My Sex and Violence

While living in Orlando, I saw my first pornographic magazine in my older cousin A’s Camaro. I was more fascinated by the hushed tones with which people reacted to the the object than by the copulatory images themselves. To me they looked like flesh colored Rorschach tests. And like Rorschach blotches, their meaning was frustratingly ambiguous. My mom was against it, my dad and my cousin pretended to be, but when my mom left the room, they shared this conspiratorial vibe that I found confusing. Is it right or wrong guys? Help me out here. I’m 9.

A year later, after my family moved to Miami, I finally got the hang of pornography with Waldo, this small brown monkey faced kid who lived on my block. I found this magazine on the street one day and we spent most of the afternoon sitting on the monkey bars staring at it. He looked at me and said: “Bro, my dick is so hard.” I understood because mine was hard too. It was like I could FEEL what he was talking about cause I was feeling it too! Fascinating. That was the first time I made the connection between my erection and sexual stimulation. Waldo was my first porn buddy.

Sometimes when I look at porn these days, and see a woman all turned on caressing her tit like it’s going out of style, I’ll remember the fascination I had with my own erection when I was kid. I got over it, and I guess she never did. Maybe that’s why she’s a porn actress.

When I was 11, I found out there was a movie about a killer time traveling robot from the future, I mercilessly badgered my father to take me til he caved like a Kentucky coal mine. I was as happy as a clam in the theater too, watching the terminator kill people and crash his car into things. Then suddenly there’s this love scene where Kyle Reese, the soldier from the future, is impregnating Linda Hamilton with the savior of the world, and her tits are totally showing!

Now Linda Hamilton had to be one of the hottest women I had ever seen. The full lips, the high cheeck bones, and that eighties hairdo. (JK about the hair.) Sitting next to my dad there, I noticed that I just didn’t feel right. In fact, to my horror I realized that I had an erection and my breathing pattern had completely changed.  So had my dad’s! The whole situation felt extremely awkward and WRONG. There I was all turned on sitting right next to my dad, and to make things worse, he was turned on too! It kind of felt like that day five years earlier when I had been caught dancing.

Instead of enjoying Linda Hamilton’s tits, all I wanted was for the love scene to be over so this bizarre feeling would go away. Either that or to crawl into a hole. This is the first time I remember feeling awkward about my sexuality.

The film that would have the most profound effect on my understanding of sex though, was Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life.” When I saw that scene where John Cleese has sex with his wife in front of the class I was utterly shocked by his violent pumping motions. To date, all the love scenes I had seen in movies like Terminator or Top Gun were in Hollywood slomo. To make matters worse, I saw the scene in a room full of people, so I made sure to hide my astonishment. Nobody seemed to notice, which makes me wonder about little kids and how hard it is to notice the things that are effecting them. After “The Meaning of Life,” it became obvious to me that sex was not only awkward and mysterious, but also violent. No wonder people reacted to it the way they did.

A few years before they shot and killed Al’s dad in a drug deal gone bad, he had owned a video store, and Al had somehow got his hands on one of the pornos. “Debby Does Dallas Part 4″ I think it was. Anyway, we locked ourselves in my parent’s room when my grandmother was distracted, stuck the tape into the VCR, and watched on the big screen TV what I could only describe as an anti-climactic humping bonanza. It wasn’t how I had imagined sex at all. In fact, when it came to sex, I would soon find out, not much was the way I imagined it. But it was cool nonetheless.

Al: “Dude, the way he’s fucking her, it looks like a piston.”

I have to admit, I learned a lot. No matter how dirty I felt sneaking around and stuff, this sex thing was really interesting. Somehow, without warning, puberty had snuck up on me and sunk its claws into my soul. In the absence of any real guidance about my sexual development, porn had gladly stepped in to educate me and fill in the void.

Thanks, Porn.

When I look back on these experiences, what stands out is that for me, the dirty feelings I had about porn were caused less by the porn itself than by other people’s reactions to it. Even at an early age, when I couldn’t understand the situation, I could easily read the emotions on people’s faces. And they were saying: This stuff is bad. Contrast that with the enjoyment I got from the porn, and you’ve got a recipe for sexual guilt so powerful, even a Catholic would be proud.