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.