The Accidental Pornographer, Part 5: Porno History X

What exactly is the protocol and etiquette for educating one's 75-year-old father about which porn streaming sites are safe, and which things one should click and not click?

I moved back to America partly to help my father, who has Parkinson's and was losing the ability to walk, as he moved into an assisted living place.

He likes it quite a bit there, and his condion has improved. It's more like a hotel for old people than a hospital -- he has a studio with a view of the woods behind the place, with a disability-minded shower and cable, and of course, internet.

I go to visit him every long weekend I have -- that's been about once a month since I came here in August. His computer, an ancient desktop, is always gunked up with viruses and malware when I get there, mainly of the porn variety. His browser is regularly full of links to the most heinous kinds of porn, often transvestite and she-male themed.

I suppose it's possible that's just a coincidence. He mentioned that he was trying to look up information about a transsexual shoe model who worked for the shoe company he worked for in Brazil years ago, and ended up with all this crap on the computer.

Perhaps that's true.

Perhaps.

PORN ON MY MIND

I've been thinking about porn a lot lately.

As we all know, I began making extra money writing indie porn in 2012, and this intensified this year when I couldn't get a TEFL job.

The Accidental Pornographer Part 1: The Pornographer Rises
The Accidental Pornographer Part 2: The Fall of the Pornographer
The Accidental Pornographer Part 3: It Ain't Easy Being Sleazy
The Accidental Pornographer Part 4: Can't Win For Losing

Perhaps fortunately, Amazon changed its payment policies, making short porn less profitable, Fortunate, because writing porn daily for a couple of months had reduced my brain to a puddle of goo.

I realized I had a problem with it when I went to Mallorca with the Girlfriend in June. We had sex maybe a half-dozen times over the eight or nine days, but then the day she left, I jacked off to porn three times.

In a row.

90 DAYS

So I went three months without watching porn. Or writing any.

(I still jacked off, I should say.)

And much like when I stopped drinking, my main thought was: WOW! What a TREMENDOUS amout of time and energy I was putting into that activity.

Three months I lasted. And then I slipped.

One of my short porn novels ended up back on the best-seller lists, and in my research for the sequel, I looked something up and I was back to porn.

It's not as frequent as before, but it's a weekly thing now. (And I'm back to making more than a thousand bucks a month from the books, which currently is going towards paying for my father's assisted living place.)

People joke: how could porn be addictive?

And I'm like, how could it NOT be?

BACK IN THE DAY 

I was born around 1970. While porn has in various forms been around since the dawn of human activity -- witness the temples at Khajuraho -- the modern form of porn has pretty much grown up with me, arguably beginning with the 1972 release of DEEP THROAT.

The attempt to include a narrative  and characters (and stupid jokes) into porn didn't really last, and we've now gone back to the sex-act-only short films which in the 50s and 60s were called "loops", but DEEP THROAT really began the "mainstreaming" of porn.

(I can't recommend the Rialto Report website and podcast enough, for a look at a history of the industry and a look at the psychopathology of people who have way more sex than they really should.)

* * *

My personal first exposure to porn was probably typical of guys my age: PLAYBOY magazine.

There was a copy of the issue that included an interview with Jimmy Carter hidden on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet in our house. I don't remember how I found out about it; but finally, one day when I was left alone there -- 70s kids were often left alone in the house -- I climbed up and got it out and looked at it. I guess I was about 11 or 12.

I don't think it showed pubic hair, even. (Girls'  pussies were covered by an additional layer of intrigue in those days, in the form of pubic hair.) Just some relatively tasteful 70s topless shots.

But I was like, wow.

I didn't jack off to it, because I didn't do that yet.  That is something I specificialy remember; some of my friends were avid masturbators in 8th grade, and always telling me how awesome it was, and I remember them actually mocking me because I hadn't tried it yet.

How many kids get made fun of for not masturbating? Is it a lot? I'm guessing not many.



* * *

From there, I remember going to a lake house holiday with one of the guys who made fun of me for not masturbating -- if you read my last memoir, it would be the guy who I referred to "the former class president" -- and he had a PENTHOUSE magazine hidden away up there. He'd found it at a construction site nearby, he said. (You could do that, in those days.)

So that was the first poontang I ever saw. Hairy split wet beavers.

As it probably was with most guys, I was equally horrified and fascinated.

* * *

The late 70s and early 80s was a time of exploitation in general, as free love got monetized, and there were plenty of horror movies and cop movies that were loaded with nudity, rape, kidnapping, and bondage. I watched these in edited form on regular TV, and then by the time I was 13 or 14, on cable TV.

In retrospect, I was twisted by these, I think.

Particularly the horror movies, many of which were actually directed by the same people who directed the porn films. I made unhealthy associations between sex and being stabbed to death from HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13th movies.



While it doesn't have any actual nudity, or not much, this film, VICE SQUAD, was a big one in terms of warping my sexual preferences towards bondage.  I remember watching this literally on the edge of my seat when I first got a TV and cable in my room at age 13:



A damn good thriller, really, but ... well, recommended for mature audiences.

And the comedies, too. ANIMAL HOUSE and REVENGE OF THE NERDS and RISKY BUSINESS of course had plenty of nudity and sex, and what we would consider now to be a tremendously cavalier and non-PC attitude towards statutory rape, illegal voyeurism and peeping, and teenage prostitution.



Tell me that doesn't give you a boner. If it doesn't your medulla oblongata is fucked up.

And then as I got to be 14 or 15, well, all I need to say are three words, baby: CINEMAX AFTER DARK. I'm delighted to find it still exists on Cinemax's streaming platform.

THE FIRST TIME

The first actual hardcore porn I ever saw?  I was 15.

The movie?

TABOO 2.

(This is just the credit sequence.)



(Researching it, I was even more delighted to find that it was the first porn that Adam Carolla ever saw also, and he has spoken at length about it on his podcast.)

TABOO 2 is pretty sleazy even by the standards of the time, about a family of sexed-up fuck-ups who do a lot of inappropriate and generally illegal fucking with each other. All filmed in glorious 35 mm.

Where did I see it?

At a party.

There was a guy at my high school, a rich kid, who was often left unattended while his parents traveled. He was a couple years older than me, and my friends were already 16, and we went over there and drank whatever sweet-ass alcohol cocktails we liked as teenagers, rum and cokes most likely. There were always a lot of girls at these shindigs.

So at one of these parties, somebody put on the video cassette of TABOO 2.

We watched it as a group. Can you even imagine watching porn in a group, these days? With girls?

But in those days, that was your only choice. Before cassettes, you had to actually go to a theater to see them.

Just ... amazing, right? Equally horrifying and fascinating.

My big take-away at the time was: that guy's cock is huge. I can't compete with that thing.

But of course I learned a few other tricks.

* * *

So that was the first porn I ever saw.

It would not be the last.

NEXT: THE ACCIDENTAL PORNOGRAPHER, PART 6 in which I will discuss the Silver Age of late 80s porn, the last days of 42nd street porn in NY, and then, of course, porn in Russia in the early 00s.