Dan Doesn’t Know
Dan doesn’t know the meaning of the word “Porn”,
and this makes his mom happy.
She smiles. He smiles.
They smile at each other.
He smiles at me, and…
and somehow his smile is ever so slightly different than
when he was smiling at his mother.
Yes, his right eyebrow rises ever so,
and just what is he communicating at this precise moment?

I do not doubt that Dan knows what “sex” is.
I mean, everybody knows what sex is, right?
How about a show of hands?
Sex everybody?
As the Brits would say:
“A bit of the ol’ in out, in out.”
Intercourse.
Biological reproduction.

Okay. Okay.
We acknowledge that it exists.
Having done so, have we
past over into the realm of porn yet?
Okay then, so, women
have breasts.
Having openly admitted this phenomenon exists
does not necessarily qualify my remark as
pornographic, but
if I make an aesthetic judgment and state,
“Hey! Nice boobies!”,
have I passed over the threshold and into porn-dom?
A matter of aesthetics?
Porn?
Assessing quality of sexual appearance?
Porn?

If I say a woman has nice child bearing hips,
is that porn or simply observing that
she has attributes conducive to
safely ejecting newborns?
Breasts advantageous to suckling—good.
Breasts attached to a woman running down the beach—bad.
Damn it! It’s just a matter of
thinking about it too much.
If you don’t think about sex,
you’re perfectly okay.
If you think about it too much,
you’re a freakin’ pervert.
Naivety.
Naivety.
Naivety.
One must remain naïve. And…
well…
was there ever a time when
one can imagine that I was naïve?

Oh, we have to go way back in time.
A time when I was younger than Dan
(let’s say, Eight? Nine?).
Yes, it was around this time that a certain
visual initiation transpired.

There in my home town,
so very long ago,
some of the older boys informed those of us younger
that they had something very special to share with us.
But…
And they were very strict about this…
This something was of the utmost secrecy,
and under pain of death,
we could tell no one.

We went to this large tin storage structure
and there, up a ladder and
wedged behind one of the support beams,
one of the boys produced an old Prince Alpert tobacco tin.
Opening it, he pulled out an ancient
multi-folded sheet of paper.
In reality, it was just a magazine clipping,
and once unfolded,
there placed in our trembling hands
lay a black and white image of…
a woman’s nether regions!

The picture?
We are talking extreme close-up.
Extreme.
We are not talking erotic.
Not even pornographic.
We are talking
gynecological.

There was nothing sexy here.
For us young boys,
it was like looking at an alien life-form.
We were mesmerized and yet
repulsed at the same time.
In hindsight, I figure if that photo had been of
a woman portrayed full figure and naked,
a few of us young boys might have achieved a
state of arousal,
but as it was,
the tattered clipping was passed boy to boy,
with each emitting a resounding
“Gosh!” as he slipped into shock.


So, Dan…
There you have it.
Your mother is right to protect you, and yet…
when it comes right down to it,
there are worse things than porn.
As a young man,
there are traumatic experiences out there awaiting you.

Beware Dan.
There will come that time when
that girl you are so intimate with will test your
total emotional commitment
by sending you into a pharmacy to buy a box of
tampons.
At that moment,
all that innocence your mom tried so hard to
preserve in you will be flushed away and lost.
And you?
You will finally be a man, or…
something somewhat close to that.

©05 Jack Hubbell