Richa Kaul Padte - Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography

WHEN I WAS a teenager, I left India to live in England. Fresh from my mountaintop home, I arrived on unknown shores armed with a pressure cooker, two cartons of Classic Milds and a desperate need to hide the naivety of my small-town self. Between passing out after three beers and setting off the fire alarm during my first and only attempt at using the pressure cooker, I learnt to wear my inexperience as a moderately disarming personality quirk.

It only moderately worked.

One busy midterm week, a housemate sent his laptop away for repair and asked to borrow mine. The seven of us moved easily in and out of each others rooms and lives, so I got used to retrieving my computer from his desk and he from the pile of clothes at the foot of my bed. Sometimes he would lie in my bed working, mostly on Facebook, and when I returned from campus we would sit together chatting, before I unceremoniously evicted him to get to my own profile.

Late one evening, I found the laptop on my bed, and I opened it to discover Jackie and Michelle, gorgeous and topless, shaking their massive breasts at me. By now their names have been fictionalized by my shaky memory, but their smooth white skin, long brown hair and flesh, flesh, flesh made crystal-clear imprints in my mind.

There were several measured responses to the situation, but unfortunately, I didnt resort to any of them. I slammed the laptop shut, fled from my room and spilt the beans to whoever was around. Amid what swiftly turned into a household joke, I allowed my outrage and eventual laughter to cover up for my embarrassment. I felt a sense of total inadequacy in the face of what had, up to that point, existed only in theorybut was now clearly possible in practice. On my laptop. In my bed. And when I went to sleep that night on freshly changed sheets, I felt a small twinge of regret. Not for outing my housemate, which in retrospect I am so ashamed of, but that in my rush to close the browser window, I hadnt got a closer look.

Nine years later, Im sorry to report I didnt have the guts to reopen that fleshy page. And Im equally sorry to confirm that, yes, Big Tittied MILFs was my first encounter with porn.

Officially, that is.

A list of things that may or may not have been porn before Jackie and Michelle made an appearance in my life:

• The time I lied about my A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location) on the popular chat forum ICQturning myself into a 5'7" 362432 blonde from Miami. I cant recall what the guys manufactured appearance was, but I certainly remember mineas far away as I could get from my flat-chested, bushy-haired self.
• Tell Me Your Dreams, Sidney Sheldons racy thriller featuring one woman with multiple-personality disorder and one very heavy masturbation session.
• Black-and-white printouts of celebrities made in our school computer lab. My favourite was Ja Rule, though I think I spent more time hunting for Jenny from the Blocks cargo pants than I did looking at Ja Rules abs.
• That hand in Titanic. You know the one Im talking about: foggy glass, steamy Leo, a lingering handprint.
• Deenie, the loss-of-virginity Judy Blume recommended for ages sixteen and up, which I smuggled out of the local clubs library at age twelve.
• A book on raising kids my parents had on one of their numerous pedagogy-related shelves. This remains a puzzling memory, but the passage about a girl who wants birth control pills is still firmly rooted in my mind.
• The moment after a month-long battle with my mother that I was finally allowed to watch Rangeela, and Aamir Khans flirtatious bad-boy laugh filled the screen and my heart.
• Oh and of course, whenever Nancy Drew met the Hardy Boys.