Elizabeth Benedict - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Elizabeth Benedict

What I learned about sex on the Internet

A decade ago, I had the peculiar dis-

tinction of being dubbed “The Sex
Priestess of the Ivy League” by the sas-
sy New York Observer. I was teaching in
Princeton’s creative writing program
and promoting a new book, The Joy of
Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers, a
serious approach to writing sex scenes in
literary ½ction. Not long after that, allá
would be more to my moniker than The
Observer–or my students–knew. Para
the next two years, while instructing my
young charges in the elements of serious
½ction, I wrote a monthly column called
“Girl Talk,” under a pseudonym, para el
Japanese edition of Playboy. Each piece
was a mini-play starring four saucy New
York women in their twenties–though
I hadn’t seen my own for some time–
who met at trendy bars and ski lodges to
discuss their latest sexual exploits. Fue
lively banter and a smidgen of soft-core
porn.

Elizabeth Benedict is the author of ½ve novels,
including “Slow Dancing” (1985), a Nation-
al Book Award ½nalist, “Almost” (2001), y
“The Practice of Deceit” (2005), así como
“The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction
Writers” (2002). Her website is www.elizabeth-
benedict.com.

I hadn’t sought out either publication.
Until a publisher asked me to write The
Joy of Writing Sex, I kept busy teaching
and writing literary novels (each with a
few sex scenes), book reviews, y el
occasional travel piece or personal essay.
But the publisher’s idea appealed to me.
Before I knew it, I was conceptualizing
theories and strategies involved in writ-
ing about sex, collecting examples from
contemporary work, and interviewing
writers including Russell Banks, John
Updike, Dorothy Allison, and Alan Hol-
linghurst. In New York, I happened to
meet a Japanese editor and book scout
and sent her the ½nished manuscript,
hoping she might interest a Japanese
publisher. En cambio, she phoned me some
time later with a far more exotic invita-
ción.

Japanese Playboy needed a monthly
woman columnist after their New York-
based writer suddenly quit. Was I inter-
ested? At ½rst I was flummoxed. Writ-
ing about sex in ½ction came easily to
a mí, but what could I possibly dream up,
month after month, that would hold in
thrall tens of thousands of randy Japa-
nese men? I balked until she mentioned
the mini-play format, which suits my
taste for writing dialogue, and the hyper-
generous fee–every month for a year.
Surely, I could think of something. Una vez

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What I
learned
about sex
sobre el
Internet

I did some novelist’s research into the
sex lives of Gen Xers and New York’s
latest hot spots, I was turning out my
spicy columns the morning they were
pendiente. Readers were happy. I was prosper-
ous. The contract continued for a second
año, until the editor in Tokyo moved to
Venice.

Her departure coincided with the end

of my four-year appointment at Princ-
ton in 1998. Perhaps as a result of this
series of losses–the job, Playboy, y el
cherished Sex Priestess title–my body
soon lurched into another phase, el
phase of losing all the estrogen I’d been
born with, and then the phase of taking
little blue pills every day that gave me
back the estrogen in another form. Todo
of these events spanned the period in
which we witnessed the collapse of the
nasdaq, where I’d put my Playboy win-
nings; the election of George Bush; Sep-
tember 11; and the warning, expedido por
the nih on July 2, 2002, that the little
blue pills, also known as hormone-re-
placement therapy, caused small but
distinct increases in a virulent strain of
breast cancer, and we all had to stop tak-
ing them.

It was one thing for a part-time sex-
writing expert to lose a cushy magazine
gig and a teaching job with a pension,
but quite another to lose the essential
hormone that regulates libido and keeps
the equipment working. A woman mi-
nus her estrogen is like a car with no oil
–and no shock absorbers. With my es-
trogen flowing, in real or synthetic form,
it had been easy to imagine the hyper-
bolic escapades that ½lled my monthly
columna. But without it coursing through
my blood, I could barely remember what
desire felt like. Or do I mean I didn’t
want to remember, didn’t want to be
reminded of what was no longer there?
Gone was the World Trade Center, gone
was my libido.

