I had a comedy bit but I don’t have the stage presence to deliver it, so I’ll write it instead.
I noticed that when I used to watch porn, I wasn’t consuming it in the way they warn you about. I wasn’t watching increasingly sadistic, unrealistic fantasy stuff. There were no tentacles, orgies, no buffering anime tits. The reports of men going soft with their Wendy’s cook girlfriend because they’re using VR porn to bang 3 hookers in a hot tub in Cancun. That’s not me.
I found myself deep in the libraries of Pornhub scraping for scenarios that had just enough credibility to be real in my life. In some horrible alternate timeline, I could find myself in this exact POV (point-of-view) situation, living out this depravity for an inkling of sexual gratification.
I wanted post nut clarity like Joseph Smith discovering a shameful new religion. I wanted a life reckoning, the smells and sights and regret boners truly felt and earned.
One video stands out as a lighthouse in the dark. I found it some pages along the Pornhub shuffle. It’s grainy from the start. It opens with a neon PowerPoint message scrolling down the page, like Star Wars for the less fortunate.
“I went to help my mom’s friend …
wearing grey sweat pants…
she couldn’t resist”
Cut to:
Someone holding a phone aimed at a pale skinny stomach, recording down towards a tumbleweed. Looking up at the viewer is a woman of some 60 years.
You can see Fox News in the back, a dog wandering around. The cigarette smell has surely settled onto the clothes haphazardly falling out of the numerous dressers. Her papyrus skin glints in the camera light.
I watch this ready for my form of escapism, I want it to feel so grossly real that my body reacts.
————-
So, I create a scene in my head: I was working at a restaurant late with my older coworker. She has a fun personality and we flirt casually.
Her Corolla has been acting up recently, could I give her a ride home?
I hesitate but say sure why not. We make awkward talk on the way, when we arrive at her house she asks, “Want to stop in for a beer? I owe you one.”
And we have the set up my friends.
————-
We have the front lobe calculations that put me in sweatpants on that poorly fitted bed sheet.
I have to be able to see myself in the scenario, but more importantly, I have to be able to see the part of myself that is dark enough to go there. Porn as escapism must acknowledge our humanity, not rise above it into an unrecognizable fantasy realm. It’s the dirty “what-ifs” that simmer underneath and ache to be tapped.
In the near future, when nobody can get it up, there will still be those in the trenches seeking gritty realism.
There will always be the frontiersmen finding sideways videos from hotel rooms, backs of cars, or rent controlled houses. The sex was so real and urgent and kinda gross that it had to happen. People living on the precipice of demise, rushing to act before their brain catches up with them. That’s how we got here.
Maybe we’ll pay more for that in the future, to get back to reality. AI is conditioning us to live in this false reality and seek things that we’ll never actually see; create images of ourselves and storylines that barely scratch the real. Are you really a sex god satisfying these single women in your area, or are you a pirate radio freak fucking before your body falls apart and your judgment kicks in? The ugliness, the futility, and living on the edge of ruin that’s required to feel fully alive sometimes. Slugging down the Oregon trail, haunting scratched home VHS that have gathered dust; masturbating regally, while the violinist plays and the ship sinks.
Wanderthoughts 