20 SECRET MUSEUMS | B. PIETRAS
almost everyone in the class had a hand in the
air, and the mood shifted from embarrassment
and fear to an almost rueful sort of pride. Guys
traded grins of acknowledgment across the aisles.
Yeah, I’ve seen it. Even one of the most beautiful
boys in the room—one I’d been admiring for
months without ever quite admitting to myself
that I was doing just that—even he had thrust his
hand up, a little smirk playing on his pink lips.
I was one of the only boys in the class not to
raise his hand. I didn’t move, didn’t breathe, until
Mr. C. continued, launching into a lecture on the
dangers of porn.
I was lying, of course. Just that fall, my mother
had brought home a new computer and signed
my sister and me up for accounts with an internet
service provider called CompuServe. Both of
these accounts had filtering software designed to
keep minors away from “objectionable content”;
sites deemed offensive would fail to load any-
thing more than a page that said, in outraged
capital letters, WEB RESTRICTED. Before
long, though, I figured out a loophole. The
software worked by scanning pages for indecent
or obscene words, but only English ones; sites in
French often slipped past the blockade. And that’s
how, in the hours after school, when my parents
were still at work and my sister was shooting
layups at basketball practice, I found myself
downstairs at the family computer, typing out
foreign words into search engines. I didn’t know
French, but I quickly learned a few key phrases—
garçon, beaux mecs, hommes masculines—the words
as alien and alluring as the men themselves.
Because that, I found, was what I always went
looking for: photographs of men. Not the chaste,
faceless underwear models from the J. C. Penney
catalog, but actual, honest-to-goodness naked
men. I’m just curious, I told myself, again and
again, my right hand trembling on the mouse,
my dick painfully hard in my jeans. The men
didn’t care; they were hard, too. They were
older than the boys at school, more muscled, and
they stayed perfectly still as I stared, letting my
eyes travel over them. Often they were dressed
in work-related outfits—the uniforms of police
officers and firemen, auto mechanics and army
grunts—which they peeled off their bronzed
bodies piece by piece, photo by photo.At school, Mr. C. warned us that porn would
pollute our relationship with God, but his words
faded from my mind at the staticky hum of the
computer dialing up. For that first year or so,
simply looking at the photos made my heart
pound so loud and frantic that it scrambled any
attempt at thought. Shame washed over me
only later, when I realized how soon my parents
would be home. Panicked, I’d spend at least five
minutes filling up the browser history with a
backlog of innocuous websites, covering my
tracks in case my mother went online to check
her email. It was a relief when I finally learned
how to clear the browser’s history, and, for a
time, I thought it would always be that easy—
that porn would always be something I could
erase from my life with the click of a mouse.as a word, pornography has ancient roots, but
its current meaning—“the explicit description
or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in
literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner
intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic
feelings”—is more recent than we might expect.
The word comes from pornographoi, a classical
Greek term so rare that scholars have found only
one use of it, in a fifteen-volume work from
the second century CE called the Deipnosophis-
tae. Compiled by Athenaeus of Naucratis, the
Deipnosophistae discusses a wide range of subjects,
including cooking, dining, music, wine—and
prostitutes. While describing this last topic,
Athenaeus alludes to pornographoi, which liter-
ally translates as “whore-painters” or “whore-
writers”: he seems to be referring to artists
who depicted prostitutes in their works. How,
then, did the word come to acquire its current
meaning?
According to the cultural historian Walter
Kendrick, the answer lies in the eighteenth-
century rediscovery of Pompeii and Hercula-
neum, two ancient Roman cities buried after
the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. The
cities’ excavators were shocked by the brazenly
erotic art they found there: mosaics of lusty
nymphs and satyrs, bathhouse frescoes depicting
threesomes, bronze wind chimes in the form of
winged phalluses. Too scandalous to be openly
displayed, these items were also too historically