Why the Nigella Superhero Meme Does Not Exist

Women are dominating my news feed. From Kim Kardashian’s baby, to Sarah Palin’s ‘Allah’ gaff, Hilary Clinton’s pant-suited foray into Twitter, and the Duchess of Cambridge’s last public appearance, I am being bombarded with the female face. Yet, it is the terrified visage of Nigella Lawson being choked in a public restaurant by her husband of 9 years that has me reeling.

From the outraged and the sympathetic, to the slightly off-colour (see: Dee Dee Dunleavy), commentators have continued to sum up the story in simple terms:

This was an overt act of domestic violence. In a public space. Nobody intervened. And neither did Nigella.

Despite claims from her husband, Charles Saatchi, that it was a ‘playful tiff’, early coverage of the story casts considerable light onto public perceptions of violence, women and celebrity.

For me, the Nigella Lawson of three days ago occupied that difficult space that gets near to defining the perfect woman. She effortlessly straddled the angel-whore dichotomy, wielding her sexuality with as much skill as she did a paring knife. She had curves. She appeared to unite commercial success and fame, whilst preserving her traditional role of a home cook, wife and mother with ease.

So why didn’t Nigella whip out a luscious, dripping, monster baguette from her handbag, and wack the douchebag over the head with it? This was perhaps been the only conceivable situation in which woman-made sandwich and feminism may have cohabited the news space successfully. It would have also made for an epic photograph/Vine/Youtube post.

It’s because in this moment, Nigella was not miraculously immune to what we perceived as an act of domestic violence.

This is frustrating. It’s frustrating because so many of us maintain an internal dialogue about how we’ll react if faced with the same situation. We’ve been through high school classes and workplace sessions about not tolerating this kind of bullshit, and we like to wax poetic about kicking assailants in the balls or screaming bloody murder or mobilising the pepper spray and running away. When our vision of the perfect woman is violated, so too are our comforting narratives.

And then we attempt to move on. We try to graduate from an empowered, ball-busting character to a damsel in distress. Or, we try to appeal to humanity. We question why nobody intervened. Perhaps the public did not wish to interfere. Perhaps the very same pedestal that allowed us to adore and aspire to Nigella, kept us from crossing the boundary and speaking up. Maybe the moat around the star was so filled with paparazzi and opportunistic iPhone journalists, that capturing the sellable moment was just far too high a priority.

Nigella was quiet in her response. She left the restaurant, removing herself from the situation and tweeting a glorious photograph of a buttery bagel. Safety and comfort food. Safety and normality.

And she coped.

There won’t be a meme. There won’t be a sketch of Nigella donning chocolate sauce army paint and hitting back at her adversary. Because this is reality. The face of domestic violence endures – unexplainable and inexcusable. And sometimes the fist is still mightier than the sandwich.

 

Gerard (Paris via Far, Far Away, February-May 2013)

Stepmother: And, by royal command, every eligible maiden is to attend.
Drizella: Why, that’s us!
Anastasia: And I’m so eligible!

Cinderella

I often dance through fairytales. I believe in parables, escape into Hollywood and forget myself in television serials. Life can be built on borrowed scenarios – we learn that from the moment we go to Sunday School and they sell sheaves of corn and blades of grass and proliferating loaves and fish as infinitely applicable to contemporary life. If corn works, we fantasize, then why not royal balls and brunch afterwards at the Ritz?

Gerard was fifty-five years old. It was the kind of fifty-five that one could overlook. He was impeccable. Italian by origin, he’d spent his younger years in the city of Grasse, the home of perfume. Gerard owned shoetrees. He drove a BMW with a stick and had a thoroughbred hound that would come when called from five hundred metres away. His daughter was the youngest, brightest lawyer in all Paris and her husband was the kind of man you dream will materialise just in time to grab your hand and waltz you down the aisle at the precise age of twenty-five, in a blur of off-white tulle and diamonds.

We met four times over the course of several months, navigating around missed phone calls. He didn’t like to text. The first evening he cooked me dinner – the contemporary Parisian version of riding up on a silver steed to perform an epic rescue. He saved my hot-plate-jailed tastebuds with his pro Japanese knife-set and Miele appliances. After dinner, he showed me a box full of photographs of the models he’d courted. I had a veritable online catalogue of my conquests. We were characters from the mind of the same crazy author. I smoked my first cigar from his box of Cubans and resisted his advances.

