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.