Preference And Template
Everyone has preferences. I want to say that plainly at the start because the distinction I am trying to draw is not between having preferences and not having them. It is between two ways of holding a preference, which produce very different encounters with the world.
The first way is to hold a preference lightly—to know that you tend to find certain things attractive, to move toward them when they appear, and to remain genuinely available to what turns up when they don’t. This is preference as direction rather than requirement. It orients you without constraining you. The second way is to convert the preference into a template—to have decided in advance, with some precision, what will be acceptable, and to arrive at every encounter already comparing what is present against the specification. The template is the preference hardened into criteria.
I observed both in the men who came to me, and I observed them in men describing how they approached their encounters in the wider world. The man who said “I usually like older men” was expressing a preference. He had noticed a tendency in himself, given it a name, and offered it as information. The man who said “I only meet blond, muscular men under thirty-five” had done something different. He had converted a set of responses into an admission criterion. The difference is not merely one of degree. It is a difference in what the encounter is for.
A preference can be revised by experience. A template precedes the experience and judges it before it begins. Which means the template is largely protected from revision. The encounter happens, but it happens inside a structure that was determined before the encounter started, and the structure tends to confirm itself because any encounter that might revise it has already been excluded. The template selects for evidence of itself and calls that confirmation.
What I noticed in the men who arrived with the most rigid templates was that the rigidity did not stay in the domain of attraction. It was a quality of approach that appeared across the encounter. These men were often not particularly present in what was happening, because what was happening was being filtered through a structure that had already decided what it should be. They were experiencing the encounter through the template of the encounter, which is not quite the same as experiencing the encounter.
I began to wonder—and this was genuine wondering rather than a conclusion I arrived at quickly—whether the template extended beyond attraction into other parts of how they approached the world. I could not know this from observation alone. What I could observe was the texture of the encounter, and the texture in those cases was notably less available to revision than the texture in encounters with men who had held their preferences more loosely.
The men who carried the most rigid templates also seemed, in my observation, to miss more. Not only the men who didn’t meet their criteria—those were simply not encountered. I mean they seemed to miss what was happening in the room they were actually in. The encounter became an exercise in confirmation or disappointment rather than in discovery. And the possibility of discovery—of something arriving that you had not anticipated, that could not have been anticipated, because you had not yet known to anticipate it—that possibility was precisely what the template had been designed to foreclose.
Surprise has appeared throughout these essays as something I found myself returning to, and I want to say what I mean by it more carefully here. I do not mean surprise in the sense of the unexpected event, the thing that catches you off guard. I mean something more like the revision of an assumption by contact with what is actually present.
The man who arrives monitoring himself, and then stops monitoring—that is a surprise, in the relevant sense. The man whose body carries a narrative that the work reveals to be beside the point—that is a surprise. The beautiful man who wanted ordinary pleasurable sex rather than worship: the surprise there was discovering that the narrative his body generated did not match the person it had been generated about. In each case, something real displaced something assumed. The actual replaced the imagined.
A rigid template protects the assumed from the actual. It prevents the displacement. Which is, I think, one of the functions a template serves—it offers the security of the already-decided against the uncertainty of what might actually be discovered. If I know in advance what I am looking for, I am protected from the disorientation of finding something I was not looking for. The template is a defence against surprise, and against what surprise might require of you.
I have been asked, occasionally, over the years, what my type was. I found the question difficult to answer, not because I lacked preferences but because the question seemed to be asking something I did not quite experience. What I noticed, paying attention to my own responses over three decades of working with men, was that the men I found most interesting were consistently not men I could have predicted would interest me from their appearance or description alone. The interesting thing about them was almost always something that revealed itself in the encounter rather than something I could have established in advance. A quality of attention. A way of being present. An unexpected response to something. The thing that made the encounter interesting was, in almost every case, not the thing that had been visible before the encounter began.
This is not a particularly heroic observation about myself. It is simply what I noticed. And what I noticed, putting it beside the observation about templates, was that the preference I had—if it could be called a preference—was not for a kind of body or an age or a physical configuration. It was for a kind of openness. A man who arrived genuinely available to what was happening rather than monitoring it against a predetermined structure. A man who had, to put it simply, no type so rigid that it prevented him from being present to what was actually there.
If I have a type, it is the man who has no type that closes discovery down. Which is perhaps a strange thing to call a type, and I hold it a little uneasily, because it sounds paradoxical and I do not intend it paradoxically. What I mean is that the disposition I found most interesting was one of genuine openness—not the performance of openness, not the claim of having no preferences while actually holding very fixed ones, but the real thing: a man whose attention remained available long enough for the actual person in front of him to replace the imagined one.
That possibility of replacement—the actual displacing the imagined—seems to me to be what runs underneath all of these essays, though I have not always named it directly. The history of the male body, as I have traced it, is in large part a history of imposed narratives: the Augustinian narrative of the sinful body, the classical narrative of the ideal body, the advertising narrative of the insufficient body, the colonial narrative of the body requiring correction. Each of these is a template applied to bodies that had not consented to the application. The suffering I observed in men was rarely about the body itself. It was about the template that had been placed on the body, and what the body was then required to live inside.
My work, such as it was, involved meeting the man who arrived rather than the narrative suggested by his physique. This was not a philosophical commitment I articulated clearly to myself at the time. It was simply what the work required. But reading back over what I have written across these essays, I notice that the same impulse appears in how I have approached everything else I have written about.
History is approached with curiosity rather than settled conclusion. Bodies are approached as particular rather than representative. Men are approached as themselves rather than as instances of a type. Even disagreement—with the sources I have read, with the positions I encounter—is approached first with curiosity, as something to understand, before it is approached with judgement.
I do not know whether this constitutes a virtue or simply a habit of mind. What I notice is that it produced, over thirty years, a quality of encounter that I found consistently more interesting than the alternative. The encounters I remember most clearly—not most fondly, not most dramatically, but most clearly, as encounters in which something actually happened—were the ones in which the script failed. In which reality presented itself as something other than what the narrative had predicted, and the person in the room had to respond to what was actually there rather than to what they had been expecting.
The man who wanted to uglify himself was not in the script. The man who arrived most braced for rejection and then, for an hour, stopped bracing—not in any script I could have written in advance. The man who lay on the table and said “I was beautiful once, when I was running”—not beautiful, not handsome, beautiful—was not saying anything the template of the encounter had room for.
What I find, sitting with all of this, is that the essays have been circling something I can now name more plainly. The template is the thing that limits encounter. Not the preference—the preference is fine, the preference is simply how attention moves toward certain things rather than others. The template is what happens when the preference is no longer revisable. When the assumed is protected from the actual. When the script is maintained against all the evidence that reality keeps providing that it was never quite the right script.
The men I most wanted to spend time with—in the room and in these essays—were the men for whom the script had already failed, or who had never quite had a script, or who arrived still open to the possibility that what they were about to encounter might be something they had not yet been able to anticipate.
That openness is, I think, what curiosity actually is. Not the absence of preferences. Not the refusal of direction. Just the willingness to let what arrives be more interesting than what was expected.
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