The other day, my pal Steve finally loaned me a book he’d been telling me about for years. It was John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which has sort of been eclipsed by his later blockbuster, Into Thin Air. It recounts the story of a young man who decided to move to Alaska and try to survive in the wilderness by his wits alone. But as I paged through it, I found I was most interested in the pictures—which were of Steve and Suzie having sex! It turned out that he had stashed a handful of naughty Polaroids the two had taken years ago, probably before the arrival of digital cameras. (The Polaroid used to be the camera of choice for amateur pornographers—no worries about nosy workers at the film-processing counter.)
This, obviously, raised some questions. First of all, my finding these snapshots inherently violated the longstanding moral code all guys have, which is to be tasteful whenever referring to one’s own spouse, no matter how lewd the conversation. It is okay to talk about your love life, but it is not kosher to be too specific about your lover’s unique assets or skills or liabilities. In other words, it is best to be general. Polaroid photographs of you making love with your wife are highly specific. You should not willingly share them with your buddies. I phoned Steve right away and told him what I’d found, and of course, he was mortified. I promised to seal them in an envelope without giving the matter a second thought, and I did. I could tell you more about what I saw. (Some readers may remember how I’d been briefly obsessed with whether Suzie had had any, erm, elective surgery done—but you’ll also remember how it was not appropriate to ask, no matter how intimate my friendship with Steve.) Needless to say, I won’t turn a moving violation into a first-degree felony by violating “the code.”
I hasten to add, though, that Steve’s and Suzie’s misadventures with a camera were a perfectly legitimate subject for general discussion. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Steve had already boasted about it to some of our mutual buddies. That’s the kind of thing guys discuss, but again, only within a certain range of what’s considered tasteful detail. (Women, you do this, too—I have it on good authority that you get just as down-and-dirty, but that you, also, observe certain unwritten rules about what’s foul territory.) If we hadn’t talked about it before, we certainly did now. Steve wasn’t embarrassed because they’d taken the pictures, just that they’d been seen by one of his buddies. Of course, I wanted to know if there was any back story to the photos, and there was.
Here’s how it happened. Suzie had once caught Steve with a girlie magazine, and she, being a solid feminist with certain predictable politics, had gone ballistic. Steve first confessed that men are the inferior gender—mea culpa, blah blah blah—and then he gingerly suggested that men seem to need frequent release more than women do. In his view, the girlie magazine was a harmless assist to a biological imperative. If Suzie wanted to have more sex, then she would surely be asking for it, right? In Steve’s view, it was saving his good wife some hassle to be taking care of his own business, as necessary, instead of pressing his need onto her. It also seemed to him that Suzie was asking the impossible—was he supposed to be celibate just because she didn’t happen to want to have sex as much as he did?
For her part, Suzie said what bothered her most was that Steve was getting turned on by other women. Without even going into the nettlesome politics of porn, Suzie basically said that playing solitaire mentally was one thing, but playing it with someone else’s deck was going too far. So Steve made the radically brave suggestion that he’d prefer, of course, to look at dirty pictures of his wife. Suzie one-upped him—she actually agreed to it!
Perhaps the best part of the story was that, according to Steve, the Polaroids had loosened both of them up quite a bit. Suzie came to enjoy the idea that she could be stimulating to Steve even in her physical absence, and the two had since graduated to video. Obviously, they’d never want these tapes to fall into the wrong hands. But we must all learn to celebrate that there is an inviolate line between the public and the private, and that line can be played with for fun and personal growth. Your love life is your own business, so why be constrained by what others would think?
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