Would love your insight: youth and inexperience and porn…

[GuiltyCowboy]

I’d really love some help from the forum on a particular subject I’m trying to explore in a new story…would you be willing to share your wisdom and insight?

Here’s my question: Is there a difference between the porn you sought out when you were 19, 20 years old - ie right at the very start of your adult sexuality - and however old you might be now?

I’m particularly keen to hear how our youth, greenness, lack of experience etc. played into what we *wanted* to see in porn when we were young - and indeed how it affected our reactions to the porn we were exposed to then too. Does that make sense?

As a man, I’m particularly interested to get a little female perspective on this.

My hope with this new story is to explore how our experience of porn intersects with our real lives; it involves people in their forties and people who are 18-20 years old and, honestly, I feel I’m grasping in the dark a little too much when it comes to the tastes of the younger women.

Of course, I appreciate the world is a wide and weird and wonderful place and people differ from each other. And I appreciate it’s a v personal question but, still, if any of you would be willing to offer your own insights I’d really appreciate it. Thanks.

 

[TiberiusPrime]

Ok, I'm in my 60s, so my porn was Hustler, etc., and going to the local adult movie theater. So there's definitely a huge difference for me!

 

[ElectricBlue]

Ok, I'm in my 60s, so my porn was Hustler, etc., and going to the local adult movie theater. So there's definitely a huge difference for me!

Likewise, Bob Guccione's Penthouse magazine and, living in Canberra in the eighties, X rated videos on VHS. But most of the content was garbage. The ACT was the only state in Australia where X rated content was allowed, everyone else had to get their content through the post. As a consequence, the Fyshwick post office had the biggest parcel service in Australia.

I'm a very visual creature, but I find photography and illustrations far more arousing than video. The content one finds nowadays I find incredibly dull, so the garbage element from the porn industry hasn't changed much. Those rare occasions I do go looking, I generally steer towards lesbian erotica or the sites that show amateur stuff. At least on those sites there's a chance of seeing something more genuine. Also, Hysterical Literature.

 

[Britva415]

I’d really love some help from the forum on a particular subject I’m trying to explore in a new story…would you be willing to share your wisdom and insight?

Here’s my question: Is there a difference between the porn you sought out when you were 19, 20 years old - ie right at the very start of your adult sexuality - and however old you might be now?

I’m particularly keen to hear how our youth, greenness, lack of experience etc. played into what we *wanted* to see in porn when we were young - and indeed how it affected our reactions to the porn we were exposed to then too. Does that make sense?

As a man, I’m particularly interested to get a little female perspective on this.

My hope with this new story is to explore how our experience of porn intersects with our real lives; it involves people in their forties and people who are 18-20 years old and, honestly, I feel I’m grasping in the dark a little too much when it comes to the tastes of the younger women.

Of course, I appreciate the world is a wide and weird and wonderful place and people differ from each other. And I appreciate it’s a v personal question but, still, if any of you would be willing to offer your own insights I’d really appreciate it. Thanks.

To this day I still prefer porn with pubes.

 

[erotica_n_s]

...Also, Hysterical Literature.

I loved Hysterical Literature, although I must admit - even after all these years, I haven't watched all of them. But can I just say - Amanda's moment (at 07:10) has to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

I just wish someone would do an Indian version of Hysterical Literature.

 

[erotica_n_s]

Is there a difference between the porn you sought out when you were 19, 20 years old - ie right at the very start of your adult sexuality - and however old you might be now?

Interesting question. For me, yes and no.

Some fantasies/fetishes I had when I was younger, I still have them, but I have a greater awareness now that not everyone shares my fantasies/fetishes.

I've long had a "thing" for touching, caressing, and kissing a woman in 'intimate' places - her stomach, her breasts, her waist, etc., and I thought that sort of thing might make a young woman blush, or giggle, or both (yes, I'm a very vanilla dude). When I first started watching porn, I was disappointed to see there's not much of that in porn - it's mostly penetration, fellation, etc. But yes, I understand that my 'tastes'/preferences are boring to most people.

