Erica Garza - Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction

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This book is for the wankers, the loners, the weirdos, the perverts, the outcasts, the bullied, the flawed, the awkward, the shunned, and the shamed .

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

F RIEDRICH N IETZSCHE

This guy I kind of know named Clay, who has a neck tattoo and sells arty photographs to tourists, is on top of me and hes not wearing a condom. I dont care. Im completely sober. Hes not.

Im not sure what time it is. It is so dark outside that I can barely see Clays neck tattoo, his condomless dick, or his mouth full of crooked teeth. I hear him grunting; I feel his bodys weighthis six-foot-eight frame on my five-foot-twoand I know hes almost finished. Im too tired to have an orgasm, so I wait for the inevitable end.

Its not that I dont enjoy this. Enjoy is not big enough a word. I have come to crave these nights with Clay.

Sometimes he calls during the day and we make plans to go out for drinksnever dinner, because what would we talk about? But then I dont hear from him until the middle of the night, when hes drunk or high and knocking at my front door. I dont care. I cant even picture him in a bar ordering drinks, sliding dollar bills over to the bartender, or making conversation with me fully clothed. Its true that I met him in a bar many months before, so I must have seen these things, but I was so drunk and heartbroken from my last breakup that Im not sure exactly how that night went and what things he said to get me to swallow his cum.

He called me in the morning, and even though we made plans that I knew we wouldnt keep, I got dressed anyway and put on my mascara and took a small swig of the vodka I keep in the freezer to prepare myself for an awkward date, imagining the questions well trudge through out of politeness until the drinks weve ordered make us courageous enough to suggest the next move, to someones bed, likely mine.

After the time wed chosen to meet had long passed, I wiped off my makeup, slipped on my pajamas, and fell asleep. Sometimes he shows up in the middle of the night; sometimes he doesnt. Either way I wont get another call for a few days, or a week, until hes bored and horny and we play this game again.

Tonight when I heard him knocking I woke up straightaway, but I stayed in bed a little longer than usual. For a fleeting moment I considered that letting him in might not be the best thing for me, which isnt so much of an aha! moment, but the usual common sense that I choose to ignore. I thought about the sensation of his hips against mine; his heavy breath on my neck; the fullness that sex gives me, like having feasted on a hearty meal; but I also thought about the immediate emptiness that follows my nights with him or men like him.

I weighed the options like a sensible person. I did the expected. I took off my pajamas, opened the door naked, and led him back to my bedroom.

He turns me over, which is his favorite way to finish. My eyes, fully adjusted to the darkness now, focus on the dent forming between my headboard and the wall. I think about spackling. Then I see my reflection just above that, in the large mirror with a rattan frame that hangs above the bed.

I hold eye contact with myself while he fucks me, slipping into some sort of twisted meditation. Im someone else, a queen or a goddess. He is just some lowly subject I use for fun. There are guards in armor waiting outside my door and maidens who will bathe me and rub me with sweet-smelling oils before putting me to bed.

But when Clay pulls out, he flips my body back over like a rag doll and comes all over my tits and stomach so a pool forms in my belly button and rolls out onto the bedspread.

Afterward, we lie there, our elbows touching. I am less sleepy than I was when I opened the door, so the awkwardness sets in fast. He asks how my day was, and then I wait in desperate anticipation for the Call you tomorrow or See you in a few days , which may or may not be true. I dont care. I dread the nights when he tries at intimacy, holds me in the sweaty crook of his arm for a few minutes before he retreats to the farthest corner of the bed to sleep while I lie there for hours, unable to sleep beside a stranger.

Finally he feeds me his lines and gets dressed and goes, and I give myself two orgasms in the wet spot of the bed. Once, to a three-minute clip of a teenage cheerleader fucking her stepdad on the kitchen counter while her mom showers upstairs, and then again to the thought of what a miserable slut I am to allow a guy like Clay to use me for sex.

Theres nothing unique about this singular moment in bed with Clay. I can reach into my arsenal of memories and easily pick out another story just like it, sometimes not even including a man. Because what I got from Clay was more than just his penis inside of me. What I got was an elaborate mix of shame and sexual excitement I had come to depend on since I was twelve years old. And my methods of getting this only became darker and more intense so that it wreaked havoc on all aspects of my life until I became a shell of a person, isolated, on a path to certain destruction.

With Clay gone and my two orgasms over, I steep in the afterglow of having gotten what I needed. And, by now, Im too exhausted to consider answering the overwhelming question echoing inside of me, where he and the cheerleader and the stepdad just were.

Why am I doing this?

What I block out of my mind, because it doesnt fit the sad story Im devising in my head, is that Im using Clay too. Hes probably caught up in the same emptiness I am, desperately filling it with any warm body available. For what little conversation we have, Clay and I are actually quite similar, and we could probably have a genuine connection if we talked about these things. But we dont talk about these things becausewell, it isnt sexy. Id rather stick with the one thing that always manages to get me offIm bad, bad, bad.

My favorite porn scene of all time involves two sweaty women, fifty horny men, a warehouse, a harness, a hair dryer, and a taxicab. You can put it all together in a dozen different ways and I bet you still cant imagine just how revolting the scene actually is.

Revolting . Ive been using this word and many adjectives like it to describe the things that have brought me to orgasm for more than two decades. Im not just referring to porn scenes either. Im also referring to those scenes from my own life, costarring semiconscious men in dark bedrooms and sex workers in cheaply rented rooms, where I prioritized the satisfaction of sexual release over everything else screaming inside of me Please stop .

Revolting: that summer after college when, after downing too many shots of tequila at a party, I stripped naked and took a bubble bath in front of a group of men.

Disgusting: slipping a few twenty-dollar bills to a woman who called me baby on the other side of a semen-stained pane of glass at a Times Square peep show.

Sickening: letting daylight dissipate and with it all my plans and obligations for the day because Id rather stay in bed with high-definition clips of naughty secretaries, busty nurses, incestuous cheerleaders, drunk frat party girls, and sad Thai hookers.