Once upon a Wednesday afternoon, I invited Gerard to join me while I looked for replacements for my cobble-stone-ravaged heels. He arrived on time, with an Amex. My prince and fairy godmother had collided into one happy character and we were roaming the city, armed with gold. There was no time wasted trying to squeeze my feet into somebody else’s sparkly glass slippers. We ordered my freakishly small size delivered to his door, and sped away in the BMW.

It was Friday, two months later that Gerard took me to Harry Winston. He asked me to move in with him, offered to pay my rent, plied me with several rounds of champagne and dinner. It would be a ten year deal. I would look after him, physically and emotionally. In return, I would be taken care of, have every whim catered to and live a lush life in the centre of the Parisian fashion scene. He knew Karl Lagerfeld. He was promising me Karl Lagerfeld. And, I would have a claim to permanent French residency. But at the restaurant, I could feel the eyes of the waiters and the regulars boring into my fox-fur covered back. They knew him there, knew his tricks. Those models from his box had materialized – ghosts in the restaurant – and were chanting at me from the mirrors, mirrors on the wall. I’d taken a wrong turn and stepped into the wrong fairytale. I could feel my innocent ball-dancing, sparrow-toting, shoe-perfect vision melting away. Was I to become the fairest money-grubbing whore of them all?

I wanted so much to take the immoral high ground. I had joked, frequently, irreverently about being the right kind of sellout princess. I had worn a wide-brimmed hat and sashayed around the seventh arrondissement in search of benefactors (where all good stories begin, before veering off into lands with greater space for castle building). But it was time to decline Gerard’s offer. He was devastated.

And then, two weeks later, Cinderellagate happened.

A beautiful pair of Jimmy Choos and sky-high Guiseppe Zanottis had been delivered to his door. Gerard would withhold them until I accepted his proposal.

The clock had struck fucking insanity hour.

Again.

I left my heels abandoned in an apartment in the centre of Paris. Wandering about, bereft, I knew I’d reached the very nadir of my depression. Conventional storylines told me that this heralded an eventual well-lit, chiffon-draped, happy-sountracked fantasy resolution, assisted by cute little wood-dwelling mammals.

Instead, it rained and I found shelter in the Monoprix.

Cinderella sold out to spangles and glass shoes. One drunken dance with a prince at a ball and she was spellbound. That’s a recipe for valium and vodka addiction and a tumultuous “rags to riches to bitches” reality show three years down the track.

Tuna and bread are ever abundant. Wine is cheaper than water. We all make up stories about the immaculate contraction of STDs. Jesus had 21^st Century France sorted long before the Grimm brothers and Disney came through, glamorizing parables and giving me wildly unrealistic expectations about moneyed men on the metro.

Time to cut my losses and go back to basics.

Time to find a benefactor with a Bible.

One Lonely Sugar Baby (St Germain-des-Près, 1 June 2013)

My name is Symonne Torpy, and I am a society and culture researcher addicted to online dating media.

Under the pretext of comprehensive study, I have signed up to platonic meet-up forums, online yenta newsletters and gay cruising apps. Each has a unique approach to publicity, with communication quality ranging from emails fraught with spelling errors and bad malapropisms, to those with smart copy and professional layouts. A curious email inbox, an eclectic Twitter feed and a bizarre Google search history are symptomatic of my ‘Compulsive Subscription Disorder’.

Rarely, however, do I stumble upon web flotsam so profoundly persuasive that I am endowed with a duty to share it.

The following comes from the website, SugarDaddyForMe.com. Having never actually paid for a subscription to the site, I have been receiving basic level access afforded to the most poverty stricken ‘Sugar Babies’. Now, I find a gentle prod to get on my game, and, as the subject line reads: ‘Invest in [My] Financial Future’. 

I dive into the first paragraph.

‘You are on this site because you want to meet a generous man to be your Sugar Daddy. You want a man to help you with your bills and to spoil and pamper you in other ways. A man doesn’t have to be a millionaire to be willing to help you out and spend money on you. And who said you can only have one sugar daddy at a time? We won’t tell if you don’t.’

Why yes, mystery author, I DO want to meet a generous man. I do want to be pampered!

I am impressed by my mailer’s immediate promise of discretion and sympathetic moral standpoint. I also delight in his/her crafty use of bolding.

