Pornography: God's Little Miracle

When my children ask me, "Daddy, where do babies come from?" I am not going to pussyfoot around. I am going to tell them the truth, just as my father told me. I will sit them down, arranged according to their various ethnicities, and tell them, "babies are made when Mommy is really mad at Daddy so she tricks him into thinking they have an open marriage based on mutual chemical dependencies with strictly recreational sex, then one night she pokes a pin-sized hole in her diaphragm through which some of his high-potency semen escapes and this is how babies are made." And when they ask me, "Daddy, where does pornography come from?" I will tell them, "God's special fleet of Pornography Angels," because it's true.

Children seem to have a natural enhanced sense that pornography is lying around somewhere. When I was littler, I would be walking down the street and undoubtedly miss all of the serendipitous treasures lying about - dropped 50 dollar bills, wallets, prescription drugs, coupons for Steak-ums - but my eye would never, ever miss that very special flash of pink on glossy paper peeking out from beneath the shrubs or at curbside. This would happen to me over and over again. I would be on my way to little league or Esperanto classes or something and I would come across a torn page from Oui magazine, wrinkled and creased into an abstract design of gleaming wet and pubis which I would have to examine for a good ten minutes like a Highlights magazine picture before making visual sense of the lewdness that graced this page in its reconstructed state. (I regarded the time spent trying to mentally reconstruct porn as some sort of academic field research, like trying to piece together the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was, of course, not an archeologist; I was an idiot.)

Stranger still would be finding entire bound magazines lying in the street (or my dad's lap while he was sleeping). But, although all of the pages would be intact, still bound between their greasy covers, the magazine itself would usually be jaggedly ripped in half. Essentially, you would be staring at half-mast, incomplete porn, its torso cleaved from its nether regions. Somewhere, dearest god in heaven, its twin rested. Probably between the hands of another half-wit kid like me, wondering why he was looking at an entire magazine devoted to disembodied vaginas. Summoning nearly all of my psychic powers (I say nearly all because if I summon all of my psychic powers, I usually wind up soiling myself), I would try to send a Wonder Twins message out to that other kid, my doppelganger of smut. I don't think I ever saw an entire, intact naked woman until I was 23 years old (and that wasn't for long, either. The circumstances were strange, indeed, because as she was taking off the last remaining articles of clothing while I began buttering my body in anticipation like Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, a low-flying cropduster airplane swooped down and tore off her entire torso, scattering it for miles. I remember thinking to myself, as the warm butter began to congeal, "man, some little kids somewhere are going to be really happy when they find this.")

My point is - and I assure you there is a point, although I have been criticized by some of the greater minds of the online community for tending to avoid things like points - all of this pornography must come from somewhere. I used to think that my childhood discoveries of half-torn pages of nude women were unique but have learned since that most guys I know have chanced upon pornography in completely similar circumstances (a couple of guys actually told me that they had found pornography in my dad's lap as well which I think is pretty ironic, though not impossible, as my dad was almost never without a lap full of pornography): shiny, grimy snatches of pink, torn from some of America and Europe's finer strokebooks. Which leads me to believe this is not a coincidence alone. Enter: Pornography Angels.

Someone somewhere is spreading the wealth, making sure all good little boys are regularly thinking about perverse sexuality, no matter how old they are. I believe, whether these Angels are actually heavenly bodies or whether they are simply a public service to all children everywhere, there has been a concentrated effort to sprinkle the planet with bits of porno dust. If you concentrate hard enough, you can even picture them, sitting in a giant warehouse, with a map of the world and color-coded blinking lights identifying international locations of elementary schools, little league fields, and vacant lots. As dispatchers order these Angels to descend on their region, in another room there are day laborer-type angels in hairnets, sitting at a long table which seems to stretch to eternity. They are tearing up back issues of Swank, Hustler, Penthouse, and Good Housekeeping, ripping magazines in two, tearing up pictures and stuffing them into sacks printed with words like, "West Park Babe Ruth little league, Angleville, MO."

There must also be some measure of quality control, to ensure that every scrap of picture has at least something sleazy in it. Pictures of stomachs, feet, and faces are immediately burned into dust and spread out over the Atlantic Ocean, while breasts, legs, etc. are saved and catalogued. I can picture a Quality Control Manager standing over one of his workers: "Look here, Earl (author's note: that seems like an appropriate name for an angel of pornography, I think). You can clearly tell that this is a woman performing oral sex on another woman. I mean, check it out. You can see mouth on labia, the entire head and torso of the recipient, and a good deal of the face of the woman performing these delightful sexual services. This will not do. 10 year old boys are not ready for this degree of smut. I mean, shit, we might as well just mail them a goddamn subscription to Black Pussy. Why don't you take a break or something, get your head together. Here, grab a Hustler. There's a great article in that one on Lacanian cultural theory, with some pictures of old ladies sitting on the crapper.

The juicy bits of porn must then be distributed freely by Courier Angels. I have always pictured them looking a bit like the kinds of skinny single men you see shuffling down the street, badly balding guys in steel frame David Koresh-style glasses and vermin-shaped mustaches wearing worn-in brown corduroy pants and greasy blue down feather jackets no matter the weather. These guys always seem to be carrying around unidentified packages. And these are guys who don't seem to have too many materialistic requirements. Generally, this type of character has a very serious unemployed edge to him, so it leads me to believe he is doing some sort of public service to fill the day. I think those paper bags, those wrinkled up grocery sacks are probably filled with scraps of porn to be scattered around like Easter eggs for all good little boys to find.

So when my children and I inevitably have that conversation, as I did with my own father, I won't take the easy way out by filling my ears with cotton and loudly quoting passages from the Book of Revelations. Instead, I will take their hands, polish those hands, then give them back. And then I will take my kids for a walk to the nearest pee wee t-ball league, and let them find out for themselves where pornography comes from.

letigre@smug.com

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