Juvenile smut aquisition nostalgia in the pre-internet era

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Maybe since a girl is posting the OP (nevermind that I’m a lesbian), hopefully there won’t be as huge of a gender discrepancy in the responses as there may have been otherwise…

I have to say that I feel a little sorry for kids these days with their ease of access to all things pr0n, because my super-secret-stealth missions (we’ll call it Operation Babydyke) of sneaking into my older brother’s room to swipe or return portions of his Penthouse/Playboy collection were at least half of the fun.

In Phase 1 of the campaign, I was always careful to only take one or two at a time from the stack, not obvious enough of a change to arouse suspicion. I’d peruse them for a day or two, keeping them underneath my mattress and either reading them in the privacy of my room, or taking them out into the middle of the woods somewhere on our 60 acres. Once tired of that particular collection of Forum/Xaviera Hollander entries or Pia Zadora spread, I’d implement Phase 2 and sneak back into the Lion’s den to return the rags.

Then there was the time that I noticed, after my brother had moved out upon graduating high school, that the collection had mysteriously moved from the bookcase in my brother’s room, to my Dad’s bookcase. :eek: Thereby signifigantly increasing the degree of difficulty of my missions.

After one particularly sloppy Phase 1, Mom was out doing something so Dad and I were home alone. I was flopped on my parents’ bed watching TV when I noticed out of the corner of my eye, that my Dad had noticed some of the various books and magazines on his bookshelf were askew. He nudged them back into alignment with his foot as he walked by. He probably wasn’t even aware of what he was doing, or the type of reading material that had been disturbed, but my pre-teen heart began to pitter-pat in my chest as I was convinced in my red-handed paranoia that he was onto me. Not only was I convinced of that, but also that his eagle-eyes had systematically determined exactly which issues were missing, implying that he would of course be aware of any attempts at an emergency Phase 2. My worst fears were realized in an instant and my world began to spin. Operation Babydyke had been exposed!!!

I immediately escaped to my room, desperate to dispose of any incriminating evidence. I collected the small stack of magazines from under my bed, shoved them into my backpack and hit the road to parts unknown, or through the woods about a 1/4 of a mile from the house. My plan was to toss the magazines into the brush where no one would possibly find them and they would quickly disintegrate in our 200" of annual rainfall.

This is where it gets interesting, but some of the reasons why I decided to do what I’m about to relate elude me. After much anxious pacing in the middle of the woods, and much inner conflict, I decided that my best course of action was to face up to having the magazines in my possesion…by lying through my teeth.

This is where my memory is fuzzy.

On one hand, I was pretty much convinced and terrified that even if I managed to destroy all traces of the magazine and my involvement with them, that Dad had already deduced the whole sordid affair, and was sitting somewhere hopelessly trying to figure out what his tomboy daughter was doing with “entertainment for men”.

On the other hand, I was also quite sad at the idea of the magazines melting in the rain, because then I’d lever be able to read them again, and each one had become extremely important to me and my budding notions of sexuality. Each was completely irreplacable. Whatever my primary motivation, perhaps a combination of both scenarios, I swallowed hard and came up with a manipulative fib of almost professionally criminal proportions and trudged back to the house to find Dad.

With my best look of doe-eyed innocence, I handed him my backpack of smut and said something to the effect of, “I found these magazines…Why do you have them, Dad? Isn’t Mom enough?”

I don’t remember exactly what Dad said in response, but it was through raised eyebrows and stammers and mumbling about not even knowing they were in the house, and the details certainly never made it to Mom. And I was happily able to continue spending “quality time” with my precious reading material for many more years…with much closer attention to detail in my missions, of course.

To this day it cracks me completely up to remember the whole thing. Oh to be a kid again…

2

have you since admitted this to your father? i’ve found that almost all of the stuff i ever kept from my parents that i’ve admitted to as an adult is met with uproarious laughter. ymmv.

3

:stuck_out_tongue:

Well, even in the modern era there will still be the fun of “guessing dad’s pr0n site password.” And even with Internet, ya know dad’s still got a stash somewhere and that that stash is worth any ten times of the internet!

