What things did you resort to to get your hands on porn when you were younger?..

[AmateurEmale]

All right, here goes: I first discovered erotica/porn in 1988-89, when I reached puberty at the age of 12. I started noticing bikini pictures in the Weekly World News, lingerie ads in the newspaper advertising section, and a relative's stack of 10-12 Playboy magazines that schoolyear (sixth grade). I couldn't legally get porn in Cincinnati until I was 18, but I did buy tabloids and confiscate newspaper inserts that were close enough to what I wanted. The next two schoolyears (seventh and eighth grade) added swimsuit issues and calendars of mostly naked women, thanks to nicer people in middle school.

By the start of high school (ninth grade) other people I knew used mostly illegal means of getting real pornographic magazines in the hands of fourteen- and fifteen- year-olds at school, some of which I purchased for $5 each. I can't tell anyone which relatives threw out V.S. and/or F.O.H. catalogs, but they were in my collection by tenth grade.

Two decades later, I mostly obtain free digital files of softcore models, cherry-picking the best images and printing them out fifty at a time. This method has replaced the archaic 20th-century method of clipping images from magazines and/or scanning them in. I was buying printed matter from eBay as late as 2007, but I decided there was a more cost-effective way of getting what I wanted by using my new photo-quality printer.

One thing has not changed: Like Mitt Romney said, "There are binders full of women!"

[steelydan]

I picked the lock in my brother's file cabinet to get to his Playboy stash.

LOL.

[donmega]

Parents stash was easy to get to, I just always made sure to put it back exactly how I found it. Friends had an easy time as well and always willing to share. For the life of me, one friend always kept mags in our little club house in the woods. Never figured out where he got them. Think the worse thing I did to get hands on some material was hop in a big recycling bin to pull out this box full of mags. I felt a little pathetic after words. After a few months, i took em back and dumped em. You know after they served their purpose, haha. I was more into film anyways.

[ikeswanson]

We used to go through people's garbage cans late at night on trash night looking for playboy and penthouse magazines. We hit the jackpot one night and found one or two hidden between a bunch of newspapers. We must have been between 10 and 12 years old. It wasn't easy to do as you had to be real quiet and those metal cans were noisy when you opened them. That and the fact that you were standing out there right in front of someone's house going through their trash made you easy to spot.

[martsm]

Maybe I’m off on a slight tangent here, as I was younger than now but not particularly young, but I thought it would be interesting to write about my experiences of finding porn in hotel rooms. Until a few years ago I travelled regularly for work, and a quiet evening with some magazines in my hotel room (or latterly my well-loaded laptop) was one of the occasional perks from my point of view.

One time – in the 1980s, quite early on in my travels – I found a magazine under my bed by chance when I dropped a pen on the floor. After that I regularly looked under the bed but rarely found anything (I later discovered from a second-hand shop that hotel workers regularly brought in piles of porno they’ve rescued from rooms, and I guess they often looked in obvious places like under beds).

Soon after that I wanted to hide some magazines in my room and decided the safest place to do this was under the bottom drawer in the built-in chest of drawers in the room. It was a fiddle to get it out and back, but I knew how to do that. To my surprise and delight I found I was not the first person to do this in that room. There were two hard European mags there already. From then on, I would always check under the drawer(s) in each room I stayed in, and I guess I found porno mags in at least one room in five tucked away somewhere under or behind a set of drawers. This was a two-way traffic, as I quite often left mags I’d finished with – and I sometimes took away the mags I’d found.

Then one time I stayed in a room without any drawers. I looked around and considered where else someone might have hidden something. I realised I could stand on a chair and remove the slatted grille on an air-conditioning duct and – sure enough – there was a mini-stash there too (along with a couple of empty vodka bottles). The next time I found I needed a screwdriver to remove the grille. I improvised – and once again I found a magazine. After that a screwdriver went into my overnight kit – again, I’d say, I found something in every fifth room I stayed in - or perhaps even more often than that. I also left a fair share of mags behind in similar places, and no doubt others found those.

I did have a tricky experience in one room where I removed a big panel held in place by four screws and then found I couldn’t get it back in place single handedly because of its weight and its awkward shape. I managed in the end, but I spent an awkward hour or two wondering how to explain the removed panel if I couldn’t get it back. And there wasn’t even anything there that time – though there was by the time I put the panel back!

