Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope it’s a fun time for you all, even if the presence of family can be tense. Trust me, I understand.
We’ve dicsusssed this subject before. Every time I go to visit my family for a holiday, I must perform a careful balancing act. Everyone around me, with the exception (maybe) of my grandmother, knows that I spend much of my time watching, reviewing, thinking about, and talking about pornography. My parents and siblings know. My cousins know, and they’ve all told their parents and friends. My friends certainly know. But I have been very specifically forbidden from discussing any of this at family gatherings. My parents do not want the topic to come up at the dinner table over turkey and cranberries, and they definitely don’t want it whispered about during hors d’ouevres. They want to preserve the never-actually-extant illusion that their family is “normal.” That’s their right, of course: it’s their house. But if any of my friends and relatives who watched me growing up and didn’t expect me to end up doing something like what I’m doing now, or if any of them think it’s actually normal for a house full of people to never once bring up sex… something is very wrong.
But the end result is that, rather than discussing the fascinating ins and outs of the adult inddustry, which I am absolutely certain all of my extended family members have plenty of questions about, we discuss our even-more-extended family’s health problems, in grotesque detail, while stuffing our faces. This seems strange to me. Obviously there are some things in porn that might turn stomachs easily, but I find colostomy bags and surgical details much more repellant than insider knowledge about pay models in adult entertainment.
Well, whatever. As long as there is food, friends, and family, who cares what we talk about? I get kind of sick of all the sex talk, anyway, so it’s a nice break. And it’s slightly less alienating to know I’m in the presence of like-minded individuals, even if we’re not allowed to mention it: last year my aunt sidled up to me in the living room and asked, in a whisper, if I thought Hilary Clinton was into BDSM in her private life. I said yes, definitely.
>I often wondered how you handled that.