Before the Internet

[Sharkhunter]

As a guy in his mid-forties, my entire porn discovery phase took place before the Internet era. Like many others here, it was pretty much a diet of mags, mags and more mags.

I guess I was pretty lucky. Having grown up in a house with a pretty religious mother I never really knew anything, and arriving at an all-boys boarding school at the age of twelve was something of a major culture shock. At first I was very much anti-porn (the other lads soon gave me the name "priest" on account of some of my - in hindsight embarrassing - sermons) but having looked at a copy of Club - for whatever reason - I decided that I sort of liked it.

Not wanting to be a hypocrite, I gave up on the preaching. Puberty therefore was a fantastic time for me. Mags were traded like sweets at school,and very quickly I was able to get a good sighter of most of the well-known titles as well as some of the more hardcore publications showing pink, such as Whitehouse and Park Lane. I was a serious wanker by the turn of my thirteenth birthday, and all thoughts of calling it "self-abuse" had long been consigned to the memory hole.

I soon ended up with my favourite, which was Club... Seeing a girl's nether regions was one thing, but I discovered that this by itself didn't really float my boat. The girl had to be pretty. This helped me no end - I'd confiscate a copy of Whitehouse (Pink! Arseholes! The occasional flaccid cock!) from a junior, and swap it with another guy for three copies of the sightly softer Club. Life couldn't have been sweeter.

When I left school I simply couldn't risk taking any of my stash with me (fire and brimstone would have rained down upon me!) and traded most of the mags with some the guys in the year below me - for tuck, mainly. I also stuffed a few others in convenient places for others to find - I was nice like that. Of course, these were the ones with some of the pages stuck together - for those who discovered them, it was going to be a simple case of beggars cannot be choosers!

Back home as a randy sixteen year old with four years of experience trading porn and a far better knowledge of a woman's intimate parts than a trainee NHS gynaecologist, I was left up in the air. As well as missing my mates, I found myself missing the thrill of leafing through a dirty magazine on a regular basis. I reverted to looking out for images in my mother's Kays or Trafford catalogues - I am sure many of you of a similar age remember the thrill at finding an image of a woman wearing some skimpy lingerie through which you could see her minge - and also found a nude photography magazine which provided me with a clearer look at some pubic bush. The photos were of course completely anodyne, but it didn't stop me fantasising about the model putting on a sexy face and beating off over them.

Another project I had was cutting out and collecting images from Page 3 - with any image of Dee Ivens or Kathy Lloyd being a major draw. It truly was desperate times. As far as video went, the nearest I got to porn was some footage of East German long jumper Heike Drechsler extracting herself from the sand pit after a jump, with the cameraman perfectly situated behind her. I would pause the video on the image of her taut white Adidas knickers, almost in a doggy-style position.

Meanwhile, I'd often venture into the local newsagent and stare up at the top shelf, dying inside at being too young to even risk reaching up. Of course one day this all changed, and from that point on it was like my good old school days. The first mag I bought was Vol. 19 No. 10 of Club (I have related the story elsewhere on these boards) and apart from avoiding the stares of nosy old biddies buying porn was a breeze. The guy behind the counter - I never new his name but called him "Salman" as he looked a little like the controversial author Salman Rushdie - even started to keep a copy of Club back for me.

By the early 1990s when I was at university, I'd often supplement my boring politics tomes with porn, loading up on PRP mags. On one occasion, not giving a shit about anything by that stage, I waltzed into a local newsie and picked up the latest copies of Club, Best of Club, Men Only, Mayfair, Men's World and Model Directory all in one go, as well as a couple of others. I walked out that day carrying around ten pornographic magazines, all of which helped me relieve the tension after hours of intense essay writing combined with some serious edging.

While I could never bring myself to go to an obvious "sex shop", on my occasional forays into London I'd go to Lovejoys (some of you may remember that place!) which had a "normal" bookshop at street level and a den of pornographic iniquity in the basement. After perusing through the military history books, I'd ghost down the stairs, where my eyes would be treated to copies of magazines (at that point at least) that were unavailable in the local corner shop. Hustler XXX, Barely Legal, Private, and more. Mags that contained not just fucking, but DPs and girls getting their faces glazed in cum.

