I feel as though Burroughs wants to desensitize his audience by using a constant stream of vulgar descriptions and very surprising sexual encounters; almost as though he wants us to not be distracted by the sexual aspects of the so-called story. The characters are being taught to "maintain a state of total alertness during sexual excitement" (75); and maybe he's trying to the same to us. He wants the sex and the weirdness of the provocativeness to not surprise us, he wants us to accept it.

Maybe...he wants us to be turned on by it...it seems sick, but the ideas in this book are pretty sick.

So, it's been hard to wrap my mind around this book, yet I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be able to. I surprised constantly by the behavior and lifestyles of the characters. Especially when the man uses frogs' eggs as lubricant and then Ali cums into a jar where the eggs turned into little frogs. I can't help but be disgusted by the idea of this actually happening. I fall into the pattern where I don't want to read anymore because it's so choppy and hard to understand, but I get lost in these chaotic missions or sections where the absurdity of the situations is unbelievable. I constantly compare it to our society and our lifestyles, and how what seems perfectly open and normal to these characters would be spat upon by our society. Our society constantly bears down the pressure that sex is sacred and supposed to be between a married couple. Yet, MOST people don't abide by those "rules" or don't admit to breaking them. Being promiscuous is considered a bad thing for a woman, but for a man it's not seen as a big issue. There are no women in the story, which is interesting to me and I wonder why that is. Perhaps if the characters were women our reaction as the audience would be different towards the character. Would we have an emotional connection with the woman and feel sorry for her because she was being taken advantage of? And we don't feel this way because the characters are male and we assume that they wouldn't let it happen if they didn't want to let it happen? The sex is so casual and there's no emotional connection between the people involved and its such a masculine way of looking at sex, if there were women in the story the dynamic would change drastically.