In this maelstrom of loss, I conflated
the personal, the political, and the grim
news of the day, more and more of
which I began to consume online. Soon
after the invasion of Iraq began, I be-
came aware of a slew of alternate news
sites, ballast against the media’s lust
for Shock and Awe and Annihilation
and for the neocon con job: sites like
www.mediawhoresonline.com, desde
retired, and www.buzzflash.com, still
going strong. Instead of going to sleep
with J., my partner of many years, I
found myself staying up late many
nights, reading the latest flood of news
about what had become the great dra-
ma of our time, Bush-Cheney-Rove vs.
the United States of America–and the
Rest of Humanity. In my nightly haze
of anxiety and disbelief, I occasionally
remembered a friend’s funny story. “My
wife and I had a huge ½ght,” he said. “I
left the house and went to the movies.
The theater was mobbed. I said to my-
self, ‘All these people had ½ghts with
their wives?’” Adopting his twisted log-
ic, I became convinced that the political
landscape had cast a pall on everyone’s sex
vida, on those, anyway, who were paying
atención. Wasn’t everyone awake till all
hours reading the same alarming news I
was reading–and if not, why not? I sent
frantic emails to reporters, I fretted, I
worked on political campaigns when the
time came. Sex? It had a familiar ring,
like the word ‘gramophone,’ but as a liv-
ing concept–well, in my addled, scared,
estrogen-starved, 3 soy. cerebro, it had
begun to sound passé. It had begun to
sound very September 10.

Reader, I am trying to explain how the

former Sex Priestess of the Ivy League
came to the abject place I found myself
on a recent night: googling the word
‘sex.’ After midnight. Alone in the living
habitación. Ashamed of typing in those three
little letters, as though I had no better

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Elizabeth
Benedict
en
sexo

offers at that hour. As though I were des-
perate. When in fact I was only . . . curi-
ous . . . to see what everyone else was up
to while my own libido languished.

There is more going on than I had

imagined. On my ½rst try, Google
coughs up 733,000,000 entradas. (I’ve
since learned the number varies enor-
mously, some days down to a mere
44,000,000.) The top entry is “Sex Etc.”
at www.sxetc.org, “a website by teens
for teens” that’s straightforward and
informational. The quote of the day:
“‘I give masturbation two thumbs up.’
–Ian, 13, Hancock, ny.” Reassuring,
that the gods of Google have somehow
made it easy for the most vulnerable sex
consumers to have access to so many
facts put forward by people they can
confianza.

The next entry is “Salon.com Sex In-
dex,” leading to all of Salon’s entries on
the topic, notably www.shoperotictv.
com, where I watch an advertising video
that appears on tv (not sure what chan-
nel), in which two straight-faced women
cheerfully sell a Turbo Stroker ($89.99, marked down from $99.99), a mechani-
cal vagina in a canister. It’s topped with
pink rubbery lips, into which a man can
put ‘himself’ and experience a mechan-
ical squeeze similar to a real woman
and/or Portnoy’s cored apple. (What a
hoot! I’m tempted to wake J. from his
sleep–but what if he wants to order
uno? I suppose I wouldn’t blame him.)
Next I ½nd Wikipedia’s exhaustive
and exhausting entry on ‘sexual inter-
curso,’ and then the home page for
Playboy, where I ½nd, alas, no links to
my alma mater in Tokyo. The Playboy
entry makes me feel nostalgic for the
bright, shining days when I made as
much money per hour as Bill Clinton’s
lawyers. But then it’s on to the next en-
intentar, a tilt toward the sinister: “Sex Ad-

dicts Anonymous.” The dark sides of sex
soon assert themselves on every page of
Google, in the proli½c Sex Offender Pub-
lic Registry sites. The ½rst such site be-
longs to the U.S. Department of Justice.
doj insignia appear beside the name of
our beloved attorney general, Alberto R.
González. But in order to ½nd out where
the rapists live in my neighborhood, I
must click an ‘I Agree’ box, and there’s
no telling what I’m signing up for when
I do this. Próximo: the home pages for Sex
in the City; the Museum of Sex; the Sex
Pistols; the eeoc Sex Discrimination
oficina, which I am surprised still exists;
and swop usa, the Sex Workers Out-
reach Program, announcing its upcom-
ing State of Women’s Health Confer-
ence, in Toledo, Ohio.

The next eight or nine pages are pret-
ty dreary (Frequently Asked Questions
about Sex, and lists of sex offenders in
Maine, Tennessee, Nueva York, Oklaho-
mamá, etc.) until I spot “Anal Sex Accord-
ing to the Word of God.” The url–
www.sexinchrist.com–leads me to what
must be some of the more bizarre faqs
ever written:

Anal Sex in Accordance with God’s Will

Are you saving yourself for your wedding
night? The Devil wants you to fail, that’s
why he puts stumbling blocks in your
way. But God wants you to succeed, y
that’s why he has given us an alternative
to intercourse before marriage: anal sex.
Through anal sex, you can satisfy your
body’s needs, while you avoid the risk of
unwanted pregnancy and still keep your-
self pure for marriage.

