Fridays Without Borders: Almost Masturbating in the Late ‘90s
The fall. A magical time when the colours begin to change, people start to bundle up, and sexual journeys begin. For me and, I believe, for a certain generation, our local cable company’s annual Sigma Box promotion opened a carnal doorway. We didn’t have TV anymore. We had cable.
In the late ’90s, cable was like an amazing gateway. It allowed you to see what your imagination would be like if you were smart or cared enough to write anything down. I remember the whispers around the schoolyard: “Channel 60 has nudity.” Keep in mind that this was pre-internet, and pre-me finding a porno magazine at the creek, so nudity was a big deal. The word just held power over my 12-year-old self. This wasn’t the nudity I was used to at the time either: Like a trucker stuck on a sexual highway in a blizzard, I had spent many hours trying to decode the snow of TV static for any glimpse of bare skin on the movie channels we didn’t get. The 1996 classic film “Barbed Wire,” starring Pamela Anderson, came in exceptionally clear on a particularly eventful Saturday night. By “exceptionally clear,” I do mean the image was jittering up and down violently, heavily distorted down the middle, and the whites and blacks were inverted like a haunted painting. Maybe I saw breasts? Maybe it was two cups on a table? I still don’t know.
