Pornographic Mind

Now I don't believe it's degrading for a woman to pose for pornographic pictures. I don't believe women who do are sluts, if that means anything anyway. But when I am lost in pornography I enter another way of thinking. Despite the many thousands of porno shots I have seen, I still retain that childish sense of surprise that women would pose for such photos. And my pornographic mind is excited by their imagined degradation.

I'm at a ten pin bowling alley with some school friends when a boy named Philip, who's a little older than the rest of us, having had to repeat a year or two, holds up a slide. "Look at this," he says. He puts it against that contraption they have in bowling alleys that projects the score, so that the light is shining against it. I have a look and see a tiny, abstract pattern which I can't make out.

"What is it?" I ask.

"It's a root!" he exclaims.

I look again. I see now it's a close-up of a cock going into a cunt, the legs of the man and woman forming a diamond pattern.

So there it was. I had finally seen a picture of that great and mysterious thing - the sex act.

It is said that the 19th century art critic John Ruskin was so unnerved to discover on his wedding night the existence of pubic hair - having hitherto believed that women's crotches were as smooth and bare a statues - that he remained impotent for the rest of his life. I too at this time was somewhat in the dark as to what a cunt looked like.

I knew there was an opening, of course, but I imaged if you were looking straight on at one it would be featureless. Then one day I was at the beach and saw a young woman emerging from the water, wearing a white bikini which had become quite transparent. She either had very sparse pubic hair or she had shaved, for the slit of her pussy was quite visible.

In 1978 I finally mustered the courage to buy one of the porno magazines I had been eyeing in newsagents for years. I remember I'd been to see a Greta Garbo movie at a revival cinema, then walked to seedy area of town where I thought an underage kid could more easily buy porn. I went into a newsagent, my mouth dry and heart pounding, settled on a ‘Penthouse' magazine, took it to the counter to a woman who, amazingly, sold it to me without a word. I rushed home, shut myself in my bedroom, lay on the bed and contemplated my prize.

When I moved out of my parents home a few years later I foolishly left my porn stash behind, this stash inevitably being found by my mother one day and hastily thrown away. I've since bought again some of those first mags I had though, and have another copy of the April 1978 ‘Penthouse', one of those satisfyingly thick and heavy publications from the period. On its cover is a very pretty blonde, wearing a white, halter-necked dress with thin straps, tantalisingly open at the front so that her breasts are almost exposed. Inside it contains four pictorials. The first of these, entitled ‘Living Dolls', features three extremely beautiful, similar-looking brunettes who are supposedly shop store dummies who come to life after the store closes for some lesbian action. These images of women kissing and fondling each other's breasts and pussies were the first lesbian images I had seen, and were incredibly exciting. And there was one picture that was particularly notable. The three girls are seen draped over a couch, fingering each other's pussies. One of them has her backside to the camera and her anus is quite visible. For some reason, a woman showing her arse to the camera like this seemed to me even more obscene than her showing her cunt.

The next two pictorials, of Mariwin (the centrefold) and Kiki, are relatively unrevealing, although there are a couple of nice shots of Mariwin pulling the crotch of her panties aside to show her pussy, still one of my favourite erotic poses. But it was the final pictorial, of Teri, that had a profound effect on me. Teri's a typically American looking, slim, suntanned blonde with white triangular bikini marks on her pointy tits and crotch - which later became something of a fetish for me. She's seen frolicking around on a beach. In one shot she's sitting in about an inch of water. In the picture I liked the best she's wearing a blue dress of lacy material which is pulled up to her waist. One tit is poking out of the top of the dress and she's staring intently down at her pussy with its thick blonde pubes. But it's the picture on page 144 which really got to me. This time Teri's inside, apricot-coloured dress around her waist and her tits bare. She's looking down at her cunt again but this time she's got her legs spread and with two fingers she's opening it up even more and pulling the clitoral hood back. And for the first time I saw the structure of labia and vulva, the hard, shiny, intricate lines of pink flesh which reminded me of the shape of a gothic church window. So that's what a cunt looked like! The image, and this realisition, frankly shocked me, and it was a while before I could masturbate to this particular picture, but I soon came to love photos of women opening themselves up as wide as possible.