You may be shocked at ½rst by this idea.

Isn’t anal sex (sodomy) forbidden by the
Bible? Isn’t anal sex dirty? What’s the
difference between having anal sex before
marriage and having regular intercourse?

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What I
learned
about sex
sobre el
Internet

I thought the Bible said anal sex was a
sin.

This is a common misconception. Anal
sex is confusing to many Christians be-
cause of the attention paid to the Bible’s
condemnation of homosexual acts. Cómo-
alguna vez, it’s important to realize that these
often-quoted scriptures refer only to sexu-
al acts between two men. Nowhere does
the Bible forbid anal sex between a male
and female.

De hecho, many biblical passages allude to
the act of anal sex between men and wom-
en. Lamentations 2:10 describes how “the
virgins of Jerusalem have bowed their
heads to the ground,” indicating how vir-
ginal maidens should position themselves
to receive anal sex. Another suggestive
scripture tells of a woman’s pride in her
“valley” (referring to her buttocks and the
cleft between them) and entices her lover
to ejaculate against her backside: “How
boastful you are about the valleys! O back-
sliding daughter who trusts in her treas-
ures, [saying,] ‘ Who will come against
a mí?' (Jeremiah 49:4) And in the Song of
Songs, the lover urges his mate to allow
him to enter her from behind: “Draw me
after you, let us make haste.” (Song of Sol-
omon 1:4)

The site tackles, and mostly endorses,

adultery, masturbation, pornography,
even ‘½sting’; and each page is presented
with a straight face and plenty of Bibli-
cal quotes. But the most bizarre Q&Como
come from readers, who have a page of
their own. A colloquy on Christianity
and swallowing semen leads to this:

This is complete blasphemy. You must
take this down. To suggest that the Lord
Jesus Christ propositioned a woman for
a blow job is preposterous. You are sin-
ning against God by twisting the words
of His son. You need to take this down,
for your own good.

We did not mean to suggest that Jesus
was propositioning the woman at the well
or asked her to give him a blow job. De
course not! Jesus would never do that. En
hecho, he refuses to give her the “living wa-
ter” himself. When she asks him to give
her the living water (semen), Christ tells
the woman to get her husband. This is so
él (Christ) could instruct her on how to
give a blow job to her husband and receive
the living water from her husband. Thank
you for your concern, and we hope this
clari½es matters.

Shame on me, I ½nd myself engaged
and amused. In a world of unimagin-
able sexual abundance and license–
consider those 733,000,000 Google en-
tries–this bizarre site somehow man-
ages to be truly over the top. To whom
does it belong? There are no ‘Contact
Us’ or ‘Who We Are’ tabs, no links be-
yond the site. That it’s an elaborate joke
makes the most sense, a prankster try-
ing to infuriate the Bible thumpers.
Another possibility: an obsessive guy
trying hard to convince his Christian
wife that anal sex–and porn and adul-
tery and ½st fucking–are kosher. Puede-
be it’s the work of a solitary, tormented
man dreaming of a perfect world, dónde
he can be a good Christian and a guilt-
free perv, if only the right woman comes
a lo largo de.

Or maybe–contrary to the usual pub-

licity–sexinchrist.com represents one
tributary of the Christian mainstream.
In this spirit of inquiry, I google ‘sex +
Christ,’ and in 0.19 artículos de segunda clase, I’m blessed
con 23,300,000 entradas. Curiouser and
curiouser: sexinchrist.com is the top
listing.

