Women deformed by the pornographic sexual templateperceive other women as masturbatory objects.

Sex has, through being photographed, become a thing to beobserved, to be performed, rather than experienced so deeplythat it is unnecessary even to open one’s eyes.

My generation was, in effect, the product of a social experiment. If we did not understand marital intimacy, it was because we had not seen it modelled. We lurched from relationship to relationship, dazzled by the newness of meaninglessness, relentless in our search for something even the most perceptive of us could not identify.

For years, I had used these fractured men to justify my cynicism and workaholism, and the grief, insomnia and casual anorexia were no longer of any interest to me.