I have often wondered what it would be like to have sex with a woman for the first time, without having seen in pornographic pictures what an open vagina actually looks like. I can only imagine it must be quite a disturbing sight. As it was, some years and innumerable crotch shots later, on my first night with my first girlfriend, Louise, I couldn't wait to get my hands, and mouth, on her cunt. To see as many cunts as possible, both in pictures and in real life, had become one of my main goals.

That ‘Penthouse' was the first of many porno magazines I would buy and hide away in my wardrobe, My favourites became the British magazines published by Paul Raymond - ‘Club International', ‘Men Only' and ‘Model Directory'. These were bigger than their American counterparts, had more numerous pictorials with clearer photography, and I generally preferred the British and European models to the American ones. I also liked the irreverent approach to sex shown in the articles.

My porn purchasing soon took on a regular pattern. Every couple of months I'd feel the need to see new images - to have another fix. I'd head into town, to one of the book shops which sold second-hand porn mags and leaf through their plastic-wrapped stock, terrified all the while that someone who knew me would come in. Having selected five or six promising looking publications I'd go to the counter - after ascertaining there was a man serving behind it - and hand them over, looking as relaxed as I possibly could. I'd always try to give the exact amount - I didn't want him to see my hand shaking as I was given change, and I didn't want to sense any reluctance on his part to touch my hand - the hand of a masturbator.

With my purchases safely tucked away I'd head for home, a journey which could never be completed quickly enough. Once there, I'd lie on my bed or on the floor, on my right side, with my new treasures spread out in front of me. Pulling my pants down, I'd take hold of my cock with my right hand and, leafing through the mags, begin to wank. When I had been though all the magazines I'd open them to the image in each one I had found most exciting, and poring over these, bring myself to orgasm.

Leafing through the pages of these magazines I marveled at the infinite variety of women's bodies, the myriad variations of breast and cunt. I believe that the fact that today I have no particular physical preference in women probably stems from this time. Blondes, brunettes or redheads, flat-chested as a boy or big-breasted, shaved or hairy, skinny or voluptuous, I can find all these types attractive. But always my initial attraction is to the face. If I find a girl's face attractive, her body is automatically interesting.

For me, pornographic images were more than two-dimensional. I wondered about the women whose images I wanked to. Who were they and why had they posed for these photographs? Were they prostitutes, for whom a porno shoot meant nothing? Were they normal women who had been cajoled into posing just the once? I studied the photos for details of the rooms in which they had been taken, and imagined how the shoots might have gone.

On a couple of occasions I plucked up the courage to enter sex shops. The first one I went into contained the usual room filled with X-rated magazines and, in a back room with a very high ceiling, a big, black, freestanding structure which housed booths for the viewing of porno loops. I noticed a young guy with a mop and bucket walking around this structure, and realised with some queasiness that his job was to wash out the spilt semen on the floor of the booths. I nevertheless ventured into one of the booths, where I saw film of a woman stripping. I got my cock out and wanked into my handkerchief, not wanting to create any work for the unfortunate cleaner.

The next sex shop I visited had a black painted room also filled with video machines. On the first machine I put my money in, I watched film of a podgy, middle-aged man of middle-eastern appearance fucking a girl from behind, with the two of them lying on their sides and him with one leg raised so you could see all the action. Fascinated, I watched his balls wobbling as he plunged his cock into her cunt. This was the first filmed fuck I had ever seen. This sex shop was also notable for the fact that, out of about ten loops on offer on the machines, no less than two of them featured bestiality. In one, called something like Farmyard Antics, a woman was seen fondling and kissing the genitals of a horse and other animals. In another, two naked women are in a barn with a pig. One woman gets on all fours, the other drapes a sack over her back and encourages the pig to mount her . She guides the pig's prick into her friend's pussy and the pig fucks furiously, its haunches wobbling. I found this extremely unnerving.

Only once did I venture into a cinema to see an X-rated movie. It was a cinema in Chinatown, which still exists today (it shows only Chinese films now) and on the advertisement were the tantalising words ‘live acts on stage'. The first movie shown I have no recollection of. The second was called ‘Devil's Little Acre', and I remember it as being a very strange film indeed. It was set in the American south and had a sort of surreal feeling to it. It concluded with a bizarre wedding ceremony conducted by a masked preacher, with about five couples fucking standing up. My favourite scene featured a girl waking up in the morning, going outside, sitting on the ground with her legs apart and washing her hairy pussy with a hose. I could have watched this for hours.

