It Ain't Grandma's True Confessions!
by Doreen Orsini

I stumbled upon my first glimpse of erotica in a dark attic while playing hide-and-go-seek when I was just thirteen. I remember dusting off cover after cover of my grandmother's True Confessions magazines. At the time, I didn't know and would never have guessed they were hers, but I learned years later, and always wondered just how many of her generation had similar magazines hidden in their homes. I remember it took a few more years before I worked up the nerve to read what lay between the covers. Once I did, I looked forward to visiting my grandmother and spent more and more time in her attic, losing myself in stories I doubt were really true confessions.

A member of the generation of women who gladly burned bras and fought for equality, I kept my growing addiction to myself and felt ashamed when I responded as I did to what some might call porn.

My other grandmother, a demur woman, shocked my mother and I when I was still a teen. During one of her visits, a scene on cable with two naked men wrestling sent my mother rushing to the cable box to change the channel. My grandmother snatched that box out of my mother's hands and held it to her chest until the scene came to an end. My mother turned her back on the TV. I and my grandmother only glanced away long enough to pass knowing smiles to each other. Sadly, my grandmother made me and my mother swear never to tell a soul that she watched it. Thus, I again felt ashamed of my love of erotica.

Generations of women have read, hidden, and battled to ban erotica. Obsessed and overwhelmed by their need for equality, they perceived erotic novels and movies as an exploitation of their gender. Why?

If a man has sex with a woman, is he the only one who gains pleasure? When a man goes down on a woman, does he orgasm? Are men the only ones who fantasize about a woman with two men? Three? Are men the only ones who get turned on by seeing or reading erotica?

Those questions and others plagued my generation. We chanted about free love but never lived it. We demanded equality in the workplace and home but never in the bedroom. Free love and equality meant giving in to men and having as many orgasms as we wanted. But in the video stores, we still averted our eyes as we passed the red curtain housing the x-rated movies.

Well, times change and women change. Today's thirty-something women have   more >>