HALL OF FAME: JAMES FALLON, THE GETTY OF PORN

Horatio writes: Thanks to Jay Grass of Chicago for this submission:

A product of divorce, lax parenting, advanced tastes, and being the youngest of three brothers, James Fallon was always flush with porn. From fifth grade onwards, his bedroom was littered with magazines, discarded brazenly on the floor, and stacked inches high on a stool by the throne in his en-suite bathroom. While the rest of us proudly possessed two or three mags maximum, Fallon amassed a John Paul Getty sized collection. Magazines, Videos, Posters. If you were offered a golden ticket to the Wonka factory or an invitation to hang out at the Fallon house, 9 out of 10 boys in my class would have plumbed for the latter. Such was its size, that every six months or so, word would get out that James was doing a "purge" of his collection. This was the signal for all of us to turn up at his home and cart off whatever he was giving away. The scene was amazing. You would turn up and see your mates exiting his front door with piles of mags -- as much as they could carry, and a video or two tucked under their arms. Did every class have a James Fallon equivalent in their lives?

The True Beat Generation Hits The Road!

In what will surely go down as one of the greatest clerical errors in history, last week the authors of The True Beat Generation were invited to speak at the First Assembly of God in Sandusky, Ohio. Evidently, the church's aging secretary/PR administrator confused us with "The New Beat Generation of Christ," a group of reformed hippies who travel the country preaching the word of God. Never ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, we accepted the church's kind offer and made the trip to the Buckeye State where we treated a small parish of no less than 39 congregants to our views on the evils of Internet pornography and its clear connection to the destruction of a healthy adolescence. They couldn't have agreed with us more.

Sadly, just as the head nodding and amens were really heating up, the bulb on our projector burned out and we were unable to proceed with our planned presentation of wholesome, family-oriented, fisting-free, pornography from the late 70's and early 80's.

They did, however, offer to invite us back for the Pentecost, so perhaps it's all for the best.

Lube-o-lution, Part 2 of a 52 Week Series - Brought To You By Nivea For Men

In the beginning there was vaseline. This much is certain. But what came next? Did you jump straight to mom's face cream? Shampoo? Conditioner? Both? Or was it something more exotic like ripe fruit, deli meat, or a seemingly forgotten Thanksgiving gourd that your aunt cooked and served to your entire family?

A recent Zogby poll estimates that 28% of serial masturbators under the age of 18 but older than 15 living in an Eastern Seaboard state from 1979 to 1985 preferred conditioner over shampoo by 10 to 1. As a policy, TBG usually disregards polls but the lack of concrete evidence in this case is compelling.

Viva le beat!

J. Brown of Los Angeles sends in this adorable little tale of quality mother and son reading time. And to think we here at the TBG thought Goodnight Moon was as good as it gets:

In the summer of my 12th year I was a very skinny kid. Too skinny. So skinny I once overheard my mom asking my father, “When is he going to get muscles?” My dad laughed and told her to stop worrying. But she wasn’t the type to let go of anxieties that easily.

That was also the summer my mom and I started to read the same books together. Not together like over-the-shoulder-together. That would be creepy. We’d buy two copies of the same paperback and read them at the same time. But I was a faster reader than her and would always be 20-30 pages ahead. The book we were reading around the time she expressed concern for my lack of anything resembling a manly physique was “Papillon,” the French prison story.

One day I was reading and came to a point where the narrator remarked that many of his fellow prisoners were “so skinny…because they’d been masturbating too much.” I closed the book and thought, “Fuck. She’s going to think that’s the reason.”

Now let the record state that I was masturbating a lot that summer. But I knew that had nothing to do with how skinny I was. One look at pictures of my dad when he was a kid would tell you that it was genetics. But that’s not what my mom was going to think.

Sure enough, a couple days later, we were sitting in the family room both reading when I felt her eyes boring into me. I looked up over the top of my book. She was holding her book and just staring. With that heavy, accusing, stare. She didn’t say anything. Never even brought it up, not even after we finished the book. But she knew I knew what she was communicating with that stare. “Stop jerking off and you’ll grow to be a man.” I looked back down and kept reading.

King of the Wild Frontier

Horatio writes: We have commented before that learning to shoot one off can be the closest we get to being like Peter Parker trying out his newly-found Spidey skills. This is especially true when the discovery is accidental as Edmund Ross of Los Angeles describes. We would love to hear your stories, be they of being taught, self-taught etc.


