"Seventeen" by Troye Sivan, Wednesday, June 16, 2021 (Warning: Graphic Descriptions of Pornography and Sex)

 

The opening track to Troye Sivan's Bloom, "Seventeen" tells the story of Sivan losing his virginity to an older man he met on Grindr. Sivan looks back on this first encounter fondly, despite the man knowing Sivan was underage. The age of consent is a pretty complicated issue, and the law varies from place to place. There are issues of sexism, homophobia, and maturity involved when people pass judgement on age gaps between partners, especially if one is below the age of 18. Sivan has talked about this song, saying, "I don't ever want to come across as condoning [sex with someone underage] or anything like it. But. . . I felt a responsibility to tell the true story of the curious gay kid who puts himself in some kind of shady situation to fund a connection, like all of us crave."

AGE IS JUST A NUMBER. Troye's experience of losing his virginity at 17 is very different from mine. For one thing, when I was 17, there weren't smartphones. Seventeen was the time I had keys to my first car, but I was a pretty good kid--home by 10, practicing guitar, doing homework, working odd jobs, going to church. But there was the hidden shame of pornography. I knew all the guys were looking at porn and trying not to. My shame was deeper than that. I remember my first encounter with pornography. It was just like everything mothers try to keep their sons away from--at a friend's house, a stuffed away magazine at the age of 12. I remember not being aroused by it and thinking, what's wrong with me? In my early teens, my friends started sharing porn, and they especially liked lesbian porn because there were no men in the scene. Scrolling through my friend's computer after he finished, I exited a bunch of windows before seeing a threesome with two girls and a guy. The girls were off to the side kissing completely naked, and the guy was watching, masturbating. That was the first man I ever saw in porn. I was drawn to him. He wasn't the most handsome man I had ever seen, but he stood there confident, naked, and hard. From an early age, men had dominated my sexual fantasies, but I thought of it as more of "mentorship" fantasies. In my mid-teenage years, these "mentorship" fantasies got more and more graphic.

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, SAW THINGS I'D NEVER SEEN. By 15 I started looking at porn at home on dial-up. It was a matter of stumbling across the wrong file on Kazaa, an illegal file-sharing site. I'd stay up so late some nights waiting for files to come through, only to be disappointed or deeply ashamed. It was a shared computer, so I also had to learn to cover my tracks. However, one night at about 2 in the morning, I opened an image that burned into my memory forever. It was a picture of two men having anal sex. It wasn't that the men had perfect, 20-something year old bodies, lean muscle, and hairless chests, which they did. It was the expressions on their faces. It was just as what the boys at school said: don't let another guy do that to you. You'll like it so much that you'll never want to have sex with a girl. From the facial expressions, I could see why. The intimacy I saw on their faces was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. In that photo, they looked like they were offering each other their souls in two very different ways. The top had a quiet strength to him, yet something in his eye looked a little vulnerable. The look on the bottom's face, though, was pure ecstasy as he lost himself to the man inside of him. I was probably sixteen when I saw that picture. Church made me feel so guilty about enjoying and ultimately wanting to experience something like that photo. So, I put it on the back burner. I would pray for forgiveness and believed that God would change my affections to more natural ones. 

https://genius.com/Troye-sivan-seventeen-lyric