Growing up, I had no older brother so I grew up without many things, chiefly among them R-rated action and horror flicks and pornographic magazines. I never even found porn among my parents' stuff. I was aware of stuff like PLAYBOY, and I remember asking one time what could possibly be in a PLAYBOY that's simultaneously so great, so forbidden and so accepted by society.My mom couldn't answer, so instead she said to my dad, "Can we just get him a PLAYBOY and show him?"
"No," my dad said.
Linda Hamilton's boobs were probably the first ones I saw when I was old enough to know I was seeing something sexy. I'm sure I'd seen nudity before THE TERMINATOR, but it never really mattered until then. In retrospect the sex scene in TERMINATOR is more romantic than it is sexy, and only lasts about thirty seconds (if that). Still, when I was 12 (or whatever) it was pretty amazing. Now, if I'd had an older brother, chances are I would have seen TERMINATOR 100 times already by the time I was 12. But, I didn't.
I did have an older sister, though. That meant VICTORIA'S SECRET catalogues and lots of fashion magazines like COSMOPOLITAN and VOGUE were around the house. Back in the mid-90s, before the Internet got super awesome, that was enough for me -- a provocative Kate Moss ad here, a lingerie spread featuring Laetitia Casta there.
One time my mom caught me reading COSMO and, catching a glimpse of the smutty ads in the back of the magazine I was staring at, asked, "Is that a girly magazine?"
I had never heard the term before and had to think for a moment. COSMO was definitely girly. So I shrugged.
"Yeah," I admitted.
There was also cable. Of course, my family didn't have cable, and even if we did have cable, we wouldn't have had any premium channels, which meant -- no boobs. But, I did have a friend who had cable, and before I'd go spend the night at his place on a Friday or Saturday I'd check the TV guide to see what was playing that night. The back of the TV Guide had a listing of every movie and why it was rated whatever it was rated -- so you could tell the R-rated flicks WITH boobs from the R-rated flicks WITHOUT boobs. Before I even went over to my friend's house, I had an entire map of what I'd be watching that night. He always fell asleep first and the dirty movies didn't come on until late, so no one was the wiser.
This way, I ended up seeing low-rent cable flicks like THE OTHER WOMAN and BIKINI SUMMER 2 as well was recycled 80s teen comedies like SPRING BREAK. But the best of all was BLOWN AWAY. Not to be confused with the main stream action flick starring Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones. No, no. This was BLOWN AWAY starring Corey Haim, Corey Feldman and. . . Nicole Eggert.
I knew Nicole Eggert from BAYWATCH, the other porn substitute besides chick magazines that I was able to see in my non-cable household. She was the younger, more girl-next-door version of Pamela Anderson, even though she was still way too hot to actually live next door to anyone. Still, she got totally naked and had simulated sex scenes in BLOWN AWAY, which, to my young teenage mind, was the best thing ever.
Later, I went through a phase of attempting to rent every video in the comedy section of the video store with the word "Hot" in the title that came out in the 1980s and was rated R. I figured all of these would feature boobs. The 1980s were a glorious decade when boobs were allowed in mainstream films. These days, good luck finding boobs in a mainstream flick outside of the arthouse.
So, I saw shitty movies like HOTS, HOT SUMMER, HOT MOVES, HOT DOG and HOT RESORT, which had the extra benefit of starring pre-fame Bronson Pinchot. Almost all of these were about a group of four dudes trying to get laid during some kind of vacation. There was usually a hot dude with no scruples, a good looking dude with a heart of gold, a total nerd, and a fat dude. The main character was always the good looking dude with the heart of gold, and all the guys usually got really close to getting laid only to face horrible embarrassment or injury. Eventually, one or all of them would get laid. Along the way, you'd get a few boobs here and there, if you were lucky. AMERICAN PIE went back to this formula in the late 90s but left out the fat dude and dared to have (relatively) three dimensional female characters.
