The Porn Project, Part 2
The Porn Project, Part 2
And an Update from The Unfiltered Scribe
Pictured above you will see me reading a portion of my most recent published story. It’s called The Bear Facts of Life and paid subscribers can read it here. If you’d like to purchase a copy of the journal you can find it on Amazon for $10.
Once upon a time, I was thinking about trying to be a writer but I wasn’t sure if I was good at writing or not. So, I enrolled in a memoir writing workshop at a local university. The workshop leader was supportive of my interest in growing as a writer. She suggested I, A) join The Eastern Shore Writers Association and, B) submit my writing for publication in their journal, Bay to Ocean: They Year’s Best Writing from the Eastern Shore Writers Association. I did both. That was roughly 5 years ago. I’ve since submitted for publication four times and had three submissions accepted.
If you’ve ever thought about being a writer, joining a writers association is a good way to get a start. I’ve met some supportive people, learned quite a lot about the writing process, and have a group of people who are normal just like me trying to do what they love to do. There’s no doubt in my mind that if not for the writers association, The Unfiltered Scribe wouldn’t be a thing.
I like it when people read what I write. I imagine most writers do. A blog is a good way to share writing. Further, I have a few books in the works that I hope people read. So do publishing companies.
A little insight into publishing (from a guy who’s yet to publish a book - me). Publishing a book can be somewhat of a daunting and intimidating process, even if an author decides to self-publish. I’ve been told that when a publishing company is deciding whether or not to publish the work of a given author, one of the many factors they take into consideration is what kind of following the author already has. The company wants to be sure the money they spend on getting the book to the bookshelves is going to be worth their time and money, that people are already interested in the author.
So, I started the blog in an effort to grow an audience, first and foremost.
Today I am sharing the next installment of an eBook I am working on. It’s called, How I Gave Up Pornography the Unorthodox Way. (Tap/Click here for the first installment.)
(Remember: What you see below is a rough draft of still-in-progress writing. You should expect typos, atrocious formatting issues, incomplete thoughts, flawed logic, and grammatical problems that might want to you want to put needles in your eyes. This is part of the unfiltered way. Please feel free to send me feedback. You can comment on the post or send me a private email at jeffreyscottwriting@gmail.com OR by responding directly to my emailed article.)
From the time I was 13 straight on through high school, I hid my self-gratification activities from everyone. I certainly couldn’t talk about it with my best friends at church. I mean, looking at a woman lustfully was a sin. There wasn’t anything clearer than that. If I was giving into my temptation to think about woman lustfully, I wasn’t fighting against Satan’s temptation hard enough. There’s no way I could place a number on the how many times I’d pray for God’s forgiveness for giving into temptation. Every time I gave in, I’d promise myself it was the last time, knowing all the while it probably wasn’t.
It was interesting though, even though I was telling myself it was the last time, as my willpower began to fade, I’d find creative ways to seek visual images that would help me along in my journey to my next orgasm. I mostly accomplished this by renting R-rated movies I hoped would have sex scenes or topless women in them. Sometimes I’d rent the same movie repeatedly, always being kind to rewind and get them back to the story on the due date. My creative capacity for sneaking nude images knew no limits. I just had to make sure my parents didn’t know.
These days everyone has a video camera in their back pocket. But people my age will remember things were different back in the 1990s. Home videos were captured on a camcorder. Our family had one that would record whatever memory you were trying to capture right onto a full-sized VHS video tape. The camera was somewhat large, and the videographer would view the image they were capturing through an eyepiece viewfinder. Once could also playback the video to see what had been captured on the tape. Then one day, I had a thought, and wondered if I could use the camera in a manner nobody had thought of. I thought maybe I could use the camera as a projector of sorts.
I made my way down to the video store and rented Tango and Cash, a movie starring Kurt Russell and Sylvester Stallone who played rival drug investigating cops. I’d seen it before and really couldn’t have cared any less about the plot. All I cared about was the scene when they were backstage at a strip club. I put the movie into the camcorder and began to play it. I fast forwarded the movie to the scene I was looking for and then, in a moment of genius, turned off all the lights in my room and turned the viewfinder lens towards my wall.
And would you look at that…
It worked. The scene of the movie was right there projected on my wall like a little movie screen. Granted, due to the nature of physics and how light bends as it goes through a viewfinder lens, the picture was upside down. But that was an easy fix. I just flipped the camera upside down and balanced it on some books.
Mission accomplished! Well, almost.
