Pornography

Here's another grey area for you.

Actually, maybe it's not so grey after all...

When I was growing up, my dad has pornography in the house. On the walls. In the closets. Sitting out. In the john, of course.

This was a house with one young boy and three young girls. This was a house where Mom left (GEE, Wonder why? ) and the kids were raised by this man. This man who thought it was OK to have pictures of nude women hanging around, who thought it was OK to have pornography (not the classy kind) just sitting around, accessible to these young minds.

Yep. I looked at it.
Yep. I was affected by it.

This morning I was thinking about what I thought about it all of those years ago and how I was affected by it. How I am, in fact, still affected by it. Let's start with a thing that happened when I was in the second grade.

I was in my second grade class, talking to some boys. They mentioned naked women and I said, "I can show you lots of naked women!" So we organized a trip to walk over to my house (literally 100 steps from the classroom door) so that these boys could see the naked pictures. I remember it being at least two boys (Tom an Michael), but I know that there was at least one other boy. We walked over to my house and into the garage. I turned on the lights/ the boys eyes lit up! The walls were covered with pictures. I felt kind of proud, kind of knowing, kind of generous. That is, until Mom came out and scooted us out of the garage. Until that moment I had no idea that it was a shameful thing or that there was something untoward about having naked pictures on the wall. To me, that was normal.

When I first became curious about the books and magazines around the house, I guess I was pretty young, in elementary school. Somewhere I ran across this old black and white dirty magazine of sorts. While most of Dad's pornography was of young women, this thing had an image of a naked dude standing there with a huge penis. As a kid I remember looking at that picture and feeling horrified at that hideous thing. I kept that picture hidden for months just so I could look at it with disgust.

As I got older, the message was always something like "Women are either virgins or whores." So any sexual activity, regardless of how freaking normal that is, was viewed as being a whore, being sinful, being unlovable. In fact, as soon as my sex life became common knowledge in the family (thanks to my brother reading my diary when I was 16 or 17...), my dad moved about fifty miles from me emotionally. From that moment forward, he never acted loving toward me again, and he died almost forty years later...

Imagine that weird dichotomy. Pornography all over the place, but we're not supposed to be sexual or to have sexual experiences. I was effed up about that one for decades...
What's normal? What's real? What's healthy?
All of these issues have reared their ugly heads because of the normalcy of pornography in my life.

Anyway, more stuff in my teens...somehow my boyfriends were from very conservative families, resulting in mothers hating me. Whore.
Yep.

And the pornography?
Somehow it gave me a weird, fucked up vision of women, of femininity, of sexuality. Using and enjoying pornography doesn't bother me. Use it if you like. Be in it, if you choose to. Enjoy it. Just use your integrity...your principles.

And, forgoodnessake, keep it off of your walls!

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