To this day, I can't remember what made me do it. But it changed my life forever. I was thirteen years old and had jumped into bed at the same time in the same way a thousand times before. But this night, something felt spectacularly different. My penis had liberated itself through the fly of my brown kung-fu style pajamas. The ecstatic shock as the underside rubbed against the light starch of my fresh Scooby-Doo duvet was as pure a feeling as I have experienced, before or after.

When I look back on this definitive moment twenty-something years later, I am amazed at the bravery of my next step. If this kind of thing happened to me today, I would be risk averse. Persuade myself it had not, turn off the bedside light, and try to forget. But in those days, I was fearless. After catching my senses, and making sure I could hear no footsteps -- the sound of my parents downstairs -- I tentatively slipped my hands under the sheets, took hold of my schlong and tried to recreate the move which had provided me with such unknown delight just moments before. After a couple of trial efforts to work out what felt best, I started rubbing and rubbing. Against Daphne, Wilma, Fred, Shaggy, and, yes, even Scooby, with increasing confidence approaching abandon.

Imagine the shock then when it happened -- an explosion of pleasure carelessly shooting out across my duvet cover. After thirteen years, I had learned something absolutely new about my body. I had found a hidden skill. Like a young Evil Kneivel experiencing the thrill of performing a wheelie on a push bike in his back yard for the first time, I recognized I had identified the talent I would devote the rest of my life to. I quickly picked up my new tool and rubbed and rubbed some more.

After this there was no stopping me. All day in class I would count the minutes till I could return to my bedroom and my new trick. Checking my watch at lunchtime, a thrill would spread through my body. Only five hours till home, and home now only meant one thing. After cursorily dispensing with my homework, I would wolf down the bolognese or lamb chop we had for dinner, kiss my parents goodnight and race upstairs to my field of dreams.

I only knew one way to do it. Rubbing it directly against the cotton-polyester mix of my duvet. The friction was intoxicatingly addictive. Even when then that friction shaved off the top layer of my skin and turned my innocent manhood bloody. Possessed, like a junkie searching for a vein, I would fiendishly focus on any small area of my tool that was not scabbed over. My duvet cover was transformed into a crisp and bloodied rag. Lying in my bed breathless after the act, I would look up at the Adam and the Ants poster that was taped to my ceiling. Adam Ant himself looked back with approval.

Here's To Good Friends, Tonight Is Kind Of Special...

A hearty thank you goes out to the Blog of The Day crew for naming us, what else?, blog of the day. We can't thank you enough. We can, however, thank ourselves, so we did what we always do in times of celebration and hit the cellar, breaking out a vintage Porsche Lynn VHS compilation and a well-aged bottle of lavender scented body lotion.

Great Works of Literature: Cosmopolitan Magazine

Horatio writes: Thanks to Chris Levy of Edgware, London for this fine literature review.


I was fourteen when I discovered one of my Mum's Cosmos lying around the house. After a quick perusal, I soon sequestered it in the bogs where it stayed for the next seven years. There was one full-page lingerie advertisement by some French sounding brand with two models fully decked -out in suspenders, knickers, bras. The works. I must have knocked one out to that picture alone over a thousand times when I lived at home.

The key was that one was blonde, the other brunette. They reminded me of Pepsi and Shirlie who came to fame as Wham!'s backing singers before setting the world alight as a talented pop duo under the tutelage of Mr. George Michael who produced their big hit Heartache. I used to rest the ad on my knee while I was sitting on the bog and mentally transport myself from my suburban home in North West London to a hotel room in New York in which I was doing it with both of them.

For Chris Levy and other fans of Pepsi and Shirlie. Knock yourself out

HALL OF FAME: PAUL FEIG

Horatio writes: Paul Feig is our hero. Aside from the fact that if there was a Nobel Prize for whacking off, he would, so to speak, win it hands down, he is one of the finest comic minds alive today (Bruce Vilanch obviously excepted) Everything we do is inspired by the Feig. He was the adolescent everyman (or is there such a thing as an "everychild"?) For proof, we urge you to check out his classic tome, Superstud in which he pleasures himself, amongst other things, whilst climbing a rope in gym class, to photographic manuals, and to copies of National Lampoon. Superstud is, to our genre, what the Mormon Bible is to astute religionists.

