I wrote before about my recent taste for two websites filled with infinitudes of women. What I didn’t write about was the part of all of this that is in some ways the most surprising to me and in some ways shouldn’t be.
It turns out that on my terabyte disk, which has literally hundreds of thousands of images of literally thousands of women, I don’t have enough. I’m still hungry for more. Not only that, give me a few spare porn moments and I’m much more likely to be trying to add to my collection than I am to be admiring it.
In a way that feels not disconnected from my previous recognition that switching away from a particular model or photoset or video may be as important to my arousal as looking at it, so too, it may be that the bulk of the pleasure that I take from my terabyte of porn has been in the getting of it and not the having of it.
I say this is surprising and not surprising. I’ve written dozens, if not hundreds of times about how much better it feels to me to get than to have. That’s a theme that courses through so much of both my pleasure and my suffering. So why would I be surprised to discover it manifesting in this instance?
I suppose it’s because of my resilience — or rather resistance — to giving up the fantasy that somehow getting might lead somewhere different than having. That having might lead to a feeling somehow different than hunger.
Featured image prompt (gemini): Dim blue-hour light in a cramped, cluttered home-office interior — shelves stacked with hard drives, tangled cables, the cold glow of dual monitors casting pale rectangles across the desk. No person. A single desk chair pushed back at an angle, still warm-looking, a half-drunk glass of water beside a keyboard. On the monitors, grid after grid of thumbnail images, too small to resolve, too numerous to count, scrolling and multiplying. One external hard drive sits open beside another, both lit with tiny amber indicator lights. A ceramic mug, a scatter of notes. The room feels inhabited by appetite rather than satisfaction — dense, hoarded, restless, the hunger visible in the sheer accumulation of things rather than any single thing. Shot close and slightly wide-angle, the geometry pressing in, the glow the only warmth.
Bottom image prompt (gemini): Dim blue-hour light in a cramped, cluttered home-office interior — shelves stacked with hard drives, tangled cables, the cold glow of dual monitors casting pale rectangles across the desk. No person. A single desk chair pushed back at an angle, still warm-looking, a half-drunk glass of water beside a keyboard. On the monitors, grid after grid of thumbnail images, too small to resolve, too numerous to count, scrolling and multiplying. One external hard drive sits open beside another, both lit with tiny amber indicator lights. A ceramic mug, a scatter of notes. The room feels inhabited by appetite rather than satisfaction — dense, hoarded, restless, the hunger visible in the sheer accumulation of things rather than any single thing. Shot close and slightly wide-angle, the geometry pressing in, the glow the only warmth.