The First Time I Saw Porn

People often say that the modern world or this culture and that industry are “saturated with sex.” I’m inclined to believe this isn’t true because it wasn’t long ago that most women were regularly married off at twelve. That’s a culture saturated with sex, when it’s acceptable to fuck children.

Despite what they said about suggestively wholesome teen pop singers and hot shorts marketed to little girls, my generation wasn’t saturated with sex. We were tormented by it. Sex haunted our steps like a distant noise of flesh slapping against flesh or an ouroboros that penetrates itself over your shoulder while you are little and trying to fingerpaint. That is, until I crossed the threshold and sex was no longer an ineffable thing. The fastest, most brutal and heartless way of passing from the stage of not knowing to the next is to witness sex, which is to say, discover pornography. A ruinous passing it was.

It happened on my ninth birthday. I was a friendless kid, thanks in part to my debilitating social anxiety, weird affectations and general physical discomfort. Those, in turn, were exacerbated by being about a foot taller than every other kid my age and also by my mother relentlessly pressuring me about the importance of popularity. Luckily, at nine years old, many of a child’s social habits are still determined by parents so, even though I didn’t have any friends, my birthday would roll around and six or seven little girls my age would materialize.

Unfortunately, the established social hierarchies of the blacktop didn’t just go away because you were shuttled over to someone’s house. Basically, my ninth birthday slumber party involved all the things I hated about the school day: girls my age ignoring me, ridiculing me, avoiding me, talking about me like I wasn’t there, and doing cool shit they sloughed off as soon as I expressed approval or interest.

Leading the pack was Sarah Gill, not necessarily one of the popular girls at school (there isn’t really a quantifiable measure of popularity until breasts develop) but one of the cool ones. She was really pretty and blonde and wore low-slung pants and the boys would let her and only her play kickball or basketball with them. As soon as Sarah Gill got dropped off at my house, she looked around the room, sized up the competition, and immediately established herself as the leader. Pretty soon, they were all playing MASH with each other and talking about school politics and I just sat off a ways, feeling a mixture of grief at being alienated in my own home and gratefulness at being included even tangentially.

By the time we were all huddled in sleeping bags in the living room, waiting for my parents to go to bed, Sarah’s aggressive assertion of authority over me had become almost theatrical. It turned out she had brought a Discman and some CDs (I guess because she figured she’d need a backup if things got really boring) (I’m still astonished by how cool this nine- year-old was) so there she sat in her sleeping bag talking about this band the Beatles and this album Sgt. Pepper’s. Her favorite song was called “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and she was giddily sharing the headphones, ear beside ear, with every other girl in attendance but myself. I’d say I wanted to listen and she’d say, “You probably wouldn’t like it,” and then whoever was her current partner would express outlandish approval—“That’s probably the best song ever made”— and Sarah would nod and offer some profound insight: “You know it’s about drinking alcohol, right?”

Even at the time I couldn’t really begrudge Sarah for snubbing me this way because kids, whether nine or fifteen, can craft social humiliation out of toothpaste if it’s all they have. I was effectively used to this kind of thing. Lucky for me, it was easy to seize social cachet as a nine-year-old: just as my parents went to bed, they handed me a bowl of popcorn and the remote. Sarah’s Discman saw a rapid devaluation of the social currency it had only moments ago. I’d become the sheriff of this town.

Predictably, it was great. It was also the last time I was ever the coolest person in the room.

We started off the night with a pay-per-view movie that I don’t remember. At this point I should say we had a black box acquired through some distant family member, so when I say “pay-per-view” I mean not paying per view. I mean stealing views. The black box unscrambled every channel, even the super-premium ones that would show movies all day long and then after about one a.m. become adult channels. I had never stayed up late enough and unsupervised enough to really know what an “adult” channel was; I had just once or twice experienced the moment they switched over, when one movie ended and suddenly the sets and lighting of the next seemed suspiciously lower in production value. It was at this point some nearby adult, a parent or older sibling, would audibly gasp “Oh!” and change the channel, confirming the switch-over represented something abundantly interesting.

There I was, popcorn bowl and remote in hand, dictating what we watched, and all the girls were vying to sit next to me. I knew it was an empty victory but it was still pretty thrilling to feel like people wanted my attention. Naturally, Sarah Gill shoved her way right to the center of the circle and parked herself beside me, because if she couldn’t be the alpha female, she was going to be second in command.

“We should watch [whatever movie from the stack my parents had rented for us]. That’d be really cool. Have you seen that movie, Ashley? It’s really cool.”

“Yeah, I totally have,” I said and I assume I was lying, “It’s pretty cool, but I’d totally watch it again in case the rest of you haven’t seen it.”

