The world is in a strange way as I write this. Even before the covid crisis, people had began looking to the past for solace. To comfort ourselves, in the past few years people have been looking back for an air of nostalgia. We are watching old movies, playing retro video games, buying retro clothing. As the world gets crazy we are harking back to simpler times. Porn is no exception. In fact, Vintage porn is extremely current.
Why? Well let’s look at the era these movies were made in. Of course, time changed a lot in the heydays of vintage porn. Yet between the fifties and the nineties one thing was inherent. That was that porn was forbidden. From the peep shows of the post war boom to the late night soft porn TV shows of the nineties, adult entertainment sat in a place where it was still frowned upon and had shock value. Porn was adventure, a foray into the unknown.
I for one was a teenager growing up in the UK when porn magazines would often be found laying around in parks and bushes. This is a strange phenomenon but seems to be widely accepted by most people as a given (like porn grew on bushes). Finding a decent copy of readers wives or razzle in a hedgerow was like winning the lottery, as we had no other way of seeing naked women. Advertising was not strewn with nudity, music videos were sexualised in a very naive, toned down way compared with music videos today. Porn was a rare treat.
Going abroad on holiday meant that you could enter shops where they sold nude women cards and actually sold them to anyone. Often a kid at school would have plucked up the courage and would be selling them off one by one, like some prohibition era racket. Porn had to be worked at and was something exotic, a delight from foreign countries.
Modern porn does not have this. It is no longer forbidden fruit. Sexualisation is as easily accessible as the daily news. In doing this, it has lost some of the characteristics that humans crave in nostalgia and essentially, vintage porn.
One misconception about Modern porn is that it is cold and detached. That staring down a webcam or swiping right is impersonal and that porn has lost this. But it is wrong. Porn is actually more personal than it has ever been. You can actually talk to the performers, pay them to do what you like, get to know them as people. Yet in becoming personal, modern porn has lost its mystery.
Vintage porn does not offer you that. When you got a videotape from a friend or store, apart from general niches you did not have that much choice. Here are the performers. Here is what they will do. You want a creampie with this girl in it? Tough, we ended with a facial. You want to see her take a BBC? Nope, it is a lesbian scene. You could stay up until the early hours of the morning to see porn on TV and not knowing what was coming was the thrill, the excitement of it all.
So how does vintage porn fit in our modern world? Well, as described at the start, it harkens back to that golden age when porn was exciting, mysterious and essentially, still fairly forbidden. It was an age when fetishes had be discovered through experience and imagination, as opposed to the push of a button. You had to be an intrepid explorer, defiling social norms in the pursuit of kinks, fetish and sexual excitement.
In essence, the journey was just as good as the destination. Why not give it a retrospective glance? Strap on your powder blue suit or your tweed blazer, twirl your mustache or backcomb your hair and indulge in some porn from the era of true forbidden delights.