When my parents married, they got this wild idea that they would be antique dealers. I honestly have no idea how well this could have worked because they gave up on it. They both had a good eye for stuff, so I'm guessing if they'd been able to stick with it, they could have been fairly successful. We'll never know though.
What we do know is that for a while when I was younger, say, less than five, they kept up a steady pace of buying and selling antiques. We had an unfinished second floor to our house, so most of it was stored up there. If my parents liked a piece and it went without selling for a while, they'd bring it downstairs and it would become part of our household furniture. This little system is what lead to me seeing my first porn.
My mother found a dresser she liked and brought it into her room. It was too small to hold both her and my father's clothes, and the old dresser was too big for just him stuff, so they switched the one in my room for the older one from theirs. I'm not sure why they didn't clean everything out of the drawers, but they didn't. With them you could never tell. Drunk. Stoned. Anyone's guess.
The dresser had really high legs and the bottom drawer was the only one I could access. I could open the second one, but not see into all that well. I liked opening the dresser because it had hardware that looked like lion-faced miniature door knockers. I was playing with the pulls and happened to drag the whole drawer out of its slot. It fell on me. I remember it hitting my leg and it hurting. The wood on the underside was rough and kept digging into my skin. I pulled it off of me and kind of panicked a little because I knew I needed to get it back in place.
This involved me pushing it slant ways and ass up back into position. Of course I didn't do this well, so one side went up higher than the other, causing my clothes to fall out.
But not just my clothes . . .
There was also a picture of my mother in the drawer. She was sitting on the toilet with her shirt raised up and her breasts exposed. You could also see her bush. She was grinning in the picture like this was the most natural thing in the world. The strangest part was that I knew the bathroom she was in. It belonged to my great-grandmother.
I wiggled the drawer back into place, my head feeling all hot and strange. Then sat down in the closet and looked at the picture for a long time. It puzzled me. On some level, I knew I wasn't supposed to see the picture, even though my mother's nudity was nothing shocking or surprising. She was my mother. Half the time, I still ended up bathing with her.
I didn't grasp the concept at the time, but the difference was in the context of the nudity. When I saw her naked, it was a matter-of-fact kind of thing. In this picture, even though it looked like it was caught in the moment, she didn't just happen to be nude. There was a purpose to it. I wasn't sure of the purpose, but I knew it was some grown up thing. Finally, I pushed the picture back into the drawer and said nothing about it.
I'm not sure how everyone responds to seeing their first nude pics. I'm guessing if it's the gender you're attracted to, it's thrilling. Perhaps you don't understand why it's thrilling, but it is. When it's a gender you're not attracted to, and, in fact, your own gender, the reaction is a little more complex. In a way, I found the picture to be violating. She was, after all, positioned in a way that was usually reserved for very private time. On the other hand, she looked happy. Maybe this was something in which she found a lot of power. The smile didn't reach her eyes though. Her eyes looked nervous, angry.
Several years later, when I was at the house of a friend who lived with her single father, she showed me his porn stash. One of the magazines had a section where people would send in pictures of themselves . . . or maybe their husbands or boyfriends sent the pictures in. I don't know. My friend thought it was strange that people would want to look at these average women when "the really pretty ladies who showed their kitties" were deeper into the magazine.
I got it though. The "really pretty ladies" were paid to do this. They had airbrushing and makeup and time to really prepare for it. But the other girls had bad lighting and no retouches and only just their common, frank nakedness. The fact that they were "less pretty" might turn some people off, but I'm guessing more often than not, it was seen as a good thing. It made them more available. It made them more vulnerable. It made them more accessible. At its core, the trifecta of porn IS availability, accessibility, and vulnerability.
I didn't tell my friend any of this. At the time, I really didn't have the vocabulary to do it. Instead I just shrugged and forced a giggle over the whole thing. I also didn't say how much it disturbed me to see pictures of women as nude as my mom had been in that old photograph. Like her, they all smiled at the camera, but only with their mouths. Their eyes always told a different truth.
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