My entry on the Playhouse bulletin board from 12/5/03 at 12:40 AM (EST) was not written at home on my computer. Rather, I was waiting for a friend to finish some work at an office in West Hollywood. The owner of the company graciously allowed me to use a computer there. Evidently another employee must have looked over my shoulder and seen that I was on my site. He was taken aback and went to go rat me out to his boss, the same man who had let me use the computer. The boss did not care at all, but the story made its way back to me.

I kept pestering my friend to tell me why the other employee had been so alarmed. Was he worried that I was doing work on the computer that could be traced back to their office? Did he think that women in the office would be offended? Did he actually think I was doing something illegal? By the way, this guy must have an awfully sharp eagle-eye to have even noticed me on the site at all, particularly since I confined myself to a bulletin board entry that was a mere few sentences. My friend was laughing too hard to give me a straight answer, and just said: "Some people are just offended by porno."

Now I could see the guy being offended if I had been sitting there perusing naked photos and masturbating, or even just sitting there perusing naked pictures, but I wasn't. There wasn't a single one on any of the pages I had visited. Was he just alarmed because I had visited an adult site inside their building? Doesn't he know that just about every guy who has a private office with a door on it jacks off to the Internet during his lunch hour?

I've been sitting here for the past two minutes looking at that last sentence to see if I want to modify it at all, but I don't. The "just about every guy who has a private office" part seems accurate to me, but perhaps the lunch hour reference doesn't take into account the varying habits of different men. If I was better on the computer though, I would post a copy of the graph that shows the hours of heaviest traffic on the site here. Most visitors who come here (pun intended) are from the US, and the hours of peak activity (pun intended) are what roughly correspond to the typical lunchtimes for most office workers. It's not just a small spike in the graph during the midday hours either, it is a large one that is consistent month after month.

Thinking about the whole subject this afternoon made me reflect on how so many people still consider porno to be "taboo." They do, but they don't. I think many of them pretend that they do, but they actually view adult material themselves. Not just by accident either. I can't count how many people have told me that they were just flipping through channels and happened to see me in a porno, or came across my site accidentally, or saw one of their friend's magazines in which I had a layout. It's particularly amusing because there is such a H-U-G-E volume of porno out there and I am in so little of it. I'm thinking that they must have been looking at a whole lot of porno before they ever saw me in anything. How else could these folks just inadvertantly stumble across something I was in? Why do they pretend otherwise? It's not as if I would think they were weird because they were masturbating. I'd think they were weird if they never did.

I don't actually believe that all or most people need porno to get themselves off, but I would certainly think that everyone with a normal sex drive masturbates at least on occasion. So when people deny looking at porno are they just embarrassed because they were looking at the material for purposes of sexual gratification? Do most of them find masturbation to be shameful?

I'm not sure of the answer to those questions, but it was not too long ago that Joycelyn Elders was fired from her position as Surgeon General for advocating masturbation. That was a very, very sad event, and I am not at all kidding. What a pathetic commentary on the charades and pretenses of our society.

Porno certainly does lead to a lot of jacking off, which I find healthy. Other people condemn it for that same reason. I remember watching a Montell Williams show a number of years ago where models were defending their decisions to pose nude. One of the other guests on the show was part of some anti-pornography crusade. Now, here was a guy who really needed to get a life. At some point he addressed one of the models in a very loud, accusatory tone saying:

"Do you KNOW what men do when they read these magazines?" -(dramatic pause)- "They M-A-S-T-U-R-B-A-T-E!!!"

I smile at the memory, but at the same time I see how unhealthy his mentality was. Of this one fact I am utterly convinced: the men who denounce pornography the loudest always, without exception, beat off to it. They would not have that compelling need to decry it otherwise. They are endlessly fascinated by women who are comfortable with their sexuality and confident about their bodies. Unfortunately they are scared to death of these women and seek to scorn or vilify them. I'm referring mostly to the behavior of men here because men by far look at more adult material than women. I think what you always hear about men being more aroused by visual stimuli is very true indeed. For instance, I REALLY like fantasizing about different cocks, but I don't buy magazines or join websites to look at them. It's not that I'd be embarrassed, it's just that I don't really desire to have those visual images literally in front of me when I want to make myself cum.

This has been kind of a meandering blog. I'm not saying that the office guy who saw me typing on my site is a prudish hypocrite, sexually repressed, nor am I making any judgements about him. I just mentioned him here because that office incident led me to contemplating yet again why people act so offended by the mere mention or existence of porno. I'll reiterate too that I wasn't looking at any naked photos or lingering on my site in those moments so it was very surprising that he even noticed that something was awry in his environment there. Also, it was late at night after normal business hours, and I was sitting alone in a hallway that had virtually no foot traffic. Much as I espouse the merits of porno, I never would inflict it on some one who doesn't want to see it.

In a perfect world those people who wanted to indulge themselves in masturbation material would do so, and those who didn't want to see it would just not look at it. It should be just that simple. No one will force you to watch an adult video or make you buy a subscription to a nudie magazine, and sexually explicit products are usually very clearly labelled. If you don't want to look at porno, then don't look at it. Just don't tell me not to.

-- XXOO Tanya