Thursday, May 21, 2009

Moving Day and Porn

I am moving out of Grand Forks, and heading to the big city! Well, no, not really- I'm actually just heading to Minneapolis/ St. Paul. But, bigger city at least :).

Over at Punkassblog, there's a great discussion going on about porn; who looks at it, the type consumed, and what it says for the feminist movement. Now, I'm a pretty sex-positive feminist: I look at porn, and I would never advocate for it to be banned, though I do think that misogynistic porn is still bad (wow, is that a simplistic analysis). But I wasn't always like this.

When packing up, you find weird things. One of the things I found was a planner from my senior year of high school, which I brought to college because I thought I would use the "quick fact sheet" in the front (FYI, I did not. You almost never use that stuff you learn in school, particularly in mathematics, unless that's what you go into.) And, I found in the back of it a conversation that I had with a friend of mine, that just so happened to be about porn.

A- "You wanna go to Minot tonight? Pleasure Palace here we come! You're 18 now, we have to go!"

Me- I have absolutely no desire to go to porno areas. I'll allow, but not participate. Besides, if I wanted to, I could get the real thing.

God, I was a snot. At this time in my life I was full on in my "saving myself for marriage, it's against God's will to pleasure myself", la la la, hypocritical bullshit. This was even more hypocritical when at this time in my life, I didn't believe a single word of it- god was no more real to me than the tooth fairy, but I wanted everyone to believe I was a good person, and the easiest way to do that was to be a "Good Christian Girl" (TM). I might have not masturbated, nor had sex, but my boyfriend and I had done everything but have sex. We would get all hot and heavy, and stop when I really wanted it, then congratulate myself on this restraint.

Possible TMI warning- but that vaunted virginity lasted about one year after this conversation. Guess I wasn't saving myself for marriage- I was saving myself for college.