Arts & Culture
One day when I was 12-years-old, word got around school that a copy of Hustler magazine had been spotted in the woods behind the soccer field. Five minutes after the final bell rang, dozens of my male classmates and I were back in those woods scouring the ground for evidence, like forensic experts at a crime scene. We were a group of confused kids taking our first steps into the world of sex – which to us symbolized all the mystery, terror, deviance, darkness, seediness, and freedom of adulthood – so it seems appropriate that those first steps would be taken in a patch of muddy woods on a rapidly darkening winter afternoon, like a scene out of a Dennis Lehane novel.
Stalking through the forest that day, I was plagued by questions I was too self-conscious to ask out loud. Questions like: What kind of person would throw a copy of Hustler away? Would I one day do the same, for reasons I couldn’t understand with a seventh-grade education? Is the cultural stigma against smut really so great that it will force a man to try and alleviate his sense of shame and self-loathing by tossing magazines into the woods when no one’s looking? And also, why not just use a trashcan?
Answers to these questions didn’t come that day, but we did eventually find the magazine. It was tattered and muddy and missing pages, but we passed it around reverently like it was a holy relic. And that night, we all went home and remembered it fondly in the privacy of our own bedrooms, bathrooms, and hallway closets. Just on the cusp of adolescence, we had participated in a rite of passage as old as humanity itself: young men going to great lengths to come in contact with naked women.
These days, however, those great lengths have been shrunk down to nothing, and that rite of passage is as irrelevant as a boy’s first saber-tooth tiger hunt. Now any 12-year-old with a computer, an Internet connection, and the presence of mind to click on a “Yes, I’m over 18” link is granted full admission to a world boys of my generation had to shed blood to even get a glimpse at. Gone are the days when the accumulation of “dirty” materials actually required you to get dirty. Gone is the sense of illicit adventure and deviant camaraderie. Gone are the potential for metaphor and the willful push into murky psychic territories. With the rise of the Internet and digital cable, pornography has become commonplace. It’s become societal wallpaper. It’s become about as rare and mysterious as sitcoms or car commercials.
Kids these days don’t realize how bad they have it.
See, when you’ve got no barriers between you and your heart’s desire, your mind and your body deteriorate from lack of use. You know how people who grew up in the Depression always talk about how soft Baby Boomers are because they never had to suffer for anything? Well, it’s same thing with this latest generation of teenagers: Their minds and personalities are soft from the constant, instantaneous satisfaction of their desires; they’re totally self-indulgent (which I’m fine with) but unaccustomed to and unappreciative of the work and sacrifice needed to properly indulge oneself.
The thrill of striving has been replaced by the blandness of possession. Gone are the days of teenage boys robbing stores and lying to their parents and fumbling around in the woods after school in an effort to understand a little better life’s greatest mystery. Gone is the need to connive, collude, cajole, flatter, hustle, conspire, and scheme to get your hands on pornography in a time of wanting. Here to stay is the impassive, entitled, predictable consumption of stimuli … leading to numb, bloated indifference and a life of boredom. Boredom?!! My God, when I was a teenager, I never would have dreamed of using the words “boredom” and “pornography” in the same sentence. It would have been sacrilegious, disrespectful, a violation of some kind of code.
These days all kids have to do is turn on a computer, and bam! – instant access. No fuss, no muss, no shame, no skulking – just simulated carnality. Which sounds good, I know. But think about what’s being lost: an understanding of the relationship between risk and reward; an appreciation for the art of getting over, getting past, and getting by; a belief that success is contingent upon adeptness and adaptability, strategy and temerity, the conquering of your fear and shame and guilt and the acceptance of your own moral flexibility.
What other lessons do we want life to offer us?
Today’s kids don’t even have to suffer the bittersweet pain of settling for soft-core melodrama on late-night premium cable, an act of ritual maturation that taught me and my friends the thrill of unfulfilled desire, of deferred dreams, of implication and suggestion and seduction: the simple joy of making do with what you have, just like our grandparents did during the Depression and World War II.
They had bread lines and rationing; we had Cinemax.
In America, we’ve all had to make sacrifices.
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3 Comments
More then ever, I am now convinced you are a closet Christian. All this language of sacrifice and deferment. Epicurus would be rolling over in his grave, if he thought it was enjoyable, after reading this column.
[...] Eliot Tretter: More then ever, I am now convinced you are a closet Christian. All this language of… [...]
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