An advertisement on the right side of
the page tempts me at once: “Christian
Porn.” The site is a pitch for his-and-her
e-books called Sexual Satisfaction for the
Christian Husband and Sexual Satisfaction

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Elizabeth
Benedict
en
sexo

for the Christian Wife by Robert Irwin and
Susan Irwin. Seems they were married
for thirteen years, happily except for the
awkwardness in the boudoir, before his
intensive study–“bookshelves . . . lined
with books, manuals and medical jour-
nals”–led to a sexual awakening for
both of them. The ‘his’ page tells readers
that by reading his book, they can learn
to experience “pleasure so overwhelm-
ing that your wife will want sex as often
as you do! . . . hours-long lovemaking ses-
siones . . . multiple (and simultaneous)
orgasms in a single evening,” and that
they will be “capable of maintaining a
single erection, literally, inde½nitely.”
The wife’s corresponding page (“Chris-
tian Wives Click Here”) promises that
“you too can experience sex that is an
intense, frequent and spiritual event . . .
including orgasms (for both of you) eso
are so overwhelming that you will be
amazed that such pleasure exists in this
world. Y, best of all . . . you will not
have to embarrass yourself (as we did
many times) by having to look for this
information in a bookstore. You won’t
have to hide any books from anyone, intentar-
ing to avoid explaining your interest in
such matters.” In the book, readers can
also learn “how to help your husband to
become your dream lover . . . . how to be-
come a ‘sexual explorer,’ while always
pleasing God.”

At the end of Robert’s and Susan’s
letters is a spiritual note: “P.S. You did
not ½nd this site by chance. With God,
there are no ‘coincidences.’ You were
meant to ½nd this site because God cares
about you, your marriage . . . and your
sexual satisfaction!” Both books togeth-
es, $49.00. God also seems to care about my Christian sex education, and only a mo- ment later I’m inspired to google the phrase ‘Christian pornography.’ Ten thousand six hundred listings pop up in 0.28 artículos de segunda clase. What gets top billing? Sexinchrist.com. At the bottom of the page is evidence of the true Christian way: www.uncontrolledthoughts.com, which promises to help us get rid of the desire for pornography and the nasty habit of masturbation. Unlike sexin- christ.com, this site includes an address (in Midway, Utah), a phone number, and a God-fearing rallying point: “Never masturbate again!!! Por extraño que parezca, you can do without it.” But on the World Wide Web, it’s near- ly impossible to do without pornogra- phy for long. It was porn, después de todo, which gave the World Wide Web its most prof- itable product early on; it was porn that was, almost a decade ago, a $10 a $14 billion-a-year business, according to a 1998 study.1 At the top of page two on my Christian porn search, I ½nd “Por- nography Blogs: Many Great Pornog- raphy Blogs to Read,” which includes “173 blog articles about Christian por- nography.” The home page leads to a flashing billboard: The world of pornography blogged ‘til it’s raw click here to see my 22 favorite nude celebrities! famous celebrities you may have never seen naked! When I open this page, among the ce- lebrities I may have never seen naked is: jenna bush The President’s Daughter missing bikini bottoms! click here to join us inside to watch all of the celebrity videos See her and Thousands More For Just a Buck! 1 Frank Rich, “Naked Capitalists,” New York Times, Puede 20, 2001. 62 Dædalus Spring 2007 l D o w n o a d e desde h t t p : / / directo . mi t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – pd / l f / / / / / 1 3 6 2 5 8 1 8 2 9 2 8 8 d a e d 2 0 0 7 1 3 6 2 5 8 pd . . . . . f por invitado 0 7 septiembre 2 0 2 3 What I learned about sex on the Internet On the one hand, I’m relieved that all of my searching has ½nally–½nally!– led me to something more risqué than the Turbo Stroker: some actual porn, at least I assume that’s what I’d see if I were willing to enter my credit card number into the system. But who knows what list of perverts or criminals I might end up on? Still, en 2 a.m., having near- ly encountered the First Child in a com- promising position, I’m emboldened to throw caution to the wind: then and there I decide to google the real thing, ‘pornography.’ I get 17,000,000 hits. And then ‘porn’–117,500,000. Both ½rst pages turn up what we might expect– except for “#1 Christian Porn Site” at www.xxxchurch.com. These repen- tant sinners have turned uncontrolled- thoughts.com into a spiffy cottage in- dustry with a sharp-looking website. The most heavily flogged item is a tee shirt ($15.00), whose message, “Chris-
tians Don’t Masturbate,” is broadcast
in bright red letters on black cloth and,
best of all, set on a gray imprint of a
large hand. The problems with mastur-
bation are that “it is a sel½sh act that
pleases no one but yourself” (clearly
the writers have put it to limited use)
y eso 76 percent of masturbators are
aided in sin by pornography. It’s unclear
whether porn is bad because it leads to
masturbation, or masturbation is bad
because it leads to porn.

