Porn: a discovery
Sex.
Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about sex.
I was raised in a fairly sheltered house where my parents never gave their children ‘the talk’ - they decided that lesson was for the school health class. For as long as I can remember sex has always been this thing, this drug-like thing, that everyone around me was hooked on and oh so badly needed a fix of.
I knew early on that there was no stork that dropped the baby at your front door or that when Mommy and Daddy love each other a doctor gives them a baby or whatever other ridiculous run-around parents feed to their children once they start to ask questions. I learned about sex through school, for the most part, so for a while, some of the facts were a little hazy or misleading or even left out completely.
Thank you, American public-school curriculum.
I first started hearing about people my age being involved with sex and sexual activities in mid-to-late middle school, so somewhere between twelve and thirteen years old. You could not have walked down the halls of my middle school’s seventh-grade wing without hearing the cracking little voices of preteen boys discussing all of the ‘action’ they got over the weekend, winter, spring or summer break.
Looking back now, it is more than obvious those kids were full of shit but, when you are there in the moment, listening to these guys go on about their ‘exploits’ you just cannot help but fall under the pressure and go along with it, as if you believe them. That and the fact you are far too young and naïve to know what is actually going on.
The much more likely scenario of what actually happened was they discovered porn for the first time and were just trying to pass off the video's plots as their own real-life experiences.
Porn.
Now that is a different story.
I first learned about porn through my older sister and on accident, surprisingly enough. No, it is not what you are thinking — thank goodness. I did not walk in on her, or find something on the computer, or anything like that. Here’s the story.
One day she and I were watching a movie in our basement, I went upstairs to the kitchen to make some popcorn and when I came back down my sister sat up and said ‘hey, do you have the popporn?’. This was an occurrence of the not so uncommon slip of the tongue that every human has experienced at least once in their life.
She started laughing at her slip up and I stood there incredibly confused as to what was so funny, so of course, I asked ‘what does porn mean and why are you laughing?’, she refused to answer my question. This made me think it was something she would not want our parents to know that she said. My young stupid self thought this must mean it was some kind of cuss word or something. So, my response of course was ‘tell me what it is, or I’ll go ask Mom and Dad’, not knowing at the time that that is not something to discuss with your parents while you are a child.
I was about twelve or just a little younger.
She laughed harder and told me to go do it as if it were a dare. So, what were my options? I did not have many of them, so I did the first thing I could think of and turned around to go ask them about porn but, before I could make it to the first step of the stairs, she stopped me and explained.
I was grossed out by what I heard - granted I was fairly young, and my sister is four years older than myself which means she had all this ‘wild’ information about the world that I could not even imagine of. Not until I entered middle school and high school and was exposed to all this information from my peers.
Regardless after she had explained the gruesome details, but thankfully not too in-depth details, of adults fornicating on camera. Started my deeper understanding of the details of sex and not just the basics; man and woman, naked, and touching, all I could think to myself was ‘why would anyone want to do that and why would they want video evidence that they had done that?’
