Email of the Day

(via)

I've just finished reading your post about the "end of Porn Valley." I'm not too sure what Porn Valley is all about, nor is it wholly significant in the context of this e-mail.

What matters is that you've presented me with something valuable. Please excuse me for taking your time with this, but its significance to me stirs an urge to let you know that you've opened my eyes to something crucial, whether or not you determine it so or give it any time at all is your prerogative.

I am a 6'2" male, middle-class, two-parent family, well-educated, religious, yadda yadda. I have found regular solace in private intimacy for the last 11 years. I also come from a culture of guilt. These two elements make for some rough riding. I am now married to a woman that couldn't make me happier, yet something in my psyche occasionally detaches from that existence and pulls me into a different place, home to unwarranted desires, detached lust, etc. There has always been something that scratches at the walls of my secret: a voice, many voices; voices that belong to faces and lives. Voices that are daughters, sisters, humans with nominal struggles and wretched tribulations. Yet in order to avoid viewing myself with a sharp focus of hypocrisy, I have stopped my ears to these voices, occasionally questioning their existence when the glamor fades.

That voice broke through in your post. In describing the human condition of a woman on the receiving end of myriad strange and deplorable emotions, you've turned "them" human. You've given life to pornstars who for so long have provided me with (for all practical purposes) inanimate assertions of self-worth and power. In all honesty, I came to your blog looking for intriguing links while my wife sleeps. I can't do now what I had intended to do. It would be naive to imagine that I never will pick up where I've left off, but tonight I can hope, and sleep easy, picturing myself justified in criticizing society for its ill-treatment of women. I only hope that you are able to shed more light and life on people who exist in a reality that I wouldn't wish on anyone, since you are able to write in such a moving, insightful, and convincing way.

Anon.