Oh the gems that are on Craig’s List:
Dear Internet Porn,
These last ten years have been quite a trip, have they not? My letter to you now, however, is not one of celebration… I don’t feel like we are the same anymore. We just don’t have that passion we used to.
When we first met I was a loser, and you were there for me. My parents told me that you were no good for me, but I didn’t listen. You showed me that there were plenty of people like myself getting laid. It was beautiful and passionate. Your softcore erotic videos were a tasteful introduction to my budding sexuality.
As I got older I started seeing girls on the side. I knew you were jealous, but you have always held a special place in my heart. You became naughtier and it affected my relationships. I started wanting all the things I had seen you do. I wanted to be just like you. I wanted to cover my girlfriend’s face, put it up her ass, choke her.But that’s when I realized your dark secret, Internet Porn. You aren’t real: you are a fake and shallow individual. No girl wants a load on her face! Anal sex hurts and humiliates, and choking only leads to bruises that friends and loved ones ask about. You lied to me and changed my sexual expectations. Now no girl can please me.
I know it isn’t all bad. You’ve taught me so much. I can surf the internet with either hand and I know all the keyboard shortcuts for my browser. I know positions that aren’t even in the Kamasutra. But you have such a dark side. I’ve been late for work more than once and I find myself wanting to jerkoff at six in the morning. That’s what you’ve done to me.
Even now, on the eve of Christ’s birth, I sit hunched over my computer, penis in hand. I had to turn the nativity scene around so that Jesus wouldn’t see your filth. Try as I might, I can never hide you well enough either. It is harder to find you squirreled away on my hard drive than it is to get into my online bank account. Yet there is always lingering evidence. I’ve told you time and again to stop leaving your things at my place. But you ALWAYS forget something: a shortcut here, an unclear history there.
There’s no acceptance when you are discovered either. It might have been ok when we started – just innocent flirting with softcore. But now my girlfriends discover my asphyxiation collection, or that one goat video. I hate that you always invite your shadiest friends over when you come.
So I have one request. I know I can’t get rid of you… you are the psychopathic stalker to my teenage horror film. But if you won’t leave me alone, can you at least do me one favor? If I ever die, can you please format my hard drive? All of them? If you can’t do that, just burn my place down. My family can never know of my shame.
- Your shamed lover
As Ren says, porn is absolutely shitty sex education.
Thanks to Nicholas for the link.
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I have to save this line from Ren:
I really, really, really wish we could get people to understand that the things they see in the movies (not just porn) are fake, but it seems to be a problem with the human brain.
I had to turn the nativity scene around so that Jesus wouldn’t see your filth.
The nativity scene was in his room?
Oh, this is great- exceptional link!
Makes me glad I’ve got a great playmate of 20 years now who believes sex should be FUN as well as friendly. Laughing is allowed! (as well as coming so hard, you fall off the bed)
Who needs Internet porn?
This is either the saddest or sickest thing I have read in a long time. Or both, of course.
Oh, the hilarious timing. I had just posted the following to my Twitter:
…And then I log in to feministblogs.org, and this post is one of the first entries.
Twitter only gives you 140 characters to work with, or I would have elaborated further: the dude really was a complete tool. And now, yay, I just might get to see him again at our upcoming class reunion (Class of ’88, Kapa’a High School). Perhaps I’ll have a nice long talk with him, in the spirit of renegade sociological research.
I see internet porn’s successfully taught him that rape and anal sex are basically the same thing, so anything that’s true about the one must be bad about the other. Thanks, internet porn! No points, craigslist jerk.
Porn addiction is a real social problem as this craigslist post highlights. Ren’s post is an excellent companion to that as well.
Anal sex hurts and humiliates? It might hurt if you go at it wrong, but humiliates?
At least this dude recognizes that viewing porn has affected the way he views the women in his life.
Most don’t.
Yeah, I’d turn baby Jesus away too if I were a violent misogynist.
I suppose I’m the only one that laughed at that right? Um, I should go now…
No, Ren, you are not the only one. The nativity scene overlooking his place of wankage was enough to do me in.
And, I mean, come on! Anal sex, when done correctly, is, by numerous accounts, not painful and highly pleasurable.
Was somebody not making a joke???
Hello, I think this is all a joke, and a joke quite critical of pornography at that?
I thought it was funny because it was true, which means it isn’t funny, which means it is black humor, which means it is funny.
That is utterly hilarious.
