What would you grab in a fire? For a solid half of my second decade alive, the answer to that basic hypothetical was an anonymous silver stack of cheap DVD-Rs. The fleece my mom bought at Kohl's that looked enough like the cool kids' North Face Denalis, my lightly used N64 complete with two Rumble Paks, the shitty coming-of-age lit I meticulously alphabetized and re-alphabetized on my shelves—all that stuff was a distant second. If my Y2K life went up in flames, teenage me would've grabbed his porn stash and contently watched the world burn.
All you young bucks who grew up streaming mad fucks may be unfamiliar with the concept of a "porn stash." In fact, you may think that it'd be gross and shameful to tote around a physical repository of your deepest and darkest sexual fantasies in one of those cylindrical plastic towers that could be bought by the hundreds at Circuit City. Of course, you're right. It was. But that's only in hindsight because while you might not recall the world before the Internet, I do. Worse, I remember the Internet without free, streaming smut.
There's a peculiar blind spot in American masturbation that hovers over that heady, acid-washed cultural estuary where the Eighties run into the Nineties. It's hard to say exactly when this invisible moment occurred—'89? '93?—but it exists, and if you were born before it, you've probably got memories of the post-Netscape, pre-PornHub period. For me, it descended the very first day the Infante family hooked up whatever desktop computer we had at the time (at one point way back, we had a Wang PC, which, like, DICK JOKES) to a dial-up modem and only lifted midway through my college years, when I finally got a credit card of my own.
It's the closest thing a white Millennial from the suburbs has to the proverbial "uphill both ways" tale and I'm going to tell it to you now because it's weirdly nostalgic to remember a time when the most fearsome fingerbanging in recorded human history wasn't available at your fingertips. When I was 14, I would wait 'til I thought my parents were asleep, then sneak downstairs to our Dell, which was set up in literally the most visible part of our house. Cautiously, I'd slide the burned discs out of their protective case (I kept my pirated porn in one of those Sam Goody-bought binders) and sift through them.
Each disc (there were about a dozen) was unmarked but for a single or double-digit number, written in black Sharpie. My older brother—who was an early Winamp adopter and therefore led the pioneering charge on downloading illicit content from the Internet—had inscribed them when the stash was his most prized possession. If there was a method to his madness, or the numbers represented a basic chronology, he never told me. So, while I'd, uh, "been intimate" with every clip on every disc, I could never remember exactly which DVD had what on it. In other words, I was fapping blind.
When I hear people defend net neutrality, I wonder if our cable overlords promised not to throttle our free sex on demand stream, what percentage of protesters would lay down the cause?
I'll never forget the thrill: pushing a disc into the waiting tray, ensuring the speakers were turned way down and hearing the drive whir. Unsure of what would queue up—was #7 facials or threesomes?—I waited with bated breath to see what I'd 'bate to. The house settled and creaked around me—anxious, adolescent, apparitional, lit azure by the cathode screen. It was a young, hormone-addled man at his most honest. It was the closest I've ever been to a true literary moment.
I'm just kidding, of course. Covertly jacking off via a family desktop computer and a pirated pile of vaguely sortable hand-me-down porn wasn't the least bit poetic. It was a fucking nightmare. At home, my parents were light sleepers who barely drank and I was one of four kids. On the road—because, when you're 16, you don't just stop self-helping because you're traveling—I would pack what I guessed were my favorite discs into a duffel bag pocket and pray my SANYO portable DVD player didn't run out of batteries.
I wish such a fate on no man (or woman). But I did it because the alternative was my extremely limited teenage imagination, trying to find Striptease on TNT or inputting a credit card to get beyond the tantalizing, impenetrable paywalls of websites like WhiteHouse.com. That's not to say I didn't explore those options. I most assuredly did. But as the Supreme Court put it, you know it when you see it and Demi Moore unenthusiastically lap-dancing Burt Reynolds ain't really it.
I tell you that, to tell you this: No matter how non-romantic porn was then, it had more charm than it does now. The fact that most Cool Teens™ today have their own smartphones and laptops and PornHub has sufficiently disrupted the pay for play establishment. No one, and I mean NO ONE, has to go without. Today, porn is a commodity. It's well-nigh a basic human right—one that extends to everyone save the smallest fraction of people who can't afford devices that play it. When I hear people defend net neutrality, I wonder if our cable overlords promised not to throttle our free sex on demand stream, what percentage of protesters would lay down the cause?
So, what would I grab in a fire now? My girlfriend, assuming she doesn't dump me for writing 900 plus words on my teenage masturbating habits.
Dave Infante is a writer living in New York City. Read more of his work on Thrillist and follow him on Twitter here.
