I Wonder

I like to think of myself as a realist. I’ve read much on human evolution and sexuality. I have always been tuned toward the sexy side of life, finding innuendo in the most innocent of places and shaping my life around my sexual desires; how could it be shaped any other way? I have placed myself in the world of pornography in some ways accidentally, but in most ways deliberately–I hoped to find like-minded people here. People who see everything for what, biology tells us, it really is: an elaborate construction built up around the urge to fuck. Everything we do goes back to that basic need to try to pass on our DNA, to become immortal through our offspring, to collapse into each other over and over until our seed has taken to the soil of a new generation. And then to keep doing it because we like it. Sex is the basis of every movement of our heads, every building we design, every purchase we make, everything we do. Everything.

Or so I’ve thought for some time. And I still believe I’m right. But it occurs to me sometimes, when I watch people at the office or overhear conversations on the subway, that this reductive view of humanity is isolating me. It’s impossible to know what those guys on the sidewalk actually thought when they turned around to watch that woman in tight pants walk by. Maybe they simply thought, “How pretty.” But my brain, saturated in the hardcore and held up by my almost-thirty years of perversion, immediately assumed that their brains took this to an extreme: “How would my dick look in her mouth? I wonder if she can deep throat.”

I’m starting to feel like I don’t have any firm grounding in the rest of the world. I sometimes fear I’ve run straight through the looking glass without noticing and landed deep in Lalaland, where everything is distorted, oversized, oversexed. I’m sometimes happy here: these people get me to a degree. They’re not afraid of sex or sexuality and they’re fun to hang out with and their brains do the same things mine does when they’re in public, I’m sure. For us, it’s normal to wonder what that guy is packing beneath his skinny jeans, to speculate briefly on his fetishes, to be oh-so-close to just asking him before remembering that sex is not easy for everyone to talk about. It’s a huge block in the road for many. For us, though, it IS the road.

I wonder if my sense of up and down is still intact. I wonder if there is an up and a down or just this slippery slope I’ve been on for years now. I love being able to talk to people about their perversions, to be an understanding ear for their insecurities and a source of answers for many of their questions. I like being the Mama Bear of all things porn for my friends. But this work is doing something to me, to my expectations about people, to my estimation of people. I still think, and always will, that sex is what drives us, but that equation is so simple–if everything came back to this so simply, we’d have never invented calculus. Being an essentialist is easy most of the time, but I’ve begun to wonder if I can handle the complications that arise when you attribute more than just lust to people’s motivations. I wonder if I have any motivations of my own anymore.

I wonder.