Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School, Part 3. (Neighbor Boy)

Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School is a series of short essays about growing up  frustrated in small-town Pennsylvania.

The only thing the boy thinks about as much as sex is escape.

The boy is me and is fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and he feels consumed by a sort of cloud.   Whenever something is not about sex or escape, it evades his thinking. Often, at school, his teachers will give him assignments and he won’t hear it.  He’ll show up clueless the next day and the teachers will disapprove – Why didn’t you do the work?  Now you have a zero for the day.

The boy is on this threshold of becoming something other than a boy, but he advances at a confused pace.

His room has bunk beds in it, and should have a regular bed.  There’s a stuffed animal on the top bunk, an artifact from a different life.  He sleeps on the bottom because he feels encased and sheltered there, as if in the bottom of a boat.  It’s dark and shielding and he starts to sleep naked.

The door is always closed, sometimes because he’s masturbating, but often only because he’s forgotten and he’s lying on his stomach on the floor, drawing pictures of comic book characters.

He stares out the window of his bedroom and masturbates, thinking of an older boy, Lee, down the street, who should show up and rub his dick all over the boy’s face – If the boy just concentrates hard enough, Lee will show up.  He believes this with all his might: Just concentrate and things will happen.

This isn’t just about desire.  At the end of every day of school – after the bullies, the boring classes, the terrible food, the dull conversations, the racists, the dead florescent lights, the cruel teachers – the boy has to concentrate on sex and on escape; they’re the only things that save him.

Life is made up of sheer will.  If he wavers from this way of living he will tip off the edge and die.

When the boy thinks about escape, it’s not escape from his little town. He’s too tired to dream of anything that real.  All he can do is think of something bigger. He concentrates on being out of his body, on being someone else who has never lived in his town or even in Pennsylvania.  Like most people in the world, he will be someone for whom Pennsylvania barely exists.  He stands in front of the mirror and turns the music up and sings.  He’s not just watching himself sing, he’s pretending he’s in the mirror, facing himself.  His room is the audience and the boy he’s staring out at – him – is someone alien.  A spectator looking on.  He asks his mom to buy him a microphone and an amplifier.  Instead of starting a band, which he tries once and fails, he uses the microphone as a prop to complete being someone else.

Like a magical tool, that microphone.  A wand.  Hold it, stare into the mirror, and concentrate.

It’s true, this trick about concentrating, though not as he imagined.  Instead of one neighbor, the boy begins to have sex with another.

*

Next door there’s a duplex that looks run-down compared to the boy’s house.  The neighbors aren’t poor, but they don’t take care of their lawn.  Their porch is drab and the colors are depressed.  The boy’s mom has remarried and though he himself once used to live in a tiny duplex, now he has a backyard with flowers and a little pond and a green stretch of grass big enough for a badminton net in the summer.  The neighbors have half a yard, separated from the boy’s by a forbidding hedge.

At night, the sounds of the neighbors fighting and yelling ricochet in the small strip of space between the houses.  The father is a drunk, the mother is mild, and the two sons are effeminate.  The younger son, Jeffrey, is the same age as the boy.  Jeffrey is overweight and has a funny walk. He spends most of his time playing RPG-style Nintendo and reading comic books.  In school, he’s made fun of or ignored.  At home, he’s trapped.  Every day, Jeffrey and the boy have sex.

*

It starts with them daring each other to take their clothes off, just for a second.  Jeffrey’s dick is fat and short and the boy feels overwhelmed just looking at it.

They try everything.

Almost everything: They never, ever kiss, but each day there is a knock on the boy’s door and each day they get closer until they’re inside each other.

The boy’s sister has left for college, and his parents don’t get home until an hour after he does.  There is a knock at the door, a secret which no one else hears, and the boy goes to it reluctantly.  He knows what will happen and he can’t stop it and doesn’t understand why.

*

The first time Jeffrey touches the boy, reaching down to his testicles, it’s so intense that the boy jumps.  Are you all right Jeffrey asks.

The first time Jeffrey fucks the boy, he eases in slowly.  It’s painful, but they’ve worked their way up to it, little by little, pushing fingers into each other.  The boy has fucked Jeffrey many times by now, sliding into his large round ass and pulling out only to cum or when he discovers his penis smeared in shit because they haven’t learned to clean out.  They don’t know anything except what they’re feeling.  There’s no example to guide them, and no one to tell them how this is done.

Yet somehow they still unveil everything.

I think it’s all the way in, Jeffrey says to the boy.  When Jeffrey is still, the boy feels okay.  But when Jeffrey starts to move, to thrust in and out of the boy eagerly, to pound his thick body up against the boy’s ass, it is so painful that the boy has to keep telling Jeffrey to stop.  Stop.  Slower.  Stop.  Jeffrey is pushing the boy open, and it hurts.  So why does he tell him to keep going?

*

At every threshold, there are mysteries, and this one is no different.

Along with being a time of will, it is a time of secrets – ones that the boy who is no longer a boy tries to keep from everyone as well as secrets that the world tries to keep from him.

The boy’s mother, for example, is always confiscating things and watching him for signs of too much sex or too much violence.  His mother has a study where the boy spends hours every day, writing novels.  One day he shows a chapter to his mother – the story is about a girl who is saved from being raped.  The boy’s mother tears the black disk out of the computer in anger.  Similarly, she takes his books away – Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison, and others. Once, the boy draws a superhero with fire coming from his head. Too violent, too much.

Why is it all so dark? How do you know about all of this? his mother demands.

She rips up a comic book and listens when he’s watching TV.  If there are screams or gunshots, she comes in and turns it off.

One day he’s reading a Stephen King novel in their sun porch.  The light comes through and it’s hot and sticky.  There is a hornet touching one of the windows, and though the boy is used to saving them – catching them in a glass and then releasing them into the yard – he ignores it because he’s absorbed in the book.  There is a short passage about a gay bar in the book, and it’s a world he doesn’t understand but wants to.  He’s afraid of it.  He is so enthralled that he doesn’t think to hide the book when his mother enters.  Stephen King is an author she knows.  She barely has to look through the pages, she simply picks it up and takes it away.  Not in my house, she says.

Not that it matters.  He goes to his father’s house and watches all the violence and sex he wants.  His father doesn’t care.  His father is from a little Syrian village where all that mattered was reputation and respect, and from where – his father reports fondly – if you were a criminal, they would cut your hand off or hang you in the village’s center.  It doesn’t matter if his son watches sex and violence, so long as the boy is polite, so long as he shows that he adores his father.

