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When I was 10, we all ran over to the Lewyns’ house because Emily had discovered her father’s copy of Playboy. What a scene it was, a crowd of six of us kids huddled around her parents’ bed, where the magazine was laid out in a state of reverence, soaking up the sordid imagery of each new page revealed by our anxiously-turning little hands. If you grew up in the pre-Information Age, I expect that you, too, found your much younger self in some bedroom, bathroom, garage, or old shed with a weathered copy of Playboy, or Penthouse, or even Oui, breathlessly discovering that the adult world had many secrets that you, until this moment, never imagined.
If you’re currently coming of age, then you most likely never participated in this time-honoured ritual, because you’ve got the Internet. Where once we had to clandestinely ransack entire homes (our own) to turn up even a single dirty novel, kids today are limited only by their imagination in the smut they can discover. Type little people having sex with dogs into Google, and you’ll be instantly dazzled by hundreds of high-resolution images of midget-canine love (I’d act as my own fact checker right now, if I could, but as I write this, I’m not online, so I’ll just have to rely on previous Internet searching experience and assume that I’m probably right on this point.)
There are those that would argue that this ready access to such material would be deleterious to our children. To them I reply, “Of course it’s not good! It’s porn, for God’s sake!” We’re so concerned that violence in television, film, and video games is desensitizing our kids, but what about the numbing effect of instantaneous access to pornography? It was a great personal milestone when I made it to second base with a girl. Now, with the World Wide Web, those original three bases have expanded to well over a hundred and forty-eight (sex with dogs, surprisingly, is only base 127.) I was a junior high school outcast because I was the only kid without a Gotcha t-shirt, but now you’re a ‘tween pariah if you haven’t been in a threesome.
The first time I saw a picture of a man and woman having sex was in a vintage ‘70s dirty magazine from Amsterdam. Everyone was old, out of shape, overweight, unshaved and miserable-looking. Now hardcore porn is fun and cool. Everyone’s young, fit, and beautiful, and just having the best damned time fucking by a pool in the Hollywood Hills. In our hedonistic contemporary American culture, where immediate gratification of our basest desires is de rigueur, how many kids won’t draw object lessons from what they see on their computer screens?
Porn is now easily accessible, socially acceptable, and culturally permissible for the youth of America. Oh, how I wish I were 13 again!
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