 

[SigmaJay]

In the mid 1980s, I would look at porn mags in the wilderness with my friends. There were a few known caches with magazines wrapped in plastic. I don't know how they were obtained. My great uncle also had a few at his house, but it was rare I would visit.

One day my older brother and his friends brought home some alcohol and a VHS porn tape while my parents were out. The video depicted a MMF with the males DP'ing and split roasting the female.

One time my friend shoplifted a few porn mags and I looked at them. I was not cool with the theft aspect.

Once the internet came online, I looked at porn on the "Usenet" such as alt.binaries.pictures.erotica. I was on dialup and it took forever to get one high quality image. I also started reading Literotica on dialup.

As the internet access speed increased, I found more and more porn. I never really consumed it much. Maybe one session per week. Sometimes once per month. I can take it or leave it. I prefer chatting with other people online or reading erotic short stories.

My wife has never looked at porn, except when I have shown her some on the internet. She is mostly uninterested. The only exception has been when we use it to spice things up while performing sexual acts together.

Is there a difference between the porn you sought out when you were 19, 20 years old - ie right at the very start of your adult sexuality - and however old you might be now?

I didn't seek it out, I could only view what was on-hand, which was limited (all heterosexual porn). However, the basic answer is no, it hasn't really changed. I do view some gay and Bi porn, oral sex turns me on regardless of gender.

I would add: I do like the amateur porn available now and I tend to dislike most "studio" or professional type porn. I really like watching "normal people" have sex.

 

[PapaRomantic]

I think easier availability now is certainly a factor versus then.

But I also think my younger times were more consumed by discovery and excitement in finding and wanting to see anything and everything I could then, whereas now my tastes are refined and I'm more particular about what I want to see. It's very similar to reading stories on Lit - I have little desire to read in some categories, so I find myself looking at the same three or four categories for my reading interests. If I'd been reading Lit back then, I have a feeling I'd be expanding my horizons more than I do now.

 

[NotWise]

When I was young, I had zero interest in porn and no time for porn. I had a lot of interest in girls, and my time went into work and school.

Any interest came along later, after my career and my family were established.

 

[lovecraft68]

It's like many things, you start and everything is new and exciting. Over time your tastes change, you look for different things to give you that thrill the other material no longer does because you've consumed a lot of it.

Other factors can be your partner-if they also enjoy porn-maybe something they like wasn't a prior interest to you, but seeing it gets them going and you benefit, you're more willing to get into it.

I've been watching porn since the early eighties and I've run the gambit of my original fixation of blow jobs to anything and everything in between except for GM-did watch a little Bi-guy stuff on occasions because of a Girlfriend's interest in it. I get into something, then its on to the next fascination.

These days I've been watching a lot of hotwife/cuck material in the different angles from the cuck being humiliated and forced to watch to him enjoying it and joining in.

I'd say over the years my steady go to's are rough BDSM style scenes, footjobs and CFNM, they never seem to fall out of favor for me, other kinks come and go.

My wife's taste has remained consistent for years (meaning I've watched a lot of the material with her) gloryhole, gang bangs and the real degrading type like Public Disgrace and other Kink dot com sites.

I wonder about that woman sometimes. Good thing she found someone with a perv mind and no insecurities.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I don't have anything new to contribute, except this photo. 42nd Street looking west from Seventh, 1960s. "Box lunch" is a term that the patrons of those theaters would understand without all that fancy Latin. Looks like a Plymouth Valiant in the foreground.

https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2021/08/23/LILMRSQXLCR5VSVFXNTJ5D6VBA.jpg

 

[lovecraft68]

I don't have anything new to contribute, except this photo. 42nd Street looking west from Seventh, 1960s. "Box lunch" is a term that the patrons of those theaters would understand without all that fancy Latin. Looks like a Plymouth Valiant in the foreground.

https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2021/08/23/LILMRSQXLCR5VSVFXNTJ5D6VBA.jpg

Here in RI there was a place "The Columbus Theater:" which showed adult films. I used to look in the newspaper movie section and just stare at the titles they were showing.

