What '90s Kids Did for Porn, Before (Good) Internet Connections

Kids have it so easy these days.

Any half-wit with an Internet connection can bring up Google, turn off SafeSearch, type in a few letters, and bask in a bevy of pornographic choices at his disposal.

But back in my day, (read: the '90s) things were different. Internet connections were weaker, parents were smarter, and the Victoria’s Secret catalog reigned supreme. You couldn’t just sneak away to view high-def penetration on your watch. No, no -- you had to spend the better part of 24 hours to download one five-minute video... all without being caught.

What follows is a ranking of the lengths pre-pubescents went to for porn before the Internet was as fast and incredible as it is now.

Also, sorry to anyone older than 30. We know you had it worse.

There's nothing more depressing than a hormonal teenager fiddling with a flashlight in the middle of the night, desperately trying to make heads or tales of a graphic love scene from their mom’s favorite romance novel. At the same time, it’s how people used to do it before television -- so paying homage to the past with masturbation is actually sort of romantic.
 

Looking back, it’s actually pretty sick to get off to photos of tribal women breastfeeding their children. Uh, so, I’m just going to leave it at that and pretend that I didn’t rifle through my parents’ National Geographic collection for hours at a time in search of nipples.
 

Hopefully, horny teenagers in the not-too-distant future will still know what a bookstore is... because these places were paramount in supplying the softest-core porn to kids of yesteryear. I still remember exactly where the erotica section was in the Barnes & Noble bookstore at my local mall. There (in the back of the store, next to the humor section) I would find stacks of books featuring erotic photography, nude paintings, and Kama Sutra guides galore.

With the only drawback being that anybody could wander in and see you profusely sweating in pleasure onto the pages of these fine pieces of literature, it was still the closest one could get to a nudie mag without having an older sibling buy one for you.

Without the unbiased eyes of the Internet supplying people who are definitely under 18 with fuel for the spank bank, we had to rely on the extremely biased eyes of our older siblings to acquire porn for us. If you couldn't track down your dad’s secret Penthouse stash, or stumble upon a dusty box of smut in a friend’s basement, you had to beg your older brother to be cool and purchase pornography... for an incredibly high price, of course.

These elders, knowing how real the struggle was, played an integral role in ushering their younger brothers into adulthood.
 

It’s like the plot of the movie Stand by Me, except without anyone dying or unwanted appearances by Corey Friggin’ Feldman. The hidden stash of porn was a rarity -- far less common than a raise in your allowance or waking up to a snow day. No one knew where it came from or how long it had been there. Sometimes it was magazines, sometimes it was VHS tapes, hell maybe there was a home movie or two: a wild porn stash in the middle of the woods.

Word would circulate, and then the friends, peers, and other people would arrive in droves. They would overcome any and all obstacles to see it, miraculously defying their fears of water, heights, and the dark to peer inside the hidden stash. No one dared remove anything from the box, following the rules of a nature reserve in which the only thing you leave are your footprints.

As fast as it appeared, it was gone and all your dreams were shattered. The box of porn will never be forgotten and will forever appear as the most attractive, exciting moment of your life.

Helloooooooooooo C.J. Parker! Jesus, Hasselhoff, get out of the damn way! Don't you have another Berlin Wall you can go personally disassemble? 

I bet you still have your dirty channel memorized -- mine was 72. I remember the jolt of excitement at realizing porn was kinda available on my television. Of course, you'd barely make out a face or nipple before the screen would cut to blue, but TV Guide confirmed the existence of free smut. Sometimes it’d be an HBO show like Sex and the City or Real Sex, sometimes it was soft-core porn, but all I knew was it that glorious and free.

Ah, the imagination -- the only place where your Spanish teacher actually reciprocated your blindly sophomoric compliments. And, unless you were friends with some unsavory characters, the only other place where your best friend’s hot mom wouldn’t freak out if she walked in on you going through her laundry. Stacy’s mom, you truly had it going on.

Jerry Maguire, Titanic, Top Gun: these rank as some of the best movies out there, but are especially memorable to kids who grew up in the '90s because of the sex scenes. If you were lucky enough to have a copy of any of these in the house while your parents were away, you knew how to master the art of rewinding a movie to find the exact sex scene without missing a beat.

You even knew about the movies that had just enough nudity to hold you over -- like Austin Powers, Charlie’s Angels, or Zorro. The only thing you had to remember was to fast-forward the tape back to the place you originally left off so your parents wouldn't get suspicious.

Ah, the most coveted of all catalogs to feature scantily clad women selling underwear to the moms of the house. Finding one was easy -- all you had to do was snatch it before your parents got home, and put on your best poker face when they asked where it had gone.

No woman can ever compare to the models in the magazine, so innocent and free, who probably had no idea at the time that they were the masturbatory material for literally millions of people all over the Earth. Oh, Victoria's Secret, I've read more issues of you than I have The New Yorker -- and I like telling people that I read The New Yorker.

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Jeremy Glass is a writer for Thrillist and is finally ready to admit to his dad that those he did steal (and hoard) all those issues of Victoria's Secret.