‘But to have the best chance of meeting generous sugar daddies, you need to at least be able to communicate with them to exchange email addresses and phone numbers. You also don’t want to look too desperate or needy because that really scares guys away. What does it say to a man who looks at your profile and sees that you won’t even spend the small cost of a membership, so that you’ll be able to communicate with him? Why would he send you a message that you can’t read or reply to?’

I do not want to look desperate. And I certainly don’t want to scare anyone away. However, I am a very cheap person, and I only swung by this website as a voyeur with a desire to pop culturally validate Freud. Plus, I can probably meet creepy old men to buy me things at a café… or if all else fails, a creepy FREE website like Blendr.

‘Think about it. Your sugar daddy may provide you with an allowance of $1,000, $3,000 or $5,000 per month or even more! And what if you had two or three sugar daddies giving you similar allowances? You do the math. Wouldn’t that instantly make your life a whole lot easier? Don’t you need that kind of generous man today, or even a few of them? Click Here and start sending messages to generous Sugar Daddies right now.’

Woah, that’s a lot of money. If I had three top tier benefactors, I’d be earning as much as a GP or an experienced orthodontist. Without tax. I could probably afford to spend summer in the Maldives. Heck, my Sugar Daddies would probably already be taking me places like the Maldives.

Probably, they’d also be keeping my wardrobe at the Hyatt well stocked with Dior.

Surely, I’d be able to juggle eight to ten men at once. I could start wearing tiaras during the day and open up my own café inside Tiffany’s.

‘Who’s smarter, the woman who won’t spend $29.95 and therefore never meets the sugar daddy she needs and sinks into financial disaster? Or is the smartest woman the one who is glad to invest the very small cost of a membership so that she can meet lots of sugar daddies, every hour of the day, all month long? She’s the kind of woman who makes absolutely sure she gets what she needs! Will you be that kind of woman? Or will you do nothing and hope for a miracle that will never come?’

I do think myself a smart woman. Who needs to break through glass ceilings when the sheer wall my Rolex-toting, Cartier-gifting Sugar Daddy is standing behind can be shattered for less than a dollar a day? I really don’t want to ‘sink into financial disaster’. And gosh, meeting lots of men, every hour of the day, all month long would probably help my ‘Obsessive Subscription Disorder’. I wouldn’t have the time to be that kind of woman. I’d be a new woman – a strong, invincible, Sugar Baby!

‘You’re on this site because you have financial needs, possibly very serious and urgent needs. Take your future into your own hands. This is your life and your future, seize this one opportunity, it may be your best chance. Take control of your life and your financial destiny. Invest in Yourself. Invest in Your Future.’

I am now equal parts terrified about my current financial situation and equal parts hopeful that I’ll soon be encrusted in Sugar Daddy-funded diamonds. My ringless fingers twitch towards my credit card, as I repeat the mantra “This is not prostitution. This is not prostitution”.

—

My name is Symonne Torpy, and I am a society and culture researcher-cum-Sugar Baby richer than the Princess of Jordan. Pull out your bank details ladies, and find a socially awkward man who can guarantee your financial future today!

—

[Note: I did not actually fork out $29.95 to join this website for real. My parents are, after all, Indian. I'm now living a hand-to-mouth existence in a 20 square metre loft, watching Ally McBeal and praying the Huffington Post will hire me].

My Open Letter to the Political and Religious Leaders of India

This open letter was written in reaction to “10 Curious Ways to Fight Sex Crime”, published by The Wall Street Journal. 

—

Dear Political and Religious Leaders of India,

I write to thank you for your most practical responses to the gang rape of a woman on a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012. Your parties, flocks and indeed, all India’s female population should be extending their sincerest gratitude. I have high hopes that your projected solutions will successfully counteract the deeply ingrained rape culture that women and Western consumerism have together birthed in some poetic ode to promiscuity that backfired, big time, when it finally lead to death, and made international news last year.

Firstly, I address Ms Ritu Tawade. I am in wholehearted agreement that mannequins clad in lingerie should be summarily banned. As you mentioned, “These [mannequins] directly or indirectly affect rape cases”. Indeed, I have, on more than one occasion seen men covering their massive erections as they hang around lingerie store windows, mouths agape, feeling their testosterone rise to un-restrainable levels as their eyes wander over frilly pink garters on titillating, sedentary plastic bodies.  Don’t even get me started on the headless models. After seeing one of them, what man could possibly be immune to violent fantasies about defenceless amputees?

