the horror, the horror
I am going to try to tell a story. It is a story about a story. A story I read long ago, that was advertised as “erotic fiction” but was the furthest thing from that. This story was a deeply wrong sexual horror, and not even in an absurd-sexual-fetish way, like someone getting off on pretending to be a sexy snack food (Hi! I’m a glutengendered Triscuitsexual crackerkin!), but in a “oh my god, what happened to you, why are you like this” kind of way.
If you’re ready, let’s go.
These days there is free porn everywhere you look,* and if you are a person who does not actually like “porn,” but you like “porn-ish sexy things,” there are also plenty of female-friendly consensual sex-positive gifsets in tasteful black-and-white all over Tumblr and such. But back in the dark ages, there were VHS tapes and erotic books and porn magazines and that was about it.
*Chicago mystery gossip time! I am the friend of a friend of a fairly well-known local “indie music” personality, and one of the things I now know about him (but probably shouldn’t) is that he is an avid collector of porn DVDs. Actual DVDs, that he buys with actual money, and they come with cases and have cast lists and titles** and things like that. It seems so quaint! But maybe it feeds the same urge as collecting vinyl.
**I like it when those titles are sequential things like Horny Ass Sluts Go Berserk Volume 9, because it makes me think oh, we can’t just jump in and watch this, we will be so lost. We have not yet seen Horny Ass Sluts Go Berserk Volumes 1-8.
A VERY BIG DIGRESSION, BUT I SWEAR WE WILL SOON RETURN TO THE DISTURBING EROTICA
Flashback time! I spent a few college breaks working at a video store. Ours was an independent and super-old-skool, with a “back room” where the porn was kept (it had a faux “door” covered up with pink crepe paper streamers, like the entrance to a seven-year-old girl’s birthday party, but WHOA, IT WAS NOT). It was very tedious working day shift by myself on summer weekdays, when often a lone dude would come in, wander around the main floor for a good 30 minutes picking up movie boxes, before “subtly” slipping behind the streamers. Oh dude. Just rent your porn and get out. I do not care.
Apparently porn gets “stale,” because my boss used to leave instructions for me to do another day-shift task, which was discarding old porn titles and ordering new ones. You did the ordering from a catalog, and the boss had no parameters for what I should order—porn is porn, just make sure it’s fresh. No porn over 30 days old! It was a rule.
After putting in a few orders, I realized that most of my selections had been anal-related. Anal porn had the most amusing titles (because butts are funny), so that is what would naturally jump out at me from the catalog pages. I then did some quick math and realized that if I worked there long enough to put in about 10 porn orders, I could single-handedly make anal videos be the entire porn inventory of the store. I could change our whole business model! We could cater to a niche market with no effort, advertising, or publicity! So long story short, I basically did that, although I was not able to do any data collection to find out if porn business went up or down as a result, and eventually I got a different job. Pretty sure that place is out of business now, but I think that is just the reality of video rental landscape and not my secret anal marketing plan.
OKAY, WE’RE BACK
Another thing that used to exist is erotic fiction. Oh, I know it still does exist, but wank-reads are mostly online now, rather than the entire feminist-bookstore section they used to populate. Nancy Friday was a particularly popular aggregator of reader-submitted smut. Her masturbation books had vaguely Freudian, psychobabble-ish commentary in between the sexy stories, but of course no one wants to read that, so Nancy Friday got the author credit while unpaid survey-answerers wrote the books. Now there is the internet and you can self-publish your own filthy fantasies, so yay, cut out the middlewoman. I suppose.
I found a Nancy Friday paperback book in the basement of my dorm years ago, and it was in good shape so I took it back to my room, thinking it would be funny to get high with my friends and read some of the weirder sex stories out loud in Muppet voices (what? come on, like you never). But when we did that, we found “Elaine,” and got way more than we bargained for.
“Elaine” describes herself as 34, married with children, and “always had fantasies of sex with animals.” Well, okay. She continues with a multi-page scenario of how she has to fuck a gorilla in front of a bunch of scientists, who are watching through glass and also on a monitor (for close-ups). There is fruit-flavored lube involved. The scientists have names, and characterizations. Elaine portrays herself as excited by the scene, but also proud to be doing her part “for science.” What exactly this gorilla-fuck is contributing to the breadth and depth of scientific knowledge is unclear, but it is sort of implied that scientists need gorilla semen and there is no other way to get it.
There are so many terrible inconsistencies with this gross fantasy that I am actually offended. I am not offended (per se) by the bestiality or exhibitionism, but by the utter wrongness of the FACTS.
- It is absolute hogwash that there is no way to get gorilla semen other than asking the gorilla to have sex with a human female.
- No IRB in the UNIVERSE would approve this study, no matter how many consents Elaine signed.
- No really, this is so goddamned unethical.
- Although I forgot to mention it, of course a large part of this fantasy is the massive gorilla cock, and oh my god SO INCORRECT. You have time to type out this massive disturbing fantasy, put a stamp on it, and send it to Nancy Friday, but you don’t have time to look up the fact that the average gorilla penis is 3 centimeters long?
- And yeah, fantasies don’t have to be 100% plausible. You don’t have to have a realistic scenario about how Tom Hiddleston just happened to drop by to help you fix the washing machine or whatever, and then oh no look his pants are covered in grease, well now that the machine is fixed we’ll just pop those right in, it will only take about an hour, can I make you a cup of tea?
- But if you’re going to be a big weirdo who wants to fuck a gorilla in a laboratory setting, in full view of a group of scientists (who by the way, are said to “whoop and cheer” when the gorilla ejaculates—NO NO NO WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT), you should at least know how big a gorilla penis is.
I’m going to end this here because the entry is too long and I’m too mad.
—mimi smartypants thinks it’s not that hard to do a little RESEARCH.