My ex-girlfriend sexually identified with porn. Pictures of naked women aroused her. I have less of a response. I like nude photography, if the airbrush artist leaves the hair brown and the curves intact, but I've only ever purchased one porn mag. It doesn't do the trick.

Some pornography makes me laugh, especially the kind with gaping mouths and atrocious prose:

Debbie was a FRESHman in college, and while all the other girls partied she stayed in the library. She was STUDying her anatomy textbook and little did she realize that Jorge, with his book cart, would soon be stocking her shelves with page after page of CLITerature.

This brief text accompanies photos of Candy, impaled on a penis the size of an organ pipe. She leans on the bed with a yogic posture, her heels touching her backbone, fingernails digging into Jorge's lower back. A bored photographer, tilting the lighting umbrella, yells out, "show more ecstasy!" Her mouth opens wider, in a goblin-grimace of feigned orgasm. A Photoshop expert will remove her tattoo, because she's portraying a good girl, and then use the "clone" and "smudge" tools to fix a tilted tooth. A printer will shake his head at how he makes his living, sending the plates to press. Pakistani newsstand vendors will stock the magazine well behind the counter, out of the thieving hands of horny adolescents.

The romance of this eludes me. Sex is better when it's written down, without pictures. Anais Nin proved that fantasy could travel deep into the reader, uncovering quiddities and secrets. It was about unrestricted pleasure, free of social rules. It releases you, for a few safe hourse, from a pleasant, simple, slightly boring monogamous life.

My last relationship finished with Rhonda, previously a chunky freshman dressed in unmatched clothes, metamorphosed into a woman who worried greatly about dresses and shoes and how to best display her breasts. I couldn't make myself interested in this latter-day person, even though I tried. Scared to lose her to someone else's moving fingers, I wanted to stop her journey into becoming an attractive, open woman. I'm out of shape, my head doesn't always work, and until recently, I wore clothes held together with paper clips. Her progress into the world of healthy, sexy women left me behind; she went ahead without me.

After she came into this erotic power, I bored her. We began to fill our time with fussing, meaningless arguments. She'd come out from under her crush on me, and I was no longer the sonorous, handsome, brilliant man who made up stories on college radio. I now made $28,000, lived in Brooklyn, skulked, and felt worn and grumpy. My talents and humor filled up with cynicism. Our geographical distance emphasized the emotional distance. When she visited, sex was an organic, straightforward exercise at avoiding arguments.

She had the body for being beautiful, but not the face, and her thin lips and dented nose flustered her. I thought she was lovely, smooth and strong, but I was resolved not to care how she looked, and often mentioned that she looked very nice and was very sexy, but did not vary the tone or nature of my compliments. To me, it was like painting a picture--when she looked beautiful, she had painted a lovely landscape. It looked like her, but it wasn't her. I didn't care about her looks as much as what stories she could tell me, or that she could play piano, and I could not make myself care about her red coat, no matter what I tried. I did try.

The other day my friend Eli and I were speaking to a big woman, wearing a truly hot outfit: velvet shirt, skirt, boots, lacy bra beneath. Eli analyzed thus: "there's something disturbing about how erotic she is; it's very conflicting." He spoke about if for a while, and I responded, "Eli, she's freakin' HOT. She's fat, and older, sure, but she's red-streak-crazy sexy." I don't think the former precludes the latter.

What threw him off was the classic, masculine, sex-boolean operation. He asked: "does she belong to the set of women I would sleep with or does she belong to the set of women I would not sleep with?" He forgot about the overlapping area, the "and" space, that contains attractive people with whom you appreciate as erotic, interesting beings, but with whom you will not become involved.

Many people exist in this limbo, in the "and." I exist there; women get curious about my big foolish, self, and start calling and wondering. They like my sense of humor, my eyes, the fact that I'm an acceptable lover. But they usually end up "forgiving" me for my faults. Nothing grates like unasked-for forgiveness, and their pity becomes an icy wedge.

It is an accomplishment for a man to gain the affection of an attractive woman. A man looks at a picture in Playboy and says, "If I had her, I would be on top of the world." He's thinking in terms of possession and power, not in terms of love or affection. But so is everyone else. It's not the right way, but it's the way it is.

A beautiful body is a symbol, a series of well-assembled curves and angles. "Why is she beautiful?" It's a question like: "Why is gold valuable?" We desire because we are asked to desire; because we must want something. People of both genders believe in big breasts, tiny waists, and hips. It's faith without question. In a generation or two, the rules will have changed, but it comes slow enough that no one will notice, saying things like "real beauty is unchanging" as things beautiful evaporate and reconstitute around us.