In truth, the only reason I would keep anti-porn for minors laws about is so that I can torment my kids (when I have em) by gradually moving the stash location to places that require further and further Mission: Impossible zeal to attain. (MWAHAHAHA.) Just part of the fun of growing up. :smiley:

4

Sadly no. My Dad passed away suddenly 3 years ago. He died without knowing my sexual orientation, which was out of respect for my Mom’s wishes. I was always closer to my Mom, and she didn’t think Dad would be able to handle my being gay. Since she was the one who’d have to cohabitate with him while he dealt with it, I agreed, but that is a decision I have come to regret.

Maybe he’s still getting a good laugh, reading somewhere out there in the ether…

5

Beautiful OP.

I was particularly struck how the mags are described as irreplaceable, which accurately described how precious those things were to a kid in the day. They were like religious relics.

6

I was thinking about this same topic over the weekend after finding some of the sites my son and his friends had been looking at in the IE history. I remember looking through the closets of every family I ever babysat for to find their stash.

I wish the kids now could only know the Playboy type of media instead of the nasty stuff they can see on the internet. Some of the things they’ve seen I didn’t even know about until I was in my 30’s. Instead of dreaming about encounters with smiling, welcoming women, they have in their minds… well, you know, not so romantic images that involve family members and farm animals.

I have nothing against them looking, I just think the subject matter is not as nice as it used to be.

7

:smiley: I had totally intended to include just such a confession when I started writing, but the topic kind of ran away with me. I swear I could pick out porn mags from 100 paces solely based on the binding and width when they were stacked together somewhere. Sometimes I would snoop around just for the thrill of finding the stash, even without looking at it at all. Just a few months ago I even had a dream about looking around some house for a porn stash. It was still so fun I suspected that the dream had been somewhat lucid.

8

honeydewgrrl, that OP was adorable. :stuck_out_tongue:

While I was never really closeted, per se – I, too, had a stash of Playboy mags in my room, mostly kitted from the 7-11’s recycle bin. We were big on dumpster diving when I was a teen, and I found out one day that the 7-11 down the street tossed old magazines that didn’t sell in order to make room for current issues. A baby dyke’s dream come true!

Where I got the Adam & Eve catalogs I can’t remember, but they were educational in their own right!

9

I love the part about hiding the mags under the mattress. If there is one constant in the universe, it’s hiding girlie mags under the mattress.

Honeydewgrrl, you would be very cool to know.

Revtim, you’re right about the relic status of a kid’s “stuff.”

10

When I was a kid I worked at the local recycling center at the town dump. We collected newspapers, glass, and magazines. I had smut of all kinds, from the nekkid-wimmin Playboy variety to the hardest of the hardcore nasties.

It was a 14-year-old kid’s dream come true, I tells ya.

That job was cool in other ways, too. We had to sort green, clear, and brown glass in big dumpsters. The town was paid by the ton for the glass, so we had to make sure as much glass as possible was in the bins. To do that, we were given heavy leather gloves, safety goggles, and a crowbar, and we hopped into the dumpster and smashed the bottles down every so often.

On really slow days, we’d bring our .22s with us and shoot the rats in the dump.

Good times, good times.

11

Band name!

12

I just realized that some folks might think this is a thread about someone who’s into kiddie-porn reliving their glory days… :smack:

13

Loved the OP, BTW

14

You see, when you are a boy, and you have older brothers, they delight in letting you see their playboys in their apartment. (and drink a little beer)

But for me the true memory is buying your first Playboy at the 7-11. (girls of the Big 8 1982) Going in there, getting a Big Gulp, a candy bar and then when the guy says “Anything else?” responding “ummm, Is that the new playboy? Yeah, let me have that.” All the time your heart is pounding and pounding.

honeydewgrrl, did you know you can buy specific copies of Playboy on ebay? So you can return to your childhood friends if you want.

15

Beautiful idea for an OP, and beautifully written as well.

My first experience with a girlie magazine was when I was age 13. Alone at home one day and bored, I wandered into my mother’s bedroom looking for something to read. My step-father had a stack of magazines in a bookcase by his side of the bed and I looked…I’d never heard of Playboy before! After a quick glance, early teen logic told me to pull the copy off the bottom and get back to my own room with it. What I got was the very first issue of Playboy, the one with Marylin Monroe as the centerfold. :smiley:
Of course, the significance of that particular issue didn’t become apparent to me until years later, but I still think it’s cool that my first peek at smut was the initial issue of Playboy.
For months after, I’d wear the “new” off of one, sneak back in there and replace it and get the next one up. Never even came close to getting caught, or even worried about it much. I had cardboard box in my room that my mother had agreed was private and she wasn’t supposed to open it. That’s where I stashed the magazine that I was currently using. Maybe Mom checked in there and saw whatever issue I had at the time, but then, she couldn’t very well confront me with it since she wasn’t supposed to look in there, could she?

