Me and Porn

When I was about eleven years old, I used to wander up and down our quiet country road collecting soda bottles for the deposit money. It didn’t occur to me back then that the handful of motorists on our road were litterbugs, but there were always soda bottles to be found in the ditches. There was not much else in the way of litter, so I reckon that folks seeded the ditches with soda bottles precisely so that kids like me could glean them for money to buy penny candy.

On a couple of occasions, I happened on some pornographic literature that an obliging motorist had thrown in the ditch. This was real hard core porn, some of it gay porn, and my cousins and I stashed it in the abandoned pig sty that we used as a clubhouse. We pored over the graphic pictures with fascination. We weren’t yet up to much in the way of sexual arousal, so our interest was more scientific than prurient. We couldn’t get straight answers from adults on the mechanics of human sexuality, and observations of livestock teach you only so much. This porn cleared up a lot of our misconceptions and armed us with knowledge. I look back on my exposure to porn at an early age as a positive development.

My father was an occasional consumer of porn, and I would look at his magazines when I visited him. He didn’t encourage me to enjoy his porn, but he didn’t really try to keep it out of my hands. When I grew up, I didn’t become a big consumer of porn. When I was 21, I visited Times Square and checked out the peep shows, but I never went to a peep show thereafter. It just wasn’t that entertaining. X rated movies don’t appeal to me, and I have purchased a grand total of five pornographic magazines in my entire life. Watching other people have sex is not my thing.

Although I don’t have much use for porn, I heartily endorse its consumption by others, and I don’t much care whether kids might be exposed to sexually explicit images. I leave it up to parents how much and what kind of porn their kids consume, and I frankly don’t get the hysteria that some people have about the possibility that their child might see a picture of a schlong. My car pool companion was upset that March of the Penguins contained penguin mortality as he didn't want his children to know about the phenomenon of avian death for some reason that is incomprehensible to me. He aims to conceal from his children as long as possible all information about sex and avian death, and he considers this so obviously a good idea that he has never bothered to articulate any kind of rationale for this policy. He wants homosexuals to stay closeted because he doesn't want his children to know about the existence of homosexuality. It’s none of my business until these hysterics try to inconvenience me by controlling other people’s access to material because they are too irresponsible to monitor their own children's exposure to information that they bizarrely aim to conceal from them.

If I am honest with myself, my porn is the Food Channel and recipe books and magazines. I am more about gluttony than lust, and cooking shows allow me to enjoy vicarious gourmet meals and to fantasize about eating. There is nothing sexier than Rachel Ray in the kitchen. I have a cookbook collection that takes up a whole shelf, and I have been known to drool over the pictures of dishes.