Digital reality, digital libido

Andrew,

I know what you do when I go to bed. I'm not stupid, you know. When I go to bed, you crawl out from the covers next to me, sits down at the computer, and look at porn. Just look. Stare, really, with the bluish glow of the computer casting a hideous shadow of your big head on the wall behind me. You hardly move, except to bring up the next photo. You just stare. It makes me sick. Your blank, unfulfilled stare could make the girls in those images cringe. Whatever made them do what they do, it wasn't with you in mind.

I lie there awake, sometimes looking, sometimes not. Either way, it's impossible to escape. You want to know why I sometimes fall asleep so fast? I will it. I will myself to sleep so that I'm not awake when you go crawling to your computer. How are these girls attractive to you? How many photographs of breasts do you need to see before they look the same? These aren't girls. They're a collection of little dots on your screen, arranged to look like a girl that took her clothes off for a couple of bucks. I'm sure that girl then puts her shirt back on, goes home, and sleeps with someone real. She doesn't know you, or think about you, or wonder what you look like with your shirt off.

I have something in common with these girls: I am untouchable to you. They, of course, are untouchable because they're off living a life, content to let their images float around because of some lazie-faire philosophy they probably accrued the first time they got laid. The only thing I can't figure out is why I'm untouchable. I'm right here. Boys look at porn when they can't get their hands on the real thing, but I'm right there in bed with you, and you do nothing but a peck on the forehead and maybe a scratch on the back.

To be honest, I'm almost at the point where I don't want to be collected by your eyes the same way you store those girls, somewhere away in your brain marked something mature like "boobs" or "pussy" or something. I am beautiful. You told me that once, but you weren't the only one. I know I am. But when you stare at those girls, who somehow can capture your intertwined imagination and libido better than I can, I feel inferior. What's wrong with my body? Why are their breasts, frozen to a computer screen, better than mine?

What have they got that I don't? Is it because they're untouchable? It is because you can't get them? The only thing they have that I don't is an airbrush. Come to think of it, we do have something in common after all, those girls and I. We both don't have you, but they're better off for it.

Patricia