It seems like all my friends have stories about when they were kids in the 1970s or early 1980s, they found a stash of porn magazines while exploring woods or a very large parcel of undeveloped land near their house. Me? I found porn both in the woods and by railroad tracks.
My question: how did all those back issues of Oui, Cheri, Hustler and Leg Show (almost never Playboy or Penthouse) make their way into the woods?
Kid find’s dad’s stash. (Or, older teen living at home buys his own.) Hiding places where mom won’t venture are few and far between at home. Kid/teen dumps stash in woods (or takes it to woods to enjoy), then leaves it, fearing to take it home.
ETA: This is speculation. I found such a stash, but never had the stuff to dump, myself, and I don’t think my dad had any around.
Never happened to me.
However, another thing did happen: I used to collect Peanuts paperbacks, which were a few months’ run of the strip compiled into a book. One day, I bought one at a swap meet, but the cover had been swapped with another book, “How to be an Erotic Man.”
I think this a confluence of men wanting to keep it along with women wanting to throw it away.
I knew at least two kids who had such stashes. One was on top of an abandoned building. One was in a woodsy park area. The first guy has stolen a stash of magazines from his dad, the other had found a box of porn in a dumpster. Obviously, this is anecdotal, but I imagine Tom is right. These stashes were found or stolen by teenage boys (in an era before porn was available even on VCRs, much less online) and hidden away from parents. I doubt very many adults were caching back issues of Hustler and Oui.
Back in old days (I am only 36), teenage boys had to do anything whatsoever to get their hands on porn and then hide and protect it. I am not exaggerating about that in the least. I executed lots of plots personally including breaking into my family’s own warehouse late at night just to get some hard-core magazines that my uncle left there for some reason. All of my friends did the same and we had stashes all over the place and we were as ingenious as any international drug smugglers would ever hope to be. I even bribed a video clerk once to let me rent a porn VCR tape when I was 16. It was a very, very strong compulsion for us at that age but we couldn’t ever let our mothers find out about it because there was serious shame involved (mothers have a hard time relating to their sons in that way). I can only imagine what the web has done for teenage boys in that regard. I think my eyes and brain would have exploded if you just dropped today’s technology on me right away back then.
People hid it there because the couldn’t keep it at home. What other answer would there be? It’s not like porn publishers hid them around secluded places for the porn deprived to find.
That’s what we did, even before the 1970s. There was an extensive system of back alleys running through the neighborhoods I grew up in, and we managed to carve out several hiding places for the porn we managed to steal from the local drug store as kids.
And I thought a porn stash was a type of facial hair. 
Oh wow, this brings back memories. When I was in middle school (early to mid 90’s), I had a stash of magazines in a backpack in the woods. Back in those days, porn was like crack. It subsided a bit in high school. Then I got the internet and magazines were pointless.
My friends and I came across a stash or two of “woods porn” (although that ‘hunting story’ in the Urban dictionary is a bit of a crock methinks) in the late 1970, so I know it existed - I think it was just an easy place to leave a stash of porn so your mom (always mom, dad wouldn’t say anything) couldn’t find it - for some reason there was some ‘code of honor’ of never removing the magazines, or maybe it was just fear of being beaten up by the (unseen but obviously big and mean) teens who left it there in the first place. Anyway I haven’t looked for any woods porn in 30 years, and the places where we found it back then have since been built over with homes and a retail center, so no going back…
First time I hear people discuss woods porn must have been 5 years ago, on the old ‘f**ked company’ message board, somebody posted a thread with a title like ‘When we were kids, why was there always porn in the woods’, a thread which I remember went on for pages since the phemonon had seemed to affect any guy in his 30s & 40s growing up in suburbia.