That step-dad cut out after a few years. I didn’t like him very much but I’ll always be grateful to him for his collection of magazines.

16

Hell, I still remember the first Playboy I ever laid eyes on. Especially the centerfold. :slight_smile:

Reminds me of my most memorable mission: One day after my parents split up, I lived with my mom in an apartment for a year or so. Walking to the bus stop one morning I found a huge box of discarded pr0n laying near the dumpster. I quickly formulated my plan. I grabbed the box and hid it in some nearby bushes for retrieval after school. I ran back to the bus stop so I wouldn’t be late to school. I knew I couldn’t share my discovery with my friends because that would mean I would have to share. It was the longest day evar. The bus hadn’t stopped moving and I was out of my seat and headed for the front of the bus. I ran home. I remember going through the box like a perverse mix between an archeologist and the proverbial kid in the candy store. I woke up early for weeks and searched all the dumpsters in the neighborhood every morning, hoping to run across another booty of booty. Alas, apart from a few random magazines I never came upon another motherloade of pr0n like that again. Good times, good times.

17

Funny you mention that…

A friend’s girlfriend is a huge Dolly Parton fan (and a huge lesbian). One of the stack of mags from my youth was the Playboy with Dolly Parton on the cover wearing the bunny ears (October, 1978). My friend was trying to think of something cool to give her girlfriend for her birthday, and I managed to dig up an auction link for that particular issue for her.

I’m actually more fond of the memories than of having a copy of those issues myself. Which reminds me…

I kept a few issues with me well into college, but ended up burning them in a PATHETIC fit of trying to “change my ways” for my straight housemate and best friend (we’ll call her “J”) who I was completely in love with (though in total denial about that fact) and who had what can only be described as puritanical views on sex. She said one winter’s night (while we were platonically huddled together in her bed for warmth) that she didn’t masturbate and thought that it was wrong. The next day the girls got tossed into the wood burning stove and I vowed to no longer jill-off in order to get closer to “J”…denial in the presense of puppy love is a powerful and dangerous combination…needless to say my swearing off of masturbation didn’t even last a week, but sadly my magazines did not survive my soul’s torment.

Fast forward a few years and through my coming out, and kharma threw me a bone. I was helping the woman I was seeing at the time move. She was a total pack rat. While lugging luggage full of Og knows what out of a shed in her back yard, I just about got a hernia trying to lift one particular suitcase, so I opened it up to lighten the load and found it to be full of girlie mags from my “golden era” (late 70’s - early 80’s). I gleefully flipped through down memory lane for a while. She wanted to keep them and our relationship didn’t last (at least not in that pleasant and functional stage) long enough for me to charm her into letting me have a couple of them.

18

Back in my day, we had to swipe Playboy from the 7-11. And we liked it!

Actually, a friend of mine and I both had a copy of Playboy, and he got caught. He said that I had given it to him. So my only recourse was to go into the back of my closet and pull out my copy, proving I still had it and could not have given it to him. I got a little talking to, but s-e-x wasn’t something anyone ever discussed. (I never even got the facts of life talk – picked it up on my own, then when I was 17 my mother asked if I had any questions about anything that I might want to ask her. But that’s another thread.)

Other highlights of youth:

(1) Discovering school mate who had tons of nudist magazines – they sure played volleyball a lot.

(2) Finding a sex scene in *Fanny Hill * (page 141), a copy of which was on the bookshelf in the bedroom I got when my older brother went to college.

(3) Finding a gay mag in the woods. It wasn’t hard core, just individual men, but we had never seen anything that, well, huge.

19

When I was little my dad used to keep the latest copy of Playboy on the top shelf in the pantry. He didn’t know that we could climb up there. So my sister and I would steal it and look at it with our friends, giggling like mad the entire time. It’s true, half the fun was the adventure of “stealing” it and putting it back without getting caught. We’d pretend we were theives stealing treasure or something. Ah yes, young kids pretending to be criminals and stealing porn. Such innocent little things, weren’t we?

20

Cool OP.