gullybogan

Flickr photo by demonbaby.

Dear Reader,

I’m sure you’re aware, if you’ve been reading the news of late, that thirteen year old girls are completely taboo.

So taboo that twelve year old girls are going to court to get permission to have hormone therapy to stop themselves turning into thirteen year old girls.

It’s just that bad.

Well, like you, i’ve been following this whole Bill Henson thing reasonably closely. My excuse is that i’m a little fascinated with works of art and literature being banned.

The Banned wagon

When Satanic Verses was banned in certain parts of the world and fatwas issued, i raced out and bought a copy (of the book, not the fatwa). Not because i wished the Islamic world harm (which i don’t, but those Methodists…), but just because i wanted to try to understand what the fuss was about.

I have a copy of American Psycho, still mint in the plastic wrapper that the law requires it to be sold in, a plastic wrapper that guards against someone reading a paragraph in the bookshop and then going on a mass serial killing rampage. I dare not open it; i have a suggestible mind.

If i had the download capacity, i would have watched Underbelly by now.

But when they banned thirteen year old girls, it wasn’t about religion, or serial killing, or gangland wars. It was about, well, it was about thirteen year old girls.

And, as i say in the title of this post, the first love of my life was a thirteen year old girl.

I was thirteen myself at the time, of course, dear Reader.

So it was ok.

At the time.

The Second-most beautiful girl in Form 1

She was the second-most beautiful girl in Form 1, this girl of mine. Third-most if you counted Snowy, but Snowy, with her tight blonde curls and permanent glistening smile, well, she was just too contrived to be considered beautiful in my books.

First-most beautiful was without question Pacifica, this graceful Dutch girl with a face that had clearly been sculpted from living porcelain by the same artisans that worked on angels, and she was a girl whose terrible beauty meant she was destined to marry an Astronaut one day, and then go on to cure cancer, healing tumours merely by the power of her smile.

And then, after her (Snowy notwithstanding), there was my girl, Julia…

And that’s where i’m going to stop.

Is fear of being caught the same as repression?

See, this is what’s going on in my head.

I’ve been dipping into 81 Vaginas a bit lately [which is the only way to say that, right?], and i’m impressed by the idea of thinking back over one’s past loves, and reflecting on what they taught you, how they made you the person you are today.

More of a bildungsroman than one of those penny-dreadful erotic e-memoirs, dear Reader.

I’m sure you’d rather read the former than the latter.

Dobie! Wants a girl to call his own…

When i was really, really, really little, there was this show on TV deep into repeats called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Reflecting back on the loves of his life was, from what i gather, the idea of the show. He spent a lot of his time looking frustrated and pacing around Rodin’s The Thinker, so i gather that ponderful reflection was the premise. I was a bit young to fully appreciate it, i freely admit.

All i really remember of the Dobie show was this smattering of images:

• Maynard (who went on to become Gilligan) was helping babysit Dobie’s science experiment while Dobie was out reflecting on girls, and all Maynard had to do was to give a rooster a 2cc dose of growth hormone; he asked Mrs Gillis what a cc was, and she said it probably meant ‘cup’, as in a cake recipe, so he gave the rooster two cups of growth hormone and ended up with a gigantic cock that threatened to destroy the town
• Dobie was trying to lose weight to become more attractive (i presume), so his father rigged the refrigerator with a Stalag-17-quality alarm system to rouse the house if Dobie tried to eat any midnight snacks
• Dobie was telling Maynard to stop looking down at the ground, and Maynard replied that if he did that, he wouldn’t be able to see the dropped wallet lying there
• Dobie’s ‘nemesis’, the rich dude, was complaining that he needed to borrow money from the likes of Dobie because he’d already had so many advances on his pocket money from Daddy that he was advanced up to the unimaginably distant future of 1980.

Now, you’ll note that none of those recollections have much to do with girls (except possibly the gigantic cock story, by means of being an allegory). But i still like the premise.

The Problem is

Now, my problem is this. I met Princess when i was nineteen, so the sum total of girls i could reflect on would be younger than nineteen, and the vast majority under sixteen.

And not that i’d “slept with” any of those girls, mind you, or even “based”, as the Americans say. Oh, no. The only fertile thing i had to worry about was my imagination. But i was a teenage boy, and i for sure had impure thoughts and observations, the telling of which now may well constitute a crime.

Specifically, this witchhunt over Henson’s nude [and hence 'sexualised'] photographs of ‘children’ [i.e. teenage minors] concerns me that if i were to write about the crush i had for thirteen year old Julia when i was thirteen myself, i’d be hauled down to the police station and charged with some sort of child pornography offence.

Because i’m an adult now, see, and i’d be writing it as an adult.

Please assume the legal position

I’m not sure that the legal position would be any different if i were a thirteen year old writing about thirteen year olds. I do know for a fact that the police have said that kids who publish photos of their friends or even themselves in sexualised poses on MySpace can theoretically be charged with making and distributing child pornography, so it seems a bit parlous.

So, even though there were no vaginas involved, i’d be reticent to do my own version of 81 vaginas – 81 pashes, perhaps – because i’ve had it resoundingly revealed to me that i live in a culture where any sort of sexualisation of thirteen year old girls is anathema.

“So only talk about the girls you dallied with aged between 16 and 19, then”, you might advise, sagely, dear Reader. But, see, my chick-magnet freckles had faded by the time i turned sixteen, and so the girls were not only few and far between after sixteen, they were almost entirely absent.

They were all washing their hair. Every night. Well, it was the eighties, after all, and there was a lot of hair to wash.

I’d learnt the guitar as a hedge against the loss of my freckles, but that didn’t help. I suppose if i’d learnt something a bit more girl-friendly than Pink Floyd and AC/DC, things might have turned out differently.

Who knew?

Material girls

As far as girls post-sixteen that i could use for material go, there was Linka, who stood me up almost every single fricken time i organised to meet her somewhere, and there was that mad, predatory, bunny-boiler chick who bragged about having suffered this horrible wound on her leg from falling off a tram, and when i asked to see it, she said i’d have to buy her a meal before she’d show me her leg.

And that was about it. And then there was Princess.

I did see Linka wet haired and steamy in a towel once, and i helped her put her contacts in one time, which was as intimate as we got, but that’s not much substance for a kiss-and-tell blog, is it? I mean, i’ve pretty much given it all away just there, in the outlining of it.

That’s more a paragraph than a blog. It’s not even a full post.

Pathetic.

So, sadly, you’ll never hear about what me and Robyn learnt about each other in the sanddunes together when we were fourteen and it was summer and she was in that blue bikini of hers everyday, or find out what happened to Julia in the end, after we broke up and she took up with Motorcycle Boy. Or about Beth, or Janine with her bob-cut and her hands on her head, or Faena, or any of the rest.

Which is a pity.

I think i could have written some fairly good stuff about all those experiences, if it wasn’t off limits.

Wistful, touching, emotionally real stuff.

Oh, well.

Nevermind.

Yours,
Gullybogan