Jackie has brought home his first floozy in a while. She looks old. I don’t know where he picks these women up at 8:00 in the morning. Maybe he works with her. I think I hear the shower going, so I imagine they’ll get soaped up for a few rounds of fucking and then off to sleep until work time. I don’t know whether I’m jealous of the active sex life or angry that these women just seem to be . . . beneath them somehow.
I should probably go into this. I have a lot of issues when it comes to women. Big surprise, I know. But mine stem from an unusual fact about my childhood: when I was young, I was always jealous of them. Dad would leave me and my brother alone for days at a time in pursuit of them, and he was always
giving his woman preference over us whenever any decisions had to be made. After my mother died, he had a series of liaisons with extremely young women to try to find some companionship. I don’t know why he tried to “move himself up” in the marketplace, perhaps it was his version of a midlife crisis. But I always resented him for it: replacing Mom so shallowly and ignoring me at the same time.
On top of this, I was a late bloomer. I was homeschooled from the 3rd grade to about the 7th grade, and during that time a young man is supposed to learn enough about sex to appreciate dirty jokes. But I didn’t, not at all. I viewed sex as a good Christian is supposed to view it: as an essentially dirty thing
that should be reserved for marriage. I had next to no sexual thoughts, dreams or fantasies before I was 14 or 15. This rigid Christian upbringing also gave me a tendency to be Preachy, so once I re-entered public school when I was about 12 I was sorely equipped to deal with the pubescent mindset of my peers.
People would always ask me if I was a virgin, and of course I would have to say yes. Then they would make fun of me for being one, and try to talk about sex, maybe to make up for their own inadequacies. But I never knew what they were talking about. It wasn’t that I was completely ignorant as to how
sex works, I was given the medical description of sexual intercourse when I was about nine or so. But I didn’t know any of the slang, like “pussy,” or weird sexual acts like the “blowjob.” (I imagined a blowjob involved making an O with your lips and blowing on the penis, or something.)
As my ignorance became manifest, the ridicule would grow until I was being openly mocked. Sometimes kids would call over other kids once they knew how I was, “Hey Jody! caco doesn’t know what a pussy is!” My response to all this was to become indignant. “I’m a Christian!” I would harrumph. “Just because you constantly have your mind on filthy topics doesn’t mean everybody does.” This would only make the kids more hostile, and eventually I would turn them off enough that they would quit speaking to me. Girls avoided me or taunted me. Guys looked down on me. So sex was a sore point with me early on.
Then came the Dad thing. Here I was, bereft of a mother and ignored by my father, who concentrated all his energy on acquiring this thing called sex. I distinctly remember kneeling in a field behind the church in [REDACTED] one night, crying and wiping my eyes and vowing to myself I would never have sex because I hated it so much. That vow was almost like a curse, which has wrought itself upon me with devastating effectiveness. For the most part, I avoid women, unless they’re really old or really ugly. I don’t really know how to behave when I’m sexually attracted to someone, so I end up quietly staring at the ground or being generally creepy. I’ve shut myself off from this essential aspect of human life.
I tried to get dates a few times in high school. I would develop a crush on some girl, let it fester for awhile, writing pages and pages about it, and then finally work up the nerve to ask one of them out. They invariably turned me down. I was a skinny little nerd at that time. A few times since high school I’ve been put in the “Friend Zone” and because of my experience then, never did anything to break out of it. Eventually I just decided that a relationship with a girl wasn’t going to happen for me and stopped trying. It wasn’t even that I had tried that hard. I had asked out maybe a total of five girls. I just assumed that my rejections meant I was somehow permanently damaged, that nobody would ever be interested in me. That’s when I let myself go, physically and emotionally. A descent into psychological instability wasn’t very far behind.
Throughout all this time, I substituted artificial women for real ones. I discovered pornography on the Internet shortly after I figured out [self-pleasure] and got pretty heavily into it, eventually downloading gigs at a time. I became the “Internet male” people rail against in articles and on forums. My standards for attractiveness became unrealistically high, while my preference for sexual kinks became very outlandish. After years of this sort of thing, I feel like a part of me has been seared & that my mind will always be comparing women to airbrushed photographs and that my sexual responsiveness has been melted by years of intense . . .
They did a study in Japan on this. It said that men who waited until their twenties to become sexually active had an extremely high prevalence of sexual dysfunction, something like 70%. Their specific malady was “inability to orgasm inside a vagina” and wrote that women were leaving their husbands because of it. The theory was that these men had developed techniques of [self-love] that felt nothing like an actual vagina and had become so used to it that they couldn’t get off any other way. I know two guys in real life who are like this, and their sexual histories are similar to mine. I have a suspicion I’ll be the same way.
Since my mental episodes, I’ve become much more suspicious and intolerant of others, as well. I usually never put myself into a situation where I will be forced to meet new people and if I do somehow end up in such a situation I remain stone silent. (That happened to me most recently when I went to a Halloween party of Bill’s.) I intentionally sequester myself from the world to prevent any negative interactions from occurring. When I am in [REDACTED], I alternate my time among four specific people at the most. In Lexington this number jumps to five. The rest of the time, I’m alone.
This has made me quite bitter, although realizing this bitterness mitigates it somewhat and makes me aware of attitudes and reactions I have that are due to its influence. I used to be a “closet misogynist,” hating and envying women without really realizing it, but now I’m more of an open, apologetic one. That is to say, I can’t help but resent women, but will discuss my prejudices more openly with full awareness of their existence. Several of my beliefs about them have become set in stone; I view the high school concepts of “leagues” of sexual desirability as a rule carved in bedrock and become immediately suspicious of any mismatched couples. I consider it much more likely that I’ll find an intelligent, talkative woman among the scores of “plain” ladies than I ever will find a traditionally attractive one. Maybe that’s what I should go for.
Delbert thinks I should just fuck it all and get a prostitute. After all, it’s been so long that I’ve gone under my own power, what are the chances I’ll ever let anything happen after all this time? He thinks it will break some kind of psychological barrier and that afterward I’ll be a stone cold ladykiller. I think it’ll be more complicated than that. I wouldn’t be able to view it as anything more than an economic transaction, for one thing, and its actual effect on my willingness to risk rejection would be nil. I would probably feel dirty and used after the experience.
Regardless, I hope this explains some of my reactionary hatred for my brother and friends’ sexual escapades when I’m around. A combination of loserdom and jealousy, mixed up with plenty of self-hatred and seasoned with misogyny, causes the pot to boil over when friends of mine are “getting lucky.” I took a break from writing this entry, however, and my brother had an extremely attractive girl sleep over with him on Saturday night. I thought she was friendly and engaging and felt no resentment although quite a dollop of jealousy. She was from Eastern Kentucky, a blonde. I tried to be generally pleasant and crack a few jokes, we went out to eat together on Sunday and I think I managed okay. It’s possible that my social life can still be saved, but I would say that living in [REDACTED] isn’t going to do it. I would have to move to Lexington and be exposed to new people frequently in order to become comfortable with it.