"In the beginning there was...?"

Dr. Andrea Urlan thought it wise to start each group therapy session with a discreet, self-diagnostic test of how well she knew the men and women in the group. Her question was designed to give her a valid idea quickly.

"Chaos," said Gena, a sensual, sleepy-eyed brunette in her early thirties wearing bright red lipstick. The Bawdy Red lipstick attracted more notice than the yellow see-through blouse that put her breasts on full display beneath the sheer, middle-class fabric. Showing her breasts in public was not a problem for Gena or for Andrea whose sheer green blouse made her breasts as accessible to the eye as her face and hands. Gena's and Andrea's breasts were the proper size and shape to conform to most community standards of decency. Conversely, the days when a woman could wear Bawdy Red lipstick without being seen as a particular brand of slut, were rapidly nearing an end.

Sitting next to Gena in the comfortably spaced circle of cushioned chairs, a plump young woman with a pretty face, named Judy, in an opaque blue frock, looked at her with open admiration. The disheveled, unshaven, young man next to Judy, dubbed "Silent Ray" behind his back, for his refusal to speak, snorted contemptuously. Of the two fiftyish men flanking their elegant, attractive, fortyish psychologist, Bud, the big-bellied one in the green T-shirt with thinning blond hair and a protruding lower lip, cut his eye toward Judy. Arnold, distinctive only by the pink, bottom-of-the-line Softglow suit and tie he was wearing, with its distinctive, not-so-soft glow, glanced disapprovingly at Raymond.

"Well?" said Andrea, giving herself a secret pat on the back for having anticipated each of her patient’s responses perfectly. "In the beginning there was... Chaos." Why do you think Gena said that?"

"Because she’s fucked-up," said Raymond, catching everyone, including Andrea, off-guard.

Gena, the first to recover, smiled cruelly and said, "So, the little jerk-off can speak." Quiet filled the room as though all the sound had been sucked out by a giant acoustic sponge.

Though Gena intended the "jerk-off" crack to be a bullet directed at the mid-section of one man, its affects were more like a bomb exploding in the middle of a crowd. It had been years since Gena felt the pain of causing pain to someone else. But as much as her remark had injured Judy and embarrassed Raymond and perhaps Bud, she could see that its effect on them was nothing compared to what it did to Arnold.

The man in the cheap Softglow suit looked as though he had been caught in the act by his mother with a dirty picture in one hand and his rigid, unmentionable "thing" in the other. His face broke out in a profuse sweat, his body quaked and his chin trembled. He shifted his gaze to the ground and wrung his hands.

It was time for Andrea to step in.

"Isn’t it interesting," she said, "that it took six meetings for one of us to get around to mentioning the one thing we all have in common?"

Raymond and Gena stole tentative looks at each other. Gena smiled apologetically. Raymond, reluctantly, smiled in kind. Judy and Bud snickered. Arnold scowled.

"You know," said Gena, "Silent Ray was right about me. I am screwed up."

"We all are," said Bud, "That’s why we’re here."

Raymond shook his head, slipping back into the hostile mode everyone was used to, "Not me, Jake."

Andrea rolled her head down and her eyes up to his. "Oh?"

"I was ordered here as a condition of my release from jail, remember? I don’t belong here. Sure, we’re all a bunch of jerk-offs, but so what? I don’t have a problem with that."

"The law says you do," offered Bud.

Raymond locked his dark brown eyes on Bud’s dark blue ones, "The law says I have a problem with what I watch when I’m doin’ it—or when I’m not doin’ it. But that’s only Section One of the same obscenity law that says people with dark brown eyes can’t eat at a decent public restaurant. He pointed at Bud’s thinning hair, "You either, Jake." He gave a quarter turn of his head in Judy’s direction without looking at her, and pointed his thumb, "The same goes for this hippo."

Gena glared at him, "Hey, Jake! For five weeks you do nothing but sit there twisting up your face and grunting when somebody tries to contribute something to the group. Now you can’t stop talking. And you can’t be civil about that."

"That’s right, you phony, arrogant bitch."

Judy was about to say something but Arnold stepped in ahead of her. "Please!" he implored, like a man begging for his life with a knife at his throat. That’s all it took to stop the budding altercation in its infancy.

Andrea was not pleased by that turn of events. If anyone was to benefit from these sessions, he or she would have to be honest about their feelings and, for the first time, that was happening.

"Judy," she said, "how did you feel about the name Raymond called you?"

The flustered girl looked first at Arnold, then at Raymond, neither of whom could face her. "I...At first I was mad...No, first I was hurt. Then I got mad. Now...I...I don’t think he meant to hurt me."

