21
66
09
42
FF
16
16
99
16

Read the whole thing pronouncing it like CLEET:

Before the colors of online porno were glory-hole #000000 and jismy #ffffff and fake-tan #ff9900 they were the zany kandy-kolors of kid-safe AOL, where I’d pick KIDS (or sometimes TEENS) from under CHATROOMS and talk to grown men (or “other kids”) about boners and clits and the things people do to them. And once I found a couple of good ones—good “other kids”—I’d line up their windows to fit neatly on my screen and mouse frantically between them like, DO YOU HAVE A BONER and ARE YOU HARD and TOUCH MY CLIT and MY CLIT IS WET AND HARD and I HAVE A BONER—because I didn’t really know which sex adjectives belonged with which sex nouns, because I’d only ever seen these words on AOL Kids.

And you might think if I knew how to find these “other kids” that I might also know how to lookup these new words, but knowledge has a habit of accumulating weirdly, especially in late grade school, and on the early net. Like porno now, it was less about sex than finding the extent to which things can be out there, and seeing how far people will go, and switching between windows like BONER BONER BONER CLIT CLIT CLIT.

Jamie Lauren Keiles writes about daily life on and off the internet.