*

The boy closes the door to his room and masturbates.  He wonders if people can hear him masturbating through the walls, or if, when he cums, people can hear the semen hit the blanket or the paper or the tissue he cums on.  He masturbates in school in the bathroom and into his notebooks under the desk.  He makes a list of everyone he has ever thought about masturbating, and there are hundreds of names on it.  Each time he pictures someone new, he adds a name.  His stepbrothers, their friends, his sister’s boyfriends, his teachers.  Sometimes he doesn’t know the names – someone he sees at the mall, or the construction workers that work for his father who all take turns fucking him.  He is obsessed with this list.  He does not write anything on it but the names, so that even if it’s found, its meaning will remain a secret.

*

He doesn’t include Jeffrey on this list, because he never thinks of him when he masturbates.  He tries not to think of Jeffrey at all, because every time they have sex, the boy hates himself.

Jeffrey has a certain smell.  It’s not unpleasant, it’s just a trace of him, an echo, and he leaves it on all the boy’s sheets and the boy’s hands and on the boy’s face.  So the boy washes his sheets and changes his clothes.  He takes showers.  But still, the smell will creep up.  How did it get into everything?  He’ll open a book and a brief flash, a ghost of the smell, will brush his face.  When they’re not having sex, this smell nauseates him.

He tries to locate where it’s coming from – in the space between Jeffrey’s balls and his leg?  In Jeffrey’s hair?  In his armpits?  But it’s not coming from anywhere.  It’s like an aura, an outline, and a repeating loop of history.

The boy doesn’t say goodbye to Jeffrey when they finish.  He doesn’t say I’ll see you tomorrow.  He knows they’ll see each other tomorrow.  He knows that he’ll ignore Jeffrey in school and then see him the next day and suck his dick and rub Jeffrey’s cum into his chest and the new trail of soft hair that has grown on his belly.

When Jeffrey leaves, when the boy hears the sound of the front door closing, he walks into the bathroom and looks in the mirror.  This mirror isn’t like the one in his bedroom.  He looks into his own brown eyes and slaps himself in the face, hard.  Never again, he says to the mirror.  He slaps himself over and over until his cheeks are red and he fears a bruise may develop and then he stops.  More than wanting to punish himself, he does not want to get caught.  People will ask where the bruise came from and the boy cannot allow that to happen.

There is never a question of why he should hate Jeffrey, nor why he should hate himself or what they do together.  And there is no name for it yet.  The boy isn’t gay or queer.  He just feels some deep wrongness in his guts.  It’s a despair, because the boy has not yet learned to connect his feelings with his thinking, his thinking with his will.  Everything is separate, like planets circling each other unseen.

*

He decides to be obsessed with a girl – Nicki.  He talks and talks about her as if he’s in love.  He tells his friends that she’s the best looking girl in school.  She has blonde hair and is pretty, but average.  She’s not a girl that other boys would have chosen except as an afterthought.  He never talks to Nicki except once, to tell her he loves her.  The boy doesn’t even pay attention to her response, because what he’s said is a lie.  Who cares.

There are other girls.  Lots of them.  Most he doesn’t do anything with.  He spends time with them, but never touches them.  They’re perplexed – or in some cases, his aloofness, his way of not caring, makes them like him more.  There is a girl he dates for months, never once kissing her.  She corners him in a dark bedroom and he shrugs her off.  She asks him to kiss her and the boy laughs and hugs her.  What is he up to?  When she calls him to tell him she’s dating someone else, he yells at her.  He isn’t angry, it’s just that he’s learned that this is what you’re supposed to do.  When your girlfriend leaves you for another man, you show anger.  The girl cries.  She sends him a letter full of apologies and regret.  At the end, she says she loves him and wants him back.

The boy is somehow touched by the letter and the betrayal, so he calls the girl.  But instead of taking her back, instead of explaining himself, he cruelly reads the letter aloud to her and laughs.  The girl, understandably, never speaks to him again.  He is always being hurt, somewhere inside of himself, but doesn’t understand how.

And he doesn’t yet understand that others could be hurt.  Everything seems like a great show to him.  The world is dismembered; what you show is never how you feel.  What you see in others in never what is true.

For the boy, crying, laughing, affection are all just behaviors separated from the heart by the thick, impenetrable line of his body.

*

It doesn’t occur to him, but the rest of the world is feeling its feelings and showing them.

He dates another girl that he does kiss.  This girl wears black and listens to industrial music.  They have some things in common.  The girl also seems to be walking through life in haze, and they prick each other’s fingers with a needle and drink each other’s blood.  Even this rouses nothing in the boy.

One of the girls he dates has a jealous ex-boyfriend.  He gets a knock on the door and it’s her.  A surprise visit.  Come outside, she says.  I want to show you something.  He follows her down the street to the park, and there is Joel, the ex-boyfriend.  He wants to fight you, she says.  Come on bitch, Joel says to the boy.  The boy doesn’t say anything.  He looks at Joel and feels some sort of stirring – of what?  He looks at the girl and feels nothing.  Joel has blonde hair and blue eyes.  The girl seems ugly to the boy now.

He turns around in silence and walks away.  Come back the girl shouts.  Where are you going, you pussy, Joel shouts.  The boy walks back to his house and goes up to his room and shuts the door.

He carries out all these motions as if he is someone else.  There are people that do this their entire lives.

*

At his school, there are rumors about the boy and about Jeffrey, but these rumors haven’t found their way to each other yet.

No one talks about Jeffrey, except to spread this rumor.  And Jeffrey doesn’t seem to have any friends to defend him.  The rumor is that Jeffrey masturbates by sticking a carrot up his ass.  How do things like this get started, and how do people intuit the truth?

No one says this directly to Jeffrey, because talking to Jeffrey doesn’t occur to anyone.  Everyone’s got lives to live and tests to take and games to compete in – Jeffrey is outside of all that, and beneath it, the other students think.  The thing with the carrot is just known.  It’s something people say to each other.

There are rumors about the boy, too.  That he’s queer, though this rumor comes and goes in the spaces between his girlfriends.  In these lapses he suffers taunting and bullying, and then it dries up for awhile.

There are rumors, also, that the boy still plays with toys.  No secret how this was started: a girl came overto his house and saw the stuffed animal on the boy’s top bunk.  It’s not true, though in a way the boy wishes it were.  He’s tried to play with his action figures but they no longer hold his interest.  Once he could activate them with life and meaning, but they don’t do anything anymore.  They’re in boxes in the basement.  There’s no going back to them ever; their lives are done and now they’re just things.

*

The year goes on, and every day, the boy and Jeffrey fuck.

They’re in the same biology class, and the boy is waiting for a moment.  He hopes that it will be a moment that severs him from Jeffrey and their intimacy and the punishment afterward.

He buys a pen, rubber and orange and shaped like a carrot, and carries it with him.

Each day, he hopes that Jeffrey will announce that he’s forgotten to bring a pen to class.

The boy wills it; concentrates.  Ask, he thinks.  Ask.