"Oh," said Gena incredulously, "What do you think he was trying to do, warm you up for a hot date?"

"I think he was scared."

Though her statement didn’t answer the question, Raymond’s chastened expression showed that it was on the mark.

"Scared of what, Judy?" asked Andrea.

"Us...Raymond doesn’t want us to like him. That way he doesn’t have to worry about what we think of him."

Another direct hit. "Christ!" he mumbled.

When Arnold tried to rebuke him for his profane use of The Lord’s name and the words he thought were profane in themselves, everyone except Andrea and Judy turned against him. Andrea wanted to, almost as much as she wanted to reach out to him. Bringing him into this group had been a mistake. She was sure of that now. She was also beginning to question the wisdom of having him as a patient at all. He needed more help than the others, a different kind of help, a different kind of doctor, perhaps, than a Ph.D.

"Okay, everybody. We were talking about fear of judgment."

"No," said Raymond, "We were talking about the law that says I have to be here when I say I don’t."

Gena ran her fingers through her silky brown hair, batted the long-lashed lids of her sleepy blue eyes and sighed. "Then you went off on a tangent about public dress codes you wanted to rebel against, for some silly reason, and started calling everybody names."

"Silly? So, the law makes sense? A law that says; one," he held up one finger, "I offend the public decency in my own bedroom by watching something that would offend people I wouldn’t want in my house? Two," He held up another finger. " I have to wear colored contact lenses, Bud has to wear a wig and Judy has to cover her beautiful body in a gunnysack to eat at the same restaurants you do? What kind of public dress code is that?"

All eyes widened at his reference to Judy’s body as "beautiful" when the most any of them had seen of it was an unfashionably large form beneath the most fashionable garment Michigan’s public decency statutes would allow. Judy herself was clearly nonplused, reflexively starting to cross her hands over her overly abundant breasts before catching herself and folded them on her lap.

Gena moved in on Raymond for the kill, "How do you expect anybody to listen to you when you don’t say a word all this time, then you rant and rave about nothing. You insult everybody and you can’t even be consistent about that. First you say Judy is ugly—"

"Wrong. First I said you were an arrogant bitch."

Bud burst out laughing and Andrea thought she would burst at the seams trying not to as Gena fumed, Arnold scowled, Judy held her breath and Raymond continued, "That hasn’t changed. Then I called Judy a name I shouldn’t have..." His last words were said with bowed head and downcast eyes. Bud and Gena, the farthest away from him could barely hear him say, "because I was afraid. I never said she was ugly."

Andrea let the silence do the talking, allowing the awkwardness of the moment to be itself without judgment. When she felt the time was right, she said, "In the beginning there was Chaos."

Gena looked up sharply, "You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you!"

"Yup."

"Me too," said Raymond. You’re not the only one who took Greek Mythology in college but you’re the only one who would have used it to impress our mutual love interest." He dared a look at Judy, who was smiling and blushing furiously.

"Raymond!" Gena protested.

"I know," he said, "There’s nobody here but us heterosexuals. I was just being nasty."

"What did you get busted for," asked Bud, liking the new Raymond immensely.

Andrea shook her head, "We don’t ask those questions, here."

"No, no," said Raymond. "I’ve already exposed myself, so to speak. I don’t mind. Besides, I don’t have to get any more specific than I already have about what raises my flag and how I salute it. I downloaded an X Channel ELF program to my VRV—you know, the poor man’s Virtual Reality in a visor instead of a booth."

A white-faced Arnold, gripped the arms of his chair as though he were on a rocket sled about to blast off down a track toward a brick wall. "The police can’t—There must be more to it than that."

"No. There isn’t."

"Except that you got caught," said Gena in a surprisingly sympathetic tone.

"But how?" asked Arnold.

Bud couldn’t believe that a man living so far into 21^st century America could be that ill-informed about modern electronic surveillance. "You ever hear of a time scan or a—"

"I don’t mean technologically. I mean where do they get the legal authorization to invade someone’s privacy like that."

Bud looked askance. "From the Supreme Court...The Bork Doctrine? Where have you been for the last 40 years? There is no Constitutionally protected right of privacy. I thought everybody knew that. As long as pornography is illegal, the state can nail you for it. Even if you could afford a privacy license there’s no guarantee against losing it if you were accidentally surveilled in possession. The odds of that are astronomical, but..."

"But how... How..."