Odes to Onanism

Why did the 80's spawn so many songs about masturbation? Are people still penning tunes about it today? If so, I can't think of any.








Billy Idol's, "Dancing With Myself."
Prince's, "Darling Nikki"
Violent Femmes', "Blister In The Sun."
Tori Amos's, "Icicle."
Devo's, "Praying Hands."
The Pixies', "Holiday Song.
Cyndi Lauper's, "She Bop."
The Vapors', "Turning Japanese."

And the list goes on...

Because We Are...

Sent to us from Mitchell K. of Los Angeles.

Blue Dot Special

Horatio writes: To thank to the discerning people at New York Magazine for Approving of us in their Matrix (bottom right corner, baby: brilliant, perhaps, but lowbrow, really?) we have a New York question. This was triggered by the astute Mark L. of Brooklyn (but born and bred, Upper East Side) who reminded us that when Time Warner took over the world of cable in the city, they tried and failed to shut down our heroine and role model Robin Byrd, the equivalent of forcing an entire generation of city boys to wear chastity belts. Their fall-back plan to stunt our adolescent development was ripped right from the Cinema Paradiso playbook. They went to the remarkable lengths of superimposing a blue dot on any sexual organ that lived or breathed on the show with the exception of breasts. If a penis or beaver showed its head, a blue dot would swoop down and smother it. Our question is... Just whose job was it to sit in an editing suite and insert the dot? Our imaginations say it was a beautiful, nubile woman in a bikini, but from what we know of the television industry it was more likely to have been a sixty-year-old pot-bellied chain-smoker with plumber's crack. We NEED TO KNOW! Both for the purposes of adding to the storehouse of knowledge and to try and understand why our careers advisor never mentioned this kind of occupation to us in high school. If anybody knows the answer, kindly be in touch.

HALL OF FAME: AMERICAN DAD

Horatio writes: Few figures loom larger in our lives than Good Old Dad. Reuben Polak submitted this thoughtful nomination to our hall of fame:


"Spare the rod, and spoil the child" as the good book says, is rarely truer than when it comes to matters pornographique. Basically, there are two kinds of father-son relationships in this world. Those who have no shame about their love for the porn, and those who seek to keep their sexual proclivities a dark secret. Either way, it is interesting to think about the impact their predilections have had on our psyches. Consider, if you will, the Dad's with porn addictions so far gone that they keep the mags out in the light of day. Hardcore in the bedroom, immense collections filling boxes in the garage, leading to childhoods like Augustus Gloop's let loose in the Wonka Factory. Sweet summers gorging on porn, inviting select groups of friends to come over and partake, as long as they did so quietly, and in different corners of the room.

My father was of the other kind with serious books all over the house, but not a dirty mag to be found. Shelves stuffed to the gills with such classy tomes as the Inner Game of Golf, Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking People, and Phillip's Illustrated Atlas of the World. But around the age of twelve, I came to notice four books tucked away in the corner of the highest shelf. The thing that first drew me to them was that they all were shelved with their spines facing inwards. A mistake surely. Innocently, or obsessive-compulsively, I reached up on tippy-toe to correct this oversight. And like Alexander Fleming and Penicillin, accidentally uncovered the greatest discovery of my life. Living is Loving (great cover), The Art of Sensual Massage, The memoirs of 1920's sexual revolutionary, Frank Harris, My Life and Loves, Complete and Unexpurgated and my favorite, the lo-fi aesthetic of Variations on a Sexual Theme. The thrill of discovery was quickly tempered by a sense of mystery. My mind was filled with questions such as:
-- what on earth are these books doing here and who could have left them?
-- Does my father know?
-- How should I break the news to him?

As I flicked through the pages full of calm yet explicit descriptions accompanying pictures of hippies doing it, it dawned upon me that these were actually the property of my parents and that they were doing stuff like position 32 ("Wife leans forward and nestles herself between his feet). I am a practical man, a trait I get from my father, so the overwhelming sense of disgust i experienced was quickly replaced by a calm realization that I had uncovered a secret trove that would occupy my waking hours for the next five to seven years. At first, I used to replace the books painstakingly back into the exact position I had found them after using them for my own devices, but then it dawned upon me that even if my father realized I was putting his precious books to use for my own purposes, just how was he going to broach the issue with me? I am happy to report that I was just home last week and the books are still there. Spines still reversed to maintain the air of middle class propriety and appropriate sense of decorum. Photos below. When I took them, I experienced the same thrill of doing something so irresistibly sacrilegious as when I was a kid.

