One person’s pornography is another person’s Page 3.
Softcore- must’ve been before ten. The father of the neighbour’s kid had a workshop with some centerfolds. Then, at age 13 or so came the internet, and so did I.
And one country’s Page 3 is another country’s child pornography…Before 2003, British tabloids could legally feature 16- and 17-year-old girls as topless models. Samantha Fox, Maria Whittaker, Debee Ashby, and others began their topless modelling careers in the Sun when they were 16, while the Daily Sport was even known to count down the days until it could feature a girl topless on her 16th birthday, as it did with Linsey Dawn McKenzie in 1994.
If “Dear Penthouse” letters qualify as erotic, then romance novels are erotica. I didn’t realize that anyone was under the impression that the genre describes candle lit dinners and strolls on the beach with a dashing stranger. Sure, there’s that, too, but the reader doesn’t have to wade through much warm-up to get to all the thrusting members and velvety pouches.
That’s an inside joke to those in the know. The only difference I’ve seen between Penthouse letters is the painterly, flowery prose used to describe the sex act. The authors tend to replace street profanity with a creative (read lame; hilarious) set of replacement words for penis and vagina. But the sex act, while it may be slightly whitewashed for effect, is described in vivid and graphic terms.
Now see, I didn’t realize this as a kid. Actually, I didn’t realize that people didn’t know how filthy romance novels were until B. Serum corrected me. I assumed everyone knew that women toting these things around the house and on errands were charging themselves up. And I felt pretty awkward about interrupting the moms of the kids in my dance class to ask them questions, and felt pretty weird when my friends’ moms would dog-ear a page and begin quizzing us about our school day or something. Couldn’t figure out how they could switch gears so quickly, or why they didn’t feel embarrassed about getting all wound up while waiting in a dentist’s office waiting room full of strangers. We all knew what they were doing, right? Apparently not.
Is there a moral to this story? No, not really. Just that I assumed women seemed to prefer a different genre for pornography, and they were totally getting away with reading smut in public because men who cracked open a Hustler in the dentist’s office would be shooed out like a bad dog. Well, maybe there’s a moral. Men, next time you see a woman reading one of these at home or in public and you have something on your mind but don’t want to interrupt her reading, she might very much like to be interrupted. You know what I’m saying?
I can’t remember exactly. I’m going to generously say 10, but it may have been younger.
As is traditional, a friend and I found them in the bushes at the beach, near where I lived, and then I kept them hidden under the house.
I don’t count fleeting glimpses of my Dad’s stash.
The OP really should have asked for our ages. Growing up in the 50s, I had no idea porn existed, not even *Playboy. *So when I became old enough to need it, I simply drew my own. It wasn’t until the 70s that I discovered porn other than my own.
I found my mom’s stash of Playgirl when I was 8, I think. We moved in with my stepdad when I was 9 and I found his stash of Playboy soon after. I was a latchkey kid and did a lot of snooping.
Depending on how you define porn. I’m pretty sure I didn’t see genitalia until I was at least 16 or 17, when I got the Internet. I probably saw other stuff before that, but my parents never, ever had any pornography in the house, nor did any of my friends or their parents. Hell, I got slapped for saying the word “pregnant”. (I still wonder what the hell word I was supposed to use?) I probably read some very very light erotica but my mom would have found out if I’d read too much.
My parents never hugged and kissed and never once in my memory shut the door, even at night, when everyone was sleeping. The door was always wide open. They did not exactly model a loving relationship, and my mom especially gave the impression sex was nothing but bad and dirty. (Dad, when the big kerfluffle over my boyfriend went down, asked me if I knew how to use condoms. Big difference.)
Indians girls just don’t grow up with access to that kind of stuff. Maybe now, that everyone’s got Internet, but I mean, my friend got upset because I posed her Barbie and Ken dolls naked on top of each other. It just Isn’t Done.
I chose 15, as that was when I first saw ‘full on’ porn, but my dad’s work had a selection of girly calendars and suchlike, and no-one was ever bothered about me seeing nudity.
The stuff at 15, incidently, was on the school computers, which had uncensored access (after the first censoring attempt blocked the University of Essex homepage, amongst other things). I didn’t go looking for it, it was accidental- one one notable occasion some fairly hardcore pop-ups suddenly appeared when the head teacher was standing right behind me, showing someone around the school. I was trying to do my homework…
Yes women only read those romance for titillation. And those “massagers” are for their aching necks.
