a brief essay on masculinity

I like porn. I don't love porn; that sort of feeling is reserved for women and baseball players. That said, every so often I get a peculiar craving. It's not something I'm proud of, but it's out of my control. I'll be sitting on the computer and it will suddenly come over me:

"I need to see donkey cock."

Not just the cock itself, mind you; I need to see a woman riding a donkey, preferably while another donkey is riding her, and maybe another few people are scattered around punching themselves in the crotch... it doesn't matter too much. I just need to see a cat's cradle of hooves and tits and semen, slapping and spraying wildly across the monitor. And if it could all take place aboard the Starship Enterprise, so much the better.

So I'll head to Google and I'll type in "veritable cat's cradle of yadda yadda yadda" and I'll get a dozen different sites advertising the latest and greatest in ass-on-ass action. So I'll click one, and wouldn't you know it, they want my fucking credit card number.

Scheming sons of bitches. Donkey porn used to be free, you know. How dare they deprive me of such a basic need.

Now, no man is going to admit to knowing as much as I'm about to tell you, but the fact is that every one of us has been down this same road before. Many a Kleenex has met its fate at the end of a journey similar to the one I will now describe. Girls, don't look on your husband or boyfriend with disgust; this is just as much a part of him as his obsession with Foreigner. (They're fucking awesome, so just leave them alone.)

They offer a few subscription options over at "tumbleweed-of-donkey-cocks.com". Their basic options are, naturally, exorbitant; 1 month for $30, 3 months for $60, and so on. Nobody in their right mind is going to pay for this; after all, the urge to spank it to donkey porn is infrequent and fleeting. I don't need to look at this stuff for a whole month straight; I might start to like it.

However, they do offer another option, which every guy you know has clicked on: the one-day trial for a mere five dollars. It is, of course, a trick; after your "trial" is up, you'll automatically be signed up for a one-month subscription and your credit card will be charged accordingly. Realizing this, we hatch a plan. If we sign up for the trial, we can inundate ourselves with donkey-related pornography. We can drown ourselves in our perversion, not daring to look away lest a single moment of our 24 hour liberty pass to Burro Ball Boulevard be forgotten in the weeks to come. And for fuck's sake, we can't save any of it to the computer, because we know that one day our daughters will get on and discover our more-than-casual interest in equine biology, and God only knows what that would do to them.

And just before the 24-hour deadline, we will cancel our subscription to "mules-gone-bugfuck.com" and narrowly avoid being charged. This particular hurdle, however, is more treacherous than it first appears. They won't let you simply click on an "Unsubscribe" link, oh no. The process is far more shameful than that.

Now, you must realize, they do understand our dilemma. We don't want anybody to know what we've been looking at on the internet. When they charge your credit card, they don't bill you under "GRAMMA'S SLINGSHOT LABIA PARADISE," they bill you under something innocuous, like "QBill GSLP." That's if you're a loyal, paying customer. However, once you want to get out from under their thumbs, you're going to have to swallow your pride... because you're going to have to tell an actual human being exactly what you want.

In order to unsubscribe, you will have to call them on the telephone and say, to a live person, "I want to cancel my subscription to Mule Fisting Fiesta." They are counting on your burning shame to keep you from leaving.

Now, most of us don't really think about the fact that this is a person whose entire job is listening to people nervously cancel their porn subscriptions, but it doesn't matter. Someone out there knows your name and can associate it with at least one act of beastiality that you've spanked off to. Someone knows exactly how sick you are.

Once it's over, though, and you crawl back into bed, hands crusted with ejaculate, you can feel perfectly secure.

As long as you deleted your browser history.

You did, didn't you?