But It Feels So Real to Me

Juan Ecchi’s novel ‘Dryback’ investigates the ways porn has eroded men’s capacity for real connection.

By Sam FranziniMarch 21, 2026

• Fiction

• Gender & Sexuality

DOPAMINE HITS ARE abundant these days: for better or worse, we live at a stage of history when quick satisfaction can be easily achieved. Post a photo of yourself and sit on your notifications tab, waiting for likes. You do not have to walk anywhere; you can Uber or scooter. Text a friend and get a response within seconds. Access a wealth of sexually explicit content, the likes of which our brains are surely not used to comprehending.

“Pulling out your phone and watching a hardcore sex scene is now as simple and straightforward as checking the weather or sending an e-mail,” writes Brady Brickner-Wood for The New Yorker. X’s Grok AI was recently undressing underage women and putting them in bikinis at the request of users, who also did the same with Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk. Bespoke porn is omnipresent.

For the depraved and unabashedly perverted, Juan Ecchi’s excellent debut novel Dryback picks up where Tony Tulathimutte’s 2024 story collection Rejection and Daniel Kolitz’s recent gooning essay for Harper’s left off. Javi, its pushing-40 narrator, is a portrait of male worthlessness, a wine seller who is plagued with crude and candid thoughts of sex. He’ll funnel co-workers’ faces into the deepfake app Simulcum, “scroll infinite ass,” and unbox the gifts that fans send his influencer roommate—including a snow globe with her in the center, surrounded by real jizz after a good shake.

Although infinite opportunities exist to create artificial scenes, Javi still feels nostalgia for the cumbersome, amateur porn of his youth. “The new breed of online sex workers didn’t satisfy,” Javi thinks,

because they overlooked what was so alluring about porn and femininity and had become genderless salespeople. […]

My youth wasn’t even that long ago, yet I never could have imagined living in a time where every mother, daughter, sister, and wife was implying hole online for a foreign conglomerate.

How can anyone turn out to have a healthy view of women after this?

Javi knows the difference between the proximity of familiarity and the outsourcing of desire—“No porno of a Swedish teen sucking off her step-grandfather in the woods could compete with a slutty vacation pic of a mutual I met for five minutes at a Christmas party”—but in the end, he doesn’t seem to care. When a flirtatious single mom arrives in the wine shop, asking him to come over and check out some of her expired wines, he misreads the scenario and promises to send someone else. The porn has eroded his capacity for actual connection.

That Javi sees women so one-dimensionally and pornographically is a product of, well, the porn he streams into his mind at every waking moment. His treatment of women as sex vessels is not a rogue case of chauvinism but a sign of where traditional masculinity is heading, where sexual assaulters, racists, and body-destroying looksmaxxers can get crunk to Ye’s “Heil Hitler.” “Your body, my choice,” one notorious neo-fascist twentysomething tweeted the night of Donald Trump’s reelection. Is this even worth fixing? Is it possible? Will these men all just dwindle on their own time, through prison sentences and steroid-induced heart attacks? Will they be shamed into oblivion after a woke Pete Buttigieg presidency?

Despite the violence and harm this sort of life could lead to, Javi rests in a sort of pathetic masculinity. He jerks off, orders food, and wanders aimlessly; all his objectifying of women, really, happens with them out of the room. He doesn’t harm so much as mentally degrade them—which, to be clear, is not great. But maybe it’s better to get his rocks off to an AI camgirl who fulfills his every wish, lest he abuse, insult, or traumatize a real woman. His egalitarian penis doesn’t discriminate; pleasure’s pleasure. For that brief moment, does it matter where it comes from?

Yet there is a way out for Javi. He enters a relationship with Charlotte, the woman whose flirtation he failed to register, at just the right time: “Before Char, I would’ve settled for a disembodied pussy on a leash and called it a life.” After moving in, he settles into a comfortable rhythm with the yoga-clad MILF and her daughter Kelly; he makes beats during the day and orders takeout for everyone when they get home.

Despite Javi achieving what every incel yearns for, XXX hardcore still lingers in his mind at every turn. When having sex with Char, the phrase “I’m in the porn now” loops in his mind. She urges Javi to make a Simulcum of her, pregnant, getting fucked by him. He AirDrops it to the flat-screen and she gets on all fours. “It looks so real,” she says. “I see why you guys are so obsessed.”

Interestingly enough, the cracks in their relationship come not from Javi’s depravity—he has actually been behaving himself, accepting Char’s love and rejecting the pull of gooning—but from Kelly, a progressive teen who storms out one night after their takeout sushi strikes her as “gentrifying.” Her problems run deeper—she dons blackface and AAVE like a Gen-Z Rachel Dolezal, becoming “K’ellée” and growing emboldened by her recently discovered, fictitious Black identity. Javi isn’t irritated so much as intrigued. Teens, he decides, had “grown up hearing that being white and cis meant they were upholding their ancestors’ atrocities. Who could blame them for adopting niche, oppressed identities to fend off the constant judgment?” This was done better by Lexi Freiman in her 2018 novel Inappropriation, but still, the violence of K’ellée becoming the first “black transracial killed in a gang-related incident” hits a nerve in a way that most contemporary fiction wouldn’t dare to attempt.

Ecchi is a talented historian of this age’s perverted tendencies while remaining an astute prose writer. He puts out clean, precise sentences while playing around and cracking jokes that have the plucky cadences of tweets: “Marrying a white girl used to mean something if you were Mexican, but their DEI dating habits over the past decade had diluted the luster,” Javi laments. “When I put my hands on Char, I wanted it to look like a race play porno, not a banking ad created by a they/them ad exec.” Getting into the weeds is Dryback’s biggest undertaking, and it results in the book’s nauseating conclusion. The novel is like an uncomfortable but not abusive sexual move that colors the night. It’s a playful choking that lasts one second longer than you’d like it to—that one second where the fantasy breaks and you think, Wait, is this real?