Assholes are Bullshit
He slithered around in his chair and made a noise intended to drown something out—my God: pornography turned the world upside down. You gave your head away, and what your mind liked no longer mattered; now the animal parts were in the driving-seat—and tall in the saddle. As Lolita took her Amazon from the rear, Brendan attended to the ordeal of his own arousal. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen, he thought, when you’re watching the one about the oversexed undertaker, the coprophagic pigfarmer, the ladykilling ladykiller…
Martin Amis, Yellow Dog
It was during the summer of 1994 that I discovered dirty things on the Internet. I was trapped in rural Indiana on a National Science Foundation research grant (much less impressive than it sounds), a UNIX lab and umpteen thousand miles of fiber optic cable connecting me to the world. Yes, even way back in ‘94 there were terabytes of porn piled by the dumpsters in the shady back alleys of Usenet—mostly high-resolution stills scanned from glossy European sex magazines, old GIFs leeched from archaic bulletin board systems with names like Rusty-n-Eddie’s, and perhaps a few thousand grainy videos. This was before the deluge of broadband porn, before cocksucking sluts in every inbox, before anyone took seriously the idea that there was money to be made. Previously I had seen the Internet in purely technical terms: as a highly distributed network designed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Now I saw it for what it truly was: a sort of psychic holocaust all its own. A wanker’s paradise.
A few days ago, as we sat together downloading mp3’s, a kid boasted to me of his digital porn collection back home. I can barely remember what life was like Before Internet Porn (B.I.P.), when it was good enough to huddle under the covers with a copy of the Swimsuit Issue, enthralled at the mere outline of a nipple; to steal a glance at some kid’s coveted copy of Hustler magazine, maybe fish a mildly hardcore video out of the trash (Big Black Dicks in Little White Chicks, it might read)—when wanking at least required some imagination. Nowadays you’re always one slip of the mouse away from Paris Hilton doing double anal, or enemas, or goatse.cx. Pr0n, the kiddies call it. Listening to this kid, already jaded about so much at such a young age, I was glad I grew up in the B.I.P. era. I wondered whether we’re raising a generation of raincoaters. I told the boy he had to choose between downloading porn and having real girlfriends. He nodded slowly, as if acknowledging that he’d already lost touch with something vital.
During the heady, debauchery-filled summer of 2001, porn lost its hold on my imagination. The animal in me simply stopped responding to it, like when you’ve seen that video and you’ve wanked and wanked and then you’re done for awhile, except now for months at a time. You could say I was busy out there in the real world, but I still held on to my other solitary obsessions—reading, video games, madly surfing the web. Somehow the increasingly rarefied on-screen sex acts were no longer even appealing to me on an animal level—it was as if pornography had rocketed so far into the erotic as to come out the other side, to metastasize into the anti-erotic.
Like a whore doing her nth line of blow, the inundated wanker grows desensitized to the product. The industry has to constantly chase after the next big thing, to manufacture new stimuli at steadily decreasing marginal returns, to plumb deeper into those animal parts. But animal is at least natural—we’ve gone beyond that into something darker and more insidious in human nature. It’s not a matter of lust but of conditioned response: Wanker gets a hardon. Bored with his porn collection, Wanker downloads a video depicting quad-anal. Wanker confuses the organic source of his arousal with the depiction on screen and soon enough Wanker gets a hardon whenever he sees quad-anal. Eventually he doesn’t develop a hardon unless he sees quad-anal. Over time quad-anal grows boring and the cycle continues. Simple penis-in-vagina was left in the dust a thousand jizz-stained rags ago.
“Pussies are bullshit,” as Amis famously quoted porn-king John Stagliano. And assholes are reality.
Except that assholes, too, are bullshit.
As a sex writer I’ve been granted access to a lot of state-of-the-art porn, the balance of it overwhelmingly anal. But assholes are bullshit: mere assfucking ain’t enough anymore. Ready at any moment to plunge into rectal prolapse, the asshole now has to gape to proportions that would make a proctologist blush. Our barely-legal starlet is routinely expected to suck a cock clean after it emerges from her own—or someone else’s—pooper. “I want to taste my shit juice off you cock,” says one frenzied girl. “I want to gag off my own ass juice.” (What young woman doesn’t dream of this?) But even this is old-hat. The edgy performer now chokes down jism-enema after jism-enema expelled from the gaping maw of her playmate’s incontinent sphincter. We’ve gone off the deep-end of unusual sexual practices, and there’s some danger in this—not moral, but psychological; of expectations raised to the point that even a sphincter-ripping buttfuck seems bland. It’s not the physical acts I worry about so much as the lack of context or conscience. Looking at these videos I feel less like a wanker than a harried motorist rubbernecking at the scene of a particularly gruesome collision. This stuff doesn’t even pretend to be human anymore.
But perhaps I’m making too much of it all. The kids will probably turn out alright—desensitized to porn, yes, but not to the overpowering sights and sounds and scents and feelings of the real thing. I’m the last one on earth who should be hurling stones. Maybe you, the wanker, get turned on by gaping anuses and jism-enemas and that’s probably okay. Maybe I do, too. You’d just better hope that this doesn’t happen when you’re watching the one about the oversexed undertaker, the coprophagic pigfarmer, the ladykilling ladykiller…
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