Love in prison

This thread is absolutely riveting. It's a question and answer session by an ex-con who just got out. (Impossible to tell if it's true, but it feels about right to me, whatever that's worth.) The whole thing is a long must-read, but this view of love has to be the the most horrible and heartbreaking thing I've read in a long time:

QUESTION: This is a question for later or tomorrow or something because you've got enough to contend with for now but what did you miss most about sex while inside? Just the sex itself or the intimacy? I know there are cliches on both sides about that so I was wondering what your thoughts were.

ANSWER: This is a really interesting question. So much so I went and had a smoke and a think about it.

You know how a lot of people that hang around these boards will say how they're desensitised to sexuality? How years of the most twisted porn the Internet's underbelly can offer has made them numb? I guess I was like that going in. If you had have asked me, the day before I went inside, what my ultimate sexual fantasy was I'd have said something stupid like 'Emma Waton, a rubber tube, two mexican fighting fish, a chainsaw and a bucket of grease'.

Now, I shit you not, my answer would more likely be 'a beautiful woman that loves me'.

Every convict has a jack bank. Scraps of magazines, smuggled porn, that kind of thing. I used to keep mine under the inner sole of my sneaker. If you took a survey of what convicts keep in their jack bank, you'd be shocked to learn that mostly, it's women's faces. The single most sought after item in the common area was the TV guide. Because you'd get full page ads for movies and beautiful women. Fucking up the TV guide was a hangable offence, since our TV was pre recorded and edited to cut out the news, and anything not G rated, you needed the TV guide to keep track of what you were missing out on. As an aside, one of the most surreal moments inside was the Superbowl, all these convicts crowded around this caged screen watching a repeat of Blue's Clues - muttering about how the Superbowl was really on. It was like even though they couldn't watch it, they wanted to be a part of a national, communal activity. Two days later they replayed the Superbowl, with the ads and half time show taken out - no one watched it. How fucking weird is that?

So yeah, I got side tracked while talking about the TV Guide. The keeper of the TV Guide would be whoever scored it out of a mail bag. Usually the guy on mail duty. And after a few weeks, you'd ask, as nicely as possible, preferebly with a gift of candy, if you could take a look, and maybe later, in return for smokes - you'd cut something out. I cut out a half page ad for The Other Boleyn Girl. Actually, i'll find it an post it here.

Now you think about the shit you can get with just three clicks from here. You can hit up one of the porn boards and be jerking away in minutes. You'd probably even not jerk off to soft core porn, because just a few clicks away, you could see some whore being cranked by 9 guys and getting glazed with cum.

I guess in the real world, where life is mundane and boring - you need those fantasies of dark sexual shit to keep you going. But inside, there is just dark shit everywhere. Violence, death, fear. You don't want it in your head. So no matter what you were like before, inside, you try and escape in your head to places that are good and just... decent I guess.

You go from having elaborate rape fantasies to having sweet, candle lit intimacy fantasies. Sounds gay, but it's true for most guys inside I think.

It changes the way you think about women. When I went inside, I was full of bitterness over the mother of my kid leaving, I felt like my sister had betrayed me, so I left her - and I thought of some of the girl's I'd used in my life and felt like they were pathetic sluts.

But inside, I would have given anything to know just one of them loved me - and when I say love, I don't mean like, I'd want to marry them, or that kind of passionate, movie love. Just that they'd consent to being intimate with me.

I don't think I mentioned it before, but I spent a few months inside under the impression that I'd been infected with hepatitis - thankfully I wasn't, but that really compounded this need for intimacy, because I felt like, even once I got out, a woman would never touch me again.

If you read anything this week, read that. Gripping.