Not long before me met, Amy went backpacking when she fell in love with a guy who had to go home to Israel and finish his compulsory conscription. He was, she declared, The One. They were planning to move to Australia and start popping out babies as soon as his service was finished.
In the meantime, Amy hung around his house with nothing much to do. And here is how I imagine the events that followed unfolded:
One morning, Amy looked up from her copy of “The Beauty Myth” and asked her boyfriend in a slightly tremulous tone: "Honey, do you like pornography?"
Without hesitation he replied, "Why, yes Honey, I LOVE pornography."
Amy had to ruminate on this one for a little while to make it okay in her vegetarian, liberal-arts-degree-educated mind. She really liked this guy, so she concluded that men are socialised to think pornography is okay, and women – at least, the kind of woman she was – are socialised to find it complete and utter disgusting depraved animalistic filth.
And it was probably a bit of a cultural thing, too. You have to respect cultural things.
So.
She bit her tongue and told herself she should just accept the guy the way he was.
But then, quite by accident, she found a box of dvds and magazines at the bottom of a cupboard in their bedroom.
Amy was on the plane home as fast as she could shriek: "You have something wrong with your SOUL, man!"
And now, three months later, she was crying into her beer and telling everyone who would listen that she was still in love with him. If it wasn't for this one flaw, he was truly Mr Perfect. And they couldn’t stay away from each other. They were on the phone every second day, and he was appalled, aghast, how could she let this come between them? She KNOWS him. It wasn't like he was off somewhere doing it with animals, for Godssake. He was merely interested in what people were "into".
As in, he was into animal porn, but only from a “sociological study perspective”.
And then she asked us, in a hopeless, hollow voice, "What would you guys do if you were me?"
I floundered – I wasn’t sure if I knew enough about human nature to say. I mean, if she settled down for a life of wedded bliss with the guy, would she inevitably find him in bed with an ALPACA?
"What you need to do," said Jake, "Is write up a list of pros and cons on the guy. If the pros outweigh the cons, you stay with him."
As in, 'Pro – Big Knob. Con – Something Wrong With Soul?”
Tess then declared that one Con can outweigh a whole page of Pros.
"Animal porn is CRUEL," she declared, her voice getting all high and squeaky.
"She still loves him," I argued, the subtext of my argument being that love justifies all crimes.
"I wouldn't be able to love HANS if he were into that stuff,” she said. (Hans being the Great Love of Her Life So Far.) "I wouldn't be able to love YOU anymore if you were into that stuff."
I tried not to look shifty, and said, "Well… I-I'm not…"
Amy just sat there, looking baffled and upset.
Jake tried to cheer her up by saying: "I stumbled on some Animal Porn on the Internet once. It's not necessarily cruel, you know, some of these people are writing love poetry to their furry friends – and they’re clearly consenting parties in the-."
"AAARGH!" Tess cried. "You've been looking at ANIMAL PORN!!!!!"
"No, wait, you don't understand," he said. "I was CLEANING the animal porn, in the nude, and…"
And then of course everyone started jumping in with their favourite animal porn-related anecdotes and any efforts to sooth Amy were abandoned. The best one was about a guy who was wheeled past a friend of ours in a Lismore hospital looking a bit like this:
Apparently the guy had a dead gummy shark in the shallows at the beach in Ballina, and quickly discovered that something in a shark’s “anatomy” goes “CLAMP” when you stick a certain part of your “anatomy” into it.
The worst part for him was obviously the lifelong infamy – It’s like that old joke about the goat… and it’s clearly the main reason Amy shouldn’t bother getting back with her boyfriend.
