Why Have I Bought This?

In another post I write about recently buying a copy of Mayfair, the British girlie magazine and finding it an utter disappointment. Not only was I disappointed but I found myself thinking “Why have I bought this?”

I’ve bought or stolen pornography since I was 15 and had access to soft porn since about the age of 11 in the form of my father’s collection. My father’s collection consisted of a selection of late 60s top end girlie magazines he’d lifted from work. He worked for a newspaper and magazine distribution company at the time and such magazines were available to him to pinch or to buy wholesale – knowing my dad I guess he pinched them. He later worked for a large Northwest TV company and had access to all kinds of magazines and films sent to them, including Girlie magazines sent for promotional purposes, several of which he brought home, and threw out before I rescued them from the bin,

But I didn’t buy such magazines myself until I was 15, as I say. And from the age of 15 until the age of about 45 I bought them regularly. Apart from being heterosexual, and uninterested in the sub side of S&M, my tastes in pornography were pretty much polymorphously perverse. Whether my tastes in actual physical sexuality would be so I cannot say, as my sexual experience is as close to zero as to be statistically irrelevant – too small a sample set as my cousin Ian might say.

But throughout 30 years (wasted, it should go without saying) I bought soft and hard pornography, mostly magazines but also a few videos and DVDS.

When I could steal the stuff, which I did in my teens to early middle 20s, I stole as many magazines as I could get away with, but I’ve never actually tallied how many magazines I would buy a month. I’ll do so here, based on what I can remember. I can remember recent years best, so I’ll let the monthly purchases of my early 40s stand for every decade.

By my early 40s the british magazines were already on the slide, and most of my purchases were of American, Canadian, and European origin. The only British Magazine I bought regularly was Men’s World and that only because it featured every month a set by J0anne Guest, who though not my favourite ever model was close enough to my tastes in every department to make her photo-sets a must-buy.

Other than that, my regular purchases when available were

1.    Barely Legal
2.    Babyface (later 18eighteen)
3.    Live Young Girls
4.    Finally Legal
5.    Tight
6.    Taboo
7.    Cheeks
8.    Rear Ends
9.    Tail Ends
10.    Derriere
11.    Oriental Dolls
12.    Shaved Orientals
13.    Buttman
14.    Hustler Hardcore
15.    Barely Legal Hardcore

Most of these magazines were published 10 times a year, except for Buttman which was and is published – I think – every two months. I wouldn’t buy every issue available – there were a couple of shops where I was a well-known customer and could look through the magazine without censure because the shopkeeper knew I would buy a few and wasn’t just another nuisance flicking through his stock for a furtive thrill. Where that situation obtained I would not but a favourite magazine if none of the models appealed to me. But in that situation I might buy some other magazine that took my eye instead.

If I give a nominal price of £5 to each of the magazines and round  the total up, I was spending perhaps £100 a month on porn,  £1,200 a year. I must have spent the 2005 equivalent of £40,000 over my porn-buying life time, not a fortune, but a down payment on a good house, or several good nights out with a real woman per year, or a good quality car, or at least a few hundred  bouts of actual sex with reasonably classy prostitutes.

So, a substantial amount of money to pay for a few thousand wanks.

It took me a long time to learn my lesson – that what I was looking for wasn’t in these magazines, that my favourite girls were no more a part of my life than my favourite pop singers, and that the energy I had put into tracking these girls through magazines, the money and time I had spent, should have been spent on courting actual women.

And once I reached that realisation my interest was substantially gone. My need for a sexual outlet remained, as did my lack of any opportunity for a real sex life, never mind a romantic one.

This realisation was partly precipitated by a remark of a relative “that you buy porn because it’s easier than finding a real woman”, and by a diagnosis of severe hypertension, which brought home to me the likelihood I would die comparatively young, and also – because of initial problems with my medication – that I might soon become impotent and have no further sexual opportunities of any kind.

Within the year I had become impotent, and the depression that ensued killed most of my sex drive.

For a short while I would continue looking for these magazines as I had done, out of habit, and because pornography had come to mean sex to me.

But I quickly realised that I was feeling nothing when looking at the magazines and masturbating. It was just very hard – and pleasureless – work.

So I stopped buying them. Then my mother – with whom I lived – became terminally ill, and I didn’t even have time to think about such things.

After she died, my depression deepened.

I made a few forays over the following few months to look for magazines but bought nothing.

In 2008 I bought two magazines.

This year I’ve bought a few more, but to no point. To be specific I bought a copy of Mayfair,  a copy of Escort, a copy of Razzle, all of which were dreadful and which I’ve thrown out unused,  a copy of 18eighteen, a copy of Tight, and two copies of Buttman, which I’ve added to my collection but not used.

I’ve also bought five hardcore DVDs, all featuring violent and apparently coercive buggery of women.

For a while now anything depicting normal sex or even depictions of normal loving relationships makes me so sad I cry. It has put not only “normal” pornography, but ordinary drama and novels out of bounds for me if I want to get through the day without sinking into paralysed depression, reminding me as it does that I have excluded myself  from everything I believe makes life worth living.

