scenario: in London we are gifting our real estate lease to Peau, solely to the benefit of the survival of our future relationship. It is explicitly clear to both of us that it is a relationship asset. Perhaps some couples routinely think that way, but Peau makes it very obvious and very much in our face.

Keep in mind that every time we sit down to talk about the relationship it is initially difficult. It does not sit well with the modern fairy tale-injected values we learn about romance. When tired or frustrated it is very annoying to feel forced into a rational discussion. But we have found that once momentum has built, say an hour or so into it, it becomes a shared task and quite motivating. It makes us feel closer and over time has become easier and easier.

Weird? Yes. But so far it works.

Boo!

It is the afternoon after Halloween (in Asia) and I think we have recovered from the freak show that is Halloween in Hong Kong. I had no idea.

Unfortunately this post is going to put the other posts in the queue out of order. I am allowing it to jump in the queue to post it in a timely manner, whereas the other posts which were started earlier have not been completed. Ah, the challenges of asynchrony.

Don't get me wrong; it is different from New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where I have previously had debauched experiences. After all, Halloween is predominantly an American holiday (I am including South and Central America here), although its origins are in Druidic traditions in what is now Ireland and Britain. I think Ireland still celebrates Halloween; other places in Europe have different celebrations around the same time: I find the Spanish approach to the holiday more frightening, their El Dia De Los Muertos has a real morbid ritual feel. And England now celebrates this, kind of, as Guy Fawkes Day, named after the English terrorist recently rekindled in the consciousness of Americans in the movie, "V for Vendetta."

But in Hong Kong, this is a time that American expats go crazy along with their buddies looking for an excuse to go out. Because the average expat has access to more entertainment expense account than an average American, along with the fact that Hong Kong has an active movie industry, means there is quite an impressive Halloween celebration in the city.

Knowing most of the ex-heads of major investment banks in Hong Kong helps secure invites to the most interesting parties. (It's hard to know a current head of a major bank because they seem to change so quickly. And they are usually busier and drink less.) Jenny and I had a pretty good time. Because we did not have very much time in Hong Kong to prepare, we ended up with less sophisticated costumes (meaning there were no special effects or latex molds needed). We both went as North Korean missiles. It was a good conversation starter for that crowd.

Because the expats do party too hard and too wild, we left a little early. We wandered into a room salon where all the women were also dressed up. And, boy, some of the outfits were very, um, nice. We hung out and did some singing, and then went back to the hotel by 2 AM. Yeah, we are wimps, but had we dragged ourselves in at 5 AM, we would not have been able to launch those missiles...

Honest Disclosure

I have written before about the strange basis of my relationship with Jenny. It is an experiment, hopefully a life-long one. We do a major assessment every quarter.

Because of this, everything in the blog is subject to Jenny's view. But not her editing or approval. It is yet another test of the honesty approach. It turns out that this constraint is not nearly as confining as many seem to think; honesty does mean I say things that might seem hurtful, but it is also a litmus test -- if it's too difficult to post something, then I must be hiding something. That's not always wrong, but it is worth examining. A blog is not a channel for communications with your significant other.

Anyhow, I just thought I would make that clear.