The First Time I Saw a Porn Movie: I Was in College

"Fortunate or not, I was in college when The Devil in Miss Jones was released to porn's first popular audience. My roommates and I treated it as a joke, of course, since we’d never seen porn before. We giggled on our way to the University auditorium where the U.C. Regents were screening it (during REAGAN's stint as California governor - his signature is on my U.C. Lit Degree).   And we're not girls, then or now, who giggle. The auditorium was packed, of course, with sweaty red faced college men and discomfited college women. I wondered who watched these things. I had an active fantasy life by then, my junior year. Maybe it was the big screen but fantasy is so intimate and this piece of porn was so BIG, weirdly more anonymous than my anonymous fantasies, and, of course, focused on mechanics rather than relationship, even when one’s 'relationship' fantasies don’t include any one-on-one you'd actually care to experience. I pretty much signed off porn forever after that, preferring The Story of O and Kate Millet’s critiques of sex-authoring men like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer - a worn paperback copy of Sexual Politics that I'd pilfered from the radical feminist women’s center I volunteered at."

"The First Time I Saw a Porn Movie" is a digital project. Want to share your story anonymously? Email susannahbreslin@gmail.com.