We did file it under “humor”…
Well, if your entire understanding of sex is based on internet porn, and you purposely seek out porn that hurts and humiliates women, and you get off on humiliation, then yes, you’re going to think that anal sex hurts and humiliates.
Am I a bad person if I think that this whole cultural “porn is addictive” meme is a way for boys like this to not own their shit and want said meme to die choking on its own blood?
Anal sex… Lube is Your Friend. Know this.
Jill…good…I mean, if I was the ONLY one laughing, er…I’d have to go back to my cave or something.
This is brilliant. And pathetic. But mostly hilarious. The anal sex thing is sort of wtf to me too, but at least he sort of gets it in a dim way that maybe a porn addiction is something he should consider working on? Wow. This hits a little too close to home for me (ex-boyfriend? Is that you?) but nonetheless has been one of the highlights of my evening. *snerk* Baby Jesus…
Uh, he refers to videos being his introduction… not many videos were available back in the dial-up days of 1997-98. Not very genuine, but I appreciate the overall sentiment.
It really is sad how true this can be for a large number of guys. Which of course makes this funny.
“porn is addictive” meme
Well, I’m no psychologist, but there have been studies of people who fit addict behavior with respect to porn. Just to say, as a depression sufferer, I’ve been basically told to “own my shit” as well, in the form of “Suck it up, man up, and grow a pair” a la my father. Yeah, that didn’t help.
Hugo: There were plenty of images though. And you could find videos, they just took hours to download.
Crazy post – I feel bad for him if it’s true, but it’s sure funny.
(I still love David Wong’s contribution to the ‘is porn addictive’ debate: The Great Internet Pornoff.
No Ren, you’re not the only one laughing. It was pretty clearly a humorous post (there are lots of them on CL) but let’s not let that get int he way :)
Heck, even if it’s a serious post it means basically nothing about life as a whole. There are billions of people on Earth. Many of them will have odd addictions to all sorts of things – porn is no worse than any other.
In deference to the tone of this blog, I won’t comment on Anal sex here :)
[...] say it over and over – I find so much of the good stuff on the web via posts on various feminist sites by reading what gets them upset. In this case, there is a pretty funny post on Craig’s list [...]
Trin, I agree completely.
And I am so over “anal sex” == “painful bad humiliating etc. etc.”
Why is this a problem? Some of the rest of it, yeah, but I thought wanting an orgasm when you woke up was normal.
But JESUS IS EVERYWHERE! HE SEES YOU!
Waaaaay back in 1991, there was a scandal at work when some guy forwarded (we had some kind of mainframe-based arrangement with late-70s vintage terminals; not even DOS) some text-based porn to someone else at work, and that person, not wanting to have anyone think that she wanted to see it (and wasn’t just being harassed), let everyone else know about it.
Holy crap, but was that thing boring. Just paragraph after paragraph of dull, badly written wank material.
Oh good, I’m not the only one who was wondering about that. Unless it’s really cutting into his time for other activities the masturbation part of this just isn’t bothering me.
It’s the “late for work” part that’s a problem, not the masturbation.
Sadly, much of the rest of the letter went right out of my mind, because as a hardcore YAOI fan with an incredibly straight-laced family, I just died laughing at “can you at least do me one favor? If I ever die, can you please format my hard drive? All of them? If you can’t do that, just burn my place down.”
I have mixed feelings on the porn addiction thing. I think addiction-prone people can become addicted to any number of things, be it alcohol, gambling, risky behavior. But it’s so overused by right-wing preachers that it sounds more like scolding an immoral society than addressing the real problem with lots of (but not all) porn.
[...] Renegade Evolution, this being the day that I checked it before Feministe, I found out about this post at Feministe quoting a humorous Craig’s list letter addressed to Internet porn, conveying the anonymous [...]
Hee! This is wonderful.
About the anal sex: I think there’s no doubt that *many* women find it painful and humiliating (since I’m figuring we’re talking about het sex here). Partly this is because of the nature of the body parts involved. While it’s definitely not *inherently* painful or humiliating, I think it’s a mistake to laugh at people who think it is.
Especially since it’s often *perceived* by the penetrator as a humiliation of the penetratee (? not a word, I know), and most women are aware of that. It’s hard to forget about the possibility that the guy might just want to have anal sex with you to prove you’re his bitch and you’ll do any degrading thing he asks for (yeah, yeah, it doesn’t have to be degrading, but HE thinks it is, which will make the experience of it with HIM degrading).
