I’ve always hated porn. Porn on the internet has given several generations of men a false idea of what sex is like, an idea that doesn’t match the experience of real women. I would’ve hated porn before the internet. Watching other people have sex has never interested me. It’s none of my business.
I don’t even like erotica. Most of it seems silly, and unless it’s my personal dress being ripped off (in a consensual and appropriate manner), I’m just not into it.
What turns me on is good writing. Not good writing about sex. I can get high on a turn of phrase or a particularly funny paragraph. I read good books and articles over and over again until I have them practically memorized. I laugh in yoga class at a line I found amusing 30 years ago. Almost everyone whom I’ve dated has been a good writer. Some have been great.
Whether I agree with the author or not, I respect the craft of writing. There’s something about a literary bad boy that gets me in the way that a real bad boy doesn’t. I prefer my men to be law-abiding, sober citizens who open doors for ladies and pay their taxes on time. But give me some swagger in the form of the written word and I’m a teenage groupie.
Several months ago, I came across an article by a journalist I’d never heard of before on a topic on which I write frequently, substance use disorder and 12 Step programs. It was a 2003 article, but it had the author’s email address, so I wrote to him to say I liked the piece. He kindly wrote back, and suggested that I read his book, though I might not agree with it.
I read the book, and subsequently every article he posted. I haven’t read that many articles by one author since college, but I was at a point in my life where I was longing for some swagger and raw male energy, both of which could be found, in abundance, in this particular journalist’s writing.
I don’t think he wrote most of those pieces with the intention of turning grown women with master's degrees into groupies, but I also suspected he’d be flattered. So I wrote a few times. Being unusually direct for a woman, I mentioned something to the effect that I find his work much more stimulating than internet porn could ever be. I don’t think he minded.
There’s a long history of using things for the purpose other than that for which they were originally intended. Doctors prescribe medications to be used off-label, meaning for a condition other than the one for which they are FDA-approved. I hate televisions, so when my parents gave me one, I used it as an end table for years. I have a friend who uses a pomegranate as a paperweight. Perhaps the pieces weren’t meant to pick up girls, but they can be used for that purpose.
A few hundred Twitter direct messages later, we’ve become friends. These days, at my request, he reads his old columns to me on the phone as bedtime stories. Like all good bedtime stories, they chase away the nightmares, of which we both have had way too many. They soothe me to sleep, like very few other activities can.
This sort of discourse is so far above that which passes for flirting for my generation (X) and the generations after it. Far from dick pics and pussy jokes, it reminds me of a time when people wrote letters to each other, beautiful letters, and waited by the mailbox for them to arrive. It harkens back to a more civilized era, one where men and women got to know each other before throwing all of their clothes on the floor. Where the content of someone’s character, as shown in their work, meant more than their looks or their narrow adherence to ideology or their economic status.
Perhaps the world I speak of is fiction, but it’s a fiction I’m happy to live in now. In one small corner of the world a gentleman with a slight Southern accent reads me bedtime columns as we chastely sleep alone in our own apartments, a few states away from each other.
