Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel, Damned, is a tour of Hell narrated by a recently-deceased thirteen-year-old girl. Spoiler alert! It’s Dante meets Judy Blume, with running palahniukian gags about The Breakfast Club, celebrity serial adopters and the nature of evil. Go read it already.
Chapter XIV opens with this revelation about internet porn.
As far as I can tell, you have a choice between two types of careers in Hell. Your first option is you can work for one of those Web sites which everyone assumes are run in Russia or Burma, where naked men and women stare unflinchingly into the webcams, a dazed look in their glassy eyes, while they lick their fingers and insert greasy plastic model airplanes or plantain bananas halfway into their shaved woo-woos or hoo-hoos. Either that, or they fake-smile while sipping their own urine out of champagne flutes. You see, Hell is responsible for about 85 percent of the Internet’s total smut content. The demons just tack up some old, soiled bed sheet to serve as a backdrop, they throw a foam-rubber mattress on the ground, and you’re expected to flop around, putting junk inside yourself and responding to the real-time Web chat of alive perverts, worldwide.
That explains a lot.
