After reading my colleague’s piece on how New York is now recommending “Glory Holes” as a way to avoid coronavirus, I was hit with two big thoughts. Firstly could the year get any worse? And secondly would it be possible for me to lower the bar further at Weird World Wire?
It was then that I was hit something even more worrisome than the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the destroying of the global economy. Porn mags were no more.
This year Playboy, the magazine you could buy “for the articles” as well as for the boobies announced that it would no longer be putting out a physical copy of the legendary publication and that from now on would only be online. Younger people probably barely noticed, but for those of us of a certain vintage, an era had passed.
If you were a guy that hit puberty at any point before home internet became a human right rather than a luxury, then you will know of the humble Jazz Mag.
Looking back at porn mag culture through the lens of coronavirus makes you want to wash your hands immediately, but the fact was that for many lads the first naked bodies we saw were in magazines stolen or handed down through the generations like the oral traditions of a great culture. This was a right of passage, not without sticky pages, fear of being caught and an overall sense of a lack of self-worth only sharing a wank mag could bring.
Of course, coronavirus cannot be blamed in its entirety for the death of the spank mag industry, for that we need to look at good old Al Gore and his invention of the internet. This was of course closely followed by the invention of online porn and now smartphones. On more than one occasion whilst in the company of muggles, I have unwittingly opened up the browser on my phone only to be immediately hit by the pumping sounds of the German bloke from trike patrol ploughing a young Filipino. Porn has essentially become simply far too easy. Why then would you go through the pain of grabbing something from the “top shelf” and then purchasing it from the kind gentleman at the corner store? This is particularly true if your tastes are somewhat less vanilla than your average bear. You know who you are.
But what has happened to these once-great publications, and where are they now? With Playboy, they were already an international brand involved in numerous business enterprises not reliant on the magazine. Their literary side has simply moved online, and they remain a global behemoth. They briefly removed nudes from the magazine before deciding that to “go woke, go broke” wasn’t worth it and have now gone back to their roots, but what of the rest?
Penthouse was probably the second biggest gentleman magazine brand after Playboy and was formed in 1965. Initially featuring softcore pornography and battling Playboy and other outlets in the “pubic wars” before just going the whole hog as a hardcore jerk mag. Alas, they were not as quick as Playboy in converting to the digital age, and after various bankruptcies and buyouts now exist as a rather unimportant online entity.
Now, I once read a report many years ago, or perhaps I just imagined it, but there’s a theory that whatever porn you were first into, it affects your sexual preferences in adulthood. My first sticky pages porn mag that I had handed to me by a fellow masturbator in arms was called Asian Babes. In the interests of my journalistic integrity, I had to find out where they were today.
Asian babes was a British softcore pornographic magazine that featured South Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai girls that launched in 1992. Initially, it only used Indian and Pakistani based UK models but had to spread the catchment area after numerous Pakistani models got into trouble when their families found out. Obviously, if they’d all been pious enough not to read the magazine, no one would have found out, but that is very much a take for another day.
As you might imagine, Asian Babes magazine was not without its controversies, such as the oft used “fetishization” of Asian women. It is no longer politically correct to be attracted to people from certain races you see (even Grindr removed the ethnicity feature). Make no mistake; a publication like Asian Babes really could not exist in our woke era, thankfully though PornHub does.
Asian Babes eventually ceased publication in 2012 going the way of that other favourite “Readers Wives.”
As for if your first jazz mag affects your later day sexual tastes, I really couldn’t say. I mean, I am a white guy living in Asia, but in this PC era, I’m also color blind….
The Porn Mag may be gone, but for a generation of gentlemen you shall and will not ever be forgotten.
