My First Porn Site.

When I was thirteen years old, my best friend and I started a porn site.

Well, an erotica site; it didn't have photos, but there was a sizeable selection of written and drawn erotic (or more often "erotic") material. It was hosted on GeoCities, and hamfisted in every way--the layout was a mess of big purple text and teenagerish babble, the pages were random collections of anything we thought would be cool, and the content was an unsorted hodgepodge of things we'd made, things stolen from other amateur sites, and things stolen from the free sections of professional porn sites. We had no concept of copyright and would post anything that CTRL-C could grab.

We did have a PayPal account set up and linked to the site, but (fortunately) the technical intricacies of a password-protected paysite were way beyond us and we charged on a "donation" basis, which of course never made us a red cent.

We were both virgins, and I was about to make fun of how this must've affected our writing, but looking back at the old TXT files, honestly, we were pretty damn good at theorizing. Knowing these files were written by thirteen-year-olds makes me feel all dirty. I didn't realize until just now that at age thirteen I knew exactly how buttsex works. (Also, my spelling and grammar were quite good. I'm so proud of little proto-Holly.)

So as fairly young kids my friend and I were so immersed in porn culture that we were not just avid consumers, we were trying in our puppyish way to join the production side. Three questions that come up in retrospect:

1) Where were our parents? Clueless, of course, not because they were negligent but because we were wily like foxes. We knew when and how to sneak computer time and cover our tracks, and "parental control" filters barely slowed us down. Our parents could have disallowed all unmonitored computer use and probably stopped us, but that would have put a considerable enforcement burden on them, and thirteen is probably too old to be so draconian--we used the Internet for legitimate purposes all the time.

2) Were our views of women or sex skewed? Probably not too badly. We looked at a lot of gay male porn, which was fairly equalizing, but also a lot of Japanese and anime straight porn, which was chockfull of humiliation and rape. I think we took it in fairly good humor--we understood the difference between rape fantasies and real violence, and I don't remember ever thinking that real rape was sexy or that humiliation fantasies were literal. Certainly I don't ever remember feeling or expressing any ill will toward the women in porn--hey, they're just actors.

3) Were we harmed? I don't think so. I'm not really sure what kind of harm to check for, honestly. I don't regret anything other than the copyright infringement and the poor web design. If we'd been a little dumber we might've posted pictures of ourselves, and that might have had consequences legally and socially, but I don't think the act of posting self-kiddy-porn would have done much to us psychologically. Even though it was sexual, we were coming at this from a pretty innocent place--we just wanted to entertain and get a little attention--and there was no sense of exploitation or debasement. We were in control of the whole project, after all.



So when people get all panicky about kids under eighteen being exposed to anything remotely sexual, pardon me if my monocle doesn't exactly fly off. Kids getting into sexual situations with older people is a different matter, but kids experiencing sexual material on their own or with peers is as natural as the morning dew and about as hazardous. Hot Coffee, sexting, racy scenes in library books, Janet Jackson's nipple, gay marriage taught in the schools, putting condoms on bananas? Yeah, whatever, I was younger than that when I ran a goddamned porn site.



In fact, the only thing that did get dangerous was a result of society "protecting" us. We could download pictures and text, but this was dial-up-era, and being under 18 we couldn't buy porn videos on our own. We had a friend who was 18, though, and he would buy porn and invite us over to watch it with him. Now that was some sketchy shit.