Pornography, love, and adolescence

When I was eleven years old our cable company made a simple but influential mistake. They included Cinemax in our television cable package for reasons totally unexplained. It was like Christmas came early. Their mistake was my introduction to sexuality. Cinemax, or "Skinemax" as my friends used to call it, is a premium channel that plays big-budget film productions by day and low-budget soft-core pornography by night. As this was the early 1990's, this cable company error was accompanied by the dawn of internet still-life pornography which served to supplement the eager and uninformed teenaged minds of myself and neighborhood friends. As a result, a multimedia education regarding sexuality emerged.

Even at that age I figured that this was an unrealistic portrayal of sex. Women were presented as objects for the sole purpose of satisfying the sexual urges of men. However, I think that the desperation for interaction with girls was enough to make these scenarios not only appealing but vital. The confusion of male adolescence sets the stage for the hope for female touch, even if this is only via the voyeurism of pornography. Adolescence is a particularly unusual period as it is likely the longest period in a male's life when skin-to-skin interaction is a distant memory or not remembered at all as it was already a decade past. As a result, a vacuum of tactile experience is created for which pornography serves as an indirect and bizarre educator. These films are strange in that love never makes an appearance while lust plays prominently and frequently to the point where the narrative itself is paper-thin. Pornographic films hardly make sense from a story point-of-view. The screenwriters correctly realize that issues of dialogue, plot and character development aren't valuable to their viewership.

I am confident that even the most seemingly tough teenaged male longs for the sensuality of human touch. I don't believe his desire is borne out of the wish to brag to friends regarding sexual conquest, although this likely plays a part. Notches in bedposts aren't the center of this urge. As the childhood body and mind evolve into the teenaged body and mind, a revolt against human touch e.g., the forehead kiss by a parent is accompanied by the desperate wish to be intimate with another. The teenager attempts to reconcile this contradiction via pornography and is often met with punishment by parents despite the adolescent being helpless to his confusion that is only amplified by biological drive.

When I was in high school I felt jarred by the juxtaposition of my desire to be in a romantic relationship with the appeal of what I saw in pornographic film. As I would frequently accompany my family to classic Sandra Bullock/Meg Ryan romantic comedies, I fell in love with love. I could watch While You Were Sleeping or Sleepless in Seattle over and over. Mine was a love that wasn't centered around sex like the pornography I had seen. This was doe-eyed romance. However, this couldn't totally satisfy the powerful hormonal pushes and pullings I felt. I think one of the most difficult things about being a teenager is trying to manage one's own confused lust with the simultaneous hope of curling up in the dimples of 90's-era Meg Ryan. The desire for intense physicality smashes headlong into the childlike wonder of actual romance in a perplexing and unsatisfying way. I felt dirty watching pornography but I also felt pathetic wanting to date Sandra Bullock. A "connection" with a woman seemed either like an exercise in sexual domination as portrayed in pornography or a fantastically impossible experience as seen in the romantic comedies which made me swoon.

It feels trite to say, "hang in there" to all those thirteen to seventeen-year-olds who feel confronted by these seemingly opposite experiences of love and sexuality, but its really true. At some point the two will intersect in a way that's not awkward and horrible. I'd like to suggest to parents to not be disgusted by your adolescent's desire to view pornography. Overall I think many teenagers are just seeking to unify the power of lust that constantly shakes their bodies with the melting desire for romance that seems impossibly far away. At the time, both desires seemed heartbreakingly mutually exclusive to me.