in their room and frigging themselves raw through their jeans.
Girls can be horny now; they can be hot and wet and desperate for a fuck. Their cunts can twitch and ache with longing and desire. They can feel that deep, angry kick-in-the-gut that signals something has triggered the naked, rutting, cavewoman instinct inside them. But they must do it all with a giggle and a smile and a wry sense of how liberated they are. They can read Fifty Shades of Grey on the bus, but when their friends ask they’ll say they’re only reading it to see what all the fuss was about, and they didn’t like it and it was badly written and they didn’t rub one out to it, honest.
I’ve heard men complain about this with smiles that say they’re only half joking. ‘Why is it OK for women to read porn on the bus but I can’t flip open a jazz mag without commuters running in terror?’ They can’t sit on the back seat with a copy of Penthouse flipped open, casually perusing the weekly selection of tits on their way into work. And they’re right, they can’t. Partly because—for fear of stating the blindingly obvious—Penthouse has actual pictures, for the love of Christ, and they might terrify people around them. But primarily because men are seen to have a different relationship with porn than women. When a woman looks at porn people raise their eyebrows, and assume she’s just curious. People don’t think about her cunt getting slick or her nipples getting hard or her heart pounding or stomach contracting. They don’t imagine her lingering over the hottest paragraph, the one where our hero finally succumbs to his own desire and bends the heroine over a desk, spanking her as she writhes and moans and pushing his engorged cock into her spit-lubed ass. No. When women read porn there’s a vague assumption that they’re doing it frivolously.
Men can’t read porn on the bus, but that’s not because we hate your porn, or think you’re a filthy pervert. On the contrary, it’s because we feel like you’re the only ones who truly understand it, who get what it’s for. Women can look at porn in public because strangers assume that they must have a motive other than the simple desire to get off. Men: you might not get to read porn on the bus, but at least you have the benefit of the doubt. When you say you’re horny, when you say you like sex, when you get hard over porn, we believe you.
I don’t think porn played a huge part in my teenage years. There was one computer, and it was in the dining room—even the bravest of teenagers would have to take quite a leap of faith to pull their trousers down in confidence that their parents wouldn’t walk in just as you got to the good bit. More importantly, I’d have had to ask permission to actually use the internet. Each minute you used it cost money, and all you’d get for your investment was a clunky image of a woman’s nipples, loading slowly down the screen, line by agonising line.
Whichever way you look at it, the nineties weren’t an ideal time in which to learn about sex, and all the filthy, spunk-covered, hair-pulling ways in which people do it.
But I tell you what we did have back then—imagination. Acres and acres of it.
To this day I rarely watch porn to have a wank. Occasionally, I’ll browse through a few of my favourite websites, clicking through videos to find the best moments, or I’ll read a book with the specific intention of putting it down halfway through, conjuring up the images in my head, gritting my teeth and then coming all over my fingers.
But more often than not I can come up with better images on my own. I don’t need porn to spark them off. Why? Well, the filthy naked people in my head always do just what I want them to do. No one’s going to put me off by saying something dodgy at the wrong time, or changing camera angle just when I was getting into it. Nor am I going to be wracked with guilt and worry that the people in my imagination might be being exploited.
Exploitation makes me careful about the porn I’ll seek out. I wouldn’t want to watch something that looks like it’s been filmed covertly, for instance. There are enough blurred videos of me sucking someone’s dick that I don’t want to encourage any more sex-tape-leaking than there is already. But the main reason I don’t like porn is that it can only take a tiny thing to completely kill my mood.
For instance, using the word ‘pussy’. As in ‘fuck my pussy’ or ‘you’ve got a nice wet pussy’. Just say it—say the word to yourself, and try not to shudder. ‘Pussy’. ‘Wet pussy’. It’s like something you might step in, not something you fuck. Likewise ‘hole’. Everyone has different words that they find hot, but the porn people in my head always talk about ‘cunts’.
Similarly, no matter how hot the porn scene, I can be instantly turned off by a switch to a close-up camera angle. Not that there’s nothing beautiful about a nice, thick, porn-star cock, but when I’m watching two—or three, or four—people fucking, I want to actually see them fucking. I don’t just want to see the bumping, wet smack as one small part connects with another. Just as I wouldn’t go to Disneyland and ride nothing but Space Mountain, likewise with porn I want to see the full show: the slaps, the grabbing, the facial expressions. In real life we know that a fuck is about much more than rubbing the right body parts together, but for some reason pornographers have forgotten that. They show us the dismembered bits: part A fitting into slot B, like a crude jigsaw puzzle. I want to see the whole thing. I want to watch as he bends her over the sofa, see his hand settled firmly in the small of her back. I want to see him reach forward with his other hand and grab at her hair or squeeze her tits. I want to see her throw her head back with desire when he does this. I want to watch her pushing herself back onto his dick, to feel the full, thick length of him. And I don’t get any of this if you just show me her cunt in close-up.
And finally, crucially, the main thing I hate about porn is that it so rarely reflects how actual sex happens. Even with amateur porn, or BDSM porn, or any kind of specialism, most of the videos will follow a reasonably tried and tested formula.
Guy meets girl, guy kisses girl, guy removes her flimsy top and firmly rubs her tits. Girl strips sexily. Guy removes her knickers. Guy plays with her cunt for far longer than the average guy would play with a cunt. Guy licks her clit, she sucks him off, they fuck in a minimum of three positions, he pulls his cock out and wanks onto her face, the end.
With slight tweaks to the details, this story runs through almost every porn film that’s ever been mainstream. It might be popular, and it might do good things for some people, but it’s frustratingly formulaic. Sex, actual sex, just doesn’t work like that. And it’s a bloody good thing, too. Actual sex is hot and fun and sticky and sweaty and it all happens out of order. If we followed a manual like the one they give to the porn industry we’d all die of boredom before we reached the come shot.
But I digress. When I was younger none of this occurred to me. I’d never seen any porn, I’d never watched anyone else fuck, and even the launch of Channel ‘we show tits late at night’ 5 only gave me some vague soft-core humping that didn’t quite press the buttons worth pressing.
My obsession was still with the word ‘thrash’, and derivatives of it, and the stories in my head were far more tailored to this personal quirk.
As I lay in bed with my duvet bunched around me, rubbing gently at my clit with silent movements, full-colour, scripted porn masterpieces would play out inside my head.
Angry, horny men would crowd round a girl and call her a slut. She’d groan with arousal, delighted to be the focus of so much desire. She’d twitch her cunt around the dicks she was being fucked with, or bend over a desk to get beaten with a thick, black belt. The guys around her would be pushing in, trying to get closer—to touch her, to grab her, to slap her arse and see how firm it was. To push their dicks into her mouth, her cunt.
One guy directs them all. He tells them this girl is good, that they’ll all get a chance, but that he has to punish her first.
Thwack.
‘You’re a filthy girl.’
Thwack.
‘I’m going to punish you …’
Thwack.
‘… and then I’m going to fuck you.’
Thwack.
‘Let’s