In The Beginning There Was Vaseline -- And It Was, And Still Is, Good

Lube-olution, Part I in a 52 week series exploring the evolution of lubricants, sponsored in part by OPEC, Crisco, but not even remotely by the Annenberg Foundation

Screw KY. The hell with Astroglide. Fuck Lubriderm. Seriously, what the hell ever happened to good old Vaseline? Was it truly not good enough? For my money, it's still the fire of the lubrication world-- Impossible to improve upon, and as just as indispensable as the day it was created.

Am I crazy? The only 30-something still nostalgic for the blue-collar goo of the gods?

Conde Nasty

Horatio writes: thanks to Steven Blankstein of Westchester, New York for this functional reminiscence.


I am going to introduce a a revolutionary concept to this web site. Buying your own porn at the source of the Nile, the newsstand. Did any of you have the balls to do it? Reading your entries, it appears not. If any of you have the good fortune to be time-machined back to 1985, follow these five steps and your life will be one lived knee-deep in porn. I guarantee it.

1. location, location, location
Find a store that is off the beaten path and instantly eliminate the fear of a parental walk-in. The ultimate nightmare situation. Distance from home is everything. Find the oasis that is far away enough to ensure that if you do happen to encounter your clergy man, he will be more embarrased to be there than you but close enough to respect the fact that once the goods have been acquired, you will want nothing more than to be test-driving it back in the bedroom lickety-split.

2. Foot traffic
Don't fall for the rookie mistake and scout for a totally deserted store in which the 6-12 months you could be sent to the big house for shop lifting are the only thing for clerk to focus on. Foot traffic can be your friend. It gives you cover. It diverts the clerks attention. Embrace it.

3. Shelf Placement
First. Accessibility. Can you reach the shelf and access the porn or is the top shelf a promised land you can see but never enter? Second -- shelf placement is all about sight lines. The physics of the relationship between cashier and porn. The more you can hide away the better. If the porn is in a nook away from the rest of the store, the architect has given you the greatest gift.

4. Clerks
After all this. The final hurdle is the clerk. No matter how perfect the rest of the conditions have been to this point, if it is a 26 year old girl behind the counter, or someone who mildly reminds you of your father, it is pretty nigh impossible to hold your nerve and finish the job. If life were like the movies, all newsstand clerks would be blind old guys with a tin cup. Until I become president and this becomes the law, the rules of thumb are pretty simple. All stores with female clerks are no-no's unless the clerk is of an age where she could play the Jessica Tandy role in an amateur dramatic version of Driving Miss Daisy without the aid of make-up. Males are more complicated. Clerks for whom English is not a first, second, or third language are one of the most magnificent products of America's glorious tradition of immigration. English speakers are a test for your nerves, unless they are on methadone, in which case, go for it. You are not their first concern.

5. Shangri-La does exist
Just as there are golf clubs and there is Augusta, there are newsstands that satisfy the previous four conditions to such an extent, that you will not be the first to discover them. These are the holy grail and are worth locating. The pay-off will be that on the low rows, behind the seemingly innocent copies of magazines such as Model Railway Enthusiast and Cat Fanciers Monthly, will lie porn mags left there like litter on the peak of Everest by all those who have been there before you. Find one of these and you are a lucky man my friend. This is not a newsstand, it is a club house.

My work is done. I have given you the adolescent equivalent of the secret of life. Use it only for the force of good. And learn to enjoy that special thrill of encountering the forbidden material of your choice -- be it Barely Legal, Nylons, or Old Ladies Extreme in full public view. It is a unique feeling -- getting sucked into the pictorials and losing yourself within their fleshy promise and then snapping out of it and realizing you are leaning against a rack of Slim Jim meat snacks.

Rosh Hashana - A Time of Apples, Honey, and Sticky Penises

Norman W., of Highland Park, Illinois, tells this sticky little tale of love and honey:

It was twenty years ago that a Sergeant named Pepper taught the band to play. It was also twenty years ago that I thought using honey as lube was a good idea.

