Things I've Learned From Porn, Part One

I couldn’t have been older than eight or nine the first time that I saw a naked woman in a playboy magazine. My friend Paul had a copy of the magazine under his mattress, and he allowed me to look at it one afternoon after we rode our bikes back to his house from the park down the street, where we had been playing catch. I have no idea where he got it from, nor did I really care; I was being allowed to see a naked woman, and despite the fact that I was still years away from sprouting my first pubic hair, I knew that this was a profound moment in my life; one that would influence and guide my aspirations for many years to come.

Seeing a naked woman can be both an enlightening and confusing experience for a pre-pubescent, overly imaginative child. My knowledge of human anatomy was extremely limited. I was an expert on the anatomy of Voltron: Defender of the Universe, a massive, humanoid robot comprised of five smaller lion-shaped robots that transformed to form his various limbs. I knew that the black lion was in the center and transformed into the body and head, the red and green lions formed the arms, and the blue and yellow lions formed the legs, but when it came to humans I was at a bit of a loss. All I had were my Masters of the Universe action figures, and both He-Man and Teela looked like eunuchs from the waist down. Being a boy, I had at least some understanding of my own genitalia and how it functioned, but when it came to girls I was limited by what knowledge I had picked up on the playground.

According to the boys on the playground girls were born without penises; instead, they were born with some sort of an opening called a “vagina.” It was generally assumed that this is where they peed from, and I was relatively certain that the vagina was located in the center of a girl’s stomach, either just above, or just below their belly button. I was also aware that there was something called “sex,” and that sex had something to do with where babies come from. From what I was able to gather, the act of sex involved a man sticking his penis into either the belly button or the vagina of a woman and holding it there for a while. I also learned about something called a “blowjob.” For a while I thought that a blowjob was something that grown-ups did to their cars when they weren’t working correctly. As it turned out, a blowjob was an unfathomable, and seemingly pointless act where a woman would take a man’s penis into her mouth and blow on it until it turned white and peed sour milk; I found this to be beyond comprehension, and I doubted its scientific validity. I knew absolutely nothing about anatomy, but I knew that men were not cows, and that milk could not come out of their penises no matter how hard anyone blew on them.

My first experience studying the photographs concealed within the Playboy in Paul’s room proved to be both informative and confusing. The vagina, Paul knowledgably pointed out, is not a hole located in the center of a girl’s stomach, but rather a large patch of hair between her legs. This was the late nineteen eighties, and the Brazilian wax was not yet en vogue; nor was Playboy magazine allowed to show a photograph of a woman with her legs spread. Therefore, I was now convinced that the vagina was nothing more than a bundle of well coiffed hair between a woman’s thighs. This made me somewhat confused about everything that I thought I already knew about sex, but Paul assured me that I had the basics down, and that the woman just holds the man’s penis between her legs, and that it is very warm, and that is how grown-ups like to sleep.

Seeing these photographs at Paul’s house awakened something in me. The very thought of them gave me an overall ‘warm’ feeling. It was pre-sexual and almost impossible to describe, but there was an inexplicable rightness to it. I was hooked. It became my new goal in life to look at pictures of naked women as frequently as possible. Unfortunately, such pictures were not readily accessible to me. A few of my friends had older brothers who would let us look at their Playboys from time to time, but not nearly as often as I would have liked. Anytime I would see a magazine lying face down on a table at a doctor’s office, or on a coffee table in one of my friend’s living rooms, I would eagerly turn it over, silently wishing that someone had accidently left a Playboy around in plain sight. I was always disappointed when the magazine’s cover read Better Homes and Gardens or Golfer’s Digest.

It was 1989 and I was in the fourth grade when someone, probably one of the wise, pre-pubescent playground gurus who had taught me everything about sex, gave me the idea that all grown men had copies of Playboy magazine hidden somewhere in their homes. Since I understood that my father was a grown man, I concluded that this meant that even he must have some of these precious magazines hidden somewhere in our house.

Searching the house wound up being more difficult than I had imagined.

It was impossible to search for any extended period of time because my mother would become nosy and ask what I was looking for. “I thought my baseball glove might be in the cabinet above the refrigerator,” I’d say, or, “I think I left some comic books under the sofa cushions in the living room.”

Over a period of a few weeks I had concluded an exhaustive search of the living room, family room, kitchen, dining room, computer room, garage, attic, and all three-hallway closets, without discovering so much as an underwear catalog. I had even searched my own bedroom, and that of my younger brother Alex, age six, top to bottom, just incase my father had tried to throw me off the scent by stowing his treasures directly under my nose. The only room left unsearched was my parents’ bedroom.

One evening, when my mother was downstairs cooking dinner and speaking on the telephone, I gathered enough courage to creep into their bedroom. My parents’ room had an enormous closet, two dressers, and two nightstands; one on my dad’s side of the king size bed, and one on my mom’s. I devised a strategy where I would search a single piece of furniture, then retreat until another safe opportunity presented itself, upon which time I would return and search another item of furniture. I would continue until every inch of the room had been examined.

Ninja-like I crept over to my father’s nightstand. I pulled the cabinet open quietly and peered inside. In my head I could hear trumpets blowing the 20^th Century Fox fanfare as my eyes settled on the magazine laying face down on the shelf. I grabbed a hold of it and flipped it over. When I saw the cover I suppressed the urge to leap in the air and let out a victory “whoop.”

The word “PLAYBOY” was printed across the top of the magazine in large, blocky letters, the tagline “ENTERTAINMENT FOR MEN” directly beneath. I scanned every detail of the cover. The publication date of the issue was October 1988 and the price was $4.00. “Special College Issue” the headline read, “Girls, Football, Fashion, Prize Fiction, Beer.” There was a photo of a blonde co-ed in a suede baseball jacket with bunnies on the sleeves; she was in leg warmers and cowboy boots. One of her feet was up on a stack of textbooks and she was bent over as if to pull up her boot.

I leafed through the pages thoroughly, yet quickly, my ears honed on the sound of my mother in the kitchen cooking dinner, prepared to dart from the room like Rickey Henderson stealing second base if I thought I heard her heading for the stairs. I dared not risk being caught, lest the magazine be moved to another hiding spot, so, far from satisfied, I took one more look at the centerfold and placed the magazine back on the shelf, face down as I had found it, closed the cabinet door and crept from the room.

That night I lay in bed thinking of my discovery. I drifted off to sleep knowing that a wondrous new chapter of my life had begun.

Check out PART TWO!