CW: porn, masturbation, sex
If you lay awake at night trying to masturbate but there's just no joy to it—like the one New Year’s Eve I spent just furiously beating it to every video in my meticulously sorted porn folder—like every single one, one after another until completion and then I'd delete it—and you can see where this is going—because I was at a national evangelical missions conference and I'd promised myself that starting January 1, no more: that's how you do the Purge as repressed gay teenage Christian. Just the whole year's worth of bashing the bishop in one night. Or maybe I was de-cluttering my life Marie Kondo style. What is it she says? That you have to give your things a proper goodbye? You look at each thing and you have a conversation about what it means to you.
I've never had a bad breakup. I just have to leave suddenly and somehow I do. We come to a mutual agreement that our lives are diverging and...I've been blessed, what can I say, I've seen good dudes. I've written a sweet little goodbye note to each one of my three boyfriends from the same deck of colored note cards that I've kept in my backpack since I was a virgin. I take an inky black pen and I cram this profession of love into tiny block letters that squeeze between the lines and spill out onto the front. I tell them they'll always be family to me and how beautiful they are and how much they meant to me in this trying time; all after, of course, unsheathing and polishing my sword on their pecs and sniffing their balls til I cum all over their pretty little faces. What can I say. I give them a proper goodbye. I say: "You mean the world, but I'm sorry. You no longer bring me joy." Sploosh. Goodbye.
So back to the porn folder. I guess it's like that. I guess you do learn to love these men in a way. Can it really be a one night stand when you've seen Jayden tear Mason's sweatpants open exposing his perfect ass over sixty times? No, they've become a part of your world. The thrill can't last forever. It's become a more intimate, tender sweatpants tearing. A domestic tearing, if you will. You have to keep things spicy. You have to get naked in the dorm computer lab and rub your dick on the screen. You just have to. We had fun times, me and Thomas from Active Duty. We had a connection. But I'm sorry, Thomas and your big, big fucking penis sticking out the side of a jock strap. You no longer bring me joy.
Part of the point of this story is that when I set my mind to something, I fucking do it, man. I stroked the puppy until it spit 31 times that evening. Am I exaggerating? Is that physically possible? I said goodbye to Dru and Caiden and Conor, and Brandon, and Brent, and Brent, and Austin, and Austen, and Brent, and Justin, and Johnny, and all the nameless Czech twinks doing yoga in that big empty house. At a certain point I ran out of sentimentality and operated purely on dedication. Just squeezing raindrops of cum from my tired knob. Just the most joyless faps. Like there were fewer and fewer areas of my brain that were lighting up until it was just one lonely, creepy little bulb flickering deep in the basement of my limbic system. Maybe that's part of what I was trying to do, as well. Burn the feelings out until I saw this depravity for what it really was.
There's a politic to being lonely and horny. You have to be young and beautiful and graceful about it. You can't be too needy. You can't be aware of how lonely you are, just vaguely dissatisfied. You can't appear to be horny except for with your eyes. You can only talk about it on cigarette breaks in stilted sentences to someone who is also young and beautiful and lonely. And if they're horny, you will fuck.
Not allowed: desperately needing a man, masturbating to facebook photos, whispering "I love you" to nobody in the middle of the night because you just want to hear someone say it. You're not allowed to shrink. You're not allowed to be pathetic. You can't need something you aren't able to give yourself. You're not allowed to just be lonely. You have to be lonely and scared. Lonely and waiting. Lonely and defeated. Something has to happen to make you feel lonely and then you're lonely. You can't just be lonely.
Sex is liberation after all. Just free yourself. Just shed your fucking baggage and get laid. Go. The internet is an infinite pile of dicks. Go pick one and guzzle it down. Dating is a numbers game. You swipe and swipe and tell your coming out story and gauge their level of sympathy and make a transparent play for their flesh, and then you get touched. Someone touches you. And if you close your eyes, it's like being held.
At one point I kept a list of everyone I ever slept with. I think initially to feel less like a slut. Who wants to be the kind of person that doesn't remember the names of the people you fucked. But I think after awhile I realized that forgetting people's names is less about the number of men I've been sexually active with and more about how unimportant someone's name is to the uncomfortable or bizarre experience you had with them.
I don't believe that everyone whose penis you touch becomes a part of you in some way. Not spiritually. Maybe our bacteria colonies or like "gut biomes" have integrated, idk, the science on that is still unclear to me. But I don't feel, for example, that hot but severely broken and humorless russian-german guy who fucked me in the bathroom of my apartment has some dominion over my soul. And no, I'm not trying to be completed by someone or something that doesn't exist, I'm trying to be honest. Hookups aren't like snacks or gushers—are gushers a snack? Hookups involve people, and people involve relationships. Fuck casual. Am I alone in this? There's no such thing as a casual relationship. You can't throw on a set of lasting memories and unresolved emotional burdens on your way out to Shakespeare in the park. More importantly, you can't throw it off.
Am I soft? Did I miss the day in fuckboi class where they teach you to forget people? I guess by definition there are dudes I've totally forgotten. A dude that didn't smell like anything or kiss me upside down like spiderman or ask me to confess my darkest secret. Maybe there was a dude that just had a face and a body and we did a thing without any stress or lasting impressions. Maybe that was casual? Maybe casual is another word for utopically mediocre. If so, I just don't think that happens for me. I can't help thinking about these dudes. Even the 20 minute ones or the ones where he shows up and I just say nope or he shows up and sees me and then immediately fucks off, even those involve at least a couple hours of emotional investment over the internet. Some of them never progress past the snapchat stage and yet, snaps were sent. There was nervous internet flirting and calculated attempts to appear completely uncalculated. There was emphatic insistence that no part of this experience would add to my cumulative sense of self-worth.
