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For better or for worse, porn was either accidentally or on purpose the first exposure so many of us had to how sex might work, especially sex between women. Even when it wasn’t, it was an exposure to what sex was maybe possibly “supposed” to look like, and sometimes a confusing one! Here’s all the good, bad and the ugly about our first time viewing porn. Remember VHS tapes? Were we ever so young?

Riese, Editor-in-Chief. 13 / a hotel in Michigan

In 8th grade, a girl I’ll call “Jessie” had her birthday party at the big hotel out by the highway, which was the first time I saw porn and the first time I saw two women kiss each other. Hotel parties were becoming a bit of a thing, then — the boys would come over in the evening for swimming and pizza, then they’d go home and the girls, usually six or eight of us, would spend the night. Jessie’s Mom was a little crazy and Jessie was a little weird, too, and I guess we all were but for some reason we’d decided Jessie was weirder. Like how her Mom had made her with a sperm donor instead of a Dad and how her skin was so pale you could see through it. Her Mom was asleep when Jessie suggested we check out the hotel’s adult offerings. “I’ve seen lots of these,” she said, and the way she said it made me think that porn was one of those delicious things I needed to see, too. We went along with it, because why not. We knew boys who’d seen porn, after all. I’m sure mostly we were thinking that we could brag about it later, or that one of the meaner girls might say that Jessie was so “horny” she made us all watch porn! We’d just learned the word “horny.” I’d considered sex, like that it existed and I might want to do it one day, but I’d never masturbated or anything like that.

I remember the first scene involved a bunch of guys with eighties haircuts by a pool wearing tuxedos, and then they were inside the beach house having sex with a girl on a billiards table. We laughed about how they guys had bad hair and outfits. The second scene was two women who were gonna make pancakes but were then inspired to pour pancake batter all over each other and lick each other’s nipples. They had huge breasts and it looked very messy. I felt nauseous watching them, although I’m not sure why, and I remember leaving and sitting outside the hotel room with my head in my hands. Our room exited onto a walkway that went all the way around the hotel interior, overlooking the courtyard and the pool below. I don’t think anybody came outside to get me. But that was it. That was that.

The next time I saw porn I was 19, in another hotel room.

Laneia, Executive Editor — 19, a living room in Florida

I was in my late teens and with a guy the first time I saw porn. It was a VHS tape and I didn’t ask where he got it or how, I just sat on the couch and decided I’d pretend to be turned on by whatever was about to happen. I remember him telling me that I would really like ‘this one’ — like he knew my fantasies and preferences so well, and had viewed so many videos himself, that he was qualified to cross-reference this information and had found the perfect match. (It was not a perfect match.) There was a lot of gauze and the lighting was baby pink. The setting was a bed and some lattice dividers, and ivy. I wondered if they only made porn in the late 70s and then just stopped, so that this was all we had to choose from now. Because surely you’d choose something made a little later if you had the opportunity, right? Later he told me he thought I’d like it because it was the one where a guy had oral sex with a girl, and that I’d be turned on by the attention he was giving her. Yay.

Rachel, Managing Editor – 12/13, living room of parents’ house

My first individual instance of watching porn is hazy. I was a young teen in the era when home internet had just become commonplace, so it was way easier to find porn online than on a TV screen, but it was also very much during the era of The Family Computer, located in a central and high-traffic area, so execution was complicated. I was generally loyal to the Literotica experience, which was way easier to hide than a streaming video and also because I was always described as a “voracious reader” in report cards. I am almost certain that the first porn I actually watched was of xtube/redtube provenance, even though I don’t think either of those existed in what would have been about 2001. I think I looked up both “regular” porn and “lesbian” porn equally — they didn’t do anything particularly different for me, and I knew enough about straight sex to know that straight porn is pretty well abstracted from it so more or less able to infer the same about “lesbian” porn. Now that I’m thinking about this with the perspective of adulthood, this was a really unsatisfying endeavor! Giving it a solid “eh.” I was great at erasing my browser history, though, which was a useful life skill to develop.