It shut down after a decades long run and was empty for some time. Someone bought it and now use it for gatherings and film festival style events. I saw some of the HPL festival films there and went to see Joe Bob talk about redneck horror. Its funny being older that I know what the place used to be, but a lot of people going there don't. I joke about hoping they burned those seats.

But the better story is the Rustic Drive In that showed adult films late at night on the weekends and if you were driving up 146 and looked over you'd see flashes of the screen between the trees, couple of times me and friends pulled over and would stand in the woods with binoculars and watch.

 

[Erozetta]

19/20 for me was around 2002/2003, so no, not really. I watch less of it now, but I'm still attracted to the same type of stuff (mostly still images or short gifs with captions where I get to make up the rest of the story in my head.)

Porn, while it can be interesting and I have watched way too much at times, has never really held my attention in a sexual way, mostly just watched due to the curiosity/intrigue.

 

[12oclocktales]

What I remember from back in the 80s when everything was still videotape, porn flicks were copying legit films in that almost all told a story, lasted an hour or so, and weren’t just short clips of sex acts. The story was ridiculous crap but who cared? The adult emporiums (how’s that for a fancy euphonism?) I remember were stocked with hundreds of XXX skin mags, so many different titles it would make your head spin. I haven’t been to one of these places in 35 years so they might still be the same, but I doubt it.

Interestingly, the filthiest video I can recall coming across back then had to be mail ordered and wasn’t available in a store, and was a watersports compilation of a woman peeing on the floor in what looked like a major bank lobby around 3 a.m. followed by scenes of another woman desperate to pee who walks into a small house or apartment and gets up on a table and pees on it. That’s it. Almost yawn-producing by today’s standards.

 

[PurpleNekoKitten]

I think I have a unique perspective on this one.

I am an approximately 50 year old transgender woman. I transitioned about 15 years ago. All dates, ages and time frames are obviously off for anonymity.

When I was young there were calendars and the occasional poorly hidden porn mag. I never really had much interest back then in anything more than naked women. If I only knew then what I know now...

When puberty hit it was whatever I could stumble across. I grew up lower class. There was never anything around and no money even if there was. Using computer junk my father brought home from work I was able to get onto a few local BBSs and download a few things. It never amounted to much.

It wasn't until the internet that I had real access. Around my 20's I got on the internet via a T1 at work and dialup at home. It was the very early days of the internet. Static sites, slow CGI, terrible fonts, a giant mess. I looked at what you would expect someone of that age to look at.

Porn wasn't really a regular thing for me. Just something I looked at occasionally. Nothing really stands out.

Until close to when I figured out I am transgender. I did seek out more porn. Specifically couples and/or Lesbian. This continued after I figured it out and started my transition. More relationship and closeness oriented and less focus on specific acts.

After HRT it definitely changed. I started reading erotica and looking for cuddle porn. Internally I identify as mostly Lesbian. I have gone for the occasional guy. But I'm much more into women and very much into closeness and cuddling. I still watch specific things sometimes to just get off, but that is rare. Now if I do seek out porn I'm more likely to watch girls kissing or an obvious couple.

Sometimes I even take this to the extreme of reading one of lovecraft68's stories right up until the sex starts. Then starting over on a different story just for the relationship and buildup. My own writing, very little of which I've shared, is almost entirely about the relationship and tends to be vague on the sex. Sometimes skipping it entirely.

(PS. I wrote this on painkillers. Sorry for typos and grammatical errors.)

 

[TheRedChamber]

No, my tastes haven't really changed. I liked everything back then and I still like everything now.

 

[SimonDoom]

The thing I remember about porn most when I was young is that it was much harder to find. I came of age over a decade before the Internet. I'd sneak peeks at Playboy or other magazines when I could.

I wasn't that interested in porn, or erotica of any kind, in my early 20s. I always enjoyed seeing a photo of a naked woman when I could, but I didn't think about it or seek it out much.

