My History With Porn: College

At some point in my teenaged years I got religion. I became a born-again Christian, and eventually decided that all of this pornography (let alone the masturbation) probably wasn’t a good idea. So, remarkably, I stopped. Looking back on this it still amazes me. Later in life I tried numerous times to quit and wasn’t able to do it, but apparently I was able to stop in my teenaged years, when my hormones would have been far more... hormonal.

Of course, one doesn’t just shut off masturbation like a valve; there has to be a release. But that’s where wet dreams come in. When the pressure built too high the release valve would open, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find myself covered in semen. I may have quit, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I sort of looked forward to these dreams.

But then I went off to school, as all smart kids do, and found myself renting a room from a family who lived close to my college. The rent was cheap and they provided basic cable so I was pretty much set. But one night I was flipping channels and I discovered that the porn channels, though scrambled, weren’t scrambled very well. Well... sometimes they were. But very often I could see enough to be able to tell what was going on, and the sound wasn’t scrambled at all. (I don’t know if that was a good thing, though. I had to turn the sound down very low, because I quickly learned what most men learn at some point: there’s something about the sound of porn that travels better than any other sound on earth. Turning the television to the lowest possible volume, to the point that you can’t hear anything else, still produces moaning sounds loud enough for everyone in the house – and possibly the neighbourhood – to know exactly what you’re watching. If there is a way to weaponize the faked female orgasm, the rest of the world is in serious danger of going deaf.)

Next thing I knew I was just as addicted as I’d ever been, coaxing nightly orgasms into my sock. (Once, when I was at a night job during my college years, a coworker asked me if I ever masturbated into a sock, and I played dumb. “Wouldn't that chafe?” I asked. It was one of the best lies I ever pulled off. For the record it definitely can chafe. You have to be careful when fucking a sock.)

I lived in that house for about a year before moving into a new place with some roommates. I no longer had access to scrambled cable porn, so I now had to actually procure some pornography. I could have gone to any store and bought the usual magazines, your Playboy or Penthouse or Hustler or what have you, but the problem is that my previous magazines had been harder than that. The “regular” porn mags would have seemed like a step down. Just naked women? Who cares?

But there was another option: A store fairly close by with a big neon “XXX” in the window would have exactly what I needed.

Getting up the nerve to go into a pornographic video store took some time. I was feeling fear of a much different nature than my nervousness from the early days of masturbating: this was a fear of getting caught. Even though this particular store was way off in the middle of nowhere, and at night it was completely dark – somehow they’d managed to find a spot where even the streetlights didn’t have much effect – there was still the chance that someone would drive by and see me going in.

But eventually I did. And holy fuck! There was porn as far as the eye could see, and with the covers facing out it was all right there on display. There was enough porn in my face that I could have pulled down my pants and jerked off right there if I’d been so inclined. (I’m not happy that I used the phrase “in my face,” but what’s done is done.)

However, I also found out that those stores are fucking expensive. You could pay $60 for a video, or $20–25 for a magazine. Now, granted, these magazines were much more hard-core than the ones I’d had when I was a teenager; I’d call those previous magazines mid-core. But still, on a college budget $25 was a lot of money. And I still had that notion that magazines were all well and good, but movies were the holy grail.

However, when you’re an addict you’re an addict, so there was no choice. I bought the magazines. Occasionally I would buy a video, too, but there were a couple of things going against me:

1. Since I now had roommates there wasn’t much of a chance to watch the videos. I was rarely home on my own. So magazines were a lot more practical.
2. Since they were so damned expensive I had to choose very, very carefully. I wasn’t going to be buying movies every week or even every month; they had to last a long time, so I didn’t want to throw away $60 on something I wasn’t going to like.

That second point has an important psychological impact to it, though, which might not be evident at first: When one is presented with too much choice, one often becomes paralyzed and unable to make a decision. When I walked into a store and saw hundreds of movies on display, but was under pressure to get one that I’d really like because I knew I couldn’t buy them that often, I just didn’t know what to do. The reality, of course, is that under normal circumstances I’d have been fine with any of them.

There was another psychological point which impacted my behaviour at the time as well: one gets tired of looking at the same magazines for too long. They start to get stale; they start to get boring. The first time I flipped through the magazine and saw that one particular picture that just blew me away was great, but after seeing it over and over for a month it would lose any kind of allure for me. So I had to go and get new magazines (or videos, or something) occasionally.

I was broke for much of the time that I was in college but it was partially my own fault. I was spending money I didn’t have on porn.