I don’t know exactly how old I was but I guessed about 10. Back then, my friends and I found that, for a quarter, you could get some baseball card-sized nudie pictures from a coin operated vending machine in the men’s room at a restaurant we used to pass on our way to and from the Boy’s Club.
Playboy at 14 (my sister’s husband had a bunch), Hustler at 21, videos at 25.
If Playboys count, I was around nine when the neighbor’s kids found their dad’s stash and showed everyone. If it’s just stuff we sought out on our own, not until I was in my late teens.
Hell, I never saw my parents kiss, let alone read/receive porn! I mean, I didn’t have a super sheltered childhood, so I don’t think I’m that odd in finding it odd that someone’s parent would openly receive and partake in porn around their kids? None of my friends growing up EVER talked about porn or showed any curiosity or anything about it. And while I know that porn isn’t just a male thing, I always got the impression from people I know that men are far more likely to seek it out than women. Plus, all the women I know prefer things like erotica and slash fics, but have little interest in video porn. With men, it seems to be opposite. Again, this is just my own observations throughout my life.
And trading and sharing porn as kids? Omg, I would have died. Hell, it would have never even crossed my mind to do something like that! Maybe it’s an age thing? I mean, I didn’t even get access to the internet until I was 18 and that was with a 14.4 modem, which was state of the art at the time. So it’s much easier (and more private) now to share porn as a kid. Ugh. My daughter’s never using the internet XD
Gosh, I just turned 43, so I have no idea why our experiences are so vastly different. And other than the Playboys which were generally kept in the side table by my dad’s chair, the porn was hidden and I had to snoop to find it. I’d have been in trouble for snooping if they’d caught me with it and I’m certain they would have found better hiding places. All my friends and I tore the house apart looking for porn whenever we were left alone, and we shared it all and saved it for sleepovers, laughed about most of it. But we were all insatiably curious, and come to think of it we all started having sex (not together!) pretty young. We were good kids, played sports, were in the honors programs, dance class and such, but we were all about sex from about the middle of elementary school on.
My parents are pretty snobby and my mother wouldn’t have been caught dead in public with a romance novel, but a lot of my friend’s mothers carried those pink-covered bodice-rippers all over the place. Seeing women in the doctor’s office openly reading those things led me to believe that all adults, women included, were as interested in sex and whatever version of pornography that appealed to them.
ETA: my parents hugged and kissed all the time, still do in their 70s. My sister and I knew not to barge in or even knock when Mommy and Daddy were “napping”. I never felt creeped out about it; I was glad I had a happy family. So many of my friends didn’t.
I’m not disputing your personal experience, but I must point out that it is anecdotal, and in this case at least, almost certainly an outlier. While pornography use among women appears to be on the uptick in recent history, the industry’s primary customer is still men, mainly hetero men. Erick Janssen, PH.D, an associate scientist at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University writes:
Quoted from the PBS Frontline special: American Porn for anyone interested in further investigation.
I’m not disputing it, I responded with an anecdote and the assumption that since I only saw women (lots of women) toting around romance novels in public places and on the shelves at friends’ houses, and an entire section of my library filled with the silly things that women were into porn too, just a different kind. Actually, it’s still the case. I have never seen a man with a romance. My assumption may be completely false, but for the last 35+ years I assumed that women were just as interested in porn as men, just had different preferences as to format. I am surprised that I’m the only one who noticed women with romances, though, and leaped to that conclusion. I mean, that’s a huge industry, and women get away with getting all hot and bothered in the waiting room. No one bats an eyelash but we all know the main purpose of those things is titillation, right?
Well, that sounds about as healthy as it was possible to be at the time about sex in the USA . Love is timeless. I have learned that as I have become more timeless as the years have gone by.
