When I was younger, the only way to get from Flagstaff to Phoenix if you didn’t have a car was to take the Greyhound. For reasons I can’t quite remember, taking this bus always seemed to necessitate me hanging out at the Phoenix Greyhound station for what seemed like hours, waiting for either the bus to take me back to Flagstaff or for one of my parents to get off work and come pick me up in at the Phoenix end. In retrospect it was probably all just bad planning on my part, but in my defense we didn’t have a little thing called the internet back then (or at least I didn’t), and so the bus schedule was always something of a mystery to me.
The first few times this happened I stayed in the bus station, because downtown Phoenix back then was not only scary, but also really boring. There were no street performers, no trendy bars, no cute little tapas restaurants. There weren’t even any sports arenas (yeah, I’m that old.) All there really was was guys in suits working in offices twenty floors up, and, as I discovered once the boredom won out over the fear, two kinds of shops: porn and pawn.
Which is how one day I came to be standing in front of a rack of magazines with names like “Lactating Nurses” and “Edward Penis Hands.”
Yeah, I could have gone to the pawn shop instead, but really: who doesn’t like browsing a book store? Or rather, browsing the “stacks” (heh) had been my plan: I hadn’t been in there for more than five minutes before I was told that I had to leave. When I asked what I had done it was gruffly explained to me that it wasn’t what I had done, but rather who I was. The store clerk’s exact words were, “Girls shouldn’t be looking at any of this.” I tried to point out to him that from what I’d seen so far all of his products featured “girls” (in fact, some of his products featured nothing but women), but my arguments fell upon deaf ears, and so out I went. Which was fine—the pawn shop ended up having way cooler stuff to look at anyway. But I was still a little bit put out at having been booted in the first place, especially for such a ludicrous reason as the one I was given.
Even now, thirty years later, it seems ridiculous to me that this man was trying to protect me, a “girl,” from finding out that there were, in fact, girls in the porn industry. Although, in retrospect I’m inclined to think that what he was actually trying to protect was himself; he was trying to protect himself from the embarrassment of potentially having to face my questions about what, exactly, kind of business he was running.
I think of that porn salesman every time I hear someone make a similar argument about “protecting” young girls (it’s always girls, isn’t it?) from frank discussions about porn stars, or rape, or sex work (and especially about the ways the three often collide). “I don’t want my daughter to see that,” they say, or, if they’re being unknowingly honest, “I don’t want to have to explain that to my daughter.” Because what they’re really saying is “I don’t want to have to explain to my daughter that this world treats some women—not you, honey, never you—as if they are things instead of people. And I really don’t want to have to explain to her why I haven’t done one single thing in my life to try and change that.”
Including, it would seem, having the discussion in the first place.
[This column was inspired by local artist Drayla Vanrachack. Drayla’s artwork was denied space at a recent local exhibition because the owner of the space “didn’t want to have to explain it to his daughter.” You can find—and buy—Drayla’s art on Drayla’s facebook page.]
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