I’m a little ashamed to tell you this story, but I’m pretty sure you won’t think any worse of me than Internet marketers apparently already do. A few months ago, I got an e-mail with the startling subject line DONKEY DICK!!! and, well, I opened it. Color me naive — can you even be naive at 36? — but I assumed it was a reference to some guy’s package, à la "hung like a horse." And, homosexual that I am, I dared to look.

Imagine my surprise to discover that — good Lord — this was no metaphoric offering; the e-mail contained a password giving me FREE FREE FREE access to a site where TEEN SLUTS GET BANGED BY DONKEYS!!! I did not follow the link, thank you very much, as I have less interest in bestiality than in just about anything this side of nude shots of Donald Rumsfeld.

But that e-mail was, disturbingly, only the first of a full barnyard assortment. Horses, cows, sheep, pigs — apparently there are teen sluts for all creatures great and small. I knew better than to hit reply and type the word "unsubscribe" in the subject line of these missives; if the return addresses even work, replying to them often lands your e-mail address on yet another crappy list. So I finally set my junk-mail filter to the e-mail equivalent of Code Red; this means that while these mooing, honking, or braying come-ons still appear, they now go directly to a junk folder that self-deletes weekly. (Sadly, so do some innocent e-mails from people I actually know.)

But all these messages bring up the question: why me? I don’t belong to any, er, animal-affection groups, nor have I visited any sites that offer such interspecies exotica. My rabbit, Poo, is the only pet I’ve ever had; beyond the fact that the little fur ball is not a sexual partner of mine, the poor thing doesn’t even have a bunny mate with whom to get randy, as we enforce strict pet celibacy in our house. So just how did I end up on the list of those with a zoo-erotic bent?

I decided to look at my junk-mail folder a little more closely — and I didn’t like what I found. The other most-recurrent topics were CHEAP VIAGRA, SCHOOLGIRL PUSSY, and INCREASE YOUR DICK NOW. So who the hell am I — a lecherous retired headmaster with a small penis and not enough libido to keep up with all the teens and sheep?

This was baffling. I never wanted to have sex with schoolgirls, even when I was a schoolboy — a time when I dreamed of hunky farmhands, never their livestock. I’ve never once considered penile implants — the very thought makes me queasy. And, thanks to the power of advertising, I still associate Viagra with Bob Dole’s fantasies of Britney Spears (there’s that queasiness again). I am not the man my spammers think I am.

The most plausible explanation is that I must have carelessly offered my e-mail address somewhere I shouldn’t have. I joined a gay personals site while separated from my partner, but I don’t remember women or mules on the menu there. (I suppose, however, the Viagra and penis enlargement e-mails could be a direct response to the implied emasculation that comes with reducing one’s entire romantic self to an online questionnaire.) Otherwise, I use the e-mail address primarily to purchase tickets to alternative-rock shows and Broadway plays. So shouldn’t I be inundated with offerings to see Beck or Bernadette Peters instead of farm sex?

Of course, I do write articles and columns that often display my e-mail address. Perhaps an irate reader has decided to show his or her displeasure by setting me up for spamming, the kind of long-distance aggression that can only be described as all-American these days. Or maybe a bored intern for some Internet marketing sweatshop is paid to do nothing but search publications for e-mail addresses and add them to the list of unsuspecting victims. It may be that soon I’ll have no choice but to put the address itself out to pasture — which would be a victory for the irate reader, an unsurprising draw for the marketer, and a loss for me regardless.

I could also just suck up the e-crap as a fact of life and try to convince myself that the spam has no meaning at all. This would be easy to do, except that I recently had a conversation about this very topic with a stylish yet frugal friend, who also complained about her spam. "Don’t you just hate all the e-mails?" she asked. "Crate & Barrel, Macy’s — the seemingly endless sales!" I don’t know what she had to complain about: her e-mail profile screams woman who can be chic on a shoestring — in other words, a perfect reflection of who she is.

And so I find myself still contemplating the meaning of these messages, which run counter to both my gayness and my aversion to donkey dick (with or without performance aids). Worse, a new trend has emerged: porn-themed e-mails whose subject lines are clearly ungrammatical, full of typos and missing words, yielding comical commands such as PLEAZUR HER LIKE WITH A WOOD!

So what does this latest pattern mean: that I’m seen now not just as a perv, but as a semi-literate perv? Or that my supposed predilections have now become such global knowledge that even those who don’t speak English can’t wait to spam me? I would fairly squeal in protest, but I wouldn’t want to give anyone the wrong idea.

David Valdes Greenwood can be reached at areyoukidding@likeidtellyou.com