pr0n
Let me tell you about a friend of mine. This friend, like Abel (as he was forced to confess in his inspiring post on the same topic), was a teenager during the 1980s, and, also like Abel, is kinky today. (Imagine!) This friend of mine was raised by fairly straight-laced, waspy parents. Nudity was unknown beyond toddler-hood, and the facts of life were discussed in a way that tried to communicate neutral acceptance, as was the custom, but could never quite conceal her parents’ embarrassment and shame. There was an 
excruciating episode–which I will not recount in detail because if you heard it you would have to pull out all of your teeth with pliers–surrounding her audition for a professional production of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July. She was auditioning for the part of a pert, over-sophisticated girl whose lines included the words masturbating and cunnilingus. My friend’s parents didn’t really want her to say these words, so they talked the director into allowing her to substitute euphemisms (“Playing with himself” and “uh…..”). However, they also had to explain to her why this change was happening, and this involved explaining what those words meant. This is where I will draw a veil over the episode to save us all the need for Mind Bleach. Needless to say, although she made it to the final call-back, she was not cast in the role.
That was just background for you. I could tell you more stories along similar lines, but we do all need to eat today. Let me tell you instead about my friend’s first sight of a porn magazine. She was sleeping over at her best friend’s house (let us call this best friend Frances). This would have been around 5th grade (age 10-ish). Up at the top of the coat closet, Frances’s dad had a stash of Penthouse. My friend got only a glimpse of this periodical because she reacted pretty much as Poppy described here. (Such a great post, by the way!) This encounter with Frances’s dad’s Penthouse extinguished any interest my friend had in pornography. Thus, my friend looked to mainstream fiction, stage, and film for things to think about while falling asleep at night.
Fast forward to the late 1980′s when my friend was just starting college. Her mother was at this time going through a kind of rebirth, emerging from a long, debilitating depression occasioned by divorce. As my friend discovered one day whilst poking through her mother’s bedside table, this rebirth apparently included a sexual revolution. Because in this bedside table, my friend found some extraordinary volumes. One, Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Two, a paperback called Venus in the Country, by Anonymous. There were a couple of other books along these lines, but my friend can’t remember the titles.
Now, you may well throw up a little in your mouth at the idea of finding your mother’s secret erotica stash. You might also writhe in agony imagining my friend’s discovery that her erstwhile euphemism-toting mama was a closet tgi enthusiast. But my friend, through some self-protective twist of psychology (or psychosis) managed to close her eyes to the source of these paperbacks and merely borrow them, one at a time, on the sly to peruse in her bedroom with the door locked. When my friend had to put the books back in place, she merely pretended she wasn’t doing what she was doing. Mentally, she went on a little vacation when it came time to borrow or return these volumes, which she did many times at the end of the 1980s. I guess she had a plentiful supply of mind bleach and no qualms about using it.
You may well ask why my friend did not simply jot down the titles and go buy copies for herself. Please understand: this would have been dirty. My friend would never have been able, then, to bring herself to purchase erotica in a store (Amazon.com did not yet exist). And to possess such books, to have them staring at her all the time from inside her own bedside table? Grody! Grody to the Max, in the parlance of the 1980s. My friend could only enjoy these books (thoroughly enjoy them) because they would not be there staring her in the face the next morning. She enjoyed them because they lived elsewhere.
And oh, did she enjoy them. The Sleeping Beauty series took her already wavy imagination and twisted it into tight kinks. And the quasi-Victorian compositions by Anonymous, where to begin? A commentator on Amazon says this of Venus in the Coutry:
I have owned this book for years having stolen it from my father’s dresser when I was a teenager. It is full of non-stop sexual encounters which seem to focus on the need to educate young maidens in the ways of the world.
My friend’s memory was hazy (when I interviewed her for this post) about the plots of these books by Anonymous. She remembers one in epistolary form (possibly the aforementioned Venus). It featured a household where the mistress took delight in corrupting the young girls who came into her service. Their bedrooms were equipped with peepholes, and early on the mistress arranged to catch some young servant pleasuring herself. The poor girl was hauled before the mistress, who threatened to send her back to her parents with a full explanation of her misconduct. The girl begged mercy, and the mistress granted it, but on two conditions: one, that she submit to an exemplary chastisement at the mistress’s hands; and two, that she submit to regular inspection to ensure she never do such a thing again. The poor girl agreed.
The inspection, to save the modesty both of the girl and of the inspector, would be done anonymously. The girl would go into the cellar and bend forward with her head and torso inside the dumb-waiter. The hatch would be lowered and locked across her waist, holding her firmly in place. Shortly, someone would come along, adjust her clothing, and perform the necessary inspection, which more often than not became an opportunity for sensitizing the girl to all of her exposed parts. The girl typically found herself in such a state after the inspections (by she knew not whom) that she was forced to repair to her chamber as quickly as possible to relieve the tension (all of which the mistress observed, delighted, through peepholes).
My friend also recounted a most satisfactory scene in which the mistress permitted her close friend (and governor at a reformatory) to conduct the inspection. This scene involved use of “the school spanking strap” as well as buggery, and afterwords, the girl was taken away, destined for the reformatory or the white-slave markets, my friend could not recall precisely which.
Of course, in later years my friend became more comfortable with erotic literature and acquired a respectable library of her own, but, she told me, she mourns some of those volumes from the unmentionable bedside table, since she cannot recall their titles, and since Venus in the Country, at least, is not readily available.
I told my friend that such lost classics are the spice of life, even more delightful through the confusion of nostalgia and likely improved by the imagination. Upon reflection, she rather agreed.
What about you? What are your Lost Classics?
