By Laura Bramon Good
I started twittering this week.
“You don’t even answer your voice mail,” my husband Ben pointed out.
Still, I tried to justify it by arguing that Twitter is the best way for me to keep in touch with a whole raft of friends who are nearly as phone averse as I am. But he was nonplussed—especially after he found one of our new roommates and me laughing hysterically over twitter gem Sara Barron, whom I’d discovered via Maude Newton’s literary newsfeed.
“It’s porn!” I shrieked and made Ben watch Sara Barron’s dramatization of the ecstatically innocent “porn” she penned at the age of eleven.
He didn’t crack a smile. Honestly, I wasn’t sure why. What’s not to love about a skit that sincerely apes adolescent lust of the 1980s, an era of humping and frenching and a naïvete that’s rare among children of the Internet age?
I didn’t tell Ben that I, too, at the age of eleven, wrote what could only be extremely loosely described as a porn. I typed it all out in stream-of-consciousness on our blue-blinking PC, where it could be hidden among labyrinthine files and, as necessary, completely deleted.
Possessing even less technical knowledge of sex than eleven-year-old Sara Barron, the scene was not so much a PG tryst as it was an exclamation of hormones, one that relied heavily on deus ex machina (the crashing of a ceiling, the implosion of an entire Parisian flat) where biological facts failed.
Tonight, I couldn’t stop hysterically quoting a few of the skit’s choice lines, so my sisters made me show them the Sara Barron video. Only one of my sisters laughed. Another roommate, also in attendance, was repulsed.
Doubling over with laughter even as I watched my roommate recoil from the computer screen, I had just enough presence of mind to recall the initial horror I felt when, as a social services provider attending the first of many anti-human trafficking conferences, I was initiated into the weird world of federal law enforcement agents’ humor.
In particular: the photo of a real live Mexican stowaway half-sewn inside the captain’s chair of an Aerostar mini-van. That killed the FBI agents every time. It took a couple of anti-trafficking conferences for me to realize that they weren’t poking fun at the man’s dilemma, so much as they were acknowledging the absurdity of sewing oneself inside a captain’s chair.
As the Sara Barron video faded to black, I stifled my own laughter and thought: Is this it? Have I crossed over to the dark side of anti-trafficking social services providers, a weird no-woman’s land where child-peddled porn is a laughing matter?
Considering the recent sexual confessions of Sandra Tsing Loh (undersexed), Mark Sanford (possible sex tourist), and other headliners, I have to say that Sara Barron’s sexual honesty is highly refreshing.
Without any disregard for Tsing Loh and Sanford’s very serious forays into infidelity, reconciliation, and equating of oneself with King David, I’d like to propose that Sara Barron’s eleven-year-old self possesses a particular insight that both of the adults seem to have overlooked.
Sex is an appetite, and a strange one, in that it points us back to the heart, where we receive love, and to the mind, where we learn to temper the appetite. It seems wiser to see the humor in pandering to base pleasure than it does to argue that there is wisdom in the pandering.
p.s. i'm really hoping that you are one of my co-workers (?). otherwise, the google HT tweet will thoroughly out me as a HT bureaucrat + writer. yipes.