I was just a kid at Boy Scout Camp when my 13-year-old friend produced a stack of Hustler magazines he’d sneaked onto the trip.

There were four of us in the tent, and we stayed up late with our flashlights on a windy, hot summer night experiencing what was my first view of hardcore porn: there were facials, cumshots, muscled naked men standing over submissive blondes, and close-ups of spread-open vaginas, along with big-breasted women salaciously sticking out their tongues. Hustler was far more explicit than most dirty magazines, and some of the images were shocking.

My friend said he found the stack in a dumpster, though I suspect he was either given them or stole them from his stepdad. Something similar to that experience is shared by nearly every teenage boy in America, gay or straight, generation after generation, as long as they came of age after the invention of photography and before the popularization of the Internet. Dirty pictures were something we all eventually came across, but still a rare thing to be cherished. We got porn from our older brothers, from boxes in the garage our fathers thought they threw out years ago, or as in my case, from friends, proudly presenting discoveries in the form of smut printed on the backs of dirty playing cards and erotic posters.

Discovering porn for the first time was something that made us feel free, mischievous and deviant; ironically, it is also something persistently normal and commonplace, and more often than not our parents who discovered us would feign appropriate anger, but secretly shrug and say that’s what boys do.

The next time I saw porn was just a few weeks later. This time I found it on the family computer when my parents weren’t home, using our household’s new dial-up connection. It started with a web search for sites featuring “shirtless boys,” but I sat in delighted shock after I discovered that some of them actually show penis, and a new chapter in my life began. I had never seen a grown male naked besides the fat old men who changed out of their swimsuits in the rec center locker room – I was literally dizzy with endorphins and adrenaline seeing young and attractive guys on the preview pages of major gay porn sites.

Porn was easy to come by once I knew how to get it, and over time it naturally became much less exciting. We all know the progression: it starts out that a random photo in National Geographic is enough to have us thinking about sex for days. Five years later, we’re flipping through dozens of ho-hum hardcore videos till we find the right one; the guy in it has just the right body type and he’s not doing anything we don’t like, and even then we’re into it for about two minutes before it’s on to something new.

The world is changing in regards to nudity. Porn is seen as less and less deviant, less and less novel as it is increasingly accessible online. It’s a few keystrokes away, with or without a credit card. With increasing ease of access comes a sense of tedium; robbed of the exhilarating cycle of risk, guilt and resolution, it’s just part of the routine, along with hot showers and breakfast cereal. For some.

Wendy Maltz, a sex therapist and writer, describes her decades-long turning against smut; she started as a member of the sexual revolution who prescribed porn as a way to train patients to be comfortable with their bodies. She evolved to later assert that porn takes the healthy aspects (intimacy) out of sex and leads to intense addictions that rip apart marriages. Porn’s ubiquity makes it nearly impossible for porn addicts to control themselves, she argues.

Maltz describes the process I just did, in which users, mostly men, have to turn to increasingly extreme sexual images to achieve the same level of stimulation; eventually they stop being aroused by their real-life partners, she explains, and they begin to see porn as a negative force in their lives that they can’t stop.

But I think the process that Maltz describes is just the brain and body adjusting to what it sees, and the personality not knowing how to handle it. I’ve often wondered if extremely modest societies, like Muslim cultures, the Amish, or Christian Puritans, along with Catholic and Buddhist monks, would develop an extreme sensitivity to sexual suggestiveness in their austerity. Would they, for example, become aroused simply by looking at ankles or shoulders, and find them as provocative as we would find women’s nipples or men’s genitals? Would they be blown away just thinking about sex like we did when we were teenagers?

Juxtapose them with other cultures, like the Greeks and indigenous people from warm, wet climates, where normal attire can mean someone is shirtless or even nude. They are not becoming irresistibly aroused by each other, they do not seem hypersexualized. They seem to be “desensitized” to plain views of the human body, but not to the point of losing all interest; instead, other things besides nudity must signal eroticism. Nobody has the energy to be constantly aroused, and if they were they’d neglect other things like feeding themselves.

Your brain is designed to make what’s constantly around you into the new “normal.” The strange thing, now, is when hardcore fucking becomes the new “normal” and loses its eroticism. That is doubtlessly why people start becoming frustrated by pornography, and why humans invented kink.

I don’t see porn desensitization as an unambiguously bad thing, and it’s a process designed to keep us from being addicted, not to foster addiction. Perhaps the fundamental difference between Maltz and I is that the gay community takes much of the stigma away from sex, and we deal with changes without freaking out about them. I am also not one to desperately gaze at something that once gave me intense pleasure, agonizing that the old rush isn’t there. All things are transient, of course. To me that’s just a signal that the batteries need charging; and it’s time to get out and do other things, get some exercise perhaps, or read the articles for once.

© 2010, Matt P.. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com