It was kid in a sweet shop time, but I never kept more than half a dozen mags at any one time. My mother once had a major go at me for looking at a Page Three girl's tits, and while she might have been satisfied with giving me a lecture (even at the age of 22!) for having a copy of Playboy, being caught with a copy of Private was just too much of a risk. I would have probably have been thrown out of the house after being crucified.

It was wave after wave of frustration, but that all came to an end with the massive explosion of web-based porn. Porn websites were not really that great back then, and most of my images were found on the Usenet bulletin boards - a process that involved downloading a series of binary files and stitching them together to create an image the size of a postage stamp.

As I was the only one in the house that knew how to operate a computer, it was a great time to be a porn fan. I could have as much dirty stuff as I wanted, and nobody would ever know.

[Pinkpapercut]

Originally Posted by Sharkhunter

As a guy in his mid-forties, my entire porn discovery phase took place before the Internet era.
...having looked at a copy of Club - for whatever reason - I decided that I sort of liked it... ...Mags were traded like sweets at school,and very quickly I was able to get a good sight of most of the well-known titles as well as some of the more hardcore publications showing pink, such as Whitehouse and Park Lane. I was a serious wanker by the turn of my thirteenth birthday, and all thoughts of calling it "self-abuse" had long been consigned to the memory hole.

I soon ended up with my favourite, which was Club... Seeing a girl's nether regions was one thing, but I discovered that this by itself didn't really float my boat. The girl had to be pretty. This helped me no end - I'd confiscate a copy of Whitehouse (Pink! Arseholes! The occasional flaccid cock!) from a junior, and swap it with another guy for three copies of the sightly softer Club. Life couldn't have been sweeter.

From what you've said about yourself I'm a decade and a bit older than you so my porn odyssey began in the early 70s.

I went to a state boy's grammar school and there was quiet a trade in softcore magazines between us boys - the likes of Whitehouse were not yet available but some hardcore was passed around by boys whose older brothers had traveled abroad.

I was never that wild about the hardcore and I too remember being most impressed by Club International and to a slightly lesser extent by Men Only more than any of the other UK mags that were then available. I'd say that between the early 70s and the early mid 80s Club and Men Only were the best girly mags around.

i can remember sitting with friends behind our gym looking through a small stack of Clubs and being impressed that one of the girls in the photosets had cropped her bush quite short so that one could see everything through the short undergrowth. It was the first time that I realised that pubic hair wasn't immutably a tangled thatch.

The girls in Club were usually very pretty, the poses were a mixture of tasteful nudity and explicitness and, at least in the 70s, the articles were usually interesting but in a genuinely hip way, often being written by members of the late 60s/early 70s UK counterculture, unlike Playboy where the articles were usually worthy but dull.

One of the things I liked most about the Raymond publications was that the girls were good-looking and - to use your words about Whitehouse - showed pink and arseholes sometimes but unlike Whitehouse the girls weren't wrenching their flaps open while the camera was shoved up close in macro mode to the omission of everything else the girl had to offer.

Even the more downmarket Raymond publications of the 80s like the relaunched Razzle and Escort were well produced, having the cheap-and-cheerful feel of Fiesta without the musty out-of-date feel of that mag.

There was a brief fifteen years or so when some softcore publishers actually treated their product and their punters with respect and I'd place Club and Men Only in the front rank. I'm pretty sure that the Sullivan publications while opening the doors to top-shelf explicitness in the UK also dragged quality down a very long way, mostly due to Sullivan's contempt for his market.

Apart from VEF of course, I think that the Creamcheese site and the venusobservations blog both do wonderful work showing the excellence of softcore in the prime years of the 70s and 80s.

[saddo]

A lot of this stuff brings back memories. The Freemans catalogue I think it was that had underwear, if you stared hard enough you might imagine you could make out a nipple or bush.

Going to an all boys school, there was a lot of trading going on, mostly the top shelf stuff like Penthouse and Mayfair although I remember seeing the occasional Colour Climax and one called Massage girls of Bangkok, which to be honest shocked me a bit.

In the early 80s when I first passed my driving test I remember driving miles to find a suitable place to buy my favourites, Club and Fiesta. I vividly remember the build up to making my purchase, it was nerve wracking finding the right shop where nobody would recognize me, with the right person behind the counter to minimise the embarrassment. Then there was snatching from the shelf, putting the money on the counter and making a dash, shaking with embarrassment and excitement. At the time it was terrifying but looking back it was actually quite a turn on in its way. I remember on one occasion miscalculating and finding a middle aged woman behind the counter instead of the expected man but I was past the point of no return and had to go through with it. She smiled at me and asked if I would like a bag, knowing full well what I would be doing in the next half hour or so. That was a huge turn on.