I can understand why you’d be skeptical, but I would say in response that recognizing something is an addiction, or at least can be addictive, is not an excusal from responsibility to do something about it when one recognizes what the addiction is doing to her or him and other people in one’s life. In fact, the first step in recovery is to do exactly that: admit you have a problem and do something about it. Some people might say they’re addicted to something and can therefore do nothing but continue the behavior and thereby avoid responsibility, but that doesn’t mean the addiction isn’t real, nor does it mean that person can’t actually remedy the situation.
I’m not an expert, but from what I’ve seen on addiction, mental health practitioners have for a while now noticed that there are a range of addictive behaviors and that one need not be addicted to a chemical substance in order for there to be an addiction.
That surprises me a bit. My experience with right-wing preacher types is that they tend to denounce the notion of addiction, because they think problematizing things like alcohol abuse, etc. in terms of mental health obscures the issue of morality and makes moral judgment harder. In other words, in the right-wing view, you’re not an alcoholic, you’re just a drunk. You’re not a drug addict, you’re just a junkie. You’re not addicted to porn, you’re just depraved.
I think it’s part of a wider cultural tendency to take mental health issues seriously, as a commenter above alluded to with respect to depression. I’ve had my own problems openly dismissed by others who went on to claim they knew what the real problem was. Some people like to interpret mental problems in terms of character, because this interpretation is a good rationale for putting themselves in a position of moral superiority, which is more comforting that having to think about the complexity of human personality and behavior.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting any one here is taking that stance, just to make clear.
er, make that “wider cultural tendency to not take mental health issues seriously.”
Yeah. I don’t so much think there never exist addictions to erotic media as I think that… well, we also, some of us, cast about for cultural stories to explain what we do, and that’s a very common cultural story. It seems to me it’s easy for someone who feels ashamed of his sexuality or way of expressing it to tell himself “it’s not me who’s afraid of intimacy/who wants to do these degrading things/who masturbated to THAT… it’s THE ADDICTION TAKING ME OVER.”
And I do worry about that. I’m unimpressed by the way a lot of the theory on sex, porn, and love addiction is tied tightly to the conservative Right. And I don’t see a similar tie between theories of depression that say “people can’t just get over this” and political stances.
Am I a bad person if I think that this whole cultural “porn is addictive” meme is a way for boys like this to not own their shit and want said meme to die choking on its own blood?
I don’t know… I know three men who are trying to quit porn… one because, like the guy in this letter, he feels like it has affected his relationships with women, one because he’s Christian and thinks it’s a sin, and one I don’t know the reasons. And they do own their shit, they do take responsibility, and I’ve never heard any of them say: “It’s not my fault I can’t quit, I’m just addicted!” But all three are having a hell of a time quitting. The Christian guy in particular is really miserable and keeps beating himself up over it. It seems like an addiction to me.
Linnaeus: I take your point. And I’m sure that they are not using addiction in the accurate medical sense, which is the problem. My research skills are totally failing me this morning in my attempt to actually back myself up.
On the one hand, yeah, the whole “porn addiction” thing seems more a side-effect of living in a culture where sexuality is shunned.
On the other hand, there exists stuff like (oh god, I can’t believe I’m mentioning this again) 2 Girls, 1 Cup where I don’t think anyone’s having a good time, and the whole humili-porn subgenre that’s existed for… a little while, now.
On the other other hand, I can see this really embarrassing a person if they were watching it for actual wank material and not, as countless “reaction” videos have suggested, the gross out factor.
Astraea, I’m not at all saying you’re wrong. In fact, you bring up a good point about how the right-wing preacher types may in fact use the term “addiction” in an inaccurate fashion. I hadn’t thought of that.
I’m just relaying what I’d experienced, and I realize that anecdote like mine only gets you so far.
FAKE. Sounds like it was written by a mother or girlfriend who found porn on a guy’s computer, not a male porn “addict”. Looking at porn when you’re horny is no less moral than eating a twinkie when you’re hungry.
But I agree that mainstream porn is shitty sex education. I expect that people did get bored with vanilla sex, and looked for something new. If you reduce sex to pistoning, you run out of variety right quick, and have to turn to the athletic or the improbable. Semen has always been a hallmark of authenticity in porn, so finding new things to do with semen makes sense to hold the viewer’s interest. But to me, porn should focus on seduction, not pistoning and squirting. Watching another man’s penis does not excite me.
But it’s so overused by right-wing preachers that it sounds more like scolding an immoral society than addressing the real problem with lots of (but not all) porn.
Well, this may be true in terms of the fact that some people use it as an excuse for continuing their addictive behavior, but not all addicts are like that, and some do get help.