At this age I was also into movies for artistic reasons. That was convenient, because it meant I could rent otherwise seemingly harmless foreign flicks, classics and cult films that were all more free-wheeling with nudity than your average multiplex fare. This way I saw everything from the worst of the worst that made me ashamed to be human (I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE) to the best of the best that made me proud to be same (BELLE DE JOUR), all in the name of boobs. Well, not ALL. I mean, I was legitimately into flicks.
It was interesting the seemingly harmless places you could find T&A if you were desperate and obsessed enough. For instance, around this age I became obsessed with 50s pin-up queen Bettie Page (pictured above -- isn't she lovely?) who was having a resurgence in popularity. This had the benefit of seeming innocent, since she was antiquated and from a bygone era. That meant you could easily see naked pictures of her, because everyone these days pretends naked chicks didn't exist back in the 50s. I could have a pin-up of Bettie Page in my locker at school and it would look harmless, then go home and look at totally nude pictures of her in totally legit books for film nerds. Meanwhile it would have seemed suspicious if I was suddenly into Anna Nicole Smith.
Speaking of Anna Nicole Smith, when I was in Junior High a (kind of) buddy of mine stole her PLAYBOY video from the video store and let me borrow it. I call him a kind of buddy because I never really hung out with him outside of school, and met him for the first time in 3rd grade when he held his cast against my throat and stole my Chips Ahoys. For some reason, though, he respected me after stealing my Chips Ahoys, and became kind of a loyal follower. I guess it was kind of like a prison thing -- he stole my Chips Ahoys, I didn't rat him out. Respect.
Anyway, I took the Anna Nicole Smith video home and feigned illness while my entire family went to Izzy's to feast, popped the tape into the VCR and checked it out. It was the most female nudity I'd seen since TERMINATOR, but it was as alien to me as it was hot -- for instance, thanks to the giant (and artificially enhanced) boobs of Anna Nicole, veins were more prominent than my imagination had previously allowed. It was simultaneously more fantasy than I'd ever seen and more reality than I'd ever seen. Since it was a PLAYBOY video, there wasn't any actual sex and only a tiny bit of simulated sex, and focused a lot on where the girls were from and what they liked to do in their spare time. I didn't really get it.
I wanted to give it right back to the dude who stole it in the first place, to wash my hands of it, but I remember him rejecting my attempts. He didn't want it on him, either. I don't remember what ended up happening to it, but I only had it for a week or so.
Where was I? Oh yeah. High school. In high school, about a year before I actually turned 18, I started getting real bona-fide porn from various sources. One was a buddy of mine (a real buddy this time) who wasn't afraid to yank stuff off of magazine racks. That's how I got my first PENTHOUSE, and my first couple PLAYBOYS. I realized at this time that porn had many faces. There was innocent stuff, just featuring the sheer joy of naked ladies. Then, there was more prurient stuff, that seemed to appeal to more sinister impulses including violence, misogyny and perversion. Unfortunately, a lot of times, all this stuff would be in one single magazine. Or, if not, there would at least be graphic ads for this stuff throughout.
I would hide the porn and then wonder what my mom (or anyone else) would think of me if they found it. I knew what I liked and what I didn't like -- the pages I lingered on, and the ones I skipped over. But, to outside prying eyes, they'd just see this magazine full of terrible stuff and assume I was into every single page no matter what, and I'd look like a monster. That was the problem with porn when it was contraband -- there was no quality control. You took what you could get, and the people who produced it and sold it knew that. It's what they call a "vice" product. They know you're going to pick it up one way or the other so the actual contents don't really even matter, as long as they can sell it to you. So, you had to take the good with the bad.
Quick example: PENTHOUSE went through a phase where they were really into chicks peeing. I, however, did NOT go through a phase where I was really into chicks peeing. Still, in every pictorial (or at least once in one pictorial per issue) there had to be a chick peeing in at least one shot. I don't know who made this editorial decision or why, but there it was. Now Bob Guccione's dead, so we may never know the truth.
