Yesterday, I tweeted:
My first exposure to porn was a brief flash of printed penis when I was young. Had to be quite young as my recollection is it happened when we lived in the first house I can remember so maybe about five years old or so. I was at a friend’s who lived with his single mom and I remember a Playgirl magazine (at least I assume that’s what it was) open to its centerfold on a chair. That was the first time I saw another guy’s dick and I remember it totally blowing me away. It wasn’t hard (since that would be vulgar), but it was big. You know, compared to a five-year-old’s, they’re all big. This entire event lasted seconds but has stuck with me my whole life.
How I started to look at porn in a serious way is almost too cliche to admit: My dad’s Playboys when I was ten or eleven or so. He stashed them in what he may have thought was a good hiding place in the bathroom, but it wasn’t. I poured over these magazines, eventually even reading them. I wasn’t just interested in seeing the woman, I wanted to get a peek into this secret world of grown-up naked stuff. The things they would never discuss with or around a kid. The first time I saw the term “cock ring” was in a Playboy and they were not fans of them (they said it was a gay thing — the Playboy editors were fairly conventionally prudish, considering). I was also unsure of the dirty Alice in Wonderland comic where Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum stood side by side with their hands in each other’s pants and the mushroom, instead of making Alice taller or shorter, made her tits so big they burst out of her pretty blue and white dress.
Soon after, I recall looking at those and other magazines with my friend Larry (who was from Florida and profoundly racist) along with some other dude from next door and me saying something about how all these naked women were fine, but seeing a guy every once in a while would be good, too. They both thought that was pretty funny and laughed at me. Like, why in the hell would you want to see a dude, dude? That was the first time I realized that maybe what I liked (re: naked people) was not what the other boys liked. Or, at least what they’d admit to liking since Larry was yet another in a long line of purportedly straight boys who was happy to have naked play time with me.
In general, I think porn is a good and natural thing. Sure, it can cause issues (like unrealistic expectations of what real sex is like and body image issues for all genders, etc.), but wanting to look at porn and enjoy it is, I think, a basic human desire. I think it has a lot to do with our fundamental inclination towards sexual promiscuity (see: Sex At Dawn). We get off seeing others fuck because we’re wired to. Anyway, I think the modern version of my dad’s Playboys is way, way better.
The thing I really appreciate about Tumblr over the hidden stash of girly mags thing is that the act of using someone else’s porn at such an early stage fixes in your mind to what’s “normal.” You have no exposure to anything else so you don’t even know there’s a spectrum of erotic imagery and words from which to partake. And then you might innocently say something like, “Gosh, it’d be nice to see a naked guy every once in a while,” to your pals and get laughed at. On Tumblr, you can find the entire breadth and depth of human sexual expression laid out before you. And that’s a social benefit.
I believe that exposure to people who are different than those your immediate life experience typically includes leads to an understanding of them and their motivations and that leads to tolerance. I’m a big fan of tolerance, as a general rule. My main Tumblr is a pretty good reflection of my interests in that it’s filled with images of men and woman and men with men and women with men and women with women. A bisexual’s paradise. Over the time I’ve been curating it, 3,403 people have chosen to follow it on Tumblr (and another couple of hundred visit its URL every day according to Google Analytics).
Typically, what happens is someone stumbles upon my stash and likes or reblogs a whole bunch of stuff all at once, along the way following me. I can see through this reblogging/liking and visiting their own Tumblrs what kind of stuff they’re interested in and nine times out of ten, they go for one gender or the other exclusively. But they also often follow me which means they’re going to be exposed to their non-preferred gender frequently as the images I choose to include get posted. So, when they’re on the Tumblr and getting all hot and bothered and playing with their fiddly bits (or clawing at the containers covering their fiddly bits), they’re exposed to all manner of erotic stuff. Stuff inside their comfort zone, stuff outside their comfort zone, stuff they never even thought about before. And not just from me. Tumblr is littered with this stuff. I wonder how many kids today identify as flexible or bi or pan or whatever word they choose (let’s all try and get “biflexipan” in our conversation today) because they saw things on Tumblr that got them off they wouldn’t have otherwise seen had they been paging through the stuck-together pages of Dad’s magazines?
I also wonder how Tumblr is affecting women’s sexual empowerment. Boys finding their dad’s stash is pretty common (or at least it was when the stash was physical rather than virtual), but I’ve never heard it said the same was true for women. At what time was porn for women even a thing? For how many women was their first exposure to the stuff through their boyfriends or husbands? Now, they can sample the entirely of human sexual interests in their own time and follow their own bliss. They can form an idea of their sexuality prior to going out and trying to practice it in way I just don’t think was possible before. I think this is a big fucking deal.
I know my son’s looking at porn because he’s a) 16, b) a human male, and c) has internet access. I’m actually pretty happy for him that he’s coming of age in this environment and not the one I grew up in. Eventually, my daughter will start to be interested in sex as well (come on, Dad, she already is). Perhaps the easy access to porn, which bothers so many, might end up being something good for her, too.
Based on the things I’m told and hear from my peers who have kids, my thoughts on this are pretty far out there. We like to pretend our children will never be as we were. That we can keep them from seeing that sex and sexuality is a thing in the world until they get married. But I remember being young. I remember the lengths I went to to explore sex and I also remember all the things my friends were doing right along with me (and sometimes to me). Humans are sexual animals. Even the young ones. I hope being able to see all of it like they can on Tumblr will help them find themselves faster than people of my generation or older.