Having strict and religious parents, the next hurdle was smuggling back into the house and getting up to my room to have some quiet time reading through the articles. Modern Internet porn I find too sterile, I still love the real women from the 70s and 80s magazines complete with natural boobs and a nice bush.

[tomesing]

tomesing

[trailmaster]

Before the internet I had subscriptions to Playboy, Gent, Voluptuous, and for awhile Hustler. Playboy in the late 1950's, the 1960's and the early 1970's was the best I feel that there ever was. I don't care for pubic hair on models, and the models from those earlier periods had larger breasts than they did decades later. Gent and Voluptuous were strictly big breast mags. Hustler I did not really care for because I thought it was kind of sick, but I liked the jokes.

[bnbscans]

In the mid 70s my younger brother found my dad's stash of Playboy and Penthouse. I mostly remember big hair, big boobs and big bush. As an 11 year old, it never occurred to me that there was anything interesting underneath those massive mounds of pubic hair. Still, the pictures made my pre-pubescent penis throb in strange new ways.

A couple of years later in high school we were taught the 'how babies are made' basics. The best part was the textbook with line drawings and small blurry black and white pictures showing the stages of female puberty. One of the fellas at school was sent to the library to photocopy some exercises by our maths teacher. While in the library with the staff key to the copier, he made quite a few copies of the good bits from the sex education text. Enough for all the boys in the class, what a good guy he was. Those few pages became my first 'porn stash'. For the next few years I collected the underwear pics from catalogues and women's magazines and pasted them into an spiral notepad that lived under my bed so it was close to hand.

There was softcore available at the newsagent, e.g. Club, Fiesta and Mayfair. I think at that time in Australia softcore was mostly imported from the States or the UK. The mags were taped shut so we couldn't see what was inside. Besides, the newsagent or his mum would alway appear if we were hanging around and we would be sternly told "the comics are over there boys".

In the late 70s a mate found his dad's stash of C*l** Cl****. What an eye-opener that was to see a spread pussy being penetrated! Was also amazing to see that grown up men all had 8-10 inch dicks and I wondered when mine would start to grow.

In the early 80s I left home, I had a car and an income, so it was time to go shopping. Around Melbourne in those days if you wanted hard core you'd make a trip to the adult book stores in Fiztroy St in seedy St Kilda or the seedy end of Swanston street. The prices of imported European mags were eye-watering, $15.00 - $30.00 a pop (at a time when a six-pack cost $4.80 and a packet of smokes was $1.20). As a $3.00/hr fast food worker I didn't buy many imported hard core mags. You could buy the second hand mags cheaper of course, but as a savvy shopper I knew that they wouldn't be very good otherwise they wouldn't have been traded in.

The spread beaver, cum on the tits and cum on the face pictures were great at first, but there was a sameness about them in the way they were posed. I began to appreciate the English and Aussie mags more, the girls were prettier, there would be several pages of strip tease and sexy lingerie. By the late 80s the pubes were trimmed shorter giving a good view of lady bits after the model dropped her panties.

In the late 80s I got my first 2400 baud modem. I could download almost a megabyte in the one hour time slot on the bulletin board before it kicked me off. As one of the other members mentioned you would download several smaller files and catenate them together to produce an image the size of postage stamp. No previews when downloading from usenet back then, very annoying when you found the resulting image didn't measure up to the description. Online time was precious, so I'd tag a megabyte and half and let the modem suck down the LZH files (ZIP hadn't been invented) for decompressing and catenating later.

Makes me think of Monty Python's Four Yorkshire Men
"E-mail... luxury... we used the Blue Wave packet mail reader"
"Blue Wave... luxury... we used QWK on FidoNet"
"FidoNet... luxury... we used NNTP on the ARPANET"
"ARPANET... luxury... we had porn on clay tablets"


BTW when we say "internet" we are usually referring to the WWW. Back in the early 90s it usually meant "world wide wait". We now know that it really means "world wide wanking" or "world wide wetdream". And don't be fooled, http really means Huge Tits Tight Pussy.