Evan is watching porn while his wife is at the gynaecologist. He knows there is something inherently wrong or ironic. Or hilarious. Or just generally bad. He knows there is something off about this action for sure.

He kinda feels bad anyway for watching porn even when his wife is still in the house. He often waits till she has gone, though, before firing up The Empornium. That self-hosted database of filth he’s been downloading and watching for the past ten or twenty years. It is a treasure trove that he has built. And he feels that he needs it for survival.

He also feels vaguely bad for just even having this; he knows porn is exploitative. He considers himself a feminist. He wants to be a good ally. He refuses to be that guy who coerces his wife, who pesters her for her body when she clearly isn’t interested. He respects her autonomy too much for that. So instead, he retreats here. To the girls of porn who always say yes to everything. To the dark web of his own hard drive. He tells himself that by pirating it—by self-hosting it on his own metal—he isn’t feeding the beast. He’s stealing from the pimps to save his marriage. It’s his little win in a world of losing.

He finds the whole thing disgusting and shameful. And yet there he is. He has it. It is kind of like a life jacket.

He is part of a Reddit sub called r/DeadBedrooms. In it, people bemoan how it has been so long since their partner or their spouse has given them the attention that they want. It isn’t just erotic attention, but it is nearly always based on that. And from that lack of erotic attention stems a huge assault of other negative feelings. Some of which have curdled from love into hate.

He doesn’t want that. Evan doesn’t want that with his wife. But she doesn’t want him as much as he wants her, and that has always been the case since they tied the knot over twenty years ago. When they first got together, of course, there was no mismatch and they did it all the time. Evan even remembers times when he had been too tired or he turned her down. He would love to get that pleasure again. He wishes he could go back in time and scream at that younger version of himself. Tell him to just say yes.

Ironically, Just Say Yes is the title of the book he bought her ten years later. It sits on the shelf right now, spine unbroken, gathering dust next to The Sex-Starved Marriage, mocking him.

He wonders why she doesn’t want to do it so much. It causes him actual anguish when he gets rejected. Maybe it’s just because they had a kid and a busy lifestyle that made her libido drop off a cliff. She treats a fuck with him the same way she treats household chores. Or maybe it’s just because they both got old. Who fucking knows?

But the bottom line is this: His libido is mismatched to hers, and yet she’s the only person he’s legally allowed to even see naked. Anything else would be a transgression that breaks the vows of their marriage. And he loves her. He doesn’t wanna get a divorce. Although that has been on the cards now and then, here and there. But they have settled into a routine now where he tries not to feel bad.

He never asks her if she wants to do it. He occasionally instigates things and if he is lucky, he gets lucky. If she turns him down, he just turns away. And the next chance he gets, he visits Madame Palm and her five lovely daughters.

And Madame Palm has an array of very erotic digital media all running on The Empornium. Carefully curated. In a way it is beautiful, although of course it isn’t beautiful at all. It is hideous, obscene by definition. And as he watches these videos of these young harlots being exploited and these idiotic jockmen fucking in large groups, doing all kinds of acts that he would never even know about had he not had a porn habit since he was a teenager. Things he could never ever probably do in real life even if he wanted to because it would just be too fucking weird.

As he watches all this stuff on his screen for the hundredth or thousandth time, he realises. Again. That he hates himself. For doing this. And he hates his wife for making him hate himself. And the depression runs cold and deep into the marrow of his bone. And he doesn’t know what to do.

So he starts dictating a story. In the third person. All about some guy called Evan. But really, it is about himself.

Justification: The Digital Onanist

This is a Stephen Prime original. It’s raw, it’s a bit nasty, and it’s about the silent negotiations that happen in long-term relationships. It explores the intersection of modern male guilt, tech addiction, and marital stasis. Evan isn’t a bad guy; he’s just stuck in a loop.

I find myself writing about wanking a lot. Not sure why… it’s probably because, I, like you, am a wanker. We all are. Everybody wanks and I find it hilarious how shameful that is. The church even said it makes you go to hell. If you can’t wank in heaven, then sign me up (or down) for Hell.

But let’s look at the history of that shame. It starts, as most Western guilt does, with Onan. In Genesis, God smites the poor bastard not strictly for the act of self-pleasure, but for coitus interruptus—for spilling his seed on the ground rather than doing his duty. From that moment on, the act of “spilling seed” was codified as a waste of resources, a theft from the tribe.

Fast forward a few millennia, and the Catholic Church perfected the guilt mechanism. The Confessional booth was the original “clear browser history” button. You whispered your sins in the dark, got your penance, and reset the clock.

But Evan, the protagonist of Just Say Yes, lives in a different era. He lives in the age of the Digital Archive.

For my generation, the delivery system of shame has evolved. We went from finding water-logged porno mags in hedges (the analog era of scarcity) to the terrifying lottery of LimeWire and Kazaa (where a file named Jennifer_Lopez_Nude.exe was just as likely to brick your PC as get you off).

Then came the Torrents. This is where Evan lives. The rise of private trackers—like the real-world site “The Empornium”—changed the psychology of the wanker. It turned us from consumers into archivists. We stopped just looking for a release; we started hoarding. We bought hard drives. We set up Docker containers. We curated terabytes of “Girls of Porn” (a nod you’ll notice in the story to the Mr. Bungle song; see also my poetry video, Porn Clones, which illegitimately utilizes that track as BGM).

Why do we do this? Why does Evan build a fortress of smut in his basement? It’s because the internet promised us we could bypass the shame. It promised anonymity. But the irony—and the point of this story—is that the technology didn’t remove the shame; it just gave us better storage solutions for it.

Evan considers himself a feminist. He respects his wife’s “no.” So he turns to the digital “yes.” He uses his server capabilities to pirate an alternate reality where he isn’t rejected. Is it pathetic? Absolutely. Is it better than the alternative? Maybe. In the end, this story isn’t really about sex. It’s about the lengths a man will go to strictly to avoid having an awkward conversation with the woman he loves.

So, there you go. Just Say Yes. A tragedy about a man, his mouse, and his hard… drive.