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Early signs for sex that evening were positive: it was not yet 8 o'clock, the baby was asleep, and neither my wife nor I had been overly exhausted by another difficult day on this too-trying Earth, nor overly depressed, nor overly angry, nor overly murderous, nor overly suicidal. As my wife showered, I sat with my laptop on our bed, responding to some late emails and sipping a glass of wine. It is a fact that the probability of any evening's marital sexual relations is directly proportional to the length of either partner's shower that said evening, and she had been in there for some time now. When she finally emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel and chased by a gentle billow of steam, I was pleased to see her head straight for her lingerie drawer.
"Hey," I said, "you're not the regular poolboy."
"Just thought I'd come by, Ma'am," she said, "see if anything was
too wet."
I laughed, and then she laughed, and as she turned and headed back into the bathroom, she asked if we had any decent porno we could watch.
"No," I said, "but we have broadband."
"Even better," she said, closing the door behind her.
It's important for you to know at this point that me and porno go way back. Me and porno are buddies. Me and porno, we hang.
When I was a nine-year-old Orthodox yeshiva student, I found a pile of discarded pornography magazines in the woods behind my house. Compared to the physical world around me — a world of overwhelming religious restriction and suffocating social regulations — the fantasy world of pornography seemed like a parallel, if gooey, version of the Garden of Eden my rabbis had just described to me. Legs were eternally spread, bodies were proudly exposed, heads were thrown back in ecstasy. In porno there was no guilt, no shame, no fear,
Perhaps this had been Walt Disney's idea when he created Disneyland — a place free of anger. |
no anger. Black people fucked white people, white people fucked black people, men fucked women, women fucked women, and, in a magazine named Blueboy, buried at the very bottom of the pile, men even fucked men. People in Pornoland ate pussy, they ate ass, they ate come. Was come kosher, I wondered? Was there a blessing on pussy? The people of Pornoland didn't seem to care, and I loved them for it. With inspiring abandon, women lavished attention and in turn were lavished upon, and men spilled their seed on the floor and the chair and the couch and the bellies and the backs and the faces and the lips without fear of retribution, without worry about damnation and without concern for the purgatorial post-death punishment one rabbi had described to us that year of being boiled alive for Eternity in a vat of all the semen you wasted during your lifetime. Licking, sucking, pinching, fucking: do what you want, the leaders of Pornoland declared, but judge not, scorn not, worry not. Paradise.
Perhaps this had been Walt Disney's idea when he created Disneyland — a place, first and foremost, free of anger. But Mickey didn't have a cock, and Minnie didn't have a pussy, and so I wasn't all that impressed with their idyllic existence. John Holmes, though. Ginger Lynn. Wendy Whoppers. Now there was a group I could emulate. I admired their daring, their rebellion, their freedom. They made me feel better about myself, as rabbis both dead and alive did everything they could to make me feel the opposite. So I was surprised when, a few years later, I saw people (non-religious people!) in Manhattan (Manhattan!) protesting pornography. Pornography! I had recently begun yeshiva high school on 181st Street, and had cut Talmud class to go to Times Square. It wasn't long before my backpack was filled with hardcore magazines and videocassettes, and I headed over to the bus stop on Forty-Seventh and Fifth, whereupon I passed an angry woman shouting into a megaphone and waving a wooden placard above her head. On the placard was a large still-frame from a hardcore porno movie: a large-breasted blonde woman on her knees, eyes closed, getting done from behind by an ecstatic black man. I was about to ask her where I could find such a movie when I noticed her friend carrying another placard which read "Porn = Hate!"
Really? I wondered. I thought it =ed liberty. I thought it =ed escape. I thought it =ed fun.
Lunatic, I thought to myself.
And where the hell did she get that movie?
The door to the bathroom opened again, and my wife climbed into bed beside me. We sat side by side, the laptop between us, and underneath the "Bookmarks" heading in the web browser, I selected an online porno forum I used to frequent. It had been a while since I'd been to that site, though — the combination of a pregnancy, a newborn baby and the stress of raising an infant hadn't ruined our sex life as completely as some had predicted, but it had made pornography somewhat inconvenient — when you have barely the time or the energy for the main feature, so to speak, who can be bothered with the previews? I clicked on the first forum entry, and screen caps of the downloadable video began to appear.
"Jesus Christ," said my wife once the page had loaded.
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