Drugs, Side-Effects, and ‘Fourth Walls’

I’m going to have to admit some embarrassing things about myself here. Please pay no attention to the open wounds and loss of precious bodily fluids – The Author has it under control. (He thinks……)

My long-term marriage finally failed about 9 months ago. (Heh. Interesting that this post gets birthed at just that interval.) I moved out, and started doing what had to be done to sever the financial and material ties, and to try to salvage the rest of my own life. More on this elsewhere.

And continuing, even amplifying, the pathological behavior I had been doing before, I trolled Teh Intarwebz looking for …. porn, certainly, but – connection? Friendship?

I mean, I have some very dear friends with whom I interact 90%+ online. (An even higher percentage since the pandemic, ofc) Hell, back in the day, I wooed my then-soon-to-be- wife online. (Emails, you young whippersnappers! None of the new-fangled web crap! shakes cane angrily) It’s not unreasonable to think of making a new friend online, merely implausible.

By the usual snares and pitfalls, I ended up at aSite. It’s a very well-known site for “camgirls”.

(NOTE: If you don’t grok the mechanics of this, go look it up for yourself. For the protection of the other person involved, Imma Gonna obscure all of the identifying details. If you figure out any of them, please keep it to yourself. Thank you.)


And I found one specific young woman, and started spending quite a lot of time and coin with her there. I mean hours a day, every day, and budget-crimping amounts of money.

I’m not exactly certain why her of all the “models” – tbh, she’s not really the body or hair type that pushes my buttons the hardest. One thing I can say is that she has as gorgeous a whole-face smile as I have seen on any person in a very long time. And she offers what is called in the trade “the girlfriend experience” (GFE). And she does it very, very well. (See smile, above, among many other things.)

But – she has her limits and boundaries. And she publishes them, right on there on her personal profile page on aSite – “NO escort / … / NO marriage / NO sex / NO boyfriend looking for”. She makes it abundantly clear that her only level of interaction with “members” is as a professional virtual sex worker. (She doesn’t say that last part explicitly out loud, but, gimme a break – that’s all aSite is really about, once you strip away all the coy bafflegab and pretense.)

Still, I got hooked – quickly and hard. I mean that at all the metaphoric levels, including a fish helplessly dangling on the end of a wire stuck into his mouth (for me, I suspect it was attached to a lower and shall we say temporarily more prominent part of my anatomy), and a junkie helplessly groveling for his next fix.

This went on for many months. At aSite, even in her public ‘room’, she would be carrying on multiple one-on-one private conversations with various members, myself included. There, in between my giving as appreciative “catcalls” as I could for her explicit display on cam, we would chat about the world and our lives. Just like you would with your long-distance girlfriend. Your exquisitely sexy, horny, explicit, ‘cum machine’ girlfriend.

Sometimes the personal details got very personal – well beyond discussing daily activities and ‘food porn’. For whatever reason, this woman broke the ‘fourth wall’ enough with me to exchange our RL names and addresses. I had asked for hers so I could send her a small physical gift (a paperback scifi novel, of all things! Just what a nerd would send to his girlfriend!)

And armed with this increasing amount of information, talk by talk, I thought I was getting to know the person behind the persona.

I did things as obsessive as looking up via Google Maps Street View a picture of her apartment building (in fairness I sent her the coordinates and picture of the place I’m living now), and I started to research RL things to do on a “date” in her far foreign home town. (For simplicity from here on out, I’m going to say her persona’s name is “Jane” and her RL name is “Eve” – neither one is at all close to the actual values, so I think this is safe for her.)

As an economic hack (cutting out aSite as a financial middleman) and a way to give more personal attention to the “member”,  Jane did one-on-one shows in Skype, accepting her tips through PayPal. This we did, multiple times. I was even obsessed enough that I recorded them (with her permission, ofc, and giving her a copy of them each time – at least the компромат is mutual, but I suspect we’re both shameless or hardened enough to not care).

At the time I thought it was so I had some …. ahem, ‘backup erotica’ …. of a very personalized variety. But now I think it was as much for the conversations we had. Because the format of these rather sad and in some ways tawdry ‘home sex movies’ became – we would do the XXX-rated stuff, and then we would just talk for some time, like a Zoom call with your buddy across the country. Or your long-distance girlfriend that you couldn’t come to visit F2F for a while….

It finally reached its climax almost two week ago. (Pun fully intended – actually the meta-climax of the relationship, not the mere physical ones, which had been reached in very full measure on both sides, heheheheheh). Somehow the topic on our private conversation on aSite got around again to meeting people IRL (something we had talked about before a fair amount), and she went on about how she could chat people up easily enough, but when it came to guys, she ‘had issues’ and didn’t know how to ….

