On Internet Pornography
by Nicholas Miller

[. . .]
Once, I’d been looking for blondes
[. . .]
innocent looking girls with assholes the size of shotgun barrels
[. . .]
“Goddammit!” I thought. “This isn’t what I want!” As if I really wanted comfort from pornography, as if pornography could successfully traffic in comfort. I dug around frantically for something to hold onto. A woman, another enticing woman in a pop-up ad I’ll never see again, offered me access to her webcam for a single $1 payment, one dollar in exchange for lifetime access to the webcam. I wanted to take her seriously. I wanted to believe that when she said for life, she meant for life. Would she keep the webcam after she got sick of showing off her tits to the subscribers? Would I get to watch her troubled on the couch with all her clothes on and her arms folded across her chest? Would I get to watch her as she proceeded through a series of failed relationships? Would she get married? Would I get to watch her get married? Would I get to watch the honeymoon? Could I watch her conceive and bear children? Could I watch her get bored and cheat on her husband, or better yet, be tempted at all turns to cheat on her husband but refuse to out of her own sense of justice? After all, she had kept her promise to her $1 subscriber, she could surely keep her promise to her husband. Could I watch her raise the children, ship the children off to college, and cry a single tear? Do I get to watch her grow old? Can I see her tits go wrinkly? Will I get to watch her die? And when I watch her die, I want to be able to say that I’d watched her since she was seventeen years old (my mistake, eighteen). I jerked off to her as she took a shower, and I cried when she had that nervous breakdown, and I know more about her than she would ever care to know, and I did it all for a dollar and she doesn’t give a shit about me. If I could have that, I’m in. What I want from pornography is love behind [. . .] I just want [. . .] will never know my name.
[. . .]