My dad, bless his tech-savvy heart, generously bought me an iPad mini when I was too young to have enough money to buy such things for myself. It ended up being a stroke of technological luck because, soon thereafter, I got an office job where the work was slow and sporadic but we weren’t allowed to use our phones at all while on the clock. This meant that employees who could afford an MP3 player, iPad, or other non-phone media-playing device could while away the boring hours listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks, while those who only owned a phone had to either stare at a blank screen in silence or try to strike up conversations with other workers to pass the time. This blatantly classist policy still makes me angry when I think about it. I wish I could’ve bought an iPad for everybody there.
My closest friend at that office was an Eastern European girl who loved to gossip with me about our respective sex lives; mine was frequently ridiculous at that time, so there was a lot to gossip about. (I will never forget her calling me a “social butterfly” because literally no one else in my life has ever or would ever call me that. I am a social caterpillar at best.) Sometimes I brought a headphones splitter to work and we would listen to old episodes of sex podcasts together, or pick out an album on Spotify to groove to. The work we were doing, despite being kind of boring and repetitive, was “adult” in nature (technically I signed an NDA so I can’t tell you what it was, but Playboy commissioned and paid for an article about it which I completed a year and a half ago but has still never been published, so, uh, look out for that eventually, I guess) so there was a culture within the all-women office of… not quite sex-positivity, but certainly openness about sex. (I still recall a raging – and very loud – debate between two coworkers about whether or not the term “gangbang” inherently meant non-consensual sex.) So periodically, someone would come across a strange porn clip or unusual nude pic in their idle web-surfing, and before long, we’d all be looking at it on our screens and giggling up a storm.
It was sometime during my year at that job that I discovered the joys of watching porn on an iPad. For one thing, it was much more subtle than pulling up a clip on my office-assigned computer, where a supervisor (or, in one case, a hot repairman who came to fix the air ducts) could walk in at any moment and see what I was ogling. But even when I wasn’t at work, it was clear that the iPad was the best tool for the job. It felt more intimate than watching porn on a computer – you could get closer to the iPad, prop it up next to you in bed, without worrying about a laptop overheating on the mattress. It was small enough to allow for secrecy and a sense of clandestineness, but large enough that you could see all the details of what was happening on-screen. Gradually I began to load up my iPad with favorite porn clips, mostly ones purchased from indie queer porn sites. I discovered some of my earliest kinky inklings back then, curled up in bed staring rapt at the spankings and whippings and strap-on fuckings that glowed in front of me.
That iPad is super old and barely works anymore; I keep it at my parents’ house now as basically a Netflix and Scrabble machine to use occasionally when I visit. But recently I bought myself a new one – an iPad mini 5 in space grey, refurbished – because my chronic pain and fatigue have been making it tricky to sit at a computer for long stretches, and I figured it would be easier to write on a smaller, more touch-oriented device.