Now listen: I have had bad days before. I have been fired from jobs, I have been dumped by girlfriends, I have totaled cars. I have had days where I have received three — count 'em, three — tickets for speeding or moving violations between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. But I have never had a day as bad as a woman named "Cloey" had the day they shot the video that appeared on that page — that is to say, I have never had a day where someone wrote the word "Cockwhore" on my forehead with lipstick, tried to shove their entire fist down my throat and then "choke-fucked" me with their penis until I barfed on their testicles. Never, ever had a day like that. Nor have I ever had a day like the blonde woman in the movie that was pictured below it: I never had a day where someone hung a toilet seat around my neck, spit in my mouth and slapped my face as he tried to shove the head of his cock through the back of my skull.
Bad days I have had. But not that bad.
"Jesus. Fucking. Christ," said my wife.
We sat like that, side by side, proclaiming disbelief as I scrolled further down the page, the subject headings for the forum entries sounding like the police blotter from a place Snake Plisskin might have escaped:
GIRL SLAPPED!
CHICK STUFFING BASBEALL BATS INTO HER CUNT!
HARD ANAL, THROATFUCKING AND PUKING (A LOT!)
PERFECT SLUT EXTREMELY HARD TREATED — MUST SEE!
This was the description of that last one the poster had included with his screen caps:
"This scene has everything: blowjob, gagging, ass-to-mouth, rimming, assfuck, streched holes — there is nothing left!"
"Nice work, man!" another poster responded to the original poster.
"Thanks a lot for all these fine videos," responds another.
"Very, very good post," responds a third. "Thanks a lot for sharing."
What happened to my cheesy pool boy?
Such politeness, given the nature of the video, is only funny if it isn't your stretched holes they happen to be discussing.
This was not some "extreme sex" forum. That forum existed at the bottom of the page — "Paid Members ONLY" — though I can't imagine what sort of headings might be found there.
No, this was the regular forum. This was the mainstream. This was porn, 2007.
I know I'm supposed to be okay with this. I know I shouldn't judge. I know that I'm showing my age or my prudishness or my conservatism or my narrow-mindedness. But I'm thinking about those porn protesters back on the corner of Forty-Sixth and Sixth, sometime in 1985, and I'm beginning to wonder if porno in 2007 isn't proving them right; it's difficult to present a credible defense against charges of hatred and misogyny when the star witness has the word "cunt" written on her forehead and a guy named Max Hardcore is urinating in her mouth. A moment with my client, Your Honor.
My wife sat back and pulled the covers over her legs.
"Do guys really want that?" she asked.
"Looks that way," I said.
It didn't look that way because of one forum. It looked that way because the Gag Factor series of films, in which women are turned upside down and choke-fucked until their faces are covered with drool, semen and barf (Adult Video News Award Winner, "Best Oral Series"), is now up to sequel #22. Because the Slap Happy series, in which a male performer only pauses from asphyxiating the starlet with his penis to slap her repeatedly across the face and verbally abuse her, is up to sequel #13.
What happened to my wonderful porno?
What happened to that oasis of playful, heathenish fornication?
What happened to my cheesy pool boy?
I'm afraid he's "punch-fucking" some girl's ass while calling her a dirty whore cunt slut. And I think I'm right.
My wife pulled on her robe, and I blew out the candle she had lit on the nightstand.
Ginger Lynn had made feel free.
The Devil in Miss Jones made me feel better about my own devils.
But Meatholes ("Nasty whores who love to be treated like worthless pieces of meat!") makes me feel exactly the way my rabbis wanted me to feel, makes me feel just as self-loathing and disgusted with sex as a community full of ultra-Orthodox lunatics were convinced I should be. So who's the worthless piece of meat now?
My wife went into the kitchen, made some tea and grabbed some biscuits while I went to YouTube and found an episode of South Park.
We watched and laughed and sipped our tea and soon my wife asked, "Do you think these kids will want to do that to women when they get older?"
"I think Stan will be gay," I said. "And I think Cartman already wants to."
We finished our biscuits, shut down the computer and went to sleep. I wonder how I'm going to explain all this to my son. I wonder what happened to the people in Pornoland. And I wonder how many of you only read this far in the hopes of finding out the name of that website. n°
Shalom Auslander is the author of Beware of God: Stories, which was a finalist for the 2005 Koret Award for Writers Under 35. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and he is a regular contributor to Public Radio Internationalıs ³This American Life.² Foreskinıs Lament, a memoir, will be published next year by Riverhead Books. His memoir Foreskin's Lament will be published this October.
