1. I remember our tv guide in the movie section had letters at the end of the late-night movie blurbs which indicated things like the rating and if it had nudity in it. There was a time when I would scour these and lose a lot of sleep watching the ones that indicated nudity just to catch any brief glimpse of boobs. An actual sex scene was a major score.
I also remember realizing one day that our cable box allowed you to start a pay-per-view movie and you could watch like 3 minutes before deciding to keep watching it and be charged on your bill, or change it and not be charged. I’m sure I went over time more than once but bless my parents they never said anything.
2. It’s impossible to overstate how critical the Victoria’s Secret catalogue was. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue as well
3. I lived near woods and the older kids had a stash in the woods. I remember peeling the soaked pages apart. that shit was like Elmer’s glue. You had to peel real carefully when it was dry. On the one hand you were like “OMFG!!!” But on the other hand, it was never enough to make you throw it away
4. When I was below 13, with no internet, I used to sneak out to commute to the mall by myself, go to Video City and by VCDs of porn. There was also a store in the mall where I buy Hentai. Being so young, it always took me a couple of hours of walking around the mall before I can screw up the courage to actually browse the copies of porn/hentai and bring it to the counter. But the excitement and exhilaration of doing so was addictive.
As far as hardcore porn, I discovered my dad’s stash early on, and I always knew where he hid the key to that cabinet. He had a multiple CD wallets worth of porn, it was amazing. I always found excuses to stay at home so I can access his porn stash while they’re away.
5. You did a lot of snooping through your dad’s things looking for it. Hit the jackpot with a cowboy boot box that seemed out of place in the top shelf of his closet. About 10 VHS tapes and a few mags
I was so meticulous with rewinding to exactly where he left them that I forgot to put them physically back where they were. In my 20s he told me that’s how he knew I’d found his stash.
6. I used to jerkoff to the Playboy Channel. We didn’t get it, I’d watch the scrambled feed. I guess I was just listening to it.
7. These kids got it easy nowadays on their phones, back then the family had a computer and you couldn’t just be beating off in the living room.
8. I had to sneak into my garage, into my dad’s stash, find whichever of the 15 or so VHS tapes I wanted, put everything back as if it hadnt been touched, sneak back upstairs, put the VHS into the VCR, turn on my 64 as a coverup, and sit within arms reach of the tv so I could change it lightning fast if I heard anyone coming, which I would because the TV was muted… all at 2am
OR
Once in a blue moon I’d be lucky, the cable was messed up, and the channel after Comedy Central was super grainy, black and white playboy. I don’t know how or why this happened.
9. Cable box tuned to 53 and TV set on channel 3 and you could get a garbled, scrambled version of Playboy Channel where you might see a flash of something every 5 or 10 seconds.
10. I remember waiting 30+ mins on dialup for a pic to load clearly enough for me to decide whether it was good enough to wait another 30 minutes for it to completely download or go back and try another link
11. When I turned 18, I got memberships to all the local video stores. Daisy chained two vcrs together so I could record the adult movies onto one 6 hr vhs tape. Had to hide it from my parents. At one point, I placed it inside a Tupperware container and buried it in the backyard to keep my parents from finding it.
12. If you were so lucky to have a satellite dish with the basic channel package you could be brave and sneak up at midnight, turn off the audio on the tv and tune in to the channel. The one that just went from one movie to another, but at 00:00, that movie was a porno.
Or you could play it smart, do your chores, be the good son and once the parents trust you enough just leave you with cash for a pizza for those evenings when they’re off to celebrate some friend’s birthday instead of getting a babysitter. That’s when you watch it with the audio turned on (not too high though, you wanna be able to hear them returning home) and just absorb as much of the content as possible so you can live on that spank bank until the next time you’re left to your own devices.
13. Nude scenes in mainstream movies were actually something we bothered watching for and talked about. Now, nudity on video has almost no effect on me. I don’t know how much of that is because of the ready availability and how much is because I’ve gotten older.
14. I grew up with cheap internet 56k dial up when dsl was mainstream. I remember setting 2 minute porno clips to download from kazaa and limewire and they would take over 10 hours just for me to watch that short clip and beat off to the blurriest pussy I’ve ever seen. Also, in middle school, I knew a guy that would sell printed out pictures of naked women. It was $1 for an 8×11 of a woman and $2 for an 8×11 collage of women. He also had DVDs burned for $5. I remember that 8×11 sheet of paper was the most disgusting piece of paper I’ve ever held onto lol