When I was 14 years old the thought of going into my local magazine store and purchasing FHM, or Maxim scared the crap out of me. What if I saw someone I knew? What if I bumped into a girl from school? Of course it didn’t matter. I still did it.
Now of course, you don’t need to go into a store to buy porn. You can get it online completely free. But back in the late nineties before we had internet at home, I had no choice but to go out and search out porn.
Change the local bookstore for the local sex store and you have a completely difference scenario. First off, I wouldn’t even know where the nearest sex store was. I don’t even know if we had one in my pretty conservative city. But if we did I am certain there is no way that I would ever have stepped through the doorway. The idea of being confronted by an array of vibrators, fluffy handcuffs and strange sex contraptions would have been enough to send me running a mile the opposite direction.
As a teenager growing up most of the porn I was exposed to (or more accurately exposed myself to) was of a very soft nature. I saw sex toys as something darker and more sinister and to be honest the only sex toy I could have named would have been a vibrator. It wasn’t something I was that interested in. Girls? Yeah. Semi naked pictures of models? Sure. Sex toys? Mmm I’ll pass, thanks.
Sex toys and aides were something that I didn’t need or really want. I just wanted pictures.
Lube was just too messy (Slightly ironic when you are a teenager who looks at porn).
But even if I did want them, I wouldn’t have known where to look.
Sometimes porn was difficult to get, however sex toys were near impossible to find. Even if you did have an adult store close by you most likely wouldn’t be able to get through the door unless you were old enough. But the internet has opened up a whole world where age often is not the barrier it once was.
Most sites anyone can visit. Lying about your age doesn’t require your big brother’s dodgy fake I.D. You just need to be able to click a button on a screen. So if porn is so easy to get access to and you can hide behind the internet to protect your identity, is the same true for sex toys?
Probably. But do teenagers even want sex toys? I didn’t, but what about others? What about my friends? What about you?
Well if the topic of sex toys ever came up it was in the context of a joke. None of my friends had any. Not that they admitted to anyway. And even if they had, I’m not sure what they were doing with them. And I certainly wasn’t close enough to any females to ask if they had any. I don’t think it would have been a wise move either. I think I would have received a few slaps if I had.
So thanks to the internet I don’t have to worry about that. So here are my questions to you, the ones who know. As a teenager what is your perception of sex toys? Do you own any? Did you buy them yourself or did you get someone to buy them for you? At what age were you first exposed to them? Do they have a place in God’s view of sex?