by Luke Ryan
Years later, when the internet informed me that these shows were actually considered failures in America, I felt betrayed. While American children were watching better shows with better stories and better heroes, we had been tossed the damaged and expired stuff. Much of the breakdown in Pakistani and American diplomacy can be traced to this unhealed wound in our collective psyche.
Then satellite dishes erupted in our sociocultural landscape. Within a few months, every household I knew had installed a large fibreglass bowl with an antenna sticking out the middle. All of a sudden television had become the centrepiece of a cultural revolution. CNN and BBC broadcast 24-hour news that gave us the outside world’s perspective on Pakistan; music channels taught us pop, rap, rock and R’n’B; and Indian channels showed us that the enemy was just like us (in that they also watched terrible soap operas about the endless wars between mother- and daughter-in-laws).
And then there was Baywatch.
Given what I have just said about the depths of our collective sexual frustration, the effect of those swimsuit-clad buxom bombshells shouldn’t come as a surprise. Overnight, Pamela Anderson and her cohorts jiggled and bounced their way into our lives. Parents suddenly had to vigilantly guard children from the television, and children had to guard against their parents catching them watching said television. Moral authorities were up in arms and, if the shrill panic in every social moderator’s voice was to be believed, we were on the brink of societal collapse, brought about by slow-motion jogging. The impact on us teenagers – struggling to stay focused on impending examinations – was catastrophic. We couldn’t have been more distracted if we had been told to solve differential equations in a strip club. In unison, Pakistani boys tossed aside their textbooks and grabbed their penises.
For me, Pamela Anderson’s arrival was almost perfectly timed to coincide with the discovery of masturbation. It was all my friends and I talked about; endless discussions conducted in hushed tones during school lunchbreaks, as we reverentially shared fabricated wisdom with each other. We were in the throes of puberty, and all around us girls were sprouting breasts.
Unfortunately for the boys, we countered those wondrous mutations with itchy underarms and painfully constant erections. For us it was torture; for the girls, as far as we could tell, it was highly amusing. And so every day, during lunchbreak, we would form a protective huddle and talk about the single greatest shared achievement in our lives.
‘I read in my dad’s medical books that every time you masturbate you lose a pint of blood,’ expounded one boy. His father was a doctor, and so he was our resident authority on all medical matters. ‘That means if you masturbate more than twice a day, you could die.’
‘Fuck,’ said another with a look of horror on his face, ‘I masturbated four times last night.’
‘You should have orange juice quickly,’ offered the medical expert.
‘You know, if you masturbate more than a hundred times in your life, you get AIDS,’ announced another prodigy. This was followed by a long moment of silence as each boy did some panicked maths.
Finally, I worked up the nerve to ask, ‘What’s AIDS?’
‘Oh, it’s a disease that makes you gay. And everyone you touch becomes gay as well.’
‘Shit,’ said another. ‘I think my cousin has AIDS then. He plays with dolls.’
‘Don’t touch him,’ we advised.
And so on. Each day brought some new bit of information about how masturbation could kill you, and each night we all worked hard at separating fact from myth. By the end of seventh grade, had the stories been true, my school would have been struck by an epidemic that attacked only boys, leaving them emaciated husks who played with dolls, had fur on their palms and whose penises had been worn down to tiny, withered nubs.
Back then we had no easy access to pornography. This was still a pre-internet world, in which porn was hard to acquire and hoarded jealously when gained. For two years after I turned eleven, I owned one single porn film: a VHS I had received from a friend whose house was not porn-safe, due to a father who didn’t respect the privacy of his pubescent son. I watched that tape over and over, night after night. By the time I was thirteen, I knew every grunt and squeal by heart.
When I found myself growing bored with the single VHS porno I possessed, I asked friends for more, but no one was ready to surrender theirs. So I drew some.