BTW, wasn’t ‘Leg Show’ a magazine of the 1990s? I bring this up since I don’t think it was a candidate for woods porn, to my thinking a phemonom of the 1970s and 1980s - an era of affordable, mass-produced somewhat-readily available porn magazines: the 1960s seemed to have mostly expensive porn, somewhat hard to get - can’t image too many teens leaving that rare stuff out in the woods; and by the late 1990s we had - well, you know what really made the internet popular…)
What is interesting about this is that it seems to be a very common adolescent male instinct. No one trained me or my friends to do it, we just knew that we had to at puberty. We wouldn’t have hidden them all over the place if it weren’t for the shame from mothers and other female family members but I can certainly understand why a mother wouldn’t want a 13 year old son having an extensive collection of Hustler magazines on the bookshelf either. Therefore, we were forced to hide them in the woods, ceilings, walls and wherever else we could find.
I made my first amateur mistake by simply hiding magazines under my mattress. That lasted about a month until my mother decided to wash all my sheets and change the bed and found all of them. She wasn’t happy but not furious either but they all got destroyed. The second mistake was hiding my newly acquired ones carefully under the sink in the bathroom. There was no way that anyone could ever find them until…the sink plumbing sprung a leak during a large family gathering and my uncle is quite the fix-it-kind of guy. He pulled out everything under the sink to look at the pipes and then started dropping soaking wet Playboy after Playboy on the floor. It doesn’t seem so bad now but everyone was crowded outside the door and watching. I was mortified.
That is why teenage boys used to be forced to go underground with that type of thing. Porn was an extremely valuable commodity and hard to get and you couldn’t really risk losing what you worked hard for.
Kids these days have it so easy.
I found a porn mag in an abandoned refrigerator behind a bar. My first stash for it was a field near my house. It didn’t last too long there, as I realized it was more than likely to change hands again if I didn’t stash it at home somewhere. It ended up in a pile of old school papers in my closet, which turned out to be a pretty good hiding spot.
Shag…that made me LOL!!!
[Lecturing Father]You know, when I was your age, I had to walk A MILE IN THE SNOW just to get to my porn stash.[/Lecturing Father]
Also, you tend to find tons of hard copy porn all over the place around migrant worker and homeless encampments. I don’t think that all the kids who “find porn in the woods” are necessarily finding other kids’ porn.
I learned about sex mostly through porn found in the woods in the 60’s. When my mother sat me down to explain “the facts of life”, I was astonished, and said, “but that’s fucking!”
The reason the porn is always out there is that the number of people hiding it is always greater than the number of people retrieving it. After you grow up, you don’t go back and get your adolescent porn stash, you just get new porn, and keep it at home. When some new kid finds your old porn stash, they look at it, laugh at how tame it is, and then add new stuff to it.
Tris
My first job when I was 16 was cleaning out an trash cage that was behind a store. It was several feet deep in old damp paper. I found my first porn, a mildewed Penthouse Forum.
For years after the smell of mildew gave me a boner.
When I was 16, I spent the night at my older brothers house. He had porn tapes. After everyone went to bed I snuck out and watched a tape and cranked it in the living room. IMO, this was very risky behavior. But I was so horny I couldnt help myself. One of the great things about getting older is not being so horny that I do stupid things.
Wouldn’t Dad figure out that all that porn was missing? And wouldn’t he be fairly sure that the culprit was his teenage son? (Not a lot of porn burglars around.) When I made use of my father’s porn, I was careful to put it back exactly where I had found it when I was done.
I’m reminded of Bart Simpson and Milhouse finding Homer’s discarded Playdude magazines, but with the pictures removed (Marge had made him cut them out after he claimed that he only read them for the articles). They wondered what the big deal was, and wound up sitting around in bathrobes smoking pipes.
A few times I found Playboy, Penthouse or porn cassette boxes on the streets, and I would marvel at the windfall. Years later people explained it to me – that men may buy it, uh … enjoy it in their car, then toss it, rather than bring it home and irk the ire of their wife. So just to add to the “stash” explanation above, it may instead have never made it to someone’s house.
I suppose that the dad might miss it if the kid took it all. On the other hand, if the kid took a magazine a week from a collection that was several years old, the dad might not miss it.
I already noted that my guess was speculation, but you’ll note that it seems to correspond with most other guesses.