Around this same time, I was also able to have friends older than me buy the stuff for me. Sometimes even chicks bought it for me. My favorite place to get it was the Greyhound Station, which was nothing more than a convenience store that the bus happened to stop at, because they had the stuff on a rack that was NOT behind the counter, so you could kind of look through it and didn't have to ask for it. Just plop it on the counter. Everywhere else in town you'd have to be like, "Uh, could I have that one? No, not that one, THAT one," while the clerk rolled his or her eyes at you and I couldn't blame them.
One time a chick bought me a copy of CLUB INTERNATIONAL and a copy of something tamer -- I can't remember what, off the top of my head. Either a PLAYBOY or PENTHOUSE, I guess. Anyway, she was looking curiously through the magazines and commenting on the artistic merits of them.
She was disgusted with the CLUB INTERNATIONAL but thought the other one, whether it was PLAYBOY or PENTHOUSE, was more acceptable.
"See, I don't understand what's so great about this one, I mean, it's just big close up shots of this chick's privates," she observed. "But this one, at least there's some good photography and it's interesting to look at."
What she didn't know was that I didn't really care. You don't buy a magazine like CLUB INTERNATIONAL because of its artistic merits, you buy it because it's refreshingly, unabashedly and unreservedly true to what it is -- naked chicks. Naked, naked chicks. Brightly lit, super naked chicks. No imagination required.
Soon after that I turned 18 and was old enough to buy porn, which is one of the first things I did. My friends took me to see LASER FLOYD around midnight, and on our ride home we stopped by the adult video store I'd seen a thousand times on the side of the road growing up. Most of them weren't old enough to go in, so they loitered outside while me and a buddy went in to check things out.
First thing's first: brand new porn is expensive! I didn't have $40 or more to throw away on a VHS tape of dubious quality. So, I went straight to the used wall and found a flick called DESIRE FOR SEX for $19 (or something). Again, quality control was out the window. I wouldn't know until I got home if I had bought a lemon, but hey, half the fun and novelty was in buying it, anyway. And, I guess, I could have tried it out in one of the booths, except 1) I never quite understood how those booths work and 2) that's the most disgusting thing ever.
DESIRE FOR SEX turned out to be a quaint little story driven affair starring Asian-American beauty Stephanie Swift. At the time, she was an up and comer. Since then she's had a double mastectomy. No, she didn't have implants. Anyway, the flick was about a sex therapist and her porn producing husband. They start the day out by having sex, then each go to work. Before the sex therapist can get to work, her secretary shows up, impersonates her, and has lesbian sex with a patient. The sex therapist fires the secretary, then has sex with her next patient, who is having trouble getting it up. The fired secretary goes to try out for a porn flick and guess what? It's being directed by the sex therapist's husband. Anyway, they have sex. Then, the erectile dysfunction patient goes home and has sex his girlfriend (or wife, whatever) who happened to be the chick who says, "Is there any coke at this party?" in BOOGIE NIGHTS before overdosing. The end.
Later, in college, I'd see more porn -- compilation tapes with all kinds of starlets from the 80s and 90s. The interesting thing about being penniless and watching porn is you ended up being about 5 years behind the times, no matter what. So, the chicks you considered current stars might be out of the industry or all washed up at the actual time you were watching them. The current ones, you'd never heard of. It was kind of comforting to know that, no matter how much porn I saw, I was never up to date on whatever was new. I was always behind. That meant I could pat myself on the back and assure myself I wasn't too far gone. Only the real perverts were up to date. Not normal guys like me.
Right?
The older I got, the more mainstream porn became. I guess on one hand this is kind of to be expected. After all, the older you get, the more accessible it is. Once you're past the age of 18, you can go into any adult shop or strip club you want, or rent whatever video you want at the mom and pop video store. Still, it seemed to get more mainstream even outside of all that. Regular cable seemed to have more T&A on it, quasi-celebrities Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian used sex tapes to help become household names and pursue otherwise non-porn-affiliated careers, even video games got more and more risque.
