The first time I ever saw a porn film, it was by accident. I was 13 years old and wandered innocently into the front room of a friend’s house, who had a slightly older brother.

He was sat with a few of the neighbourhood boys, one of whom I’d recently kissed in a gut-wrenchingly nervous episode involving babysitting for my best friend’s naughty younger brother and several glasses of her dad’s dubious home brewed beer.

I was prepared, having been practicing the kiss on my own upper arm for weeks, gyrating my mouth and head around like I could see they did in the movies (although I admit I was having some problems with integrating any kind of meaningful tongue movement). This was the early eighties and life was still delightfully innocent. The steamiest scenes I’d ever witnessed were the seduction scenes in Flashdance and Ghost. My model for masculine sensuality was at this point Patrick Swayze.

The first strange thing I noticed about my friend’s front room was that the curtains were shut. In the middle of the day? Weird. The second strange thing was the look on all the boy’s faces. I wasn’t sure what that look meant because I’d never seen it before.

They were all evidently fascinated by a video that was playing. I moved around to have a look at the screen. It was a naked woman. Thin, with blond hair, enormous breasts and a curiously pube free vagina. Well that was confusing! Weren’t adults supposed to have pubes?

She was sprawled on a rug on the floor with two men, also naked. One man seemed to be stabbing a horrifyingly large piece of plastic between her legs whilst uurrggh! Touching himself up.. Another man, knelt over her face had his enormous penis in her mouth as she made moaning, gagging and sucking noises. It seemed to me that he was trying to suffocate her.

I felt the blood rush to my face and a strange sense of embarrassment wash over me. The two men in the movie had the same leering look on their faces as the boys on the sofa in front of me. I instinctively averted my eyes from the screen exclaiming scornfully, ‘This is shit! I’m playing out.’ And with burning cheeks, I turned and walked out of my friend’s house, followed by general laughter from the boys in the room.

From that day on, the easy familiarity I’d had until then with the neighbourhood boys was gone. Rather than general talk of who was best at jumping the privets, there was increasingly segregated talk between the girls, generally about which boy they’d like to kiss. And talk amongst the boys, generally about which girl they’d like to fuck how men fucked women in porn films, only better. And harder.