*

The biology classroom feels like someone stunted its growth, too dark and claustrophobic, like everything at the school.  The thirty students sit at large black tables, three students to a table, in two rows, and Jeffrey sits behind the boy in the aisle over.

The teacher is unthinking and strange, and many of the students claim he used to be a cocaine addict.  He flirts with the female students and makes them all dissect things.

The boy, who is a vegetarian, resists at first but then experiences a sort of resignation to what is real.  These animals were raised to be dissected, he reasons.  They were always dead.  All that’s left is to look inside them and hope we learn something.

*

In the pan is a crayfish, and next to the pan is a worksheet with a drawing of the crayfish splayed open.  Cut the crayfish open with the scalpel and as you pull it apart, write down what you see.

Sternal Artery.  Pyloric Stomach.  Dorsal Abdominal Artery.

On the sheet these organs are different colors, but when the boy cuts open the crayfish, he sees it’s all the same shade, a sickly dull gray-green.

From behind him, a voice.

A pen, Jeffrey asks.  Does anyone have a pen?

The boy’s heart jumps.  His hands smell like formaldehyde and are covered in a film of dead animal, but he reaches for his backpack.  Where is the carrot-shaped pen?

A girls turns to Jeffrey and gives him a regular blue pen.  The boy has taken too long, the moment has passed.  But here, in the front pouch of his backpack on the floor of the dead biology room, the boy’s fingers touch the rubbery surface of the carrot pen.  He pulls it out and cannot stop or slow down.  He announces it.

“Here’s a pen Jeffrey,” he says and stretches his arm out, far out into the empty aisle, so that everyone can see.

And they all see, and the class erupts in laughter.  One girl cries out, shocked by this joke, and then laughs.  The boys laugh.  Some of these students are enemies of the boy who is no longer a boy.  But there is this moment.  If he is cruel enough, he can weld himself to them.  They may pick on the boy and bully him, but here is a defining line – he is above Jeffrey, he is above being ignored.

The teacher cluelessly tells them all Settle down.  He doesn’t know what has just happened.  He doesn’t care.  Just no laughing.

Innocently or knowingly, Jeffrey says: I already have a pen.

And there is a knot in the boy’s stomach and everyone starts to laugh again.

*

That day, after school, the boy is sure he’s done it.  He’s ended their get-togethers.  He goes up to his room and throws his backpack on the top bunk.  But strangely, he doesn’t feel victorious.  He feels like he’s lost something and made a mistake.  He goes into his backpack and finds the carrot-shaped pen and throws it in his wastebasket and turns his music on.

Through the noise, there is a knock at the door.  Leave me alone, he thinks.  He turns the music up and then goes to the wastebasket and pulls the pen out and hides it under the bottom bunk.  A secret.

And the knock goes on, and then the doorbell.

He tries to ignore it.  Please, please leave me alone.

He starts to sing into the mirror, but the mirror has changed.  He’s not anyone else now, he sees.

He can’t stop thinking: I am just myself.

So the boy turns his music off.  Then he goes downstairs to answer the door.

Extinction

This essay is inspired by the ten years I spent in Western Massachusetts studying writing and biology.

The road is always lined with dead animals. Beneath the red maples bursting into velvet blossoms: groundhogs, possums, squirrels, rabbits; soaking into grass and pavement. Sometimes there’s a porcupine with its quills accusingly pointing in all directions, or a skunk I can smell from a mile away until I pass what’s left of its body, torn bits of black, red, and white. If I don’t see any animals on the road home from school, I feel a strange disappointment. Not because I want to see them dead, but because where else do I see so many? I’d miss the foxes and turkeys and coyotes if they weren’t turned over on themselves, dead and pulled at by crows.

I’m in school for writing and biology. I study the scientists and their strange motions and theories. These are crazy movements that wouldn’t make sense anywhere else, like spinning bits of mouse thymus gland in a machine. Or tearing the hindguts from termites. Hold the termite with tweezers and pull the long string of its guts out, then examine it under a microscope. There are important questions to be answered.
When you kill an animal in a lab, it’s called “sacrificing.” But sacrificing to what? To which god?
I don’t know, but it’s necessary, we say.
I know that you can’t always swerve your car on the way home to miss all the animals. Not at night, when the moths smack against my windshield, lured by the beauty of red and white headlights. The wings disintegrate into scales and dust, and the legs stay smashed and stuck until you smear them into oblivion with the wipers. Or when it rains and the black slip of road is covered in frogs, looking for food and each other. They burst so easily under the tires, that I don’t even know I’m hitting them. I know it’s happening, but it feels like nothing, and I can’t help it. Nothing should have to die that way.

* *
At the Harvard Museum of Natural History, there are blown glass flowers, bird’s nests in glass cases, and huge and humbling dinosaur bones. In the lobby, there’s a greying skeleton of a sabertooth tiger. You’ll walk in, past the skeleton and the man at the desk will smile at you.

Here’s what else you’ll see: A hall of taxidermy. You’ll walk through quietly, because if you’re too loud, you might rouse the dead animals. There are heads on the walls. White rhino heads, water buffalo heads, bison heads. There are antlers that seems as long as you are tall. The air smells like sawdust, and everything is seized in place. You will think, at some point, I do not want to die alone.

The animals are grouped by family, not habitat. The polar bear is next to the grizzly and black and sun and sloth bears. The maned lion and its stuffed cub are propped up next to tigers and a leopard. There are cats you’ve probably never seen, nor even heard of; jagurundi, ocelot. Perhaps you will walk by them, look into their plastic eyes and still not see them. They’re posed in angry gestures, and their teeth are bared. They were fearsome
before they were killed. You’ll wonder if these were the looks on their faces before their faces went slack.

Next room, ungulates: black buck, oryx, eland, impala. Horns twist up and away in different paths toward Heaven. The ungulates look noble, even now with straw poking through the seams in their skin. Seams in their skin; lines you’re not supposed to see in the skin, the revelation that they’ve been emptied out.

You will feel unlucky.

To pass through the shadow of these animals is not something you’ll want to do. You’ll be captured and curious, but only if you’re a scientist who sacrifices animals each day will you feel immune in the shadows. The shadows are like doorways to a Wrong Place.
Did I say that the animals are dead? I take it back. They’re beyond death. Either more than dead or less.

And then you’ll find yourself in the hallway of extinct animals. There are no living versions to compare these to. The great auk – its beak could have been funny, it’s such a huge beak. The Eskimo curlew is here, the reconstructed dodo skeleton. At the end of the hall, two passenger pigeons huddle next to each other as if in love or cold.

You’ve seen pictures, maybe. Flocks of them so huge and dense that they blocked out the Sun. And in the pictures, too, are men with guns pointed up, trying to make a hole for the sky to come through.

