In 1919, a molasses tank on top of the Purity Distilling Company burst apart, sending a dark tide of two million gallons of sticky fluid down onto the streets of Boston. Nearby buildings were swept off their foundations. Twenty-one people were suffocated in the sticky goo, their throats clogged with strange fluid, the survivors suffering sweet coughing fits for months afterwards. They had to get a guy with a shotgun to go around and put down the shrieking horses trapped in the fluid.
It's an awful image, and I keep imagining similarly dire results when my sex drive comes back online again. It's been at least ten days since my body has bothered to be aroused at all, and at this point Little Elvis is in a coma deeper than Sunny von Bulow, so I'm pretty sure that first pop will unleash a torrent of hentai-sized proportions. If the neighborhood's not in danger, I'm pretty sure I'll at least ruin a five-by-five section of the carpet.
Yet I am still downloading porn. Not because I am stockpiling for the day my libido returns - no, I have a wife who I suspect has equal needs and has been patiently waiting for systems repair - but because even in this carefully neutered state, I find looking at porn to be anthropologically fascinating.
Porn right now is like looking into a bizarre mirror universe where all the women are obsessed with sperm, trying to collect little nuggets of it with all the fervor of Ash seeking Pokemon. They'll do anything to get it, using spoons and glasses and speculums to retrieve it from locations I think most people would much rather it remained, and then make little nung-nung-nung noises at the camera to indicate their happiness.
The semen also seems to have some transformative properties as well. The more of it they slurp, the larger their breasts get - though not in a natural way, but rather like someone's stuffing sandbags behind their nipples. Their abdomens become strangely concave, like starvation victims. Their lips puff out like their philtrum's been attacked by wasps. They become hairless, and aggressive.
I can only imagine that in this strange place, sperm brings them closer to some sort of bizarre melding with some mono-faceted Goddess, an abstracted Porn Queen with tits out to Dakota - plastic, odor-free, completely Barbieized. Some of them seem to go into a trance as they work the shaft to get their milky nectar, zoning out like it's time to make the donuts; others seem to engage in a love-hate relationship, spitting on their delivery device, making angry growling noises, looking as though they'd punch every nutsack in the room if they had their druthers, screaming "Bring it! Bring it on!" as though they were giving some kind of reverse birth.
Others smile. All the time. No matter what's happening. I think it's intended to be a come-on, but it looks like three guys are humping a sex-changed Joker.
Yet I think - I think - you can occasionally see glimpses of real personality. There are state-mandated ways and positions in this porn world - people fuck in positions that make their skeletons resemble erector sets being put to engineering tolerances, painful positions that make my thigh muscles cramp in echoed agony - but particularly in scenes with newcomers, you can see when someone attempts to give their own style to lovemaking - a craned neck as they try to make eye contact, a little fillip in the blowjob that's uniquely theirs, a non-erotic comment that slips out when she's being hoisted into position for another plowing. Then, in later scenes, all that disappears and she's just another injection-molded fury ready to do whatever.
Or maybe that original personality was the trick. Who knows? It's all mirrors.
Is this particular scene a performance, having left their personality behind at the door for a paycheck? Or is this what they wanted to be, becoming some Jungian archetype of sex, getting off on getting others off? Or some other combination of kinks and external pressures? It's hard to say. It's a bizarre people-watching, seeing all this at work and knowing that porn is like any other job - some women adore it, some women try it and hate it (but the documentation remains), others just want the cash, and still others have even more mixed feelings. (It gets even stranger when you bring in society's default reaction that no woman could possibly enjoy doing this.)
You can't really tell what's happening, just from this small window. It's like trying to determine what the actors in a play are feeling from watching them from the audience; you can't really do it, and yet if you're me you can't not wonder.
It's a little strange. But still fascinating.