Yvonne, Senior Editor, 19/ My Dorm

Technically the first time I watched porn was in the band hall after school when I was 17 and my friend Alonso showed me the “Two Girls One Cup” video that everyone watched in 2007. I think he had it on his iPod and he dared me to watch it because it was so fucking disgusting and I think I literally watched like five seconds of it before we scurried away because our band directors were nearby.

The actual first time I watched porn was with friends in my dorm room when I was a freshman in college. I hadn’t watched any porn before college because it wasn’t accessible to me. I didn’t grow up with cable and we had dial-up internet at home and it could barely load MySpace so I didn’t waste my time trying to load porn on my laptop when my mom could walk in at any time.

In college, my roommate and some friends from down the hall were hanging out and I don’t remember how it came up but we were talking about Kim Kardashian. I wondered how she became famous and everyone was like because of her sex video with Ray J! And I was super clueless and had no idea what they were talking about so they pulled it up on the dorm’s fast internet that our good tuition money paid for and there was Kim’s ass and Ray J’s dick. It was super awkward and weird because it was the first time I was watching porn (we watched most of it, if not all of the video) and I mean, the people I watched it with were relatively new friends.

Heather, Senior Editor, 19, My boyfriend’s dorm

There probably was a way to get porn on the internet when I was in high school but basically everyone who had a computer at that time had a single computer in a shared living space and it was dial-up and anyway I was too busy building my first Geocities web page — Heather Anne Land — to worry myself with it. However when I got to college and got myself a boyfriend so the girls on my basketball team would stop side-eyeing me whenever anyone talked about tomboys it became apparent that everyone else had dabbled in porn. The guys in my boyfriends’ dorm used to rent porn on DVD and pass it around. Also sometimes on a Friday night they’d all just hole up in one person’s room and watch it together. (Not gay.) One such Friday night I was like, “Hey, can I watch that porn with you guys?” And my boyfriend was like, “FOR REAL?” And he and all his friends were heckin’ impressed with how accepting and open-minded I was. Really what I was was curious about whether or not women could actually enjoy having sex with men, because my experience up until that point had been not being turned on even a single bit by any boys. (Not gay.) Anyway this particular DVD featured a college guy who’d returned home for the summer and all his friends’ moms wanted to bang him when he came around to cut their grass. He was like, “Gosh no, Mrs. Peters, I could never do this to Billy” but then Mrs. Peters or Mrs. Johnson or Mrs. Collins or whatever other horny house wife was grabbing his crotch or grinding all over him while he was just trying to get some juice out of the refrigerator and next thing you know they were fucking. The porn didn’t enlighten me in any way about the joys of heterosexuality but it did give me enough straight cred to stop worrying about people thinking I was a lesbian for a little while.

Erin, Staff Writer, 20-ish, Girlfriend’s Apartment

I don’t know if I’ve made clear yet that I had a little bit of a sexual represh that carried me through high school, but I did. Catholicism is a cancer that feasts upon the fears of children and your body is shameful and also how dare you. Luckily, I was able to unpack all of that and send it down a trash chute almost immediately after exiting that environment, but it still meant that at 18 years old I had never even considered masturbating. Sad! Porn seemed like something you worked your way up to, not something you incorporated fresh out the gate, so my first experience with it was with a girlfriend who revealed that she had A VERY LITTLE AMOUNT of porn on her laptop if I happened to want to see two gay men fuck each other. I was like, “Oh, okay! This seems great – they’re doing so well.” Remember that scene in The Kids Are Alright when Annette Benning and Julianne Moore are trying to explain the gay porn thing to non-lesbians? It was sort of like that.

