Life After Porn

It's actually quite difficult to write this thing chronologically because I simply don't remember some stuff. My points of reference generally I suppose are the places I was living at the time.
I left home for Uni when I was just 18 and then spent the summers etc at home in the flat, so all the memories of this time and this subject that relate to mum and dad's house must relate to this five or six year period.

I used to fantasise about a big tent being in the local rec where people would be naked inside, or that I somehow had a secret camera in ladies changing rooms. LONG befoe the event of webcams of course!
I used to keep the mags and the pictures that I 'collected' - I was much too young to buy anything - in a box in the corner of my bedroom, stacked up under the copies of Shoot and other football mags I used to read.
They could probably here me rummaging about when I was in bed, but they never said anything.
The only confrontatin I remember came when Mum found my drawings.

I have always been (until I stopped practising anyway) very talented at drawing. Classical style, copying photos etc with pencils. I went througha phase of drawing the models from the mags in various topless poses etc and, as I think of it now, I recall one I was particualry pleased with. A4 size of a girl standing in a swimming pool. And lots of random scribblings as I experimented with drawing different size and shaped boobs on the sam egirl.
Childish and silly, but caused enough concern at the time for my parents to 'talk to me' about there being "nothing wrong with looking at pictures of naked women etc, but" – and I forget the rest.

As time has passed and I am in a position to look back, I remember my dad had a few mags of his own in his various tool boxes in the garage as well as well-read copies of classic erotic fiction. Fanny Hill especially, and The Story of O. The latter of course is regarded as good literature,a nd I can see the quality of it. Well written story, deservedly famous, and in fact John Adams book too is no less of a classic.
Perhaps that's where the seed of an interest in 'erotica' also started. The sins of the father and all that.

The birth of my own son has certainly been a catalyst in my intention to come off and to shift the lifestyle accordingly to make it work. My dad now, I have recently seen, has discovered the world of porn at his fingertips out ther ein cyberspace. I had to sort a problem out on his computer some months ago and discovered The Hun's Yellow Pages in his favourites, and loads of hits on Big Blonde pages etc. he never did have very much imagination.
This is what I don't want for Sid.

One experience I have clear recollections of concerning erotica are the trashy novels by Fiona Richmond, which it seems have become classics. As I write this, I have just checked out the titles of a coupel I remember having and they are rare, fetching up to £15 on just a couple of antique book sites. Which of course makes me want to get them again, for nostalgia sake. Amazon has most of the ones i remember:
Fiona, On the Road, Galactic Girl and my favourite, 'The Story of I' which is a spoof on the French classic. Some (un)lucky man (called I) finds himself imprisoned in a castle where he and all the other males slaves are routinely used and abused by the women in charge of the place. Classic fantasy material.
I got copies of these books (which were published between 1978 and 1980) by nicking them from a local newsagent, and I kept them in the same box. Titles by Emmanuelle Arsan found there way there as well, and Xaviera Hollander. I remember all the names.
When for whatever reason I could no longer keep them in my box, I hid them in the woods where I used to go regularly birdwatching. Still the only place I have ever seen all three British Woodpeckers on the same day.
In plastic bags (those that sealed with a strip across the top) and carefully either buried under loose soil under a particualr tree, or at least one in the rather crumbling wall of a railway bridge.
they stayed there for ages, and I would regulalry go and read them there as I walked around…

That's where it deviates slightly from what is normal adolescent behaviour I suspect. Or does it?
No idea.
Just reads funny now looking back. As if I am writing about someone else.

I suppose like many other teenage boys, I 'became aware' of the attraction presented by the female nude long before I was aware of pornography. One exists of course very much without the other, and I recognise fully the difference between a 'nude' painting or whatever and an image that is specifically created to arouse the viewer sexually. That's probably where the difference is between one and the other. But its a blurred edge, and that's what makes it so easy to fall over.

So defining where and when I started to get into it is hard, because I don't imagine my earliest dabblings were any different from anyone else of my age at the time, or social background or whatever. Or perhaps they were? Its not something I've ever tried to talk about with anyone before.

Hey, when did you first get into porn?
Not a great conversation starter…

I can remember being fascinated by and drawn to the pictures of topless African tribeswomen and trashy dancers or NYC hookers in the pages of my grandfather's National Geographic magazine, and I can remember furtively flicking through them out of my parents sight to see what images I could find.
There. I have already used the word furtively.
My use and abuse of porn has always been a clandestine affair. Always. Is that typical?
If so why?
How come we recognise that it is 'wrong' at an early age - right from the beginning.

