Prude at Penthouse

I was so bashful I could hardly say the word "sex." But my job at the porn mag was an education in being unashamed

Published July 15, 2013 10:45PM (EDT)

Of course I had seen a naked woman before. As a child, I’d flipped through the pages of my older sister’s European fashion magazines where small-breasted models posed languidly on uncomfortable surfaces in black-and-white. I had entertained myself with the Technicolor genitalia illustrations in my grandmother’s medical textbooks that made the crude machinery of the human body look bright and beautiful. I had caught flashes of porno films being played on hand-me-down television sets at college parties. The bleached and waxed and puckered actors were as titillating as oiled-up rubber chickens, a ridiculous sight gag. And, obviously, I had seen my own body, which by my 20s had become like a well-studied map of a foreign country — a land familiar, boring even, yet strange, distant.

But inside Penthouses pages was the first time I had intimately viewed the intricate underworld of a female genitalia in all its slippery, complexly layered glory. A close-up shot of a woman’s vagina, or vulva, as new-wave feminists might prefer I call it, was what the Penthouse editors liked to call a “kidney shot,” for its almost medical, vaginal-speculum view. I stared in horror at the varying lengths and shapes of the fake-tanned models’ labia minora — some twice the length of the red, fleshy lobes that hang underneath a turkey’s neck, while others were less generous and remained tucked neatly inside their relentlessly groomed, almost sparkly, outer parts.

Faced with this new visual perspective, my supposed adult knowledge of my own gender’s genital landscape was reduced to a bewildered pre-adolescent curiosity. What is that weird hanging thing? Images that might have been tantalizing for a blue-collar man in the Midwest, Penthouse’s much-researched demographic, were, for me, a confusing lesson on the sum of my lady parts. Like a 3-year-old first discovering her belly button, I sat in my new cubicle panicking that there might be something dreadfully wrong with my anatomy — gone unnoticed for all these years. Then, I took my pencil to a photo of a brunette displaying her anus, with a pull quote above her head that declared, “I’m a perky, small-town daddy’s girl,” a...

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By Margaret Meehan

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