I shame the matriarchy

So I'm thinking a little bit on how we get where we are, how we develop into the adults we are, for good or ill, what shapes our political/sexual identities.

Although I fear that such a discussion may trip triggers or mash buttons or otherwise cause more harm than good, I guess it doesn't have to. I mean, if we're all very respectful and careful and gentle with each other, maybe we could find more similarities than differences between us. Or, if differences present themselves persistently, maybe we can honor them and learn from them rather than let them continue to get us all upset with each other.

When I was about twelve I had a friend, F. She was exponentially more sophisticated than I was on every level. She was a wild child - no two ways about it. I admired her, certainly, as I was kind of shy and retiring and gawky and, well, doofy. Anything F. did/said/wore/liked was about a thousand times cooler than what I did/said/wore/liked - and intensified by the "bad" factor, that cigarette-smoke-lipgloss-hairspray aura that made everything she did so much more alluring and naughty and grown-up.

One thing F. had none of was respect for her elders. She thought nothing of talking back, openly defying, subtly sabotaging - she was rebellious to a shocking degree. Her flagrant disregard for parental authority was made abundantly clear to me one day when we snuck into her father's bedroom and rooted around under the bed until we found The Dirty Pictures.

By this time I had grasped the nuts-n-bolts of reproduction, thanks to The Life Cycle Library and a handful of "Your Body and YOU" - type books. But The Dirty Pictures seem to have anything at all to do with the reproductive process. I'm not sure I would have known they were Dirty Pictures, except that F. announced it when she found them. "aHA! The Dirty Pictures!"

While the pictures themselves were surprising and fascinating, it was not the naughtiness of those pictures that was so captivating. Far more exciting was the act of violating a closed door, seeking out the hidden and forbidden, learning the strange and arcane secrets of the adult world.

Thereafter, I devoted much of my free time (probably too much of my free time) looking for more Dirty Pictures. When I discovered that Dirty Pictures were hard to come by (being under eighteen and all), I moved on to Dirty Books, which were much easier to get my juvenile hands on. I haunted the Adult section in the public library, of course with the finely-honed eye for quality and high level of sophistication of the average twelve year old - Anais Nin left me cold, even though the title of the book clearly read "erotica"; Danielle Steele kept me occupied for hours. My mother and I began to wordlessly trade the most egregious paperbacks, silently removing and replacing them in their hiding places between our respective mattresses and box springs. The Happy Hooker - fascinating. Wifey - not so much.

It's important to realize that nobody was shoving the material down my throat. Not by a long shot. I hunted this stuff, stalked it, like a kitten stalks a grasshopper.

And then I found it. The motherlode. The granddaddy of them all.

Way way up on my stepmother's highest shelf, innocently hiding in plain sight among the much-loved American and world lit of her grad school days, was the legendary Kama Sutra.

And next to it, Philosophy in the Bedroom. I didn't know what that was about, but I figured it had the word "bedroom" in the title so it had to have at least some good parts. And I had begun to hear the author's name, Marquis de Sade, flung around here and there...

In order to reach the books I had to stand on a couple of encyclopedias, balanced on a box, balanced on a chair, and even still I had to strain every muscle in my body upwards while teetering precariously on tiptoe. But it was worth it, I felt. Worth it for the good parts.

The much renowned encyclopedia of the Hindu art of love was totally beyond me, frankly. I had trouble adjusting to the whole "yoni" and "lingam" thing...I was looking for something, I don't know, something...different...something dirtier...

something like Philosophy in the Bedroom.

I remember that book, the way the pages felt so soft and fragile, the way it smelled so delightfully old, the way some of the pages slipped from between the ratty paper cover on to the floor. I remember feeling so afraid that a random page would float away and get lost behind a shelf or under the bed, only to betray me later. Mostly, I remember skipping the philosophy and aiming right for the bedroom.

Dirty I wanted, and dirty I got. I knew my quest had come to an end. No book could possibly be dirtier.

I dug it. Maybe I dug it because it seemed the the very peak of rebellion. Maybe I dug it because a couple of stories featured the utter destruction of a mother or stepmother, and that meshed nicely with how I felt about my own stepmother at the time. Whatever the reason, I dug it.

I guess that was the point of no return for me.

any thoughts?