In which the young you learns to have a better hiding space than "My Documents."
You never forget your first experience with porn. A wrinkled magazine half-buried in the recycling, or an errant folder on the desktop, and your world is never the same. Here are tenHooksexup readers' formative porn experiences.
I used to tag along when my friend Christine went to babysit her cousin. This kid’s parents were super-patriotic, intensely religious Revolutionary War buffs. The mom was dowdy, with giant brown-tinted glasses, and the dad was brawny and chubby with a handlebar mustache — think Meathead from All In The Family. Their apartment was full of crosses and dusty Americana — tattered license plates from every state and American flags of every kind.
After Christine got the kid to nap one afternoon, we turned on the TV, thinking we’d finish the movie we rented yesterday. The tape flickered on and, instead of Sixteen Candles, we saw a couple dressed in Revolutionary War-era garb going at it under a cherry tree. The guy wore a tri-cornered hat and stockings, and his paramour wore ruffled petticoats bunched up under her shockingly large-aureola'd breasts. It ended up being only one part of a series of tame, hyper-American porn featuring the Founding Fathers and their wives, or, in Jefferson’s case, his slave. I still remember Washington crying, “Martha, feel my member!”
— Tina
I was ten years old and at a local corner store buying candy with my friend, and somehow, I ended up in front of a row of pornos in the magazine aisle. My friend and I spent fifteen minutes staring at a picture of a very attractive and very naked woman doing some sort of complex gymnastic pose. In retrospect, I realize now that as far as porn goes, this was incredibly tame — arty, even — but at the time it was a veritable Cirque de Soleil of sexual wonderment. I remember thinking, "If this is what sex involves, I better start stretching now."
It was this fear that caused me to slip the magazine into my coat, pay for my candy, and sprint home like Indy being chased by that boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I spent the next three hours looking at vaginas and eating candy. It was a good afternoon.
My friend who was with me told my other friends at school about what I did, and I ended up becoming pretty famous. Kids offered lunch treats and begged to loan me their new video games in order to get some time with the magazine, by then comfortably resting under a pile of clothes in my room.
Nine years later, I think I still have that magazine.
— Matt
I was at the home of a friend of my mom's, when the two of them went to run some errands and asked me to house-sit for a minute. I had no problem with this, because I knew her son (who was in jail at the time) had a massive porn collection.
The nanosecond they were gone, I snuck into his room and grabbed the first VHS I saw, not even paying any attention to the title. I popped it in, and saw a naked man getting orally pleased by a woman. One of the major reasons I wanted to watch porn, other then to masturbate, was to compare my own penis to others. I saw what the guy was packing and thought to myself, "Well, that's not too bad. He's about my size."
Then the scene cut to him with an actual erection.
My ego took a hit that wouldn't begin to heal until years later when I lost my virginity and a small yelp from my partner convinced me that I was a decent size. But it took some time to get over the years I spent ashamed of my perceived inadequacies in the face of that unnamed man.
— Glenn
My suitemate and I were cleaning out the new place before we moved in. She went into the closet and, in the process of dusting off a high shelf, realized there was a videotape there. It was an unmarked VHS tape, but it was broken, so we left it alone for a week. A week later, we all got stoned and decided to fix it. We opened it, fixed the tape, rewrapped it, and stuck it in the VCR.
The title popped up: Old Enough For Anal. We assumed at this point that the title must be referring to the busty blonde walking across the screen in lacy children's socks and Mary Janes. All well and good, we thought, but we were suddenly horrified when her geriatric counterpart sauntered onto the screen as fast as his aged limbs would allow. Having never really seen porn, we were startled enough by the set-up, without the presence of the elderly. By the time he started in on the titular act (on a pool table), we were all screaming. We ended up putting the video back up on the shelf and pretending that we never found it. It's still there, as far as I know.
— Jamie
In 1970, I was doing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Lund in Sweden. My daughter was four at the time, and was rapidly picking up Swedish from her classmates. We frequently went to see American movies, which provided some unintentional lessons about Swedish morals: one day, while buying tickets to a ‘40s-era Tarzan film, I was admonished by the teenage box-office clerk for exposing a young child to such a violent film. The Swedes actually censored the most violent parts of these film, like scenes of people being struck by spears or arrows.
A few weeks later, I took my daughter to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While I was occupied at the ticket window, my daughter wandered across the entrance to look at the stills for the theater's other offerings. They included scenes from the theater's adult offerings: a film featuring an orgy, and another starring a woman we called “the Pig Lady” since she had her way with a variety of barnyard denizens. My daughter pulled me over by my coat sleeve and asked, “What are they doing?” I rose to the occasion and simply answered, “Making love.” That satisfied her, and there appeared to be no harm done.
I might add that she grew up admirably well-adjusted. She graduated with honors from an Ivy League university, became an IT professional, and has been married for over two decades to a wonderful man. However, she did write her undergraduate anthropology thesis on “Sex as a Woman’s Commodity,” so perhaps that first exposure to porn made an impression after all.