The passenger pigeons are unremarkable. Pink feet, grayish feathers, nothing special if you’d see just one. But when they lived, you wouldn’t see just one. Like weather or a flood, they’d come in waves of thousands. Then they started to evaporate. There were ten, then four, then none.

The exhibit sits as if innocent. When you walk by, the fake black eyes of the passenger pigeons follow you. Your image walks upside down inside of them.

* *
Sometimes I wonder why the animals don’t just kill us all. They could destroy us utterly in just a day. And on that day, every dog turns on its owner. Every insect flies into our homes and sinuses, every bear pushes down our doors and does away with us. One violent swipe, that’s it.

Maybe they’d begin to speak, to notice our habit of speaking, notice how it organizes us.

Imagine a word from the throat of something that has never spoken a word before.

The fish would flense our bones clean, the starlings and seagulls and hawks would smash our windows and kill our planes. The moose and antelope would pound our cars in, the snakes would snap at us. Even the snails and the slugs and leaches would patiently creep down our sleeping throats.

Soon our dogs would meet the wolves; our cats would go feral. Every building would be vacated and overrun with green grass, and deer would walk in calmly and eat there.

* *

The road from school to my house in the woods is split each day by a huge train. When it passes, there’s no seeing to the other side; just a thick, blurring line and a loud, moaning whistle.

I’ve taken this train from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, and it makes its way through woods and past water. The ride is beautiful, but people don’t take the train much anymore. Why get onto a train when you can have your own little environment? You could have a car with a stereo or a truck you can put your stuff in. So across the country, there are dead tracks everywhere, like ribs sticking from sand.

Some people are wondering: what will happen if we need that railroad again? When cars can’t run because there’s no more gasoline or oil or rubber, maybe the train could save us from whatever mess we’re in. But maybe the tracks for trains are all torn up, and the blueprints for the tracks are torn up too, unreadable now, like our thoughts.

And then what?

* *
This is not a polemic, it’s only a eulogy for the animals; we’ve all got little extinctions we take part in. There are the animals I’ve killed indirectly by eating. There are the animals I would say I’ve killed by accident, as if driving a car were an accident. There are the animals I killed on purpose, as if anything I’m about to tell you is a “purpose.”

I shot a dove with a bee-bee gun once when I was twelve. It was sitting on a branch, and then not. I walked to the tree it fell from, and it had curled itself into a prayer. Its head fell to the side when I picked it up.

With that same bee-bee gun, I shot a snake. I was fifteen, not twelve, and I should have known better. I caught it from a river and threw it on the ground and shot it in the head. It flipped and twisted like a fish held at the end of a line. But it didn’t die. It bared its little fangs and I shot it again. It didn’t die. I shot it again. The gun kept snapping the pellet out, but it wasn’t enough to kill the snake, which was not fragile like a dove. This is the hardest story for me to think of. That snake. Eventually my cousin pounded its head in with a rock and asked me why I’d done it. He hunted deer every winter but couldn’t understand why I’d shoot this snake. I mumbled that I thought it was killing the chickens on my father’s farm, but that was a lie. This little ribbon of a snake, cooling itself in a river. You can spend your whole life paying for a moment like that, for when you close your eyes, you think of it.

In between on purpose and by accident are my pets. My sister and I were allergic to fur, so we always had “exotic” pets. None of them died nor lived naturally.

One turtle was left in the car overnight. It froze to death. Another, the reverse: we left it in our backyard kiddie pool on a hot summer day. We came back to its dessicated husk. The lizards were poorly handled. They’d stop eating for some unknown reason or blackness would develop on their toes and spread up their legs.

My mother kept buying these animals for us to thrill at and feed crickets or mealworms or fruit to. And then we’d forget about them.

* *
In the woods behind my house are all sorts of animals, and most of them stay hidden. At night, I’ll hear a coyote gurgle or a shuffling in the leaves and needles. Mostly they won’t come out from the tree line or from under the stones or from the branches. When they do, it leaves me breathless. I’m sitting on the steps to my back door and a deer emerges casually from the thick line of trees. He lowers and then lifts his head, then strolls away. A tree frog crawls up the side of my house and looks over its tiny shoulder at me. The screen door is covered by an explosion of green katydids, clicking and jumping onto my shoulders. A little snake comes to visit from under the steps.

How can they not care, I wonder. Why is everything in the world so forgiving?

The bees are dying. Maybe cellphones, but who cares, forget it. The cellphone towers are surrounded by the bodies of birds. Go to one and wade through their frail bodies. The fish are dying. Not just the overfished oceanic ones, but the fresh water ones too. Viral hemorhagic septicima, melting them from the inside. Maybe from the run off of shit from pig farms, where the pigs are stuck in hot metal cages, too small for them to turn around.

Hornets touch the window of my living room, but I’m not going near them to try to let them out. What if I get stung? They fall to the sill, so weightless that they could be blown away by an exhale. Just breathe and they’re gone.

When I’m at my most hopeless, I imagine the animals killing us. I imagine the world going back to what it was, only a few people left, huddled and figuring out what’s next. But if that happened, all these disasters and extinctions would show up again – because that old world, that world of grass and calm, is where all our errors emerged from in the first place. Disaster came from peace. But at least they’d have some time to rest. At least there would be no hornets in the sills or moths on windshields, no turtles left in cars, and no snakes shot and smashed.

* * *

I don’t live in the woods anymore. I’ve moved to San Francisco, maybe to get away from all those dead animals. Here, all the trees are gone, so you don’t have to worry about hitting animals. I’m sure some people consider this sensible. It’s the reverse of wanting to go back: Go so far forward, paving over everything, that you don’t have to think about animals anymore.

The sky is open and often cloudless. There are parking meters instead of saplings. There are billboards instead of mountains. There are flashing lights instead of birds chirping. What we can’t replace, we make a steel version of. When I tell people I miss the woods, they tell me about the mountain range, a forty minute drive from here. Or they tell me to go down to the docks by the shops and the tourists. Or they tell me to go to the park. The trains here seem more alive, but they don’t pass through woods. They slip into huge tunnels we’ve dug under the ground and lined with cement and tile.

The animals here are mostly pets. There are dog parks everywhere, and on the sidewalks there are people bending over to clean up after their dogs with plastic bags. Men stride through town with birds sitting on their shoulder and the birds are restrained by tiny leashes around their legs. Cats look lazily out of windows but never go outside.
The animals that are not pets are considered dirty and repulsive. People barely notice them, except when they’re avoiding them: Seagulls and rats, raccoons and mice. Roaches, house spiders, crane flies, sparrows.

Pigeons.

Not passenger pigeons, but enough of them to darken the sky if they wanted to.
On that day they’ll refuse to clean the streets for us, to eat our garbage, refuse to have their toes mangled or to run away from our feet.

