Forbidden

I live in my parents home, a girl child, and I'm sitting on the floor of a grotesquely pink bedroom with red shag carpet. Caught between the never ending dilemma of right and wrong I'm stewing in a pit of delicious guilt trying to consider if I'm a bad girl or not. So, I like the attention afforded me by being a cheap broker for my dad's porn chest but I feel sleazy for letting these boys come in my home and get their fix. I can only imagine the massive ruination of tube socks and disappearing jars of Vaseline across town tonight but that's not really my concern. To be honest I'm too selfish to even consider the consequences of my actions. To consider if I'm opening up the door to female exploitation for these horny little boys or if I'm perpetuating sad ideas of women as sex objects- bald as babies from the neck down, mammaries the size of boulders to suckle even balder men. To consider the affects being a ringmaster to the porn chest might have on me and my budding sexual identity. No, instead I wonder if I'm a bad girl because I, too, like looking at these women, legs spread apart with the f*** me hard look in their eyes. I like that the boys want to come to My house, are paying some small measure of attention to Me, and if I'm so lucky, are imagining my face on the naked bodies they're imagining in bed tonight while they ruin another pair of tube socks.

Oh sure, I knew I was a good girl. Isn't that what all the adults around me were constantly intoning over and over again. "Isn't Charlene such a good girl?" "Aren't your parents so proud of you?" If they weren't fawning over my report cards full of A's they were referring to my general ability to excel at what all "good girls" do- obey. I had a severe case of this do-as I'm-told disorder that I'm still recovering from in my early 30ies. The truth is that I craved attention. Isn't that the modus operandi of adolescence? Who likes me and who doesn't? Who's looking at me and who isn't? All of my measures were weighed against the stereotypical female subplots of boys and physical appearance. It took me a few more years and a few more trips to the library with armloads of Betty Friedan and books with titles like Cunt: A Declaration of Independence to be able to attract attention and value it in different ways but there, on the red shagged bedroom floor of my parent's 1970's split-level I craved it and the only ways I knew to get it were by having boys want me. And of course by offering library cards to my dad's extensive porn collection.

Oh, he had it all. Big 'Uns (how did those women walk upright?), Small 'Uns (there were a lot of these to my surprise until I remembered my mother's own tiny breasts), the classy Playboy and the raunchy Hustler. My heart would pound with adrenaline as I sat crouched in their bedroom after school and studied their hairless bodies, winced at the sharpness of manicured red fingernails pulling and prodding at places I was always careful to only inspect with freshly clipped nails. I stared blankly at cartoons way beyond my understanding and in general marveled and basked in the full frontal dirtiness of the adult world. So this is what it means to be "sexy", I thought. Or mental note-these are the types of faces one should make when experiencing sexual pleasure. I was a focused study.

But even still, the issue of being a good girl still disturbed. There seemed only to be two options, the good girl I practiced for the adults in my life, and the bad one I pretended to be in my bedroom when no one was home. There were so few real female role models for me. There were of course my teachers (good girls) and the women who taught me dance (very good girls). There were the mothers of my friends (good girls to my knowledge) and my own mother whose naughty naked Polaroids I had found in my dad's chest (bad girl). There she was, standing with one leg atop the infamous chest with freshly sharpened manicured fingers spreading such a small and tender little place for the unforgiving instant camera. I remember cocking my head a little at the look on her face. My own mother seemed to have so little in common with the other women in the magazines that I had seen doing the exact same things. Hadn't she just cooked me Campbell's minestrone and a grilled cheese sandwich? Their faces were so... magazine. They looked like they were enjoying themselves, wanted You to enjoy yourself, and were generally having fun. You know, like they were going out for ice cream after and you weren't. But there was something different in my own mama's eyes. Sadness. Fear. Overexposure. A lack of light. As a grown woman today I would love to hear her side of the story. Whose idea were those pictures mom? (My dad's.) Did you like doing them? (I'd never get the truth here.) Did you feel powerful or powerless when they were taken? Are you proud of them? Did you do it for him or for you? I wish at that moment that I had the courage to ask those same questions of the women who I looked at in the magazines. But I had neither the maturity or intellectual muscle to even sniff in that direction. It would take me years to question the link between my father's affinity for pornography and the violence he committed against my mother. It would take me even longer to heal my own sexual identity with the help of my best friend and years of a healthy marriage under my belt.

As for the porn chest, it had it's run. If I thought it was popular with me and my friends I obviously was too busy to notice the traffic it received from my brother and his friends. Oh, we were the house of smut and pubescent enlightenment. I laugh now at my parent's blind trust or complete naivete. I can't imagine they would have approved of us romping through their pornography, it wasn't exactly pulled out at the dinner table nor was it among the choices of bedtime stories. But there it was, unlocked, with its white poster legs and fuzzy yellow top, inviting all to partake of its cheap entertainment. Apart from the damage it caused I still think of it fondly. A treasure chest of sorts. All good treasure offers something a bit more colorful than gold. Something fuzzier and grayer than black and white. Something more complex than the good girl story vs. the bad.