Yet the graphically engaging site
includes more than just tee shirts and
bad advice. There is a section, “Just
For Pastors,” with a slew of statistics
about how susceptible pastors are to
porn, and a slick video called “Pastors
and Porn,” starring lifechurch.tv pas-
tor Craig Groeschel. He’s a surprising-
ly handsome, hunky guy–considering
the depths of his sexual hang-ups–who
tells us that images of pornography he
viewed as a child and young man have

remained “burned on the hard drive”
of his mind. He admits that every site
on his computer is monitored by “some-
alguien mas,” lest it lead him to the naughty
lugares (117,000,000 sites–a lot of temp-
tation by any reckoning). He won’t trav-
el anywhere alone. “I’ve had to put in
necessary safeguards to remain pure,"
he con½des. Is it just masturbation he
fears in that lonely hotel room–or is it
some of the other big naughties that get
so many squeaky-clean preachers into
so much trouble? (Ask observant friend
S. to view video and psych out Craig’s
interests.)

In a nearly 3 soy. epiphany, it dawns
on me that sexinchrist.com might well
be one man’s cheeky answer to Craig’s
purity campaign. Who knows? It might
even be the work of Craig Groeschel.
This is why he needs a chaperone. Este
blasphemous website is why he can’t
be trusted alone in a Comfort Inn. No
telling what other passages he might
½nd in a Gideon Bible, what other sins
could be washed away with the right
chapters and verses. Wonder who trav-
els with him so he doesn’t have to trav-
el alone?

When I return to the Google ‘porn’
listings, the right-hand column of ad-
vertisements includes a surprise. El
top ad–“Help the Children”–is an or-
ganization promoting children’s rights
en la India. The other ads are more pre-
dictable, but they have a plucky variety
I hadn’t expected: “Get Laid,” “Sexy
Russian Brides,” “See Photos of Hot
Women,” “Mobile Sex.”

Before I’m tempted to revert to my
true Internet addiction, left-wing politi-
cal websites of the www.antiwar.com
variety, I do one ½nal Google search for
plain old ordinary ‘sex,’ and ½nd a list-
ing so quaint it makes me smile: “Tree-
hugger: TreeHuggertv. In the same
week that thtv released this How To

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Elizabeth
Benedict
en
sexo

Buy A Green Sex Toy video, Greenpeace
issued a warning about the toxicity of
sex toys . . . . "

Yet another sweet one turns up, like a
daffodil blooming in April: “cnn.com–
Mouthy parrot ‘reveals sex secret.’ A
computer programmer found out his
girlfriend was having an affair when his
pet parrot kept repeating her lover’s
name, British media reported Tuesday.”
Touching. An antitechnology story:
no pastor-to-pastor Quick Time videos,
no photos of Jenna uncloaked, no bat-
tery-operated vaginas, no porn videos
you can watch on your new Treo. A par-
rot who chirps the Other Man’s name.
Hooray for unbridled, unchaperoned
Mother Nature, even when she gets you
into trouble.

Who knows how the mind works in

a state of Google stimulation? The con-
dition may soon require its own word.
Tal vez: Googlelation? Such disorders
could become a new entry in the dsm
compendium. Christian pastors are
afraid of their own penises and everyone
else’s, and perhaps I ought to be afraid
of what I’m doing: studying the fearful,
the obsessive, and the flat-out pornog-
raphers. A friend jokes: “If there are
800,000,000 websites for ‘sex,’ there are
a total of 900,000,000 websites.” Actu-
ally, ‘money’ and ‘war’ both beat ‘sex’
by a mile. Tonight ‘war’ kicks out 1.02
billion websites; ‘money’ 1.3 billion.
‘Sex’ is chump change. Perhaps ‘sex’ will
be no more than a comma in the history
books, as President Bush recently said of
the war in Iraq. Even if the porn indus-
try has doubled or tripled since the 1998
estudiar, it’s nothing compared to the hun-
dreds of billions–or is it trillions?–that
‘war’ generates.

Some seven years ago, as the Internet
took off and my mother’s brain started
to shut down, she said something quite

endearing: “Before the evening gets
away from us, could you tell me what
‘dot-com’ means?” It’s part of an ad-
dress on the Internet, I explained, saber-
ing it wouldn’t make much sense to her.
I showed her what it was all about once
or twice on my laptop, but the informa-
tion went no farther than her short-term
memory bank. Reading this piece, she
would have to ask: What does ‘Google’
significar? What does ‘www’ mean? Qué
does it mean ‘to kick out 1.2 billion web-
sites’?

