10 - Scant Outlets in the Age of Frustration

The sexual instinct exists and manifests itself, in some way or another, in everyone’s life. Sexual urges, hidden deep within until the end of childhood, spring up unconsciously and come to the fore and flare up in adolescence, catching us unawares. It is said that libido and physical drive peaks around the end of the teen years. These instincts are founded in primordial biological processes and the vital necessity of reproduction and the ‘survival of the species,’ but the evolution of the human kind they aim, sometimes exclusively, at pleasure derived from the gratification of the senses via sexual intercourse, one of the driving forces behind the pull to the opposite sex. This drive is universal and timeless. What electrochemical processes and reactions occur in the brain from the sight of a woman's body, a beautiful face and figure, a seductive smile, a persistent and penetrating gaze, that stimulate us and sometimes set our hearts on fire, so to speak, it is irrelevant for the non-expert. It is rarely needed to be dissected by the layman. It just happens; it fascinates and captivates the soul.

Whether and how such urges, the erotic desire, find outlets and are fulfilled, that is, to the extent the senses are gratified via sexual activity or constrained by the lack or sparsity of that activity leads to frustration, and, consequently, to low self-esteem and anxiety. It determines the degree of an individual’s sexual freedom or oppression. In turn, the magnitude of this oppression in adolescence, will eventually determine not just the sexual but also largely and by association the emotional maturity and social behaviour of the individual. It can be considered, therefore, a major step towards the realisation of a man, the culmination of a boy into a man. It goes without saying that, during adolescence, due to the often-suffocating dependence on family and the subjection to norms and social prejudices, the broader cultural context and geography one grows up within, and the de facto limited contact interaction with members of the opposite sex and the volatility of teenage personalities, as those are forming and solidifying, some degree of sexual oppression is exerted on everyone. In my case and of others in school, this obtained relatively large proportions.

It was the six long years in the boys' only high school, six years of ardent dedication to study under often-unbearable pressure from family, because ‘it was for me; for my own well-being and a prosperous future!’), six years of a few numbered outings for circumscribed entertainment, all of which, along with the introverted and timid character I was, reduced any associations with girls of my age to almost zero. Regardless of that, what naturally occupied my thoughts and consumed mind and soul during the endless hours of isolation within the four walls of my room, between studying and attending my schools (school proper and tutoring) and the few ineffectual and fruitless outings with Yiannis D in search of female company, was not as much the lack of interaction with friends as dreams and fantasies of relationships with girls. Some amongst them were the real ones, whom I came across in our neighborhood and streets of the city, and often watched with chimerical hopes of acquaintance and intimacy; other were imaginaries, projections of a vivid imagination originating from pictures on posters, magazines, television and cinema.

Yet the fire from the burning desires had to be extinguished. Arousal from sexual stimuli had to be channelled through at all costs and suppressed at least temporarily. As did every male of my age-group, I naturally started masturbating (or ‘playing with him’ or ‘wank’ or ‘pumping spunk’) as it was frequently pointed out loud and mockingly by school bullies who had already introduced themselves into it, as means of hands-on self-gratification. I had indulged in that habit since before the nominal age one enters puberty, somewhere between the eleventh and twelfth year of my life. At first with a makeshift vagina, comprising a cardboard funnel lined with rubber gloves; later with my right-hand hand, as soon as I realized that a hand can do an effective job for an equivalently pleasing outcome. The joy from the first climax in was; it was an unforgettable moment of overwhelming pleasure, as I believe any teenager would testify. The subsequent ones ranged from simply satisfying to ecstatic, with fluctuations in pleasure, depending on the stimuli and the circumstance. All in all, it was a ritual with a pleasant ending that provided more than a mere relief: if nothing else it dampened the urges, ‘extinguished the fire’ within.

Stimulation from images the mind forms, either ex nihilo, or stitched together from scattered scraps here and there, remnants in memory of various pretty girls I had seen in the streets or of the one or two beautiful teachers, images the imagination extrapolated into more complete and animated forms, began to weaken with time and repetition. Then, I resorted to glossy magazines: like, for starters, the legendary Penthouse or Playboy magazines, which initially Yiannis D and I shamelessly stole from kiosks, until we were almost caught. Later, when the intensity of the urges forced me to overcome certain inhibitions, I bought them furtively, that is meticulously trying to avoid inquisitive looks from the kiosk owner or glances from customers and passers-by.

Sensually pleasing myself via those practices was invariably accompanied after the act per se, even in adulthood, by a vague guilt, which only a Freudian psychoanalysis could address and explain, and that inadequately. The prevailing feeling at the core of this guilt, was that masturbation was stupefying and, if practiced regularly, in the long term can be stultifying, blunt the function of the brain and impair cognitive ability. In short, it could potentially turn me into an idiot and hamper my intellectual and career ambitions. In a way, I validated that notion by observing a reduced performance in solving puzzles, mathematical problems and in playing chess, at least temporarily after the act. With such worries swirling in the mind and the anxiety from potentially impairing my brain functions, I found difficult to fall asleep. However, the temptation of the pleasure I would derive, in fact, the need to satisfy that overwhelming biological urge, drove me to practice those tactics that consistently brought pleasure. The urge was irresistible and masturbation became a regular habit and a secret hermetically sealed from family, in a locked room or under the sheets or the bathroom. I am sure the family knew and, perhaps, they understood. But knowing their personality and idiosyncrasy, it was something that they would have never discussed in my presence. It thus remained, for me and many others, the universal open secret of adolescent onanism that ‘is the talk of the town...’, in schools, cafés and playgrounds, wherever youngsters gather and chat.

