One night last year I walked into my dorm room to go to bed, interrupting my roommate while he was having sex with his girlfriend. The room was pitch-black, so they would have noticed me entering the room thanks to the light spilling in from the hall. However, I reasoned, if I simply flopped on my bed and went to sleep, they would never know I’d seen them. So that’s what I did. Now, my question: what should innocent roommates like me do if they happen to walk in?
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So what do you do if you walk in on your roommate having sex? You walk right back out, head down to the lounge, wait 20 minutes, and then head back up to your room. In that time your roommate should either have finished up or bailed out, and when you return you should be able to go to bed. If your roommate is a clod–if he or she hasn’t wrapped things up–stand in the door and say, “Look, you guys, I have to get to bed. I’ll wait outside the door for five more minutes.” That will either kill the mood entirely or inspire them to bring things to a conclusion.
No doubt all of this will be covered in the upcoming sequel to American Pie, which I saw the trailer for today. Unfortunately the trailer didn’t include any footage of Chris Klein sitting on Seann William Scott’s face. Until the film is released, however, I shall live in hope.
So why did the homo PDA stress you out? Because public displays of affection, be they homo, hetero, or bestial, stress everyone out–except the inconsiderate horndogs responsible for them. You write that you would’ve been aroused by two chicks making out in the elevator. That’s speculative! In your imagination it’s a turn-on because the women making out in your elevator are the kind of over-made-up sluts who appear in “lesbian” porn produced for straight men. In reality, the life lesbians in your elevator would probably be a couple of frumpy dykes with big shoes and facial hair. I guarantee you would have been just as disgusted witnessing that distressing scene. (This is not intended to disparage dykes, but merely to point out that in reality most people are unattractive.)
“Your reader’s solitary erotic excursion, conducted in the privacy of his own home, is not so different from conjuring up the image of a stranger he may have passed on the street,” said Randy Cohen, author of the Ethicist column in the New York Times Magazine. “Because the woman in the photo is not harmed by what he is doing–indeed, she will never know–he is not behaving unethically. There are no thought crimes. He may give his imagination free rein.”