They’ll take to the sky together, and blot the Sun out like we’ve blotted out the stars with all our evening electric light. Swimming in and out of each other, feather touching feather, wing touching wing. The mass will be dotted with pink feet, pulled up close to their bodies. Thousands of them, farther than anyone can see, threading through the space between buildings and splitting the Earth from the sky like the train splitting my old town. They’ll whistle and coo, beaks open and drinking air. The wind will be musty and thick and smell like sawdust.

And on that day we’ll turn to our friends and loved ones. We’ll look up and scratch our heads and breathe the hot air. We’ll believe and not believe all at once. Then we’ll turn to our pets, who are looking up too. Our dogs will be fixed to the sight, and we’ll wonder why they’re not barking. We’ll reach to pet them.

“Hello,” they’ll say.

10-Point Program to Embarrass Assholes + Update

While I’m writing the next real blog entry, here’s an update on what I’m doing, along with a little list of principles I’ve been trying to live by.

First – I recently appeared on one of my very favorite podcasts,The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, hosted by comedian and deep thinker Duncan Trussell. It feel amazing to have joined the ranks of Joe Rogan, Tim Heidecker, Natasha Leggero and others as a guest. Duncan and I discuss Christianity, gloryholes, the nature of time, porn, and more. It’s funny and deep all at once.

I also completed a new movie – After the Heist – for Joe Gage(NSFW). I don’t usually mention movies I’ve made on this blog, but Joe is an amazing director and writer, and has directed many mainstream films in addition to his huge porn catalogue. I shot three scenes in the movie and have tons of dialogue. I also have a moustache in the movie that makes me look like a
real sleazeball. Hurray! In related news, the last movie I shot for Joe, Dad Goes to College won me the 2012 Grabby Award for Best Supporting Actor. Which actually means something about acting skills, since the other awards are for specific sexual acts.

My essay on shooting porn with straight guys (Girth Brooks and Berke Banks, to be specific), “Gay for Pay” was selected for publication in the upcoming Best Gay Stories 2012 from Lethe Press. The second half of that essay (which I like as much or maybe even better than the first) is available on my blog.

My essay on the Occupy movement has been anthologized in a great ebook – which you can download for free – called Occupy Consciousness: Essays on the Global Insurrection.  Other contributors include Russel Brand (!!!), Daniel Pinchbeck, and Doug Rushkoff.

I’ve got my regular gig over on Logo TV’s website, NewNowNext, where I hand out sex and relationship advice as best I can – generally from a cultural or philosophical standpoint. If you have any questions for me, send me an email at connerhabibsocial at g mail dot com. In fact, feel free to contact me in general.

A new website is in the works, and lots of ideas are bouncing around. I’ll keep you updated.

Finally, I’ve recently become way too interested in tumblr, where I started my own little image-and-quote-and-GIF-depository. It’s called Conner Loves Everyone, although on the page it says “YouWillFuckConner,” so I’m still having trouble with whether or not I want to fall in love with you or just get laid. Either way, the tumblr is NSFW, so proceed with caution or abandon, whichever you prefer.

The list below originally appeared on my tumblr. Of course, there are a million other things that should be on it. But the point is to start today, and fill in the rest on your own. Thanks for the love and more essays up here soon.

If you want to make the world a better place,turn yourself into someone who assholes and politicians look ridiculous next to. When you’re awesome, they’re exposed as absurd, stupid, outdated, and manipulative. Here’s how:

1. Eat real food.

2. Read books.

3. Talk about big things instead of making small talk.

4. Don’t ingest poison in the form of alcohol or drugs.

5. Dedicate your time to things you care about instead of money.

6. Meditate.

7. Meet your neighbors and be kind to them.

8. When you fuck up the above, forgive yourself.

9. When others fuck it up, forgive them.

10. Whenever there’s a fuck up, pick yourself and others up and get back to it.

Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School, Part 2. (Hall Pass)

 

Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School is a series of short essays about growing up  frustrated in small-town Pennsylvania.

 

Everyone loves Mr. Haines because he’s awesome.
That’s their way of saying it – but it’s so generic.  He’s awesome, all right, but what does that tell you?  Nothing.  Here’s what I’d say about him: he’s built and funny and young and his hair is blonde. His face gets red when he’s angry or embarrassed and he lets us get away with a lot more than other teachers.  He’s smart and really interested in us, and can you tell I’m kind of obsessed with him?

His last name is the name of an underwear brand, so it’s not weird that I’m constantly thinking of him in plain white briefs, or today when he tells me to stay after class.

He’s saying stuff, but I have no idea what he’s saying, because I’ve made this deal with myself that I’m going to stare at his dick the whole time.

I’m sixteen and I’ve really just started to read and love books that aren’t sci-fi or fantasy or horror and there’s this book by Herman Hesse called Demian and it’s not the best book I’ve ever read, but it has this part about staring into someone’s eyes that I’ll remember for the rest of my life:

If you stare into someone’s eyes and they look away, then you know you have power over them.
So when someone’s looking at you, don’t ever, ever look away.
I’ve got this down.

In the halls, when the guys that pick on me walk by, I don’t look away.  Maybe they pick on me more because of this, but they don’t win.  And I don’t look away from my parents or the guidance counselor or teachers.  They’ve all taken a sudden interest in my “behavior.”

I’m not dumb: all “behavior” means is that I don’t act like they want me to act.  It’s only “behavior” because they notice it.  They notice my punk rock t-shirts and the stories I’m writing and my foul fucking mouth.  They only notice it because it isn’t nothing, and that’s what they want from me, a pleasant, unnoticeable nothing.

It bothers them that I don’t look away when they talk to me, so they look at each other and lose their power.

Not looking away gives another power, too: When you’re looking around, you see all the people that are looking down or have their eyes open but might as well be sleepwalking.  Or like the handful of black kids in my school, what are they looking at?  They look at each other and they look around nervously, but that’s it.  Everyone who’s not black – which is almost everyone – is looking at them and the Puerto Rican kids, and it’s a sort of scared look, or sometimes a “poor thing” look.  Or sometimes an I-fucking-hate-you look.

I know what it’s like, I guess, because for awhile, everyone was calling me “camel jockey” or “dot.”  They were so stupid, they didn’t know the difference between an Indian and an Arab.  Arabs don’t wear dots, stupid.  They’d call me “sand nigger” and said when you suck your dad’s dick, does the dickhead have a towel on it?  Mrs. Rothrock, my eighth grade cultures teacher, got mad at me for talking in class and told me that if I didn’t shutup, she’s send me back to Syria on a camel.  I thought, “I grew up in Pennsylvania, you dumb bitch,” but I didn’t say anything. I just listened to everyone laughing and I shut up.  I looked down then, because I didn’t know any better, because I didn’t even know who Herman Hesse was.  I was too busy reading Piers Anthony and comic books.

