I looked at the women on pornhubpersonals - amateurs most of them, really - and saw them looking into their cams, their tops down, their legs open, seeking a connection. A thrill. Anonymous sexuality. Something that races.
I pulled down my pants and fingered my cock. I opened up my webcam.
I opened a video and while I watched a woman masturbate in her wet panties, 5 men watched me masterbate and cum on myself.
Another memory, driving long distances, usually through areas I'm not familiar with, with the landscape around me barren and uneventful and the radio fading in and out of range of stations that play the same second-tier hits from 10 years ago or unknown local artists, and bored-sounding local djs reading the news.
The wind and the sun sneaks past me through the open windows and as I hurl 80 miles per hour in this anonymous landscape I open my shirt and pull my pants down to my ankles and spread my legs, still driving, and slowly jerk off, my cock open-air erect and dribbling pre-cum on my lazy fingers.
Relax. Don't do it.
My mind wanders and I don't want to ejaculate, merely pass the time, moving fast as a flowing waterfall, a metal body hurling through space. A ton and a half of momentum, technologically mobile and disconnected.
In the middle of adolescence I ran into the canyon, behind my house, climbing trees and feeling the wind as I played through the thigh-high grass at the bottom of the ravines. I paced through the creek, a thousand feet below the houses on the edge of the cliffs up there, alone and in the wide-open spaces.
At the cusp of puberty, I stripped off my clothes and layed on the ground, the wind breathing through my hair and across my young stiffening cock. The clouds and birds up above blew quietly by out of reach. No one could see me unless they really looked for me. They never did.
I explored my own nudity, feeling myself and getting hard in the sunny warm breath of summers. I looked down on the roads below cleaving through the canyon a hundred feet away, naked and spry on the crux of two branches in an oak tree, pants around my ankles. Invisible.
The conveyance by which we receive our pornographic images is as entwined with the experience as the actual content. Going to adult movie theatres in the '70s and '80s had a physical world that contextualized sitting in the dark watching a 40-foot projection of Seka's pussy with new meaning.
We were at the site of reception, and we had to go there to see that spectacle.
Nowadays there are petabytes of images of women opening up their legs to their cameras and streaming them online. They are alone, and they chat with us, allowing our good charm and anonymity to coax their panties down and their fingers in. The objective and unblinking eye of the webcam is complicit yet completely guileless in the capture and transmission of these forbidden and ubiquitous behaviors.
Anywhere. At play, relaxed, and wanting to connect. They are digital girls, fucking themselves in front of their computers, seemingly for us, but primarily and perhaps exclusively for their computers.
The visibility of the computer in the screen adds a narrative backstory to the spectacle. We see how it empowers the women to play. It becomes their partner. It is us by distant identification, yet it is not. It is that screen they're making love to. They don't even look at us or make eye contact.
In many ways the interaction with the computer/webcam has been placed as intentional mediation to create a fiction that motivates the expressive sexuality. A third-person interaction we are merely observing and not a participant in.
Ultimately the computer and the camera work keeps us comfortable that what we're seeing is real. The extra-textural traces of a moving camera, works spoken off-screen rather than to the screen, and editing devices remind us that the fantasy so carefully and deeply fabricated by the streaming images is only that - a created product.
This one-to-one interaction with a screen liberates us, for a moment, from that realization.
