Little Cat

The girl’s mother yelled, ‘What on earth are you two doing down there?’

The king’s rod was about to be taken, or hung off or fed to the fat-cheeked females! I felt something freeze inside my gut. The girl’s mother was walking down the basement stairs. My friend knew when to stop. The film caught and snapped dark; light got suddenly sliced up inside our closet. I heard my friend laughing and I ran upstairs after her, confused and coughing, past her mom. We burst out the front door onto shining concrete. My laughs were dry yelps. That girl’s mother knew. Her lips were down-turned. I knew it wasn’t the first time that the girl had done this, i.e., shared the miraculous inevitable.

I hung out with that girl for at least another year, but I never thought about what happened to her that night. Did she get in trouble with her mother? Did her mother go into the closet after we’d left? Did she rewind the film that her daughter stole from her drawer? Was a kid supposed to get in trouble for seeing this?

I didn’t contemplate any consequences for seeing a cock and two girls put to work – nearly. What I understood was that adults were very powerful creatures. Sex was their secret and inborn pact. That circle-edged, soft-core minute of film pushed at the edges of my growing girl mind. It shouldn’t be nightmarish to admit this as true. People today seem terrified of the effects of precociousness in girls. But after the bronze cock vision in the closet, I did not go out and start to fuck. Porn did not shut my mind down. It ripped and stained my mind’s eye, maybe, but I don’t even think it’s as ominous as that. I had a truck load of shame to tar and feather myself with yet. A dream is a dream. A kid is a kid. Some dreams get trampled, some thrive, some expire.

Enter James Deen, L.A. porn-boy-next-door. It’s 2013. James Deen hadn’t even been born when I was indoctrinated in that closet. James Deen is the pre-eminent sign that the ‘chipmunk-cheeked’ don’t have to feel shame anymore. James Deen says that he will not have sex with a woman on camera who does not want to have sex with him. James Deen reverses the poetic violence of the porn I first saw, read and wrote, because he’s so transparent, so puppy-like; because he does it with the girls, not to them at all.

Sex is like soccer, says Deen. It’s fun and athletic, and you should do it with your friends.

It’s possible, though, that shame is essential for growing a spine. Maybe humans are just all mutations of shame. Maybe James Deen is the devil in disguise and porn today is an apolitical trick. Ariel Levy wrote the book Female Chauvinist Pigs about the misogynistic impulses in and around porn, porn that is often full of sexually traumatized subjects.

It’s true that porn is full of misapprehension. Porn ill-advisedly too often gets rid of our shames.

It seems fitting, regardless, that a man should put us chipmunks at ease. James Deen, the sweet metafictional entertainer, takes my decade-old, shame-laced, porn problematic – how can a fucked woman speak clearly? – and he turns me to look in the mirror while doing me up the ass.

Speak up, he implores. Don’t rest there dammed-up, hiding or weak!

Okay, James, Motherfucker:

Porn’s a non-functioning hologram where men and women are equally fucked, each according to their wishes, each according to their need. This alleged egalitarian space in real life is a particular Deenian paradox – the naked and the public are slut-loving and safe; it’s the end of being born female as a receptacle for shame. And if our current, steady Canadian existence is threatened by juiced-up females roaming and fucking in packs, in my opinion, there will still be empathy.