In between these two films came the live act - not, as I had hoped for, a couple fucking - but a stripper. An obviously young girl, she failed to excite me much, being clad in an elaborate harem costume with her face masked (I've never been turned on by strippers, I must admit). She was dancing for a while when I realised that, while it was surrounded folds of wispy material, her crotch was bare. "I'm looking at a cunt for real," I told myself, my eyes fixed on her brown-haired triangle, but the effect was oddly less exciting than watching a movie or looking at a photograph.

My immersion in porn from a young age meant that I was well acquainted with just about every fetish and perversion in existence years before I was able to have sex for real. I devoured de Sade's ‘120 Days of Sodom' and, in my mind, played out countless outre sexual situations. Another great influence, and the inspiration for this memoir, was ‘My Secret Life' by ‘Walter', the anonymous Victorian gent who faithfully, and in monumental detail, recorded his memories of the thousands of women, mostly servant girls and whores, whom he had fucked during his life. I had the one-volume, abridged and expurgated edition of this vast work, and an unexpurgated edition of the first third of it. I marveled at the ease with which Walter had seduced women and, over the years, satisfied every fantasy that had appeared in his mind. Having engaged a girl in conversation, one of Walter's favourite methods of seduction was to unbutton his trousers and pull out his penis (or ‘pego' as he calls it) and show it to her, a method which was surprisingly successful. They were simpler times then, I thought.

I began to develop fetishes of my own, but instead of becoming fixated, in perpetuity, on one particular fetish, as is the case with most fetishists, I found myself picking and choosing, taking up one fetish, fantasising about it for a while, then dropping it for something else - a pattern I retain to this day. While I will candidly admit I have no interest in rubber clothing, suspender belts or feet, I can assure you that there few other fetishes, both common or uncommon, that I have not at some point contemplated and usually enacted.

The first fetish I can remember having was for women's armpits. I fantasised endlessly about licking the sweat from under a woman's arms. This fetish blended into another involving T-shirts, particularly white T-shirts. I also had a thing for female tennis players for a while, and used to wank watching tennis matches, looking for glimpses up the female players' skirts. A typical fantasy involved a woman tennis player after a match, wearing a white T-shirt with big wet patches under the arms which I lick. I was thrilled when the first Emmanuelle novel, which Mum bought (and later the movie) featured a scene where Emmanuelle plays tennis with a young girl whom she then undresses and makes love to. I started to collect pictures of women with their arms raised and their armpits showing. Later I would attempt to lick Louise's armpits when we were in bed, but as she was ticklish there this proved to be less than erotic for her, and it never got very far. (I do remember fucking her armpit once however, with her pressing her arm against her side so that my cock was held tightly in there, and finding this very pleasurable.)

It was in fact not until some years later that I was able to satisfy this particular fetish, when I took to bed a younger sister of one of my friends. Bronwyn was a short, slightly plump girl with an elfin face and thick red hair. Her skin, dusted with freckles on her shoulders, arms and legs was otherwise a doughy white. Her breasts were large and rounded, the nipples so flat and pale pink they were virtually invisible, and her pubic hair was so bright a shade of orange as to be startling. I woke up next to her in bed in the morning and, as she put her arms back on the pillow I saw that her freshly shaven, slightly creased armpits were slaked with sweat, although it was not a particularly hot day. Kissing up from her fleshy breast I licked at her glistening armpit. Her sweat tasted incredibly sweet. She wasn't at all ticklish and as we kissed and fondled each other my mouth kept returning to the sweat which ran freely from under her arms like nectar.

