Books which helped to pervert me.

On their top shelves they had some slim little magazines called Forum. In that pre-internet age it was a write-in mag where people would talk about their sex lives, problems etc and I think there were contact pages at the back. No pictures, just text and ads. And some of that text was a revelation to my young self 🤣
I remember Forum fondly.

Also I think Quest... a section in Penthouse magazine which was supposedly a psychologist interviewing people and discussing their sex lives. Very informative.

Then in my late teens UK magazines like Fiesta and Razzle... the letters pages were obviously (in hindsight) manufactured but focussed heavily on shared wife scenarios where the wife would let all the husband's mates/groups of strangers have a go. I think that formed my tastes very heavily!

Also Fiesta had a Readers Wives section and imagine the bliss when we found a friend's mother featured; that copy got passed around over and over.
 
The Ages of Lulu, by Almundena Grandez. Forget the movie though.

The Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs. Again, forget the movie version.

Incidentally, Burroughs, in one of his last interviews, also made me feel better when he reported on his sex drive and how as a young man he had assumed this was just a phase and he would mellow out as he grew older, only to find to his consternation that he was just as sex-obsessed in his 70s as he was in his 20s. It never goes away, folks :)
It never goes away, but sometimes the machinery is rusted to shit.
 
There was an author named Shawna Kinney who wrote a book about working as a dominatrix while attending college somewhere on the East Coast. I forget the name of the book, I read it a long while ago, but it was a great read- and made me fantasize all kinds of ways of being under her boots- or at the end of her paddle!
 
The book that probably did the most to give my kinkier imagination a boost was Havelock Ellis' "Studies in the Psychology of Sex." I found it in a box of my dad's old college textbooks and got my first inkling that some of my fantasies weren't confined to me. Ellis was a student of Freud's and presented a casebook of "sexual perversions" such as foot fetishes, sadomasochism and incest.

Around the same time, I bought a copy of John Norman's "Imaginative Sex," which was part of the DAW books science fiction series. Norman was the creator of the Gor books; "Imaginative Sex" was, essentially, a guide to Gorean D/s and included sexual games based on it.

Later, in college, I ran across the Grove Press edition of the works of the Marquis de Sade and was hooked. Some of the activities were quite gross, but the long discourses on the psychology of pleasure and human nature were surprisingly prescient. And who wouldn't want to have a go at poor Justine, a professional virgin made for suffering if ever there was one. I devoured the other Grove Press books in the library and discovered a world of carnal literary delights I had never dreamed existed.

But the book that really hooked me was The Story of O. Surprisingly, I found myself identifying with O and imagining how it would feel to be used as she was at Roissy. It was the beginning of my move to the other side of the slash. The elegant sensuality set a high standard for my porn reading and helped me discover classics like Fanny Hill.

Later, I discovered The Image, by Jean de Berg and the Marketplace series, as well as the Sleeping Beauty series. Those got me started thinking about my bi side and opened up aspects of myself I had never known.

One curious aspect, which I wonder is just a quirk on my part or something others share: while I've seen my share of videos from Kink studios, I find them much less sexy than the best written BDSM novels.
 
^Yes, that was the one. She was a 19 year old college student at the time, but I was sort of reluctant to post the title because it had the word "Teenage" in it (and was afraid of the "Banned words/themes" algorithm kicking in.)
 
The Story of O in parts was disturbing as fuck, but other parts were shower nozzle masturbation material. Even though the book has a lot wrong with it (like the ending) it was the first book I recall reading that made the idea of being whipped pleasurable.
 
Story of the Eye
By Georges Bataille

An obscure little book...kinky as they come.
 
Contours of Darkness & Mind Blower by Marco Vassi
Marco Vassi: there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I picked up his books many years ago. He's an underrated writer and a darn sexy one. I went back to Amazon last night to look for a Kindle copy of Mind Blower only to discover all they have left is paperback versions of his stuff. I don't know what happened to the Kindle versions. Open Road Media had all of them at one time.
 
SEX by Madonna...mostly a pictorial but it set a tone for my future path. It was considered quite controversial at the time but might be considered tame today.
Oh yes. I remember getting a copy of that book and loving every picture. Definitely inspired a lot of orgasms.
 
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