— Silenus
I was sixteen and my boyfriend had borrowed a tape from a friend. The label was handwritten and listed Missing In Action, Rambo, and a few other erased and rewritten titles. Since I didn't know what it really was, I left it sitting out. My ultra-conservative Southern parents rarely sat down and watched movies, so I thought I had nothing to worry about.
But then I came home one evening to my mom ordering me to get that "filth" out of the house right then and there. I innocently asked why, figuring it was just a tape of a few action movies, but she proceeded to tell me about walking in and finding my dad watching it. I had to stifle my snickers at the thought of my dad ogling porn and my mom nearly having a heart attack trying to get it out of the player.
Incidentally, my boyfriend and I watched the tape later, and it turned out to be the iconic Deep Throat. My favorite line from the film is still during the scene when the delivery boy goes down on Linda Lovelace; she pulls his head back and politely asks, "Mind if I smoke while you eat?" I often wonder if that made my dad laugh the first time he saw it.
— Cindy
Back in the quaint pre-internet days, we had to enter into some mighty dangerous terrain to satiate our perversions. I remember those “porn runs” all too well. Five or six horny nerds stuffed into a parent’s car, driving down the Henry Hudson Parkway with high expectations, evading the homeless Windex washers, and eventually stopping across from some sleazy sex shop in pre-Disney Times square.
Once parked, one unlucky fellow was chosen to go make the purchase. This was a lot of pressure, not only because it was a really sketchy area filled with shifty-looking men in overcoats and intimidating thugs, but because the responsibility of choosing something good was placed on your shoulders. After all, these tapes were expensive, and none of us had any money, so a lousy selection would incur the wrath of the entire geek posse.
Stepping into one of these sex shops was much like diving into an icy cold ocean head first. You held your breath, adrenaline leaking out of your ears, harsh fluorescent lighting exposing your every move, and made your way through the aisles, avoiding eye contact with all the perverts. Usually you had some suggestions from the troop: “Christy Canyon!” “No… Amber Lynn!”
The drive back was high-spirited, with all of us laughing over the sheer seediness of the excursion. Then we'd would all crowd around the VCR to review our bounty. Some selections would be worse than others, and in those instances we would take great pleasure in heckling the sorry fool who’d chosen it. As soon as we’d watched them all, the haggling would begin as to who’d get first dibs to jerk off to them.
Eventually it would all be worked out, and we’d say our goodbyes and finish the rest of the night in privacy. It’s incredible to think what we put ourselves through just for a little sexual release. Still, I suppose risking our lives to buy a porno tape in Times Square was far less risky than actually asking a girl out.
— Branwyn
I grew up in the '90s, when the internet was just starting to become big. We were a technologically-inclined household, and of course my mom and dad had all the new toys. We had had a desktop computer since 1995, and I was allowed free rein. It was about three years later, when I was ten or so, that I turned the desktop on and was shocked to find a picture of a naked woman in a bathtub — thankfully, not my own mother — on the desktop. I, of course, closed out of it, and ran outside to assemble my friends who lived close by. I gathered them around the computer and showed them what I had found. Eventually, afraid that my mother would be angry at my father, I deleted the dirty picture from the desktop. After that, though, I installed a keylogger, browsed his internet history, and found his porn stash, hidden deep within "My Documents."
— Sam
I’d often have trouble falling asleep, and while my parents were watching late-night TV downstairs, I would crawl into their big bed to feel more at ease. One night I was having more trouble than usual and I reached into my dad’s bedside table looking for the latest Model Railroader (we had a big model train set in the basement for years). Instead I found a Playboy, which I wasted no time flipping through. It was there I discovered my first naked lady — a businesswoman slowly undressing until she was totally nude save for a pair of black stockings. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but I excitedly told my friends on the bus the next day. I also made the mistake of asking my dad about his odd magazine collection, which promptly disappeared.
I realized years later that I frequently ask my wife to fool around in various states of undress, always with a pair of black stockings.
— Ben
My family moved when I was eight. One day, my mom and dad got a call from a realtor who said a family had vacated their apartment the day before . We went to inspect the apartment and arrange for the possible move-in.
While Mom and Dad were inspecting the rooms and filling out forms with the agent, I walked around looking in closets and under sinks. In the bathroom there were magazines inside the vanity that had a lot of people with costumes that looked like Batman, so I sat on the side of the tub going through them. I was a little confused because all of the ladies were naked, tied down, or blindfolded. Occasionally, the masked man had no pants.
I figured they were something I would get in trouble for reading, so I hid them under the sink again. I wandered around more, before I found the mother lode in the front closet: a king-sized jar of petroleum jelly, whips, blindfolds, random chains, a variety of leather gear, and magazines.
Before I knew it, there was a piercing scream. I had lost track of time, and my mom found me sitting on the closet floor reading the magazines surrounded by "toys." My dad couldn’t stop laughing but my mom and the realtor were a matching shade of red.
— Alexis
Submit to our next story roundup: roommate stories. Shared apartments make for strange bedfellows. What's your best story about the intersection of sex and roommates? Roommates you had sex with? Roommates who stole your girlfriend/boyfriend? Roommates you had to call the cops on after they chased you around the room naked?
Send your best story (150-250 words) to [email protected]. We won't print your full name, so please don't skimp on the details.
