Manifest Man

On a cool June evening in Berkeley, I watched a man named Victor try to shoot a beam of light out of his penis. Minutes earlier, he had raised his hand because he found the volunteer onstage before him attractive. And now here he was, facing her in front of a crowd of perhaps 60 people, having been instructed to do precisely this by a woman named Aella, a pseudonymous camgirl and self-described sex researcher. She had promised the men in the room that the exercise, if undertaken in earnest, might actually result in hookups, real ones. Now she told her first subject to imagine himself gathering all of the energy in his body into his pelvis and then sending that energy outward as a beam of light, straight through his trousers and into the room.