Molly Priddy, Staff Writer, 15, my best friend’s living room

When I was a sophomore in high school, I was surprisingly good at volleyball, and on the varsity team. It was exciting, because I felt older and cooler, obviously, to be hanging out with the juniors and seniors, who were clearly the wisest and already knew everything there is to know about life.

I went to a Catholic high school, and that meant priests and nuns being a regular part of our school life. They were also super supportive of our sports teams, which was always kind of fun, to run over during the starting lineup announcements and high-five a tiny nun. There was one named Sister Rita, and she was the absolute best. When my volleyball team made it to state, Sister Rita gave the team captains some cash to have some fun for the team, I think it was like $20, so we could get snacks or something.

Naturally, the team captains rented porn with the nun’s money, and we all watched it together as a team in my best friend’s living room while her parents weren’t home. I fell asleep. Given my Catholic upbringing, I hadn’t even considered masturbation a possibility for girls, and didn’t get the whole appeal.

I have overcome (heh) those barriers, FYI.

Archie, Cartoonist, 18, Fairbanks, Alaska

I’m not sure how anyone is actually able to remember the first time they saw porn, but I’ve narrowed it down to four instances that all happened around the same time, maybe even the same year. When I was about 18, I stole some of my boyfriend’s porn at the time to watch during a sleepover with my best gal pal (ha ha “str8″ amirite). I also around this time found a plastic bag of VHS tapes — all lesbian porn — on the side of the road and took them home to watch in secret in the basement of my parent’s house. Also around this time during a family vacation I snuck off from the lunch buffet to the sex shop that was in the same strip mall. I bought three issues of Lipstick Lesbians and hid them in my backpack the rest of the trip, causing myself a lot of needless anxiety. Also when I was 18, I was finally able to get my own membership at the local independent video rental place and bravely rented some lesbian porn on my own (along with Better Than Chocolate, probably more my root more than any of the porn I watched). The owner of that shop self-identified as a vampire which has nothing to do with me renting porn, but doesn’t feel irrelevant either.

Carmen, Staff Writer, Tween(?), My Aunt’s House

I was a big Literotica fan (Hey Rachel! We’re twins!) in my junior high school years, when I had the luxury of being both an only child AND having the house to myself for two hours after-school everyday. That little sliver of independence gave me a lot of time to, ummmm, get to know myself better? It started with curiosity, and turned into my safe space exploration. I’d make myself a snack, turn on the computer in the family room, and read around a bit until I got horny. Then I’d masturbate, clean out the internet caché, and do homework until my mom came home.

Anyway! I felt really grown up about my special “alone” routine, so one day I made the mistake of sharing this secret with my older cousin. Hillary* (*that’s not her name) is three years older than I am, but we spent every summer attached at the hip. The summer after I first discovered Literotica, I blabbed big time about my sexual awakening. Hillary quirked an eyebrow and asked if I wanted to see some real porn. To be honest with you, I didn’t. But, I had already made a big show out of it. It felt too late to dig myself out now.

That afternoon, along with some other cousins, we snuck into her mom’s bedroom and Hillary pulled out a shoebox full of old VHS porn from the 80s. My aunt had a secret stash underneath her work heels in the closet! I’m the youngest out of that pack of cousins, and Hillary is the oldest, so I can’t tell you how anyone else felt — but I was mortified! I felt so aware of how young I was as we piled together in the living room and watched on the VHS tapes with the volume on low. Somehow the difference between reading porn and watching it was way, waaaaay more than I could handle. I spent most of the time staring at my hands or the spot on the wall above the television console, anything to escape the situation!

Maybe the rest of the group was terrified or embarrassed too? We never spoke of that afternoon. Never, ever again.

KaeLyn, Staff Writer, 18, Oswego, NY

To be honest with you, the mid-late 90’s were all wrapped up in chat rooms which transitioned to AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and the internet was a new-ish and strange place for a hormonal bisexual teenager where dudes would send me dick pics that I definitely did not ask for. And because of that I can’t quite remember where my first glimpse of porn started and the unwanted dick pics/sex chats ended. I know I happened across porn around 16 or 17, probably as a result of sneakily searching for “sex” on AskJeeves.com in the school library (before content filters were a thing).

