That theme ballooned into a greater realization, too, that my initial fantasies about the adult world or, more, the adult world of pornography, were incorrect, were shallow and unconvincing, that there was a carefully ordered balance between the everyday public sphere and the furtive world of desire, and that the porn stars and prostitutes were not carrying the banner of perfect bacchanalian body and mind pleasure, but were stand-ins, simulacra, for a shadow projected by our bodies, that since the end result of sexual desire was families and children and stability and rules and education, a precise and orderly protection of children until we can finally buy those magazines and videos and booze, we needed that balance and that hidden world to remain a shadow, a longing, an urge, channeled and kept fast with fear and guilt and an inchoate sense of calamity or we might descend into animalistic chaos, unable to partner with only one girl or boy or man or woman until the children grow, safe and with that perfect loving parental dyad, and so just as I had become discontented after only a few months with my stack of sexual dynamos, I imagined that there might be some virtue in trying to avoid masturbating, resisting and pushing back what had become a ritual driven by whatever stimuli were present on a given day, Farah Fawcett, Colonel Wilma Deering, Rebecca, Gwen, the shorts of the girl riding the bike, the slightest hint of bra straps through the teacher’s white blouse, every cheerleader at my school, individually and in groups, Princess Leia, then working through to orgasm eidetically in the hardest, dirtiest porn I had seen, that if I could control myself I could also control the urge for novelty as well and derive satisfaction from the resistance and overcoming of these tendencies, like being forced to wait, snackless, with the clots of kids before a dinner party and trying not to whine about it, trying to be more like the adults and governed in my wants and my actions, that by so doing I would be becoming those adults and take more pleasure in simpler acts like holding Rebecca’s hand, unsweating, my erections stabilized somehow, and be present at that moment without the sharp sword of desire and sex hanging over me, coarsening me, at every moment.… Read the rest