Nobody thinks that maybe women don’t watch as much video porn because perhaps, the video porn was not made with them in mind? I mean, there’s whole subsets of media devoted to getting women off (yaoi comics, romance novels, fujoshi games) that shows that there’s definitely a female-oriented smut market there, but everyone pretends “oh women just don’t want porn, and if they do, it’s just erotica”
I mean, a lot of women were taught not to want it openly for one thing. Makes you dirty and slutty to be so into sex and porn. Then people assume women don’t want it, and then go on to not make anything for them, and the circle completes itself. I’m pretty sure if we made porn for women (and properly - without a male directing the whole shebang all the time) then it would be bought and enjoyed. It may still be less for a while because “good women don’t look at that stuff” is still a thing.
Anyway, written stuff was about all I could find as a teen that pushed my buttons. All the pictures were naked women, women, women. Couldn’t they see I was into men? Since I couldn’t find any visual men I liked, I turned to written men. Thankfully, tumblr has bridged the gap and gives me plenty of the visual stuff I wanted with blogs like shirtlessboys. It’s a treasure trove over there.
And shower massagers. We hold so much tension in our necks from all that reading.
I said 12, though I’m not entirely sure that was when it was - I will call it sometime between 11 and 14, though.
It was a page torn out of some porn magazine folded up and hidden on a shelf in the teen shelves of the local public library. As an adult I fully realize how creepy this actually was that someone put that there and I recognize that I probably should have said something.
However, as an adolescent, I was so confused by sex in general at that age that I was fascinated by it - I remember the basics of what was on it even now, and it meant that “what went wear” was finally answered for me, at least a little. Note that I never got a sex talk from my parents and I was in religious school so the only “sex ed” we got was years later, when I was a senior in high school.
I’m pretty sure I took that page home. I don’t know what might have happened to it later though.
Yes. Look at Ron Jeremy porn. Men watch that and think, Holy crap, a butt ugly guy like Ron Jeremy’s getting some, I can too. Women watch that and think eeewwww, I wouldn’t do him with somebody else’s vagina. Video porn is almost exclusively for men, even the stuff that’s “supposedly” for women. It’s awful and has made me completely lose my taste for the stuff. I don’t want to look at ugly guys. I want to look at hot guys.
There’s a reason a lot of us watch gay porn, and even that tends to skip right past the erotic foreplay and jump to 20 minute blowjobs (BORING - do even guys like this?) and then they start fucking each other in the ass, and I’m like HEY! DO PEOPLE EVEN KISS ANYMORE?
Anyway. I guess i need to get on this tumblr shit. I’ve been hearing about it and boy howdy am I behind the times.
Under 10. It was either a penthouse or hustler. It’s one of the things that helped me be sure I was gay.
I was about seven years old at a friend’s house when his older brother and cousin (they were around twelve, I think) decided to let us view a Playboy issue that they had been perusing. Just pretty naked girls in seductive poses, of course.
About four or five years later, I was at another friend’s house when his older brother showed us a set of pictures (some black-and-white, some color) of various couples engaging in sexual acts. I was disgusted and not turned on at all by this (my friend was, though). The women were not attractive at all to me, and I was already into my fetish / paraphilia of superheroine knockout scenes. Oddly, I was more turned on by seeing scantily-clad heroines getting hit over the head than regular “Vanilla” sexual acts.
Ironically, from everything I’ve heard he was always one of the most popular actors among the female actors. Charming, respectful, fun to be around, and a knack for making his female partners feel comfortable.
Well, I don’t watch gay (male) porn, but as I’ve said a number of times in other threads about straight porn, I hate blowjobs that go on and on and on and on. Like you said: BORING. Along with the tendency to skip over the girl undressing and just go straight from “fully clothed” to “completely naked and doing the deed”. I’d prefer to see the undressing process, thank you very much. All this is one reason I like lesbian porn (the actual “made for lesbians” stuff, not the “hot girl-on-girl action” stuff aimed at straight men). There’s actually some seduction going on in there.
Under 10, and by a fair bit. Probably about six or seven years old, one of my friends discovered a Joy of Sex type book in their parents bookcase. I don’t remember how I thought about it to be honest.
The next time was well after ten-years-old though. Maybe 13 or 14 for a proper jazz mag, and well…
I was probably around 11 when I tripped over my dad’s stash of Playboys, this being what passed for porn for a pre-teen in the mid-1960s.
Saw some Playboys in my neighbor’s garage when I was about 10. At first, I felt like I did something wrong for seeing them and went home and felt bad for a while.
Then, one day in the not-too-near future, I was washing my hands in the bathroom, and suddenly something turned on inside of me and I thought to myself “I gotta see those again!”
I consider this the day I hit puberty.