I’ve always enjoyed drawing. Having discovered comic books years before, I had filled many sketchbooks with detailed renderings of muscular heroes eye-blasting alien menaces while scantily clad women pranced around them. As I grew more and more desperate for something new to inspire my masturbation, I realised that the scantily clad women were a great deal more fun to draw than the muscular hero or his enemy. Except, that is, for when I drew the muscular hero and the scantily clad woman having sex.
I filled page after page with carnal battles. I would draw late into the night, studiously mastering the rules of anatomy and musculature for my own deviant purposes. Within a few weeks I had several-hundred pages filled with graphite copulations; thick sketchbooks crammed inside my cupboard drawers under a camouflage of socks and underwear. And if I had left them there, everything would have been alright.
I’ll admit to pride. There was definitely some of that involved in my decision to take those drawings to school and show them off to my friends. I thought they were really damned good works of art. The shading and tonal values in some of them were beyond anything I had done up to that point.
But there was also genuine altruism involved. I actually thought I had come up with a solution to our porn deficit. If someone comes up with a viable alternative to fossil fuel, would that person not want to share their discovery with the world? I simply wanted to provide much-needed relief from the pornographic famine. So I stuffed the drawings into my schoolbag and took them with me … on the same day that the teachers announced a random bag check.
They hadn’t been tipped off. It’s not like someone had warned them about a teenage boy smuggling contraband smut into the classroom. No, it was just bad luck on my part. Terrible luck, really. Someone had stolen someone else’s brand-new pocket calculator; the victim had complained to the principal; the principal had asked the teacher to announce a surprise bag check.
Three teachers walked into our classroom and asked us all to put our bags up on the desk. Then they went to each bag, took every book out, held the bag upside down and shook it. When they got to my bag, pages and pages of drawings depicting sexual acts in explicit detail tumbled out, fluttering to the ground like autumnal leaves.
My mother was called in. We sat together in the principal’s office, she glaring at me as he laid the illustrations out on the table.
‘What is this?’ he asked.
‘Michelangelo drew naked people,’ I protested.
‘Yes, but not doing it,’ he replied.
My mother confiscated all my drawing pencils, took all my comic books and told me I wouldn’t be allowed to close the door to my room until I was seventy years old. I was suspended from school for a week. At the end of that week, I was expelled.
There are details from this dark episode that still stab at me occasionally. Jagged shards of memory that poke through the haze of time, and fill me with shame and regret. The staring, wide eyes of the girl seated two rows behind me as I was escorted out of the class by an astonished teacher clutching a bundle of pages. I was going to confess my feelings for this classmate that very day – I’d been working up the nerve to do so for months. The plan was to slip her a small note during recess with ‘I like you, do you like me?’ written on it. That note was lost in the cascade of incriminating pages.
I remember calling up one of my closest friends the day after and his mother answering the phone: ‘He’s not allowed to talk to you anymore. I don’t think anyone should let their children talk to a pervert like you,’ she said.
My mother crying as she told my father over the phone what had happened. I reme
mber thinking about suicide. When you’re thirteen and you find yourself without friends or even a school, the future seems quite bleak.
I didn’t kill myself. Probably didn’t even think about it more than once with any degree of seriousness. I don’t even think I stopped masturbating for too long. Two months later, I was admitted into another school. I made new friends and collected new comics. It wasn’t long before I even trained myself to forget the whole thing had happened.
The only real evidence of trauma showed itself when, a year after starting at the new school, the teachers announced a surprise bag check. Someone’s brand-new pocket calculator had been stolen – I suppose there was a massive underground black market for stolen pocket calculators in Karachi in the early 1990s. The contents of my bag that day were nothing more than a few textbooks and probably a Hardy Boys Casefiles, but the moment it was my turn to hand the bag over to the teacher, I started shivering and sweating like a Vietnam War veteran suffering flashbacks while watching Platoon.
‘Are you okay?’ the teacher asked as she handed my bag back to me.
‘Yes, miss,’ I replied, then excused myself to go vomit in the toilet.