The year was 1987, it was the second night of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), and I was stuck in synagogue with my parents, bored off my ass. Looking back, I can't believe what a difference today's technology would have made—— If I had just had something to preoccupy my mind with-- an iPod, a GameBoy, or even some crummy late model cellphone with instant messaging capabilities -- the tragedy that follows might have been averted. But as it stands, the only thing I could think of to keep my mind and sanity away from the off-key, hallutosis-tainted, droning voice of Cantor Lebovitz, was the newly rounded, freshly plump, virgin, challah shaped ass of 13-year-old Leslie Applebaum. Wise beyond her years and with tits beyond a D cup, she was the pride of my Bar Mitzvah class. Without a doubt the only reason for my perfect attendance and stellar haftorah performance. But, like all great love sagas, Leslie wanted nothing to do with me. Or any of the boys in my class. With her mind on her money and her money on a 16-year-old with a Silver Ford GT (asshole), she saw us for the trifling boys we were. But there she sat, just two pews ahead of me, my crazy Golem eyes staring bullets into her behind.

After two hours of biblical ranting and raving, I couldn't take anymore and begged my parents to be excused. Unable to mentally exorcise the image of Leslie, and with only five minutes to spare before my parents sicked my older brother on me, I knew I only had time for a power beat. Rushing towards the bathroom I suddenly became very aware that I had no lube. Not that I usually brought it to services, but for this power beat to be successful I was going to need some assistance. And then I saw it. Or it saw me. With services almost over, the caterers had begun to bring out the traditional Rosh Hashanah treats, apples and honey. Wet, moist, golden yellow honey. It's kind of like vasoline, right? With no time to spare, I dipped an apple into the yellow ooze and booked into a stall.

Preparing to do battle, I unzipped my pants and rubbed the lavender scented goo against my peepee. I couldn't have regretted this any sooner. Sticky and disgusting, I was appalled at my stupidity. How could I have even thought this was a good idea? But the clock was ticking and the situation was what it was. I needed to try. Rubbing up and down the honey quickly dripped into what little ball hair I had accumulated. Disgusting, but I pressed on. And low and behold, it was working! Maybe I wasn't as bad a Jew as I thought? Maybe G dash D was actually on my side on this one! I'm not chemist, but there must be something about the viscosity in honey breaking down with a certain amount of friction. Or maybe I was just so damn horny I didn't mind that I was practically peeling the skin off of my banana. Whatever the case, I was close. I was very close. So, so close-- "NORMAN! ARE YOU JACKING OFF IN THERE?" And the stall door came crashing open and my brother came rushing in.

Years of therapy couldn't correct that night. The only silver-lining in the whole debacle, was that if this were to occur today, my brother would have taken out his cell phone cum camera, snapped a photo and put in all over the Internet. Looks like I'm the big winner after all!

Splooge! For That Sparkly Clean Shine!

Danny Kaufman of Encino sent this in last night. And yes, Danny, you are the only one.

Am I the only kid who beat off into the kitchen sink? For whatever reason, I thought this was the cleanest way to go and the best way to prevent getting caught. Every morning before school I'd set up shop in the kitchen with a mag, jar of vaseline, and the step stool.

If I ever heard the sound of my mom's footsteps I'd just toss everything in the cabinets and pretend I was washing dishes. At the time, this all made perfect sense to me. But even as I write it now, it seems insane.

Elvira - Mistress of A Horny, Teenage Girl

At long last, a female writes in! With latent, lesbian fantasies, no less! This beautiful, touching tale comes to us from Kerry of San Francisco. Please enjoy it. I did. Twice.

If i were a cartoon, I'd be Olive Oil - Popeye's dowdy love interest with lanky limbs and big feet. They say opposites attract, so my intrigue for Elvira, the curvaceous, goth, femme fatale, was only logical. I first met her in October of 1987, when I was just twelve-years-old. I nearly bumped into a life-sized cardboard standup of her, greeting me just inside the entrance of a Halloween costume store. Holding my mother's hand, I was captivated by her. My bony broomstick frame paled in comparison to her curvaceous, well-developed figure. Her late nite TV appearances were intermittent where I come from, but I was fortunate enough to catch her act periodically over the course of my adolescent years. Just enough times to leave a very vivid impression, and more than enough times to gaze into her deep, black, eyes and diddle myself to conclusion.

