Formative Experiences with Nude Imagery

June 17th, 2011

Sometimes, when I search the internet for what might seem at first to be an impossibly esoteric piece of masturbation fuel and I inevitably find it within five clicks, I wonder in which ways my libido and sexual proclivities would be different had I grown up in the age of the web. What does immediate access to the entire gamut of great and terrible filth do to a soul when its id is not yet permanently imprinted with whatever sick shit will be its catalogue of preferences? Does the internet, with its infinite choices, lead to jadedness and cynicism when it comes to, um, matters of the flesh? That seems like too easy an answer. It’s also the answer that a senior-editor-at-a-major-American-newspaper (read: sophisticated Luddite) would be likely to give. But I think that the web-porn cornucopia could just as easily have the opposite effect on kids—could be an energizing force. Maybe that virtual morass of parts, acts, and fluids could be engendering a new breed of fearless, highly evolved sexborgs. When I was young, seeing the most basic images of naked women made me want to get started on the whole puberty deal right quick. What sort of effect would seeing (just an example here) videos of ‘interracial, BBW, real hometown amateurs’ pissing and spitting on each other while strapped to a basement wall above a workbench laden with two-foot dildos and diesel-powered vibrators have had on me?

Since porn at a level of such complication and specificity as the above is more like vaudeville than anything else and thus becomes essentially slapstick, the reality of its effect on the young is probably innocuous: Internet-era kids will start having sex maybe a year earlier, on the average, than my generation did. They also might be a little quicker to jump into the rarefied air of anal, threeways, bisexuality, bondage, and what have you. Because guess what. My peers and I—arguably the final group of teens to grow up sans web—got into plenty of Sodom-and-Gomorrah activity, plenty young. Maybe the only difference is that we came to it a little less prepared, less visually acclimated, than kids today. They can hop online, dismantle their parents’ attempts at web security, and see anything, anytime.

I’m 35. I come from an era in which pre-teens had to go on cultural-archeological digs not just for porn, but also for punk music, so-called art house movies, strange literature, and underground comics. We shoplifted, sent away for zines and catalogs, and traded with each other to get our hands on contraband materials. But something we probably have in common with the youth of today, and all kids ever, is that when we were even younger, images seem to have sought us out—not the other way around. That brings me, finally, to the subject of this post, which is a few of the images that, at some point early in my life, lodged themselves into the nascent “this is what turns you on” portion of my brain. These things are running around in there even now, perhaps a little more spectral with each year, but working their influence nonetheless.

(Before I start, I’d just like to mention that the first recorded instance of me being sexually curious was when I was 4 years old and, while obsessed with Grease, saying to my mother, “I can’t stop thinking about Olivia Newton-John naked.”)

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CHORUS GIRLS OF WEIMAR GERMANY
My grandfather had the complete set of Time-Life books on World War II. I went leafing through the first volume looking for photos of Nazis to be scared of, but instead I came across these Frauleins. There was a chapter on the decadence of pre-war Berlin and it opened with a double-page photograph of topless German chorus girls onstage in a nude, we’re-soon-to-be-Eva-Braun version of Paris’s Folies Bergère. This was the first time that I realized there exists in the world a seemingly endless series of variations upon the basic theme of breasts-and-nipples. What was small and perky on one Weimar girl might be pendulous and puffy on the girl next to her, and so on, ad infinitum. I recruited my cousins, a brother-and-sister team, to corroborate my discovery. This quickly, inexplicably, led to us grabbing a tape recorder and a blank cassette and recording ourselves chirping, “Titties! Boobies! Nips!” into it. I would like to hear that tape today, but I imagine that at some point my grandmother found it and, hopefully, threw it out without listening to it.

One final (Freudian) note on this one: Later that same year I used a pocketknife to carve up the cover of the book. I don’t recall my motivations, but make of it what you will. My best guess is vestigial Catholic shame and a typically violent vestigial Catholic response to it. I was 6, maybe 7, years old.

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PARTIALLY NUDE FEMALE GNOME
People who are near me in age might remember the brief fad in the late ‘70s for a Swedish book called Gnomes. It was a faux-field guide that explained the lives, customs, history, and physiology of the mythical Scandinavian gnome. It was an oversized book, copiously illustrated with beautiful drawings, one of which was a representation of a blushing, topless gnome girl. This picture enacted a weird fascination over me. I’d drag the book off the shelf, open to the appropriate page, and gaze at the hefty, rosy tits of… a gnome. But looking back now, I wonder if this is really so odd. Let’s not forget R. Crumb’s admitted childhood sexual attraction to Bugs Bunny. At least the gnome girl was humanoid, even though she was a drawing of a made-up species of underground-dwelling, ankle-high endomorphs.

I still have the book today, and she still looks pretty good.

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RINGO STARR’S NUDE GIRLFRIEND
My mother and stepfather had a copy of the January 1981 issue of Playboy, I think because it contained an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They kept it by the side of their bed. Once I became cognizant of its presence, I waited until they were both out, crept into their room, and took a look. The cover model was Ringo Starr’s then-girlfriend, an actress named Barbara Bach. In the photo, she stands in a witchy, gauzy, Stevie Nicks-y dress against a backdrop painted to look like a night sky full of stars. I remember opening the magazine, and I remember being distinctly unimpressed by what I found inside. Maybe, to break through the miasma of such a young kid’s sexual bewilderment, I needed something far, far less subtle. A real hammer to the head. And that was coming soon.

