When I was in college Larry Flint put a Hustler store in downtown Cincinnati. The city gave this store constant shit, cops always around, sending in kids to try to buy porn, etc.
Shortly after it opened me and a friend went there to check it out. The place was dimply lit, kinda shabby looking with oddly sized shelves and crappy painting. The other people in the store were your classic sleazy older men with their heads down looking embarrassed as they shuffled from shelf to shelf. Meanwhile, me and my friend are running around yelling ‘Wow, check this out’ to each other. We ended up buying a few magazines, and the look the cashier gave us on our way out was priceless.
I was going out with a friend one day, when her room-mates asked her to pick up an item each from the local megastore while we were out.
One wanted an ultra-sized box of condoms; the other, a frozen turkey. That was all we bought at the store.
The checkout cashier’s eyebrows raised a little at this odd juxtaposition. I instinctively blurted out “oh, they aren’t for us - they are for friends!”
Embarrassed? I was incredibly proud. One of the first things I did upon turning eighteen (as in the day of my birthday) was buy a copy of Playgirl. Sigh, if only I had been a born a little earlier I would have been able to legally buy alcohol that day.
I bought Penthouse a time or two, if that counts, but the clerk didn’t care and it didn’t occur to me that I should be embarassed.
OTOH, my wife wanted to see a porno tape, for the experience (she led rather a sheltered life before she met me). And she wanted to see a particular one, called IIRC Bodacious Ta-Tas. Asking for that specific one by name was a little offsetting, since the video store clerk was 18 or thereabouts, and it was a general purpose video store, not one dedicated to that specific genre.
They didn’t have that title in stock, and, when asked for a recommendation, the clerk shrugged and told me that unless I was looking for a specialized type they were all pretty much the same. So I wound up with Debbie Does Dallas.
It only occurred to me later that going up to the female clerk and asking, “Pardon me, miss - do you have bodacious ta-tas” was setting myself up for a punch line and/or a sexual harassment lawsuit, but the clerk let the situation pass without comment.
When I was in my late teens/early twenties, I’d get my porn mags from the Tower Records near me. I used to spend ages agonizing about which mag to buy, and then selecting appropriate “cover” purchases to go with it, and then ages more trying to gin up the courage to take it to the counter. This was mostly pretty vanilla straight guy porn. Oddly, I got over the majority of my embarrassment when I started buying gay stuff. Because now, if the clerk silently judged me for my purcahse, instead of me being a sad sack pervert, they were clearly some sort of a homophobe.
I had a similar college class on Law and Society. One lecture was on obscenity and pornography, and the professor brought in multiple copies of Playboy, Penthouse, and Oui. I wondered what her experience was; an African-American woman in rural North Carolina, buying multiple copies of three different porn mags.
As for me, breaking up into small groups and looking through Penthouse magazine with female classmates was my most embarrassing porn experience.
I’ve bought a few porno mags in my time, usually because I had just moved and the internet wasn’t hooked up at my new place yet. I always bought them at liquor stores. I figured a patently “adult” place that that wouldn’t be judgemental. It was a bit embarrassing the first time, but from the second time on I didn’t care what the clerk might think.
Same thing with condoms. It was a bit embarassing the first time I bought some, but now I’ll just toss 'em on the drug store counter like it’s nobody’s business. I would probably wait if there was a little kid standing there, but otherwise I’m not going to be shy about it.
I’m completely unembarrassed buying condoms, except the one time I had to go to a place where they were behind the counter and it was where my parents went for prescriptions.
I do get embarrassed going into adult shops, even the clean and well-lit variety. In fact, especially those, because my fear is not that they’ll think I’m a perv but that they’ll think I’m a poseur.
As a point of interest, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that real porn could be bought in Ontario. Up till then Penthouse and Hustler were about as porny as you could get: nothing showing any kind of penetration was allowed, pictures or movies.
I remember buying Anne Rice’s “Sleeping Beauty” books from B&N or Waldenbooks when I was about 14, and was only a bit nervous that someone would ask my age. I’d be more embarrassed now, simply because they’re pretty stupid. (At 14, you aren’t as particular, though!) As it turned out, the cashier didn’t bat an eye. Probably didn’t even know what they were.
On that note, I used to check out raunchy Fabio-cover romances even younger from a teeny rural library–where I was quite chatty with the ancient cat-lady librarian–and didn’t think much about it. OTOH, I checked out a dozen books a few times a week, esp. in summer, and pretty much exhausted their collection by the time I was 13. The librarian may have thought I was just being thorough in my reading, and she wouldn’t have been wrong, exactly.
I do remember buying ONE naughty film at an “adult bookstore” when I was about 20, and hugely pregnant, and it oddly costing about $50. That was the most embarrassing instance I can think of. It was a pretty bad one, too, IIRC, but then I’m extremely picky about film.
I rented an x-rated tape at a video store some years ago and wouldn’t you know, it got chewed up in the VCR and broke. I had no problem renting it but had to take it back and tell the clerk I busted a dirty movie that retailed for $50. But he said no problem, tapes got broken all the time.
I used to peruse curious magazines on the stand at a gas station/convenience store. How could I not, with articles like “my visit to an anal sex resort”? Didn’t buy any. I guess they were there for truckers to buy, or maybe all those suburban housewives filling up their Toyotas.
I remember going to our small-town pharmacy with a high school friend the week before Prom, and suddenly he came running back to me, shoved a box of condoms at me with some cash, whispered “buy these for me and meet me at the car”, and quickly ran out the door.
Confused, I went to the counter, and then suddenly realized the reason – the cashier was the owner of the pharmacy – and it was his daughter that my friend was bringing to the Prom. I could hardly keep from laughing. And he noticed, and thought it was because of the condoms – so he reassuringly told me I was very smart to buy them, and he wished more boys my age would do so.
I worked at a bookstore in my 20s and I can assure you that none of us cared what porn magazines anyone was buying. (This was at a Barnes & Noble owned bookstore so there was nothing too raunchy.) It was more annoying finding copies of Playboy, Penthouse and the little Kama Sutra guides hidden around the store at the end of the night by the looky-loos too afraid to actually buy a copy.
I never took any but one of the “perks” of working there was getting free copies of the old porn mags when the new issues were put on the shelves. We would tear the covers off the unsold issues and send them back to the magazine distributor for credit, then “destroy” the rest of the magazines. Most went in the garbage but some people would take copies. The store dumpster was always trashed at that time of the month by people who knew about the procedure.
I only ever bought … erotic materials … around the beginning of the internet being available to normal people (before that I was too young to want to and after that I realized I didn’t need to). I went into a bookstore and paid cash; I thought it was ridiculous that someone would buy something like that over the internet with a credit card with their name on it. The clerk at Barnes and Noble didn’t know my name. (The aforemetioned Playboy purchase might not have been in cash, but that hardly counts as porn.)
I don’t remember ever buying one. When I was a teen in the 70s I used to sneak my dad’s Playboy, Oui and Penthouse mags. If I were to buy one now, I would be no more embarrassed than when I purchase sex toys in one of my local porn shops. I’m not embarrassed - if I was, I would purchase them exclusively on line.