I hate reading things like this.
I particularly hate it because I’ve dated several men like this, but with one really crucial distinction: the men I dated all deeply cared that their partner enjoy whatever taboo-violating act they were focused on as much as they did. As a result, they were incredibly creative and attentive in bed, nobody felt guilty, and nobody felt humiliated.
It seems like such a thin line that separates unhappy, misogynistic men like the letter writer from the sort of men I like to sleep with. How do encourage that subtle perspective shift from “I will badger my girlfriend until she lets me do whatever it is I want to do” to “We will experiment and play around until we figure out what we both enjoy”?
Yeah, somehow I wasn’t making the connection because he said the job thing first, and then “six in the morning.” Which wasn’t very smart of me.
Anyway… I do think it’s fake to some degree or another (possibly really written by a guy who liked porn, possibly not, but I’m pretty sure he made up the Baby Jesus part.)
Heh, I’m not big into yaoi but I do have some anime-inspired art on my hard drive that… let’s just say I hope no one goes poking through it in the event of my death.
Yes, some people consume porn compulsively, I still don’t think it’s helpful to talk about porn as being addictive, per se.
To get back to the food analogy, we can take compulsive eating seriously without concluding that food is inherently addictive.
I hate to say it but this is a Promise Keepers-style just-so story that serves the same purpose and has the same basic validity as a Jack Chick pamphlet. Butthole equals bad! Wife stay home, make babies, clean house! Sex and erotic play are out and “wifely duties” aka “wifely burdens” are in! What is disturbing but not surprising is to see it serving a “feminist” perspective as well. Sorry gay men, but your sexual practices are icky and therefore unacceptable! Anal? Check. Facials? Check. Rimming/fisting/dominant and submissive play? EEeeew! It does not fit into my current worldview and therefore must be suppressed for everyone! More countersubversive is the fact that this particular sermon assumes, a priori, that women have no power over their own lives, their own bodies, and their own fantasies and are not capable of judging for themselves what is pleasurable and what is good or bad. The sermon presumes that only men, as father figure for wives and children, have the judgment and character to avoid both “pr0n” and sodomy in the sense of Texas law, being oral, anal, or masturbatory acts not leading to coitus for the production of young’uns.
While feminists or really individual people may find certain practices, activities, movies, and so on unpleasant whether it is the act itself or the sociopolitical context of the act, should that act be banned for all people at all times? Ted Haggard? Bill Bennett? Is Rodin’s Thinker gay porn? Are women always so weak and men always so strong? Are you willing to make that call for everyone at all times? Welcome to the jihad, then, and greet President Huckabee appropriately.
Fake? Um, try piss take? It doesn’t sound anything like a mother or girlfriend who found porn on a guy’s computer, it sounds like someone making fun of porn addiction and the culture of porn whilst making a few choice shots at the less savoury aspects of porn.
Hell, I like porn, or I would if it wasn’t so hard to find free porn that isn’t disgusting in it’s treatment of women. I like hardcore porn and I don’t want romance. But I can’t think of a bigger turn off than realising the clip I’m watching is subtitled with the explanation that the male protagonists “tricked some ho” into fucking them. Yeah, that’s real fucking sexy *gag*
Hector: Not at all. Actually sounds like some stuff a man who was in my life confided to me once (who shall remain as anonymous as possible). This guy just seems to have a sense of humour about it.
Oh I see he make funny.
Well here’s a novelty request for the porn industry, how about showing women enjoying sex so much they don’t give a fuck about their hair and you can see pleasure, not shock and or fear in their eyes?
I just wanted to second what Serafina said about anal sex. No, it’s doesn’t have to be humiliating and painful. However, for some people it is. To me, anal sex is a very disgusting thing, a humiliating thing (for me personally. If other people like it, that’s fine and none of my business). It seems like every guy wants to do it these days though. If you aren’t down with it, you’re a prude or you’re not good in bed or any number of things. Forget about what a freak you are if you don’t want to go down on someone.
Oh, I agree. I wouldn’t make the argument that porn is intrinsically addictive; much like alcohol, if it were intrinsically addictive, we’d be seeing a lot more addicts. At least I would think so.
But that doesn’t exclude the possibility that people can get addicted to it, IMHO, if we think in terms of addiction as a behavior.
[...] having pubic hair. You wouldn’t know that if you got all of your sex education from porn, but that’s generally a bad idea. And plenty of people remove their pubic hair. More power to ‘em. While I’m sure there [...]