I Stopped Feeding the Algorithm.

When I removed explicit pornography from this space, something curious happened: the constant clicking on my phone vanished. It was almost comical in its speed. Not because men disappeared, but because a certain use of men did. The carnal appeal was gone.

I miss that daily presence — the idea of having a man in my life — and these channels sometimes fill a space that mirrors our awkwardness and lack of social skills when we meet someone who might actually be interested in us. I write from experience. Let me tell you about a therapist I once spoke to about love, who said he wanted, in his words, passion. Passion is a personal and elastic term. To me, it includes self-respect and communication — qualities that expand over time. Through storytelling, whether carnal, sentimental, or even wishful thinking, desire can be expressed in a way that includes the world around it, not just the body at its center.

That therapist called me “sweetheart” and “dear.” We exchanged numbers and promised to meet the following summer. I don’t know whether mentioning my transplant and open-heart surgery cooled his interest, but it ignited something in me — a hunger for connection and emotion I hadn’t felt in years. That is how I ended up here, behind a computer screen.

So I understood something clearly: what I had mistaken for engagement was, in fact, consumption. The writing hadn’t become less queer, less erotic, or less honest — it had simply stopped functioning as a delivery system for immediate discharge. Please, don’t mistake me: I enjoyed the attention, the intimacy with readers. I gave us a rush.

This isn’t a condemnation of desire. Our desire is human, necessary, and beautiful. The difference between desire that seeks encounter and desire that seeks release of much of what we call “connection” online is a hormonal shortcut that bypasses curiosity, listening, and risk. Bodies appear, friction happens, and everyone leaves unchanged. When sex is stripped of context — age, fear, power, tenderness, contradiction — it becomes efficient, and that relief is the enemy of intimacy. It is “wham, bang, thank you, man.”

Writing about men as people — not merely as surfaces to enter or be entered — demands more from both writer and reader. It slows things down. It asks us to sit with longing, shame, softness, cruelty, and restraint. It asks whether we are capable of seeing another man without immediately using him to regulate our own chemistry. That kind of attention is quieter. Therefore, fewer clicks. Fewer comments. But what remains has the potential to be real.

Perhaps this disappearance says less about the absence of sex and more about how rarely we are taught to meet one another without the promise of release. There is more to eros than friction. There is more to men than performance. And there is more to connection than what can be finished quickly and forgotten.

I choose alignment over applause.

Yours,

Adriano Selvi.