Years later, Pakistan was blessed with internet pornography. No longer were our masturbatory needs limited by scarcity of supply. In the early days of dial-up connections, we used to have to sit and stare at a single picture loading slowly on a flickering monitor. Then video clips appeared online, and internet speeds grew, so that the gap between clicking and relieving was minimal. People without internet access in their homes would go to cyber cafes, gasping and sighing in the privacy of small booths fitted with all the necessities: computer, mouse, chair … and a box of tissues. It was a glorious time. Porn DVDs could be bought in video stores with a nod and a wink.
I once walked into a store near my house intending to buy a new horror movie DVD, and the man behind the counter nodded for me to come closer as he took the money.
‘You look,’ he said with a salesman’s grin, ‘like the kind of man who watches porn.’
When I got home I stared at my face in the mirror, trying to see what it was about my features that tipped him off.
But then Pakistan changed again. In 2012, during a fit of religious cleansing, the government declared a ban on all porn sites. It was decided that internet pornography was ruining the ‘youth of the nation’. Clearly, no one bothered to ask the ‘youth of the nation’ their opinion on all this. Soon, dedicated teams of cyber-censors catalogued and then blocked all the online smut. Pakistani males frantically scoured the web, hoping with each new browser refresh that they would be faced with a wall of questionable thumbnails and a gallery of sad people fornicating sadly, only to be met time and time again by the hateful ‘THIS SITE IS RESTRICTED’.
The effectiveness of the ban on online porn was enhanced by the hard work and dedication shown by a fifteen-year-old boy who gave the censors a list of over 780,000 websites that he claimed to have personally checked. For a fifteen-year-old to have done so without being reduced to a smouldering husk is, no doubt, some kind of epic feat that defies human physiology. Unfortunately, what he accomplished so proudly at fifteen, he no doubt came to regret deeply when he turned eighteen. History will remember him as one of the greatest villains mankind has ever known, and only in his later years will he truly appreciate the damage that he wrought. Modern man is not equipped to deal with a world in which he has to make do with imagination alone. I tried. It was all in black and white.
Fortunately for me, I moved to Australia a few months after the ban took full effect. Sometimes I wonder if that was one of my motivations to get out of Pakistan. After all, with my personal history, whenever I masturbate to porn, I’m doing it to get revenge on society.
From I, Migrant by Sami Shah (Allen & Unwin 2014)
ROZ HAMMOND
Because You’re Worth It
❛Her pupils were dinner plates from which she gorged on the rare and exquisite beauty that beamed from the looking glass. This, she decided, is what God must feel like when She looks in the mirror.❜
It began with Pamela Moore’s spectacularly successful trip to Paris. Max, her husband of seventeen-and-a-half years, had been speaking at a tile, cork and hardwoods conference at the invitation of one of the larger French parquetry firms. For the past fortnight they had wined and dined atop all the finest floors in Europe, from Scandinavian elm to Belgian yew.
The conference invitation had arrived at a most suitable time, because for some months, Pamela Moore had been obsessing over her own mortality. She had grown profoundly maudlin – at times spending upwards of three hours simply staring into a mirror and naming each of her individual wrinkles.
Max was otherwise occupied. At the peak of his managerial powers, he was increasingly staying out late with various colleagues and coves from his many clubs and committees.
Toby, Pamela’s first-born, had grown ambivalent towards her, except for when he wanted to borrow the Audi or invite some friends down to their chateau in Portsea. Toby and his current squeeze, Miranda, a sulky and over-sexed young woman, were ensconced in the beach house at that very moment. Supposedly studying for their practice exams, they were in fact alternating between chopping out lines of cocaine, dropping suspect GHB and having clumsy, frenetic sex in the Moores’ king-sized waterbed.
Pamela’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Annabelle, whose indifference towards her mother was the stuff of legend, was away until Christmas, pirouetting and pas de deuxing her way through a ballet scholarship in Geneva.