Years later, an old VHS tape laying on the street caught my eye. The discolored and filthy jacket made it difficult to distinguish, until I caught a glimpse of the raven black hair, pale skin, and bright red nails and lips. It wasn't THE Elvira, however, it was some raunchy, low budget B-grade porn star named ELBIRA. Jackpot. They might as well have been twins. I quickly grabbed the tape like a bitch wolf with seven hungry pups would pounce on a ground squirrel, and headed to my vacant abode to rub one out. I held on to that little gem as long as my juvenile fantasy starring the seductress vamp lasted. She rarely comes to mind anymore, as my latent, teenage, lesbian fantasies have been replaced with far more sophisticated things.....like cock and balls.

Greasing My Pole

especial from NYC writes:

One of the joys of being raised in a strict Catholic household is that no one talks about anything. So it goes without saying that on matters of sexuality, I grew up retarded. Especially when it came to masturbation. I was so ignorant of the wonders of hand lotion that I was going “caveman style” and chafing my penis raw until the age of 14. But not even the pain of exposed second-layer skin could stop this eight-year-old boy from pretending Olivia Newton John was his girlfriend. Alone time in the middle of the night was my time. And it didn’t hurt that the crucifix hanging on the wall was across the room so he couldn’t see what I was up to.

Every night before bed I would ask my older sister if could borrow her Grease double LP album. It didn’t matter that I didn’t own a record player. All I cared about were the photos of Sandra Dee on the inside cover. Particularly, the ones before she started looking like a whore. Dressed in my Star Wars pajamas, I stared at them forever, meticulously studying every inch of her awesomeness. I thought if I fell asleep with Olivia Newton John on my mind, I'd have a better chance of dreaming about the two of us holding hands and slow-skating.

Of course, the ritual of filing images of Sandra Dee into my mental file cabinet could only occur until after I said my prayers. Sinning all over my hands and R2-D2 sheets before saying my Hail Marys just didn’t seem right.

Gymkata

We are proud of being featured on Gawker last Friday. It is the only site on the web that is more about mastubatory pursuits than this one. We've been flooded with submissions in the wake. This little gem, on the classic subject of the "taped over video" was submitted by the talented Jeremy Willinger:

My good friend had given it to me. A beaten up copy of Gymkata with the spools of vhs tape about equidistant on either side. "This doesn't look like porn," I said. "Trust me," my friend assured me in his all-knowing voice, "its taped over."

Word spread quickly through my intellectually gifted magnet school that I had a porno. This was big news. Wednesdays, my parents came home late and the tv was in their bedroom, so after school, six friends and I walked briskly to my apartment.

This was a motley crew- myself, a good buddy, three chicks and one wierdo kid who stopped off to buy condoms at the drugstore on a dare while en route. Why he bought condoms I'll never know, but he did pass them out to everyone except me. "Strange," I thought, "why would he pass them out to everyone EXCEPT the one person who is making this journey into XXX-hood possible?"

We got to my place and clustered around the television. My friend, being the impish prick that he was, had arranged the tape so the first thing one sees upon hitting play is rough anal sex and a moment later, a massive explosion of man goo upon a smiling female visage. I was hoping to open with some foreplay and ease everyone's porn experience slowly- like a seeing eye dog guides a blind owner across a street that moments before, was teeming with impatient traffic.

There was a collective "ew" as the same face twisting visceral reactions spread from classmate to classmate. I too was taken aback but also eager to see how it all started- how did that wind up thrusting into there?

I rewound the tape, silently cursing the cheap VCR owned by my parents that prohibited viewing the material from its natural start seconds earlier than if we had bought a better model.

The movie quality itself was at best, poor. The actors all looked like rejects from the 1970's and the stories preposterous. Hardly a cinemaphile, I at least expected some production value and not some hairy guy who personified "cocaine problem" working out and suddenly having his member being fellated by a girl who has seen a truck stop or three.

We watched several scenes together in pondering silence. Slowly my friends began trickling off to their masturbatory privacy at their own apartments, leaving me to enjoy the video for another 10 minutes before my parents came home.

It is true what they say, porn does desensitize- but only if you are watching it with 5 other virgins with a less than zero chance of an orgy suddenly breaking out, or any offers to re-enact the scenes playing before your eyes.

I tugged ferociously, scene after scene of charging spunk finally released into my second pair of boxer shorts- the green ones with fishing lures on them from The Gap.