What I remember most vividly is my first time watching gay porn and that was in college, in my friend’s dorm room, in front of his desktop computer. It was these two young-ish men, one with dark hair and one with shaggy blond hair, and there was some light spanking and then some anal and it was… um… hot… and I think what was so hot about it was how earnest their desire for each other was. How their fucking was existing entirely outside of the heteropatriarchy and, like, I got it for the first time, that fucking each other is an act of queer resistance. I wrote a poem about it, actually, because I was a poetry major and that was kind of my whole deal back then. I just searched and thank all that is holy you can’t find “anal deliverance” online anywhere, but I’ll share it with you here behind the red curtain of A+. Please promise not to screenshot it and put it on twitter or tumblr, though, ok? I’m about to start promoting a YA book, so uh… not the best time for graphic poems about porn anal to surface. Also, please remember I was 18 and it was 2003 and that was a long time ago and I was really trying to be deep and stuff, so uh… be gentle (pun intended).

anal deliverance

aaron and i are watching
gay porn on his computer, streaming
video via webcam, a young couple from philadelphia
kissing on the screen. i think of my ex-boyfriend,
how we attempted anal last Xmas,
to prove our fucking was for pleasure, not some hetero, Catholic
animalistic, procreation bullshit. i couldn’t sit for two days
afterward, and there was blood
in the toilet every time i shit.

i watch the soft,
heavy bodies of the two men, penises blurry over the
webcam feed, and the intense, determined way they fuck,
the open gasp of the blond-haired boy as he is
penetrated, as though he is being transformed, as though
he could be. and he is praying, repenting his sins
in the shrouded confessional of
the world wide web to a
million horny priests, jacking off silently and
certain that he is damned. he is
confessing, a hard dick in his ass, while
his soft-faced partner grimaces and delivers a sermon
on sodom and gomorrah, leviticus, deuteronomy, and
all the homo sins of the universe.

when i fuck, legs spread
sacrificially, calloused hands holding
my arms over my head, i think of adam fucking
eve in that first moment of pleasure, her back curved
against the warm earth, newly naked, lips exploring, hips
pushing up screaming, discovering pure unadulterated electric
life, clit shivering, god worshipping, unashamed, alive, and i want to be
there, feel it. i want to fuck like that.

they are wild
now, moaning, gripping, coming
together, pumping sweaty to salvation, and
they are near, so close, fucking, fucking,
buttfucking all the way to eden.

Alyssa, Cartoonist, 13, Mom’s House

First of all, I know this isn’t technically watching porn. But my first memories of anything remotely like it, was watching MTV’s Undressed with the sound turned almost all the way down so my mom wouldn’t hear or know I was watching it. I remember most specifically being INVOLVED with a storyline involving queer boys. And I definitely think it was my very very early introduction to seeking it out. (And maybe the first time I realized that gay boys do something for me?) I can’t honestly remember my first memories of explicit porn viewing, because it’s gotten so blurry over the years. I’m almost entirely certain that I was hanging out with pals giggling about it because we were all “soooo bad!”

Porn eventually became a huge outlet in figuring myself out, exploring what turns me on, and feeling okay about it all. Yay porn.

Mey, Staff Writer, 17, Parent’s House

So, this is the first time I purposefully watched actual porn, like, not Titanic or something on HBO. My senior year of high school I started thinking more and more about trans women. I would purposefully seek out episodes of Maury or Jerry Springer that featured “women who were really men.” Eventually I started googling things related to that, seeing what I could find. I found lots of porn. Just about everything that I found was for trans sex workers. I was hypnotized by how beautiful and sexy these women were. Like, wow, the way they were women but they had parts of their bodies – their hands or chins or shoulders or genitals – that looked like my body. It was this whole new world opening up for me where I found a type of sex that actually seemed realistic for me. I didn’t have to imagine what it would be like being a man or having a completely different body in order to get turned on, I could just watch these videos. For a while I did that thing where I could tell if I was just really into looking at naked trans women because I was into them or because I wanted to be them, but hey, it turned out to be both! Happy ending.