“Cool,” said Sarah.

I left the channel on pay-per-view and summoned one of the other girls to go get said movie from the stack on the counter. Let’s say it was Free Willy, which would be eerily appropriate, if it weren’t so asinine. We watched the movie and it must have been about one thirty when the credits rolled. Banter was exchanged about how cool this or that was, how “fine” such and such lead was, what we enjoyed from the soundtrack, and so on. At this point, I was probably feeling as good as a nine-year-old could feel without getting a pony. Not only was I staying awake really late, but I had this whole group of peers actually lobbying for my attention because I, for the first time ever, was in control of what we as a social system were doing.

Then it all went to shit.

I hit Stop on the remote and wriggled out of my sleeping bag to fetch the video. We were immediately transported back to the television, to the black box still at channel 99. The set was a quaint Christmas scene, with a sleigh in the background, a full red sack bulging with (presumably) toys, a pine tree decorated seasonally, and a completely disgusting, tattoo-clotted dirtbag pounding a giant-titted siren, bent over the front of the ornate red sleigh. Neither member of the couple involved was dressed as a Christmas character. I am unsure if she was supposed to be Mrs. Claus or a “naughty” girl, just as I’m unsure if he was supposed to be Santa or an elf or a reindeer. Both of them were naked but for her Lucite heels. The only thing Christmas-themed about the central characters was located between her tan, sinewy thighs: she had a clitoris piercing, from which swung a classic cherry-red Christmas tree ornament, the kind you see families lovingly hooking to branches in holiday coffee commercials, and it swung from his balls to her belly like some shining pendulum of forsaken childhood. Also, it was March.

Before I could leap back to the remote and change the channel, I was swept away in what I saw and this, I can reasonably say, was probably the moment that marked my first real psychological snap. I stood tall among a group of elementary school girls huddled in sleeping bags watching this disgusting display and I thought to myself . . . That’s it?!

And then: That’s what I get for surviving adolescence? That’s what this life of alienation and humiliation and self-loathing and public torment is hurtling toward? That’s what it means to be an adult? Someday I, too, will be bent over and squealing like a sow on a slaughterhouse floor while some grim-faced refrigerator of bulbous muscles and leathery skin that weeps off in folds smashes his vein-suffocated manhood into me from behind, grunting and pulling at my swollen breasts? . . . Only dumb, how a nine-year-old would think it.

It was at this point that she scooted into the sleigh and turned on her back, putting her feet into the air. His hulking carriage barely accounted for the change in placement as he continued to joylessly hack away. I will always remember her shoes, commonly referred to as “stripper shoes,” a towering clear platform with a burst of white fluffy material across the toe. I fixated on them, drowning in horror, that someday I would have to endure this and furthermore would have to lie back, watching my feet shake up and down in high heels with little fuzzy pom-poms on them.

It was a dense darkness that came over me. I’d never experienced greater antipathy in my life. Here again, I thought to myself, No.

The camera suddenly fixated on her little clitoris ornament and zoomed in with its unwavering lecherous gaze until all we could see was the glistening shaft of his penis and the incoherent bouncing of the little red ball. She shrieked and shrieked.

One cry was so blood-curdling that the spell broke and I realized I was still surrounded by my classmates. I grabbed the remote just as Sarah Gill grabbed my pant leg, her eyes rapt on the television, and she said with the same blank, affected worldliness with which she said everything, “That’s a cute ornament.”

As if the idea dawning—this is what sex looks like—hadn’t been practically voluptuous in its horror, I then had to realize I was completely fucking alone in recognizing what we’d just seen. I knew it was sex and not a single one of the other girls had come to that same conclusion. Yes, as soon as the popcorn was gone and I was relinquished of the remote, not only would this false camaraderie evaporate, but I would also be separate from them developmentally. I could never go back to the world of believing in man’s goodness.

We watched another movie, mostly in silence. Then we all fell asleep. The next day, we went back to our respective homes, and the day after that, we went back to our respective social stations.

I didn’t really care as much as I had before, though, because it was in that moment of watching the little ornament waggle back and forth—in the very moment I distinctly remember thinking that her labia looked like turkey spilling out of a sandwich—that I somehow became a little older than the rest. If Sarah Gill, the most cosmopolitan of the group, could look on that image and see nothing but a prop in a vacuum, then every last one of them were still affixed to a place that I, for some reason, had been severed from. Because of this, the teasing didn’t smart quite the same way it had before. Plus, I learned a valuable lesson: don’t let children watch hard-core pornography. Which is a lesson a lot of people don’t have to learn, but life is about the journey.

Tags: ashley cardiff, coming of age, porn, sex, sleepovers, that one girl, thresholds