Ejecting the tape, I realized I was almost at the anus oriented point that I had begun. In a way, I had come (pun intended) full circle. The next day at school, my 5 classmates and I had a shared secret. I often wonder if they remember their first introduction to this world of taped copulation.

As for the tape, my parents made me throw it out after one of my classmates told her dad about what she saw and my parents demanded the video be destroyed. To this day, I have never seen Gymkata.

Ghosts in the Machine

Horatio writes: New Jersey, it appears, was a pioneering state in the 1980's. Scott Bracey we thank you for this testimony.

Unlike some of the other losers on this site, I was no stranger to a pair of breasts by the time I was thirteen. Indeed, I had seen lots of couples actually doing it. This is my story. The story of early cable.

The cable boxes we received in New Jersey featured thirty-five buttons on the front panel, set out in neat rows of fifteen which you had to push in combinations while manipulating a switch on the right hand side to dial up your channel of choice. Push the 30 button and the 6, and up would pop Channel 36 showing Bosom Buddies over and over. 20 and 2 bought you the news. For most families, the design was simple enough to serve up hours of mediated fun. But for many of the amateur John Forbes Nash types across the state, the box was a platform for mathematical experimentation . How else can you explain the fact that someone, somewhere, discovered that if you pushed the buttons 3, 5 and 7 with one hand whilst positioning the switch to the down position with the other, you could crack the code to the local porn channel and watch Electric Blue. Before you become overcome with excitement dear reader, know that reception was not too good. Actually it was completely fuzzy -- like watching two people fucking in a snow globe. Forget about developing a penchant for blondes or brunettes, you could not actually tell who was a man and who was a woman. You could just see vague shapes pumping away in rhythm, backwards and forwards, over and over. There was no sound apart from the white noise crackle of bad reception. I would sit there watching mesmerized, with the television on mute, aware that my parents would find it odd that I was watching television without the volume and could come to find out why at any second. And this is how I spent my youth. Beating off to the idea of porn.

Something For the Weekend, Sir?

Jonny Prince writes in from Brooklyn with, what he calls, a burning question:

Did anyone else do this? Masturbate wearing a condom to see what sex would feel like.

Addicted To Self-Love

Back in the day, when I was young, free, and nimble, this video defined SEX. I had never seen anything more titillatingly arousing. Quintuplets with man-pleasing lips, wearing next to nothing, who knew how to play their instruments. The masterstroke was to have them seem content to be backing Robert Palmer, a sweaty, podgy, high-pant waisted everyman. If they were pleasuring him -- and they clearly were -- who wouldn't they be content with? The video was in heavy rotation, thank the gods, and so I was able to study the minutiae, down to whose areolae were most visible under the clingy black elastic of their stretch cotton. Back then, I mastered the art of shooting my load in the three minutes of bacchanalia Palmer offered six or seven times a day. But what is remarkable about watching this video twenty two (yes, 22!) years later is how safe and innocent it appears. The hem line of the guitar player on the right is just above her knees. What felt so risque in that time (1985) and that place (I lived in suburban Chicago) are now safe enough for an Amy Grant video.

Submitted by Steve Lavin, Chicago

Pornucopia

S. Grover from NYC writes:

Junior year of college I moved into a house on campus with five of my fraternity brothers. We each had our own bedrooms, complete with every convenience a 20-year-old boy could desire. From a personal mini-fridge to our own Mac Plus computers, we were as self-sufficient as we'd ever been in our lives. Or so we thought.

Like most young men, our priorities were very clear: drink beer, sleep with girls, tell your friends about it. And, like most young men, we had only mastered the drinking beer part. God knows, we tried our hardest, but evidently Milwaukee's Best soaked breath, flannel shirts, and Timberland boots weren't as enticing to the opposite sex as we'd suspected. And so a ritual began— every night, around 3 AM, we'd all congregate in the hallway outside our rooms to commiserate about our lack of poon, and to subsequently begin the process of swapping VHS porn. With five men to the house, an estimated ten tapes per person, and an average of 7 to 8 masturbatable scenes per tape, we were looking at a total of about 400 scenes. Which at first blush sounds like an awful lot of material, but it actually isn't. You see, Ron was only into blow job scenes. Andy would only watch fetishes. Dave could only tolerate anal. And I, the normal one of the bunch, could only pleasure myself to lesbian scenes. You begin to see how getting the right tape was crucial to one's future enjoyment. And so, after much bartering, we would sheepishly excuse ourselves with the tape of our choice and slink away to our private beat tanks.

