Boobies, circa 2003

The circulation of porn on the playground

Image courtesy of @NostalgiaNerd on Instagram

Content note: Includes brief mention of abortion and suicide.

You are around ten years old and you are standing in the playground on a cold, damp morning when you hear one of the boys start shouting about boobies. He is on the other side of the square of black tarmac, frantically gesturing his friends over from their game of football to come and look at something he’s found on the ground. From your vantage point by the trees, you can see him squatting over a pile of playing cards by the car park, picking them up one by one, handling them like sacred objects, turning them over in his hands with awe.

A gust of wind blows in (this is the Isle of Man, after all - it is always windy) and just as the boys begin to approach, the cards are flung into the air and scattered towards the rest of us. The teacher’s backs are turned, they are gossiping, and they don’t see the mass movement of children towards the cards, the frantic scrabbling and fighting to grab one and see why the boy had shouted boobies. Some other children grab cards before you and echo the call - “A lady has her boobies out!”

The cards are a pack of porn playing cards, left on the playground by an unknown person for an unknown reason. Perhaps someone dropped them by accident out of their car, perhaps the intent was more nefarious, either way the result is the same: A mass of para-pubescent children scream in excitement to see the various ladies with their boobies out (and just their boobies, there is nothing below the belt here).

You look over your friend’s shoulder at one of the cards they’re holding and the image looks back at you, foreign and strange and unnerving to your ten-year-old eyes. A woman is smiling, teeth impossibly white, bleach blonde hair sitting poker-straight on her shoulders, tanned orange skin glistening. Her breasts are, frankly, enormous - modelled on Pamela Anderson and Katie Price, they are surgically enhanced and sit high on her rib cage. You are immediately convinced that this is what all breasts look like under clothes, and you too will grow breasts like this, and the thought terrifies you.

The circulation of porn on the playground doubtlessly happens much differently now, in the futuristic time of 2021 where the majority children have the internet on their phones. For us in 2003, however, the only time most of us had internet access was at home via enormous desktop computers and a dial-up internet connection that meant each image took at least a minute to load (not that that stopped many of us from furtively typing “sex” into AskJeeves as soon as our parents left the room).

The presence of porn on the playground, real physical porn, was beyond our wildest dreams - we knew it was taboo and definitely, absolutely not allowed, but for reasons we couldn’t quite understand or articulate. In the absence of understanding why the porn cards were so exciting to us, we defaulted to our only other experience with valuable trading items and treated them identically to Pokémon cards, assigning arbitrary values based on how much skin was showing, how big the woman’s breasts were, or how much she was smiling. We then, in the way only playground children are really capable of, established a frantic trading system that would put Wall Street to shame where the only goal was to collect the most valuable porn cards possible before a teacher intervened.

I don’t remember what happened to the porn cards - presumably a teacher noticed the scutch of children trading in tit pics and the matter was stopped pretty quickly, perhaps with a few children hiding cards in their pockets to take home later. It is certain that in the absence of any sex education, the appeal of the cards was not only in the images they depicted but also in their distinctly taboo essence, and the idea that we shouldn’t be seeing these images without a real explanation as to why drove a hunger to search for porn away from any adult knowledge.

Being the first generation to grow up with computers, only the most tech-savvy parents knew how to install child blocks on our home desktops and, for most of us, the internet provided completely unlimited access to porn if we knew what search for. When we inevitably found the porn we also inevitably knew that it was secret and shameful that we had gone looking for it at all, even as we sat on the cusp of puberty with a host of unanswered questions about what was going to happen to our own bodies and desires in the coming years.

If we had chance to have open and honest dialogues with trusted adults about sex and desire, maybe we would not have had quite the same frenzied and shamed response to the porn cards or unregulated internet searches. If we had been able to ask why does my body feel funny when I look at naked people sometimes and receive an honest, compassionate answer, then maybe we would not have spent hours trying to learn how to erase our search histories. As it was, when we engaged in “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”, often in exchange for a chocolate bar from another child’s lunch, adults reacted with horror and dismay that we had wondered how ‘boy’ bodies differed from ‘girl’ bodies. The ideal child, it seemed, was one devoid of curiosity or desire.

The suppression of desire does not lead to its abolition, merely its sublimation into shame. The internet searches did not stop, but we learned to open incognito windows, learned to print erotic fiction and hide it under our beds, learned how to erase our search histories entirely. Torn between parents and teachers who refused to talk to us about sex at all, and the unmonitored, limitless availability of sex on the internet, we learned how to access one without the other knowing. We learned to hate the sexual parts of ourselves as we grew and understood them as dirty and unwanted, rather than a natural and joyful part of life.

The impact of poor sex education was not limited to our understanding of porn - by the time we were teens, girls would become accidentally pregnant and go to Liverpool for secret abortions, queer kids would self-harm and attempt suicide on a regular basis and boys would take photos up girls’ skirts to blackmail them with. Sex and sexuality was a source of shame and control, patterns that had to be unlearned in adulthood if they were unlearned at all.

The porn cards on the playground were the tip of the iceberg, one part of a culture that taught us sex is both worse than death and the most exciting, taboo thing you could ever want. Sexuality was available to you if you could only escape your parents’ notice for a few hours, if only you could keep it hidden and quiet under your bed, behind the bike sheds, on the computer after dark. Your desire was yours, as long as you understood that it was wrong.

You can find Robin on Twitter here and Instagram here. You can ask him to write for you at robinccraig@gmail.com