Muristek
As a young woman, I’ve been surrounded by porn my whole life. It’s shaped the way I see myself, in and out of the bedroom
I was young the first time I watched porn. I didn’t have hips or enjoy eating olives. My parents still paid my phone bill and I’d never kissed anyone, despite the story I used to tell about some guy I met on my family holiday to Spain. I was on the school playing fields at lunchtime and a boy from my form came over and put his Sony Ericsson slider phone right in my face. On the screen I could see a blurred video of a woman in red suspenders pleasuring herself, letting tense breaths hiss out from behind her teeth. The space between her legs was smooth and hairless, like the skin of an unripe nectarine. She looked like I did, except I was 13 and she must have been older. “I bet you do this, don’t you?” the boy said, his eyes hidden beneath floppy hair.
At the time I didn’t think much about the video, except it was a bit gross that she was doing that alone. There was no way I would have believed it affected me or that seeing more images like that eventually would. But porn was already shaping how I, and the men I would later share relationships with, viewed my body. It was implementing a code of behaviour we would draw and learn from. It was telling us what sex was when the only way we were educated about it in school was via condoms on bananas and photos of untreated gonorrhoea.
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