Seedy, Shameful & Criminal: A History of Buying Porn

Why You Should Pay For Kink Pt1
Seedy, Shameful & Criminal:
A History of Buying Porn

Ahoy! Pirates

There’s a long history of end users not paying those who actually ‘produce porn’. This was embedded into our culture way before the internet came along. From the ’60s into the ’90s porn was an extremely scarce commodity. What was available by today’s standard was incredibly mild. Known as ‘soft porn’ it consisted of images of naked women and pretend sex. Magazines like Mayfair, Penthouse or Razzle could be obtained via top shelves in certain newsagents (sometimes covered in a ‘modesty bag’). While VHS tapes came only from mail subscriptions or late night visits to seedy sex shops in a city’s red-light area.

All hardcore porn in the in UK was illegal. Today anyone can make a film with their phone, back then you needed hugely expensive cameras and editing kit. So ‘full penetration’ films were brought in from Europe, usually Holland but also the USA. People could make a lot of money popping over to Amsterdam buying a video bringing it back and then running off 40 copies. That’s a lot of profit but also a lot of risk. It was a long prison sentence if you were caught. LGBT+ or Kink content would sell for a premium. Pirated films were big business.

If you wanted to buy hardcore porn you had to go to a dodgy bit of your city, at night; into a seedy sex shop; down into the basement, then shiftily ask the man at the counter if he had something ‘under the desk’. It was illegal, it was risky and it was very expensive. One of the ways the sex shops made you prove you weren’t the police was you brought in a sex tape. They would then give you a discount on another one. It was a kind of pervy swap-shop. A clever business model as that tape would then be copied 40 times over. The shop never paying for any of the content. That’s why the quality was always terrible, analogue tape copied over and over degrades with each generation but no one was going to complain. And it was still brilliant.

Consequently porn – hard or soft was a scarce commodity, that everybody wanted. It was never thrown away “My Precious”, it was kept for years. A fuzzy VHS’s showing  a sex scene in a snow storm of white noise, could always be sold on for money or circulated as manly currency. A dog-eared, battered and sticky copy of Mayfair could be passed around connoisseurs for years. Hell, it’s probably still in someone’s shed right now. (And well, if porn gets banned again that stuff is going to be worth a fortune.)

Porn was always something to be embarrassed about and kept secret. It criminalised anyone wanting to watch it and was in extremely scant supply, creating a huge market for pirated material and second-hand content. Creating the mindset that the adult industry is not legitimate and that watching porn is sleazy and shameful.

No Sex Please We’re British

The notion that pornography is ‘bad’ within our repressed British society compounded and reinforced the Christian ‘hang-up’ that sex was wrong and something to be ashamed of. To confound matters we then sexualised its seediness. Part of the thrill of porn and any sexual encounters, outside of a married couples bedroom, was the need for secrecy, its naughtiness and dirtiness. Our press would get an instant hard-on exposing anyone involved in a sex scandal, self righteously moralising while deliberately titillating with sexually lurid stories. Dirty jokes, seaside postcards, double entendres, the Carry On films. Hypocrisy. It’s God damn part of our Britishness. I blame the Victorians.

Demonising and restricting any form of consenting adult sexual activity is damaging as it engenders a culture in which a person’s sexuality and sexual choices can be deemed ‘wrong’, ‘repugnant’ or ‘immoral’. This has a greater kick back onto the Kink & LGBT+ communities, it acts to restrict sexual freedoms and the diversity of sexual identities. Exploring your sexuality including using paid for erotic images or encounters is perfectly natural. It is not seedy and it is not wrong. It’s also not for everyone. It’s a personal choice and freedom.

What A Difference A ‘Generation with the Internet’ Makes

OK times have changed, the internet came along, we live in a more sexually open world. There’s probably been more porn produced in the last 10 years than in the entire previous history of the world! And it is more accepted, talked about and understood. There is less disgust, still a little derision but broadly society is more accepting and open to the idea of enjoying erotic images. Once it was only joked about in macho enclaves or in furtive embarrassed whispers. Now it’s discussed on Friends, The Big Bang Theory and pretty much every episode of Top Gear.

“Half the adult population of the UK watched online pornography during the pandemic, according to Ofcom … a far larger audience than (some) mainstream television channels.” The Guardian June 2021

The use of porn still has its opponents who are ardently renewing a cultural war against it. Spearheaded by religious groups, some feminists, a general fear of it’s corrupting nature and those uncomfortable with the proposition of ‘selling sex’. Porn in the 1970s to the noughties was pretty much exclusively made by men for men, unsurpisingly some content was brutal, offensive and misogynistic. But a lot has changed since then. Women are taking control and it’s changing the face of commercial sexual encounters and imagery.

So pornography is no longer reserved for the top shelf or dark corners of dodgy stores, it has become a totally virtual commodity in demand by, and in possession of most adult men and a considerable percentage of women. You can pretty much access it whenever you want and for free, if you so choose. It’s also become a more personal and interactive experience. With the quality of mobile phones everyone can create their own sexy images or sex tape. The distinction between using a sex worker and watching pornography for intimacy and gratification is now a very blurred line. With sites like Only Fans you can have an on-line relationship with a sex worker and get your rocks off in a myriad of ways e.g. custom clips, interactive web cams, on-line sex rooms, 3D interactive Virtual Reality experiences.

The internet has changed the world and our lives. And, do you know what? Porn built the world wide web! It certainly propped up an emerging Google and today is why sites like Only Fans even exist. Yet once they get successful they turn their backs snootily on sex workers and act all shocked and indignant in an attempt to claim respectability. So in Part 2 of this article I’m going to explain – Why you should pay for your kink!

Read Pt 2 Here  10 Reasons Why You Should Pay For Your Kink

(P.S. I did research the possible negative affects of watching pornograpy/adult content, it’s a difficult area to study but I couldn’t find any credible evidence that suggested any harm!) See here https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170926-is-porn-harmful-the-evidence-the-myths-and-the-unknowns