Gentleman's relish

Jesus fucking Christ would you believe the amount of porn the is on the Internet? A year or so ago the population of Lego minifigs actually surpassed that of human beings. That is, the factory that turns out the colourful choking hazards churned out its seven billionth or something. The calculation did not take into account that, very much like human beings, minifigs have a finite lifespan. Unlike human beings, I imagine that a lot of them end their days in the intestinal tract of an infant, or canine, or infant canine. That's what porn has become like, there is now so much porn that one person could not hope to get through it all and remain hydrated in their lifetime.

And the variety is staggering. I'm told that web sites these days offer sub menus to cover every taste, some of which, and I like to think of myself as a man of the world, I have never heard of. Believe me, once you do hear about them, they tend to be something that you will never forget, no matter how much you want to. For instance, if you type 'pegging' into Google will you be rewarded with links and images about a) how to secure guy ropes, b) how to hang clothes on a washing line in such a manner that creasing will be minimised or c) something so bloody deviant that you think you'll have to bloody sandpaper yourself to ever feel clean again. Answer: c, and no, pegging does not involve sandpapering bollocks, that's an entirely different category.

Before the Internet, in a kinder, gentler age, porn was distributed in one of three ways. It was sold in newsagents. Hard core stuff was sold in sex shops. And children accessed it by finding discarded porn mags in hedges. Quite why porn was so freely available in hedges I'm not sure as I never imagined that browsing through a porn mag was an activity hat leant itself to being undertaken al fresco. Now I know that there's a category for that too.

The hedge dwelling discarder's mag of choice was 'Razzle'. There's probably an official advertising or publishing industry term to describe the demographic that it was aimed at, but let's just settle for 'downmarket' and leave it at that, although 'downmarket porn lovers' is probably a fairer, shoddier picture. Razzle did though, years before people started posting pictures of their girlfriend passed out drunk and naked on the web 'for a laugh' and lads' mags featured high street girls in their pants on the covers, blaze the trail with using very-much-not-models to fill its filthy pages in a section titled 'readers wives'.

This provided a terrifying insight into the world of kitchens because, for some reason, the kitchen was the place of choice for the ladies to pose. Terribly unhygienic. There were three constants in the resulting snapshots. Harsh and unflattering lighting. That sort of flat, characterlessness that you get from Polaroid shots (this was in the days before digital photography and one hardly wanted to rock up at Boots to collect some explicit photographs and be smirked at by the oik behind the counter). And unattractive, bordering on scary, subject matter. In many cases where there had been 'tidying up' of hair down there, any trimming would of been better done taming the horrendous perms that often topped the model off.

Simply put, the 'readers wives' section was more horrific fascination material than erotic. An overweight housewife atop a kitchen counter legs akimbo is not, and never will be, erotic. Adding stockings does not help. Stockings do not automatically make something erotic. The sight of a shotgun wielding bank robber does not immediately fill anyone witnessing a bank raid with the urge to crack one off. Indeed, of anything likely to invoke gentleman's wilt, 'readers wives' would do the job. Maybe that's what the editors were thinking placing the feature half way through the magazine, instead of simply having a page adorned with the words 'enough skiving in the bogs, get back to work'.

Razzle has, I imagine, long gone and, until broadband reaches rural areas, so has accessing porn in hedges.

The Sex Issue...literally

It would certainly appear, at least if you’re a bloke, that there’s no such thing as a watertight seam on the male body during the hours of slumber. If we’re not peeing in wardrobes then we’re drooling – I’ve occasionally woken up with what is basically a small village pond on the pillow, complete with ducks.

Then there’s that special male nocturnal emission problem – the erotic dream related discharge.

As a teenager it’s bad enough that you spend every waking moment thinking about sex, so it seems especially perverse when you start dreaming about it too. And with such worryingly little control over the erotic scenarios that flicker, like some old movie, through your head at night.

Perverse doesn’t just mean dreaming about having a buttered goose shoved up your arse. No, more likely perverse means just who or what your untamable subconscious decides to populate your erotic dreams with. Given the wide range of fantasy partners from the waking world, from the unobtainable girl at school through the proper, real women of the underwear section of the mail order catalogue (be careful not to flip accidentally to the gardening section at a critical moment, or you could start yourself on a path that ends with your arrest for frenzied masturbation at an agricultural fair) and of course the slightly blurred images of the women found in the rain-soaked pages of porn found in hedges, it’s a shame that you find your dreams full of the sort of people that you’d normally find as erotic as gravel. Or, you know, goats.

The er, physical manifestation of erotic dreams usually happens when you’re asleep, with you waking up just too late to really enjoy it and far too late to do anything about it. As a teen, your ability to produce this stuff is prodigious to the point of baffling. If you adopt the wise policy of ignoring the whole episode and getting back to sleep despite a rapidly cooling wet-patch on you, then you run the risk of waking the next morning to find the stuff dried and covering you from knees to eyebrows. The trouble with being asleep is that you move, scratch and fidget without regard, leading to questions like ‘what the hell is dried spunk doing in my hair?’ the next morning, leading to suspicions of others in your dorm.

On the whole, it’s best to minimise damage as quickly as possible, thus avoiding the embarrassment of having to be cut free of your sheets by the fire brigade.

Sex in general is a funny beast. As a teen you think about it to the point where you convince yourself it’s never going to happen. After it happens you agonise that it may never happen again. When it becomes regular you wonder if others are getting more, better or different than you. When it’s with the same partner you worry that you’re never going to do it with anyone else ever again, when you break up you worry that you’re never going to do it with that person ever again, then you worry that you’re never going to do it ever again ever but one thing is for sure…you never think that everyone else has the same concerns as you because surely to God somebody, somewhere out there must know what they’re doing.