Please bear with me and I'll tell you about Captain Kirk in a minute.
First, I will share that I have seen dozens of guys who have had the hardest time just saying their right name on a phone call. I have heard the hesitating, quiet voice on the other end of the line finally admit that "yes, my name - the one the real people in my everyday life know me by - is Pinchas". It is a terrible strain for some - and I hear myself in their trembling. That same hesitancy - fear mixed with shame. It's mine, too. It's just that in my case it is behind me - in theirs, it is still in front of them.
What is really going on here?
I have seen frum guys finally drag themselves into live meetings and start off the first few meetings using a 'fakish' name - their English name that no one who knows their frum persona really uses. Only to later change their names in the meetings to the Hebrew name that their wife and friends use - cuz they began to see the perverts in the room are like they are, that they need what the guys in the room have been given just as desperately as they do. No difference in that respect. That is when the walls go down and the real juicy work can finally begin. Until then, they are still unattached to what goes on in the meeting, for on some level it is not really Pinchas who is sitting there, but 'Robert' (the bad guy who is subject to porn worship).
How to bring them together?
Which brings me to Captain Kirk.
There was once an episode of Star Trek in which there was a time travel shtick, and the Kirk of the present went 10 years into the past. Now, there was another Kirk then, too, right?
That was a big problem. The scientists told him that normally two of the same people cannot coexist. It just does not happen. But as this was an exception (it was a TV show and they were getting paid $15,000 per episode) as long as the old Kirk did not actually meet the present Kirk, all would be fine. However, if they actually met each other, the entire Time-Space Continuum would be 'ripped asunder' (chas veSholom). Under no circumstances could they be allowed to meet!
I do not remember what actually happened to Mr. Shatner, but everything turned out OK, for there were another few seasons of the show (and also we are all still here, no?). But my point is just this:
How does a frum guy get all drawn into his very private porn, admitting by his actions its awesome, sweet power for him, and privately have sex with himself (masturbate) with such intensity and imaginative pleasure and power? OK, so he has shame, self-loathing, and sadness afterward. But how does he do both tefillin, teaching Torah, being mekareiv and really davening for others hard and really crying for the churban, and really working on his middos... and masturbating himself with a fantasy that could onlymean he (secretly) also worships the beauty and power of those naked shiksas and the act of sex? How does such a contradiction survive in him?
How does it survive in us?
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