The only entertainment sector that seemed to get more uptight was my favorite one, movies -- despite what conservative watch dogs would have you believe. Trust me, as a student of cinema, I can assure you, nudity and graphic sexual situations are far less common these days in mainstream flicks, even R-rated ones. Used to be, every R-rated action flick or comedy guaranteed you at least one set of boobs. These days the only boobs in EXPENDABLES belong to Sylvester Stallone, and even Sly wouldn't take off his top in RAMBO IV.
I guess part of this is thanks to the Internet. My first Internet porn experience was before the Internet was really good for porn, in a friend's basement. We sat and watched pictures download for what seemed like hours. Maybe it was hours. That was the olden days. We'd click on a picture, then go off to do something else while it downloaded. Check back in a while, it'd be half done. It was so suspenseful -- the pictures would invariably start downloading from the top to the bottom, so you always had to wait in suspense to see the interesting parts, almost in the order you'd get in real life -- first the chick's face, then slowly the boobs would be unveiled, and FINALLY you'd get her pants off.
That same basement also housed a book that was a treasure trove for my young imagination -- a big red picture book called, simply, THE BOOK OF SEX. Or was it THE SEX BOOK? I can't remember. It was like one of those books adults in the 70s got for themselves so they could feel all enlightened and edgy. It was a pseudo-educational book -- a kind of dictionary of slang and non slang sex terms, with big black and white photos to illustrate. It worked as porn insofar as the pictures were very graphic -- unabashed shots of genitals and boobs and couples in the middle of knocking boots. The book had plausible deniability, though, because all the pictures were in black and white and basically depicted normal-looking people instead of porn stars or models, and gave about as much attention to male anatomy as it did to female.
Still, when you're in your early teens and the hottest thing you can get your hands on is the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED SWIMSUIT EDITION, the big red book of sex was pretty awesome. But it was also frightening. As much as I wanted to see naked chicks in sexual situations, I didn't particularly want to read antiquated text about out-of-date slang terms, let alone imagine the circumstances under which this book found its way into my friend's house via his parents. Shudder.
These days you can watch full porn movies via streaming video for free at the click of a button. People have been saying for the last decade and a half, or so, that porn is readily available on the Internet and all that stuff, but I don't believe it was really that big of a deal until streaming video was perfected. Basically, as soon as YOUTUBE took off around 2005 or so, that was it for Internet porn -- the thing that had always kept me at arms length was basically the same thing that had always kept me away from adult shops in general, which was, the act of actually paying for and owning porn. As soon as streaming porn became available, there was no reason to download anything, pay for anything, or own anything. It was basically as easy as turning on your TV and checking out whatever was on, except, again, you didn't have to subscribe to anything. It was just there!
So, suddenly, quality control didn't matter anymore. You could peruse as much as you wanted, totally free, and if you stumbled across something good, bonus! If not, no harm no foul. And there's nothing for you to leave behind to falsely incriminate you of being a worse pervert than you actual are. Of course, the only thing you have to waste is time, which, I guess, is at least as valuable if not more so than money.
Here's the thing, though. Given unlimited access to porn any time I want it, I have learned that the selfish search for the perfect piece of pornography is never-ending. It really is like "chasing the dragon" as a heroin addict would say. Back in the day, when I was forced to watch late night HBO, I'd think, "This is what I'm stuck with." Later, PENTHOUSE in hand, I'd flip the pages looking for the best pictorial and never find it. Now, given infinity, I've still never found the One Porn to beat all porn.
The lesson? There's no such thing! It all sucks. Sure, some is relatively better than others, and of course everyone has their own likes and dislikes. But nothing will ever be as good (or bad) as whatever it is you're looking for. In fact, sometimes I'm envious of my younger self, who could be satisfied with the clothed chicks in VICTORIA'S SECRET or a short scene in TERMINATOR, or especially back when I had a love affair with Bettie Page -- partly because I didn't know any better but also because of the fantastic promise of something better down the line.
I guess maybe I'd rather live in a world with unforeseen potential possibilities than a world with infinite access to definite limits.
Or, maybe it's just that I'm not a virgin anymore.
Either way, high five!
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