Mamarati

I just saw this on Boing Boing as I sipped my morning coffee and enjoyed the complete and total silence that signals that school has started for my wee boy…

And wow, does that bring back memories or what? I don’t think I have ever realized just how much damn television I watched as a kid. I recognized nearly every logo clip except the local ones. Go through it with your eyes closed and you can even see the logos in your head… the one for ITC — that’s totally Muppet Show, y’all. I must have seen and heard that a million times in my life.

My personal faves are WGBH and the drums on the CBS special presentation. We must have watched a lot of that last one, although I don’t remember what any of them were. I have the vaguest feeling that it must have come on some time after 60 minutes… or maybe the tick tick tick of 60 minutes is just embedded in my head with the drums… perhaps just connected by era.

This all fits in with something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. And it’s that my parents did not filter anything for me. Not books, television, movies, anything. There were two things I wasn’t allowed to look at/watch:

The Helter Skelter movie.

Dirty Magazines.

When the Helter Skelter movie came on TV (not the most recent version, of course, but the 70s version) I was about 9 or 10 I guess. I wanted to see it badly because they’d been advertising it and I’ve always been interested in dark things like that. Everyone in my family was going to watch it that night and I had to go to my room. The way our house was set up, was with a sunk in living room and then sent back a ways there was a hallway where all the bedrooms were. Everybody was so involved in the movie that it wasn’t hard for me to sneak out and peek around the corner and watch a lot of the movie.

There were also two windows in the living room that were parallel to two windows in my brother’s room so when I felt like it was too dangerous to be in the hallway I could stand up on his bed and see the television in the living room. There was no sound, but I didn’t care. This was the first time that anyone had ever told me that I couldn’t watch something and so of course I was going to watch it come hell or high water.

The movie didn’t really do much for me, however, so I checked the book out at the library soon after. I thought the book was spectacular.

Looking back, I am shocked. I am more of a shelterer. I would not want Jacob to read that book or see the movie.

I also remember watching Johnny Carson. Again, looking back it surprises me that I was allowed to stay up that late. It surprises me that I was allowed to watch it knowing now what was on that show. Now I know about the monologue and how political or sexual it was. But at the time I guess it went over my head most of the time. And I guess that when I was curious about it I just internalized it. I drew my own conclusions. I certainly wasn’t gonna ask my parents about it and risk whatever humiliation would’ve come from that.

I watched a lot of shows that today would have a TV 14 or a TV MA rating.

[protect]With the dirty magazines, having perverted parents (haha) and all those brothers gave me access to all the dirty magazines anyone could ever dream of. I mean, if that’s the sort of thing that you dream of. Being a small child who was often in trouble and who was afraid and my father and then later my stepmother, I spent lots of time trying to hide in the small spaces where dirty magazines were hidden—under beds, in closets, behind boxes, in the backs of cabinets, etc. I was also a nosy child, and since I was already in trouble for so much stuff that was unpredictable and unwarranted it was no problem for me to risk getting in trouble as long as the reward was finding something really juicy and interesting.

So, one time I got caught looking at dirty magazines (not red handed, but I guess I didn’t leave the stack the way it had been… Maybe I put March on top instead of December in my haste) and my step dad took me out in the car (I was maybe 7 or 8 at the time) and he was grumbling at me about looking at the magazines. He was saying something along the lines of, “You don’t even know what you’re looking at.”

Well, duh. Let’s hope that at 7 years old I didn’t know what I was looking at, people.

So then, I was sitting there in the front seat and he opened up this page in a magazine and it was the most close up shot of a vagina. It was spread apart and you could see everything—vivid color, veins, moisture, hair—and I was mortified. And my step dad held this thing like inches away from my face and was yelling at me saying, “Do you know what this is??!” And I was screaming and crying and completely flipping out.

And I do not know what he wanted to accomplish with that.

At any rate, I suppose I’m lucky that the dirty magazines I was exposed to in my formative years were full of women with real breasts and full pubic hair… Women with real curves, hair on their thighs, small breasts and full breasts and everything in between. So that even while my father was making fun of me for being so fat (which I wasn’t) I had a good idea what a large variety of women looked like. And even though I went through a phase of unhappiness with my body brought on by the 80s no doubt, and even though I went through a brief period of wanting a boob job, I’ve arrived in my 30s with a pretty healthy sense of body self esteem.

I credit much of this to my boyfriend who is completely comfortable with all aspects of my body and all the various states that those body parts can take on—with or without hair, with or without smell, with or without cushion, scarred, bruised, pimpled, dimpled, shaken or stirred, functioning or not. It doesn’t matter. And I have to give some credit to myself because after spending so much time hating parts of myself, a light bulb went on and I realized just how stupid and unhealthy it is to spend all your time in that frame of mind.

Anyway, as usual I digress. The point is my parents did not care what I was reading or looking at as long as it didn’t involve giant vaginas or really crazy cult leaders involved in mass murders.

I had to say giant vaginas like 100 times and then I finally had to spell it out to get speech recognition to get it right. I guess Microsoft doesn’t like giant vaginas either. Or maybe it just wants me to be proper and say vaginae. Whatever.[/protect]