Five minutes of viewing, rewinding, pausing, rewinding, etc… then I accomplished my mission.
It was a private, proud moment I never shared with anyone until this little eBook. Geez… if I’d placed half that much effort into studying, I’d have been valedictorian.
All this to say, I had a lot of alone time I never talked about. Never. I couldn’t risk people thinking I had lustful feelings.
So, you can imagine my surprise when I got to college and a guy was explaining to me just how many times he thought he’d masturbated in his life. It was the very first conversation I had with him.
I was a freshman, barely in my dormitory for half a day when Jim came up to me to introduce himself. Jim was a senior, and a bit older than the traditional student. He was clearly an extrovert like me, which made me comfortable. It seemed like he was glad I was there. And then, before I knew what was happening, he started talking about his propensity for masturbating. That was the word he used too – masturbate. This was also new for me. Not only had nobody ever been so bold as talk about masturbating like it was the most normal thing ever, nobody ever called it by its actual…name.
“Dude,” said Jim looking me dead in the eye with an excited though inquisitive look, “have you ever tried to count how many times you’ve masturbated?”
I had absolutely no idea what to say. If you’d asked me what I thought one of the first conversations I’d have in college would be about, masturbation wouldn’t have made the list. Especially not at my conservative Christian college. I stared at Jim for a moment, perplexed as to what I should say. Was this a trap? I improvised.
“Um, nnnnnnooooooo?” I replied, looking around the room to see if anyone else was paying attention. Nobody was. In fact, we were alone. He wasn’t trying to make fun of me. This was a legit question he’d been thinking about.
“Listen,” Jim continued wide-eyed. “I whack it at least once a day. Sometimes as many as three times a day. So, let’s call it one and a half times a day, on average. I’m 22 now and I started masturbating when I was 12. That’s 1.5 times a day for 10 years… multiplied by 365 …” Jim did some quick math in his head before exclaiming, “that’s almost 5,500 times!” Then he paused and looked at the floor for a moment. “Nah, that seems low. Man, I bet it’s closer to 8,000 times!” He said tapping me on the shoulder and smiling big.
“That’s a lot of… uh… masturbation.” I uttered. I was as uncomfortable as I possibly could be in the moment.
“You’ll get there, man!” Jim promised. I just chuckled as he walked off.
Looking back now, Jim might have underestimated things. I don’t know. I didn’t do the math then, and I’m not going to today.
When it comes to my use of pornography during those years, the details just aren’t coming back. I simply can’t remember. There are likely several reasons for this. For starters, it was a long time ago. Without some sort of standout event, memories of the day-to-day routine of life are filed away in my brain with no way to bring them back. Still, I don’t think viewing pornographic images was something I’d consider routine in my life during college. Certainly not like it was when I had my calendar girls back in high school. I wasn’t in high school anymore, though, and there were new goals for me. Expectations, you might say.
Within a few months of going to college, I had a steady girlfriend. There’s a joke on Christian college campuses that women are there for a specific degree which doesn’t have much to do with educational pursuits. They’re there to get their “Mrs.” degree. Patriarchal joke aside, the fact was that guys were looking for a spouse too. It was at the top of my “to do” list before graduating.
So, after the 1st semester of my senior year at the young age of 21, I was married. I’m tempted to say it’s unheard of these days. I’m also tempted to say it was far to young to get married.
It was the early days of the internet, the late 1990s. I’d heard that there were now pornography sites on the internet. There was no need to go to the video story to find steamy movies, or even wait in line to buy a magazine at the convenience store. Online porn was available in my home when I was alone without anyone watching. At first, I was simply intrigued. Seriously? I can just find pictures of nude women or people having sex on the computer? I wonder… so I’d did a search and found the rumors to be true. A whole new world almost opened up to me. Almost, because those were the days we could access the good stuff only after providing credit card information to subscribe to the site. They’d give you a free trial period, usually something like 24 hours period before charging your credit card. So, I’d enter my billing information including my credit card and peruse the files of pornography. In those days it meant waiting for an agonizing amount of time for the pictures to unfurl on the screen. Even so, I was mesmerized by what was available. I was amazed that it even was available so easily!
If there were periods of time when my wife wasn’t in the mood for sex. Well, I now had an easy alternative. And do you know what? Even on the days when she was interested in having sex, I still found reason to get to the porn. I mean, there were so many new … ahem…things to see on the internet!
All the while however, I carried guilt with me.
(This ongoing work will be continued…)