While writing a review this week, in terms of the current, I was thinking about previous moments. That made me think about how much everything has changed since I was a kid; how it’s all for this generation’s kids now.
I’ve been attempting to read an erotic anthology today, and because it’s a Saturday; I’ve got my own kid, I’ve got my niece staying over, they’re both playing on their bicycles outside and running in and out of the house every few minutes like kids do. Since I’m reading a tale between their next fleeting indoor visit (I’ve got another fresh reason to enjoy short stories now), so I can close the book before they get into the living room and read the title. Laughing at myself I have to hide my’ Book Porn’ from them as an adult so that they don’t ask me inquisitively, or even know my luck to the college teacher what’ Bondage Erotica’ is. I associated it with trying to sneak a glance at my parents ‘ porn magazine when I was 10 years old under their mattress.
Thinking about that now, it looks really strange. Seriously? Under the mattress, a porn magazine? My child is shit out of luck when he reaches his teenage years, if he hopes to discover a porn magazine under my mattress, he’s going to be extremely disappointed and more than probably totally repulsed to find me under the bed restraint scheme.
Then I thought about how times have changed. I mean he’d even contemplate looking for a porn magazine in this century under my mattress? Or are a child’s activities from a long time ago?
I remember my friends and I stealed clothes magazines from our parents when I was younger so we could look at the underwear models. My brother was infamous for it, it would be a little bit of a race for who was first able to release it. Usually it was him in all fairness, I would later find them in our’ den’ in a plastic bag, buried next to the tree in the loose mud. That’s where we’d hide all we didn’t want to find our parents. It wasn’t all clothes magazines, it would be the strange chocolate bar we wouldn’t be permitted to consume; a toy our parents insisted we would throw out, and even the odd Sun Newspaper page 3.
I had a discussion with my mom a few months ago, she was upset that she had just caught her adopted 11-year-old son looking at porn on his tablet. She couldn’t believe it, she told me that for an 11-year-old this wasn’t ordinary behavior. I laughed at her indignation and told her boys are going to be boys. She couldn’t think it, when she declared he was older, her son (my brother) had never been like this. It was then that I had to remind her that when we were younger we didn’t have access to the internet, we couldn’t just get a hold of porn so quickly; I filled her in on the robbery of her magazines and told her that if it was a distinct moment, she’d probably caught him looking at porn, and not just him more than probably all three of us.
You see, I was an 80’s child, computers and the internet hadn’t made their way into virtually everybody’s homes at that time. So the only way we could stop our curiosity was to take stuff we discovered, hide them, and then look at them later; generally with a group of our colleagues–we’d laugh at the half-naked males and females, wondering if that’s what our bodies would look like in a couple of years. I couldn’t just have an awkward issue with Google that I had–I would either have to put my trust in someone or cope with it the best way I knew–to guess!
Part of me is envious about how easy it is for my child now (not the potential to look at porn easily online! –Although I’m sure he’ll be thrilled when he gets to that) but all the information that’s readily available to him; yet the other part of me is so relieved that I didn’t have to go through high college with camera phones, and the capacity to record somebody / something with a whim, that social medicine.
It’s 2015 now, when I believe back to being a child, it looks like it wasn’t that long ago at all; but when I think about the fact that my child probably won’t do any of the things I used to do when I was younger to get my thrills; make me think about how much time has actually gone by; and how much it has actually changed.
I mean, has anyone hidden under their mattress even a porn magazine? Is anyone buying the full stop of these magazines now?
I would love to understand what you believe about your remarks, was your childhood very distinct from mine?