I First Saw P*rn

I was 13 or 14 when I first saw porn.

My best friend and I were planning our big Saturday fun and she said she wanted to walk to a boy’s house who I didn’t know at all, but her boyfriend did and he was already there. We walked fairly far to his house and shortly after I met him, we all went into his bedroom and he put a tape in his VHS player.

It was cued up to a scene where a man and woman were having sex. Even though I had seen movies before with love scenes, I had never seen anything graphic. I remember thinking, “Why did his parents let their kid have a tv, video player, and this kind of movie in his room??” I sat on the floor next to him, back against his bed, and looked everywhere else in the room but at the scene, occasionally stealing glances.

My friend and her boyfriend disappeared and I didn’t have a clue where my brand new friend’s parents were. We started making out, and I squished myself as far into the corner as I could on his bed, stiff as a board, all the time wondering if he expected me to do the things the woman in the video did. I was clearly giving off vibes that I didn’t want to be there. I don’t remember much else about that day, and I don’t think I ever saw that kid again that was my new boyfriend (because that’s what that means when you’re thirteen, right? Morgan and Mike, sitting in a tree…). Looking back on it now, I wonder if my friend had told her boyfriend I’d definitely have sex with that kid.

Early events like that tend to shape a person’s view of pretty important things like sex and sexuality, intimacy, what other people want from us, consent, attractiveness, etc, and one of the problems with porn isn’t that it shows us too much, it’s that it shows us too little, as it doesn’t teach us what true intimacy looks like. From the first movie I saw, I was taught that sex happens in the middle of the day with the curtains and windows open, and the girl’s parents are home, and she doesn’t lock her door (which accounts for the storyline that her dad bursts in and the dude escapes through the window by the skin of his…teeth).

The lines of communication were not open with my parents, church leaders, or any of my other friends to be able to talk about what happened. I don’t think I even told another soul about that experience until well into adulthood. My beliefs around sex and sexuality were entrenched in conservative Christianity, where the most said explicitly about sex was that abstinence until marriage was the only route. I was 13 in the late 90’s, right at the height of some of the more iconic Christian books on dating and sex like I Kissed Dating Goodbye and whatever prompted the movement of dads giving their daughters purity rings (I think I still have mine somewhere). My public education in high school was more informative but still left out some pretty key details. My teacher stretching a condom over her arm and talking about STIs doesn’t really count as a well-rounded synopsis of what healthy sexuality looks like.

I was largely taught to stuff down desire, curiosity, and exploration, but somehow magically turn it all on when I got married. I was expected to know what the hell I was doing, even though I had been given no guidance and had years of sexual repression under my belt.

I’ll never forget the conversation I had with some close friends of mine (as young, married, already had a kid or two, adults) and we started discussing sex. I was absolutely floored that both of them (both women, both grew up in Chrisitan households) said they had never masturbated. Ever.

At that time I had already started to deconstruct my religious beliefs and question some of the principles of my conservative upbringing, and I remember thinking If you don’t understand what you like, how can you communicate that to your partner?

Questions came hard and fast over the next several years (I’m killing it with the accidental euphemisms here), and I was surprised by how many other seemingly beliefs were tied up in my views that had been shaped by purity culture and conservative Christianity. As my ideology frayed and unraveled, I discovered that some pretty pivotal and deeply important issues bubbled to the surface and needed attention: modesty/clothing, body image, pornography, sexual abuse, marital duties and roles, homosexuality, emotional regulation, and more.

My biggest lesson in all of this was understanding how desperately disconnected I was from my body and my emotions. Brene Brown talks extensively about how detrimental it is to us to numb our feelings.

“You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.”

I don’t really place all the blame for decades of suppressing and ignoring my emotions, particularly around sexuality, on my experience with evangelicalism, but it’s not hard to see where the corollary lies. As a parent now myself, I’m desperate to teach my kids what I wasn’t taught. I want them to know that shame lives in the hidden crevices. “Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgment.” (Brene Brown, again).

I want them to know that their sexuality belongs to themselves first and that they have the autonomy and right to invite others into a shared experience when it’s right for them, pleasure is important, and their body doesn’t belong to a future spouse—it belongs to them.

I’m doing the work to reclaim what was lost and build something new, something that feels like me. And yes, it’s work, and it’s work worth doing.