My Body Is Yours by Michael V. Smith

Author:Michael V. Smith [Smith, Michael V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781551525785
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press

THE OMG OF OCD

Lesson #4: It’s never a bad idea to be completely honest about the facts.

—Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World

AS I MOVED THROUGH my thirties, it became increasingly clear to me that I hunted for sex more than necessary. If I had free time, I filled it with cruising. Just as with my use of alcohol, even a small sip of porn online could get me drunk on clicking for hookups.

In 2008 I landed my dream job, teaching writing at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, so I packed up my Vancouver life and moved to the Okanagan. A fresh start. I hadn’t had sex in Kelowna; I’d never put myself at risk there. Now, I reasoned, I could re-make my romantic life. All good promises by drunks are about as ephemeral as their intentions. It didn’t take more than a month for the machine to start back up again.

A typical week for me included about five or six nights of cruising online—I sometimes called it “typing class”—sometimes as few as four nights if I had other events that kept me up late. The nights when I wasn’t cruising were ones I spent trying not to cruise.

Compulsion is a mild form of temporary lobotomy. Sexual compulsion is a lobotomy with orgasms. When the machinery of sexual compulsion is turned on, part of the brain shuts off. Like a blind person leaning against a touchpad light switch, you don’t even know you’ve hit it. As the body turns on, the critical, rational brain dims.

I’d always been good at paying attention, so I caught on that in the park the encounters were brief, which didn’t help my goal of finding a more long-term partner. Also I was putting myself at risk of STIs, and I didn’t have any way to contact my sexual partners if I wanted to do the responsible thing and get in touch with them. You can only tell the clinic nurse so many times that no, you don’t have contact information for the person who gave you crabs or chlamydia or gonorrhoea, and yes, you’ve had sex with a bunch of people since you likely caught it, and no, you don’t have contact info for them either, before you figure out that maybe you need to moderate your behaviour.

I swapped out the park for online cruising sites because at least with the latter, there was some conversation beforehand and a means to contact tricks afterward, provided they hadn’t deleted their profile.

Those automatic nights at the keyboard, I surfed porn for at least an hour, usually for about three hours, masturbating. At the same time, I’d be on two other websites for hooking up, one with a chat room and one with a list of other users near me who were also online. I could have my cam on in a room and watch a half dozen other folks masturbating. I could simultaneously chat in

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