Pornucopia

S. Grover from NYC writes:

Junior year of college I moved into a house on campus with five of my fraternity brothers. We each had our own bedrooms, complete with every convenience a 20-year-old boy could desire. From a personal mini-fridge to our own Mac Plus computers, we were as self-sufficient as we'd ever been in our lives. Or so we thought.

Like most young men, our priorities were very clear: drink beer, sleep with girls, tell your friends about it. And, like most young men, we had only mastered the drinking beer part. God knows, we tried our hardest, but evidently Milwaukee's Best soaked breath, flannel shirts, and Timberland boots weren't as enticing to the opposite sex as we'd suspected. And so a ritual began— every night, around 3 AM, we'd all congregate in the hallway outside our rooms to commiserate about our lack of poon, and to subsequently begin the process of swapping VHS porn. With five men to the house, an estimated ten tapes per person, and an average of 7 to 8 masturbatable scenes per tape, we were looking at a total of about 400 scenes. Which at first blush sounds like an awful lot of material, but it actually isn't. You see, Ron was only into blow job scenes. Andy would only watch fetishes. Dave could only tolerate anal. And I, the normal one of the bunch, could only pleasure myself to lesbian scenes. You begin to see how getting the right tape was crucial to one's future enjoyment. And so, after much bartering, we would sheepishly excuse ourselves with the tape of our choice and slink away to our private beat tanks.

All in all, not a bad system. Until, that is, I began to outgrow my sapphic fantasies. Unfortunately, the loving triangles my imagination had so easily placed me in the middle of soon began to grow stale. I was outgrowing the lonely housewives, the curious co-eds, and even the ladies of leather. I was growing up, and it was time to branch out. Not wishing to stray too far from the nest, my next genre, one-on-one heterosexual sex, seemed like the logical choice. Much to the surprise of my roommates, I began requesting different tapes. At first, not a big deal, but then something curious happened. Roommate X and I seemed to be on the same path. We were both in pursuit of the exact same subset of tapes! I, of course, learned to work around it and we found ways to compromise. But as the pool of scenes grew shallower, my attention to detail grew greater. You see, roommate X would always stop the tapes at the exact same point. Without fail, each scene was always stopped at the precise moment before male ejaculation. No matter the scene or actors, it was the same every time— mouth agape, muscles tense, head thrown back, and STOP. What the fuck was wrong with him? Why now? Why not let the man finish for Christ's sake? And so I began to delve too heavily into the psyche of this decision. Why did I continue to watch? What was it about me that needed to see the man groan to climax? Holy shit, was this gay? Of course not, he was with a woman. It's her I'm watching, isn't it?

Porn is a terrible thing to critique and doesn't really stand up well to this type of introspection and analysis. The bad lighting and poor acting can't do much to disguise what a terrible time these two-bit actors are actually having. And so here I was, porn in hand, chaos in mind, unable to concentrate on the job at hand. For the rest of junior year I lived a monk-like existence, resorting to theater of the mind, conjured from the few and far between actual sexual encounters I'd had. It was the most difficult semester of my life and one I hope never to revisit.