(no subject)

[which_chick]

So I'm reading vintage porn on the internet. Actually, in my educated opinion, the stuff is for-looking-at porn, one of those mags that just has text to fill up the spaces between the naked girlies. Not, mind, that there's much space between the girlies in the first place and I think that's the point, given that the title of the thing is "Dolls & Dolls". Anyway, the magazine (available in pictures here, No. 8, 1968), contains a story ("Jet Set Beach Bum") involving an ex-Navy frogman (sort of what they had before they had SEALs, I guess) and some woman named Ursula that he's boning. That truly delightful piece of prose, penned by one Bill Starr (and I'm totally sure that's his real name, too), contained the oyster of a line from which I am generating a stew of LJ posting.



The oyster of a line is this one: "Ursula snuggled her 160 pounds of pink plumpness against Rick (our hero) and moaned rapturously as his roving fingers rekindled the passionate fire that had so delightfully consumed her an hour before."

Okay. The first thing I noticed about this whole story was that it was written by someone who wasn't very good at writing porn for men. You might think that the problem here is one of vintage -- tastes change and stuff, right? Not so much. I've read vintage porn, from the delightful Mr. Wilmot (whose Restoration-era use of the word "cunt" sounds thoroughly modern) as well as some more recent efforts from significantly dimmer literary stars. One of the most delightfully funny pieces ever was a 1950's era member of the "Little White Woman is Hungry for Huge Black Cock in a Tale of Forbidden Lust!" genre. (Not an avian bestiality story, either. It was so racist it was practically too offensive to be functional as porn. I'm kind of saddened that we're still making Black-guy-on-white-girl porn as a marketing genre in this day and age, too.) Probably the second most amusing vintage written porn in my experience was a really cheap ass novel written about a set of identical twins (blonde, with huge tits, one virtuous and the other slutty). Anyway. I've read vintage porn written by and for men and it doesn't read like the effort from "Bill Starr".

You know what "Jet Set Beach Bum" reads like? A fucking romance novel, that's what. (I should know. I've read a lot of them.) It's freaking *coy*. It uses the word "ebullient" in the summary blurb. It spends actual time describing the guy... wtf? "Rick moved his lean, darkly-tanned body against her and dropped his blong head to kiss her ear. His China-blue eyes were set deep in his handsome face and his long limbs still contained the strength and coordination that had once made him a topnotch Navy frogman." No. This is not porn for men. I don't give a damn if it's appearing in "Dolls & Dolls" or not.

Continued on page 43, we also see an advertisement for "My Secret Life" -- nine hundred pages of improper victorian sex memoirs described as candidly as a Kinsey Report -- in plainer language. You know, back in the day it was hard to come by DIFFICULT TO FIND porn. Some poor souls might just send off for Victorian sex memoirs. (In 1968, nobody had ever heard of bukkake. There was no Two Girls, One Cup. Goatse didn't exist. Oh, and here's an FYI: porn without photoshop is just pictures of naked people.)

So. Victorian memoirs, eh? Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about that, yo. Wikipedia says "Yes, eleven volumes. Content may or mayn't be real. Might just be a huge pile of erotic fiction, possibly written by Henry Spencer Ashbee or possibly by someone else." Wikipedia ALSO happily says You Can Read This Here, without paying for it. The first volume of the book cost $5.00 in 1968 dollars. Internet research suggests that $0.34 would buy a gallon of gas in 1968. The first volume of this book would have set you back 14.70 gallons of gasoline in 1968. Today, that gasoline would cost you $58.82, working on a price of $4.00 a gallon. (Sound as a dollar? My ass. Inflation, I say. Paul Volcker agrees with me, too.)

Anyway, now we have the internet (which I guess all the cool kids have stopped talking about as a new, nifty, cool thing because in their world there has always been a Google. Damn kids. I remember when there wasn't a fucking Google. I remember 14.4 modems and Trumpet Winsock and Windows Fucking 3.11 for Fucking Workgroups. Also, get off my lawn!) so you can read this smut for free. It looks like a very functional website. There are browseable chapters. There's an index of frequency for the dirty words -- helpfully, "cunt" is the single most frequent dirty word, appearing 5,357 times. (I like to highlight things that may be selling points for the readership.)

On a slightly related note, here are my favorite Helpful Demographic Identifiers for Textual Porn:

1. If the porn is aimed at heterosexual men, the single most frequent pornographic word in the work will be "cunt".

2. If the porn contains more instances of the word "cock" than it does "cunt", it is either aimed at homosexual men or at women. To discern the difference, compare the relative length of passages contained in quotation marks. The longer the dialogue instances, the more likely the work is aimed at women.

Back to the Beach Bum. Roland (husband) walks in on Ursula (wife) with RIck (beach bum). In Roland's wake is Sally ("secretary" who can't type). Ursula accuses infidelity, as does Roland. There Is A Scene. Roland and Ursula go back to their hotel room, whereupon Roland says "There's no law against a man possessing his wife". (Guys, take note: This was true in all of the US until 1976. However, in these, our modern times, marital rape is illegal. In particular, if you live in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia, the law makes NO DISTINCTION between marital rape and stranger-based rape where you just shag some lovely young devotchka against her will like BillyBoy and his yobs do in the beginning of Clockwork Orange.) Roland, who is apparently up to the challenge *snerk* of a handsome young rival, rips off Ursula's panties and slams her to the mattress. "Darling," sighs Ursula, "I never knew you could be so masterful." "Nor did I guess that you could be so responsive" says Roland. And they're off to the races Marital Bliss Happyland, which is apparently the heteronormative happy ending that you get from 1968 porn. They even decide to thank Rick/Sally for helping put their marriage back on the right track. (There are Moral Standards, y'know. Can't have the fapping legion of readers deciding that it's OK to cheat, or else we'll have Swingin' Wife Swapping in the Seventies. Oops. Too late.) Meanwhile, Rick the Beach Bum and Sally the nonsecretarial Slut hook up, kinda, but they need money. Rick decides to hit Roland/Ursula up for money (with a gun) while being all gangsta with his speech. It's painful to read. Roland forks over the dough when Ursula is threatened. Rick and Sally go back to their hotel room and gloat over the money... but then Sally's estranged husband shows up. He mistakes Beach Bum Rick for Big Shot Roland and shoots him. The End. I guess Sally gets to keep the money in exchange for whatever of her dubious virtue was enjoyed by Roland, though I don't reckon it stopped Jim (the husband) from being all off-screen violent on her. As he says, "You'll get yours in a minute, as soon as I teach this big shot that there are things that even money can't buy!"

The final page of the story has a border ad for "The Pearl", a victorian sex mag of three whopping issues that "duplicates the vivid and unabridged language of the original" Three bucks for that one, yo. (I'm sure that all ya'll, being a clueful and educated readership, get the joke in the title, right? Right? The Victorians certainly did.)

Comments

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

I have heard of the multivoluminous "My Secret Life" before - it was mentioned (and quoted) in The Victorian Underworld, in the chapter on prostitution.

Love the trainwreck ending of the beach bum book!

[cmain84.livejournal.com]

Ya know, I'm not saying those ladies aren't attractive in their own way, but I think that either the type of woman doing porn has changed, or the body type men find attractive has changed with the times.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I think probably you're overlooking the delights of (a) plastic surgery enhancements and (b) photoshop.