Natalie, Staff Writer, 19, College Dorm Room

My exposure to porn was limited until I got to college — partly because growing up in a family of six didn’t allow for much private time but mostly because, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I was still grappling with a whole lot of hang-ups about sex and intimacy. Early in my sophomore year, Playboy’s Annual Girls of the ACC edition came out and a good friend of mine from high school was chosen as the Tar Heel representative. Eventually, I gave into my curiosity and went into a bookstore and, after meandering around for like 30 minutes, picked up a copy.

“My friend’s in it,” I remember saying to the cashier who eyed me suspiciously when I put the magazine on the counter, as if that made my purchase seem less weird.

As it turned out, seeing your high school friend pose nude isn’t enticing at all, but the rest of the magazine felt like a bit of an awakening. That one magazine opened up my mind to the value of pornography in my recovery. It allowed me to regain comfort with my feelings of attraction at my own pace, rather than throwing myself into ill-conceived relationships were the pace was set by expectation — his, hers, mine — instead. Soon thereafter, I’d gravitate towards watching porn instead of just looking at it or reading it (it’s not a lie, the articles in Playboy really are good).

Stef Schwartz, Vapid Fluff Editor, 16(?), Friend’s House

Um, I’m not honestly sure when my first exposure to porn was… I remember finding my dad’s Playboys in a dresser drawer when I was hunting through his belongings (during a quest to find definitive proof that the tooth fairy wasn’t real), and I remember that the women in the magazines made me feel uncomfortable in a really unfamiliar way. We got AOL when I was around 10 or so, which was way too young for a kid my level of weird to have access to the internet. Well before I knew what a search engine was I was looking up like, sex.com (Sure, that’s probably a thing!) to see what the hell that was all about. I didn’t know anything about deleting browser history though, and my dad definitely made fun of me about it at some point, thus humiliating me out of ever doing it again (JK, thus driving me to painstakingly research how to erase all the evidence). I was never allowed to have a computer in my own room, so my options were fairly limited.

The first time I can clearly remember watching an actual porn tape, I was about 16 and visiting friends in Ontario. A friend was having a party for New Years Eve and put a video on in the living room, mostly for us to laugh at. I can’t remember the context but it was probably one of those films where the beardy, muscly mechanic shows up to work on the nice lady’s car and yada yada yada. I do not remember feeling one way or another about it; porn always seemed really cartoonish and unnecessary to me until one day it… didn’t.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Staff Writer, 19ish?/Ann Arbor

I dealt with some serious sexual repression in my youth that pretty much all goes back to this one book my parents bought me that said all sorts of messed up and factually wrong stuff about sex. I never got a sex talk; I had to learn most things from pop culture and the internet! Porn scared me in more ways than one: I thought I was too inexperienced to know how to access it without accidentally welcoming a virus to my precious laptop. I had no idea how easy it was to just, like, search and find porn. So I just avoided it altogether! I have hazy memories of maybe accidentally seeing something porn-esque while clicking around the internet a.k.a. my favorite place in the world. But I looked away quickly enough that it didn’t really count.

(I did secretly watch a few episodes of The L Word and was 100% convinced it was basically porn.)

Then, I went to college, and I really wanted to have sex with women but also was terrified by that thought, so I buried it deep and remained extremely repressed and extremely horny. I don’t remember exactly when it happened or all the details, but I do know that I looked up lesbian porn at some point when I was alone in my dorm room, but I was so scared about my roommate coming in that I got all the way under a blanket to watch it? So I was in my little bed tent Googling “lesbian porn” or “lesbian sex” or something like that and, folks, I did not find the good stuff. I found the stuff that is made for hetero dudebros. I decided all porn was bad, which I’ve since learned is not necessarily true. But it honestly just isn’t really for me.