To the esteemed Hindu Leader Asaram Bapu, I will henceforth remember to repeat my religious mantras when I find myself in a bus, restaurant, art gallery or study hall filled predominantly with men. I will say these out loud so as to remind the men of a divine presence in the room. I shall then be sure to evoke my powerful feminine victim complex, as I say “I am helpless, you are my brother by dharam”. Religion is thicker than blood and forms an impenetrable seal over a whole gamut of vulnerable spaces. Fingers crossed this includes my cervix.

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, your right-wing conservative wisdom has cautioned me against Western ideologies and convinced me to move to a rural area, where sexual violence seldom occurs.  It’s time to revisit the “Indian ethos and attitude towards women…in the context of ancient Indian values”. Maybe if I do get gang raped, someone will offer me money or a whole wardrobe of conservative new outfits in compensation. Perhaps someone will even purchase my father a goat. Win.

Respectfully, Mr. Abu Azmi, I shall not date before marriage, nor shall I ever watch another Bollywood film again. Those rain-song scenes were starting to give me unrealistic expectations about my role as a wet, sari-clad sex kitten. A line has now been drawn. No more promiscuous scarf twirling for me.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, kudos to tackling the rape problem at its root. Indeed, your observation that “Today, boys and girls study together. We have to stop that” could not be more astute. Separate the genders at birth, reintroduce them at marriage. There shall be no footsies. The girl germ pandemic will be eradicated. Penises will seem mysterious again. Genius. Fucking genius.

Finally, to my dear Lalu Prasad Yadav, head of the Rashtriya Janata Dal. I am taking inspiration from your suggestion to “Cover up the depictions of naked people” in public spaces. Your wisdom certainly has international import, and I’m starting in my city, Paris – at the Louvre. This is a space which indulges such a flagrant disregard for clothing morality, that it makes me want to mount pieces of clay and stone, and hump my way into inanimate artsy bliss. I saw a tourist taking a photograph of a Ruben the other day. I am sure he was going to jerk off to it later. And the sculptures in the Tuileries? Gangs of men loiter around these veritable deities of rape under the guise of friendly soccer games. I’ve noticed this is becoming more prevalent in the Spring. Must be because it’s mating season. Now, more than ever, we need to limit interactions between primal males and inflammatory statues.

Armed with brilliant ideas to keep my vaginal zone free of unwanted attention, I venture out into the world with a divine sense of comfort. In the spirit of adding to your infinite wisdoms, dear Political and Religious Leaders of India, I offer a final bit of advice:

Throw your rape whistles away! They’re probably kind of phallic, and you don’t want to accidentally simulate a blowjob, mid-rape, lest you be at fault for adding to the visual assault our race’s vulnerable, weak males face every single day.

Larry Scott (Paris, Janvier 2013)

“From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs…”

Oscar Wilde, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’

It wasn’t quite an Oscar Wilde opening. He’d kept me waiting in a café on the Boulevard St Germain, which meant icicles and blue extremities and quickly dwindling cigarettes. I’d ordered mulled wine, mostly because I liked the aesthetic. Pre-midday, I sat there plugged into iTunes Verdi, eyes half-closed over some boozy requiem – a pseudointellectual and a pseudoalcoholic.

He arrived with a proposition. An afternoon in his apartment to see the photographs he’d taken – a career evolution to behind the lens. It was motive-laden, but I accepted the offer without pause. I was shallow. I was cigaretted. I thought myself some kind of muse to the celebrated model Larry Scott.

The studio was one he’d borrowed for the week. Housesitting, but there wasn’t a cat to feed. Just weed. And the heady fragrance of vanilla incense hovering in the pages of books that filled the walls, and closed windows, and a neon sign above the computer that said “OPIUM”.  There was a large bed – not the typical futon I’d grown accustomed to in Parisian apartments. And the light in the room constantly flickered, provided by the glow of the computer screen and the languid movement of the word “OPIUM” as it moved from left to right, and the fire-pricked end of my cigarette. He sat in the middle, a picture of Dorian Gray.

