Amateur Internet Porn: An Appraisal

My first ogling of internet porn came in middle middle age.

Growing up I accessed the customary channels: Playboy, French playing cards, National Geographic. You wouldn’t say I was ever obsessed, just eyes wide while thrashing in hormonal nuttiness. A normal kid.

It wasn’t long before I was more interested in the real thing. Not that it was available necessarily. Some of it was.

I don’t remember any porn in college. The real thing was available.

After college was my reintroduction to porn. I got a job as a projectionist in a small X-Rated movie theater. The films were sometimes fascinating but ultimately silly. The only thing I remember about the experience was falling asleep every so often, awakened by an angry fist pounding the window because the reel had finished and I hadn’t switched on the other projector. It was always one fist, never two.

Not really much porn for me for the next handful of decades. I’d see a magazine now and then, maybe saw two or three videos at parties, one peep show, that’s about it.

Then sometime in the 2000s, I stumbled (not really stumbled, I was looking for a place to stumble) upon a bunch of internet porn sites.

At first my reaction was WOW THIS IS GREAT but after fifteen minutes or so boredom set in. The next time I clicked one, boredom in five minutes. Then a minute.

Okay, I’m lying. Once and awhile I’d spend time rummaging around.

Some random takeaways:

The amateur ones are much better than the professional ones. There’s something almost charming about two everyday folks fumbling around after one turns on a camera, checks the red light to make sure it’s recording, then awkwardly crawls back into bed. Or one person holding a smartphone, trying valiantly to keep the subject/body part in frame while both are squirming and jerking. I’m thinking the revolutionary cinema-verité auteurs of the 1960s would be proud to know their techniques are so esteemed and in such wide use today.

Googling is helpful when focusing your porn search for specific interests. Videos of all imaginable (and unimaginable) kinkiness can be accessed instantly. This is a big improvement. Back in the old days of analog porn, you got what you got and that was it. And you’d be happy with it.

My one revelation: I had no idea there are so many variations of male genitalia. I guess this is due to my lack of experience. I knew there were big, small, thick, thin, circumcised, uncircumcised. That’s all I knew. Thanks to the internet I’ve now seen hundreds from all sorts of angles, in all sorts of poses and distended states, doing all sorts of things. It’s like turning over a big rock and finding types of earthworms, earwigs, and millipedes you’ve never seen before. Quite an eye-opener.

There are more sexual exhibitionists out there then I ever could have imagined. I just assumed it was a rare quirk. It’s not. People love people watching them.

I wondered if I were a lot younger if I’d be putting up porno of myself and whoever. I don’t know. I always remember focusing on whatever I was doing or whatever was being done to me to really care much about what it looked like.

Of course, making a porn video today would be pointless. Old bodies lose definition. The whole mess would be too much of a challenge to shoot. Just blobs undulating. You might see some toes or a nose float by, but that’s about it. Not very cinematic.

I’ve read that the next big technological advance will be virtual reality porn. I don’t think I’ll be checking that out due to an age-related issue — every so often I have mild episodes of vertigo and dizziness.

I don’t need a virtual reality machine. Life is a Fun House.