ogres
thoughts on amateur sexology and shock sites; a more in-depth introduction
It’s hot outside and I’m slowly disappearing. In two years time, the I that exists now will no longer exist, observed only by a handful of family members and really not even that. My brothers are at hockey camp for the summer and I’m home alone in the interstice between childhood and maturity. I don’t know it yet but I won’t grow up, really, for another few years. Unsuspecting of and really unaware of any physical changes happening to my body. Just lengthening.
I’m twelve years old and based on my memories wearing my brother’s red athletic shorts (I don’t own any) and a t-shirt I’m rapidly outgrowing. I feel just fine.
One of my online friends, always at least a few years older than me, sends me a link over IRC then a message that just says ‘holy shit’. I click on it and stare at a triptych, three pictures of a man’s penis, urethra spread and maggots crawling in and out. I close the tab and don’t remember what I do next. My best guess is that I send it to someone else, almost immediately.
Earlier, ages nine to eleven:
my brother shows me porn, not really the kind I’d later be shown by adult men over the internet and later seek out myself, just basic digital pinups of women, all blonde; consciously I realize that this is sexual and intended for adults but don’t feel anything more than bewilderment that my brother’s not only looking at it but sharing it with me
on the Roblox forums, I am told to Google ‘blue waffle’ and ‘tubgirl’ and quickly undergo this rite of passage
Later, stretching into the present day:
a man I’m not super familiar with starts talking to me over IRC; he introduces me to his friends, who introduce me to hardcore (furry) pornography, e.g Bugs Bunny eating a pile of rotting feces while Daffy Duck sodomizes him (2012)
a man wants nude photos of me; start of a very strange ‘relationship’ that lasts under a week (for the record, he did not get any pictures!) (2012)
odd digitally altered photograph of a woman with grotesquely large breasts and an even larger penis fucking a small, frightened looking dog; a little girl watching asks ‘are you sure [dog name] wants to do this?’; thought bubble emanating upwards from the woman reads as ‘who the fuck cares what the dog wants?’ - in hindsight the only thing I’ve seen, pornography wise, to induce an emotional reaction other than mild disgust (I was twelve, so I cried) (2012)
discovering yaoi;1 embarrassingly the only type of pornography to give anything other than disgust (2012 - 2017)
insects the size of a large dog fucking women; penises twice the size of a fully grown man and filled with thick semen; clown erotica; observing that some people have a psychosexual obsession with bald women; the she’s really a four-hundred year old vampire defense; allegedly trues tales of incest and worse; mister hands; sadistic transformations into chairs, antique cannons, so on; dogs a.k.a a white woman’s best friend; the devouring mother via twelve different kinds of vore, each vehicle of consumption growing increasingly more absurd; sweat; death (2012 - 2020)
The above is an extremely blunt synopsis of my personal history with pornography. I want to throw in the disclaimer that a lot of it, the stuff that wasn’t given to me, came out of an extremely childish competition between me and a very close friend to gross the other one out. We’d go to the worst places to find this sort of thing and share increasingly more degrading, disgusting, absurd examples of fetishism. It wasn’t sexual.2 There is nothing less sexual than the extreme end of an obsession viewed by an impartial observer. Nonetheless it did have an effect on me, albeit the opposite of what’s intended, as if intent matters. I didn’t masturbate until I was twenty-one years old.
Read into that what you want.
A major part of why we did this was, more or less, amateur sexology. We wanted to know why and more importantly we wanted to know how; how what is face-value a normal human male presumably lacking in any easy excuse trauma could, for instance, find pictures of women being melted by acid, the translucent brownish liquid stripping away skin and exposing bone, face horrified, titillating. The crossroads between sex and death made too easy to read into. Too obvious.3
Asking them why never helped and revealed either a learned defensiveness, the argument of pure fantasy or a sad pathetic agreement that normalcy is gone. None of them knew why and in the first category I read an intentional struggle to avoid knowing why.