He came with a narrative; spoke in long, unbroken sentences, fueled by sadness, as I flipped through old copies of Russian Vogue. He’d grown up in Washington, part of the only white family in a black ghetto. His father was a coke dealer with that sensibility for fashion that comes from pimp nurture. Furs. Colour. Tailoring. Money. And then there was his stepmother who’d molested him. He told me about her trailer trash hands on his twelve-year-old body. Six years later, he’d been model-spotted selling jewellery in a store in California. He had been used by his management and propositioned by gay designers, received innumerable gifts, scored windfalls of cash and done ten-hour shoots without pay. He’d met everybody from Gaultier to Jimi Hendrix and Patrick Demarchelier. He’d become the face of Armani Aqua di Gio. Now he was an icon, and still booking shows.

But everything was a little self-aware. It was as if his stories had been told too many times. Pity stories in want of a pity fuck. Stories laced with names to impress. Don’t know why. He was beautiful enough to have rested on aesthetic laurels.

We did look at his photographs. Many of them were nudes – prostitutes and women he’d seduced, and self-portraits. He’d spliced them against landscapes and images of nature and hoped to print them large enough to cover whole walls. Palm trees and bees, cities and flying machines that carried lines towards and away from his human subjects. They were brilliant; he had an understanding of beauty and grit that was breathtaking. At some point he took me out into the snowy street. I took off my clothes. I kept my hat on, gold, like fucking Nefertiti. He took photographs. I got gangrene. Emotional gangrene. Manufactured in facile rebellion against an American consumer culture that had been eating him for decades, his talk had turned to unceasing sermons about the fashion industry (which he hated) and ‘70s flower power ideals (which he was old enough to have experienced first hand).

Back in the apartment, he massaged my limbs out of entropy and my mind further into it. Hot oil and high-pressure over fourteen cigarettes. And he asked if I would mind if he took his clothes off. I didn’t mind.

Then, it was time for me to leave. He’d begun to wank in the corner. Red lipstick and hats are reason enough for avoiding such situations. He was a visual fantasy that had transgressed the line into the momentarily tactile. And he was grating. He had his own gluten free baking website. Two gluten free narcissists trapped in a European artist’s cliché. I had to get out.

I got a telephone call from Larry Scott two days later. He called me a clown and whined about me leaving lipstick on his Levi’s.

From the corner of the Parisian futon on which I was lying, smoking, as usual, fucking countless cigarettes, I could just catch the gleam of beautiful icicles dripping from my window. 

Larry Scott had a brilliant career and a hard on.

He’ll remember the hard on.
I’ll name drop the career.

My Months as a Marilyn: Instalment III: Richard Westin (June 2012)

“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.” - Socrates

There is nothing more immoral than putting a bunny in a dryer.

Contrary to the opinion of our favourite Athenian gadfly, seeing pink eyeball ripped from white fur and spun around with the socks, shatters clinical values under the weight of emotion, and visually overwhelms the fading yardstick of principal. And yes, that bunny always appears to be of the motherfucking albino Easter variety, with a generous heart and a couple of lollipop stains on its cotton-tail from the times you hugged it extra hard as a kid.

Richard Westin was the second bunny that made it into the laundry room of my life. This was a space reserved for the special ones – the ones that were a little more fragile, that I liked a little too well. I attempted to keep them clean, and succeeded for a time. Doom smells nicer soaked in OMO.

We met (or should I say, he and Clark met) and casually flirted on Grindr, one cold Monday night in June. Richard was interesting, clever, multilingual. His sweetness was something that one encounters rarely. And so, after a week of conversation, I came clean about my gender. His reaction was slow, but positive, and we decided to meet. A phase of platonic bliss ensued – we walked to work together, sipped local coffee and drew on memories of respective Stonewall nights.

But, as my gay relationships are wont to do, our friendship quickly re-evolved into something more.

By Tuesday, I had kissed him in the alley behind the Wesley Mission lodge. So the mis en scene of our lust, first coloured by a virtual gay networking site, shifted to a drug rehab hub in Surry Hills. It was raining in the city and I was entering an oriental wardrobe phase. The whole of Sydney sought warm beds and closed windows. Everybody was fucking. Very film noir. And I, the femme fatale, hung by my mental washing machine, ever sinister in my domesticity, ever attempting to make this one clean.

Five dates, fourteen bottles of red and too much gay sex later, Richard Westin was beginning to crumble.

