Self abuse

I never used to like pornography – not really. Yes, in my teens in the Seventies I used to have the odd copy of Mayfair under my pillow; yes, as a student in the Eighties I used to filch the occasional Fiesta from my flatmates. But on the whole I didn’t really go for jazz mags or blue movies. I found them tedious, repetitive, absurd and very embarrassing to buy. There was also a certain bleakness about the harder, nastier porn videos: all those sad and sorry women; all those contrived and silly poses. And as for the guys with mullets and thick moustaches: ugh!

In 2001 I went online. A few months later, sitting idly at my laptop feeling a bit bored of typing my own name into Google, I decided to have a peek at all this porn that was supposed to be saturating the Net. I did this by googling the words ‘girls’ and ‘hardcore’. Instantly the screen was flooded with suggested websites – hundreds of thousands of them. Some of them seemed to be free. I chose one. It was called The Hun and turned out to be various kinds of pornographic image arranged in galleries. Each gallery was given a title, e.g, ‘two lesbians in a jacuzzi’ or ‘blonde Japanese co-ed loses her knickers’. I clicked on one of the picture galleries and sat back. Slowly the screen filled with about a dozen small photos (thumbnails) of the aforementioned lesbians. It didn’t take long to work out that these disappointingly small images could be enlarged with a further mouse-click.

Somewhat to my surprise I found the images pretty titillating, and so I kept looking. I looked at more pictures of lesbians; I checked out the Japanese co-ed; then I looked at some more hardcore images, some pictures of group sex, and something called ‘bukkake’ which seemed to involve men ejaculating over submissive Asian women.