Thinking back, I couldn't describe the cover more than the bare minimum: A semi-naked blonde stands in the centre of the page, her back to us, but she's looking over her shoulder in stereotypical "come hither" style and just above her arse is written "Cream!" and something else that my mind never took in. There was other writing as well, of course, including the name of this particular wank mag, but none of it really registered with me. It was, of course, the girl herself who'd grabbed my attention and left me standing, stealing disbelieving glances at the top shelf of the garage shop.

Which is the way it's meant to be, isn't it? That's what porn mags are meant to do; feature some top-heavy "babe" looking out emptily and "sultrily" at her audience, trying her best to entice some poor wanker (literally) to grab the magazine shiftily, pay for it and run home hiding it in a brown paper bag or under something more respectable. As if the picture isn't enough to convince, there's normally some headline in oversized letters somewhere on the cover, occasionally an unsubtle pun like "Come with me inside!" or the like. And we all know about porn and say we're above it and it's only for sad pathetic men who wear big coats and dribble and so on and so on and all the stereotypes, but. But.

I don't know. I can't ever "defend" porn, not really. I know all the usual arguments, that it's degrading (although I'm not sure who is degraded more, the models who get paid to be someone's fantasy or the punters who pay to believe in them) and that it's one of these widely-acknowledged bad things, but I can never really bring myself to completely damn the thing that easily, either. After all, for most of my adolescent years pornography taught me everything I thought I knew about sex.

I remember in school one day, and a friend and his friend pulling me into a corner far away from most people, hidden even from the junior smokers trying to smoke like their older brothers and sisters, and opening their schoolbags as if inside was the most dangerous thing on Earth. "Here," my friend said, gesturing to his open bag, "look at this." And I can't even remember what the thing was called, but sure enough, there was the stereotypical sexy, overly-made-up woman looking at me, lips moist and slightly parted from a brightly-coloured background. This, I thought back then, WAS sex. And later, once I'd gotten past the glare and fake glamour of the women with no clothes on (which wasn't that hard, once I decided that none of them were really that pretty), then there were the articles and the letters. All these things to read! That's where the real treasure lay for my teenaged self, the idea that reading these words would let me in on what it was really "like". Women writing in telling of their husbands with their small dicks who leave them wanting "real men", or men writing in boasting of shagging women when they were working or all that shit (although at that time I was torn between thinking it was crap but not wanting to dismiss it all because, y'know, maybe that really is what it's like, all 12 inch penises and multiple orgasms and "Once I saw his manhood I knew I had to have it in my mouth"s).

It took me far too many years to get past all that shit in my brain, all the sexual brainwashing that I'd read as a kid. It is all shit of course, and I fell for it because I didn't have a clue any better (Years later, I'd find myself exchanging e-mails with a model for one of these magazines, and she'd tell me "No woman wants to be fucked porn style - even the actresses hate it"). But what about all the people who buy it every month and write the letters or send in the photos of "Readers' Wives" or their "intimate confessions"? Do they really believe it, or are they just going along with the joke that women really just want a good shag up the arse or are all secretly dying to fuck their boyfriend's best mates while he watches? I don't know. Part of me can't believe that so many people willingly part with so much of their money just to be part of a big joke, but it's just as difficult to think that so many people think that what you get between the glossy covers is anything really resembling real life (My pornstar e-mail-pal again: "Fantasy is great; unfortunately, many men do not realise the difference between that and reality. What is even worse is that it is replacing reality... It's like fashion dictating an ideal of beauty that very very few can live up to").

It's not that porn lies to you as such (although it definitely does that as well), but more that it pretends that so much doesn't exist. It concentrates on the physical and ignores the, I don't know, the spiritual, I guess. That's what gets to me. It's an unreliable teacher because it tells you all the wrong things; who cares about Jenni (always with an "i") liking it doggy style, or someone else liking a man with staying power? It doesn't tell you about the important things, like what it feels like to go to sleep holding someone or even about PMS and periods. It reduces everything to the physical, and personalities to stereotypes (and all the same stereotype, almost: that all women really want is a good hard cock in their cunt, even the lesbians). Everyone that grew up stealing their dad's Fiestas or their friends' Razzles or whatever only learnt a tiny part of the whole thing.

Still, porn follows me through my life and leaves that buzz to unsettle me when I least expect it. An ex-girlfriend and her friends once made me a fake porn mag as a joke, using their heads cut out and stuck onto the bodies of the real models from a real copy of Razzle. And the whole thing was surreal and unsettling, you know? Not just the visual thing of the woman I was then sleeping with's face on the ill-sized body, but the fact that it shrinks them so much; real people that I knew went from 3 dimensions and conversation and thoughts to cartoon sex zombies mouthing speech balloons full of brightly-coloured letters "I like it in my mouth" "Ram it up hard!" or such shit.

So.

So there I was staring at the wank magazine in the shop, but not for the reasons that you think. It wasn't that I'd fallen for the whole thing again, but instead that I recognised the figure on the cover. I can't be sure (and I daren't have looked closer at the magazine for embarrassment's sake) but the woman emblazoned with the "Cream!" looked like a girl I once went to college with, the last of whom I'd heard was that she was trying to become a model. And I didn't know what to think, because all these things were going around in my head at once, and then I remembered another friend from my past, whose ex had left her and taken Polaroids of her naked with him to send into some Readers' Wives magazine somewhere as revenge. "I really hope he doesn't send them," she said to me, "I can't imagine anything crueller."

Graeme McMillan [E-mail] [site]

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