I guess this is all rather historic now. Presumably most people travel with laptops or tablets and get their porn that way. The chances of finding a mag in a room are probably very low. But there was a certain frisson in the whole experience - knowing I was not the only one to have enjoyed the mags – or leaving mags behind for others to enjoy. Rather like a very early ancestor of VEF!

[Jazz Man]

Now that porn is so easily available online its hard to imagine the lengths I went to in the 80's to solve my craving. It Britain it was hard to get hold of genuine hardcore, so had to be satisfied with the simulated shots in Whitehouse and Playbirds. Then I discovered "secondhand bookshops" in Birmingham and London where it as possible to get genuine Private and Colour Climax, etc plus VHS videos. I would go out of my way to visit one of these shops and nothing but nothing can match the excitement of taking a new stash home to open and "enjoy".

And then I started to travel abroad on business in my first job. Then it was all about the excitement of finding more easily available porn (although still sometimes involving a trek to the other side of a city to find a sex shop) and then smuggling it back to the UK. Probably nothing will match my first trip to Amsterdam and being like a kid in sweetshop.

I'm sure that it was all the more exciting for being difficult to get. The search was just part of the excitement.

Happy days..

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[KingKeigh]

(1978) My friend, Jimmy's father had stacks of magazines in their basement. We never really looked through them much whenever we played down there because mostly what we saw were old issues of Popular Science and LOOK (this was 1978). But Jimmy knew there was at least a couple of "special" magazines in there somewhere because he said his mother had reamed his father out about having them in the house. But Jimmy could never find them.

One afternoon after school while his parents were still at work, Jimmy called us all to the house. He'd found the stash. His dad had hidden them in the trunk of his Dodge Dart which had been sitting in the garage in a state of disrepair covered by a car tarp for as long as we could remember. It turned out to be a motherlode of commercial mags like OUI, Hustler and PB. Nothing too heavy but it might as well have been XXX hardcore to a bunch of horny 70s high school sophomores. He never really let us borrow them though for fear his old man would discover them missing. Just had to learn to hold those images in my head until I got home.

[Historian]

I don't recall ever really having to go to great lengths to get my hands on porn- I started off when I found my parents' collection (and naturally, like a fool eventually got caught when I got careless about where I hid the mags I'd borrowed) and soon graduated to acquiring my own illicit stash

I was lucky enough that as I'm tall and always looked a bit older as a teenager than I actually was, so once I'd overcome the usual fear of being caught in the act by someone who knew me, it wasn't all that difficult to get served in newsagents when I was still really too young to be able to buy top-shelf mags.

It wasn't long before I'd got a fairly decent knowledge of newsagents in the local town which combined the qualities of having a decent range of mags on offer, and out of the way enough to pose less chance of running into a neighbour or one of my mum's work colleagues out shopping.

My local newsagent was useless on that score, not only much too high-risk, as I went to school with their daughter, but they never really stocked much of a 'top shelf', if at all...

[AmateurEmale]

@WineBeavis: Your post reminds me of working at a comics and collectibles store in Cheviot, Ohio back in 1996, a year out of high school. They had a fairly raunchy top shelf of books and comics to choose from, ranging from Crumb Comics to Glenn Danzig's Satanika comics, to photos of women like Bettie Page and Julie Strain, and very occasionally real pornographic magazines. At least twice I was asked by my manager to put some books in the dumpster, but I clandestinely put them in the trunk of my car instead, which was parked next to the dumpster. Think of it as "recycling"...)

[Mr. Christy Canyon]

I don't recall going thru any extraordinary lengths to look at, or watch porn, but I do remember being very very very careful putting the porn back exactly the way I had found it.

Back in the early 1990's, when I was around 8-9 years old, I remember having a grade school buddy who lived in the same Apartment complex, and when his dad would go to work, which was usually in the afternoon (and which gave us a 2 hour window before his mom would be home), we would, of course, go thru his porn stash. Which, to be perfectly honest here, was very extensive. Not sure how the mom didn't know, or perhaps she didn't care? But going off memory, I would say the guy had atleast 100-200 magazines, everything from Playboy to Gent to Genesis, and atleast 30-50 VHS tapes.

Me being very weary of being caught, or even suspected of going thru the porn stash, I somehow remember recording in my mind just how this stuff was situated. So after going thru it, I remember being somewhat OCD about putting everything exactly the way it was before. Which sometimes started slight arguments with my friend since we would sometimes bicker about how the magazines/VHS tapes were situated prior to us digging thru it.