With Max consumed by discussions of lacquers and laminates in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Pamela spent long Parisian days in the salons and spas of the 2nd arrondissement. Having decided that the ULTIMATE PROCEDURE be saved until it was time for her to dazzle as the Mother of the Bride sometime in the next decade, Pamela was desperate to find some other method with which to stall the voracious hounds of time.
It was during one of those long afternoons of plucking and pinching, injecting and firming, that the lithe and sleek Monsieur Richot first appeared to her, like some sort of holy vision. Five-foot-nothing, with a tumbling curtain of blue-black hair that seemed on the verge of consuming him whole, Claude Rimbau Richot slid silently into the chintz-covered armchair beside Pamela’s oxygen booth.
‘You are Mrs Pamela Moore, oui?’
Jolted out of her blissful reverie, Pamela was met by the largest pupils she had ever seen; only a tiny trace of pale blue was visible around their border. It looked like he was experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime optical eclipse.
‘Dr Langazho has told me of your petite problem, Madame. I think it is only I who can help. Oui?’
Richot was referring to her recent experiment with the chichiest muscle-paralysing injection on the market, a test that had found her slightly allergic and left her looking like an extra from Star Wars for three full days of the last week. The litigation-paranoid Langazho had advised against further treatment, urging her to cast her net wider in her quest for cosmetic perfection.
The face now perched in front of Pamela was line-free and a deep golden brown. Only a heavy jowl betrayed his middle age. A thin layer of perspiration bubbled on his upper lip.
Drawing a tiny vial from beneath his camel-coloured Marchante coat, Monsieur Richot tapped the bottle gently over his palm. A droplet of pure light slipped into his hand, a pea-sized globule of iridescent liquid that seemed to hover above his flesh.
Bewitched by its shimmer, and the €300-worth of oxygen coursing through her blood, Pamela Moore decided she simply must have this magnificent pearl. She turned her face towards Monsieur Richot.
With the aid of a tiny spatula, the Frenchman applied the merest suggestion of the elixir to Pamela’s eyelids and gently pressed his palms against her eye sockets. His clammy, trembling hands then proceeded to lightly brush the rest of her face, neck and décolletage with the jewel-like balm.
Pamela’s eyes stung, and a searing flash of white light pierced her retinas. S
uddenly she was awash with a sense of almost spiritual awakening. Light and buoyant, she felt a million giddy, wonderful thoughts ricochet around her brain, each more perfect and insightful than the last. Then the rush was simply gone, so rapidly she wondered if it had even occurred. However, on turning to the mirror, she beheld such a vision of loveliness that her breath quite left her.
With a tiny bow, Monsieur Richot withdrew to give her some privacy. Once he had closed the salon door behind him, he secreted himself in a nearby supplies cupboard, opened his vintage snuff box and snorted deeply. The surge of euphoria had him salivating over the prospect of selling this batch to the cashed-up clubbers in Majorca.
Meanwhile, Pamela Moore’s face blazed as if lit by an internal, million-watt globe. Her pupils were dinner plates from which she gorged on the rare and exquisite beauty that beamed from the looking glass. This, she decided, is what God must feel like when She looks in the mirror.
With a discreet clearing of his throat, Monsieur Richot announced his return to the room. Pamela reluctantly tore her gaze away from the mirror to face him. Smiling crocodile-wide, he clasped her hand quickly, their sweaty palms meeting with a distinctive thwack.
‘This is amazing, oui?’
She squinted, trying to focus on the little Frenchman’s eager face. His features were blurred and fuzzy, shrouded in some sort of cloud. Not exactly distorted, but like an image projected through a Vaseline-smeared lens in some old pornographic number. Feeling a surge of affection for the bronzed gnome, she lunged towards him with outstretched arms.
‘Surely you will want some more of this miracle?’ Richot cooed as he extracted himself from Pamela’s overzealous embrace.