Hormonal acne pimples started appearing on my face. It became a sign which the tyrannical bullies at school exploited, putting it down to a period ‘prolonged involuntary celibacy’, the inability to date girls, masturbation being the antidote to lack of sexual opportunities and intercourse. I could hardly question and counter-argue against such conjectures. I could see similar pimples in Yiannis D’s face and others who suffered from a similar deprivation. I thus became an object of regular teasing from the ‘partying and clubbing animals’ of the class, which exacerbated the repression and emotional turmoil of the era. It might have contributed to a further development of complexes that can burden the rest of one's life. I assumed those theories linking sexual abstinence in adolescence and ugly pimples on the face had a scientific basis and, for years thereafter, I put a lot of effort in the mornings in front of a mirror: to identify them, to squeeze and break them to release the disgusting sebum they contained so they are less conspicuous. For a long periods, this daily practice, which resulted in the formation of scabs and tarnished my face with a couple of scars. Squeezing and breaking pimples in adolescence, a practice affected by the teasing I endured, became a sort of compulsion when dealing with even minute pimples whenever and as soon as they appeared on my face; a compulsion I carried through into my thirties. ‘Take your hands off your face!’, Mother used to say often, whenever she saw me trying to detect and squeeze unwanted pimples with my fingers, until after I completed my military service and eventually left home in my late twenties, when the vices of adolescence were well behind me had and the scars disappeared from my face.

At the age of thirteen there was a small change into the patterns of stimulation and self-gratification. During a school break, I overheard stories told by a certain Kouroglou, a slacker par excellence, a habitual truant and a thug who was a matter of time before he would drop out of school, which indeed happened after the second year in high school. He was talking, with a mien of bravado and contemptuous superiority towards those around him about his experiences from sex-films he used to watch on Saturday nights, in the early glory days of porn cinemas of Thessaloniki.  The possibility of watching live animated on-screen sex, in lieu of recycling imaginary scenes in the mind or browsing static images of naked women in magazines intrigued me. The idea was too titillating to resist and I had to try the shows that Kouroglou was vividly describing to his mates. But the temptation of watching proper animated sex in a cinema was as big as my cowardice and the obstacles I might have to overcome before entering such a venue: the films were (supposedly strictly) prohibited to the under 18s, there was the fear of police showing up to check adherence to the law, the possibility of passer-by who knew me to see me entering or exiting such places of ill-repute.

It was a cloudy winter Saturday afternoon when, with my heart in the mouth, full of nerves and butterflies in my stomach, almost breathless, I walked towards ‘Cine Aria’ on Papanastasiou Street behind Hippocrates Hospital, a quarter of an hour away from home. I had already checked the cinema listing in Sunday’s ‘Macedonia’ paper. There were two categories of cinemas in the newspaper: the top-listed cinemas showing ‘premieres’ of mainstream films for the city’s genuinely cinephiles; the cinemas of the second category offered cheap screenings of older films. The first part of the show in the latter usually featured a ‘B-Movie’ from one of the popular genres of the era for the uncultured masses (martial arts films, horror films, etc.) The second part of the program featured the mostly anticipated by their punters sex movie. But there were a growing number of cinemas where both films screened had sexual content: the first normally being some kind of soft-porn -to set the scene, the second a hard-core porn film. Being an rookie punter of such venues, I opted for ‘Cine Aria’, which featured a Bruce Lee karate film in the first part of its program.

I crossed Papanastasiou street to the alley next to the entrance of the cinema, and spent a few minutes at the corner across from the side street, with my back turned to the passing cars ruminating on the possible implications of crossing the cinema door, the likely reactions of an uncouth cashier when seeing twelve years old kid, and the dark and unknown bowels of the cinema environment. After dwelling on such thoughts, I momentarily lost heart and crossed the street on the way back home, before an inner urged pulled me back again, towards the entrance of the cinema, when I gathered every drop of my limited courage, decisively crossed the threshold and entered the dark reception area inside. A grim, unshaven man, the likely patron of that seedy establishment was sitting behind a counter. He looked at me intensely and gauged me for a few seconds, from my face down to where he could see behind the elevated windowsill. Then in a stern and condescending voice he asked: ‘How old is you, huh?’ It would sound ridiculous to say I was ‘18’, the ratings of both films on show. The age limit was explicitly noted on a board outside and in its entrance hall along with some flimsy posters, as well as in the cinema listings of the local newspapers. I mumbled ’13…’ with a trembling voice, as ‘13’ was next lowest age rating in film classifications. I had not yet turned 13, but I thought that would be more believable. After giving me a suspicious look he said: ‘Fifty drachmas!’ Who would shun easy money, money generally? I paid. He did not issue a ticket, but with a wave of his hand he pointed me to some steps to the right.