I was about 12 or so, when I ‘discovered’ my father’s stash of pictures of naked ladies. It was about as important to me as the space program was at the time. I put the quotes around the word discovered because, as I learned later, my father put them where I would find them eventually. It was never spoken about between us, but the concept dwelt just under the surface where my mother was not supposed to delve. Years later, when he was dying, he entrusted me to secure his stash of VHS movies that he deemed unsuitable for public disclosure. That was the first time the subject ever directly came up. The tension between what was known about something and what was said about something informed me in many other matters during my years as a scientist, businessman, husband and father.
I know I was lucky, thank you for saying so. Still trying to figure out how I’ll toast their penchant for affection at their 50th anniversary party next year without embarrassing them in front of their friends 
I haven’t read one, so I have only the fuzziest sense of how explicit they are, but I had always assumed that the titillation of a romance novel was more analogous to the gritty escapism of a men’s crime novel, rather than a copy of say, “Juggs.”
My impression — and I don’t think I’m alone on this — that when people say “Pornography,” they are envisioning pictures or videos of naked people having sex; and that the novels you’re referring to would tend to fall within the descriptor of “Erotica.”
But if you contend that romance novels are typically used as masturbatory material (not just titillation), I’ll take your word for it.
If Playboy counts, then probably around eight or nine (1968-69) when my father got a Playboy calendar for Christmas. Made a huge impression on me when the adults were giggling, passing it around but wouldn’t let me see. Little did they know…
Also, one of my father’s friends had about twenty years worth of centerfolds stapled to the walls of his shop. I would spend hours in there, until I hit puberty where it only took five minutes or so. 
Harder stuff (Oui, Penthouse, Hustler) came later, probably around age twelve when my best friend showed me his brother’s stash.
I find that vaguely disturbing.
I know I was around 8 or 9 because I’d sneak peeks at porn on the same computer I was visiting the Pokemon website with when it first came out.
Many men assume this, which is convenient for women. Explicitness levels vary, but the midline of top “name” authors write books that always contain a few detailed, explicit sex scenes, and some lines are considerably raunchier than that.
I said “12”, but that’s just my best guess. One of my neighborhood friends’ dad subscribed to Hustler, and he’d sneak issues for us to look at. There was also a young adult guy whose lawn I mowed who subscribed to Playboy and didn’t mind letting me look at them. I don’t recall which I saw first.
I was 18 (1984) the first time I ever saw a hardcore porn magazine, and that was only a brief glimpse. A guy in my college dorm had a stack of those mags and he showed them to the rest of us one time. The only pictures I saw were of the “extreme closeup” variety, and I recall finding them rather unappealing (I still don’t like extreme closeup stuff).
I saw my first hardcore video at 20 or so. My best friend at the time had a membership at a local video rental store that had a porn section, and we watched quite a few.
In addition to my friend’s dad’s Hustler collection and the other guy’s Playboys, around 13-14 I discovered the magazine rack at the nearby convenience store. This was years before everybody started keeping the stuff behind the counter, and the guys who worked there just gave me a wink and nod and let me browse to my heart’s content. That was how I discovered Variations magazine, which led to my discovery that I was spanking/BDSM enthusiast, as well as my love for well-written erotica. I started writing my own (though, admittedly, the stuff I wrote in my teens was pretty ridiculous since I really didn’t know what I was talking about), and since the World Wide Web was still many years away (AOL wasn’t even around yet) I got my entire BDSM porn fix by “rolling my own” for quite a long time.
Heh-heh:
Heh-heh again:
I don’t know what the content of romance novels is like, but I’ve heard many people say the purpose is the same as the porn that men are interested in.
11 or 12, I found some mags in a brown paper bag learning up against the front of a shop as I was about to walk in. Don’t know if someone left them there expecting to pick them up again or not.
Very explicit full on intercourse.
Mum found me reading them and confiscated them. I re confiscated them a few years later when I found my dads stash.
I was 7 when I saw my first Playboy, but I only read it for the articles.
Seriously though, I don’t remember the exact age, but it was in elementary school. Some friends and I routinely stole Playboy et al from the local drugstore and hid them in a secret cache in an alley.
Likewise.