But of course she would know what
‘sex’ means. Everyone knows what sex
es. Or we used to, when it was a less
complicated proposition. Well, fue
never uncomplicated, except for the
mecánica. Now the mechanical dimen-
sion offers a few more choices than were
previously available, including this one:
me sitting in my living room staring at
a screen in my lap, with X million shots
of genitals and/or sex videos available
to me with no more than a few typing
strokes on the keyboard, all of this pos-
sible while the man I share a bed with
sleeps in the other room. I’m not sure
my mother would know what this
medio. She would assume that there is
something amiss. But is there?

George Bataille didn’t have this tech-

nology or this scenario in mind when
he wrote, en 1957: “The human spirit is
prey to the most astounding impulses.
Man goes constantly in fear of himself.
His erotic urges terrify him. The saint
turns from the voluptuary in alarm; she
does not know that his unacknowledge-
able passions and her own are really
one.” Alone in the living room, I realize
I fall somewhere on the continuum be-
tween the hyperactive Internet pornog-
raphers and the terri½ed Reverend Craig
Groeschel, whose erotic urges frighten
him into a state of endless torment. I’d
be delighted to have a few more erotic

Dædalus Spring 2007

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What I
learned
about sex
sobre el
Internet

urges, but far fewer than 17,000,000.
The libidos of millions of women have
changed since the hormone-replacement
news in 2002. And in roughly the same
time period, sex and sexuality have un-
dergone alteration, también. Frank Rich, el
Sex Priest of The New York Times, or at
least the man who’s followed changes in
the adult-entertainment business over
the years with a vengeance, describes the
fenómeno:

The cliché has it that when the formerly
contraband becomes accepted, it loses
its cachet. With sex, that’s not really an
option. What does seem to be happening
is a digitalization of sex–and not only in
the sense that porn is distributed digital-
ly, whether by Internet or dvd or televi-
sion or spam. In a more profound sense,
the erotic is being ½guratively and literal-
ly dismembered as it is broken down into
its various discrete bytes, like albums that
are atomized into their individual songs
to be downloaded from the Web.2

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
exists independently of Sergeant Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band. An image of a
shiny erect penis thrusts in the center
of my computer screen, unconnected
not only to a body and a human being
but even from the pretense of narrative
that used to accompany porn. This min-
iature iteration of porn is a far cry from
more narrative-driven examples of por-
nography that were current circa 1967,
when Susan Sontag published “The Por-
nographic Imagination.” She defended
the literary value of Story of O and did
not defend the literary value of the rib-
ald novel Candy, but from this distance,
they both have the heft of Middlemarch
when lined up against the 6,790,000
offerings that appear when you google

2 Frank Rich, “Finally, Porn Does Time,” New
York Times, Julio 27, 2003.

‘hot porn.’ Is the reason I’m not aroused
–the reason I’m so turned off–because
this form of stimulation is so ‘digital-
ized,’ so far from storytelling, or because
I’m short on estrogen? Someone–mil-
lions of someones–are having a good
tiempo. Or so the unfathomable abun-
dance leads you to believe. The truth
might well be that only a few million
hardcore porn lovers–or fewer than
that–are dipping regularly into the
Bueno. De hecho, there are probably more
people trying to sell porn on the Inter-
net than there are buyers of it.

Oh, for the good old days. Back when
I was the Sex Priestess of the Ivy League,
sex was still, as far as I can remember,
an activity people wanted to do with
other people, not with their computers.
Google was the embryonic ambition of
two Stanford graduate students. And the
word ‘war’ was employed more often on
our shores as a metaphor than as a series
of real-life conflagrations that will em-
broil the U.S. military for the foreseeable
future. Tonight there are 324,000 entradas
on Google that contain the phrase ‘war
without end,’ and that, también, is an expres-
sion I’m sure my mother would have
dif½culty grasping. The clock on my
computer tells me it’s 3:00 soy. sobre el
nose, and I am suddenly a little bit lone-
ly and more than a little sad. But before
I turn out the lights and slip into the
other room, into my side of the bed, I’m
inspired to do one last search for the
night. Astonishingly, in a matter of 0.34
artículos de segunda clase, some of my melancholy lifts.
‘Women + low libido + remedies’ turns
arriba 92,400 possibilities. Who knew?
There must be something in all those
gigabytes that will do the trick. (Leave
note for J. to see when he wakes up in the
mañana: Guess what? The drought is over.)

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