The Return of Analogue Smut?

“If you want to know the future of adult entertainment, then you need to look to the past,” says Hamilton Twekes, a digital entrepreneur now investing heavily in analogue pornography. “I sincerely believe that we are about to see a renaissance of traditional porno mags in the face of increasing demands from online adult sites for ID. The so-called ‘health and safety’ legislation driving the ID requirements is, frankly, killing the online porn industry.” Twekes was a notable early pioneer of internet pornography, establishing some of the web’s earliest adult sites. “Online porn was one of the great technological innovations brought to us by the advent of the worldwide web,” he opines. “I’m old enough to remember the days when young men like myself would have to be furtive about porn, perving over the women’s’ lingerie section of your mum’s Marshal Ward mail order catalogue, or watching The Sweeney or Play for Today in hope of a flash of side-boob, or even straining your neck to glimpse the covers of the magazines on the top shelf of the newsagent!” But the internet revolution meant that porn could instead be accessed, for free,in the privacy of your own bedroom. “It was incredible – it wasn’t just the run-of-the-mill page-three-of-the-tabloid stuff either, but just about every imaginable bizarre variation you could think of,” enthuses Twekes.  “Young people had never had it so good.  You could tell how desperate they were to see this stuff as, back in those days of dial up connections, kids were prepared to wait agonisingly long times to download some bare boobs. I only wish that I’d had such a home education in smut when I was a teenager.  I’d have been able to avoid all the guilt and trauma of trying to see naked women through off-line means.”

The switch back to analogue pornography, however, is inevitable, the entrepreneur feels. “Look, I get all this business about protecting the kids from online harm, but the reality of the situation is that these mandatory age checks are, in reality, simply a data-harvesting operation,” he says. “These requests for ever-increasing amounts of personal information for verification, often including credit card details, are simply a threat to personal security, not to mention an invasion of privacy. Rather than protecting young people, it is instead making it impossible for anyone to just casually browse porn online. Worse still, they are severing young men’s vital lifeline to free smut!” Without easy access to pornography, Twekes fears that Britain’s depraved youth will lack a proper ‘safety valve’ through which to vent their pent up, pubescent, sexual frustrations. “I truly fear that, without this stuff to quietly jerk off over in their bedrooms, some young men will find themselves overcome by their urges and take their restless libidos out on the streets,” he declares. “Before you know it, we’ll see an explosion of indecent exposures in public places – probably worse! This legislation will have proven a catalyst to create the very problem it is supposed to be stopping!”

Consequently, Twekes believes that the time is ripe for a return to analogue porn and is preparing to launch a new range of affordable adult magazines. “It’s the perfect time a comeback for traditional top shelf jazz mags,” he muses.  “Because the only ID or age verification you’d need to get your hands on this stuff would be a false moustache and maybe a dodgy fake bus pass claiming that you were really thirty six.” He believes that his initiative will be beneficial even for those without the financial means to actually buy the magazines. “With more publications physically available, maybe we could see a revival of the traditional ‘porn exchange’ of my youth:  the hedge at the edge of the playing fields,” he reminiscences.  “That’s right, back in the day hedges in parks and recreation grounds seemed to be just chock full of discarded porno mags.  Free for anyone to look at or even take home.  Sure, they were often torn, rain damaged and crinkled around the edges, but they represented a vital lifeline for less well off kids which, with the rise of easy to access internet porn, largely vanished in recent times. But I’m happy that I can now help facilitate its return!”

Traditional adult magazines aren’t the only form of analogue porn that could be making a comeback. Other enterprising individuals are taking a lead from Tweke’s example and are planning a revival of traditional strip joints, sex clubs and peep shows. “It’s been a tragedy to see traditional sex centre’s like London’s Soho decline and be sanitised and gentrified in recent decades, with the sex trade gradually declining as internet porn made inroads into their trade,” observes John Stroker, who is planning to open a chain of new sex shops across the UK. “For years now, people haven’t needed to visit physical establishments to get their quota of naked flesh and simulated sex, instead getting it all through the web. Don’t misunderstand me, I understand perfectly why it happened – why be forced to sit in a sweaty club, rubbing shoulders and God knows what else with a bunch of sweaty priapic perverts just to watch a girl take her clothes off, when you could do it in the privacy of your own home? It’s the same with buying sex toys, bondage gear and other adult stuff – it is so much less embarrassing to do it over the web than over the counter of sex shop, being served by some spotty teenager on minimum wage. But with all these intrusive ID checks, the tables are suddenly turned!”

But can traditional forms of porn really compete with the sort of stuff served up online, with its perfect looking girls and exotic locations? “Frankly, I think that’s going to be one of the real attractions of the new analogue porn – its air of raw reality,” says Stroker. “I know that the web can, increasingly, serve you up these AI-generated women with perfect bodies, but they are pure fantasy, utterly unattainable. What the average young chap desperately trying to sate their sexual urges really needs is a woman who is more obviously attainable, more realistic. Believe me, watching too much of that online stuff will ruin sex for them before they ever do it for real – the real thing, which is more likely to happen with some girl from down the street, in the back bedroom of their parents’ semi-detached house on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, than it is with a supermodel on a beach in the Bahamas, will only disappoint them. No, what they need is to go to a strip club and watch some slightly overweight, bored looking girl from the local sink estate fumble her way through a clumsy strip tease. That’s real life!”