My dad bought The Sun newspaper for me and my brother when we were young. He reasoned that this was to provide us with a newspaper with a low reading age that would get us interested in the press. We would share the papers at breakfast on Saturday mornings – a rotation of The Sun, The Guardian and The Oxford Mail. When it was my turn on The Sun I would quickly scan the cover, lift the paper up and open the first page. My face hidden behind the paper, I would linger, feinting my head toward the politics page two while angling my eyes to the girl on page three. My heart would double its rhythm.
At ten years old I already recognised there was a taboo surrounding exposed female breasts. Maybe it was the focus they were given in those photos. The model either arching her back for pertness, or squeezing her arms together for roundness, or squeezing soap suds from a sponge for wetness (from a young age I had gleaned that this was an essential trait of excellent tits). Everything was structured for my attention to be drawn to the breasts. I was interested, for sure.
At eleven years old, we went on a trip to visit my dad's family in Australia. My grandparents had a swimming pool in their garden. One day the neighbour, Stevie, (not the pussyologist, a different Stevie) played in the pool with us. Stevie was twelve or thirteen, carried a skateboard, had freckles, and wore a backwards baseball cap. He had the exotic, nonchalant air of one of those cool kids in an American cartoon – my memory may be lazily replacing his image with that of the main one in Recess. We swam around, threw balls, lounged on noodles, dunked each other for extended periods. Stevie invited me and my brother over to his house. His mum wasn't home. We went to Stevie's room. He said mentioned wanting to show us something. He pulled a wooden trunk from under his bed. He had a padlock, the key to which he had hidden somewhere else in his room. Smart! He opened the trunk. Stevie had a stash of Playboys. More than enough to go around. He handed one each to me and my brother. My heart raced. I was sat on the floor, my brother on the bed and Stevie in a chair. I saw my first sexualized vagina. It was a double-page spread of a woman, naked, standing next to a motorbike. I remember thinking that this was magnificent. I couldn't stop laughing with joy at my good luck. My brother told me to "stop" to "shut up"! Impossible, I had been overcome, giggling so hard that tears started to well. Stevie just kept his head buried in his magazine. I breathed, calming myself by reading an article about the final season of Dawson's Creek. It turned out that Playboy is not just the joyride of a pervert, but the education of a cultured young gentleman. The women might be beautiful and naked, but let our conversation avoid smut. We sat in sheer silence, leafing through the pages. There was one magazine in which the women were clothed — not even any nipples. We were not interested.
Something that struck me afterwards was why Stevie really wanted to have this moment with us. To simply share the joy? Was he trying to prove something to us? Or just to give us a story to go back to England with.