I still have a fetish for women's armpits but it has mutated somewhat into a love of armpit hair. When I was young I found the sight of hairy armpits on women off-putting. I remember visiting in hospital my cousin Kim, who was my own age, and being slightly disconcerted when she threw one arm back behind her head, revealing a patch of frizzy, light brown hair in her armpit. My first inkling that some men could find this attractive was a letter in one of the Paul Raymond magazines, by some fellow bemoaning the fact that photos of women with hairy underarms were so hard to come by, and that he had only ever found one - Japanese - magazine specialising in the subject (hairy armpits are a real taboo in Japan). In all the pictorials of women I had seen, I found only one featuring a woman with unshaven armpits. It was in an issue of ‘Club International', and once again I have acquired another copy of it. It is, for the record, Vol 4, No 2, from February 1975. The pictorial of Jane included therein is unusual because it has an historical theme, being set in the American West, and photographed in mainly brownish tones. Jane's a skinny girl with long brown hair and an ordinary looking though not unattractive face. In the first photo, she's sitting on a chair cradling a rifle, wearing a felt hat, old-fashioned stockings, cowboy boots and a white cotton petticoat which is pulled down to the waist so that one small breast is visible. In the second she's standing, facing three-quarters towards the camera. The cotton petticoat is tangled around her waist - she's polishing a gun with it. And for the first time the hair beneath her arms is visible, little strands of it poking out from her right armpit and trailing towards her breast with its little puckered nipple. The petticoat is lifted up to reveal her crotch too, which is covered with a luxurious bush of pubic hair, and there are dark-brown hairs visible on her skinny forearms too. In the next photo she's sitting again with her legs parted, lifting up the petticoat to show her crotch, and you can see the way her brown pubes grow along her inner thighs, and extend up towards her navel. Photo number four is similar, but this time she has one arm raised, thrown back over the opposite shoulder, and the patch of hair in her armpit is visible. The final photo shows her from behind. The petticoat opens vertically at the back and her bottom is poking though it. If you look closely you can just make out the hairs in the crevice between her buttocks.

When I first saw this pictorial, I was puzzled by it. This scrawny, hirsute girl looked nothing like the other models I had seen in magazines, and I was a little put off, I recall, by the hair on her arms in particular. Looking at her now, however, I find her far sexier than the more conventional looking models who fill the rest of the magazine.

One afternoon, I was standing behind a girl in a bookshop. She had short, honey-coloured hair, and wore a pair of khaki-coloured overalls over a pink blouse, the sleeves rolled up to her shoulders so her upper arms were bare. As she raised her arm to pick up a book on the shelf I saw spiky, flaxen hairs radiating from her armpit and had a sort of fetishistic epiphany. Ever since then the sight of armpit hair on an attractive girl is as exciting to me as a glimpse of breast or cunt, and I am forever on the look-out for it. Some of these chance sightings remain burned on my brain: the pretty Asian woman, raising her arm to grab a pole as she got off the bus; the beautiful, skinny, flat-chested, chestnut-haired girl named Nikki who I worked with and had a tremendous crush on, sitting in the garden at back of a pub, wearing an elegant, full-length, halter-necked black dress, her arms lifted back behind her head to reveal two long, spidery strips of damp black hair in her armpits. Or just a few days ago, in the city. I was waiting for the lights to change when I saw a short girl with a plain-pretty face covered with dark freckles, and shoulder-length brown hair. She had flat breasts and wore a tightly-fitting sleeveless blue cotton dress. She was deaf, and carrying out an enthusiastic conversation with another girl in sign language. And as she raised her arm, she revealed a wonderfully thick, star-shaped patch of brown hair. For a moment time stood still as I memorised this image, locking it away in my head for future reference.

(Before leaving the subject of hairy armpits, a paradox which shows how much fetishes are tied to cultural fashions. It was only in the early part of the century that women in the UK, US and Australia began to routinely shave under their arms. This means that, in the Victorian era, a man who cajoled his wife into shaving her arms, and who derived pleasure from her smooth armpits, would have been operating as a fetishist).

My first girlfriend, Louise, was a very pretty girl with long brown hair and a lovely figure. I had been admiring her from afar for a while when we started kissing at a party. We were standing in the hall, tongues exploring each other's mouths, when I slipped one hand under the jumper she was wearing and fondled a breast for the first time. Leaving the party we went to her car, and she drove us to a spot a few streets from my house. In the back seat, we undressed and I ran my hands eagerly over her naked body. I sucked on her shapely tits and, moving down, began to lick her pussy. I'd really had no idea what a cunt would taste like, and was pleasantly surprised. The next morning, I found I could still smell Louise's cunt on my hands, and delayed washing them as long as possible so I could continue to savour it.