another chapter from my novel! This one’s pretty darn short…

12.

What makes you hard? Over that you have no control. Seriously, there are a few things that can’t be faked, and that’s one of them — either something is exciting or it isn’t. There are plenty of people who would chose something, anything, in place of what turns them on now. They might pretend that they chose to be attracted to amputees, or high heels or little boys, or this girl you met when you were nine and she was eight, but it isn’t a conscious decision, only an involuntary swelling of blood in both the brain and a certain lower member. When Dante sees Beatrice again in the terrestrial paradise at the gates of heaven Dorothy Sayers translates his comment to Virgil like this — "There is scarce a dram/That does not hammer and throb in my blood:/I know the embers of the ancient flame." You can say that throbbing, ancient flame comes from childhood, or genetic codes, or from some past life, or figures carved on a tablet, but the fact is that there are people who, for whatever reason always seem to make you hard and then there are people, probably even better people, who just never do. It’s verifiable reality. Most of the good things in the world and most of the bad things have come from people (eventually) hoping to get off on it. Like William Heirens, the "catch-me" killer, who could only achieve orgasm by breaking into a woman’s apartment, climaxing uncontrollably as he rifled through it.

And you can’t really call that a preference, can you? The world has no menu from which to pick and choose, it’s more like a tennis game where desire serves itself — try to return it. More than that, who you look at, who you make love to, these things eventually become you, become who you are. If you want to get French and try to get profound about a play on words you could say that sexuality is textuality, that the things that get you hard give significance to the landscape, that they bring the focus with which to read the perceived world. Either a certain image spells hard to you or it doesn’t, there’s no argument.