Remember last week’s post when I told you about my discovery of that porn magazine collection hidden in a cabinet down in the cellar?
Viewed in retrospect, this episode provides a lot of psychology. The descent into darkness, the discovery of forbidden secrets, the defilement of my naive mind. It was a step towards maturity by salvaging a hidden treasure.
The main actor – besides me – in this story is pornography. Porn. My story would have been far less interesting if it was just a collection of Popular Mechanics magazines. In that case I would have run upstairs and yelled: Mommy, I’ve found something interesting, look here! But these were porn mags, and I knew that I should keep them being a secret. But why?
It was the message that porn sent me!
Porn is breaking the fourth wall. Whatever happens, it is happening for me, the spectator. Curiosity, arousal, perplexity, and finally pleasure is porn’s raison d’être. It all happened at once for me, one single moment in this lonely place. This was happening just for me. And I didn’t want to share this. It was a secret consent between porn and me.
Many years later, a bit of this feeling is still there. A pornographic image is still extraordinary, a sensation in the plethora of images that is flailing at us every moment. Taken out of its context of a porn magazine (or web site), the pornographic image still develops a subversive power, provoking the spectator. This experience shaped my concern with porn. And it is still developing further.
Entertainment, bad conscience, filth: what’s your main feeling about pornographic imagery? Leave your story right here!
Stay curious,
Mason Squelch
Post Image Source: Public Domain, taken from Wikipedi
