I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw porn.  I was a child, I’m certain, not realizing and recognizing what I was seeing.  Like my generation and those preceding it, it must’ve been in print.  Could’ve only been.  Even now, an older person, I still like porn in the same way I have fond memories of my ninth grade English teacher Mr. Mike Levin: porn taught me something.

Best thing in sex isn’t the nakedness (although it is number two!), nor intimacy, nor even orgasm.  It’s the immediacy of it.  The WENEEDTOGETOURBODIESDOINGTHESETHINGSTOEACHOTHERNOW! feeling.  Call it horniness or whatever.  That’s the best thing about sex.  About fucking.  It’s the difference between fucking and making love.

“Making love”.  Sounds like something on a movie screen directed by Jane Campion with a soundtrack by James Horner, starring Kate Winslet and Daniel Day Lewis.  Utter bullshit.

Grew up thinking and believing through the magic that was pop entertainment that everyone else wants to “make love”.  Because of societal reasons, because it’s special, because it’s meaningful, because…bullshit.  Everyone wanted to “make love” except me.  I wanted to fuck.  To have sex.  Fucking was not allowed in because…it reminded the world of pornography.  People in porn F-U-C-K and this could not be the real world.  It isn’t, we were told.  Fantasy is all porn is.

Porn is a menu at your favorite sushi bar.

(I want to make an all-you-can-eat joke.)

My favorite thing in porn is someone is eaten out and fucked from behind.

Sex is the clumsiest thing I know how to do.  You know how to do it too.  But we’d abhor the idea of watching ourselves in the middle of fucking, all wobbly legs, jiggling bits, the ridiculous faces we make.  You have to admire people whose job is just that.  I’m not saying that ought to be everyone’s aspiration in life - for some it may be - but all I’m saying, regardless of how attractive the people are, the angles are just unflattering, aren’t they?  But despite that, we watch.  I watch.  Knowing it isn’t the real world.  Just like when you turn on True Blood or Glee.  Television is porn.

When I was in my early twenties, a group of New York girlfriends and I sat around some ritzy bar in Manhattan and they told me how much they enjoy fucking, not making love.  My tiny man-brain exploded and I realized I’d been lied to my whole life.  Like being raised Catholic, everything everyone ever said to me was false.  I’d been going about it the wrong way for so long, and now there was a shift in my reality.  I needed to pursue this in the same fashion I pursued atheism.  And fuck more.

A couple of very different exes said to me, then, how their favorite television made each of them cry.  Everyone comes at the end of a porno.

Cringe if you want: your life takes on a shape more like a porno then it does your favorite novel, your favorite movie, and you ought to be glad for it.

Sex is everywhere.  You’re breathing sex in daily.  You taste it with your lunch.  Sex is in your church and in your library.  Maybe I’m just horny at five-something in the morning.  Full disclosure: I’ve photographed and been photographed while fucking; this IS the twenty-first century after all.

Being eaten out and then fucked from behind is my favorite thing to do/have done to me.

“For some people, most people, [sex is] the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing.  This is what life can give you that’s equal to others or better, even, that you don’t have to go to college six years to get.  And it’s not religion and it’s not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself.”
- don delillo, UNDERWORLD