I recall seeing a few porn movies when I was in college, but they didn't do that much for me back then.

 

[alohadave]

I appreciate older performers more now than I did in my early 20s.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

My hope with this new story is to explore how our experience of porn intersects with our real lives; it involves people in their forties and people who are 18-20 years old and, honestly, I feel I’m grasping in the dark a little too much when it comes to the tastes of the younger women.

Tough place being in my 30s...

Anyway, jokes aside, I became an adult at the beginning of the past decade, and to my perception the thing that's different is that there are more independent creators now than there were before. The 10s was the decade in which us 90s kids became adults, thus I saw not just simply a rise on independent creators, but how the ones that got the most fame were mostly cosplayers, and before them, it was the emos, the scene girls, the goths, and other alt cultures. Suicide Girls was at its peak too. The trends hadn't changed, but rather they seem to get more popular. Actually, they pretty much merged into one with the rise of e-girls, and I'm a bit at fault for that. I didn't have contact with adult webcams until much later though, and eventually became one during the pandemic, which was... a very stressful experience because it complicated my double life even further, but I still loved it.

Now, it is no secret that porn is way easier to access right now. What is it, like, 30% of traffic online is porn, or something? It's quite a large number of two digits, but it isn't above 50. I don't recall the exact number, but the thing is that it's way easier to access porn in the 10s, than the times in which the lot above me became 18-years-old, which was a time when the sperm cell that would later become your glamorous e-girl in a necktie typing this didn't even exist yet!

Aside from independent creators, one key difference I notice is how porn became more interactive than before. Before, all you had was a video that you could watch, or pictures that you could look at, and maybe the ocassional porn game, but now... Platforms like OnlyFans and Fansly are gamifying a bit the consumption, using some gambling psychology to it, plus due to the rise of social media, as well as the creation of the above platforms mentioned, people can, will, and are interacting with creators, developing parasocial interactions that can get quite spooky... but cam girls have been doing that even before OnlyFans too. Games were on the rise too. As the 10s went down I noticed a lot of people coding porn games. I speculate that some of these people trained their skills with them whether that's development, art, or music... and now these porn games started to have a crackdown since last month. But i digress.

How did it affect me? I don't know. I know for sure that my sexuality was pretty much stolen from me, and at a very young age porn did give me some unhealthy expectations regarding sex, but it wasn't like the awful things that the anti-porn people tend to say. Besides, let's be honest, porn wasn't the only one to blame. Other forms of media, like the sitcoms of that time, did give me unhealthy expectations regarding life in general, not limited to sex life. Don't get me wrong, I still love Friends, but watching that and thinking that's how my twenties ought to be, and then living my twenties and noticing that my experience is way too different than what it was depicted there? Yeah, this isn't just porn's fault.

When I was young I was rather extremely curious. Today, I'm more creative than curious, but I still remain curious. Probably because I can't compare my 18-year-old self to my current self, really; we're WAY too different people. I don't go into porn consumption to live those curiosities or fantasies, but rather I go into creation. Before, I had my sexuality stolen by rather traumatic experiences I don't want to tell because I might be discussing stuff that is against the rules of Literotica, but porn did help me to heal that, somehow. In spite of the boycott that porn has, I noticed that it validated me things that people consider taboo, including the things that I write. Now I do not like the T/I and R/NC categories personally because of the traumatic experiences I mentioned, but I will still defend to death the right of them existing, and the right of other authors writing these stories. This is why I fell in love with creating porn, even if it is written, or just taking naked pictures in my bedroom, or shaking my ass online for a year... These things helped me to reclaim what I've lost, and being a cam girl in particular helped me way too much to deal with stage fright, and boosted my confidence quite a lot. It was the perfect job for me, and I really regret leaving it.

I might add an addendum to this later, or not... I don't know. I hope this helps you.

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

Thank you so much to everyone who has responded. I have truly loved reading these experiences.

