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7 Conclusions: The Tactile Grab of Online Pornography My best friend at the age of eight had a sister and two brothers, all her senior by at least a decade. She was the baby of the family, and she performed the part by talking to her parents with a high-pitched baby voice. We went to school (third grade), had sleepovers, and played in the woods nearby. In those days, paper recycling was less organized than it is today. A few times a year, people gathered their old magazines to be collected by youth organizations that sold them for small amounts of money. Sitting on the stairs outside my friend’s house in suburban Helsinki, we looked through the piles of magazines discarded by her family, really looking for one thing—the older brothers’ hardcore porn magazines, which generally were stashed in the middle of the pile so that they would not be easily found. When we located these magazines, sitting on cold concrete steps (it always seems to be winter in these recollections), we contemplated their exotic images with attention and curiosity. These probably were not the first pornographic images that I ever saw—similar magazines were sold in most shops and kiosks with their covers easy to see—but they are the first ones I recall. This was in 1983, the year the Finnish porn magazine Erotica gained publicity by publishing an issue that came “with smell” (“mukana haju”). The magazine’s editor later claimed that the scent was achieved by mixing a foul perfume acquired from a bazaar in Cairo with printing ink and by storing magazines overnight in a sausage factory. The stunt was successful . Newspaper agents publicly complained of the smell, and the issue sold out (Korppi 2002, 111–116). Having heard of this wonder, my friend and I sniffed magazines in vain, perhaps looking for some odor of sex, adult pastimes, or forbidden things, but we managed to catch merely the smell of ink and paper. Some ink remained on our fingers, as if—suspected of 252 Chapter 7 misconduct—we had had our fingerprints taken. The sense of the secrecy of our activities added considerably to the titillation. The magazines were at times confusing, but we were not appalled. As part of the world of teenage boys and adults, the magazines were not meant for us to see, and they made us giggle nervously. After several magazine collections, my friend’s mother noticed what we were up to. Upset, she phoned my mother, who was more amused than horrified. My parents subscribed to the porno-chic discourse of the 1970s, and they have often told the story of screening Super 8mm porn films imported from Germany on the living room wall of their new house with their friends before even setting up the curtains to keep away the curious eyes of neighbors. After my best friend and I were caught, my friend’s mother at some point suggested that my friend should spend less time with me. Although the magazines were not the central reason that our friendship slowly disintegrated, I was left feeling that I had somehow corrupted my friend, the baby of the family—oddly enough, with her brothers’ magazines that were sitting by the door of their house. For some readers, this narrative may seem like a feminist “coming to consciousness story” that develops from childhood fascination and subjection to sexist fantasies to feminist revelation—an awakening from false consciousness. But although the body aesthetics of 1980s porn may not be my cup of tea, my relationship to porn continues to be marked by interest and curiosity. The adult lure of pornography may have long since disappeared , yet different kinds of affect remain, and pornography has the power to move me. For other readers, this story may be read as one of childhood soiled and even of parental neglect that made it possible for children to encounter pornographic materials. For still others, this anecdote may be another piece of evidence that the Nordic countries are a realm of sexual and pornographic abundance.1 My point is that I grew up in a culture or at least a family where pornography was a mundane issue, although definitely something not meant for children. I may have been a white, middle-class girl with blond hair and a penchant for pink clothes, but—unlike my best friend in her parents’ eyes—I would not have passed for a “hapless cherub” of the sort...

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