I’m wondering if I went too far when I felt real empathy towards someone who explicitly fantasized about sexually murdering infants; telling him that he’s fine as long as he never acts on those urges, which he knows innately are (to be kind) abnormal. He didn’t know why. He couldn’t tell me. As far as he was aware, he woke up one day and found it appealing, something that made him want to kill himself. Too easy to agree and say do it. I’m not a cruel person. I told him to stop indulging the fantasy and that I hoped he’d get better.
There are a lot of theories as to why pedophiles exist, some of which coexist. It’s a learned behavior gifted to victims by victims, a cyclical disease that’s existed forever. It’s a sexual orientation.4 It’s just evil and we shouldn’t give any thought as to the why, just the what and punish it as harshly as possible. I don’t have any myself; the first one’s easy and tragic. Second one’s controversial. Third one’s lazy, easier than the first and arguably the instinctual reaction.
And it’s incredibly easy to react that way when you’re faced with an unrepentant pedophile.
Rousseau was a fucking moron; tell me prehistory was Edenic and I’ll leave you in the Papuan countryside.
Aside from my infantile obsession with pornography, I used to look at shock sites every now and then; this is more normal than abnormal, at least in my age group. “Look at” is a strong term to use, because it implies that I intentionally sought it out; I didn’t, but I also didn’t say no to the links that my friends sent me. Chinese workers being crushed by a slab of concrete, Russian dashcam videos, bricks through windshields killing mom, cartel executions, et cetera, et cetera. Growing up in the period where ISIS peaked was probably a big part.
Yet another ‘why’ - probably just proving that you’re not a bitch, that’s why. I feel like there’s some small part of ourselves that wants to watch other people die out of animal curiosity. Show me why it’s you and not me. And so on and so on. I want to see what’s underneath, pretty please.
Here’s a pretty good example; when I was about nineteen, I watched Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes. To provide a brief synopsis, it’s a half-an-hour of dead silent autopsy footage. Everything is shown. It is apocalyptic in the original sense of the word: an uncovering, a reveal. I believe in the immortality of the human spirit, the soul, whatever you call it; this is relatively easy to couple with the fact that at the very core our bodies are a grotesque punishment inflicted on us. Something that we don’t take with us when we go. Temporary.
I don’t enjoy having a body. It’s not without its pleasant moments, yes, but overall I’ll be glad to be rid of it when the end comes. Onto bigger and hopefully better things. I don’t know how much of this whatever you want to call it, sex negativity, body dysmorphia, stems from everything I’ve written down here, my private now public horrible relationship to life. I can make a guess — yes — but not much else. Hopefully whoever reads this can tell me, objectively, how this comes across. I don’t know. I’ve always had zero idea of how what I write and sometimes what I say comes across.
Finally: I don’t want anyone to read this and accuse me of being traumatized, or that I’m exaggerating, or seeking sympathy. I wrote this because I wanted to air it out; because I think it’s not uncommon. Because I think that in all honesty it’s not that bad and even, to a certain extent, funny.5
“Trauma” is the word people use when their mom yells at them and they’re forced to medicalize and pathologize their own boring shitty lives post-college. “Traumatic” is, ultimately, a meaningless word that’s been abused relentlessly ever since a certain type of self-victimization came into vogue. All of the stuff here had an effect on me, yes. Of course. I’m writing about it. But I can’t force myself to make it out to be worse than it actually is.
Next post is going to be lighter! Bye for now!
Now a bit more mature, my thoughts are more that of distaste than curiosity. Smarter people have explained why that could be, but to more or less paraphrase: it’s fraudulent. A sanitized repackaging of male sex for an audience of women and girls. sort of like cultural appropriation but somehow less and more serious depending on what
At least in my case. It’s impossible to know what was going through his head, and he was slightly older and possessed a functioning sex drive, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure we had the same view. It was a game.
It was more than a game, sometimes. It bordered on obsession. I wanted to know why so badly. Understand what made them like this, why they seem to have gone the opposite direction I did.
Controversial due to the frankly dull conflation of orientation with something to be accepted. It’s an amoral term. The term does not inherently imply acceptance and respectability.
At least the absurd fetishism, that is. Actual death is never funny. I think a handful of shock videos have had more of an impact on me, emotionally, than any amount of grotesque porn.