1.10.2011

boobs, good ol' boobs

Remember the days when kids who had just hit puberty had to weasel around to get their mitts on pictures of naked people doing raunchy things? When I was a kid not only did I have to walk through the snow for miles to get to school but I had to be sneaky and find time alone to read about what happened at the doctor's office when the buxom nurse came in. How was it that these people found a doctor who's office wasn't chilled to a goose flesh inducing 58 degrees? And how did the nursing staff maintain such a high level of patient satisfaction all day? They worked an eight hour shift like everyone else, no?

In the new millennium, some really innocent sounding Google searches will produce images of the most atrocious things in people's keisters. Gadzooks! Who posts this stuff? Very little of the crazy weird porn floats my boat, but I am a really big fan of naked ladies. I can't get enough. If you want to careen off the road while I'm driving just mutter, "Naked people." We'll fly headlong into the gravel shoulder as I whip my head around trying to spot the aforementioned flesh while hollering, "Where? Where! I want to see naked people!" Naturally, with my particular orientation, I'd prefer the naked people be ladies... in their 20s or 30s... and jumping around... maybe wearing squirrel masks... Ahem... I could spend hours piddling around looking at boobs, good ol' boobs, and "Pictures of Lilly" by The Who could be my theme song. Other parts are good too but honestly the porn these days makes me grimace within the first few minutes after the initial excitement of, "Naked Ladies!" I don't know, I just miss the days when people still had some hairy bits and the porn was just kind of embarrassingly dumb. Now, so much of it is embarrassingly violent... and embarrassingly available. Plus the giant boob thing was more of an occasional side show and there were no inflate-o-chests with painful looking balloons sitting just below the collar bones. I'm not going to claim that the porn of yesteryear was less exploitative, more socially responsible, or that it had any resemblance to real human sexuality. The stuff has always been kind of ickified, but the old dirty magazine under the bed at least seemed contained... kept at bay... like it knew it shouldn't be out in public.

When I was five or six I laid eyes on one of my first boob pictures. It sticks in my head because it was on the cover of a High Society Magazine that I would encounter again years later during puberty. My first encounter with that issue didn't get beyond the cover photo because I didn't know what porn was yet and my dad was in the room when I spotted the thing. It had been left out in plain sight and I stared for a minute at the woman sitting there cross legged on a beach. Being cover art, she had sand demurely piled in front of her crotch and her arms were over her head as she had just pulled off her surf soaked shirt.

Boobs.

I don't think the cover gave me the intense funny feeling of excitement that I would have later but it made me stare anyhow. My dad noticed my focus and asked matter-of-factly, "Well, what do you think of that?" He neither waited for a response nor expected one. I just went blank as he encouraged me out of the room. I guess he didn't buy these magazines very often or trash any of them because this same issue along with a Penthouse or two and a couple of Playboy were what I would later seek out in a pubescent stupor when left alone in the house. That issue, by the way, also introduced me to the idiot fantasy of lewd nurses. In this case it was a dentist office thing. I think I realized right away how absurd the whole thing was, but that didn't stop me getting kookie thoughts when the hygienist leaned over to floss my teeth and her soft bits were mashed on my arm.

Dad and I never had the serious talk about sex, but the subject was not taboo so I managed to glean things here and there. Having two older siblings provided more chances to listen in. Then of course there were a couple of books left around the house in easy access bookshelves. Where Did I Come From? was cartoony but it got to the point, and Man's Body: An Owner's Manual was crazy technical but it answered all the worrisome questions. If you want to know about the reading material that did me the most good in the sack... lesbian erotica takes the cake, but you've got to be sure you're getting the stories written by and for lesbians. I had to go find it on my own when I went to college, but I have to say these are some people who know how to write about exactly what to do. If you want to help your young heterosexual son feel more confident, this is the stuff.

Dad could occasionally blurt out some astonishingly crude sexual things. Most people wish to avoid thinking of their parents as sexually active or even interested in that sort of thing. I was never really horrified by the thought... still, I think I ignored most of what I heard going on or at least didn't make much of it until later. Putting two and two together, hindsight revels that they were fooling around fairly often, and my dad's occasional explicitness made obvious his active libido. Once, when I was helping him with some carpentry project involving six inch lag bolts we found that cranking the socket wrench was getting too difficult. Dad showed me the old carpenter's trick of rubbing bee's wax on the threads of the lag bolts to ease the friction. "You know what this is called?" he asked grinning. "Love lube. You know why?" I resisted an eye roll. He couldn't help himself, "Because you put it on before you screw!" HA! Good one dad. This was far from the most crude thing I heard him say. The whoppers usually came along when he had other nutty engineer pals around. A few would take me years to decipher.

Out in the garage in the back of a drawer I stumbled onto and old deck of cards when I was deep in the teen angst. I wish I knew what happened to those. They were a 1940's cheesecake boob fest, but the deck had disappeared when I thought of them again later as an adult. I'm certain I could have made a small killing on Ebay, and I often wonder if that deck had been ferreted out of my grandfather's stash in another ignored drawer years before. The ladies all had something or other covering their happy place, but the boobs were all front and center. Some of the gals had the most awkward expressions like, "What the hell am I doing?" Some were making the most goof-ball cross-eyed fish-face nutty expressions. At least they seemed to be having fun, and I think they gave me the green light to think sex was amusing. And here I am married to someone willing to laugh with me after the deed.

I still favor the rare porn with people who look genuinely happy (and who still have their fuzzy bits). This tends to be older stuff so I guess I'm out of style. I get the biggest kick out of the photos of naked ladies who clearly were very fond of the person behind the camera. Boobs are always a really good thing. Present them with smiling eyes and a big grin, and you've got the best stuff on earth.

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