I Was a Geek

While I shan't recollect the details of my life, lest the endeavor elicit boredom in the reader. Suffice it to say, I shall concisely establish the context upon which it began.

My life took an unorthodox divergence rather early; during the Late Formative Period when I had accrued a collection of ritual viewing habits on television concerning alien warriors of an anthropomorphic variety frequently engaging in bloodless warfare with a sorcerous mummy--a subject matter in no short supply in the mid-80s--on a near weekly basis. The accumulated programming appealed to a restless preternatural fascination with the exotic and fantastical which thrived in a decade known for its scientific trends, garish aesthetics, and outlandishly cool-but-inaccurate entertainments. It was this extensive collection of related media that later served as evidence necessary for my first moment of self-awareness.

I was a geek.

And I was rather proud of my deduction, as the means of entertainment, though expensive as they were--as well as unattainable to a young boy devoid of discretionary funding--carried with it a significant increasing awareness that there was a burgeoning community of others whose interest were congruent with mine. And in those wonderful years when the vigor of youth are a sufficient currency upon which to purchase fortune and fun--except for the .25 donations towards video game cabinets in exchange for their services--I thrived in a fashion that supplanted in dominance the position of my preternaturally previous obsession.

The life of a geek in those days was a lonely one. Humiliation was incessant...and every member of elite society had the right to inflict it. And the women of our age found in us, not a single, desirable trait upon which to purchase anchorage for their burgeoning libidos. While I was never subjected to sermons of the demonization of sex (any sermons for that matter, we were secular WASPS), I was never subjected to positive appraisals either; my home life was sexless, and to protect my lascivious sanity from the paranoid ramblings of my critical parents, I suppressed my inclinations until this very day.

A young man with high-functioning autism, who had not enjoyed the benefits of the crucial behavioral education therapy and mentoring that would follow in later decades, could hardly have found himself in worse circumstances: I was unpopular with the peerage, undesirable to contemporary females, and unable to indulge my growing, impulsive need to immerse myself into the reservoirs of sexually charged material...which had been unavailable in my house, due to the austere nature of my parents, since before the age of five, when the interest spontaneously presented itself.

I had resolved, shortly after the age of 12, to never pursue even the most fleeting semblance of a relationship, for such optimism was futile: my autism would yield nothing more than failed proposals and their inevitably recurring humiliations. But such resolutions, though they may be steadfastly held for a few days, are abandoned in a few moments of bleak despair. Unable to change the quality of my station, I decided that, should I become unable to ever acquire sex on my own, I would pursue the next best thing: MEDIA DISPLAYING the intimate activities of those who could. And having a keen curiosity, and a very honed familiarity with stealth, I was able to acquire the first magazines of my youth through the ancient art of "a guy who knows a guy." At the cost of $12, a $5 magazine had been procured, and I was free to indulge my obsession with the previously inaccessible female anatomy in a most entertaining way.

From there, it evolved to videos, which were harder to obtain given that one needed to be in close proximity with the display case in order to ascertain the merit of said product; the solution did not present itself until the legal age had arrived. My natural repugnance continued to remain unchanged through high school, and so I failed to acquire the vile, misogynistic competitiveness of my more successful peers; their aggressive natures, and ruthlessly competitive approaches only reinforced their jaded sexual appetites, making them prone to prefer spectacle in lieu of quality. I suspect this is the key component to the pathological demand for sexual acts of a continually fantastical--and often degrading--"extreme" genres in the field itself.

And so, with no experience in dating or relationships, and an obvious lack of profound good looks, I ventured into adulthood celibate and miserable. My accrued talents of humor, intelligence, and polite behavior failed to compensate for a lack of animal magnetism and thus I was ignored by even the most casual of encounters with the fairer sex. I did not have occasion to lose my virginity until I was 24, and did so with the aid of an adventurous girl younger than myself at a swinger's party...almost the only viable option for me even today. I soon began to take not just solace, but also happiness in my porn, for it represented to me, not the constant ineptitude and failing in my social life, but rather the convenience and variety not found in a normal relationship. And if the truth be told, the dangers of real sex were not to be found either: there is nary a man who, upon the instance of consuming porn, is assaulted by the unpleasant smells, fluids, and frightful diseases, which would surely follow an authentic sexual encounter.

Without a catalyst for escalation, my porn addiction of today has remained largely unchanged: I abhor violent and aggressive sexual scenes, as well as fake lesbian titles. My distaste for anal stems not from ignorance but an obsessive-compulsive fixation on hygiene. And though my sexual life is far from active, it is also far from dead, having occasion to procure a handful of single-encounter horizontal partners at various events where that manner of play is demand, and professors of that science always welcome.

I've come to accept pornography as my surrogate sexual lifestyle: devoid of complication, disease, and odoriferous unpleasantness, and heavily populated with a wide range of women to satisfy every craving, it is a hollow yet adequate solution to my otherwise celibate bachelor existence. And while I am still aware of the inherent pathetic quality of being a man alone at my age, I would much rather be the connoisseur of an under-appreciated form of entertainment continuing to transcend the aesthetic limits hitherto placed upon it by forces of official history than a harried everyman, harangued by the burdens of emotional turmoil, personality conflict, atrophying sexual energy, and ludicrously inexcusable asinine conversations and circular arguments.

Women do not find me attractive enough for anything other than a gilded chair in the Friend Zone. And it is a development about which I can do nothing. So rather than dwell and ferment in my own isolation, I can use porn to have the "good parts" of a relationship while evading the burdens of engaging in a relationship with someone that will inevitably, statistically fail.

In closing, there are those who would sarcastically chastise me with a familiar chestnut of "Yeah, sit and watch your porn so you don't have to go through the actual effort of meeting and getting to know somebody else in the world." To those people I would respond:

"Look at the world and tell me the pleasure of becoming acquainted with it."