Thoughts on Porn

I write and write and write and none of it sticks; it's all this pop culture whirlpool. I feel like the advertisers have grabbed me and folded me neatly into a box. I ask for ideas on this forum and one guy stuffs my reading ears full of preachy talk on how all my writing must come from the heart or when he's reading he'll sense the lack of feeling. So here's one just for him, straight from the heart: inspired by David Cameron's plan to ban porn in the UK (there's a British word for this, it's "cunt") and the fact I've had a whole summer to wank the sunshine away. Some thoughts on porn from a seasoned pro:

• I wish I could go back and save the first porn movie I ever masturbated to; it was a lesbian video, recently filmed but vintage looking. It was nothing special but it would be a nice time capsule for one Saturday afternoon when I was 13 years old. I still don't know the thought process that goes into the discovery of masturbating for most, although I look forward to that discussion, but I picked it up from a Lee Evans gig. His O2 tour; he does jokes about shopping for beds and at one points he acts out a pervy shop assistant and therein does that hand movement. I'd looked at porn videos before, thinking the aesthetic pleasure as all there was, but it was this Saturday I decided to apply that hand movement to see just what Evans was on about. It all spun off from there.
• My first inkling for porn goes back to being a kid, around the age of 10, watching The Legend of Zorro (that's the pretty average sequel to the great Antonio Banderas original) on a dreary Saturday night; I don't know either, I guess Saturday is just perfect for pornographic consumption. I was close to my appointed sleepy time so I quickly excused my self from the living room with the vagueness of "I have to use the computer" then loaded up AOL (yeah baby!) and simply typed in "porn". Contrary what I was expecting Google did exactly as I told it to and I was faced with a page full of links; I didn't dare click on them. I've always been paranoid about what other people my age are doing - probably brought on by a lack of siblings - although I know now that if I had clicked any of the links Google forwarded to me in that moment I would have been the first person out of everyone I knew to look upon those images. So lucky I chickened out; Taxi Driver fucked me up when it comes to violence so atleast I wasn't as damaged when it comes to sexuality. Also lucky was the fact that on at-the-time AOL the "recent searches" didn't show searches with adult words in them. So no telling off for me; although I still decided to leave porn alone for a while. 
• That leaves some gap years from The Legend of Zorro to Lee Evans at the O2: in which I eventually grew restless enough that I tried again to get to porn: only this time with so much built in paranoia that my computer would rat me out that I ended up attempting to get onto porn sites in the most convoluted ways that have ever been done. This early obsession played itself out with me watching a lot of "youtube porn" which for anyone not in the know is basically a cheesy story of jealousy or cheating followed by (primarily Japanese) girls making out. This of course because porn can't be shown on Youtube. The stories, although silly and only existent at the beginning of the videos, are still sadly some of the best porn movie stories I've seen. There was tons of crap on Youtube too: one video promised the highest quality video Youtube porn had ever offered; right up until the point where the actor stopped, turned so his whole face engulfed the camera, and ranted to me about what a sicko I was for trying to watch porn. I don't remember the details of his rant although it probably had nothing to do with the act of watching porn itself: just disgust that I must have became so bored of porn on Redtube  and other real sites that I needed the thrill of watching porn on Youtube to get me off. 
• Inevitably these videos stopped fulfilling my primal needs and I was forced to devise a plan so cunning Steve McQueen himself would have applauded. I loaded up some Youtube porn, one of the short videos that shows you nothing sexual but promises you a video on some other site. Why I never thought to just search for porn and delete the history, or even write the porn links on these videos in the html bar, which my parents would never think to check, is beyond me. But thankfully Youtube (old Youtube that is; you kids don't know the shit they're feeding you) had a feature on each video that had links to every site that particular video had been shown on. Admit it, if porn was illegal I would be some sort of black market trader with this find. It took me a few attempts looking through all the links on every piece of super-soft-core porn I could find but eventually I found one that linked to a real porn site. Which was also my first realization that the majority of porn on the internet is free. I felt like a bored middle-aged man living in an oppressed Orwellian hell who had burst out of his cell block and was surfing through the streets on a hoverboard while the rest of the earth went along with their boring rituals as usual; unknowing of what was happening right outside. Here I saw my first real porn video, another time capsule I wish I had, of a black woman wearing a cowboy hat dancing naked on a table. Pretty soon I figured I could just search for porn like everyone else and not get caught which eventually lead me to that first masturbatory experience. 
• I don't think talking sex or masturbation is weird; only as weird as you find the acts themselves, really. Like everything in life it's better to just share your twisted view of obscenities. Why? because everyone has them, at least you can paint yourself an interesting colour by sharing.
• Which could of lead us to my one masturbating anecdote; only the internet, or maybe just written word, sucks the lifeblood straight out of that one. Lets just say I've came close to being caught, and in surprising stupid ways.
• But that was when I was younger; I doubt I could be badly told off now; if you are a parent and find your kids masturbating wrong then it's not that your a prude, just a self-deluded prick. I've discussed this with friends before; I doubt in the moment my brain would be able to translate the bullet points we came up with; although it doesn't matter, they're all just translations of "we're teenagers, this is what we do". Ever hear the old saying "the liar's punishment is he can't believe anyone else", well I'll translate that into porn (like Sid Vicious covering Frank Sinatra) because all good things are more relatable when they're made dirty. Everytime my parents shout my name from the other end of the house, annoyingly using that formal phone-call voice as if they're shouting from the secret CIA office hidden in our house, panic rips through my mind. Said panic would be nowhere to be find if they shouted in angry-as-fuck voices. I have this weird image of answering this formal reply, going up into the room where the family computer is kept, my dad leading me in with an eager smile, then my mother jumping out and slamming the door behind me and all hell breaking loose. Again: lucky, it hasn't happened yet. 
• Which all wraps into a sort of "prologue" to my experiences with porn; not many noticeable things or points of interest after that, just tons of wanking. I've still never seen the "classics" by which I mean the pizza delivery boy or the plumber, which I guess is a compliment to the modern porn industry. Although even with all the industry can throw at you your bound to get bored of the videos; no matter the category. Your imagination's good for a few, although eventually that just gets depressing. Never to fear though, the internet has other supplements for you too. Sex stories are my favorite of these; especially the ones on seriously-aimed sites that try to pass their weird situations and random sexual occurrences off as truth. There are sites aimed solely at sex stories but the majority of these writers seem to get carried away; I usually end up skipping to the end only to find a completely different set of characters have taken over the story. Another type is celebrity fakes which are varying degrees of photo-shopping craftsmanship used to place a famous head over a naked body. Which is porn's distorted take on celebrity culture in which people can take their gossip mag fantasies as far as they want.
• And that's porn in a nutshell. A (fantastically so) irreplaceable part of our culture. Go watch Boogie Nights, it doesn't make fun of porn; it uses it as much of a backdrop as Tarantino uses slavery in Django Unchained, some would say to the cause of less offense. Boogie Nights is also a great reminder that there's so much going on behind porn. 

