"Golf Videos"
My parents were swingers.
Given they couldn’t love each other, I sure find it unlikely they were able to love their kids.
After all, a child, as I’ve been told, is like having a mini version of your husband or wife.
If you don’t love the person you made them with, or worse hate them, chances are that’s going to end up getting put on the kid sometime. It just makes sense to me. It’s like how the people we hate the most are the people who we can probably see a lot of ourselves in. Except in this case you know it’s literally a part of you, and also a part of someone you hate.
I wasn’t made aware of sex super young. My parents put in at least a little effort to hide it from us. If movies featured scenes with just a little bit of tongue, it was skipped. I remember even one day Dad turning off the radio when the presenters were discussing nibbling their partner’s ear. Despite this he still ogled at women crossing the next red light. What can I say, a man with values.
We had sex ed in school. I wasn’t particularly interested. I’d had funny dreams and funny ideas, but even after sex ed I assumed that the woman quite literally had to jump on top of the man for successful penetration. I honestly don’t know where this came from, probably just the little diagram we’d been shown. Nothing could fit in that line unless it was probably done so with great force.
It was absolutely a forbidden topic around the house. Despite that my father managed to be incredibly careless. He’d leave discs of burnt pornography quite literally in the same sleeve of dvds that contained one of the hundred or so Chinese bootleg market children’s movies. It’s quite hilarious to me, the idea of him doing the deed and in a daze mistakenly stashing it back next to a copy of Dragonheart, either out of haste or sheer indifference.
The first time I accidentally saw the contents of a misplaced disk I was fascinated. The second time, I burst into tears. This is because I was punished for my first exposure, which occurred as I was trying to find a photo I saved from school on my usb, and doing so I found my father’s stash of digital pornography.
Again, I was fascinated. It was humble stuff compared to whatever I’ve seen over the years. It’s just a pity the family computer was next to the front stairs with a window – and my father was walking up them at the time in clear view. But either way, despite not doing anything wrong, other than discovering a very poorly concealed secret, I was treated as though I had conducted a great invasion of privacy, or had obtained the contraband myself, when my only real sin was pressing “recent files” to more easily find my picture of a tiger.
After that they placed a sex-ed book for boys on the family bookshelf in the place of the talk, much to everyone’s relief. But looking back I can’t help but feel as though my discovery of my father’s shamefully concealed habit was treated as my sin, as opposed to his.
Sex-help books ("She's On Top") left on the kitchen side or dining room table. Unusual plastic toys in the washing up that I’d never seen before. A straight up homemade movie on the family camcorder taken during our coastal holiday.
I think looking back the one that I find the funniest is when he presumably mistook my laptop for his, and saved a bunch of videos in a folder in the desktop. I have no idea how any of this occurred, just that I did not download those videos. But that was when I first read the term swinger. Confused, I clicked on the video, discovered it was pornography, and closed it in horror.
Assuming that swingers was some kind of code, I renamed the folder to the first thing that came to my mind when thinking of the word in order to reduce suspicion:
“Golf Videos”