So anyway, if I can look in someone’s eyes, then I figure no problem, I can stare at someone’s dick.  Mr. Haines is sitting loosely in his chair, leaning back, his legs spread open.  Why do guys always sit like this – like they’re just waiting for someone to come up and suck their dicks?  Relaxed, leaned back, legs sprawled out.  He’s talking to me, but all I’m paying attention to is his crotch, which is all stuffed and full of his dick and his balls, a big bulge in his kakhi pants.

I catch a few words – it’s about my report I just turned in.  I guess he liked it, because it had “well-done” written on it in red ink.  It was a report about skinheads because it had to be about “culture” and in my town there are neo-Nazi skinheads and KKK members, so I just wrote about my own town.

I wrote it in a night, and yeah, I made up some fake sources and fake quotes – but that was only because my real sources were kids from my school.  Skinheads.

I’m still figuring out what “irony” is, I mean, I’ve pretty much figured it out, it’s just I’m not sure about this: Is the fact that the skinheads in my school hang out with me – even though I’m half Syrian, and even though the jocks are calling me a faggot – ironic?
Either way, it’s a good thing, because if they weren’t my friends, they’d scare the shit out of me.
Actually, I take that back, they still kind of scare the shit out of me.
They’re outsiders, too.  I mean, you’d never see a skinhead on the football team.  So maybe me being a sort of outcast is more important to them than my race.
Maybe being lonely is bigger than being angry.

I asked Jay and Chris for information so I could write the report.  Jay sits at lunch with me and we talk about punk rock.  He catches the yellowjackets that tap against the cafeteria window and will eat one if you pay him fifty cents.  He brings a fake gun to school and people think that’s perfectly hilarious. He gives me a tape of music by a Nazi band called Skrewdriver, and I include the lyrics in my report.
Nigger, nigger,
Get on your boat.
Nigger, nigger,
Get out of here.
It’s a dumb song, but would be sort of catchy I guess if it didn’t have the nigger part in it.  There’s another song about the IRA, which at first I confuse for the IRS until I find out what it really is.  And there’s this song about violent uprising and the chorus goes,  “You can shove your fucking dove/up your ass!”

Chris gives me a newspaper made by skinheads called American Skinhead.  Well, he calls it a newspaper, but actually, it’s more like a zine.  Chris is into tattoos.  All the skinheads are.  Jay has a tattoo of the word “hatred” on the inside of his lower lip.  There’s a skinhead I’ve met once that’s supposed to have a tattoo of Hitler right on his groin, and Hitler’s arm is tattooed on his dick, so that whenever he gets a hard on, the arm rises up in a sieg heil.  I know I should be repulsed, but thinking about his tattooed hard on makes me horny. Of course asking him to see it would make me dead.  So I don’t.

The stuff from the CD and the zine go into my report, and Mr. Haines is impressed, but he’s not getting hard.  If I can just stand here, looking, maybe he’ll pull his dick out of his pants and his dickhead will be flushed red like his face gets and I’ll get on my knees and suck it.  It’s like when me and my friend Courtney found out that if you stare at a candle flame long enough, it’ll move when you will it to.  At least that’s what it seems like.  Get hard, Mr. Haines, I’m thinking.  Get hard and pull your dick out.  Now.  Now.

Courtney’s half black and we talk about occult stuff and music and monster movies, and Jay hangs out with her too, which is confusing because he’s always talking about a race war.  When the race war comes, will he save her or just stomp on her head with his Doc Martens?  If we have to pick sides, I’m not sure what I’d do because there’s no side for someone like me or Courtney.  Anyway, what is a race war?  Will there be people in the streets with guns and helicopters flying above us and fires in windows?

People have been talking about race war since Rodney King got beat up a few years ago.  Whoever was holding that camera definitely didn’t look away as all those police officers just brought their clubs up and down and up and down.  Skinheads like Jay say that Rodney King deserved it and that he probably had a weapon and that if he were innocent, he would have just stayed down.  I’m not convinced, but I tread carefully, because I’ve heard the skinheads call people “nigger-lovers” when they stand up for Rodney King.

One of the popular girls, Jess, called one of the other girls a nigger-lover in the bathroom once.  At least that’s what I heard.  Maybe there really is a race war coming, because I also heard that it got back to a Puerto Rican girl (so maybe Puerto Ricans and blacks side with each other, I’m not sure) and that this girl ran right up to Jess after school.  And Jess jumped into her expensive yellow car and started to roll the window up, but the other girl thrust her hand in at the last minute.  Then she grabbed Jess by the hair and slammed her against the dashboard again and again until her face was bleeding.  When she was done, she made Jess give her the expensive watch she wears to school.  I don’t know if this is all true, but I know I like the story.
Maybe that tells me what side I’d be on.

Is it racist against white people to pick the other side?  I know what Jay and Chris would say, but I don’t think I’d agree.  The white people always seem like the bullies.  Even when they’re my friends, I’m afraid of them.  I’m not afraid of the black kids, but maybe that’s just because there’s only a few of them.

Then again, I know when I jerk off thinking about Grady, one of the black kids, I think about him standing next to me at the urinal and saying, “See, I knew black guys had bigger dicks than Arabs,” and then I’d have to suck his dick.  I know this is somehow racist.  It’s like I can’t just think of sucking his dick, I always have to frame it somehow.  I always have to think of it happening because he’s black, because he talks about being black.

Not like Mr. Haines.  It doesn’t matter that he’s older, or that he’s a teacher.  It doesn’t matter that he’d get in trouble.  In my mind, standing here after class, getting hard in my pants and wishing he’d get hard in his, I think of him as an equal.  I think he could maybe fall in love with me if he’d just get hard.
But he’s saying my name now, and fuck, I’ll have to look at him instead of his crotch.  I don’t want to look him in the eyes, I want to stay right here staring at his dick until this works out for us.
He says my name again and I look up at him, right into his blue eyes.  They’re so intense.  His brow knots up a bit, and I say, “yes,” and nod like I’ve been listening the whole time.  And then there’s this pause.  I don’t move, I don’t breathe.

Who will protect us in this town, I think.  There are skinheads and KKK people and bullies.  There are dogs that run snarling to the edge of their yards when you walk home and stare too long at them.  There are jocks and racists and homophobes and Christian crazies and angry teachers and this school, this whole school is crazy and I’m burning like a bright moving speck of fire every single day.

I look back down at Mr. Haines’s crotch and try to stay there, but it doesn’t work, everything is dispelled. I look into his eyes and can see he knows what I’ve been doing.  He sits up straight and stops relaxing, and his face turns red.  He says, “All right, you better get going,” and writes me a permission slip for being late to my next class.  I take it and turn back, but he’s already in his own world of numbers and letters, writing in his gradebook.

