Thursday, October 04, 2007
How I got to here - Part 2
I try to remember now when I got my first taste of pornography. It had to have been when I was 6 or 7 years old, but I can't seem to recall specifically when I first laid eyes upon video of adults screwing for money, but it was definitely before the age of Nintendo, so we’re talking ’83 or ‘84. How I came to partake in such sights at such a tender age isn't as interesting as one might think. To my knowledge, mom and dad did not own any adult material at all, so there was no finding of dad’s stash. I’m sure the old man had some squirreled away somewhere, but I never found it. No, my first exposure came as a byproduct of playing football.
I grew up playing sports with the neighborhood kids, most of whom were older. Subsequently, I was exposed to quite a lot at an age when I was too young to understand any of them. In an ideal world, a 6 or 7 years old child would be free of such stains on their innocence, but I grew up in a real suburb populated by real people, so I had already gone well beyond “playing doctor”, and was infamous for swearing like a sailor. Some of the details have blurred with time, but suffice it to say that I learned more about adult behaviors than I probably should have at that age.
The primary agents for my education in debauchery were the Huddleston(sp) brothers, Dave and Rob. Dave was the oldest member of our crew, so he functioned as the de facto leader of our neighborhood gang. Rob was more passive and generally suffered all the woes of being Dave’s younger brother, meaning he was generally relegated to the background while Dave dominated the group. We spent most of our time playing football, riding bikes, and hanging out at each other’s houses. We had a circle of friends who lived within a couple blocks of one another, but we would occasionally pick up stragglers from other parts of the neighborhood in our travels. One such ‘straggler’ was a kid named Chris Blankenship.
Chris’ family lived on Lemonwood, which ran parallel to the main boulevard leading into our neighborhood. Most of our circle of friends lived on Ironwood and Mapleleaf, neither of which connected directly to Lemonwood, so Chris was something of an outsider . He was Dave’s age and if I remember correctly, they both played Pop Warner football together, which is how he came to reside on the fringes of our tiny society. The Blankenship household would serve as our gateway to the land of hardcore pornography.
Apparently, his parents were heavily into adult videos and there were mumblings about fetishistic behaviors as well. Through their substantial collection, we gained ready access to a closet full of pornographic movies and materials. I no longer remember specifically how many movies we eventually watched there, but I do remember seeing Debbie Does Dallas and being mesmerized by a short-haired brunette and her female roommate in a movie about their misadventures while living together. Not surprisingly, I could not get close enough to the TV and my desire to get as near as possible would became a running joke. What I saw fascinated me, as it was something new and mysterious. Remember that puberty was still 5 or 6 years away for me, so what I saw in these movies was nothing like what I saw in the bath at home or while ‘playing doctor’ with the older girls from the block.
As time went on, the taboo luster of pornography wore off, and the videos became just one more thing I would watch from time to time, not unlike ordinary movies. Dad owned a satellite in the era when over-the-air broadcasts were yet to be scrambled, so I gained access to the Playboy Channel on the rare occasion that the parents would leave us home with an inattentive babysitter. By the time I was 10, Dave and his girlfriend messing around under a blanket in front of our inner circle of friends wasn’t enough to distract any of us from whatever was on the television at the time. By my teens, my idea of a modern woman was centered around the cartoon caricatures I had seen in porn and the girls I had grown up with on the block. Not exactly ideal subjects from whence to draw conclusions, but these were the only things I knew. There’s no denying that what I saw and did as a child would have a massive effect on my perceptions going forward into my teens and adulthood, but at the time, those long-term repercussions were not apparent to me. As many of the girls I had known as a child became more promiscuous in their teens, I went in a more restrained, introverted direction. For a variety of reasons, I did not indulge, so the disconnect between myself and women my age grew wider. In my mind, women were becoming more like the porn stars I had watched as a child, so I wanted less and less to do with them in general.
I had too many things that needed to be worked out in high school. My head was a mess and getting laid took a back seat to depressed introspection. By the time I turned 20, I was well on my way toward shedding my depressive tendencies, but it would be years before I genuinely began seeing women in a different light.
Labels: life
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