My father had a very large, musty, cardboard box full of porn.
The box lived in the basement of our small ranch-style house. It rested atop a very tall metal shelf-structure, in a dark corner of his workshop – a room with cobwebs and sawdust and any number of on-the-go projects stacked on the benches.
It was rare that I entered that room as a child. I seldom had use for a screwdriver or hammer let alone a band saw or a lathe or a drill press. I certainly had no reason to climb on top of the leather step stool and wobble on my tiptoes when all of the other boxes contained Christmas ornaments and empty mason jars.
I can’t remember how I found it. How did I stumble across this treasure trove of delight?
One day, though, it was a part of my life. My new hobby was flipping through the pages of each magazine, digging to the bottom of the box for new material, and being careful to never leave a fingerprint on a cover and never, ever wrinkle a page.
Vividly, I remember: Naked ladies. The occasional naked man (usually as important as a throw pillow in a home decor magazine spread). Leather. Lace. Enormous breasts and tiny boobies. Shaved. Natural. Thin. Voluptuous.
Arriving home from school as an occasional latchkey kid, I’d barely drop my backpack on the floor before running downstairs, climbing up, and balancing a magazine on the edge of the shelf while working my hand inside the front of my jeans.
I didn’t dare take any of the magazines down – what if someone came home? What if I forgot to put things back properly?
It was so incredibly scandalous to me, that box. No one had ever told me that such magazines existed.
I don’t know where the collection originated or, later when it disappeared, where it went. I was the one who picked up the mail at the end of our driveway and I know they didn’t make their way into our home by that route. Did someone give them to him? Did he buy them on his way home from work?
My Dad has been dead for a long while now, and we never discussed that box of goodness.
And now I’m the adult in the house. Married, happily, with a house full of children who are precocious and funny and curious about the world around them.
We’ve had “The Talk” and explained about birth control and the names for the various body parts.They know about consent and about boundaries and limits and being safe.
But I feel like they’re missing a big part of a healthy childhood: hidden porn.
It’s the curse of the Internet Age – ready, easy, all-acess-available porn. Videos and pictures and YouPorn and every single kink under the sun presented in glorious, bookmark’able colour.
And it’s all hidden behind internet filters and NetNannies.
The print magazines are going out of business or switching to online-only.
So we took matters into our own hands, my husband and I, and we made our way to the local used bookstore. It sells porn – the vintage kind – in cellowrapped packages dating back to the ’60s.
We debated for a bit and then, not wanting to influence our kids’ sexual proclivities (nor scare them to death) we picked up a fine selection of mostly “vanilla porn”, paid the small fees, and brought them home. In the quiet of the night, we leafed through them, admiring the fluffy pubes and horrible makeup styles, and agreed that it was all about as risque as what’s available on cable TV.
It’s not our style of porn – we lean toward the kink, the BDSM, the whips-n-chains. But that’s an adult choice and the kids will find their own leanings as they mature and experiment in life.
When the kids start school next week, we’re hiding those magazines in the crawl spaces that are accessible only from the kids’ bedrooms. And we’ll wait for them to explore and discover them. We’ll deny knowing how they got there and claim the previous owners of the house must have left them behind.
That’s right. I’m the mother who bought her kids porn.
And I’ll never admit it to anyone but you.