I have long reconciled with my particular style of sexuality, but he could not. Fifteen years of gay identity, a particularly difficult ‘coming out’, and an active pre-Clark Grindr lifestyle did not lay strong groundwork for a suddenly-30 bisexual revelation. And then he told me he was in love.

Spun with the sensibilities that only come with upchuck and regret, on the nineteenth day, I unpegged Mr. Westin and spin-cycled him back into a world of men.

There is not only truth to be found in vulgar emotion, but a sound measure of principal. Perhaps our dear Socrates failed in this learning because high-heat spin dryers hadn’t been invented yet. The physical manifestation of an emotional metaphor wrenches us from our clinical logic as we lament those lost, fluffy Easters.

That fortnight with Richard Westin, when it seemed all the world were fucking like pomosexual rabbits and it was not against the moral grain to join in, has thus been challenged.

By a bunny. By a dryer. By an illusion. By an emotion.

My Months as a Marilyn: Instalment II: ‘Adult Themes’ (Sydney, June 2012)

‘Adult Themes’ lived down the street. His pseudonymn fails to do him justice. Half balding, with a forest green pea-cap and a white pair of speedos, he had a proud smile and an enthusiastic personality.

I began the conversation: ”Tony Abbott?”
He replied “You’ve found him here.”
And our romance was seeded atop stained budgie smugglers and bicycle double entendres.

We chatted in earnest for a time. He had been closeted for 54 years, yet his Grindr photograph held no ambiguity, his nom de plume held no desire for anonymity. Typical of an older generation of Grindr-dwellers, he was comfortable in a space that had been designed rather than claimed for him. It remains a platform protected from interlopers, so much unlike global gay-streets, where seedy straights catch girls unawares and ‘real men’ seek fairy blood lust in the acrid, post-2am lull.

Also Grindr-typical, the conversation broke in half cleanly. It was 16.22:

“I want to eat slices of kiwi fruit off your body”

And so I wandered under the shade of a new umbrella – the world of ‘Wet and Messy’ (WAM) – sitophilia, foodplay and pie-fetishism. Conventional sex-texting merged with detailed produce imagery and continued Abbott allusions. It was a sweet salad of a conversation.

45 minutes passed before he suggested a rendezvous. Yes, the foreplay was protracted – an unspoken decision to get the pipes warmed up and the fruit pre-juiced before abandoning our own right hand/fruit/apendage trifecta, for a menage-a-six: two dicks, two tongues, a pineapple and a banana.

It was imperative at this stage to send a photo and an address. I was underprepared. Cropping a fully-clothed photograph of my old London hostel flame, I clicked ‘send’. It was not the expected cock-shot and my modesty piqued his interest. An elderly man in a speedo and a young, suited gent in a white pressed shirt. Ready to WAM.

I baited: ”Whenever you can CUM”. It was crude, but it secured a time. 17.30, he would be at my place. To fuck. With food.

The address was my neighbour’s. She’s an artist in her mid-eighties. I had a perfect view of the gentleman from my window, and I slunk into the kitchen in a corset and lacy underwear. If Clark was having imaginary sex, damn well was I going to dress the part.

He arrived early – 17.37, and messaged me via Grindr first. Grindr Protocol #1: ask permission to ring doorbell.

Again, I had no plan. I asked if he had brought the food as I craned my neck out the window. There he was – a bald man in a pressed suit, holding three grocery bags bulging at the seams with brown, prickly-skinned fruit.

My amateur and immature mind swung into action. I could not quite summon the spirit of the great lying sex-fiends of history, nor even my fraudulent namesake. Instead, the excuse, “My grandmother is home”, had to suffice. After much discussion about my grandmother’s strict Catholic upbringing (prohibiting loud, gay, kiwi sex in the upstairs bedroom), we concluded I’d meet him at his white Toyota Celica, halfway down the block. Ten minutes later, I was “cooking dinner with grandmother” and indefinitely unavailable.

We resumed the text fucking. Phrases like “Daddy Kiwi” and “cum in envelopes” were thrown about with increasing frequency. The conversation ceased when I fell asleep, exhausted and rather hungry… smacking my lips for whipped cream and dreaming of political scandal.

I favourited ‘Adult Themes’ in my Grinder list. I will likely never know his real name. All that remains is the conversation history of an imagined evening of wholefood WAMplay between one youthful Clark Rockerfeller (circa 1980) and a sweet Australian politician (current, closeted and not quite conservative).