24 SECRET MUSEUMS | B. PIETRAS
Big Boob Lesbians,” one told me, with a shameless
grin. Another confessed that his favorite porn
star was Tori Black, “because,” he said (and the
phrasing was so peculiar and precise that I never
forgot it), “she can be both the girl next door and
a deviant sex goddess.”
Oddly enough, after college, it seemed to
become even easier to ask straight guys my
age about porn—maybe because, even though
we were supposed to be real adults now, porn
was easier to find than ever: 2007 marked both
my graduation and the rise of “tube” sites like
PornHub, XTube, and YouPorn. Freed from
the necessity of downloading, a viewer could
now stream dozens of videos in one sitting. And,
given how precisely the tube sites categorized
their content, the viewer could also be pickier
than ever, sorting through channels devoted
exclusively to MILFs or teens or redheads or
Japanese guys.
It was both exhilarating and bewildering
to have access to so much so quickly, and that
ambivalence was usually where I began when
I talked to straight guys about porn—often
after we’d both had a number of drinks but the
night still stretched out before us, gleaming
with possibility. Remember how long it took to load
a single photo on dial-up? I would ask, mimicking
the photo’s slow, jolting progress in the air with
my hands, its painstaking crystallization out of a
cloud of pixels. Remember how one photo was all you
needed?
Oh my god, yeah, the guy would say, smiling
into his beer—relaxing, starting to like me, to
think I was funny.
After that, it wasn’t hard to steer the conversa-
tion toward the present day, to questions like
What’s your favorite site? and Who’s your favorite porn
star? In all my questions, what I was really asking
was this: Give me the key. I wanted guys to tell me
what made excitement claw at their bellies, what
made their dicks go hard in their jeans. I wanted
them to tell me about the images that had stayed
with them, year after year. I wanted them to
bring me inside their secret museums.
By then, I’d listened to plenty of guys mur-
mur about porn, but it still surprised me how
eager they were to talk—maybe because I could
never quite believe they’d discuss something sointimate with me. Sometimes the stories they
told were oddly sweet (“The first time I jacked
off, it was to a topless photo of Pam Anderson
that I found online; I was twelve.”); sometimes
they were darker (a gentle, bearded hippie once
confessed he liked to watch an S&M subgenre
called “forced orgasm”). A number found that
porn made them worry: about the size of their
dicks, about if the girls involved actually enjoyed
themselves. And they were surprised, too, to find
that they sometimes preferred it to actual sex—
that what they wanted was not the real thing, not
the authentic intimacy of two bodies together,
but its image.around this time, I started to assemble a se-
cret museum of my own, a collection that existed
in more than just my mind. It began innocuously
enough. One of the many straight guys I’d had
a crush on in college posted a photo of himself
on Facebook—he was standing by a waterfall in
only a pair of swim trunks, laughing, pale and
strong against the wet black rock around him.
On impulse, I saved it to my desktop. A queasy
twinge of shame went through me as I did it, but
the beauty of the photo burned away any misgiv-
ings. Soon, I found myself saving more photos of
male friends and acquaintances. I saved images of
them mountain-climbing with their girlfriends
and skinny-dipping in Vermont ponds, and
images of them stripped down to their boxers at
parties, drunk grins plastered over their shining
faces.
I added new pictures to my collection fre-
quently, became adept at working my way
around Facebook’s privacy settings—and yet,
as soon as I was away from my laptop, I barely
thought about the file at all. The thrill, I think,
came from knowing that I could go back, that
the photos would vanish from my newsfeed but
not from my life. Though the images themselves
weren’t pornographic, I was practicing a kind of
looking I’d first learned years ago while scrolling
through galleries of hommes masculines: a kind
of looking that involved both intense attention
and willful forgetting. First came the shock
of desire—studying the image, consuming it,
feeling almost consumed by it—and then, once
it was time to leave the computer, a refusal to