And a restraint in the back of my mind broke, and a tiny gibbering monkey started jumping up and down SCREAMING “Look at me! Look at me!”. But that lead me to a couple other realizations. The fever-dream of my addiction broke for just a minute, and I realized I had to get the hell out to save myself.

A very few days later I bought another private Skype show, and at the end of it, I told her that I was going to have to stay away for a while. “Because,” as I told her, “when I hear you talking” (about her problems getting a boyfriend), “I gotta wonder if it’s Jane saying that, or Eve saying that. And if it’s Jane, and it’s just part of the professional act, I understand, but it cuts me too close to the bone. But if it’s Eve, all I can say is ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ Because you know I would be there in a heartbeat!”

And she went on to confess that this is a locus where her ‘real’ self had leaked into her persona, that she really has been ‘unlucky in love’, and I replied, nearly in tears, “I know – but I’m offering to help change that for you. And it’s not that I think you don’t believe me – I think you do believe me. I think you just can’t make that step.”

And she replied glumly, “Yeah, probably so.” And I’m damned certain it was Eve talking to me right then.

We exchanged a few more words, blew kisses at each other through the cams, said goodnight, and ended the call. I have not seen her since. I’m not sure if I ever can see her again. And I’ve realized a few things more since then.

 

The drug I nearly got hooked on is real and dangerous. Just because it’s a mix of endorphins rather than something I have to explicitly ingest does not make it any less of a drug. Maybe medicine is a better term, because it does have a beneficial clinical effect, as well as a host of side effects. Just like any other drug.

Our brains are wired to desire being flooded with oxytocin and dopamine, released as a natural effect of being in a mutual intimate relationship with someone. Add to that the glorious wirehead jolt of an orgasm (hopefully shared), and THESE are the tools Nature has kludged up to keep humans pair-bonded and rewarded for the long, difficult, but existentially important work of raising up the next generation. It’s just Evolution In Action.

I’m not certain of the place to lay the blame (beyond basic shameless capitalistic ‘exploitation’), but Rule 34 has been invoked on this also. Hence aSite, and the dozens or hundreds of others like it. And “models” like my friend who are specializing in GFE. All to profit from the needs and fantasies of horny, lonely guys like me.

But the act of Jane being a ‘pusher’ for this heady cocktail of emotional potions is dangerous to Eve, too. She must feign intimacy at least, and may even offer a circumscribed version of it. Necessarily, therefore, some of this same drug must also stimulate her central nervous system for her to play the role as well as she does. And I fear that she has been damaged by her career choices – 11 years of this, and she has had to …. build a resistance …. to the intended effects and side-effects of the repeated doses.

Eve only broke one of the ‘fourth walls’ for me. And not the most important one. What I fear and regret for her is that she has shrunk her emotional armor down to a tiny hardened box, lidded it with the toughest possible transparent material (diamond is not nearly good enough), and into that locked away her innermost heart.

And now all the world – including Eve herself – can only look in on it. Look in on, but never, ever, reach……..

 

 

Postscript – after I wrote this, I went back and re-read the transcript of our last video. Something she said in it reminded me of nearly the same thing she has said in one of our last private convos over at aSite. (In fact, something that she had said several times over there, in a few different ways.) Which was –
   Sometimes some of the members wanted things from her that she couldn’t provide. Either in the fantasy of the place, or in real life. (raises hand sheepishly)
   At one level this is just a frank acknowledgment of her personal rules (as well as any the site imposes) and the extravagance of the members’ fantasies.
   But now that I ponder it, that statement may well also be as close as she can come to admitting what I concluded in my last two paragraphs above. (Cue Meat Loaf and the last three lines of the bridge of his tune “Two Outta Three Ain’t Bad”)……….

Second Postscript – I let Eve review this before I published it. And she pointed out yet another error in my thinking, even after all this. In all her discussions with me about her past and current relationships, including the one I sorta quoted above, she never said she was dissatisfied with her current situation. She wasn’t ‘hinting’. She has had platonic RL meetings with guys she’s met through aSite, but just because they didn’t want anything more.

So that was another selective deafness or blindness on my part, that I didn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge that, that I thought/hoped/fantasized she might want more, and that there was some way I could ‘white knight’ my way into her heart. I hope that I have seriously misjudged all the rest of my silly little metaphor, and that my narrative shouldn’t come to the bleak conclusion it did….

And she was concerned that I was blaming her (even indirectly) for spending all the resources I did. I am notJe ne regrette RIEN! But it’s a measure of my folly that it was only after that fever-dream broke that I bothered to count up just what I had into it, and began to contemplate what I could have done otherwise….

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