All in all, not a bad system. Until, that is, I began to outgrow my sapphic fantasies. Unfortunately, the loving triangles my imagination had so easily placed me in the middle of soon began to grow stale. I was outgrowing the lonely housewives, the curious co-eds, and even the ladies of leather. I was growing up, and it was time to branch out. Not wishing to stray too far from the nest, my next genre, one-on-one heterosexual sex, seemed like the logical choice. Much to the surprise of my roommates, I began requesting different tapes. At first, not a big deal, but then something curious happened. Roommate X and I seemed to be on the same path. We were both in pursuit of the exact same subset of tapes! I, of course, learned to work around it and we found ways to compromise. But as the pool of scenes grew shallower, my attention to detail grew greater. You see, roommate X would always stop the tapes at the exact same point. Without fail, each scene was always stopped at the precise moment before male ejaculation. No matter the scene or actors, it was the same every time— mouth agape, muscles tense, head thrown back, and STOP. What the fuck was wrong with him? Why now? Why not let the man finish for Christ's sake? And so I began to delve too heavily into the psyche of this decision. Why did I continue to watch? What was it about me that needed to see the man groan to climax? Holy shit, was this gay? Of course not, he was with a woman. It's her I'm watching, isn't it?

Porn is a terrible thing to critique and doesn't really stand up well to this type of introspection and analysis. The bad lighting and poor acting can't do much to disguise what a terrible time these two-bit actors are actually having. And so here I was, porn in hand, chaos in mind, unable to concentrate on the job at hand. For the rest of junior year I lived a monk-like existence, resorting to theater of the mind, conjured from the few and far between actual sexual encounters I'd had. It was the most difficult semester of my life and one I hope never to revisit.

Fire all of your guns at once and explode into space

Horatio writes: This critical appreciation of an important piece of literature was submitted by Dov in San Francisco:

The now defunct Bookmonger in San Francisco was the place you went to as a kid for your serious reads. The shelves were packed with second-hand copies of Jack London and The Odyssey. But it was also the place where I tapped into a major source of inadvertent smut, thanks to a semi-regular supply of Easy Rider Magazines which would randomly appear in the periodical section. It was always a great mystery to me -- who would sell their copies of this magazine "for adult bikers" to such an above-board institution as the Bookmonger? In my mind, it must have been someone who looked like Michael Landon circa Highway to Heaven and I bought every copy I could get my hands on. The magazine was packed full of photographs of old biker guys on their tricked out hogs. I could not give a shit about the men or the machines. But every couple of photos or so, these old biker men would be photographed with their old biker girls riding pillion, or as I learned through my dedication to the pages of Easy Rider, in the "Bitch Seat." And it was these ladies, with their dirty hair, missing teeth, sun-blasted, tattooed skin, who thrilled the front of my eleven year old pants, thanks to their predilection for riding topless and exposing their sagging, worn-out boobs to the entire circulation of Easy Rider magazine. I did not have a bike. I did not know anyone who had a bike. But here was a culture that excited me. After rushing the magazine home to give it an adequate "test drive" in my bedroom, I would carefully cut the pictures out and collect them in a large brown envelope I kept in my desk -- the one in which I kept a playing card I had found on the street. A ten of hearts with a naked Asian woman sitting uncomfortably on one side, seemingly embarrassed to have such a great muff.

Diamonds Are Forever (Forever... Forever)

Horatio writes: This blog is all about the details. And so we were delighted to receive this paean to methodology from Martin in New Jersey. If you developed similar unorthodox tactics like Shawn Marion at the free-throw line, this is the place to send them.

I was a self-taught onanist. My method was effective, but as I have since learned, rare. I would make a right angle with the thumb and forefinger of each hand and connect them to make a diamond. I would then insert my cock into aforementioned diamond and work it up and down the length to get the party started. And this was the only way I could get the equipment to work. Even when I learned of more common one handed methods in seventh grade. The diamond was my signature move. I would go to bed at eleven p.m. precisely, prop myself up on my sham, put on my Sony FM Walkman, and with headphones clamped on tight, tune into WYNY for Dr. Ruth's late night Sexually Speaking and let my wankfest begin.