But first, a tangent. A few years later, I got a look at a copy of the Madonna issue of Playboy. I remember this being distinctly more thrilling. Not only was I then, somewhere inside, already a bubbling cauldron of testosterone, but there was also the added thrill of seeing someone nude who we weren’t “supposed” to see that way. Even so, the adrenaline wore off quickly. She had hairy armpits. I was from New Jersey in the 1980s, not Clichy in the 1930s. (I grew out of that, of course, and don’t care about pit hair one way or another as an adult. Just FYI, since you were so curious.)

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PREGNANT BIKER MAMA
One of my uncles was a biker—like an affiliated-with-a-gang, stable-of-motorcycles-owning, ‘outlaw’ biker—and, therefore, he possessed biker porn. One day my cousin (his son) and I dove into the stash, which my uncle kept in plain sight in his workshop. I don’t remember much in terms of details—it’s more a blur of pasty, hairy bodies contorted into various unpleasant shapes. But the afterimage of one specific page has never been far from my mind since that day in 1985. In it, a skinny-yet-potbellied gentleman with a full, bushy beard is orally ministering to a heavily pregnant young biker lady with long, straggly hair and a confused expression on her face. The pull-quote, which was almost as big as the photo, read as follows, verbatim: “Knocked-up cooze is the best!”

Just thinking about it right now makes me involuntarily shudder.

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SAD PHOTO HASTILY STOLEN FROM MÖTLEY CRÜE FORT
The house where I spent the bulk of my childhood backed up on a vast expanse of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. Miles upon miles of pitch pine, blueberry bushes, cedar lakes, swamps, ferns and sassafras, right behind our duplex condo. It was possible to become irrevocably lost out there. One could wander for hours without seeing another person. It was on one such walk that I came upon a hidden fort. It was a tiny plywood box with a roof and everything. There was a ragged hole punched in one wall to let the sun in. The floor was covered with dank carpet remnants. It smelled, and I’m sure if I could go back there knowing what I came to learn a few years later, I’d identify that stench as the ripe evidence of a spilled bong. There was a poster of Mötley Crüe in Shout At The Devil­­-era regalia tacked up. I realized that the teen creeps who did their dirty business in there might show up at any time, and so I quickly started to exit. As I did, I saw a pile of porn mags on the floor. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sneak an entire magazine back into my house unnoticed, but I figured a smaller trophy wouldn’t be a problem. I grabbed from the top of the stack, flipped to the back pages and, quickly, without looking, tore out a hunk of paper. Then I was out and gone. I never tried to find the Crüe fort again. It would have been like returning to the lair from which you’d successfully stolen a gold trinket from a family of trolls.

When I got back to my bedroom, I pulled my little porn-scrap from my pocket. The only image intact on it was a black-and-white photo of a woman with massive—I mean large to the point of deformation—breasts, photographed from the waist up. These were the kind of breasts that permanently damage a person’s back if they aren’t surgically reduced. She had the same hairstyle as Loni Anderson on WKRP. There was a partially readable phone number printed below her. The final few digits had been left behind. I kept that piece of paper under my mattress and made a habit of pulling it out when I got a minute to myself. I was still too young to utilize it, but I had some sort of instinct that, when I stared at the grainy photo of a woman with painfully enlarged tits, I was seeking the solution to a riddle. Does that sound like conveniently poetic retrospection? It’s not. I clearly remember knowing there was a question to be answered there and I not only didn’t know the answer—I hadn’t even been asked yet.

One day, I went to retrieve the porn-scrap and it was gone.

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NAKED HIPPIES IN WHOLE EARTH CATALOG
If bikers represented the coke-addled, kill-you-for-your-muffler side of hippiedom, then The Whole Earth Catalog represented the polar opposite—the earthy, “Going Up The Country,” back-to-the-land folks. The WEC was like a Bible and an almanac, chock full of info and resources related to gardening, roofing, midwifing, canning, and livestock-raising. It was basically Survivalism 101, but with a sunny, optimistic bent. It was kind of a great publication. We had one of them floating around our house, and there were two photos in there that probably had something to do with me developing an enduring Grateful Dead fixation around the age of 9. One picture was in the context of, if I recall correctly, a section on “female sexuality.” It was a basic photo of a pretty, nude hippie girl looking sort of pre- or post-masturbatory—though I didn’t know that then. She just looked really, really relaxed. Then there was a photo of two hippie women outside, gardening, wearing nothing but granny panties. Reflecting upon that image now, at least the way I remember it, I see one of the women leaning down to hoe the ground, causing her stomach to fold up a little. That little stomach ripple (get it, “Ripple”?) still does something to me when I see it on women today. Thanks, Whole Earth Catalog.

I’m going to spare you the remainder of this litany, which includes things like the hardcore bondage magazine with the cover image depicting a bound woman having her breast fake-cut by a fake-sadist, stage blood running down her torso, and the first porno movie I saw, a piece of 70s weirdness called Education of the Baroness, which unsettled me with a scene in which a blind man unwittingly gets a blowjob from his sister.

Early in junior high, things started to rush by more quickly. Puberty struck. It got weird. To put it simply, I became more proactive. I discovered that our cable service let me hear but not see the pay-per-view porn they offered. Our stereo was rigged up to our TV, so I recorded onto audio cassettes the sounds of such gems as Oriental Spice (the theme song went: “Oriental Spice… feels so nice”). I also started staking out the mailbox, waiting for each new Victoria’s Secret catalog, which I’d intercept and stash away.

There’s more, lots more. But let’s not get into all that now.

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Nostalgic Anxiety