Tug Of Love

Is Western culture being drowned by a jism tsunami?

by Steven Wells

Hi, my name’s Roderick Quaderly. No, it’s not. But that how Americans pronounce “erotic quarterly,” which is so cute. I know this because the phrase echoed around the office after we received a copy of Boink: College Sex by the People Having It, a book written by the editors of Boink magazine. Which is apparently a roderick quaderly put out by posh students.

I love that title. It’s so wonderfully arrogant. We’re younger, more beautiful and better educated than you, and guess what? We shag each other. Bastards.

Inside are tasteful pictures of buff poshos with trimmed pubes doing it. Plus lots of roderick wriding about buff poshos with trimmed pubes doing it. A few years ago these entitled twerps would be putting out thinly disguised Onion clones, hoping it’d get them a job on The Daily Show. But I can’t think of an obvious career path that would be assisted by a softcore spread in a book that’s most likely to be read one-handed by fat middle-aged sad bastards.

Maybe they’re just resigned to living in an era in which, as science-fiction writer David Brin wrote in Wired—“privacy is history—get over it.” And like Madonna did with her coffee-table book Sex, they’re carrying out a preemptive first strike so that all subsequent attempts to dig dirt will run smack-bang into the fact that, dude, they’ve flashed nad.

Or maybe they’re gambling on all jobs being porn-related very soon. They could be right.

Porn is everywhere but elicits very little serious discussion. Porn isn’t just the elephant in the room—it’s the naked elephant going “uh uh uh” as it frantically masturbates into the face of a bored lady elephant. The third-most popular plastic surgery procedure is the vagina reconstruction popularized by porn stars, says Dr. Robert Rey of the reality show Dr. 90210. Young women are apparently increasingly likely to complain that first-date shags try to ejaculate in their faces without asking permission.

I was once stuck for 40 minutes at a Latvia/Estonia border crossing where I could see, through a window, the immigration official who’d taken our passports beating off in front of his monitor.

A Muslim friend in London hosted a bunch of musicians from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan who went computer porn-crazy every chance they could. What did they admire most about the secular West? The right to wank.

So why doesn’t The New York Times have a porn section—given that more Americans whack off while watching porn than go to live shows, read books, eat out at restaurants or give a rat’s arse about politics combined?

Because it’d be boring? I just googled “my little pony porn.” Nearly 5,000 results. Try also porn plus zombies, superheroes, clowns, “porn-again Christians” and uniporn (sex with unicorns). There’s a whole wanking universe out there. Now tell me that’s not interesting.