From the bottom of a broad marble staircase (that cinema must have had some glorious days in a bygone era) that led to a hall leading to the stalls of the auditorium and further up to a gallery, I was greeted by a scruffy guy, with dishevelled tangled gray hair, and a furrowed brow with deep horizontal wrinkles -clearly, not the result of deep thinking, and dump vacant looks. He was wearing a worn-out jacket that hung like a sack, with one of its pockets apparently full of coins. His style was crude; he knew I was a novice in such a place, a fish out of water. We bypassed the main entrance to the auditorium and he guided me with a flashlight to the top of the stairs, to a gallery, where beam he illuminated a row of empty seats where I could sit. Seating a youngster well below the legal age in a balcony above the mains stalls, an area that could be locked in short notice, was a simple way to evade police patrols. He stretched out his hand without saying anything. I understood that he was expecting a tip. I emptied my pocket of the few coins I had and gave them to him. It was an embarrassingly small amount. He lit his palm with the flashlight, counted them by his eyes; it seemed short change to him; he said something like ‘Is that all you’ve got?’, I replied ‘Sorry, I gave you everything there is in my pocket’. He muttered some gibberish, but I was left unscathed to enjoy the action on the screen. The martial arts movie was still being played. A soft-porn film that followed, with silly and shallow plot, to my disappointment and against my expectations, but it marked the beginning of an incessant search for more stimulating cinematic experiences on Saturday afternoons.

The spectacle of filmed sex offered that extra visual-acoustic dimension in my solitary sexual experiences and enhanced the final climaxes. That much was certain. It didn't take long, therefore, for visits to seedy cinemas in search of that kind of stimulation to become an addictive temptation. My maiden visit to ‘Cine Aria’ was followed by other, regular almost weekly visits: to the same cinema, alternating it with another one further down along the same street, the slightly more agreeable ‘Cine Oscar’. I was self-conscious of what opinions the proprietors and the ushers of each venue might form, what they might go through their minds and say, if they saw me every week. In later years, I ventured further away from my neighbourhood: I explored ‘Dion’ in Lower Toumba, the small ‘Cineep’ in basement on busy street of the city centre, ‘Theano’ in Constantinople Street, ‘Ilion’ and ‘Aleka’ in the shady Vardaris district. It was an endeavour in search of audiovisual stimuli of increasing intensity: from the soft-porn of the early days the impressions from which faded quickly, to soft-porn with clips of hard-core interjected at random intervals in the main feature film, thus answering the demands of the porn-loving clientele and, later, at the dawn of the VHS and the in-house entertainment era full length hard-core films. The otherwise weak obstacles posed by the Greek legislature were easily bypassed by both suppliers and punters. And I was no more fearful of police invasions, as I used to be in the beginning.

Porn cinemas were squalid places, their atmosphere stale from poor or no ventilation. The floors were sticky, either from bodily fluids or spilled soft drinks, the seats greasy, often wet from fresh semen, the toilets repulsive, if not in disuse. The punters were almost exclusively men, middle-aged or old-perverts (at least, by the moral societal standards of the era) otherwise common mortals; lone heads sparsely scattered in the dark room with eyes fixed to the screen; minds stupefied by the screen action and the ensuing onanism, souls of sexually deprived lonely worlds in search of cheap thrills. At least, I had the mitigating circumstances of a young age, until I was given the desperately sought-after opportunity of crossing the threshold of sexual passion! Rarely, one could see the odd couple cowering in the darkness at some remote corner of the auditorium, motionless, seemingly amazed by the conspicuous sexual acts on the screen. More often than the odd female presence, one could recognize real ‘perverts’, who amongst rows of empty seats would come and sit on close to anyone recognizable as a boy. After a few sideways glances, they would move to a seat next and tried to establish physical contact. A male presence next to me in those places was always disturbing, the feel of a hairy lower arm revolting: I did know what he was seeking and expecting. I found it repulsive and quickly changed seats a few rows away, and in the extreme case he followed me, I left the cinema and spoilt the afternoon. But those incidents were a small price to pay and were unable to hinder future temptations.

With the lame and crooked and in a sense ‘perverted’ habit of watching porn in adolescence, in the absence of natural and orthodox ones, my existence in this domain for a few hours a week was downgraded to seeking vulgar entertainment, sitting amongst audiences in its majority drawn from lumpen or marginalised class, barring the few exceptions among them—like, for instance, the Lyceum physicist seen by classmates in one of those venues. It was a habit, an abnormal addiction as many would have described it, that was carried through into adulthood, despite, in the meantime, the normalization of love and sex life, despite the availability of more conventional and mainstream experiences, despite the existence of sexual partnerships. It continued into maturity, into the era of VHS, DVD, and internet streaming. Whether or not it became an addiction and had a detrimental effect in love and sex life, whether or not it enhanced sensual pleasure, whether it dampened or accentuated the passion, and what sex would be like without an adolescence saturated by porn are unanswerable questions. For the dull teenage years, it seemed an optimal and, perhaps, the only way, given my personality and circumstances, for some joy and pleasure in that life department.