Ever fewer newsagents in the UK stock porn, soft or hard. The only local shop that sells the stuff is offering much of its stock at half-price and still it doesn't sell.
A couple of weeks ago I found the newsagent re-tagging girlie mags at the counter while his little scots terrier dozed on the newspapers and asked him
"Does anyone still buy those?"
"Oh, there's still a few come shuffling in"
"I'd have thought that any one who wanted that stuff would get it from the Internet"
"Not this lot round here, the Internet's well beyond most of 'em"
I was one of "them" until a few years ago. I've always had a huge porn habit, largely because I had and have no other sexual, never mind romantic, outlet.
What I noticed in the last ten to fifteen years is this...
Until about 1992 the only places one could find strong soft or genuine hard porn was in the centre of big cities, and with hard porn one could even then only find it in backstreet illegal outlets often disguised as second hand bookshops with a secret room for "special customers".
The stuff in those back rooms was as extreme as the proprietor thought he could get away with - and in every case but one that I knew of, the proprietor was a man. And the prices were very high.
For a brief time in the late 70s hard core porn was available in small newagents, at least in the form of magazines from the Dav1d Sull1van and the G0ld Brothers stables, with vaginal and oral sex and female masturbation depicted. This time soon past and in most of the two following decades only soft porn was available in newsagents.
Then suddenly around 1997 some specialist North American magazines began to be available in some mainstream UK newsagents and in the hard core shops. I have always found pale-skinned oriental women very attractive so at the time I was buying a number of american "oriental" magazines, my favourite being "Shaved Orienttails"
The first sets I noticed were of japanese and other far eastern girls inserting small gourds and other oriental fruits up their cunts, then suddenly almost every american soft porn mag available in Britain was featuring women pissing, being fucked, sucking cock, dildos up the cunt and arse, gaping arseholes, the lot. And despite this, much of the material wasn't selling.
I had a number of magazines on standing order from a specialist shop in Shude Hill, Manchester, and by 2005 it became impossible for them to continue to supply them because the cost of shipping and not selling surplus copies was outstripping the profits they made.
In the last year the market seems to have collapsed entirely, shops that used to specialise have returned to being just news agents, specialist p0rn shops now mostly specialise in DVDs or rare collectors back issues.
And who can blame them? What punter would pay top dollar for stuff that isn't even that much to his taste when he can download high quality hi-def photos for free by the thousand, amateur or pirated, find treasure troves of classic sets online, and even subscribe to specific models and receive photos of the women he like doing exactly what he wishes.
I certainly wouldn't.
