Donkey porn, or, I don’t like hockey very much

I was not an athletic child. Not a team player. A little bit too compulsive. A little too lazy. A little too fat.

It took me until I was 16 to work out an elegant solution to the problem. My school allowed you to select which activity you would like to do for games: hockey, aerobics, tennis, yoga, etc, etc. Often at the start of term someone decided they’d really like to do, I don’t know, croquet, and then changed their minds and switched to, I don’t know, needlework (are these sports? I don’t know, as I said, I wasn’t there). The croquet teacher would call the register and ask why a certain person was missing, and someone would pipe up “Oh no, so and so is doing needlework now.” So all I had to do was sign up to pétanque and hopscotch, and prime two friends: one to tell the pétanque teacher I was attending hopscotch, and one to tell the hopscotch teacher I was attending pétanque. And then I retired for a peaceful afternoon of drinking red wine in a wardrobe.

By the end of the year, it was me and nearly a dozen friends drinking red wine in the wardrobe. Other people had noted my ruse. And clearly, they weren’t keeping it a secret. I feared this would escalate out of control.

One day, before retiring to the wardrobe, the 19 of us decided to check our school email accounts. We went to the musty communal computer room, filled with monitors the size of a small car, which must have been donated to the school in the early 90s. We waited 20 minutes or so for our emails to load. We had all received the same message from our friend Valencia, who was not part of our number, on account of being tall and not lazy and able to run in a straight line. She had included in her email several images. We waited for them to download, line of pixels by line of pixels.

They were the most bizarre images any of us had ever seen. There was a very blonde woman with overdrawn lips in an American flag bikini. There was a person with dwarfism. They were engaged in coprophagia. And they were seated on a donkey.

We all decided this email was a little odd and retired to the wardrobe, where I opened a fresh bottle of my finest Rioja using only a biro.

A few drinks in, one of the pétanque club grew hungry. They decided to order a pizza. A pizza, for delivery, to the wardrobe. A noisy motorbike making a delivery to a wardrobe during the school day was not going to go unnoticed. So, once delivered, I insisted we all eat the pizza in the bath to avoid detection. We locked ourselves into the room. We got in the bath. We even drew the shower curtain. No one would find us here.

I look out the bathroom window and see the headmaster coming around the corner towards the boarding house. This can’t have escalated that far. I mentally try to reckon what I will be in most trouble for: the skiving, the ring leading, the pizza, the hiding, or the wine.

There is a series of angry thuds on the bathroom door. I look at the others expectantly, signaling them to be quiet. “You’re being ridiculous”, they say. “We have clearly already been caught. Do you expect us to stay crouched in a bath forever? There’s 25 of us. And we’re out of wine.”

One of us opens the door. It wasn’t me, I didn’t open it. I was busy trying to see if I would fit in the small cupboard above the lavatory, my last hope of escape. But it is not the headmaster on the other side of the door. It is the housekeeper. We are being summoned to the housemistress’ office. I pull my leg out of the cupboard and all 39 of us march down the stairs.

But we are not in trouble. The housemistress wants to have a very serious talk with each of us about how we feel about the pornography we saw that afternoon.

Pornography? We’re all baffled. What pornography? “I thought I was here to discuss a pizza delivery”, I hiccupped.

The headmaster is not there because of the pizza, or the skiving, or the hiding. He is there because a child sent scatalogical donkey porn to most of her classmates over the school network.

Not one of us was able to identify those images as pornography. None of us had ever seen any pornography, but we assumed it comprised images that were sexually enticing. None of us had filed shit-munching donkey rides into that category. We wrote it off as nonsense from the American internet. We were utterly unfazed. She tells us she felt so disgusted after seeing the images, she had had to launder everything in her house. I imagine her looking at them. I imagine the headmaster — a man knighted by the Pope for services to Catholic education — looking at them. And I feel very, very sorry for them both. This is not the workday they were expecting.

So, I am off the hook for the pizza, because I have been overshadowed by Valencia’s exploits. No one has the mental resources to tackle her impropriety and my alcoholism in the same day.

We learned how Valencia had come to find those extraordinary images. The link had been provided to her by her boyfriend Sebastian. Sebastian was a sixth former. He was over 18. He was the head boy. He had a place at Cambridge. No one wanted to punish Sebastian: why jeopardize his chances of enjoying the shining university career ahead of him? People did want to punish Valencia. After all, he had sent the link to one person, and she had sent the images to 12. She had done a measurably worse thing. She was also a sixteen year old who had received pornography from an adult over the age of 18; an adult who seemed to be avoiding punishment because he was a #promisingyoungman. Valencia had the support of her friends. We were not impacted. We did not want her punished while he avoided consequence. We argued, loudly, persuasively, possibly drunkenly, that it was not fair. The incident quietly went away.

I think about how those were different times. I think about how now, few people first encounter pornography at the late age of 16. I think about how long it must have taken Valencia to upload those images. They were quite high res. She was determined. I think about how commonplace and how straightforward it is for people to share this kind of material now: a couple of clicks, an instant error of judgment. I wonder how it would have unfolded if it had happened today. Him sending her those images would be considered a crime. And they wouldn’t have taken so long to download.