I really am one of those people who’s like yeah, so this porn is hot or whatever but like what about THE STORY? You know what gets me real horned up? A compelling narrative arc. Character development. Convincing performances. I’ll take a sexy fanfic or a sex scene in a TV show over porn aaaaany day.

Alexis, Staff Writer, 15 or 16/in my room

My friend told me to get a Tumblr after some junior event we had in high school. I remember signing up in the library and listening to her stories about how she talks to guys on there, so the first thing I did was make sure my ask box could be hidden because I certainly didn’t want any of that. All I can really remember is being fascinated with gifs (obviously) and just typing whatever problem I was going through (like needing to see Emily come out to her parents again and again in Pretty Little Liars) in the search bar that I wouldn’t dare ask anyone else. I got like more freewheeling with searches after I got a netbook for Christmas instead of sharing the family laptop. So I put in lesbian at one point, in high school. I was looking for help with my lesbianism that I refused to claim and Tumblr seemed like as good as place as any because 1) my family didn’t know what Tumblr was 2)I knew how to clear that history better since I was always on it (there was a time I forgot to clear the history on the family computer and that is why I was going in this direction anyways) and 3) I refused to pay (with what? my lunch money?) for tips on something that I didn’t even want to be. I think I was like surprised I could be aroused for like ten minutes and then immediately all my Catholic school training kicked in and I felt guilty for at least every waking moment for two weeks straight.

So really, I’d only seen clips in the form of gifs. I was too scared to click on links in case they’d open up flashing loud sites and my sister (who at the time wanted to be a nun) would ask me what was going on even though it’d be pretty obvious. The few times I was home by myself, it never occurred to me to look up porn, I was too busy thinking about self-harm in other ways that I knew worked for me. Usually I was too depressed and couldn’t really fathom adding more self-hate to that depression.

Anyways!

I didn’t really click with it because it was mostly femme white girls, which made the whole lesbian thing feel extra not right for me, and everyone’s fingernails were too long and no one seemed like they were having fun which was sUPER depressing because I thought that at least by the time you got to be older and this was consensual, you’d at least enjoy it???

To this day, I’m still not a huge fan of porn, (well watching it, reading it is another story (Kayla gets me)) just because like it’s my journey and shit. I just recently brought my problems around sex/porn/etc. up to my therapist and she seemed like hurt for me that I can’t watch porn with the sound turned on. Going by her reaction, I’m probably missing out on a great adventure but idk it kinda triggers me so honestly I’m gonna be missing out for a little while longer. I just can’t get into the whole porn-is-really-enjoyable-for-me!experience yet. I’m not really sure I ever will.

(A much better experience is that I know Soul Food doesn’t count as porn but little kid me did not know that because Nia Long sure did look like she was having bathroom sex in that movie and I am STILL sure that Michael Beach fucked Faith forreal and as much as I rewound that one scene with the volume super low and constantly making sure no one walked into the room, may as well have been porn I guess).