And I walk out into the hall and everyone else is already in class.  The halls are empty, which feels calm.  I like times like this, when there’s no one to look at, just the lines of lockers and the sun coming through the windows and people in their classes, teachers saying things I can’t hear through the closed classroom doors.

I tuck my hard on up under the waist of my pants, but I’m never sure if people can see this or not, so I walk slowly so that it’ll calm down.  I get to English class and walk in, and the same thing happens every time a kid walks into class late.  The teacher keeps looking ahead at the class and talking, but he sort of reaches his arm out for your slip.  So I walk to the front of the room and hand it to him, and all the other kids, the skinheads and the jocks and the popular girls all look at me, because they think I’m late because I’ve gotten in trouble, right?  They think I had to be in the office because of my “behavior,” but I know them.  I know how they talk about each other and hate each other.  And how they pretend to be good kids but say racist shit in the bathrooms or pretend to be racist but hang out with me and Courtney.  So I look at all of them and keep my eyes on them the whole way back to my seat and one by one they turn their eyes back to the teacher but I never, ever look away.

Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School, Part 1. (Gym Class.)

Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School is a series of short essays about growing up  frustrated in small-town Pennsylvania.  

#1 – Gym Class

I don’t know if this is normal, but in the early mornings before I left for school, I would actually get down on my knees and pray to God for the whole gym class to fuck me. Even the teacher. Especially the teacher.

There were two gym teachers at my high school – one was kindhearted and gullible and taught sex ed. The other – Mr. Wolfe, my gym teacher – was masculine and always angry. He was perfectly built and yelled at us like we were his soldiers. He would do walking handstands in front of us, and his arms tensed to show off the thick cords of tendon; his shirt would drift toward his head and I could see his belly, flat, punctuated with muscle, hairy. He had a beat-up face. When we played dodgeball, the losing team had to rush to the locker room door one by one, a door that was lined on either side by the winners, who pelted you with the mottled pink balls. He made us run til we puked. He called us “pussies” and told us no girls would want to smell our stinking bodies after class, so we’d better take showers.

No one took showers. The big open shower room, dry, unused, didn’t even show up in my fantasies. Instead my thoughts would all center around the locker room itself.

I could see their balls in the spaces between their underwear and their thighs. Their dickheads would push aside the front opening of their boxers. They’d daringly moon each other. One of them, Brian, pulled his waistband below his ass and strutted around. He was making a joke, but I missed it. It couldn’t have been more serious to me. Every week, twice a week, I was surrounded by half naked boys. Dave, Sean, Jamie, Brian, Marco, Ethan, Brad. Their dicks would sway in their underwear as they undressed. Our skin was smooth, although most of us had armpit hair and leg hair, and some with hair just below our belly buttons.

Amazingly, I never got hard. It wasn’t that I could control it: I’d get hard in the halls, on field trips, in classes; I was constantly getting erections. There was no control, just mysterious mercy that kept me from getting caught.

Not that it mattered. Eventually, I was being called “faggot” anyway.

A high school gym isn’t like a gym you work out in as an adult. It’s only a big open space with a wooden shine where everyone can see you. We’d bring out nets and play volleyball, bring out mats and wrestle, follow Mr. Wolfe with equipment to the baseball field. Or we’d run to the big hill next to the track and play flag football. No one had ever taught me how to play football – my Syrian father didn’t know anything about American sports except boxing – and so my teacher and teammates were invariably disappointed in me. I couldn’t catch footballs or hit baseballs. Being picked last became a badge of honor. We’d bring out the horse and bars do gymnastics, and I was better at that than most kids. I have strong legs. They didn’t save me.

Until I was a senior, I was taunted and teased. Sometimes I was pushed into lockers. Once I was punched in the stomach.

I wore shirts with the names of bands – The Jesus Lizard, The Cows, Seaweed – that no one had ever heard of. I was constantly questioning the teachers, showing off some sort of angry iconoclasm. None of these things fit, so I was “gay” to them. The other kids knew I was off before I did. I knew I was attracted to men, but I wouldn’t have ever identified as gay, and was especially reluctant to when I found out that identity was nothing but an insult.

Dave kicked the bottom of my shoes as I walked, making me trip forward. Ethan pushed me as I ascended the stairs. Jamie grabbed me by the neck. Sean called me a faggot. It felt like everyone was calling me a faggot, even the girls.

When I became 17 it suddenly stopped. Maybe that was because I became friends with some of the more popular kids, or because the main instigators – one class above me – had graduated.

I thought (like most kids?) about blowing up the school. I thought about picking up my fork and going absolutely apeshit and stabbing the eyes out of my persecutors at lunch. I thought of ways to ruin their lives and cripple them. I didn’t create that violence, it was brought to me, pushed and shouted and taunted into me each day.

I hated going to school, except for gym days. And I hated gym class, but I wanted it anyway. My feelings were competing in me, and I wanted to stop competing. What were we always competing for, anyway?

Instead of killing them, I’d take my lunch and sneak upstairs everyday to the empty media lab, full of TVs and cameras. I jerked off in there and ate my lunch alone. As long as I had that time to myself, as long as I could think about them fucking me, I could keep all of us safe.

On the wooden benches, by the lockers, I’d imagine them taking turns, sliding their underwear down to their ankles, their asses were all smooth, their bodies were all young, and they were fucking my mouth and my ass. I’d think of them talking to each other over me, while they were inside me, almost as if I weren’t there. I wanted to be what made them feel good, I wanted them to meet in me. And I’d be invisible. If they were in me together, maybe I could experience their comradery. At the end, I’d see myself appear again and they’d pat me on the back and tell me I did well. I’d imagine one or more of them putting their arms around me in school the next day. I’d jerk off to them being my friends.

Dave, a year ahead of me, the most relentless of the bullies, once said to me during gym class, “You sexy bitch.” No one else was around, and to this day, I don’t understand why he said it. I wrote in my confused and urgent journal that night that he must have secretly loved me. We were reading A Separate Peace in English class, and I was consumed with thoughts of loving and hating someone at the same time. But he didn’t love me or hate me; I bumped into him at a Borders a few years after my graduation and he didn’t even recognize me. All that meaning, all those times I hated him or jerked off to him, all the times I thought about stabbing him in the throat with a fork, and I was nobody. He walked by with his pregnant wife and looked at me the way you’d look past someone you’ve never met and aren’t interested in. He had long hair but was still handsome.

Is this why so many men identify with and long for the men who dominate us? Sex was reaching its unbearable teenage fever in me at the same time that I was being pushed into walls, torn away from my backpack, berated.

In his office connected to the locker room, Mr. Wolfe had a separate shower. I imagined that little shower was for him and for his special students. I didn’t know what that meant, “special students,” I just thought the most athletic kids got to shower in there for some reason.