For the past year or so I sustained my masturbation though not my erections with increasingly vicious images I found on the web, the nature of which I will not detail, but which all featured the infliction of humiliation, severe pain and actual harm on female people, but lately these have raised in me such self-disgust that I couldn’t continue.

Nothing now reaches me. I’ve had my testosterone levels investigated and they’re normal, so even if I’m physically incapable of sex now, I should still have the emotional drive.

But I don’t.

So why did I buy this copy of Mayfair? Because I hoped it might work. Because I was facing another empty night in a chain thousand of nights long, because I wanted something to do, and taking it apart and binding it into my collection might pass the time. Because I was lonely and afraid and I wanted a distraction.

It was the wrong choice, as it always was, but now I know it for certain how wrong a choice. There is a line of William Burroughs which gave his most famous book its name, “the Naked Lunch”. The naked lunch is the moment when you finally see what is on the end of your fork, what you are really putting in your mouth, what your life, your addiction truly is.

For me, my addictions served to protect me from my fear of rejection and death. Every fear is in the end the fear of death, however disguised it might be. While I was wanking over photographs of strangers in magazines I didn’t have to risk rejection. While I was fat, I didn’t have to fear rejection, because I’d put myself out of consideration. I could put off trying and finding out for certain that I would be rejected by women and that my life was as pointless as I feared and my death would be lonely and regretful

And then I became ill from my fatness and it exposed the illusion that I was sustaining, that I could go on wanking over pornography against the eventual day when I sorted my problems out and could have a real relationship. The possibility of a real sexual relationship had gone, and although I’m still tempted to find distraction in the old way, in pornography, I now know what wasteful and destructive purpose it has served.

It has allowed me to hide from myself the fact that I was throwing away the only life I will ever have, and that I have now effectively killed myself. That there is no life left for me to live worth the living.

And there’s no way any copy of Mayfair can paper over the huge ragged hole that is in the place where my life should have been.

Soft as Shit

A few weeks ago, in my local minimarket, I bought a copy of Mayfair, the girlie magazine, on spec. I can’t even remember what impelled me to buy it – perhaps the strapline on the cover “Bottoms Up” with a photograph that matched it.


I remember that on the evening I bought it I flicked through it at home and thought “why have I bought this? It’s not what I want and it’s not even a good girlie magazine.” And I put it away.

I’ll start with why it’s not a good girlie magazine and address “why have I bought this” in a different post, as that’s the important and more complicated question.

Mayfair used to be a stylish magazine. It was owned and edited by one man, and was essentially a reflection of his personal tastes. He had quite corny tastes, tastes that were middle aged and middle class even when the magazine was at its best in the 70s and early 80s. Sports cars, hifi, wining and dining, big houses, and conventional looking pretty girls taking off their day clothes or evening wear. Sometimes they were professional models, sometimes they were ordinary young women who really did work at a bank or were in the upper 6th, and every now and then one would read in the gutter Sundays that one of these had lost her job just for appearing in Mayfair.

Hard-core and explicit soft-core pornography has been produced since the invention of photography around 170 years ago. But in Britain and the USA it was never easy to find, had literally to be bought from under the counter in a handful of specific newsagents, surgical supply shops, and such.

Some cities, usually dock cities like my own, always had shops selling pornography just as they had open prostitution. My mother, an otherwise shy woman, had friends who were prostitutes. The docks had closed by the time I was a teenager, but I remember walking down Trafford Road to Old Trafford with my mother when I was about 16 and her pointing out to me various derelict shops and pubs. One shop she pointed out and said “They used to sell dirty books and magazines. I think they got away with it because of all the sailors and the prostitutes – you used to see men coming out, always well dressed, and shifty. They must have travelled miles”. This area used to be called – at least locally – “the Barbary Coast”. Today everything has been demolished and re-developed and it’s now known as Salford Quays.

But in most places pornography was not easily available.

By the early 1970s, things had changed. Cheap four-colour printing and the “permissive society” meant that legal magazines went from printing black and white photographs of coyly posed women with their pubes airbrushed to an statue-like alabaster blankness to photographs of women showing their open genitals and their anuses. These were available not in dusty backstreet shops, but in mainstream newsagents. I started buying pornography in my mid-teens, and the mainstream magazines were already explicit and available in the family newsagents near my school even then.

But in the midst of all this gaping pink, Mayfair remained coy. There were never any open legged poses, and where possible the models had their pubic hair clearly combed and teased to cover the cleft of their fannies. Any photograph where the models’ labia (majora, never mind minora) were visible were airbrushed to a tan brown.

At the time I wasn’t a great fan of Mayfair, and only bought it if it featured a particular girl I liked. I preferred Club International, Men Only, Knave, and of the explicit softcore magazines, Rustler. They had a younger feel and acknowledged that their “readers” bought the magazines for one main reason – to wank while imagining penetrating one or another of the women in the photographs.

Explicitness wasn’t necessarily down to the models. From the late 70s onwards many top british glamour models would work in every market. They would do cute page 3 work, they would appear coyly nude in Mayfair, open their fannies and bums in Rustler or Whitehouse, and be variously penetrated in photosets for European hardcore publications like Private, Anal Sex and the delightfully named New Cunts. Models themselves usually didn’t limit the explicitness of their work, the explicitness was set by the editorial policies of the magazines. And Mayfair’s editorial policy was very tight.

