[...] A friend of mine, my cousin, stopped drinking alcohol, but he didn’t tell me that. We went out to a bar in Soho and he ordered a bottle of vodka. I didn’t know he was in AA at that time. He made me drink a bottle of vodka in front of him so that he could get a kind of thrill from it.

[...] I asked him why he was doing it and he said, I want to tell my sponsor at AA that I watched my cousin drink a bottle of vodka and I didn’t do it. I said, So what do you do now that you don’t drink or smoke? How do you get your kicks? To which he replied, I have my white noise. For three hours before I go to bed, I watch the most violent pornography I can find. I don’t masturbate. I don’t even feel anything. I just watch it, and I don’t think about anything. Hearing that, I thought: My God, man. Have a vodka. Which is all to say, there’s something numbing about it. It numbs relations. That’s what got me about those young women or old women that I slept with in America. I know I sound ridiculous when I say this, but I’ll say it anyway: I felt like I was not a person – I was a function. They weren’t relating to me as a person. They had their set of tricks that they want performed and then that’s it, and it just felt totally anonymous. I’ve never seen non-anonymous pornography. That’s my basic objection. Maybe there is some amazing feminist pornography somewhere.