Any excuse to use this

And that's the thing about porn; there's actually something to it. That's why Boogie Nights exists; because there's a history there, different eras of porn, lots of famous figures coming and going. Yeah it objectifies people and whatever, but from what I hear it's a pretty good place to land if you get shot out into the wilderness. People become a family within the business and create good careers out of it.

And it's punk too. It's more rebellious than rock and roll could ever be. It's like drugs: young people doing something juvenile in nature to show how grown up they now are. Both drugs and porn, and rock n roll too, carry over into adult hood, but it's made for young people. Porn doesn't damage people; yeah you can get traumatized sexually, but it would take a lot more than what's on a computer screen or a magazine fold-out to do that. It's part of growing up; going on some wild porn bender, watching messed up shit and trying out all the different types you can and doing something fun with the full knowledge you shouldn't be doing it. Porn would be of less interest for everyone if it was a social norm.

And that's why David Cameron's idea won't work. I doubt it will even happen but if it does then it's just a glitch in the system that'll be sorted out in no time and will stand forever as an example of why to just leave this whole porn thing alone. It reminds me of Arnold Schwarzenegger, near the end of his term as mayor of California, trying to ban all violent video-games. He likely didn't care, after all why would The Terminator give a fuck about violence? It was a last-ditch effort to say he had done something, anything at all, with his time in office. Which I guess makes David Cameron the British equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger, only without the acting chops, multi-million dollar film franchises, body-building legacy, or ability to have a cheating scandal and have no-one give a shit.