Valerie Anne, Staff Writer, 13ish/my room

I saw my first porn by accident. I was young, around 13, and I had a computer with internet in my room because my mother had my AOL account on “kids only” and she figured that meant I couldn’t find anything “bad” on the internet even if I tried. Little did she know I would find the very things she was trying to shield me from while trying to download music on Napster or Limewire. I don’t remember which came first, I just remember one of the files I thought was going to be the next track for my latest mix CD was actually a shaky, homemade video of two people having sex. Well, the floodgates were open and suddenly I was searching every sex word I had ever heard but didn’t understand and trying to find a video to explain what they were — sometimes getting the answers I was seeking, sometimes seeing things I wish to this day I could unsee. Before then, the closest thing to porn I had access to was the stories in random Cosmo issues I found at my friends’ houses, or the saucy role playing I’d stumble into in AOL chat rooms, so this was the next step I had been looking for. But it all felt purely educational until one day, around that same time, I was over my cousins’ house. Me and the youngest of them, only a year younger than me, stayed up extra late one night and he was flipping the channels, idly looking for something to watch. He stopped on an “adult” channel and there were a bunch of women together in a hot tub. He stopped changing channels and neither of us said a word. We watched for what felt like too long, neither of us moving or saying anything or even breathing, possibly. After what couldn’t have been longer than five minutes, we heard a noise and he quickly changed the channel, landing on some family-friendly movie and neither of us speaking of those five minutes ever again. In retrospect it’s weird I technically watched porn with my cousin, and I doubt he even remembers it, but it stirred up some… feelings that were one of the major red flags I would encounter in my young life that would clue me in to the fact that I was a raging lesbian. (Even though I would fight it until after college.) Even though I knew that lesbians existed, I don’t think I had ever considered the fact that women could also have sex with each other? Let’s just say my Limewire/Napster searches changed a little after that revelation.

Abeni, Staff Writer, 10 or 11, at home probably?

I’m sure my answer will be a bit different than most since I grew up as a boy and porn was a big deal, especially in the early days of the Internet. I don’t remember my exact first time, but I have a distinct memory of downloading pictures of Lara Croft, the heroine from the Tomb Raider video game series. This would have been in the mid-90s, on my dial up connection, so it took forever to get one photo. I remember printing two or three pictures out, of Croft’s animated topless body, and hiding them somewhere in my bedroom, where they were promptly discovered by a parent. I don’t think I got in trouble or even a talking to.

In terms of like, video, Cinemax had late-night softcore porn programming (either it was officially called or we called it “Skinemax”) and the parents of a friend of mine in middle school had cable. During a sleepover at said friend’s house, we watched a show called “Bedtime Stories,” which was really silly but featured breasts and people pretending to have sex. I don’t know how the other boys watched porn with each other — it was always just super awkward for me. Soon after I jumped full-on into Christianity and renounced porn for a while. There was a Guinness Book of World Records book I had, though, that had a picture of Cindy Margolis — at the time, apparently the “most downloaded woman” or something — and I would put my finger over her bikini bottom and imagine what was underneath.

Reneice, Staff Writer, 9 or 10/HBO After Dark

The first time I saw porn I was at a sleepover. It was with a group of people of varying ages and one of the older attendees suggested that we put a sheet over the television, put it on mute, and watch “adult stuff” on HBO. I had no idea what that meant but went along with it to be cool and next thing I knew I was watching an episode of Real Sex and did NOT know what to do. It was so cool and overwhelming and terrifying cause our literal cover could have been blown at ANY MINUTE. Fortunately it wasn’t (I truly don’t know how because it was the quietest we had EVER been and for such a long time which is a dead giveaway that children are up to no good but parenting was a whole different beast back then) and we even had time to watch an episode of Taxi Cab Confessions too before anyone bothered to check on what we were doing. Given my porn origin being one shrouded in secrecy, but also in a group setting I still have a strange relationship with it. I feel like I have to keep my enjoyment of porn a complete secret, but also most enjoy it when watched with others which makes things kind of complicated.

Laura M, Staff Writer, 12 maybe/internet porn ad

The first piece of pornography I ever saw was a banner ad for a porn website — I don’t know which — where a blonde woman was sucking a disembodied white dick. It was just her face and the dick; she licked it like a push pop, her head bobbing up and down, a hungry look in her eyes. The dick sort of squished to the side. And because I was like, 12, I had never seen a penis up close before? So I didn’t recognize what it was. It was just this weirdly intense gif loop, which I stared at in uncomprehending fascination for a couple minutes before I put the puzzle pieces together and understood what I was looking at… at which time I felt mortified and closed out immediately.

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