"Ah," said Gena. "You’re wondering how they can peep on you in your own bedroom or wherever you buzz your button—or raise your flag, or whatever you want to call it—and throw you in jail if they see something that offends them. You want to know how they can get us for doing what we’re doing when they have to do it to us to know we were doing it, right?"

Bud and Raymond exchanged clowning expressions of confusion, to which Gena replied with a defiantly wrinkled nose.

"I guess so," said Arnold. "I mean, I know pornography is illegal. It’s evil..." He lifted his hands quickly, palms forward, in a gesture to abort a protest against a sermon he didn’t intend to deliver. "I’m not going to push my moral values on you, okay. I just wanted to say that porn goes against nature; the natural attraction of men and women in a wholesome relationship in which children can grow up to be healthy, happy adults."

Bud self-consciously drew in his lower lip and tightened his gut, his eyes involuntarily darting between the statuesque Gena and the petite Andrea, women he found especially attractive. Then, his fists tightened and his gut relaxed when he realized what he was doing and why he was doing it...A natural attraction of men and women, he thought. Right.

The statement that wasn’t supposed to become a sermon, became one in record time. Andrea could see it coming, one idea prodding another into ever narrowing channels of thought until there was no more intellectual room to maneuver. Better to let him get it out of his system, she thought, feeling as much a hostage to his fragile emotional health as a care-giving spouse to a tyrannical invalid.

Perusing the irritated and the resigned faces of the others, all of whom had shared with her their most intimate sexual fears and longings, whether they knew it or not, she also felt like a fraud. A thousand dollars an hour could be a strong subconscious motive to keep a therapy group like hers coming back for more, indefinitely. How much could she help them anyway by breaking them of their auto-erotic viewing habits when there was no clinical need to—when, in fact, it was a cure the patient’s didn’t want?

It was a cure for which there was no disease, except in the eyes of the American Party and the "private" prisons run by Party faithfuls in most states of the Union. In one of those private institutions, psychology professionals could write their own checks for volunteering a few hours of their time a week. According to rumor, they had an unlimited research budget to "cure" the sexual deviates in their care. Nobody asked where the money came from. Like everything else about those places, it was private business. Andrea didn't want to know any more about it. She had enough to worry about with her own private business. She had enough to worry about with the private business of her group.

Bud and Gena didn’t fool her for a minute. They were using her professional services as a legal dodge to avoid the pain and expense of what had happened to Raymond, who was there only because the 36^th District Court of the State of Michigan had ordered it. Judy was there to socialize, to get out of the house, enjoy stimulating conversation, meet new, exciting people, like Bud and Gena and Raymond.

Oh, they may have been a bit obsessive in their choice of entertainment. But they were old enough to make their own decisions about what to see, to say, to do in private and who to share it with. They may have felt lonely at times, but no more than anyone else with high sex drives who craved intimate companionship from time to time and had to do without. Gena, Judy and Raymond had such a small segment of the population to choose from to satisfy their unusual sexual tastes, that the odds of finding them at random were almost nil. What real emotional problems Bud had centered around other people’s curiosity about his sex life, their expectations and demands. Now that the whole group was dealing with that, it wouldn’t be long until all of them...well, most of them, wouldn’t need any "expert" help.

Andrea saw no help for Arnold outside of long-term institutional care and a careful balance of psycho-active drugs. On the other hand, a divorce from his harpy wife and daughter, his hell-fire church and the officious State of Michigan, would probably do the trick.

Andrea was really worried about Arnold....

"Pornography" he was saying, "perverts the natural sex instinct and it’s terribly addictive, especially if someone gets hooked on it in his youth, the way I did. That’s why it’s against the law to peddle it. By God, it should be against the law, for all the harm it does! But we’re not the criminals. We’re the victims."

"We’re the victims, all right," said Gena, "We’re the victims of that kind of thinking. Hooked in your youth, my butt. The only reason you didn’t throw in that old canard about women being degraded and abused by pornography is because everybody here knows better. Frankly, I’m sick of all the whip-wielding domanatrixes and groveling male slaves who get to do the really interesting stuff. It’s like a formula for biscuits, or something, that keeps getting handed down from generation to generation. If your tastes run to the ‘unusual’ that’s usually what you get on the X Channel—male slaves and male transvestites. I love men, not wimps or submissive women in men’s bodies."

"Amen to that," said Judy daring a clumsy attempt at a flirtatious smile aimed at Raymond, who accepted it with gratitude, grace and a roaring erection. Now there is a woman a man could share his porn collection with, he thought. She was so pretty. She understood him so well. And she had such enormous breasts!

