When I was a little kid being allowed to look things up on the internet for the first time, my mom gave me a Talk on Internet Safety. There were Things On The Internet, she explained. Inappropriate Things. Things I Was Too Young To See.
Little me felt that I was a Girl Of The World. I had Seen Things, I pointed out. We had gone to the art museum; we had visited the part with the ancient Greek and Roman statues. I had seen (sotto voce) naked people. Not just in skimpy clothing, or underwear, or even a fig leaf, but entirely naked! There was nothing left for me to see!
My (poor, patient) mother sighed. No, she explained, there were Other Things. Things I Had Not Seen. Things Of Which I Did Not Know. They were on the internet, and I was to avoid them.
It was clear that this was the Parental Final World. But Small Me was left terribly, terribly curious. I’d thought I’d understood how things worked – a picture of a person in regular clothes was modest; a picture of a person in a little less than that, like Marilyn Monroe with her skirt being blown up, was a little bit racy; a picture of a person in underwear was pretty much a sex thing; and a picture of a totally naked person was (if it wasn’t art or anatomy) pornography.
So how could there be something more so than a totally naked person? What could this wrong forbidden inappropriate unnatural thing be?
The sequence so far had made sense! Less clothes, more inappropriate! And eventually you got down to nothing at all at which point you’d seen everything there was to see and nothing was left private anymore and married people could engage in baby-producing activities!
So I mulled this over for a long time. And finally, I came to a conclusion:
Clearly, the next step in the sequence had to be taking off your skin.
This was extremely explanatory! No wonder this Secret Thing was so wrong – you had to skin someone alive to produce it! No wonder they didn’t want kids seeing it – how traumatic! This really was a Perverted Deviance Of Modern Society!
Small Me proceeded to make the obvious series of extrapolations from this. There would be videos of people slowly and sexily removing their own skin, or other people’s skin, of course. There’d be images arranged to look like someone was removing their skin when they really weren’t. Some truly disturbed perverts would be watching videos where the muscle was stripped off, to show organs and bones. And no wonder sex slavery and prostitution were so horrifying, if women were being forced into that.
(Yes. Yes, I was familiar with the concept of prostitution but couldn’t figure out the concept of porn. What can I say; I had a classical education. Turns out one of those comes up in Great Literature a lot more often than the other.)
In any case, Small Me continued to operate under this assumption for quite some time, happy in its explanatory power, and feeling Terribly World-Wise And Jaded. (And occasionally feeling vaguely guilty that clearly I was not nearly so innocent as my mother thought.)
Finding out what pornography actually involved was kind of anticlimactic, really.
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