A few themes that I’m picking up:

• seems like early use of porn was occasional and prompted by curiosity rather than a strong sexual drive - isn’t ‘horniness’ a legitimate word yet? - to be exposed to it
• Simpler and more vanilla tastes develop into more complex and fetishistic ones, which is a natural dynamic as the novelty wears off but also, interestingly, because porn doesn’t often provide content for our sweeter desires
• And there’s an interest in authenticity that seems to develop in men over time but is pretty much present for women right away (generalizing of course): studies show that women search for lesbian, threesome, and amateur porn the most because there’s a higher chance of authenticity in those types of porn.
• Today’s porn scene is far more broad and interactive than it ever was and so the possibilities of porn having a positive impact are much higher, as KittyOfSteele and PurpleNekoKitten’s truly excellent (and generous) responses suggest.

I’m guessing a young person today can go and find exactly what they have in their head, what they actually want to see, whereas older people were much more likely to have to accept what was produced and disseminated.

For me, that dynamic - coming of age in the mid/late 90s (ie just before the internet was mainstream) - meant I was presented with a few fetishistic interests that I had literally never considered before, like ejaculating on a woman’s face.

Like many of us, I was really looking for something more genuine and authentic, though I don’t think I recognized it as such at the time, and so I gravitated towards behind-the-scenes videos in which you could see (extremely attractive young) people being themselves as they acted out the porn you would see in magazines and videos. And that aspect of it - being oneself but acting out a porn role for other people and the camera - has become a key interest of mine.

And that in turn has morphed into an interest in people being aroused somewhat against their will - Hysterical Literature, as ElectricBlue pointed out, is brilliant - or people displaying their sexual arousal in public, and some Freeuse concepts. Webcams works that theme a bit too.

I wrote a story about a man who has job in a Michelin-starred restaurant where his role is to display his erection and masturbate at the side of customer’s tables. There’s absolutely no way I would have written that without the effect of watching porn for about 30 years.

Anyway, to go back to the question, given they’re likely still too young to have had their tastes defined by porn, what kind of porn would 19/20 year old women want to seek out for themselves? I knew the answer would be both simple and complex: it depends, of course. But it seems it’s not so different to men.

In any case, your answers have been really helpful. Thanks.

 

[Erozetta]

...given they’re likely still too young to have had their tastes defined by porn...

... At 19/20? My kinks and interests were well established at that point. (Tattooed and pierced goth girls in pretty bondage and Peter Steele's Playgirl shoot. That was pretty much my taste and still is.)

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

... At 19/20? My kinks and interests were well established at that point. (Tattooed and pierced goth girls in pretty bondage and Peter Steele's Playgirl shoot. That was pretty much my taste and still is.)

Well, there you go! That’s the kind of answer I was looking for! Thank you.

Speaking for myself, my tastes weren’t defined as early as that. Foundations were there, for sure, but they were far from developed.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I wrote a story about a man who has job in a Michelin-starred restaurant where his role is to display his erection and masturbate at the side of customer’s tables. There’s absolutely no way I would have written that without the effect of watching porn for about 30 years.

That's an ace story! Kudos for writing that one.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I'm old enough where my first exposure to what some considered porn, were drawings on the walls of a neighbor's cave.

At 19 to 20, I had already been sowing my wild oats for years, so I had little interest in porn. I was already married, with an infant at home, going to college (UCLA) while working full time. I didn't even bother checking out Playboy because my job servicing office machines had me visiting Hugh Hefner's mansion a couple of times each month.

I also ran service calls at various "studios" in the valley, where I would frequently have to stand aside and wait while a porn shoot was being completed. VHS tapes were still a few years away, and my first VCR was a gift from one of the studios that I serviced.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

... At 19/20? My kinks and interests were well established at that point. (Tattooed and pierced goth girls in pretty bondage and Peter Steele's Playgirl shoot. That was pretty much my taste and still is.)

Same here, but I've ended up acquiring more on the go. Not due to porn though.

This is reminding me a bit of those studies that point out that kinks are hereditary. They aren't conclusive though.