"If you love men so much," challenged Arnold, "Why aren’t you living with one instead of being a slave to the X Channel."

"Because there are too many men like you. You want to be taken care of and told what to do by a strong woman so you don’t have to do any thinking or take any responsibility for your own desires. You won’t come out and say what you want but you’ll call a woman a slut or a whore if she does. And once you’ve given her a label like that you think it’s all right to do anything you want to her—beat her, rape her, kill her—anything! Men dominated the porn industry like they dominated everything else, but where they forced women into any sexual practice they didn’t want, they were guilty of sexual assault. Pornography was only an excuse to do it just like banning it is only an excuse to keep us from enjoying it the way men have for centuries. Banning porn is another way of controlling women without..."

Gena groped for words that would explain away the factual and logical inconsistencies she was afraid she might have stepped into. They didn’t come. Fortunately, Arnold didn’t notice.

"I’m not making excuses," he shouted, "I admit I have a terrible problem and I’m trying to free myself of it! You’re the one who’s making the excuses!"

It was true. She was as hooked on vicarious sex as he was, though she hadn’t gotten hooked in her youth, and she was making excuses for not giving it up. It was only the increased frequency with which X Channel downloaders were going to jail and being exposed to public ridicule that was forcing her to deal with it.

"Do you think," said Andrea, that you both might be right?"

"No, Dr. Urlan," said Arnold, "I don’t."

Andrea sighed. "Arnold, have you ever stopped to consider what your problems with sex might be other than pornography?"

Arnold sat stiffly, looking puzzled, "What else could it be?"

"Maybe your sex drive is too much for your wife to satisfy," said Judy. "It would only make sense for you to seek a safe sexual outlet somewhere else."

"Yeah," said Bud, "If your wife’s sex drive was as high as yours and you both got happy on the same stuff, you wouldn’t have a problem..."

Arnold blushed deeply.

"Jeez, man," said Raymond, "A high sex drive is nothing to be ashamed of. Especially for a guy your age. If you’re only getting it from your wife once a month or some shit like that..."

"Leave my wife out of this! She’s perfectly normal!"

"Maybe that’s the problem," said Gena, "It would be for me."

"Your problem," snapped Arnold, "is, you’re a sex pervert!"

Raymond winked at Gena, "That’s the one thing she’s got going for her."

Raymond’s wisecrack brought a smile to everyone’s lips, except Arnold’s. "There’s nothing funny about that. You’re a pervert, too. So am I. The difference is I know I’m sick and I want to be cured. You don’t."

Andrea stepped in once more. "What would it mean for you to be cured?’

"How should I know? You’re the doctor."

"Okay. Let’s put it this way: What symptoms of the illness you think you have, would go away if you were cured?

"I’d be normal, of course!"

"Jesus," muttered Raymond, "he is sick."

Judy gave him a gentle poke in the ribs with her elbow.

Hearing Arnold talk about what was normal, meaning, "natural" to healthy human adults, she wished she could tell him how she had played matchmaker to Raymond and Judy. Raymond was not selected for her group by accident and it was no accident that he and Judy hit it off like past-life lovers. It was only natural that they would, once they met.

Even Bud wasn’t as hopeless as he thought he was. But whether or not there were gorgeous women out there somewhere just for him, he was a fairly successful and reasonably happy man. Like Gena, he had learned to do without the intimate company of the opposite sex with few ill-effects except for those forced upon him by the desires and expectations of others.

Arnold had to understand, as the others did, that conformity to average modes of behavior was not the same as being "normal." He had his own physiological norms, psychological drives and sociological realities to reconcile. Before he could learn to do without pornography, he had to learn how to be satisfied with the sex life he would be left with if he did. Andrea knew that was impossible if she or another mental health professional could not counsel his whole family. Arnold had unequivocally ruled that out.

"Arnold," said Andrea, "If convincing you to change who you are is what you consider a cure, I can cure you.  I wouldn’t recommend it, though."

"But doctor..."

"Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow, during our private session?"

Arnold nodded. "Yes, Dr. Urlan. I’d prefer that."

"Meanwhile I want all of you, to give this some thought: Human behavior always moves in the direction of greatest anticipated satisfaction or least anticipated distress, whichever best applies to a perceived set of options. If you want to give up a habit, you have to learn to live without something of value. That means owning up to what you value most, learning to appreciate what your real options are, and making an honest, rational choice. But don’t think you have to do without something you want because someone else may not approve. You have a right to be yourself and to be happy about it as long as your sense of well-being doesn’t come at the price of someone else’s distress."