My grandad also used to read The Sun newspaper, and kept his old copies in the shed for gardening and that. The Page 3 girls caught my eye too, and again I would surreptitiously rummage about in thee looking for the girls.
A obsessive fascination for breasts that is still true today and will become a recurrent theme during this dialogue. There are themes in porn of course, and mine has always been tits. Not necessarily Big Ones either, before anyone leaps to that illogical conclusion. In those earliest days it was tits of any description of course, just tits, but as I grew up I became more discerning and I have been through a phase devoted to every breast fetish you can imagine I think. Towards the end, probly with the advent of internet porn, I became able to search forums for tit themes which was fascinating. I could file pictures under tits of different sizes, different shapes, different kinds of abuse etc - breasts presented in different ways. They always had to be 'different' though, somehow more alive than just Page 3 boobs. That got boring very quickly, and is also true of the vast majority of porn websites etc today. Just crap. Glamour models with fake tits and false smiles that just appeal to men who probably never see or interact with 'real' tits at all. I do, always have done, so I guess its quite natural that home alone I would always prefer to see or watch something unusual going on. It makes the women much more real somehow, and I have always liked real women.
That's a thread that makes my relationship with porn more interestng I think. I have not sought to go outside and away from what is real in terms of the pictures or women I like than I have with the relationships I have experienced over the years.. Always been out with 'real' women with real bodies. Always liked porn that features real women with real bodies.
But I have a taste for extremes too. I got massively into extremely tall women for a while, or skinny anorexic types, preferably with tiny of virtually no breasts at all. Then massively over-endowed women - but again REAL and NATURAL. I can't see the point of faking anything.
This is just the core of it, a framework to hang some of my analysis on. I have been off into the realms of darkness and deviation too of course, which does draw upon a fantasy world outside my normal existence.

But in those days, when I was what, 12 or 13 years old, it was Page 3 models and NG photos that first caught my attention. Alongside 'erotica' in some of the fiction I was reading. I can still remember scenes in Peter Benchley's books "Jaws" and "The Deep" that describe sexual activity, or young men wandering around on beaches looking for topless (or naked) women and scoring points against each other as the went around trying to glimpse pubic hair for example, or careless nipple exposure. All perfectly normal, boring stuff I would imagine.

Around the same time, I began to pursue a hobby that has also stayed with me thirty years, but is enirely unrelated and a lot more healthy. I'm a birder, occasionally a twitcher, and during these teenage years my best friend and I would cycle off most weekends to our local reservoir to watch, count and generally experience the endlessly fascinating world of birds.
The link here is that I can remember one little lane that wound down to a gate along the north bank of the reservoir, probably half a mile or so up from the main causeway where most visitors parked. We would sometimes cut down this way when we learned quite quickly that there were never any birds of any interest nearer to the causeway than the end of this lane anyway.
It was a 'flytipping' site and, you guessed it, quite often had discarded 'girlie' magazines littering it, or lying under the hedge and in the ditch.
The first signs of a cross over perhaps?
So copies of Men Only, Escort and Readesr Wives or something would often find their way into my bag and hence into my bedroom. Even ripped up, soggy copies, and again it was gathered without my ate sknowledge. For all I know, he went back and took his own.
An attraction to this kind of trash ahs always been with me, and even now I turn my head when a magazine flies past the car window - which is much less often now than it used to be. Used to be fairly commonplace to find porn in woods, or on roadsides. Reflects the changing media that more porn is produced and consumed in cyberspace now of course than is actually printed.

Note to self - Secret snapper. Sketch collection.

I'm writing this blog as a challenge to myself more than anything else. People say that blogging is cathartic, and for me that seems a great opportunity to confront my demons in some kind of public media.
So what demons am I talking about?
One really. Pornography.
Not the magnificent album of the that name by The Cure, obviously. I mean Porn.
Pictures Of Random Nudes
Simple as that.
I'm coming up 42 now, and have been 'clean' for the last six months, which is something I have been wanting to achieve for the last handful of years.
That means that I think I have overcome habitual use of pornography, via the web, magazines, whatever.
It's been hard, and I'm trying to do my part in the campaign to recognise that Porn is an addictive drug to which some people are vulnerable.
I really believe I have an addiction.
Reading Junky and Naked Lunch recently has done more to confirm that - while Burroughs is talking about narcotics, I am talking about porn. Same but different, though the symptoms of addiction are similar.

And I am clean. At the moment. I no longer have a habit, and I'm dead proud of that. This is easily the longest period clean period I have ever experienced. But its like anything else. Dieting, for instance. Or smoking. You need a fundamental lifestyle change in order to succeed, because habits are only the symptom of some bigger malaise. I'll dig out the article I read form the Philosphers Journal a while back which makes this point far better than I could.
I feel now that I have acheived that new perspective. It seems ridiculous now, and oddly embarassing, and really cringe-ingly pathetic.
I have called it CHRaP simply because the way out for me has been through finding and developing an active faith. A CHRistian Against Porn, that's me.
Though not exactly 'against'. I am not and hopefully never will turn ino an Anti-Porn campaigner. That's not what this is about.
Its just about me, and how I fell inot an addictive relationship with an attractive seducer that sucked me in and has deeply affected my sexuality, to a detrimental effect I think. BUt that's what happened to me. It might not happen to everyone, and those that are comfortable with their situation and relationship are not meant to take offence or see this as some kind of judgemental crusade.
All I am saying is beware, she is a devilish charmer, working erosively...

Anyway, I'm rambling.

What I would like to do in the pages that follow is to turn the mirror on myself. To write the story of my relationship with Porn, which covers more or less the twenty five year period that represents most of my adult life.
I'm not sure how it will pan out, but I will attempt to follow things chronologically and the analysis hopefully understanding will come subsequently.