I can't forget this truly jolly looking—I want to say serbian?—man. Round and hairy and nothing like his picture. His head bouncing up and down on my dick in a motion I can only describe as cartoon bat that has swallowed a whole cantaloupe and is laboring vigorously to stay in the air. I don't even know how it got that far. Actually I don't even remember how far it went after that. I just remember thinking, this is the worst sex I've ever had in my life. And I think about it all the time. I'm usually pretty dissatisfied with the men I sleep with but in this case I was genuinely repulsed. And I think about that man all the time. He's a part of my world. He's a dried up piece of gum I touch every time I reach into my mental locker of sexuality.
And that's just the mostly bad and weird shit. It's the good-ish sex and the good dudes that really fuck me up. The ones that are nice to me and I feel indebted to. Someone told me once that I see myself as a prize racehorse. But really who wouldn't when the dialogue around my sexuality is entirely about the specifics of my breeding and what version of athletic body (parts) I have. Who wouldn't love to be admired, and pet, and scratched on the head and told they’re pretty and do a real good job and be a real good boy for him.
He really was good to me. I'd lived in Ireland for nearly two years and he was the first guy to take me on a date. He drove me twenty miles into the country to eat crab cakes at a BnB overlooking the ocean. He kissed me on my balcony overlooking the city and stayed the night without any hesitation. The only fetish-y thing he did was mention that he really loved Japan a couple times. He had the prettiest eyes and a perfect Cork accent and the self-assuredness of a lad who grew up with the full acceptance of other lads. He was bro-y and nerdy and loved food and travel. He had a stable friend group and parents that didn't care he was gay and some significant, but un-traumatic level of angst about his future. And by the laws of whatever sexual Shangri-La we hippie-types are all striving for, it was peak casual. I told him right off the bat I was going back to America in a couple months. We enjoyed each others' company but knew we'd never meaningfully understand each other's experiences. We watched a lot of Parks and Rec in bed and had a lot of Pringles and white wine. My flatmate's friends walked in on us vertically 69ing on the couch. I bought him a condom in Paris that had a crudely drawn Harry Potter on it that said "Accio Bitch."
I liked him a lot and he bought me Japanese food as goodbye present. We sat in this tiny park in this tiny, perfect city, and made each other laugh. And I don't miss him. I don't picture us together someday. I don't wish we had more time together. But it wasn’t casual. I still feel it. See it, like a faint watermark over every pair of eyes that gets close enough for a kiss. I don’t want him back. I don’t want or need him. I want that moment. I want that dignity, or whatever dignity was invented for me, whatever it was that I tasted that I’m never sure I deserve. It doesn’t take being in love to love that dignity, to hurt every time you feel for it and it’s gone. And in its place, a selection of carefully curated photos that you took of yourself with a tripod.
By the way, I lasted about 4 months, if you were wondering—without masturbation or porn back when I was 19. That's actually pretty impressive, right? Though the last couple weeks were dicey; I remember actually justifying to myself that I could stroke it as long as I didn't ejaculate, so that was a thing. I don't even remember when I finally gave up or if it was particularly satisfying. I get the vague sense that it wasn't. That my long awaited release was thoroughly anticlimactic (sorry). So I was lying to myself. I lied to you, too. I can't say goodbye to anything. I still think about and talk to all my exes and flings. I have no closure with anyone. I probably didn't masturbate 31 times in one night. That seems impossible. That's impossible, right?
I repopulated the porn folder with a lot of the same videos, some of which I can't even masturbate to any more. So I put them in a sub-folder called "Classics," and I guess I revisit them for old-times sake. Maybe I'm just really bad at cutting people out of my life. Even people who really should not be delivering pizza if they're going to take 45 minutes with each order. Maybe I'm lonely. Maybe I'm pathetic. Maybe I'm sentimental and bad at liberation.
Or maybe there's somewhere between wanting a crazy stupid love and the word "sexcapades" (barf). I'm not talking about friends with benefits whatever the fuck that means, or any other situation or arrangement. I'm not talking about what it is I’m allowed to do, but the things I'm allowed to feel. What I'm allowed to hold on to or admit about being afraid and ashamed and self-loathing and hopeful and momentarily in love, or not, or running out of space to feel and to hurt and lick your lips while you just joylessly masturbate to a facebook photo of someone who ghosted you.
We're not okay. We're unresolved. We touch people and they touch us back and we take something and leave something behind and we don’t know what any of it is, or if we need it back, or where to find it if we do. I think dignity is a word we invented to say: there’s got to be a way I can hold myself together, to not spill over. To say: I don’t know what I want, I don’t know—how could I? I’m so fragile and my brain has this enormous surface area stuffed with alarms, this blanket of screaming baby animals, all tucked away inside my skull, and somewhere in there—one of them, or some collection of them, or all of them—is me. And I’m fifteen years old, and I’m masturbating in my bed, and I’m whispering I love you over and over again because—I want to know what it sounds like, because—I just need to hear someone say it.
By Astro Liu
Images by Jo Broughton, used with permission from the artist
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