Anyone growing up in New Jersey is bound to be told about the legend of the “Jersey Devil” at some point in their life. The creature has for centuries dwelled deep within the scorched terrain of the Pine Barrens. It is strangely amorphous, taking on physical traits of any number of animals. Though I read somewhere that it started its life as a radically deformed human baby, who had legs where its arms should have been and arms where its legs should have been. A kind of cubist mutant.
Whatever its form, no one has definitively seen the Jersey Devil; though it’s not for lack of trying. Scores of would-be ghost hunters, paranormal investigators, and cryptozoologists flood into the forbidden region of the Deep South-in-miniature to be the first to confirm or clarify—never to deny, mind you—the precise dimensions of our state’s beloved monster.
I will save everyone some time by stating outright that the Jersey Devil is not real. Likely it was manufactured by the Pinies for the purpose of repelling outsiders from entering their cherished forest dwelling. Clearly they should not have bothered, but I understand the impulse.
Just as there are “fox” and “hedgehog” thinkers, per Isaiah Berlin, so are there also fox and hedgehog liars. A fox liar can tell a multitude of lies, all of which intersect and are mutually dependent. Yet their contexts and their recipients are so various that to misplace one means to drag down all the others. A hedgehog liar tells one enormous lie that explains away or covers over many true things. The Jersey Devil is such a lie; and in truth the human world is overrun with Jersey Devils: phantasmal concepts collectively manifested and spread out until their reality is unimpeachable. Though big singular lies tend to outlast a mosaic of small lies, even they have ceilings. Or so some people committed to truth without compromise should hope.
The Jersey Devil and its hedgehog friend are especially helpful points of reference when thinking about sex. As with the Jersey Devil, you are bound to hear of its existence at an appointed stage of your life. You will be told of its superhuman, otherworldly abilities and of the seemingly limitless forms it can take. You will be told of the great lengths taken to go in search of it and of the near-successful sightings in the process. They are always half-glanced: an echo in the dark, a flutter in the corner of the eye, or a pungent aroma somewhere between death and afterlife that emanates from no exact source. Some will be bolder and claim evidence of a direct encounter. Of course it is never from the claimant, but from a claimant’s trusted source; if not his roommate then his roommate’s cousin, who went out to 7-Eleven for some milk one night but was deferred into an obscure plane by sex, and it was quite something, he was never the same again. On and on the stories go, often in greater detail but never much closer to any sense of truth.
I suppose it is a credit to our species that we’ve been able to maintain the sex lie for as long as we have. It seems as though we’ve been telling it to ourselves for a millennium at least. We get so worked up about the crimes of deceivers—bad and inept deceivers, that is—that we often fail to acknowledge the species-wide thrill in being deceived. There are ideal circumstances where giving your whole heart to a boldfaced lie like you’re going steady with it. It must validate you rather than victimize you; it must be able to spread widely; and it must be so ridiculous, so implausible, that to even question it to yourself brings scrutiny upon your own intelligence and not the obvious falsehood. A good lie is like a demonic compact. By now it is beyond dispute that sex not merely a good lie, but the biggest and best lie ever.
But thrill as we might, we can only maintain even so great a lie for all time. Soon enough its internal logic will begin to corrode and its structure will collapse. A time will come where your energy can not match the need for maintenance or the will to withstand its most vexing challenge.
Sex must always be kept at a distance. The closer you get to sex, the less enchanting it is. The diversion is temporary and the satisfaction soon dissipates until it is totally forgotten. Anyone so convinced to have experienced “sex” is likely to be much worse off than those who have convinced themselves they have not. The mind must forever be on sex. Humans must be bedeviled and fixated; they must seek it fruitlessly yet still proselytize it wildly.
This is indeed a perplexing and distressing situation. It leaves two questions in need of answering: How is it (the deception, not fucking) done? And does any good citizen expose it and thereby stop it?
Sex, like most committed deceptions, takes effort to uncover. It lends to considerable speculation. Obviously sex is orchestrated by an intricate network of dedicated actors. There is no one source but several acting in unison for the greater good of soothing the troubled masses. It’s a mind-bending conspiracy of staggering proportions. Everyone is in on it: the schools, the advertisers, the Instagram influencers. That pornography you’re watching? Just one of several thousand “moon landings” being daily—even hourly—produced to make a corresponding Potemkin village replica of your self-confidence.
Not even so-called “parents” are exempt from this charade. And sure, you might ask “What about babies? They don’t come from the fucking stork, do they?” Of course not, idiot. They come from China! Chinese factories, that is. All it takes is a blacklight to the bottom of an infant’s foot or the back of its neck and you’ll easily see the barcode and serial number. If that doesn’t convince you, you need only unscrew its head, much as you would open a wine bottle, to reveal the intricate synthetics from within. Press under its jaw and you hit the master switch allowing you to disassemble and reassemble its interchangeable extremities at your whim. (Perhaps the Jersey Devil does exist after all. Curiouser and curiouser!)
At one time, manufacturing sex was probably an honorable endeavor, and its present nefariousness may not have been the initial intention. But nefarious is as nefarious does, and it must be nipped in the bud so that humanity might see its truth and be made free once more. But how this is done is harder to answer. Experience has taught me this.
I’m nothing if not a crusader at heart. If there’s a cause in which I firmly believe or a wrong that needs to be righted, I don’t shirk from advocating or confronting it with all my strength and intellect. I thought that unveiling the sex lie would be no different. I decided to go grassroots: to redress it from the bottom-up, finding individual actors and rooting them out. Couples were high on my list of suspects, their happiness clearly being in direct proportion to their complicity. I singled out one couple and tailed them for a few weeks. Then I knocked on their door posing as a census taker … whose car broke down … and whose phone was dead. They exuding all manner of middle-class kindness let me in to call AAA. While we wait, they make me coffee. We get to talking and I commence ensnaring them.
I start with the clinical census jargon, then segue into more casual talk as they break out the wine. Me? I have a girlfriend, yes. A steady, serious very long-term relationship—engaged to be engaged and all that. I compliment their compatibility and ask them what’s their “secret”? They chuckle discretely, then I’m basically in. We talk leisure activities, intimacy, vulnerability, favorite positions, safe words, where this is all going, what are their real names, etc. Things get a bit heated. “That’s none of your business, sir!” or “That’s disgusting, who does that?” They suggest that I leave but I’m not backing down. We’re just getting started. The man gets rough and shoves me. Then I hear a cry coming from the other room. Their baby is awake. An opportunity I’d not planned on! “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” I declare as I make a beeline into its room. But lo, I am tackled, left with two black eyes, a busted lip, and an uncorked, eyeball-searingly loud “newborn.”
History is full of alleged “mad men”: searchers for truth who get a little too close and who must endure a lifetime and then some of censure, ridicule, and suppression before ultimate vindication. They have many more names for me, alas: home-invader, assaulter, attempted kidnapper and murderer. Attempted! Even when throwing the book at you they must remind you of your failure. Fine, I plead guilty to your “charges” if it means that much to you. But my true crimes are lack of patience and lack of finesse. I was wrong in my crusading approach. Combatting the sex lie requires a far more subversive attitude than my talents can manage. My hope is that as I write these words that the subversives—sexual dissidents everywhere!—may already be at work, dismantling sex piece by piece until it is just another faulty, implausible untruth.
Once overcome, in however much time it takes, the post-sex society may memorialize its likeness in all its tragic malformation: another writhing abomination of misplaced appendages and mismatched animal parts.