And when I wasn’t imagining getting gangbanged by my classmates, I’d be in Mr. Wolfe’s shower with him. He’d turn on the water and fuck me. I’d always envision him holding onto me, so that we were both standing, bent over, and his hard, hairy chest was on my smooth back, and his legs were touching my legs. His dick was huge and painful and all the way in me. My head was in the crook of his neck. His arms were wrapped around me.

I imagined all this and I prayed for it. But they never fucked me. I was never a good athlete or called into Mr. Wolfe’s office. They never put their arms around me. And we never became friends.

Sex, Horror, and TV. Or: I’ve Been Real Busy.

Generally, I only post if I have, you know, a post. But I’ve had so much going on in other venues lately, that I think an update is in order.

First is my essay on The Cabin in the Woods is up on horror icon Peaches Christ’s website. Peaches Christ, in case you don’t know, is an internationally famous drag queen, horor event host, and artist. She’s currently working on a giant horror-related event with Elvira. Whoa!

Second: I’m now Logo TV’s Sex Expert, via their NewNowNext site. You send questions about sex, I answer them in a video with my standard good-natured/goofy/slutty manner. So far, I’ve answered questions about a lack of hard-ons and the right attitude for being in pornography.

Third: my first essay as a contributing writer to Salon.com, Rest Area Confidential” “came out about a month ago, and it’s on having sex at rest areas. It caused a bit of a shit storm, including a defense on Out Magazine’s site and an appearance on the Mike Bullard Show. This kind of stuff always makes a writer happy.

More? Well, yes, more. I’ve got an essay coming out in a book from Evolver Editions. It’s an essay on pornography, love, touch, and rebellion.
My essay on Occupy Wall Street is being anthologized in a free education PDF on Occupy.
Finally, my essay on Lynn Margulis will be in a collection from Chelsea Green this Fall.
More on all those as they get closer to publication.

Oh, and of course, there’s the pornography!
Thanks for coming here and check back for a proper blog entry soon!
- CH

By the Time You’ve Seen It, It’s Too Late

After having my latest essay up for a few hours, it was picked up for publication by one of my very favorite websites,TheRumpus.net.
Below is an excerpt of that essay. Read the whole thing here.

If you’re new to my blog, here are some links to my posts on my experience with gay domestic violence, the nature of compassion, and working with gay-for-pay perfomers.

You can also check out my essay on my friend and mentor, biologist Lynn Margulis, on RealitySandwich.com.

EXCERPTS from “By the Time You’ve Seen It, It’s Too Late“

Our best shot at understanding the foundation of obscenity law is through watching Sam Raimi’s 1981 horror film, The Evil Dead. In it, a group of (who else?) students stay (where else?) at a cabin in the woods. Amidst the jokes and sexual tension, they uncover a book of demonic spells and rites. They also find a reel to reel tape player, and on it, the voice of scientist reciting a string of incantations.

The kids, as usual, never had a chance. Simply playing of the tape summons the demons; such was the power of the muffled words. Aside from the normal possessing and flesh-eating demons, there are also demons in the form of the woods themselves, which assault – physically and sexually – one of the girls. The demons literally fall apart at the end of the film when the occult book is thrown into the fire.

The movie is a cult classic and has spawned sequels as well as inspired later films, such as The Ring (and its Japanese original) in which the same sort of thing occurs except this time (perhaps more germane to the topic of pornography) from a VHS tape… (and) by the time the tape is playing, it’s already too late.

The obscenity trial of Michael Peacock arose from such fears of the supernatural power of the image and word, and even though he was found not guilty and we are told these laws will perhaps undergo a radical reevaluation, the fear will stay with us…

* * *

A popular approach to answering how the image affects us has been through scientific experimentation and social science surveys; and science is our most occult of philosophies, filled with symbols, images, and tools. But there, we have mostly failed. Not because we haven’t gathered evidence, but because all the evidence seems to clash. How can there be so many books on sex and violence that reach different conclusions?

In the meantime, a demand is made: Take sides.

Will watching fisting make someone want to try fisting? Yes or no. Do you believe that bareback sex in porn makes the viewer want to have condom-less sex? Yes or no. Will watching horror movies make you more prone to violent acts? Yes or no. Do fantasy portrayals of incest in pornography glorify abuse? What about portrayals of rape? What about gay or lesbian sex? What about general corruption and depravity – can watching a sexual or violent act make you a worse person?

The questions gather and back us into a corner, so it is easy to see why such a callous and ridiculous statement as Andrea Dworkin’s, that, “The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too,” becomes appealing: It’s not an answer, it’s an escape.

Just give up one or the other – your values or your sexuality.

Yes or no, please.

But most importantly, answer quickly, there are monsters at the door.

Permitting one form of the image on principle or cultural critique alone, but not permitting it in another form proves very difficult, and all arguments seem to undo themselves.

For example, one might object to comparisons of pornography and sexualized images of women in advertising because porn is consumed privately and advertising (sometimes) isn’t. But the logical consequence could easily – and often has easily – become: we cannot have women depicted sexually in public. To keep the argument logically consistent: in porn, we consent and so it’s okay, in advertisement, we don’t consent, so it’s not. That means banning advertisement with questionable content, back to women showing their ankles off in ads, and wearing full-length dresses otherwise.

More evidence for how problematic this is: Would you object, as many did, to gay cruising site Manhunt.com’s billboard campaign prominently displaying two men about to kiss (and surely, one thing leads to another) to anyone on the street, ? Yes or no.

What if they were kissing and you had your kids with you?

Since you’re reading this essay, I suspect your answer would be no, but you can see how the question weaves into others, and evades easy answers.

What if they were fucking?

Whether it’s behind closed doors or freely displayed must shrink in importance in our conversation next to the question, “How does the image affect us?” But to answer, we need to do more than respond with feelings and thoughts.

The menace of the image and its affects leads some to talk supernaturally about images, as if stating their names is evidence enough for their power. Because the depiction of the act is what has initially repulsed the critic, one only needs to state what the act is to argue. This is why arguments against pornography are often simply descriptions of the act. “He had a bullwhip up his rectum!” anti-Maplethorpe censors cried. Or, in Chris Hedges’s essay (in an otherwise thoughtful book – Empire of Illusion -from an otherwise thoughtful man, in which he desperately clings to Dworkin’s escapist quote), “The Illusion of Love”, he falls under the (sexual?) trance of naming what he sees and believing this naming presents some sort of self-evident truth: “…oral sex, vaginal sex, double penetration, and double anal.” He quotes a performer who says during a shoot, “Shove it up my fucking ass…: and “Fuck, motherfucker…” and “Fucking love it…” No explanations required for Hedges, who is always more rigorous than this.

The supernatural: To say its name is to evoke it…