But Mayfair did have its charms. Because it wasn’t explicit, it had to rely on showing off the femininity of the women’s bodies, to have them dress well, to have the photographs technically excellent, to rely on the models’ ability to project physical womanliness rather than just plonk on a sofa, spread their legs and hold their cunts open.

So when I bought this copy of Mayfair the other month I was particularly disappointed to see what a mediocre magazine it had become. It had nothing to offer. Every single photograph was flatly lit and all skin texture had been smoothed out in photoshop, removing the natural translucency of skin, the sense of light actually suffusing through the upper layers of skin and making them luminous.

The only selling point I could see was that the models showed their sex parts. And these days that is no selling point at all.

I wrote elsewhere in comment on an article by Naomi Wolf that H sent me that the women – and men – in pornography are not the artificially flawless airbrushed mannequins that Wolf claimed, and that if you want to see a photo of spotty bum or stretch marks, porn is about the only place you’ll find them.

I had not seen a mainstream modern girly magazine for about five years – they’re a declining part of the market, which is mostly online, or if paper, aimed at niche tastes.

Having bought this copy of Mayfair and having bought a copy of Escort a few weeks earlier and found it similarly dire, I must say that a section of the dying mainstream girlie magazine market is publishing heavily manipulated photos of unreal-looking women. The thing is that I can’t understand why it’s being done – in the old days the magazines used to do it to enhance the physical beauty of the models, to make their legs appear longer, their waists smaller, or they used to do it to render the photographs legal by airbrushing out the vulva.

These magazines aren’t doing that. The models aren’t enhanced as much as flattened and anonymised.

I’m baffled as to why these magazines exist.

Here is a page from the recent copy of Mayfair,


and a copy of a set from about 25 years ago which I pulled at random from my collection.


The modern set is characterless, the lighting does not model the contours of the woman’s body, she hasn’t been photographed in any particular location, she doesn’t have a freckle, a mole, a pose, a scar, or a line. Even small ch1ldren have some lines, however fine, natural skin creases round the eyelids, around the wrists, around the armpit.

I wonder to what degree the teenaged and early twenties lads who must now make up Mayfair’s core market have been formed by fantasizing over female characters in computer games, because the models remind me of flat featureless opaque-skinned computer-generated posable mannequins. It’s as if the boys nowadays don’t want the girl next door, they don’t even want manipulated paragons of physical perfection like the old Playb0y Playmates, they want to fuck Lara Croft.

The page of photographs from the old Mayfair are of Pat Wynn, also known as Auntie Jayne. She’s not photographed like that because was she was coy but because Mayfair wasn’t interested in genital explicitness. Pat was perfectly happy to spread her fanny as the following photo – from Whitehouse - shows.



In the old Mayfair set we see Pat middle aged, voluptuous, side lit to model her body and limbs, in a domestic setting, with moles, freckles, sags. There’s a sense of reality about it that says this is a real person, a flesh and blood human woman who has had a life, who has chosen to take her clothes off to make a bit of money by turning men on. Most of all there’s a sense that this is a real woman, and you could meet her – or someone like her – and perhaps have her, in real life.


I think that this is exactly what is missing from the modern magazine.

Far Away is Close at Hand

I discovered last night that I could take screencaptures of DVDs with one of the programs pre-installed on my poor people's computer.

I extracted frames from "Secretary" from the scenes of Maggie Gyllenhaal having her bottom smacked, as I've found Maggie Gyllenhaal very attractive since I saw her in Donnie Darko along with her brother Jake. It's a physical thing, what she looks like and her acting ability, because, her various political pronouncements suggests she's a bit of a Hollywood flake, and probably a member of F.A.G.

After I'd pulled about 30 frames I burst into tears at the thought of how truly pitiful what I was doing was; I sobbed so hard and hyperventilated so much that I had to fight for breath.

This sadness isn't sadness, it's grief. Grief for myself, for the life I lost by waiting too long, by not understanding the language of attraction, by coping with my frustration in bad and damaging ways. For the thought that nothing of life is now left to me that I would want.

For some years now I've thought I might have some problem related to autism, some kind of social blindness, and I become ever more sure as I look at myself and others.

As I sobbed, the children's hymn "there is a happy land" came into my mind, and indeed there is, and not far away but close at hand, yet all the evidence says it is out of my reach, trapped as I am in this bell jar of damaged health, impotence, and inability to connect.

Over the years my sexual obsessions became more and more tied up with the humiliation of women, but I don't really want to pummel Maggie Gyllenhaal's bum until it's black and blue, nor any woman, all I really want is someone I can spend time with, talk comfortably with, and cuddle now and then.

I met an acquaintance the other day, who explained to me how all he needed to get back to his work as a self-employed gardener after an injury was a second-hand van, but he couldn't afford one. "You know, I'm 55 and I never asked for a lot out of life and I didn't even get that".

I know, mate, I know.